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They came down to the beach in silence.

Ixara saw them from the longboat, a quarter mile out, through the fine cold rain: a line of figures at the edge of the sand, standing perfectly still. At first she thought they were stakes, or the trunks of dead trees. Then one of them lifted an arm, and she saw the gleam of a feather cloak, and understood that it was her people.

There were hundreds.

They stood along the whole crescent of the cove, shoulder to shoulder, from the black rocks at the north horn to the black rocks at the south, with the gray surf creaming at their feet. The old stood in front, leaning on staves. The young stood behind. Women held children. Men held spears. Not one of them moved. Not one spoke. They watched the boat come in as the dead watch the living, with an infinite, hollow, unreadable stillness, and the silence went out over the water like a hand laid on her heart.

"They know," said Garrick, very low.

"Yes."

"How?"

"The Mother told them. Or the Heart did. Or they felt it, in the roots, when it left the river." She shifted the baby on her arm. Sennet was awake, gazing at the shore with enormous attentive eyes, and made no sound. "They have been waiting a year."

"Ixara." He took her hand. His was cold. "If this goes wrong—"

"It will not."

"If it does, I want you to take the child and go back to the ship."

"I will not."

"Please."

"Garrick." She turned her head. "You have given me everything. Do not take this from me. I will walk onto that beach beside you or I will not walk at all."

He looked at her. Then, slowly, he nodded.

The keel grated on the sand.

…

They had left their weapons aboard.

It had been Garrick's decision, and he had made it before the anchor was down. No pistols. No swords. No powder. Nell had cursed him roundly, and Pike had argued, and Mrs. Hatch had said, with some asperity, that she had not crossed an ocean to be eaten. But he had held firm. Only four had come ashore in the longboat: Ixara and Garrick, with the child; Pike, with his black bag; and Odette, who had refused absolutely to stay behind.

"I want to see it," she had said. "I have lived on it for two months. I think I have a right."

They stepped out onto the sand.

The rain stopped.

It stopped quite suddenly, as a breath stops. The clouds did not part, but the air changed, and a hush came over the beach so profound that Ixara heard the grains of sand squeak under her feet. She walked up the shore with her head high and her child in her arms and her husband at her side, and the line of the Ahtelan opened in front of her like a door.

She knew every face.

There was old Kesh the war-chief, tall and gray, with a scar down his chest. There was Tuwa the herb-keeper, bent as a bow, with her gourds clacking at her belt. There was the fisher-woman Anaya, who had taught her to swim. The twin brothers from the north shore. The boy who had once stolen her honey. She looked at each. They looked back. Their eyes were sunken. Their skin, once glossy as polished wood, had gone dull and ashen, and their cloaks hung loose on bodies that had been strong. She saw a woman leaning on her child's shoulder. She saw a young man sitting on the ground with his head in his hands.

A year, she thought. A year of this.

The pain went through her like a spear.

"Ixara."

The voice came from her left.

She stopped.

He stood in the front rank, a head taller than the rest, with a spear in his right hand and a cloak of yellow feathers on his shoulders. He was twenty-six, broad, handsome, hollow-cheeked, and his eyes had once been the warmest she knew. She had played with him as a child under the roots of the teyu tree. She had danced with him at the first-fruits feast. She had thought, at sixteen, when he had brought her a wreath of white flowers, that she might one day marry him, until the priestesses had come to the door and she had learned what she was for.

"Daro," she said.

"You are alive."

"Yes."

"We thought you were dead. We thought the sea had taken you." His voice was low, hoarse, and shaking. "Oma said no. Oma said you had gone to find it. We said it was madness. We said a girl alone, on a stranger's ship—" He broke off. His eyes went past her, and hardened. "That is him."

"Daro."

"That is the thief."

"Daro, listen to me—"

"That is the man who came in the night." He took a step forward. The spear dipped. "That is the one who stood over you, who took the Heart from the shrine, who left us with a chest of gold and a gray sky. I know his face. The old women described it. He is the one."

"He is."

"And you have brought him here?"

"I have."

"On our own beach?"

"Yes."

She heard the murmur run through the crowd. It rose, low and ugly, like the growl of a beast. A hundred spears came up. A woman cried out. An old man spat on the sand.

