A breakfast of juicy roast hare brings me back to life again! I devour three, one after another, before I start to feeling like Nion the King of Scum again. When I reach for another, Baine slaps me hand.

"Winter Mist would be wanting some!" she says fiercely.

"I didn't think they ate much, the Folk," I mumble and throw a cockeyed gawk at my moonstruck son. He just waves his own steaming haunch of hare at me and sticks out his tongue. Odd that he don't want to sit down with the rest of us. I'm pondering over that and many more strange things that are drifting through the hazy sweep of me mind, when out struts HERSELF!

Even Baine gapes at the elf-wife. From the great mass of tousled love-locks and the two points of her long ears pricked up fearsome high, then to the bouncy morsels she's barely bothered to cover, and way down the lazy legs to those wee dancin' feet that scarce touch ground, I gobble up the sight of her more craven than I fed on the bloody hares. Jaunty as a jaybird, she steals the haunch from her blushing husband's hand, brushes her berry-red lips to just the very tip of his nose, and drawls something about her morning-after hungers and the horses as she sways her wicked hips away into the hall and out of here.

All I can do is breathe out a long, low whistle. Baine gets out her comb and starts working at her own tresses. Women!

There's something with Keu and 'Daig, a hot wall has sprung up between them. More to do with women, I'd bet. Keu clears his throat but its the Night Raven who is first to speak.

"Remember when Faramir mentioned that passageway that he said went all the way to the Niafer keep? Well, Mór Lámh says he's found the portal!"

I turn to Keu. I wonder if this is a trick. He just rubs his massively muscled arm and smiles smugly. Something tells me to go slow or else I may find meself at the bottom of a cave-pit. Forever.

"Ain't that interesting?" is my breezy reply. A certain fear tickles me into a snort of laughter. "And of what use would that be to us now? I was thinkin' we should be moving along today, and there's more worthwhile amusements for us than poking into a dark hole in the ground. Listen to this..."