She touched his face gently, his shoulders, his arms. The brush of her fingers over him was feather-light, but it left him tingling, so great was the power within this woman. He had to remind himself that she was no goddess, but only mortal flesh and daughter of mortal flesh, that upon a time long ago she had been wife to the High Counsellor Damiandane, that two sons had sprung from her and he was one of them, that once he had nestled at her breast and listened happily to her soft song, that it was she who had wiped the mud from his cheeks when he came home from play, that in the tempests of childhood he had wept in her arms and drawn comfort and wisdom from her. Long ago, all that: it seemed almost to be in another life. When the sceptor of the Divine had descended upon the family of the High Counsellor Damiandane and raised Voriax to the Confalume Throne it had by the same stroke transformed the mother of Voriax into the Lady of the Isle, and neither one could ever again be regarded even within the family as merely mortal. Valentine found himself then and always after unable to think of her simply as his mother, for she had donned the silver circlet and had gone to the Isle, and dwelled there in majesty as Lady, and the comfort and wisdom that formerly she had dispensed to him she shared now with the entire world, who looked to her with reverence and need. Even when another stroke of that same scepter had elevated Valentine to Voriax's place, and he too passed in some way beyond the realm of the ordinary and became larger than life, virtually a figure of myth, he had retained his awe of her, for he had no awe of himself, Coronal or no, and could not through his own inner vision see himself with the awe that others held for him, or he for this Lady.

Yet they talked of family things before they turned to higher questions. He told her such details as he knew of the doings of her sister Galiara and her brother Sait of Stee, and of Divvis and Mirigant and the daughters of Voriax. She asked him whether he returned often to the old family lands at Halanx, and if he found the Castle a happy place, and whether he and Carabella were still so loving and close. The tensions within him eased, and he felt almost as though he were a real person, some minor lordling of the Mount, visiting amiably with his mother, who had settled in a different clime but still was avid for news of home.

But it was impossible to escape the truths of their position for long, and when the conversation began to grow forced and strained he said, in somewhat another tone, "You should have let me come to you in the proper way, mother. This is not right, the Lady descending from Inner Temple to visit the Seven Walls."