Constance Nim is the other side of the wheel, rising (or perhaps descending) towards mortality as the Lady Sauvage withdraws from it. For the first time in days, there is color in her cheeks, freshly washed and scrubbed until they shone, and rather than gliding stately along, as unapproachable as a snow-capped Caledonian mountain, she... walks. She moves as you or I might, simply, as a woman. A smile is not far from her lips, and if you have the eyes to see, it can be glimpsed hiding in the quirk of her lips or the tightening of lines around her eyes. More than one choice was made last night, and so, perhaps, Constance will continue on this road, and dwindle, and become nothing less or more than a priestess.

What [i]of[/i] the knights? She's been so withdrawn, her heart locked away, that she knows them best as partners in Tristan's japes; as a Greek chorus offering judgment on her and her schemes; as people whose hurts and needs she has not addressed as she should. But she will have long days, in the summer, in the waiting, perhaps with Robena, perhaps with Apricot alone, and time enough to remember how to care; time enough to plant crops in the soil and water them through the cracked-earth days of the dog star, time enough to relearn gentleness and vulnerability and how to be firm enough to be a shelter and how to be soft enough to be held.

The worst is over. Now the future stretches out in front of her in yellow and gold and red, and all that remains is to see whether her knight walks away alive in the face of the numinous, or whether Constance will bury her bones in British earth-- but however her story ends, there will be a place for Constance. The ice has broken; the river runs.

"A good question," she says, quietly, not as a gnomic pronouncement but as an acknowledgement. Leave it to Tristan to ask it.