"This is the Terrace of Adoration," said Talinot Esulde. "The gateway to Inner Temple."

They slept that night in a quiet secluded lodge, pleasant and unpretentious, with its own shimmering pool and a quiet, intimate garden bordered by vines whose thick ancient trunks were woven into an impenetrable wall. At dawn, servitors brought them chilled fruits and grilled fish; and soon after they had eaten, Talinot Esulde appeared. With her was a second hierarch, a formidable, keen-eyed, white-haired woman. She greeted them each in a very different way: offering Hissune the salute befitting a prince of the Mount, but doing it in a strangely casual, almost perfunctory manner, and then turning to Elsinome and clasping both of her hands in her own, and holding them a long moment, staring warmly and intently into her eyes. When at last she released Elsinome she said, "I bid you both welcome to Third Cliff. I am Lorivade. The Lady and her son await you.

The morning was cool and misty, with a hint of sunlight about to break through the low clouds. In single file, with Lorivade leading and Talinot Esulde to the rear, no one uttering a word, they passed through a garden where every leaf was shimmering with dew-sparkles, and crossed a bridge of white stone, so delicately arched that it seemed it might shatter at the most gentle of footfalls, into a broad grassy field, at the far end of which lay Inner Temple.

Hissune had never seen a building more lovely. It was constructed of the same translucent white stone as the bridge. At its heart was a low flat-roofed rotunda, from which eight long, slender, equidistant wings radiated like starbeams. There was no ornamentation: everything was clean, chaste, simple, flawless.

Within the rotunda, an airy eight-sided room with an octagonal pool at its center, Lord Valentine and a woman who was surely his mother the Lady were waiting for them.

Hissune halted at the threshold, frozen, overcome by bewilderment. He looked from one to the other in confusion, not knowing to which of these Powers he should offer the first obeisance. The Lady, he decided, must take precedence. But in what form should he pay his homage? He knew the sign of the Lady, of course, but did one make that sign to the Lady herself, as one made the starburst sign to the Coronal, or was that hopelessly gauche? Hissune had no idea. Nothing in his training had prepared him for meeting the Lady of the Isle.

He turned to her, nevertheless. She was much older than he had expected her to be, face deeply furrowed, hair streaked with white, eyes encircled by an intricate network of fine lines. But her smile, intense and warm and radiant as the midday sun, spoke eloquently of the vigor and force that still were hers: in that astonishing glow Hissune felt his doubts and fears swiftly melting away.

He would have knelt to her, but she seemed to sense what he intended before he could make the gesture, and halted him with a quick little shake of her head. Instead the Lady held forth her hand to him.