Here it would be, then. The boughs he needed were outlined by light more green than silver and fell into his hands when he reached for them. He wondered, without pausing in the task, why this was so. When he had them all, he moved the dead elf as gently as he might to straighten her limbs—arms at her side, legs together, her spattered robe arranged neatly—and laid the branches in order. He looked at the jewels in her hair: they had been the Lady’s. Should he take them back to Amrothlin? Or as the dead elf had hinted, did they have some connection to his mother’s ring and torc? He hesitated. Robbing bodies was wrong. The jewels flashed at him. He put out his hand and touched one; it clung to his fingers; the others moved to join it. He held them a moment, still a little reluctant to rob the dead, then slipped them into a pocket. She had robbed others; he intended restoration.

“Once you were the song the Singer sang,” he said to the dead face. “Once you were born of love and beauty and loved beauty. Let that be your memory.”

When he looked around, he saw he was not even a hundred paces from the clearing where the shrine to his mother stood. As he neared it, radiance moved with him, spilled across the clearing, spreading to the tent where his Squires slept … and then beyond. He stood still, awestruck. This was unlike the first time light had come to him, when Torfinn was wounded. He felt no exhaustion, no sense of power leaving him. The light moved but had a definite edge, like … like the Lady’s elvenhome.

He heard noise within the tent, his Squires rousing, muttering, then crying out, “The king! The king! He’s gone!” and they came out, half asleep, shading their eyes from the light. “Sir king!” they called, as if they could not see him.

“I’m here,” he said, and, through the waning hours of night, told them all that had happened.

Kieri rode in silence most of the way back to Chaya. He tried to imagine what he would tell Arian, what he would tell the Council, what questions he would ask of whom, in what order, but the wonder and horror of what he had seen, what he had done, dominated his thoughts. The light that now, as he rode, moved with him, barely perceptible in sunlight but clearly seen before dawn and after dusk, was a constant reminder that he was, at least in some measure, what the Lady had been and what his mother had hoped for.