"Look!" she said, delighted and awed.

He looked around, and smiled then, from the heart.

"You brought them with you," he said.

Below them and east, in the field of corn across the river only a few voices were still singing. Elena knew what that would mean. This was the first of the Ember Nights of spring. The beginning of the year, of the cycle of sowing and harvest. And tonight they had won the Ember war. She knew what would be happening among the men and women in that field. Overhead, the stars seemed to have come nearer, to be almost as close to them as the flowers.

She swallowed, and summoned her courage again. She said: "There are other things that are different about tonight. Here."

"I know," Baerd said softly.

And then he moved, finally, and was on his knees before her among all the young white flowers. He released her palm then, but only to take her face between his two hands, so carefully it seemed as if he feared she might break or bruise to his touch. Over the rapidly growing thunder of her pulse, Elena heard him whisper her name once, as if it were a kind of prayer, and she had time to answer with his, with all of his name, as a gift, before he lowered his mouth to hers.

She could not have spoken after that, for desire and need crashed over her and bore her away as something, a chip of wood, a fragment of bark, carried by a huge and rushing wave. Baerd was with her, though. They were together here in this place, and then they were naked among the newly sprung white flowers of that hill.

And as she drew him down and into her, feeling the keenness of longing and an aching tenderness, Elena looked up for a moment past his shoulder at all the circling, luminous stars of the Ember Night. And it came to her as a wonderful and joyous thought that every single diamond of those stars would have a name.

Then Baerd's rhythm changed above her, and her own awakened desire with it, and all thoughts scattered from her like dust strewn between those stars. She moved her head so her mouth could seek and find his own and she closed her arms around him and gathered him to her and closed her eyes, and they let that high wave carry them into the beginning of spring.

THE COLD AND A CRAMPED STIFFNESS WOKE DEVIN ABOUT AN hour before sunrise. It took him a moment to remember where he was. It was still dark in the room. He massaged his neck and listened to Catriana's quiet breathing from under her blankets in the bed. A rueful expression crossed his face.

It was strange, he reflected, twisting his head from side to side to try to ease the soreness, how only a few hours in a soft armchair could leave one feeling more knotted and uncomfortable than a whole night out on cold ground

He felt surprisingly awake though, given the night he'd just had and the fact that he couldn't have been asleep for more than three hours or so. He considered going back to his own bed but realized that he wasn't going to be able to sleep any more that night. He decided to go down to the kitchens and see if any of the household staff could be induced to make him a pot of khav.

He left the room, concentrating on closing the door silently behind him. So much so that when he saw Alessan standing in the hallway watching him from in front of his own door he jumped involuntarily.

The Prince walked over, eyebrows arched.

Devin shook his head firmly. "We just talked. I slept in the chair. Got a kink in my neck to show for it."

"I'm sure," Alessan murmured.

"No, really," Devin insisted.

"I'm sure," Alessan repeated. He smiled. "I believe you. If you had essayed more I would have heard screaming, yours with an unpleasant injury, most likely."

"Very likely," Devin agreed. They walked away from Catriana's door.

"How was Alienor though?"

Devin felt himself going red. "How…?" he began, then gradually became aware of the condition of his clothing and the amused scrutiny Alessan was giving him,

"Interesting," he offered.

Alessan smiled again. "Come downstairs with me and help solve a problem. I need some khav for the road anyhow."

"I was on the way to the kitchens myself. Give me two minutes to change my clothes."

"Not a bad idea," Alessan murmured, eyeing the torn shirt. "I'll meet you down there."

Devin ducked into his own chamber and quickly changed. For good measure he pulled on the vest Alais had sent him. Thinking of her, of her sheltered, quiet innocence, took him back, by polarity, to what had happened last night. He stood stock-still in the middle of his room for a moment and tried to properly grasp what he had done, and had done to him.

Interesting, he had just called it. Language. The process of sharing with words seemed such a futile exercise sometimes. A remnant of the sadness he'd felt, leaving Alienor, washed back over him and it picked up Catriana's sorrows too. He felt as if he'd been washed up by the sea on some grey beach at a bleak hour.

"Khav," Devin said aloud. "Or I'll never get out of this mood."

On the way downstairs he realized, belatedly, what Alessan had meant by "for the road." His meeting, wherever it was, was today, the encounter they'd been pointing toward for half a year.

And after that he would be riding west. To Tigana. Where his mother lay dying in a Sanctuary of Eanna.

Wide awake, his mind snapping from night reflections into the sharper agitations of the day, Devin followed a glow of light to the huge kitchens of Castle Borso and he paused in the arched doorway, looking within.

Sitting by the roaring fire, Alessan was carefully sipping steaming khav from an oversized mug. In a chair beside him Erlein di Senzio was doing the same. The two men were both gazing into the flames while all around them there was already a purposeful stir and bustle in the kitchen.

Devin stood in the doorway a moment, unnoticed, and found himself looking closely at the two men. In their silent gravity they seemed to him to be a part of a frieze, a tableau, emblematic in some complex way of all such pre-dawn hours for those on the long roads.

Neither man was a stranger to this hour, Devin knew, to sitting thus before a castle kitchen fire among the servants in the last dark hour before dawn, easing into wakefulness and a fugitive warmth, preparing for the road again and whatever turnings it might offer in the day that had not yet begun.

It seemed to Devin that Alessan and Erlein, sitting together as they were, were bonded in some way that went beyond the harsh thing that had happened by that twilit stream in Ferraut. It was a linkage that had nothing to do with Prince and wizard, it was shaped of the things they each had done. The same things done. Memories they would each have and could share, if these two men could truly share anything after what had happened between them.

For years they had each been traveling. There had to be so many images that overlapped and could evoke the same mood, emotions, the same sounds and smells. Like this one: darkness outside, the edge of grey dawn and the castle stir the sun would bring, chill of the corridors and knowledge of wind outside the walls, cut by the crackle and roar of the kitchen fire; the reassuring steam and smell rising from their cradled mugs; sleep and dream receding, the mind slowly turning forward to the day that lay ahead swathed in ground mist. Looking at their stillness amid the bustle of the kitchen Devin felt another return of the sadness that seemed to be his legacy from this long strange night in the highlands.

Sadness, and a distinct stir of longing. Devin realized that he wanted that shared history for himself, wanted to be a part of that self-contained, accomplished fraternity of men who knew this scene so well. He was young enough to savor the romance of it, but old enough, especially after this past winter and his time with Menico, to guess at the price demanded for those memories and the contained, solitary, competent look of the two men in front of him.