SCELTO WOKE HER VERY EARLY ON THE M OF THE RITual. She had spent the night alone, as roper, and had made s the evening before at the temples of Adaon and Morian both. Brandin was careful now to be seen all rites and proprieties of the Palm. Iemples the priests and the priestesses had been almost fawning in their solicitude. In what she was doing there ower for them and they k.
Shed had a short aless sleep and wheo touched her awake, gently, and with a mug of khav already to hand, she felt her last dream of the night slipping away from her. Closing her eyes, only half scious, she tried to chase it, sensing the dream reg as if down corridors of her mind. She pursued, trying to reclaim an image that would hold it, and then, just as it seemed about to fade and be lost, she remembered.
She sat up slowly in bed and reached for the khav, cradling it in both hands, seeking warmth. Not that the room was cold, but she had now remembered what day it was, and there was a chill in her heart that went beyond foreboding and touched certainty.
When Dianora had been a very small girl—perhaps five years old, a little less than that—she had had a dream of drowning one night. Sea waters closing over her head, and a vision of something dark, a shape, final and terrible, approag to draw her down into lightless depths.
She had e awake gasping and screaming, thrashing about in bed, uain of where she even was.
And then her mother had been there, holding Dianora to her heart, murmuring, rog her bad forth until the frantic sobbing ceased. When Dianora had finally lifted her head from her mothers breast, she had seen by dlelight that her father was there as well, holding Baerd in his arms in the doorway.
Her little brother had been g too, she saw, shocked awake in his own room across the hall by her screams.
Her father had smiled and carried Baerd over to her, and the four of them had sat there in the middle of the night on Dianoras bed while the dles cast light in circles around them, shaping an island in the dark.
"Tell me about it," she remembered her father saying. Afterward he had made shadow figures for them with his hands on the wall and Baerd, soothed and drowsy, had fallen asleep again in his lap. "Tell me the dream, love.」
Tell me the dream, love. On Chiara, almost thirty years after, Dianora felt an ache of loss, as if it had all been but a little while ago. Days, weeks, no time at all. When had those dles in her room lost their power to hold back the dark?
She had told her mother and father, softly so as not to wake Baerd, some of the fear ing ba the stumbling words. The waters closing over her, a shape in the depths drawing her down. She remembered her mother making the sign against evil, to unbind the truth of the dream and deflect it away.
The m, before opening his studio and beginning his days work, Saevar had taken both his children past the harbor and the palace gates and south along the beach, and he had begun to teach them to swim in a shallow cove sheltered from the waves and the west wind. Dianora had expected to be afraid when she realized where they were going, but she was never really afraid of anything when her father was with her, and she and Baerd had both discovered, with whoops of delight, that they loved the water.
She remembered—se, the things one remembered—that Baerd, bending over in the shallows that first m, had caught a small darting fish between his