“It is finished, in truth and deed.” The silver King of Aethyr began to fade within his pillar. His voice rustled like wind in distant grass. “Farewell, Child of Air! You have done well this day.”

His image swirled, faded into a beam of sunlight, then disappeared altogether. Val picked up her sword and slapped it against the grass to earth any lingering forces within it, then retrieved her staff. With a long sigh of exhaustion, she walked across the threshold and out into the ordinary world of the grasslands, the sea, and the sky, where the dawn had brightened into day.

When she lay down in her blankets that morning, Valandario fell asleep almost before she could pull them up to her chin. She found herself in the Gatelands of Sleep, which her mind conceptualized as a green lawn stretching out in front of a garden of roses. By the gate into the garden Aderyn stood, smiling at her, in the form of the silver-haired teacher she remembered so well.

“Val, Val,” he said. “It’s time you laid aside your long grief.”

“I know,” she said. “And I will.”

“I must ask you an enormous favor. It’s time for me to be reborn. Will you be my mother?”

“I never wanted a child!” Val was startled into truthfulness.

“I know that. Never would the Lords of Wyrd force a child upon a woman dead set against it. Why do you think I’m asking? It’s your choice, Val, your free choice.”

Valandario hesitated, remembering herself as little more than a child, orphaned by a flash flood that had swept away her parents and half their alar. Aderyn had taken her in, raised her with his own son, so patiently and so well, perhaps because she wasn’t his bloodkin, and thus her success or failure had been less important to him than Loddlaen’s. He was watching her patiently now, his face carefully composed to show no emotion that might influence her choice.

“For you, I will,” Valandario said. “I would be honored.”

He did smile, then, a flicker of relief.

“But you know,” Val went on. “I’m going to have a difficult time conceiving on my own.”

Aderyn laughed, so heartily that she knew his astral self had already turned toward life once again. “So you would,” he said. “Meet the ships coming from the Southern Isles. Remember that: meet the ships.”

With a glint of light like sun on water, he vanished. She woke, sitting up in the grass, seeing the long shadows of late afternoon, and wondering if the dream had been true or just some odd fancy. Perhaps she was merely lonely, envious of Dallandra, nursing her child, and of Sidro, so elated to be pregnant again at last. Yet his last words stayed with her: meet the ships.