It was not the northerner who had come, nor, yet, her father, after all.

She knew who this was, of course. She sank to her knees on the cold ground.

"Oh, my dear," said Signe de Barbentain, the countess of Arbonne, "I am so desperately happy to see you, and so very sad just now. So many years we have lost, you and I. There is so much I have to tell you. About your father and your mother, and then about the grandfather you never knew, who would have loved you with all his heart."

The countess came closer then, moving almost hesitantly into the light of the torches, and Rinette saw that she was crying, tears streaming down her face in the cold. Rinette rose quickly, instinctively, a queer feeling overtaking her, a constriction of the heart and throat. She heard herself make a sound that was very like a child's cry, and she moved forward, almost running, into the haven of her grandmother's arms.

It was full dark now in the valley where the battle had been. He had waited patiently, even happily, for this. The moons would rise soon, both very bright tonight, spilling their rich, mingled light. It was time to go. There were no fears near where he was, no soldiers of either army sleeping or on watch in the cold.

He made his way down from branch to branch, surefooted in the dark. No one heard him; he made no sound for anyone to hear. Once on the ground he slipped away west, passing close by the forest, going the long way around to where he had left his horse two days before, north of the Arch of the Ancients.

The stallion was hungry, of course. He was sorry for that but there had been nothing to do about it. He had left food in a sack nearby and he fed the horse now, patting and rubbing its long neck, speaking tenderly. He felt deeply at peace, as one with the night and the murmuring trees all around him. He knelt, on impulse, and prayed.

There was so much gratitude in his heart he felt it might overflow. He had done exactly what he had come here to do. What he had been preparing for—though in ignorance, following instructions only—since the early days of autumn.

It was time to go now, to be away south before the bright moons rose. He saddled the horse and mounted and began to ride.

I want you to learn a new way of shooting, the High Priestess had told him on the island in the sea. And she had sent him to a place where no one ever went, to learn to do what she wanted done. He had always been able to handle a bow, but what she asked was odd, inexplicable. He didn't need things explained, though; he was honoured beyond words to have been chosen. He spent the whole of the autumn practising, learning to hit targets with the high, arching trajectories she had specified. Over and over, day by day as the weeks passed, he went off alone to the eastern end of the island and practised.

He learned. He told her one day that he thought he had mastered that new, strange shooting as best he ever would. She sent him back that very day to begin again, the same arching bowshots aimed at the apex of the sky, but now he was to do them while nestled in the branches of a tree. He did that, too; day after day, week after week, as winter came to Rian's Island and the first flocks of birds from the north filled their skies.

Then, one day, the High Priestess summoned him again, and alone in her chambers, with only the white owl to watch his face as he reacted to what she said, she told him what his task was to be, the thing he had been training to do.

The goddess, she told him, will sometimes intercede for us, but she always wants to see that we have tried to aid ourselves. He understood that, it made sense to him. In the natural world a deer might come to you, but only if you were out in the forest, upwind and silent, not if you stayed at home on a bench before the fire. She told him then—and her words made him begin to tremble with awe—where he was to go, and she even described the tree he would claim before the armies came to the valley by Lake Dierne.

He was to wait in that tree, the High Priestess told him, her hands clasped together in her lap, for a moment that might come if Rian offered them her grace—a moment when he might kill the king of Gorhaut. No man or woman, she told him, not even any priest or priestess, knew what he was being sent to do. No one was ever to know. He had knelt before her then and sworn the holiest oath he knew. He had felt her strong fingers on his head as she granted him her blessing.

Then she had given him his arrows, crimson dyed, fletched with crimson owl feathers, and he'd concealed them in a covered quiver and had himself taken by boat to land. He bought a good horse with money she had given him and rode, travelling swiftly by day and night, until he came to the valley of which she had told him. Arriving at twilight, before either of the armies had come, he saw the tree she had so clearly described to him, and he climbed it in the darkness and settled in to wait.

The soldiers had come the next day. Battle began that afternoon. Late in the day, when En Urté de Miraval had brought his corans sweeping down the ridge from the west, the king of Gorhaut had battled Duke Urté and had swept off his dented helmet and hurled it away after taking a blow in that combat.

It was exactly as he had been told it might be. He offered his heart's most fervent prayer, speaking the words aloud, though softly, and he lifted his bow from where he sat among the branches of that tree above the valley, and he sent a crimson arrow almost straight up into the bright sky along the high pathway of Rian, the soaring arch he had mastered through those solitary weeks and months on the island.

He was not greatly surprised, only humbled and full of gratitude, beyond any words he could ever have encompassed, when he saw that arrow strike the king of Gorhaut in the eye and end his life.

After that it had been a matter of waiting silently, hidden in the branches of his tree, for darkfall, and then slipping away unseen.

In time, as he rode, he left the lake behind. Not long after, white Vidonne rose in the eastern sky lighting the road that stretched away before him to the south. There was no one else in sight. He was not weary at all. He felt exalted, blessed. I could die now, he thought.

The wind had lessened with the rising of the moon. It wasn't even cold any more, and he was heading south with a full heart to where it was never truly cold, where there were flowers throughout the year by the sweet grace of Rian. When the blue moon also rose, following the white one up the sky, he could restrain himself no longer. Luth of Baude, who was Luth of Rian's Island since being taken in exchange for a poet last spring, and who thought he might even be found worthy now to be consecrated a priest of the goddess in her sanctuary, began to sing.

He was not a musician, not a very good singer at all; he knew that. But songs were not only for those who could perform them with artistry. He knew that, too. And so Luth lifted his voice without shame, feeling a deep richness, a glory in the night, as he galloped his horse down the winding, empty road to the south, past farm and castle, village and field and forest, under the risen moons and the stars above Arbonne.