“Among other things.” Kim managed a smile but her eyes were red.

“Tell me,” Sharra said. And listened as it came out like a pent-up flood. The dream. The dead King and the undead son. The children slain and Jennifer shattered in Starkadh. The one thing unforeseen: Guinevere. Love betrayed. Grief at the heart of it, the heart of everything.

Cold in the high wind they stood when the story ended. Cold and silent, facing the bitter north. Neither wept; it was wind that laid freezing tears on their cheeks. The sun slid low in the west. Ahead of them the clouds were thick on the horizon.

“Is he here?” Sharra asked. “The other one? The third?”

“I don’t know. She said he wasn’t.”

“Where is she now?”

“In the Temple, with Jaelle.”

Silence again, save for the wind. As it happened, though for very different reasons, the thoughts of both of them were away to the east and north where a fair-haired Prince was riding at the head of thirty men.

A short while later the sun was lost in trees behind Mórnirwood and the cold became too great. They went inside.

Three hours later they were back on that tower with the King and half the court, it seemed. It was full dark and savagely cold, but no one noticed, now.

Away to the north, very, very far, a luminous pearly light was being cast into the sky.

“What is it?” someone asked.

“Daniloth,” Loren Silvercloak replied softly. Brendel was standing beside him, his eyes the color of the light.

“They are trying it,” the lios breathed. “Not for a thousand years has Daniloth been unsheathed. There are no shadows on the Land of Light tonight. They will be looking at the stars later when they fade the shining. There will be starlight above Atronel.”

It was almost a song, so beautiful was his voice, so laden with yearning. Every one of them looked at that cast glow and, wondering, understood that it had been like that every night before Maugrim had come, and the Bael Rangat, before Lathen had woven the mist to change Daniloth into the Shadowland.

“Why?” Sharra asked. “Why are they doing it?”

Again it was Loren who replied. “For us. They are trying to draw him down from Starkadh to divert his power from the winter’s shaping. The lios alfar are offering themselves so that we might have an end to the cold.”

“An ending to it for them as well, surely?” Gorlaes protested.

Never taking his eyes from the light in the north, Na-Brendel answered him. “There is no snow in Daniloth. The sylvain are blooming now as they do each midsummer, and there is green grass on Atronel.”

They watched, picturing it, heartened despite the knife of wind by that lifted glow that meant courage and gallantry, a play of light in heaven at the very door of the Dark.