Not ever, she realized.
She looked over then and saw Scelto, still on his knees, the only other living person on this hill. He too was weeping. But for her, she realized, even more than for the dead. His first tears had always been for her. He seemed to be far away though. Everything seemed oddly remote. Except Brandin. Except Valentin.
For the last time she looked down at the man for whose love she had betrayed her home and all her dead and her own vengeance sworn before a fire in her father’s house so long ago. She looked down upon what remained of Brandin of Ygrath with his soul gone, and slowly, tenderly, Dianora lowered her head and kissed him upon the lips in farewell. ‘In Finavir,’ she said. ‘My love.’ Then she laid him on the ground beside Valentin and she stood.
Looking south she saw that three men and the woman with red hair had descended the slope of the wizard’s ridge and were beginning to swiftly cross the uneven ground between. She turned to Scelto whose eyes had now a terrible foreknowledge in them. He knew her, she remembered, he loved her and he knew her much too well. He knew all save the one thing, and that one secret she would take away with her. That was her own.
‘In a way,’ she said to him, gesturing at the Prince, ‘it would almost be better if no one ever knew who he was. But I don’t think we can do that. Tell them, Scelto. Stay, and tell them when they get here. Whoever they are, they ought to know.’
‘Oh, my lady,’ he whispered, weeping. ‘Must it end like this?’
She knew what he meant. Of course she knew. She would not dissemble with him now. She looked at the people—whoever they were—coming quickly across the ground from the south. The woman. A brown-haired man with a sword, another darker one, a third man, smaller than the other two.
‘Yes,’ she said to Scelto, watching them approach. ‘Yes, I think it must.’
And so she turned and left him with the dead on that hill, to wait for those who were coming even now. She left the valley behind, the hill, left all the noises of battle and pain, walking down the northernmost of the goatherds’ tracks as it wound west along the slope of the hill out of sight of everyone. There were flowers growing along the path: sonrai berries, wild lilies, irises, anemones, yellow and white, and then there was a scarlet one. In Tregea they said that flower had been made red by the blood of Adaon where he fell.
There were no men or women on that slope to see her or to stay her as she went, nor was the distance very far to level ground and then to the beginnings of the sand and finally to the margin of the sea where there were gulls wheeling and crying overhead.
There was blood on her garments. She discarded them in a small pile on the wide sweep of that white sand. She stepped into the water—it was cool, but not nearly so cold as the sea of Chiara had been on the morning of the Dive. She walked out slowly until it came to her hips and then she began to swim. Straight out, heading west, towards where the sun would set when it finally went down to end this day. She was a good swimmer; her father had taught her and her brother long ago after a dream she had had. Valentin the Prince had even come with them once to their cove. Long ago.
When she began, at length, to tire she was very far from the shore, out where the blue-green of the ocean near land changes to the darker blue of the deep. And there she dived, pushing herself downward, away from the blue of the sky and the bronze sun and it seemed to her as she went down that there was an odd illumination appearing in the water, a kind of path here in the depths of the sea.
She had not expected that. She had not thought any such thing would be here for her. Not after all that had happened, all that she had done. But there was indeed a path, a glow of light defining it. She was tired now, and deep, and her vision was beginning to grow dim. She thought she saw a shape flicker at the edge of the shimmering light. She could not see very clearly though, there seemed to be a kind of mist coming down over her. She thought for a moment the shape might be the riselka, though she had not earned that, or even Adaon, though she had no claim at all upon the god. But then it seemed to Dianora that there was a last gathering of brightness in her mind at the very end, and the mist fell back a little, and she saw that for her it was neither of these, after all, not the riselka, nor the god.
It was Morian, come in kindness, come in grace, to bring her home.
Alone of the living on a hill with the dead, Scelto stood and composed himself as best he could, waiting for those he could see beginning to climb the slope.
When the three men and the tall woman reached the summit he knelt in submission as they surveyed in silence what had