Daro drew a knife.

It was a long blade, flint-edged, bound in hide. He did not raise it. He held it low, point forward, as a hunter holds it for the kill. His face was gray with rage. His chest heaved.

"Step aside," he said.

"No."

"Step aside, Ixara. I will not hurt you. But I will have his blood."

"You will not."

"He killed us!" The words tore out of him. "He killed us, Ixara! My father is dead. Do you hear me? Dead, in the autumn. The river failed. The fish went. My mother lies in the temple and cannot rise. Every day another one stops waking. Every day I carry another body to the pyre, and it is him, it is him—"

"I know."

"You know nothing!"

"I know that you are in pain," said Ixara. She did not move. "I know it, and I am sorry. I would give my life to take it from you. But this is not the way."

Garrick stepped forward.

…

He did it quite slowly. She felt him move at her shoulder, felt the heat of him, felt her heart stop. She put out a hand to stop him and he took it, gently, and set it aside.

He walked past her.

He walked up the sand, alone, in his shirtsleeves, empty-handed, with the rain-dark hair plastered to his forehead and his gray eyes fixed on the man with the knife. He stopped a yard from the point. The blade hovered at the level of his breast. He did not look at it. He went down on his knees in the wet sand.

The crowd gasped.

"I am Garrick Wynmore," he said.

His voice was quiet, and it carried to the rocks.

"I am the man who stole your Heart. I came in the night, on the last evening of the Blood Moon, and I took it from the niche, and I left a chest of gold on the dais, and sailed away. I did it knowingly. I did it for love of my sister, who was dying. I did not do it for gain or glory. But I did it, and the fault is mine, and I do not ask you to forgive me."

He lifted his eyes.

"I ask only that you let me put it right."

The knife did not move.

"This man's father is dead because of me," said Garrick, to the crowd. "That woman's child is gone. I cannot raise them. I have no way to make it good. I can only bring back what I took, and offer what I have." His voice shook, and steadied. "I stand before you unarmed. I have left my ship at anchor. I will go where you tell me. I will do what the Council commands. And if you wish to kill me—"

He bared his throat.

"—then do it, now, and let it be done."

There was a long, terrible silence.

Daro stood over him with the knife shaking in his fist. His whole body trembled. The tendons stood out on his arm. Ixara saw the muscle in his jaw leap, and the sweat on his lip, and the dark clenched pain in his eyes. She saw him lift the blade.

Mother, she thought. Please.

"Daro."

The voice was very small.

It came from the back of the crowd, thin and cracked and dry as an autumn leaf. It was barely louder than a whisper. But the line of the Ahtelan parted, and a hush fell on the beach, deeper than before.

"Put it down, child," said Oma Teyra.

…

She was smaller than Ixara remembered.

She came down the beach on the arm of a young girl, step by slow step, in a cloak of white feathers so faded that it looked like frost. She was ninety. She had been ninety when Ixara was a girl, and had not seemed to change in all those years; she had been the oldest thing in the world, a rock, a tree, an eternal dry bright thing with eyes like yellow flame. Now she was bent and shrunken. Her hair was a wisp of cloud. Her skin hung on her bones like paper. Her hands trembled on her stick.

But her eyes were the same.

She stopped before Garrick, and looked down at him.

He lifted his face. They gazed at each other across a yard of wet sand: the old priestess and the kneeling man, the oldest of the Ahtelan and the youngest of the thieves. She studied him for a long time, from the crown of his head to the knees of his sodden breeches. He did not flinch.

"Yes," said Oma Teyra, at last. "I remember."

"You saw me?"

"I did not see you. I felt you. You came in the night, on a cat's feet, with a heart like a drum." Her voice was a thread. "I was asleep. I do not sleep deeply, but I was asleep. I woke to find the temple cold. I ran to the niche. I screamed." Her lip quivered. "I have not screamed since."

"I am sorry."

"Yes. I see that." She tilted her head. "You are very sorry. It is written all over you. It runs off you like water. I have not seen a man so sorry in all my years." A faint bright dry gleam, almost humor. "It is very tiresome."

Garrick closed his eyes.

