He was stronger now, steady and easy at the oars. It wasn't a difficult pull, in any case. He'd done it as a boy, summers he remembered.

He beached the small craft on the same strand from which he'd left. He didn't think that was an indulgence, or weak. It felt proper. An acknowledging. He gave thanks to Ingavin, touching the hammer about his neck. He'd bought it in autumn, nothing elaborate, much like the one that had burned with his father in Llywerth.

He moved inland, cautiously. He really didn't want to meet anyone. People here had known him all his life; there was a better-than-decent chance he'd be recognized. That was why he'd come at night, most of the way towards dawn, why he hadn't been sure he would come at all. He was here for three reasons, last of the balancings before he changed his life. All three could be done in a night, if the gods were good to him.

He wanted to bid farewell to his mother. She was in the women's compound now, those who'd brought the chest had told him. A surprise, a good decision for her, though with his silver she could change that.

After, in the same place, he intended to find the old volur. He wouldn't need long with her but he'd probably have to leave quickly, after. Though he also wanted to speak, if possible, perhaps only for a moment, depending how events unfolded, to a girl with a snakebite scar on her leg. He might not actually be able to do so. It was unlikely he could linger after killing the volur, and he wasn't sure he could find a girl he wouldn't recognize. The women kept watch at night, even in the cold. He remembered that.

Remembered these fields, too. He'd ridden Gyllir the last time, had a long walk now. He kept close to the woods, screened by them, though it was unlikely any lovers would be out this early in spring. The ground was cold. You'd need to be wild with desire to come out here with a girl, and not find a barn or shed with straw.

He had two farewells to make, he told himself, and someone to kill, then he could leave with his past squared away, as much as that was ever really possible. He was going to Erlond, he'd decided, where his people had settled in the Anglcyn lands. It was far enough away, there was land to be claimed, room to settle and thrive. He'd had a winter to think about possibilities. This one made the most sense.

He heard a twig snap. Not his own footfall.

He froze, drew his sword. He had no desire to kill yet, but

"The peace of Fulla be upon you, Bern Thorkellson."

When all you have to remember, through the circle of an eventful year, is a voice in the dark, and the voice is that of someone saving your life, you remember it.

He stayed where he was. She came forward from the trees. Carried no torch. He swallowed.

"How is the snakebite?" he said.

"Only a scar now. My thanks for asking."

"She is… still sending you out on cold nights?"

"Iord? No. Iord is dead."

His heart thumped. He still couldn't see her, but the voice was embedded in him. He hadn't realized until this moment how much so.

"How? What…?"

"I had her killed. For both of us."

Matter-of-fact, no hint of emotion in her voice. One less task for him tonight, it seemed. He struggled for words. "How did you…?"

"Do that? One of the young women in the compound told the new governor how the volur had used magic to force an innocent young man to steal a horse from someone she'd always hated."

He was still holding his sword. It seemed silly to be doing that. He sheathed it. Was thinking hard. He was good at thinking. "And the young man?"

"Went to Jormsvik after the spell left him. Wanting to win glory, efface his shame. And did so."

He was fighting an entirely unexpected urge to smile. "And the young woman?"

She hesitated for the first time. "She became the volur of Rabady Isle."

The desire to smile seemed to have gone, as suddenly as it had come. He couldn't quite have put into words why this was so. He cleared his throat. Said, "A great and glorious destiny for her, then."

After another pause, a stillness in the dark, he heard her say, just a shape, still, an outline in the night, "It isn't, in truth, the destiny she would choose, had she… another path."

Bern found it necessary to draw a breath before he could speak again. His heart was pounding, they way it had at Champieres. "Indeed. Would she… have any willingness to leave the isle, make a different life?"

The other voice grew softer, not as assured. Like mine, he thought.

"She might do that. If someone wished her to. It… it could also be here. That different life. Here on the isle."

He shook his head. Tried to make himself breathe normally. He knew a little more of the world than she did, it appeared. In this matter, at least. "I don't think so. Once she's been volur it would be too hard to live an… ordinary life here. There's too much power in what she's been. This is too small a place. Whoever became volur after wouldn't even want her here."

"The next volur might give permission, a release from power," she said. "It has happened."

He didn't know about that, had to assume she did. "Why would she do that?"

She waited a moment. Then said, "Think about it."

He did, and it came to him. He felt a prickling at his neck. That sometimes meant the half-world, spirits, were nearby. Sometimes it meant something else. "Oh," said Bern. "I see."

She realized, with a kind of thrill, that he really did. She wasn't used to men being so quick. She said, still carefully, "Your mother asked me to welcome you home, to say that she is waiting, at the compound, if you wish to see her now. And to tell you that the door on the barn needs fixing again."

He was silent, absorbing all of this. "I know how to do that," Bern said. "How do you know it is broken?"

"We've been to the farmhouse together," the girl said. "Your father's. It… can be bought again. If you want."

He looked at her. Only a shape. You were not to be soft. It was dangerous in these lands. But you were allowed, surely, to feel wonder, weren't you? A man went through the world carrying only his name. Some left that after them when they died, lingering, like a burning on a hill or by the sea. Most men did not, could not. There were other ways to live through the days the gods allowed you. In his mind, he spoke his father's name.

"I've never even seen you," he said to the girl.

"I know. There are lights in the compound," she said. "She's waiting. Will you come?"

They walked that way, the two of them. It wasn't very far. He saw the marker stone in the field, a greyness beyond. Dawn, he realized, would be breaking soon, over Vinmark and the water, upon the isle.

A greyer, windier dawn would also come, a little later, farther west.

He still liked to keep a window open at night, despite what wisdom held to be the folly of doing so. Ceinion of Llywerth sometimes thought that if something was offered too readily as wisdom, it needed to be challenged.

That wasn't why he opened the window, however. There was no deep thinking here. He was simply too accustomed to the taste of the night air after so many years moving from place to place. On the other hand, he thought, awake and alone in a comfortable room in Esferth, the year gone by had made one change in him.

He was entirely happy to be lying on this goose-feather bed and not outside on the ground in a windy night. Others would deny it, some of them fiercely (with their own reasons for doing so), but he knew he'd aged between the last spring and this one. He might be awake, sleep eluding, but he was comfortable in this bed and guardedly (always guardedly) pleased with the unfolding of events in Jad's northlands.