Mattio did not speak, but the pale moonlight showed his eyes bleak above the full black beard. He squeezed her shoulder, out of a habit of reassurance more than anything else, before turning to go back inside.

Elena watched him go, heavy-striding, solid and capable. Through the open doorway she saw him sit down again at the long trestle-table, across from Donar. She gazed at the two of them for a moment, thinking about Verzar, about love and then desire.

She turned away again to look out into the night toward the huge brooding outline of the castle in whose shadow she had spent her whole life. She felt old suddenly, far older than her years. She had two small children sleeping with her mother and father tonight in one of those shut-up cottages where no lights burned. She also had a husband sleeping in the burying field, a casualty, one of so many, of the terrible battle a year ago when the numbers of the Others seemed to have grown so much larger than ever before and so cruelly, malevolently triumphant.

Verzar had died a few days after that defeat, as all the victims of the night battles did.

Those touched by death in the Ember Night wars did not fall in the fields. They acknowledged that cold, final touch in their souls, like a finger on the heart, Verzar had said to her, and they came home to sleep and wake and walk through a day or a week or a month before yielding to the ending that had claimed them for its own.

In the north, in the cities, they spoke of the last portal of Morian, of longed-for grace in her dark Halls. Of priestly intercessions invoked with candles and tears.

Those born with the caul in the southern highlands, those who fought in the Ember wars and saw the shapes of the Others who came to battle there, did not speak in such a way.

Not that they would ever be so foolish as to deny Morian of Portals or Eanna or Adaon; only that they knew that there were powers older and darker than the Triad, powers that went beyond this peninsula, beyond even, Donar had once told her, this very world with its two moons and its sun. Once a year the Night Walkers of Certando would have, would be forced to have, a glimpse of these truths under a sky that was not their own.

Elena shivered. There would be more claimed for death tonight, she knew, and so fewer to fight the next year, and fewer the next. And where it would end she did not know. She was not educated in such things. She was twenty-two, a mother and a widow and a wheelwright's daughter in the highlands. She was also a child born with the caul of the Night Walkers into a time when all the battles were being lost, year by year.

She was also known to have the best eyesight in the dark of all of them, which is why Mattio had placed her here by the door, watching the road for the one Donar had said might come.

It was a dry season; the moat, as he'd expected, was shallow. Once, long ago, the lords of Castle Borso had been pleased to keep their moat stocked with creatures that could kill a man. Baerd didn't expect to find such things; not now, not for a long time now.

He waded across, hip-deep, under the high stars and the thin light of Vidomni in the sky. It was cold, but it had been many years since the elements bothered him much. Nor did it disturb him to be abroad on an Ember Night. Indeed, it had become a ritual of his own over the years: knowing that all across the Palm the holy days were observed and marked by people waiting in silent darkness behind their walls offered him a deepened sense of the solitude his soul seemed to need. He was profoundly drawn to this sense of moving through a scarcely breathing world that lay as if crouched in primitive darkness under the stars with no mortal fires cast back at the sky, only whatever flames the Triad created for themselves with lightning out of the heavens.

If there were ghosts and spirits awake in the night he wanted to see them. If the dead of his past were walking abroad he wanted to beg their forgiveness.

His own pain was spun of images that would not let him go. Images of vanished serenity, of pale marble under moonlight such as this, of graceful porticos shaped of harmonies a man might spend a lifetime studying to understand, of quiet voices heard and almost understood by a drowsy child in another room, of sure, confident laughter following, then morning sunlight in a known courtyard and a steady, strong, sculptor's hand upon his shoulder. A father's hand.

Then fire and blood and ashes on the wind, turning the noon sun red.

Smoke and death, and marble hammered into fragments, the head of the god flying free, to bounce like a boulder on scorched earth and then be ground remorselessly down into powder like fine sand. Like the sand on the beaches walked in the dark later that year, infinite and meaningless by the cold uncaring sea.

These were the bleak visitants, the companions of his nights, these and more, endlessly, through almost nineteen years. He carried, like baggage, like a cart yoked to his shoulders, like a round stone in his heart, images of his people, their world destroyed, their name obliterated. Truly obliterated: a sound that was drifting, year by year, further away from the shores of the world of men, like some tide withdrawing in the grey hour of a winter dawn. Very like such a tide, but different as well, because tides came back.

He had learned to live with the images because he had no choice, unless it was a choice to surrender. To die. Or retreat into madness as his mother had. He defined himself by his griefs; he knew them as other men knew the shape of their own hands.

But the one thing that could drive him awake, barred utterly from the chambers of sleep or any kind of rest, what could force him abroad now, as he had been driven abroad as a boy in a ruined place, was, in the end, none of these things. Neither a flash of splendor gone, nor an image of death and loss. It was, instead, over and above everything else, the remembrance of love among those ashes of ruin.

Against the memory of a spring and summer with Dianora, with his sister, his barriers could not hold in the dark.

And so Baerd would go out into the nights across the Palm, doubly moonlit, or singly, or dark with only stars. Among the heathered summer hills of Ferraut, or through the laden vineyards of autumn in Astibar or Senzio, along snow-mantled mountain slopes in Tregea, or here, on an Ember Night at the beginning of spring in the highlands.

He would go out to walk in the enveloping dark, to smell the earth, feel the soil, listen to the voice of winter's wind, taste grapes and moonlit water, lie motionless in a forest tree to watch the night predators at their hunt. And once in a great while, when waylaid or challenged by brigand or mercenary, Baerd would kill. A night predator in his own incarnation, restless and soon gone. Another kind of ghost, a part of him dead with the dead of the River Deisa.

In every corner of the mainland Palm except his own, which was gone, he had done these things for years upon years, feeling the slow turning of the seasons, learning the meaning of night in this forest and that field, by this dark river, or on that mountain ridge, reaching out or back or inward all the time toward a release that was ever and again denied.

He had been here in the highlands many times before on this same Ember Night. He and Alessan went back a long way and had shared a great deal with Alienor of Borso, and there was the other, larger reason why they came south to the mountains at the beginning of every second year. He thought of the news from the west. From home. He remembered the look on Alessan's face reading Danoleon's letter and his heart misgave him. But that was for tomorrow, and more Alessan's burden than his own, however much he might want, as he always wanted, to ease or share the weight.

Tonight was his own, and it called to him. Alone in the darkness, but hand in hand with a dream of Dianora, he walked away from the castle. Always before he had gone west and then south from Borso, curving his way into the hills themselves below the Braccio Pass. Tonight, for no reason he knew, his footsteps led him the other way, southeast. They carried him along the road to the edge of the village that lay beneath the castle walls and there, as he passed a house with an unexpectedly open door, Baerd saw a fair-haired woman standing in the moonlight as if she had been waiting for him and he stopped.