Emotions tangle into a single overwhelming mess. There's a bird -- new, and curious, but Dain will file that thought away for later. There's his own name -- right now, not very important, except where it rings with nostalgia and buried memories. And there's the time, the sheer weight of years passed and old, healed-over acceptance that Tuo might very well be dead -- and that even if he wasn't, the odds of seeing him again were so astronomical as to exist only in the realm of the gods.

But he's here. Here, in this tiny village cut off by snowstorms for half of the year, looking both completely different and utterly identical to the much younger version in Dain's memory, and he can't help but hug back, hard, as though he can squeeze some lost time back into the present.

"It has been," he says quietly into Tuo's shoulder, "such a long time. Have you been here, since Griston?"