Either of them would have let him sleep in their home these three nights, to escape the unending drone of the woman in the other room, but he would not presume to ask so much. Not on the Ember Nights, not on any night. He had his own sense of what was appropriate, and besides, he liked his own bed more and more with the passing years.

"Eanna love us as her children, Adaon preserve us as his children…"

He wasn't, clearly, going to be able to fall asleep. He thought about getting up to polish a staff or a bow, but he knew Menna would hear him, and he knew she would make him pay for profaning an Ember Night with labor. Watery porridge, sour wine, his slippers cruelly moved from where he laid them down.

"They were in my way," she would say when he complained. Then, when fires were allowed again: burnt meat, undrinkable khav, bitter bread. For a week, at least. Menna had her own ways of letting him know what mattered to her. After all the years they had their tacit understandings much as any old couple did, though of course he had never married her.

He knew who he was, and what was appropriate, even in this fallen state, far from home, from the memory of wealth or power. Here on this small farm-holding bought with gold fearfully hidden on his person during that long, blind journey seventeen years ago, sure that a murderous pursuit was riding close behind.

He had survived, though, and the boys. Coming to this village on a day in autumn long ago: strangers arriving in a dark time. A time when so many people had died and so many others were brutally uprooted all across the Palm in the wake of the Tyrants' coming. But the three of them had somehow endured, had even managed to make the land put forth a living for them in good years. In Certando's bad years latterly he had had to deplete his dwindled reserve of gold, but what else was it for, at this point?

Really, what else would it be for? Menna and the two boys, they were no longer boys, of course, were his heirs. They were all he could claim as family now. They were all he had, if one didn't count the dreams that still came in his nights.

He was a cynical man, having seen a great deal in the days before his darkness came, and after, in a different way of seeing, but he was not so burdened by irony as to defeat wisdom. He knew that exiles always dreamt of home and that the sorely wronged never really forgot. He had no illusions about being unique in this.

"Eanna love us, Adaon preserve us from, Triad save us!"

Menna fell silent, very abruptly. And for the same reason the old man sat suddenly upright in bed, wincing at a sharp protest from his spine. They had both heard it: a sound outside in the night. In the Ember Night, when no one should be abroad.

Listening carefully he caught it again: the sound, delicate and faint, of pipes playing in the darkness outside, passing by their walls. Concentrating, the old man could make out footsteps. He counted them. Then, his heart beating dangerously fast, he swung out of bed as quickly as he could and began to dress.

"It is the dead!" Menna wailed in the far room. "Adaon preserve us from vengeful ghosts, from all harm. Eanna love us! The dead have come for us. Morian of Portals guard our souls!"

Despite his agitation the old man paused to note that Menna, even in her fear, still included him in prayers. For a moment he was genuinely moved. In the next moment he ruefully acknowledged the inescapable fact that the succeeding two weeks of his life, at least, were likely to be sheerest domestic torment.

He was going outside, of course. He knew exactly who this was. He finished dressing and reached for his favorite stick by the door. He moved as quietly as he could, but the walls were thin and Menna's hearing almost as good as his own: there was no point in trying to slip out unheard. She would know what he was doing. And would make him pay the price.

Because this had happened before. On Ember Nights and other nights for almost ten years now. Sure of foot inside the house he went to the front door and used his stick to roll back the chink-blocker on the floor. Then he opened the door and went out. Menna was praying again already: "Eanna love me, Adaon preserve me, Morian guard my soul." The old man smiled a wintry smile. Two weeks, at least. Watery porridge in the morning. Burnt, tasteless khav. Bitter mahgoti tea. He stood still for a moment, still smiling faintly, breathing the crisp, cool air. Mercifully, the wind had died down a little, his bones felt fine. Lifting his face to the night breeze he could almost taste the spring to come.

He closed the door carefully behind him and began tapping his way with the stick along the path towards the barn. He had carved this stick when he still had his sight. Many times he had carried it in the palace, an affectation at a dissolute court. He had never expected to need it in this way. Its head was the head of an eagle with the eyes lovingly detailed, wide and fiercely defiant.

Perhaps because he had killed for the second time in his life that night, Devin was remembering that other much larger barn from the winter just past, in Astibar.

This one was far more modest. Only two milk cows and a pair of plow horses stabled. It was well-made though, and warm, with the smell of the animals and clean straw. The walls had no chinks to admit the knife of wind, the straw was freshly piled, the floor swept clean, the tools along the walls neatly laid and stacked.

In fact, if he wasn't careful, the smell and the feel of this barn would take him much further back than last winter: back to their own farm in Asoli, which he tried never to think about. He was tired though, bone tired, after two sleepless nights, and so he supposed he was vulnerable to such memories. His right knee ached fiercely, where he had twisted it on the mountain. It was swollen to twice its normal size and sharply sensitive to touch. He'd had to walk slowly, making a real effort not to limp.

No one spoke. No one had spoken since they had reached the outskirts of this village of some twenty homes. The only sound for the last few moments after they tethered the horses and began to walk had been Alessan's pipes softly playing. Playing, and Devin wondered if he alone knew this, or if Naddo recognized it too, a certain nursery melody from Avalle.

Here in the barn Alessan was still playing, as gently as before. The tune was one more thing that seemed to be trying to carry Devin back to his family. He resisted: if he went that way in the condition he was in right now he would probably end up crying.

Devin tried to imagine how the haunting, elusive melody would sound to anyone huddled inside the walls of their lightless homes on this Ember Night. A company of ghosts passing by, that was what they would seem to be. The dead abroad, following a small, forgotten tune. He remembered Catriana singing in the Sandreni Woods:

But wherever I wander, by night or by day, Where water runs swiftly or high trees sway, My heart will carry me back and away To a dream of the towers of Avalle.

He wondered where she was tonight. And Sandre. Baerd. He wondered if he would ever see any of them again. Earlier this evening, pursued into the pass, he had thought he was about to die. And now, two hours later, they had killed twenty-five Barbadians with those same outlaws who had pursued them, and three of the outlaws were here with them in this unknown barn listening to Alessan play a cradle song.

He didn't think he would understand the strangeness of life if he lived to be a hundred years old.

There was a sound outside and the door swung open. Devin stiffened involuntarily. So did Ducas di Tregea, a hand reaching for his sword. Alessan looked at the door, but his fingers never faltered on the pipes and the music continued.

An old man, slightly stooped, but with a leonine combed-back mane of white hair, stood for a moment, backlit by the sudden moonlight, before he stepped inside and pushed the door closed behind him with a stick he carried. After that it was dark again in the barn and hard to see for a few moments.