"Oale Niu," Minalde repeated softly, tasting the shape of that name with a kind of wonder. The Lady of the Keep and widow of Eldor, the last High King of the Realm of Darwath, had changed a great deal from the shy seventeen-year-old the Icefalcon had rescued from the Dark Ones seven years ago.

Thin-boned and delicately beautiful, with lupine-blue eyes that had seen too much: a pawn who had worked her heartbreaking way across the chessboard to become not a queen, but a king.

"And you remember to her?" asked Altir Endorion, Lord of the Keep of Dare.

He had his mother Minalde's eyes, large and blue as the hearts of the deepest-hued morning glories, and her coal-black hair.

Of his father, he had the memories of the House of Dare, memories of the line that stretched unbroken back to the original Time of the Dark; memories uncertain, patchy, in no particular order, memories of other people's mothers, other people's griefs.

Some members of his house had been spared these memories, the Icefalcon had been told. Others had had them only in flashes, or sometimes in the form of hurtful, restless dreams. Minalde had them, too, inherited from the House of Bes, a collateral of Dare's line. Sometimes Tir's eyes were three thousand years old and more.

He'd be eight in high summer and looked it now, small face filled with wonder as he gazed up at this newcomer from another world.

Hethya smiled looking down at him, and her expression softened. "I don't remember to her, me little lord," she said. "I-I am her, in a way of speaking. Sometimes. She's like in a room in me head" she tapped her temple-"and sometimes she only sits in that room talking to me, and sometimes she comes out, and... and then I have to sit in that room, and listen to the things she says, and watch the things she does with me hands, and me feet, and me body."

Her brow creased again, and some remembered pain hardened a corner of her mouth. She looked aside from Tir's too innocent eyes. After a moment she went on, "Sometimes she'll tell me things, or show me things, things about the Times Before. It's hard to explain the way of it, between her and me."