"I suppose so," he said. She couldn't see his face. "If that is all that matters."

"I mean, it's true what I said before: I've always been bad at making friends."

"Why?"

Pieces of the puzzle again. But she said, "As a girl, I'm not sure. Maybe I was shy, perhaps proud. I never felt easy in our village, even though it was the only home I'd ever known. But since Baerd named Tigana for me, since I heard the name, that has been all there is in the world for me. All that counts for anything at all."

She could almost hear him thinking about that.

He said, "Ice is for endings."

Which is exactly what Alienor had said to her. He went on, "You are still a living person, Catriana. With a heart, a life to live, access to friendship, even to love. Why are you sealing yourself down to the one thing only?"

And she heard herself reply: "Because my father never fought. He fled Tigana like a coward before the battles at the river."

She could have ripped her tongue bleeding from her mouth, out at the very root, the moment she had spoken.

"Oh," he said.

"Not a word, Devin! Don't say a word!"

He obeyed, sitting very still, almost invisible in the depths of his chair. Abruptly she blew out the candle; she didn't want light now. And then, because it was dark, and because he was so obligingly silent she was gradually able to regain control of herself. To move past the meaning of this moment without weeping. It took a long time in the darkness but eventually she was able to draw a long, steady breath and know she was all right.

"Thank you," she said, not entirely sure what she was thanking him for. Mostly, the silence.

There was no reply. She waited a moment then softly called his name. Again no answer. She listened, and eventually was able to make out the steady rise and fall of his breathing in sleep.

She had enough of a sense of irony to find that amusing. He had evidently had a difficult night though, and not just in the obvious ways.

She thought about waking him and sending him back to his own room. It would most certainly raise eyebrows if they were seen leaving here together in the morning. She discovered, though, that she didn't really care. She also realized that she minded less than she'd expected that he'd figured out the one truth about her and had just learned another. About her father, but really more about herself. She wondered about that, why it didn't bother her more.

She considered putting one of the blankets over him but resisted the impulse. For some reason she didn't really want him waking in the morning and knowing she'd done that. Rovigo's daughters did that sort of thing, not she. Or no: the younger daughter would have had him in this bed and inside her by now, strange moods and exhaustion notwithstanding. The older? Would have woven a new quilt at miraculous speed and tucked it around him with a note attached as to the lineage of the sheep that had given the wool and the history of the pattern she'd chosen.

Catriana smiled to herself in the darkness and settled back to sleep. Her restlessness seemed to have passed and she did not dream again. When she woke, just after dawn, he was gone. She didn't learn until later just how far.

ELENA STOOD BY THE OPEN DOOR OF MATTIO'S HOUSE LOOKING up the dark road to the moat and the raised drawbridge, watching the candles flicker and go out one by one in the windows of Castle Borso. At intervals people walked past her into the house, offering only a nod or a brief greeting if anything at all. It was a night of battle that lay ahead of them, and everyone arriving was aware of that.

From the village behind her there came no sound at all, and no light. All the candles were long snuffed out, fires banked, windows covered over, even the chinks at the base of doors blocked by cloth or rags. The dead walked on the first of the Ember Nights, everyone knew that.

There was little noise from within the house behind her, though fifteen or twenty people must have arrived by now, crowding into Mattio's home at the edge of the village. Elena didn't know how many more Walkers were yet to join them here, or later, at the meeting-place; she did know that there would be too few. There hadn't been enough last year, or the year before that, and they had lost those battles very badly. The Ember Night wars were killing the Walkers faster than young ones like Elena herself were growing up to replace them. Which is why they were losing each spring, why they would almost certainly lose tonight.

It was a starry night, with only the one moon risen, the white crescent of Vidomni as she waned. It was cold as well, here in the highlands at the very beginning of spring. Elena wrapped her arms about herself, gripping her elbows with her hands. It would be a different sky, a different feel to the night entirely, in only a few hours, when the battle began.

Carenna walked in, giving her quick warm smile, but not stopping to talk. It was not a time for talking. Elena was worried about Carenna tonight; she had just had a child two weeks before. It was too soon for her to be doing this. But she was needed, they were all needed, and the Ember Night wars did not tarry for any man or woman, or for anything that happened in the world of day.

She nodded in response to a couple she didn't know. They followed Carenna past her into the house. There was dust on their clothing; they had probably come from a long way east, timing their arrival here for after the sundown closing of the doors and windows in the town and in all the lonely farmhouses out in the night of the fields. Behind all those doors and windows, Elena knew, the people of the southern highlands would be waiting in darkness and praying.

Praying for rain and then sun, for the earth to be fruitful through spring and summer to the tall harvest of fall. For the seedlings of grain, of corn, to nourish when sown, take root and then rise, yellow and full of ripened promise, from the dark, moist, giving soil. Praying, though they knew nothing within their wrapped dark homes of what would actually happen tonight, for the Night Walkers to save the fields, the season, the grain, save and succor all their lives.

Elena instinctively reached up to finger the small leather ornament she wore about her neck. The ornament that held the shriveled remnant of the caul in which she had been born, as all the Walkers had been, sheathed in the transparent birthing sac as they came crying from the womb.

A symbol of good fortune, birthwomen named the caul elsewhere in the Palm. Children born sheathed in that sac were said to be destined for a life blessed by the Triad.

Here at the remote southern edges of the peninsula, in these wild highlands beneath the mountains, the teachings and the lore were different. Here the ancient rites went deeper, further back, were passed from hand to hand, from mouth to mouth down from their beginnings long ago. In the highlands of Certando a child born with a caul was not said to be guarded from death at sea, or naively named for fortune.

It was marked for war.

For this war, fought each year on the first of the Ember Nights that began the spring and so began the year. Fought in the fields and for the fields, for the not yet risen seedlings that were hope and life and the offered promise of earth renewed. Fought for those in the great cities, cut off from the truths of the land, ignorant of such things, and fought for all the living here in Certando, huddled behind their walls, who knew only enough to pray and to be afraid of sounds in the night that might be the dead abroad.

From behind Elena a hand touched her shoulder. She turned to see Mattio looking quizzically at her. She shook her head, pushing her hair back with one hand.

"Nothing yet," she said.