“The Lady would, surely,” Arian said.

Kieri glanced around at his Squires, now all decked with flower wristlets, garlands, crowns of flowers. They looked harmless as any of the farm lads and lasses strolling down the lane but for the swords and bows laid close at their sides.

Some of them, he thought, must be barely out of Falk’s Hall—certainly not more than a year or so. He felt his years of war and intrigue as a chasm separating them from him. Even Garris, leaning against a tree a few lengths away, a stone jar of summerwine in his hand, seemed young in comparison. His gaze met Arian’s.

“I could make you one,” Arian said, holding up a handful of flowers and grinning down at him as if she’d read his thoughts.

“Oh, just give him yours, Arian,” Panin said, in a teasing tone. “Berne will plait you one to make it up.”

Arian shook her head and gave Kieri a look he couldn’t interpret. “No,” she said, “I’ll make my own.” Before Kieri could move, she’d dropped her flower crown on his chest and turned away to pick more flowers.

It was not the first time he’d felt silent communications between Squires wafting past him, but he was not going to respond to it, whatever it was. If there were covert courtships or rivalries going on, better not to know. He’d learned that in the first few years he’d commanded his own company.

That Midsummer night, he and the Lady sang together again, Kieri trying to blend his taig-sense with hers. Once more she had arrived just in time, but he knew she would stay for the feast. The light of her own kingdom, the elvenhome kingdom, rose around them; the trees of the grove glowed silver-green. Other elves appeared from the trees below, circling the mound. Kieri had met many of them by now and knew their names, their families, some of their history.

After the ceremony the Lady sat enthroned on the mound, surrounded by her subjects. Kieri tried to approach, only to be stopped again and again by elves who wanted to speak with him—a courtesy he could not ignore. The Lady smiled at him from that distance but did not beckon him to her. He felt like a child—loved, perhaps, but not wanted in what was an adult conversation. For all that she was his grandmother, she seemed less cordial than the elves who spoke to him.

One who sought him out and begged him to sit with her for a time was—she had confided before—one of the youngest and formerly a friend of his own elven mother. Her crown of violets and tiny white mist-stars released a haunting fragrance. Though she looked younger than his Squires, he knew she must be older; his mother had died nearly five decades before.

“Guess my age,” she said, teasing.

Kieri had been wondering but without permission could not have asked. Asking an elf’s age was, for reasons he didn’t understand, as rude as a slap in the face. Younger than the others … age of his mother … he tried to calculate what that might have been.