So the Night Walkers of Certando did battle by that river, fighting for the deepest, oldest dream of the widespreading country fields beyond all the high city walls. A dream of Earth, of the life-giving soil, rich and moist and flourishing in its cycle of seasons and years; a dream of the Others driven back, and farther back, and finally away, one bright year none of them would live to see.

And there came a time, amid the tumult and the frenzy, the loud, blurred, spinning violence by the river, when Elena and her three companions forged a respite for themselves. She had a moment to look up and she saw that the stream was thinning of foes. That the Others were milling about, disorganized and confused west of the river. She saw Baerd splash further into the water, hip-deep now, crying for the enemy to come to him, cursing them in a voice so tormented it was scarcely knowable as his own.

Elena could barely stand. She leaned on her sword, sucking in air with heaving sobs, utterly spent. She looked over and saw that one of the men who had fought beside her was down on one knee, clutching his right shoulder. He bled from an ugly, ragged wound. She knelt beside him, tearing weakly at her clothing for a strip to bind it with. He stopped her though.

He stopped her and touched her shoulder and, mutely, he pointed across the stream. She looked where he pointed, away to the west, fear rising in her again. And hi that moment of seeming victory Elena saw that the crown of the nearest hill was not empty anymore. That there was something standing there.

"Look!" a man cried just then, from further down the river. "He is with them again! We are undone!"

Other voices took up that cry along the riverbank, in grief and horror and cold fear, for they saw, they all saw now, that the shadow figure had come. Within the darkest spaces of her heart Elena had known that he would.

Just as he almost always had these last years. Fifteen years, twenty; though never before that, Donar had said. When the moon began to set, green and full, just when, so much of the time, it seemed as if they might have a chance to force the Others back, that dark figure would appear, to stand wrapped in fog and mist as hi a shroud at the back of the enemy ranks.

And it was this figure the Walkers would see come forward in the years of their defeats, when they were retreating, having been driven back. It was he who would step onto the bitterly contested places of battle, the lost fields, and claim them for his own. And blight and disease and desolation spread where he passed, wherever he walked upon the earth.

He stood now on the nearest of the wasted hills west of the river, clouds of obscuring mist rising and flowing all around him. Elena could not discern his face, none of them ever had, but from within that smoke and darkness she saw him raise his hands and stretch them out toward them, reaching, reaching for the Walkers on the riverbank. And as he did Elena felt a sudden shaft of coldness come into her heart, a terrible, numbing chill. Her legs began to tremble. She saw that her hands were shaking and it seemed that there was nothing she could do, nothing at all, to hold her courage to her.

Across the stream the Others, his army or his allies or the amorphous projections of his spirit, saw him stretch his arms toward the battlefield. Elena heard a sudden savage exultation in their cries; she saw them massing west of the river to come at them again. And she remembered, weary and spent, with a grim despair reaching into her heart, that this was exactly how it had been last year, and the spring before that, and the spring before as well. Her spirit ached with the knowledge of loss to come, even as she fought to find a way to ready her exhausted body to face another charge.

Mattio was beside her. "No!" she heard him gasp, with a dull, hopeless insistence, blindly fighting the power of that figure on the hill. "Not this time! Not! Let them kill me! Not retreat again!"

He could scarcely speak, and he was bleeding, she saw. There was a gash in his right side, another along his leg. When he straightened to move to the river she saw that he was limping. He was doing it though, he was moving forward, even into the face of what was being leveled at them. Elena felt a sob escape her dry throat.

And now the Others were coming again. The wounded man beside her struggled gamely up from his knees, holding his sword in his left hand, his useless right arm dangling at his side. Further along the bank she saw men and women as badly wounded or worse. They were all standing though, and lifting their blades. With love, with a shafting of pride that was akin to pain, Elena saw that the Night Walkers were not retreating. None of them. They were ready to hold this ground, or to try. And some of them were going to die now she knew, many of them would die.

Then Donar was beside her, and Elena flinched at what she saw in his white face. "No," he said. "This is folly. We must fall back. We have no choice. If we lose too many tonight it will be even worse next spring. I have to play for time, to hope for something that will make a change." The words sounded as if they were scraped from his throat.

Elena felt herself beginning to cry, from exhaustion as much as anything else. And even as she was nodding from within the abyss of her weariness, trying to let Donar see her understanding, her support, wanting to ease the rawness of his pain, even as the Others drew near again, triumphant, hideous, unwearied, she abruptly realized that Baerd wasn't with them on the bank. She wheeled toward the river, looking for him, and so she saw the miracle begin.

He was never in any doubt, none at all. From the moment the mist-wrapped figure appeared on the black hill Baerd knew what it was. In an odd way he had known this even before the shadow-figure came. It was why he was here, Baerd realized. Donar might not know it, but this was why the Elder had had a dream of someone coming, why Baerd's steps that night had taken him to the place where Elena was watching in the dark. It seemed to have been a long time ago.

He couldn't see the figure clearly but that didn't matter, it really didn't. He knew what this was about. It was as if all the sorrows and the lessons and the labors of his life, his and Alessan's together, had brought him to this river under this green moon that someone here might know exactly what the figure on the black hill was, the nature of its power. The power the Night Walkers had not been able to withstand because they could not understand.

He heard a splash behind him and knew instinctively that it would be Mattio. Without turning he handed him his strange sword. The Others, the Ygrathens of his dreams and hate, were massing again on the western bank.

He ignored them. They were tools. Right now they did not matter at all. They had been beaten by the courage of Donar and the Walkers; only the shadow-figure signified now, and Baerd knew what was needed to deal with that. Not a prowess of blades, not even with these swords of grain. They were past that now.

He drew a deep breath, and he raised his hands from his sides and pointed up at that shrouded figure on the hill, exactly as the figure was pointing down at them. And with his heart full to overflowing with old grief and a young certainty, conscious that Alessan would say it better, but knowing that this had become his task, and knowing also what had to be done, Baerd cried aloud in the strangeness of that night:

"Be gone! We do not fear you! I know what you are and where your power lies! Be gone or I shall name you now and cut your strength apart, we both know the power of names tonight!"

Gradually the raucous cries subsided on the other side of the river, and the murmurs of the Walkers faded. It grew very still, deathly still. Baerd could hear Mattio's labored, painful breathing just behind him. He didn't look back. He waited, straining to penetrate the mist that wrapped the figure on the hill. And as he stared it seemed to him, with a surge in his heart, that the upraised arms were lowered slightly. That the concealing mist dissipated a very little.