"Get up," said Oma Teyra.

"I—"

"Get up. You are making a puddle." She turned her head. "Ixara."

"Oma."

"Come here, child."

She went. Her knees would hardly carry her. She crossed the sand and knelt before the old woman, as she had knelt at seven, in the dark of the shrine, when she was chosen. Teyra laid a trembling hand on her head. She stroked the singed braids. She traced the line of her cheek with a finger like a dry twig.

"You have grown thin," she said.

"Yes, Oma."

"You have been through the fire."

"Yes."

"You have been to the end of the world."

"Yes."

"And you have brought him back." The yellow eyes were wet. "Twelve moons, I said. And you have come with nine days to spare. You always did leave things to the last."

Ixara began to cry.

"Hush, hush. There is no need." The old woman bent. "What is this?"

She was looking at the bundle in Ixara's arms.

…

Sennet had not made a sound since the longboat.

She lay quiet in the crook of her mother's elbow, wrapped in a blanket of white lambswool, with her gray eye and her green eye fixed upon the old woman's face. She was two months old. She was small, and very solemn. Her hand, escaping the blanket, lay curled against her chest, and a faint blue shimmer played across the back of it.

Oma Teyra went still.

For a long moment she did not breathe. She stood with her hand outstretched, trembling, an inch from the baby's cheek. Then, very slowly, she touched it.

Sennet looked at her.

She looked with that grave, deep, ancient look, and the old woman's face changed. Ixara saw it go through her like a wind through a field: a kind of shock, then wonder, then a joy so vast and so bright that it lit her up from within. The wrinkles smoothed. The papery cheeks flushed. The eyes, those yellow lamps, blazed.

"Oh," said Oma Teyra.

She sank to her knees. She did it as a child does, all at once, heedless of her age.

"Oh, little one. Oh, there you are. I thought— I did not— the songs said you would come, but I—" She was laughing and weeping, both at once. "Look at you. Look at those eyes. A gray and a green. Just as it was foretold." She laid her forehead against the baby's blanket. "She knows me. She has always known me."

"Oma?"

"She knew me in the womb. She spoke to me. Every night, since the autumn. In the dark. I thought it was a dream." She lifted a glistening face. "She told me you were coming. She told me to hold on."

Ixara stared.

"You heard her?"

"Every word." The old woman gave a cracked, triumphant crow. "That is the only reason I am still alive, my girl. I would not die. I would not die until I had seen her face."

A sound ran through the crowd.

It was a soft, wondering, indrawn breath, rising from four hundred throats. Ixara looked up. They were all staring at the baby. The spears had lowered. The knife had dropped. Daro stood with his hands hanging empty at his sides and his lips parted. All along the beach, in the gray rain, the Ahtelan were looking at the child in Ixara's arms with an expression she had never seen on any face: not fear, not hatred, not even hope, but a quivering, incredulous awe, as of people who have been told that the sun will rise and have forgotten what it looks like.

"The Warrior," whispered someone.

"The Key."

"The Child of the Gate."

Teyra rose. She leaned on her stick. She turned to the crowd, and raised her voice, a thin reed in the stillness, but every word of it carried.

"Hear me," she said. "This is the daughter of the Gate. She is born of a stranger and a priestess, in the shadow of the Heart. She has come home. She comes with her mother and her father." She paused. "And with the Heart."

She turned to Ixara.

"You have it?"

"Yes, Oma."

"Then bring it."

…

They climbed to the shrine in a long procession.

It was a path that Ixara had walked ten thousand times. She knew every root, every rock. But it was changed. The great trees stood bare on either side, enormous, black, leafless, their branches clawing at the sky. The ferns had gone brown. The moss was gray. The stream that had once leaped down the hillside in a silver torrent was a trickle of dull mud. The air smelled of dust and dry rot, and not a bird sang, not an insect hummed, not a leaf stirred.

It was like walking through a dead cathedral.

They came out on the terrace of white stone.

The temple stood as she remembered, a low round hall of pale wood, wreathed in vines. But the vines were dead. The roof sagged. The garlands had rotted on the lintel. In the doorway lay a row of figures on mats, the old, the sick, the dying, their eyes closed and their breath faint. Ixara counted twenty. She did not stop.

She walked into the dark.

It was colder than she remembered. The round chamber was bare. The floor of beaten earth. The pillars carved with ancient signs. And at the far end, set in the wall, the niche.

It was empty.

She stood before it.

It was a hollow in the wood, no wider than her two hands, lined with moss gone brown. A faint ring of black stained the rim, where the stone had rested for ten thousand years. She stared at it. And the silence of the place came down on her, a vast, deep, ringing absence, like the silence at the bottom of a well.

Mother, she thought. I am here.

I brought him back.

She took the Aurelith out of her cloak.

It lay in her palm, warm and blue. It pulsed, once, twice, like a heart waking from a long sleep. Light rose from it in a soft slow tide, and the dark of the shrine fell back. The pillars glowed. The carvings leaped into relief. And the stone throbbed with a strange wild eager gladness, straining toward the niche as a child strains toward its mother's arms.

She heard them come in behind her. The shuffle of feet. The creak of the door. Oma Teyra's dry breath. Garrick's quiet step. Pike's low exclamation. She did not turn. She raised her hands, with the stone cupped in them, and said the words that every priestess of the Gate had spoken for a thousand years.

"Mother of leaves. Mother of roots. Your daughter returns."

She set it in the niche.

…

For a moment nothing happened.

The stone lay in its hollow, blue and quiet. The shrine stood still. She stood with her hands pressed together and her heart stopped, and she thought: It is too late.

Then the floor trembled.

It was the faintest quiver, a shiver in the earth, as though some enormous creature far below had stirred in its sleep. A sigh rose from the walls. A crack ran up the central pillar, and the dead vines on the lintel shuddered. A drop of water fell from the roof. Another. A third. And then, from the Heart in its niche, a single note rang out.

It was one deep, slow, glorious chord. It rolled across the temple like the toll of a great bell. It shook the pillars and rattled the dust from the beams, and went out through the door and down the hill, over the dead forest, and into the sky.

The trees heard it.

She felt them. She felt every one, from the mountain to the sea, the ten thousand ancient giants, the million saplings, the ferns, the mosses, the roots. She felt them lift their heads. She felt the sap rise. She felt, in the very ground beneath her feet, a vast green stirring, a gathering, an immense slow surge of life returning to a body that had thought itself dead.

"Look!" cried someone.

She turned.

The door of the temple stood open. And beyond it, on the terrace, on the slope, on the whole broad face of the mountain, the world was changing.

It came in a wave. It rolled up the valley from the sea, a tide of green, running along the branches of the bare black trees. Buds burst. Leaves unfurled. Moss crept across the stones. The brown ferns lifted, uncurled, shook themselves into emerald. Color poured over the hillsides like wine poured into a glass. The gray mist lifted. The sun broke through the cloud, a sudden blaze of gold, and struck the forest, and the whole mountain lit.

A bird sang.

It was a single note, high and clear and sweet, from somewhere in the canopy. Another answered. A third. And then a thousand, ten thousand, a great shimmering explosion of birdsong that filled the air like a flood, and the wind came up from the sea, warm, salt, and sweet, and set the leaves dancing.

Ixara fell to her knees.

She heard the cry go up behind her. It was a long, wavering, wordless wail of joy, from four hundred throats, and it rose and rose until the walls rang. She heard people laughing. She heard people sobbing. She heard Daro, somewhere, shouting his father's name. She heard a child begin to sing.

In the doorway, the old and the dying were sitting up.

They did not rise at once. They sat on their mats and blinked in the sun, like people waking from a long dream. A man put a hand to his chest. A woman stared at her own arm, and the color flowing back into the skin. An ancient grandmother, who had lain senseless for three months, opened her eyes, looked about, and demanded, in a querulous voice, to know why nobody had brought her any breakfast.

Odette stood in the doorway with her hands pressed to her mouth.

"Garrick," she whispered. "Garrick, look."

He stood beside her. He was staring at the mountain with an expression Ixara would remember for the rest of her days. It was not triumph, nor relief. It was something quieter. It was the look of a man who has been carrying a very heavy thing for a very long way and has just seen, with infinite surprise, that he may set it down.

