So she stood on his threshold again, waiting for the darkness to clear a little, and then she heard a voice she’d known all her life say, in a tone she’d also known all her life, “How long does an old man have to wait for breakfast these days?”

She screamed a little, a girlish habit she was still trying to outgrow. Then she seemed to have covered the distance into the room very fast, for she was on her knees beside Gereint, and hugging him, and crying just as her father would have and, for this, perhaps even her mother too.

“I know,” he said patiently, patting her back. “I know. You are deeply sorry. It will never happen again. I know all that. But Liane, a hug in the morning, however nice, is not breakfast.”

She was laughing and crying at the same time, and trying to hold him as close as she could without hurting his brittle bones. “Oh Gereint,” she whispered, “I’m so glad you’re back. So much has happened.”

“I’m sure,” he said, in a different voice entirely. “Now be still a moment and let me read it in you. It will be quicker than the telling.”

She did. It had happened so many times before that it no longer felt strange. This power was at the heart of what the shamans were; it came with their blinding. In a very little time Gereint sighed and leaned back a little, deep in thought.

After a moment, she asked, “Did you do what you went to do?” He nodded.

“Was it very difficult?”

Another nod. Nothing more, but she had known him a long time, and she was her father’s daughter. She had also seen his face as he journeyed. She felt an inner stirring of pride. Gereint was theirs, and whatever he had done, it was something very great.

There was another question in her, but this one she was afraid to ask. “I’ll get you some food,” she said, preparing to rise.

With Gereint, though, you seldom had to ask. “Liane,” he murmured, “I can’t tell you for certain, because I am not yet strong enough to reach as far as Celidon. But I think I would know already if something very bad had happened there. They are all right, child. We will have fuller tidings later, but you can tell your mother that they are all right.”

Relief burst within her like another sunrise. She threw her arms around his neck and kissed him again.

Gruffly he said, “This is still not breakfast! And I should warn you that in my day any woman who did that had to be prepared to do a good deal more!”

She laughed breathlessly. “Oh, Gereint, I would lie down with you in gladness any time you asked.”

For once, he seemed taken aback. “No one has said that particular thing to me for a very long time,” he said after a moment. “Thank you, child. But see to breakfast, and bring your brother to me instead.”

She was who she was, and irrepressible.

“Gereint!” she exclaimed, in mock astonishment.

“I knew you would say that!” he growled. “Your father never did teach his children proper manners. That is not amusing, Liane dal Ivor. Now go get your brother. He has just awakened.”

She left still giggling. “And breakfast!” he shouted after her.

Only when he was quite sure she was out of earshot did he allow himself to laugh. He laughed a long time, for he was deeply pleased. He was back on the Plain where he’d never thought to be again, once having ventured out over the waves. But he had, indeed, done what he’d set out to do, and his soul had survived. And whatever had happened at Celidon, it was not too bad, it could not be, or, even weakened as he was, he would have known from the moment of his return.

So he laughed for several moments and allowed himself—it wasn’t hard—to look forward to his meal.

Everything changed when Tabor came. He entered the mind of the boy and saw what was happening to him, and then read the tale of what the Seer had done in Khath Meigol. After that his food was tasteless in his mouth, and there were ashes in his heart.

She walked in the garden behind the domed Temple with the High Priestess—if, Sharra thought to herself, this tiny enclosure could properly be said to constitute a garden. For one raised in Larai Rigal and familiar with every pathway, waterfall, and spreading tree within its walls, the question almost answered itself.

Still, there were unexpected treasures here. She paused beside a bed of sylvain, silver and dusty rose. She hadn’t known they grew so far south. There were none in Cathal; sylvain was said to flourish only on the banks of Celyn Lake, by Daniloth. They were the flower of the lios alfar. She said as much to Jaelle.

The Priestess glanced at the flowers with only mild attention. “They were a gift,” she murmured. “A long time ago, when Ra-Lathen wove the mist over Daniloth and the lios began the long withdrawal. They sent us sylvain by which to remember them. They grow here, and in the palace gardens as well. Not many, the soil is wrong or some such thing—but there are always some of them, and these seem to have survived the winter and the drought.”

Sharra looked at her. “It means nothing to you, does it?” she said. “Does anything, I wonder?”

“In flowers?” Jaelle raised her eyebrows. Then, after a pause, she said, “Actually, there were flowers that mattered: the ones outside Dun Maura when the snow began to melt.”

Sharra remembered. They had been red, bloodred for the sacrifice. Again she glanced at her companion. It was a warm morning, but in her white robe Jaelle looked icily cool, and there was a keen, cutting edge to her beauty. There was very little mildness or placidity about Sharra herself, and the man she was to wed would carry all his life the scar of a knife she’d thrown at him, but with Jaelle it was different, and provoking.

“Of course,” the Princess of Cathal murmured. “Those flowers would matter. Does anything else, though? Or does absolutely everything have to circle back to the Goddess in order to reach through to you?”

“Everything does circle back to her,” Jaelle said automatically. But then, after a pause, she went on, impatiently. “Why does everyone ask me things like that? What, exactly, do you all expect from the High Priestess of Dana?” Her eyes, green as the grass in sunlight, held Sharra’s and challenged her.

In the face of that challenge, Sharra began to regret having brought it up. She was still too impetuous; it often took her out beyond her depth. She was, after all, a guest in the Temple. “Well—” she began apologetically.

And got no further. “Really!” Jaelle exclaimed. “I have no idea what people want of me. I am High Priestess. I have power to channel, a Mormae to control—and Dana knows, with Audiart that takes doing. I have rituals to preserve, counsel to give. With the High King away I have a realm to govern with the Chancellor. How should I be other than I am? What do you all want from me?”

Astonishingly, she had to turn away toward the flowers, to hide her face. Sharra was bemused, and momentarily moved, but she was from a country where subtlety of mind was a necessity for survival, and she was the daughter and heir of the Supreme Lord of Cathal.

“It isn’t really me you’re talking to, is it?” she asked quietly. “Who were the others?”

After a moment Jaelle, who had, it seemed, courage to go with everything else, turned back to look at her. The green eyes were dry, but there was a question in their depths.

They heard a footstep on the path.

“Yes, Leila?” Jaelle said, almost before she turned. “What is it? And why do you continue to enter places where you should not be?” The words were stern, but not, surprisingly, the tone.

Sharra looked at the thin girl with the straight, fair hair who had screamed in real pain when the Wild Hunt flew. There was some diffidence in Leila’s expression, but not a great deal.

“I am sorry,” she said. “But I thought you would want to know. The Seer is in the cottage where Finn and his mother stayed with the little one.”