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Valley of the Ancestors. The fear was growing so thick he could scarcely breathe. What has happened to my life?
    “Quiet now.” Saqri’s voice was music in a haunting minor key. “We are close. We must not frighten them.”
    “ They’re frightened?”
    “Only of life. Of too much care. Of the pull and grasp of memory.” He could feel deep sadness in her words. “But I must bring all that and more to my brother.”
    Things moved around him now in the inconstant darkness, forms with some kind of independent existence from the grass and the hills. He could not see them, exactly, could only sense them as a man can feel when someone stands close behind him. These new forms seemed distant, almost empty, little more than wind and the impression of existence.
    “These are the long dead, or perhaps the impressions those left behind when they moved on to other places.” Saqri’s voice seemed distant, her light scarcely more visible than the empty shapes around him. “Do not fear them—they hold no harm for you.”
    But he did fear them, not because they menaced him, but because they did not even seem to notice him or anything else. Were they simply shadows left behind, as Saqri said, or were they sunk so deep in death that they could not even be understood anymore by the living? It terrified him to imagine becoming such a thing some day.
    “There.” Saqri had moved a little closer, her swan-form faint as foxfire. “I see them—they are in the glade.”
    She led him into a murk of shadows that stood like trees. They were silvered ever so faintly by radiance from above, though no source was visible, as though the moon had let some of its light fall like dew before disappearing from the sky.
    He saw them, then—a cluster of smeared, dully gleaming shapes that wavered as if seen through deep water or ancient glass. They were deer, or at least each bore a shining filigree upon his brow that might have been antlers. They moved restlessly as Barrick approached, but did not run.
    “Do not go closer,” Saqri told him. “They can smell the life on you. They may not remember it but they know it is foreign to this place.”
    Now he could see something brighter in the wavering light—eyes. The deer-shapes were watching him. “What do we do?”
    “You? Nothing . . . yet. This first task is set only for me.” And he felt her voice stretch out as her wings had, gently enfolding the herd before them with her words. “Listen to me, all you lords of winds and thought. I seek the one who in life was Ynnir, my brother. I am Saqri, the last daughter of the First Flower.”
    Barrick heard a voice, or felt it sighing like the wind in a tangle of branches. “What do you want? You do not belong here. Do the black hellebores still bloom in the Dawnflower’s garden, or has the Defeat finally come?”
    “It has not come yet, but it may be upon us with the next breath, my fathers. I have no time to waste, even in this timeless place. Send me Ynnir.”
    “The youngest of us . . . comes ...” The voice was fading even as it spoke.
    And then another shape appeared before them, closer and clearer than the others, a great stag whose gleam was far more vibrant than those of its older brethren. A lavender glow hung between its spreading antlers, the warmest thing in all of that cold, dark valley.
    “Saqri?” it said after a long silence. “Beloved? How have you come here?”
    “By roads I should not have traveled, and on which I may not find my way back, even if you help us.” Her voice was as calm as ever, but some tight-drawn note in it told Barrick that this was not a happy meeting. “If there is to be any chance at all we must be swift. Come back with us, Brother. Your manchild is overwhelmed by what you have given him—his blood boils with it. Come back and help him to live with the terrible gift of the Fireflower.”
    The great stag lowered its head. “I cannot, Sister. Every moment it is harder to think as you think. Every