His lips moved. She could not hear what he said.

…

The Council met at dusk.

They met in the open air, on the terrace, in the golden light, under a canopy of newborn leaves. There were twelve of them. They sat in a circle on mats of woven reed, with Oma Teyra in the center and Kesh the war-chief on her right. Torches burned in the ground. The sky was the color of wine. Behind them, in the temple, the Heart sang, and the whole mountain hummed in answer.

Ixara sat on the left of the old woman, with the baby asleep against her shoulder.

Garrick sat alone in the middle of the ring.

He had been given a mat. He had been given a bowl of water, and a gourd of something sweet and strong, which he had drunk without a murmur. He had been stripped of his coat. His hands were bare on his knees. He sat very straight, with his head up, in the flickering light, and she saw that he was not afraid. He had passed through fear somewhere on the beach, and come out in a calm place beyond.

"The thing is done," said Oma Teyra.

Her voice was clear. The day had given her strength. She sat upright in her white cloak with the light on her face, no longer a frail old woman, but a priestess of the Gate.

"The Heart is home. The Mother is awake. The island lives." She looked round the circle. "We have been returned. We are glad. But the Council must decide what is owed."

Kesh stirred.

He was a tall austere man of sixty, hard as teak, with a face like a closed door. He had not spoken since the beach. He leaned forward, and the torchlight carved the lines of his scar.

"It is a law older than the gate," he said slowly. "A thing taken in blood must be returned in blood. A life taken must be paid by a life. A theft of the sacred must be answered by the sacred." He turned his head. "The thief has returned the stone. He has not returned the dead. There are three hundred of us in the burning-ground. Their blood is on his hands."

"They are not dead because of me," said Garrick quietly.

"No?"

"They would have died anyway. They died of the silence." He paused. "But that is the same thing."

"It is." Kesh regarded him. "You are an honest man."

"I try to be."

"Then you will know what we must ask."

Ixara's heart began to pound.

"The blood rite," said Kesh.

A shudder ran round the ring. She saw Tuwa press her gourd to her breast. She saw Daro, on the far side, with his spear laid across his knees, go white. She felt the cold touch her spine. No, she thought. Not that. Please. Not that.

She had seen it, once, as a child. She had been twelve. A man of the north shore had killed his brother in a quarrel over a woman, and the Council had demanded the rite. She had crouched behind a tree at the edge of the burning-ground and watched. She had seen the knife. She had seen the fire. She had heard the screaming. She had not slept for a week.

"The rite is three nights," said Kesh. "A cut. A burning. A trial in the cave of the mother. It is not a punishment. It is a gift. A man who enters it as an outsider and comes out alive is no longer a stranger. He is of the blood. He is Ahtelan." The grave eyes did not leave Garrick's face. "But it is a gift that many do not survive."

"How many?"

"Of ten, three."

"Kesh—" Ixara began.

"Be silent, daughter of the Gate." It was said without anger. "You may speak when the Council has finished."

She closed her mouth. She sat with her fists clenched and her fingernails biting her palms.

"I will not command it," said Oma Teyra.

She spoke softly. Every head turned.

"I will not command a man to the rite. It is not a thing that can be commanded. It must be asked for, and taken, freely, or it is nothing." She looked at Garrick. "The Council has said what is owed. The choice is yours, stranger. You may refuse. You may go back to your ship, and take your people, and sail away. We will not stop you. We will not harm you. The Heart is home, and that is enough."

"And if I do not refuse?"

"Then you will give your blood, and your pain, and your name, and perhaps your life." She lifted her chin. "And if you live, you will be one of us."

"And Ixara? And my daughter?"

"They are already ours."

The wind rose in the trees. The torches streamed. High in the canopy, a night bird began a long liquid song.

Ixara looked at her husband.

He sat in the circle of firelight with his hands open on his knees. His face was calm and white and perfectly still. For a long moment he said nothing. She saw his gaze travel round the ring: Kesh, grim; Tuwa, trembling; Daro, hostile and grieving; Oma Teyra, ancient, patient, bright. She saw it come to rest on the sleeping child.

He drew a long breath.

"I accept," said Garrick.