Even the spells of the Keep's mages had been unable to revive more than a handful. Raised by magic three and a half millennia ago, the black walls of the Keep itself stood isolated in the desolation.

Still, they stood, impervious to horror, night, and Fimbul winter in a world of glacier-crowned rock, and Hethya looked on them across the meadow with sadness and knowledge in her eyes.

"Not the rising of the Dark Ones that you remember, barbarian child," she added softly. "Not their brief, final rising, when they wiped out the last of humankind before themselves passing on into another dimension of the cosmos." Her hand shifted on the donkey's bridle, and she seemed oblivious now to the dead bandit's blood crusted on her clothing.

"I remember the days when the Dark Ones rose like a black miasma and did not depart. Not in a season, not in a year, not in a generation. I remember the days when humankind shrank to handfuls, not daring to leave the black walls of its Keeps for years at a time, fearing the night, fearing the day almost as much.

When the world we knew was rent asunder and all the things that we cherished were swept away so that not even the words for them remained."

"I remember," she said. "It was three and a half thousand years ago, but I remember what it was like, at the original rising of the Dark. I was there."

"I don't know how young I was," said Hethya, sipping the tisane of hot barley that Gil-Shalos of the Guards brought her, "when she first started speaking to me in me mind."

She drew up her legs under the borrowed skirts of homespun wool-worn and mended like everything in the Keep these days-and looked around her at the notables of the Keep assembled in the smallest of the royal council chambers.

"Six or seven, I think. I know I startled Mother-and horrified me aunties-by some of what I'd come out with, things no young girl ought to think or know."