And before the night was over, before the half of it had passed, with the last candles of winter burning down, she had proven herself right, terribly, over and over again. And at the end even, she was the one who lay bound and open between the four pillars of the world that was her bed and Devin was no longer quite sure of who he was that he should be doing to her the things he was. The things that made her whisper and then cry aloud his name as she did, over and again. But he did know that she had changed him and had found a place within him where his need to seek oblivion was equal to her own.

The candle on his side of the bed burned out some time later. There was a small, scented drifting of smoke. The pattern of light and shade in the room changed; neither of them was asleep, they both noticed it. The fire was down to its embers; the dog still lay before it, its magnificent head stretched out on its paws.

"You had better go," Alienor said, stroking his near shoulder absently. "While there's a candle for you to carry. It is easy to lose your way in the dark."

"You observe the Ember Days?" he asked, a little surprised at such piety. "No fires?"

"No fires," she said ruefully. "Half my household staff would leave me, and I don't even want to guess at what the tenant farmers or the villagers would do. Storm the castle. Call down some ancient curse with ears of corn soaked in blood. These are the southern highlands, Devin, they take their rites seriously up here."

"As seriously as you take yours?"

She smiled at that and stretched like a cat. "I suppose so. The fanners will do things tonight and tomorrow that I prefer not to know about." With a sinuous motion she curled downwards towards the foot of the bed and reached for something on the carpet by the bedposts. Her body was a smooth, candlelit curve of white flesh, with the marks he had made on her still showing red.

She straightened and handed him his breeches. It felt abrupt, a dismissal, and Devin gave her a long stare, not moving. She met the look, but her eyes were neither hard nor dismissive.

"Don't be angry," Alienor said softly. "You were too splendid to be leaving in anger. I'm telling you truths: I do observe the Ember rites and it is hard to find your way back without a light." She hesitated a moment, then added, "And I have always slept alone since my husband died."

Devin said nothing. He rose and dressed. His shirt he found halfway between the bed and the doors. It was shredded so badly it should have been amusing. He wasn't amused though. In fact, he was angry, or some feeling beyond anger, or beside it, a more complex thing. Lying naked and uncovered among the scattered pillows of her bed, Alienor watched him clothe himself. He looked at her, marveling still at her feline magnificence and even, despite the change of mood, even aware of how easy it would be for her to stir his desire again.

But as he gazed at her a dormant thought surfaced from wherever thought had been driven in the primitive frenzy of the last few hours. He arranged the shirt as best he could and walked over to claim one of the candles in a brass holder.

She had turned on her side to follow his movements, her head now resting on one hand, the black hair tumbling about her, her body offered to his sight as a gift, a glory in the shifting light. Her eyes were wide and direct, her smile generous, even kind.

"Good-night," she said. "I don't know whether you know it, but you are welcome back should you choose to come one day."

He hadn't expected that. He knew, without having to be told, that she was honoring him with this. But his thought, his disquiet from before was strong now and intermingled with other images, so that, although he smiled in return and nodded, it was neither pride nor honor that he felt.

"Good-night," he said and turned to go.

At the doors he stopped and, as much because he had remembered Alessan saying that the blue wine had begun with her as for any other single reason that he knew, then or later, Devin turned back to her. She had not moved. He looked, drinking in the opulence of the chamber and the proffered beauty of the woman on the bed. Even as he stood there another candle died on the far side of the room.

"Is this what happens to us?" Devin said then, quietly, reaching for words to frame this new, hard thought. "When we are no longer free. Is this what happens to our love?"

He could see her eyes change, even from this distance and in this wavering of light and dark. For a long time she looked back at him.

"You are clever," she said finally. "Alessan has chosen well in you."

He waited.

"Ah!" said Alienor throatily, simulating astonishment. "He actually wants an answer. A true answer from a lady in her castle at the edge of the world." It may have been a trick of the uncertain light, but she seemed to look away then, beyond where Devin stood, even beyond the tapestried walls of her room.

"It is one of the things that happens to us," she said at last. "A kind of insurrection in the dark that somehow stands against the laws of day that bind us and cannot be broken now."

Devin thought about it.

"Possibly that," he agreed softly, working it through. "Or else an admission somewhere in the soul that we deserve no more than this, nothing that goes deeper. Since we are not free and have accepted that."

He saw her flinch then, and close her eyes.

"Did I deserve that?" she asked.

A terrible sadness passed over Devin. He swallowed with some difficulty. "No," he said. "No, you didn't."

Her eyes were still closed when he left the room.

He felt heavy and burdened, beyond merely tired; laden with the weight of his thoughts, slowed by them. He stumbled going down the stairwell and had to fling out his free hand to brace himself against the stone wall. The motion left the candle unguarded and it went out.

It was very dark then. The castle was utterly still. Moving carefully, Devin reached the bottom of the stairs and he put the spent flame down on a ledge there. At intervals, high in the walls, tall thin windows let slanting moonlight fall across the corridor but the angle and the hour did not allow for any real illumination.

Briefly he considered going back for another candle but then, after standing still a moment to let his eyes adjust, Devin set out along what he thought to be the way they had come.

He was lost very soon, though not really alarmed. In his present mood there seemed to be something apposite about padding thus silently down the darkened hallways of this ancient highland castle in the dead of night, the stones cold against his feet.

There are no wrong turnings. Only paths we had not known we were meant to walk,

Who had told him that? The words had come unbidden to his mind from some recess of memory. He turned into an unfamiliar corridor and passed through a long room hung with paintings. Part of the way through, he found a voice for the words: it had been the old priest of Morian at the goddess's temple by his family's farm in Asoli. He had taught the twins and then Devin how to read and do sums, and when it appeared that the youngest boy, the small one, could sing he had given Devin his first lessons in the rudiments of harmony.

No wrong turnings, Devin thought again. And then, with a shiver he could not suppress, he remembered that this was not just the nadir of a night, it was the end of winter, the first of the Ember Days, when the dead were said to walk abroad.

The dead. Who were his dead? Marra. His mother, whom he had never known. Tigana? Could a country, a province, be said to have died? Could it be lost and mourned like a living soul? He thought of the Barbadian he had slain in the Nievolene barn.

He did quicken his pace then, over the dark, sporadically moonlit stones of the vast and silent castle.