He closed his eyes. "You knew?"

"Yes," she lied.

"I'm sorry," he said, looking at her. But she knew that this would be easier for him if she were able to hide how new and deathly cold this actually was for her. A gift; perhaps the last gift she would give him.

"Don't be sorry," she murmured, her hands lying still, where he could see them. "Truly, I understand." Truly, she did, though her heart was a wounded thing, a bird with one wing only, fluttering in small circles to the ground.

"The riselka…” he began. And halted. It was an enormous, frightening thing, she knew.

"She makes it clear," he went on earnestly. "The fork of the prophecy. That I have to go away." She saw the love for her in his eyes. She willed herself to be strong enough. Strong enough to help him go away from her. Oh, my brother, she was thinking. And will you leave me now?

She said, "I know she makes it clear, Baerd. I know you have to leave. It will be marked on the lines of your palm." She swallowed. This was harder than she could ever have imagined. She said, "Where will you go?" My love, she added, but not aloud, only inside, in her heart.

"I've thought about that," he said. He sat up straighter now. She could see him taking strength from her calm. She clung to that with everything she had.

"I'm going to look for the Prince." he said.

"What, Alessan? We don't even know if he's alive," she said in spite of herself.

"There's word he is," Baerd said. "That his mother is in hiding with the priests of Eanna, and that the Prince has been sent away. If there is any hope, any dream for us, for Tigana, it will lie with Alessan."

"He's fifteen years old," she said. Could not stop herself from saying. And so are you, she thought. Baerd, where did our childhood go?

By candlelight his dark eyes were not those of a boy. "I don't think age matters," he said. "This is not going to be a quick or an easy thing, if it can ever be done at all. He will be older than fifteen when the time comes."

"So will you," she said.

"And so will you," Baerd echoed. "Oh, Dia, what will you do?" No one else but her father ever called her that. Stupidly it was the name that nearly broke her control.

She shook her head. "I don't know," she said honestly. "Look after mother. Marry. There is money for a while yet if I'm careful." She saw his stricken look and moved to quell it. "You are not to worry about it, Baerd. Listen to me: you have just seen a riselka! Will you fight your fate to clear rubble in this city for the rest of your days? No one has easy choices anymore, and mine will not be as hard as most. I may," she had added, tilting her head defiantly, "try to think of some way to chase the same dream as you."

It astonished her, looking back, that she had actually said this on that very night. As if she herself had seen the riselka and her own path had been made clear, even as Baerd's forked away from her.

Lonely and cold in the saishan she was not half so cold or alone as she had been that night. He had not lingered once she'd given her dispensation. She had risen and dressed and helped him pack a very few things. He had flatly refused any of the silver. She assembled a small satchel of food for his first sunrise on the long road alone. At the doorway, in the darkness of the summer night, they had held each other close, clinging without words. Neither wept, as if both knew the time for tears had passed.

"If the goddesses love us, and the god," Baerd said, "we will surely meet again. I will think of you each and every day of my life. I love you, Dianora."

"And I you," she'd said to him. "I think you know how much. Eanna light your path and bring you home." That was all she'd said. All she could think to say.

After he'd gone she had sat in the front room wrapped in an old shawl of her mother's, gazing sightlessly at the ashes of last night's fire until the sun came up:

By then the hard kernel of her own plan had been formed.

The plan that had brought her here, all these years after, to this other lonely bed on an Ember Night of ghosts when she should not have had to be alone. Alone with all her memories, with the reawakening they carried, and the awareness of what she had allowed to happen to her here on the Island. Here in Brandin's court. Here with Brandin.

And so it was that two things came to Dianora that Ember Night in the saishan.

The memories of her brother had been the first, sweeping over her in waves, image after image until they ended with the ashes of that dead fire.

The second, following inexorably, born of that same long-ago year, born of memory, of guilt, of the whirlwind hurts that came with lying here alone and so terribly exposed on this night of all nights… the second thing, spun forth from all these interwoven things, was, finally, the shaping of a resolution. A decision, after so many years. A course of action she now knew she was going to take. Had to take, whatever might follow.

She lay there, chilled, hopelessly awake, and she was aware that the cold she felt came far more from within than without. Somewhere in the palace, she knew, the torturers would be attending to Camena di Chiara who had tried to kill a Tyrant and free his home. Who had done so knowing he would die and how he would die.

Even now they would be with him, administering their precise measures of pain. With a professional pride in their skill they would be breaking his fingers one by one, his wrists and his arms. His toes and ankles and legs. They would be doing it carefully, even tenderly, solicitously guarding the beat of his heart, so that after they had broken his back, which was always the last, they could strap him alive on a wheel and take him out to the harbor square to die in the sight of his people.

She would never have dreamt Camena had such courage or so much passion in his heart. She had derided him as a poseur, a wearer of three-layered cloaks, a minor, trivial artist angling for ascension at court.

Not anymore. Yesterday afternoon had compelled a new shape to her image of him. Now that he had done what he had done, now that his body had been given to the torturers and then the wheel there was a question that could no more be buried than could her memories of Baerd. Not tonight. Not unsheltered as she was and so awake.

What, the thought came knifing home like a winter wind in the soul, did Camena's act make her?

What did it make of that long-ago quest a sixteen-year-old girl had so proudly set herself the night her brother went away? The night he'd seen a riselka under moonlight by the sea and gone in search of his Prince.

She knew the answers. Of course she did. She knew the names that belonged to her. The names she had earned here on the Island. They burned like sour wine in a wound. And burning inside, even as she shivered, Dianora strove one more time to school her heart to begin the deathly hard, never yet successful, journey back to her own dominion from that room on the far wing of the palace where lay the King of Ygrath.

That night was different though. Something had changed that night, because of what had happened, because of the finality, the absoluteness of what she herself had done in the Audience Chamber. Acknowledging that, trying to deal with it, Dianora began to sense, as if from a very great distance, her heart's slow, painful retreat from the fires of love. A returning, and then a turning back, to the memory of other fires at home. Fields burning, a city burning, a palace set aflame.

No comfort there of course. No comfort anywhere at all. Only an absolute reminder of who she was and why she was here.

And lying very still in darkness on an Ember Night when country doors and windows were all closed against the dead and the magic in the fields, Dianora told over softly to herself the whole of the old foretelling verse: