Delanora Chapter 8 Summary

Chapter 8
IT WAS STRANGE, DIANORA THOUGHT, STILL MOVING THROUGH the crowded Audience Chamber as spring sunlight filtered down on Brandins court from the stained- glass windows above, how the so clear portents of youth were alchemized by time into the many-layered ambiguities of adult life.
Sipping from her jeweled cup she considered the alternative. That she had simply allowed things to become nuanced and difficult. That the real truths were exactly the same as they had been on the day she arrived. That all she was doing was hiding: from what she had become, and what she had not yet done.
It was the central question of her life and once more she pushed it away to the edges of her awareness. Not today. Not in any daytime. Those thoughts belonged to nights alone in the saishan when
only Scelto by her door might know how sleepless she was, or find the tracks of tears along her cheeks when he came to wake her in the morning.
What he did do, an instant later, was glance quickly beyond her shoulder towards the throne. Dianora was already turning by then, an inexplicable sense, almost an antenna, having alerted her.
So she was facing the Island Throne and the doorway behind it by the time the heralds staff rapped the floor twice, not loudly, and Brandin came into the room. He was followed by the two priests, and the priestess of Adaon. Rhun shambled quickly over to stand near by, dressed identically to the King except for his cap.
The truer measure of power, Brandin had once said to her, wouldnt be found in having twenty heralds deafen a room by proclaiming ones arrival. Any fool in funds for a day could rivet attention that way. The more testing course, the truer measure, was to enter unobtrusively and observe what happened.
What happened was what always happened. The Audience Chamber had been collectively poised as if on the edge of a cliff for the past ten minutes, waiting. Now, just as collectively, the court plummeted into obeisance. Not one person in the whole crowded room was still speaking by the time the heralds muted staff of office proclaimed the King. In the silence the two discreet raps on the marbled floor sounded like echoing thunder.
Brandin was in high good humor. Dianora could have told that from halfway across the room, even if she hadnt had a hint from Rhun already. Her heart was beating very fast. It always did whenever Brandin entered a room where she was. Even after twelve years. Even still, and despite everything. So many lines of her life led to or from this man or came together, hopelessly
Brandins amused glance went from her to Rhamanus. It was not as if hed needed the reminder of which Tribute captain had brought him Dianora. She knew that, and he knew she did. It was all part of their verbal dance. His intelligence stretched her to her limits, and then changed what those limits were.
She noticed, perhaps because the subject had come up with Rhamanus, that there was as much grey in his beard now as black.
This, she realized, was why hed wanted to speak to her alone. Hed been up on Sangarios that morning; she was one of the few who knew about it. Brandin kept this venture quiet, in case he should fail. Shed been prepared to tease him about it.
At the beginning of spring, just as the winds began to change, before the last snows melted in Certando and Tregea and the southern reaches of what had been Tigana, came the three Ember Days that marked the turning of the year.
No fires not already burning were lit anywhere in the Palm. The devout fasted for at least the first of the three days. The bells of the Triad temples were silent. Men stayed within their doors at night, especially after darkfall on the first day which was the Day of the Dead.
There were Ember Days in autumn as well, halfway through the year, when the time of mourning came for Adaon slain on his mountain in Tregea, when the sun began to fade as Eanna mourned and Morian folded in upon herself in her Halls underground. But the spring days inspired a colder dread, especially in the countryside, because so much depended upon what would follow them. Winters passing, the season of sowing, and the hope of grain, of life, in the summers fullness to come.
In Chiara there was an added ritual, different from anything elsewhere in the Palm.
On the Island the tale was told that Adaon and Eanna had first come together in love for three full days and nights on the summit of Sangarios. That in the surging climax of her desire on the third night Eanna of the Lights had created the stars of heaven and strewn them like shining lace through the dark.
And the tale was told that nine months later—which is three times three—the Triad was completed when Morian was born in the depths of winter in a cave on that same mountain.
And with Morian had come both life and death into the world, and with life and death came mortal man to walk under the newly named stars, the two moons of the nights warding, and the sun of day.
And for this reason had Chiara always asserted its preeminence among the nine provinces of the Palm, and for this reason as well did the Island name Morian as guardian of its destiny.
Morian of Portals, who had sway over all thresholds. For everyone knew that all islands were worlds unto themselves, that to come to an island was to come to another world. A truth known under the stars and moons, if not always remembered by the light of day.
Every three years then, at the beginning of each Year of Morian, on the first of the springtime Ember Days, the young men of Chiara would vie with each other in a dawn race up to the summit of San-garios, there to pluck a blood-dark sprig of sonrai, the intoxicating berries of the mountain, under the watchful eye of the priests of Morian who had kept vigil on the peak all night long among the waking spirits of the dead. The first man down the mountain was anointed Lord of Sangarios until the next such run in three years time.
In the old days, the very old days, the Lord of Sangarios would have been hunted down and slain on his mountain by the women six months later on the first of the Ember Days of fall.
Not anymore. Not for a long time. Now the young champion was likely to find himself in fierce demand as a lover by women seeking the blessing of his seed. A different sort of hunt, Dianora had said to Brandin once.
He hadnt laughed.
He didnt find the ritual amusing. In fact, six years ago the King of Ygrath had elected to run the course himself, the morning before the actual race. He had done it again three years past. No small achievement, really, for a man of his years, considering how hard and how long the runners trained for this. Dianora didnt know what to find more whimsical: the fact that Brandin would do this thing, in such secrecy, or the ebullient masculine pride hed felt both times hed made it up to the summit of Sangarios and down again.
In the Audience Chamber Dianora asked the question she was clearly expected to ask: "What did you see, then?”
She did not know, for mortals seldom do know when they approach a threshold of the goddess, that the question would mark the turning of her days.
There was no dissembling in the expression she felt come over her face at that. But over and above everything else there was something new inside her with these tidings. She badly needed to be alone to think. A vain hope. She wouldnt get that chance for a long time yet today; best to push his story as far back as she could, with all the other things she was always pushing to the edges of her
mind.
And that tone she recognized and knew shed gone too far. As always at such moments she had a dizzying sense of a pit gaping at her feet.
She knew what Brandin needed from her; she knew the reason he granted her license to be outrageous and impertinent. She had long understood why the wit and edge she brought to their exchanges were important to him. She was his counterbalance to Soloress soft, unquestioning, undemanding shelter. The two of them, in turn, balancing dEymons ascetic exercise of politics and government.
And all three of them in orbit around the star that Brandin was. The voluntarily exiled sun, removed from the heavens it knew, from the lands and seas and people, bound to this alien peninsula by loss and grief and revenge decreed.
She knew all this. She knew the King very well. Her life depended on that. She did not often stray across the line that was always there, invisible but inviolate. When she did it was likely to be over something as apparently trivial as this. It was such a paradox for her how he could shrug off or laugh at or even invite her caustic commentary on court and colony—and yet bridle like a boy with affronted pride if she teased about his ability to run up and down a mountain in a morning.
At such times he had only to say her name in a certain way and endless chasms opened before her in the delicately inlaid floor of the Audience Chamber.
She was a captive here, more slave than courtesan, at the court of a Tyrant. She was also an impostor, living an ongoing lie while her country slowly died away from the memories of men. And she had sworn to kill this man, whose glance across a room was as wildfire on her skin or amber wine in her mortal blood.
Chasms, everywhere she turned.
And now this morning he had seen a riselka. He, and very possibly a second man as well. Fighting back her fear she forced herself to shrug casually, to arch her eyebrows above a face schooled to bland unconcern.
Her throat was dry. She felt a nerve flutter beneath the skin of her wrist. Her own color was high, she knew. She swallowed with some difficulty.
"Perhaps tonight would be wiser," she murmured, trying to keep her tone light but not really managing it, unable to hide the swift response in her eyes—spark to spark like the onset of a blaze. The jeweled khav chalice trembled in her hand. He saw that, and she saw that he did and that her response, as always, served as kindling for his own desire. She sipped at her drink, holding it with both hands, clinging to self-control.
"Better tonight, surely," she said again, overwhelmed as always by what was happening to her. She knew what he needed her to say though, now, at this moment, in this room of state thronged with his court and emissaries from home.
She said it, looking him in the eyes, articulating carefully: "After all my lord, at your age you should marshal your strength. You did run partway up a hill this morning.”
An instant later, for the second time, the Chiaran court of Brandin of Ygrath saw their King throw back his handsome, bearded head and they heard him laugh aloud in delight. Not far away, Rhun the Fool cackled in simultaneous glee.
"Isolla of Ygrath!”
This time there were trumpets and a drum, as well as the heralds staff resounding as it struck the floor by the double doors at the southern end of the Audience Chamber.
Standing most of the way towards the throne, Dianora had time to observe the stately progress of the woman Brandin had called the finest musician in Ygrath. The assembled court of Chiara was lined several rows deep, flanking the approach to the King.
"A handsome woman still," murmured Neso of Ygrath, "and shes fifty years old if shes a day.”
Somehow he had managed to end up next to her in the front row.
His unctuous tone irritated her, as always, but she tried not to let it show. Isolla was clad in the simplest possible robe of dark blue, belted at the waist with a slender gold chain. Her hair, brown with hints of grey, was cut unfashionably short—although the spring and summer fashion might change after today, Dianora thought. The colony always took its cue in these matters from Ygrath.
Isolla walked confidently, not hurrying, down the aisle formed by the courtiers. Brandin was already smiling a welcome. He was always immensely pleased when one or another of Ygraths artists made the long, often dangerous, sea voyage to his second court.
Several steps behind Isolla, and carrying her lute in its case as if it were an artifact of immeasurable worth, Dianora saw—with genuine surprise—the poet Camena di Chiara, clad in his ubiquitous triple- layered cloak. There were murmurs from the assembly: she wasnt the only one caught off guard by this.
Instinctively she threw a glance across the aisle to where Doarde stood with his wife and daughter.
She was in time to see the spasm of hate and fear that flickered across his face as his younger rival approached. An instant later the revealing expression was gone, replaced by a polished mask of sneering disdain at Camenas vulgar lowering of himself to serve as porter for an Ygrathen.
Still, Dianora considered, this was an Ygrathen court. Camena, she guessed in a flash of intuition, had probably had one of his verses set to music. If Isolla was about to sing a song of his it would be a dazzling coup for the Chiaran poet. More than sufficient to explain why he would offer to further exalt Isolla—and Ygrathen artists—by serving as a bearer for her.
The politics of art, Dianora decided, was at least as complex as that of provinces and nations.
Isolla had stopped, as was proper, about fifteen steps from the dais of the Island Throne, very close to where Dianora and Neso stood.
Neatly she proceeded to perform the triple obeisance. Very graciously—a mark of high honor— Brandin rose to his feet to bid her welcome. He was smiling. So was Rhun, behind him and to his left.
For no reason she would ever afterwards be able to name or explain Dianora turned from monarch and musician back to the poet bearing the lute. Camena had stopped a further half a dozen paces behind Isolla and had knelt on the marble floor.
What detracted from the grace of the tableau was the dilation of his eyes. Nilth leaves, Dianora concluded instantly. Hes drugged himself. She saw beads of perspiration on the poets brow. It was not warm in the Audience Chamber.
The guards had Camena by now. Hed been dragged to his feet. Dianora had never seen anyone look so white. Even his eyes were white, from the drug. For a moment she thought he was going to faint, but then Camena threw his head back as far as he could in the iron grip of the Ygrathen soldiers. He opened his mouth, as if in agony.
"Chiara!" he cried once, and then, "Freedom for Chiara!" before they silenced him, brutally.
The echoes rang for a long time. The room was large and the stillness was almost absolute. No one dared to move. Dianora had a sense that the court wasnt even breathing. No one wanted the slightest attention drawn to them.
On the mosaic-inlaid floor Neso moaned again in fear and pain, breaking the tableau. Two soldiers knelt to tend to him. Dianora was still afraid she was going to be sick; she couldnt make her hands stop trembling. Isolla of Ygrath had not moved.
She could not move, Dianora realized: Brandin was holding her in a mindlock like a flower pressed flat on a sheet. The soldiers lifted Neso and helped him from the room. Dianora stepped back herself, leaving Isolla alone before the King. Fifteen very proper paces away.
For the first time Isolla seemed to waver. She lowered her gaze from his eerily serene grey eyes. Only after a long moment did she say, "You had to have known that there would be a price for what you did.” did you? And Girald? He is no King—his father is. That is your title, not his.
What does the key to a saishan mean against that reality? He is even going to die before you, Brandin, unless you are slain. And what will happen then? It is unnatural! It is all unnatural, and there is a price to be paid.”
There would have had to be. Dianora heard nothing though, only the sound of a great many people breathing carefully as Brandin opened his eyes again to look down upon the singer. There was an unveiled triumph in the Ygrathen womans face.
"She was invited here," he repeated almost wistfully. "I could have compelled her but I chose not to do so. She had made her feelings clear and I left the choice to her. I thought it was the kinder, fairer action. It would appear that my sin lies in not having ordered her to take ship for this peninsula.”
So many different griefs and shapes of pain seemed to be warring for preeminence within Dianora.
Behind the King she could see dEymon; his face was a sickly grey. He met her eyes for only an instant then quickly looked away. Later she might think of ways to use this sudden ascendancy over him but right now she felt only pity for the man. He would offer to resign tonight, she knew. Offer, probably, to kill himself after the old fashion. Brandin would refuse, but after this nothing would be quite the same.
Isollas head exploded like an overripe fruit smashed with a hammer. Dark blood burst from her neck as her body collapsed like a sack. Dianora was standing too near; the blood of the slain woman spattered thickly on her gown and face. She stumbled backwards. A hideous illusion of reptilian creatures was coiling and twisting in the place where Isollas head had been mashed to a formless, oozing pulp.
There was screaming everywhere and a frenzied pandemonium as the court backed away. One figure suddenly ran forward. Stumbling, almost falling in its haste, the figure jerked out a sword. Then awkwardly, with great clumsy two-handed slashes, Rhun the Fool began hacking at the dead body of the singer.
His face was weirdly distorted with rage and revulsion. Foam and mucus ran from his mouth and nose. With one savage butchers blow he severed an arm from the womans torso. Something dark and green and blind appeared to undulate from the stump of Isollas shoulder, leaving a trail of glistening black slime. Behind Dianora someone gagged with horror.
"Stevan!" she heard Rhun cry brokenly. And amid nausea and chaos and terror, an overwhelming pity suddenly laid hard siege to her heart. She looked at the frantically laboring Fool, clad exactly like the King, bearing a Kings sword. Spittle flew from his mouth.
"Music! Stevan! Music! Stevan!" Rhun shouted obsessively, and with each slurred, ferocious articulation of the words his slender, jeweled court sword went up and down, glinting brilliantly in the streaming light, hewing the dead body like meat. He lost his footing on the slippery floor and fell to his knees with the force of his own fury. A grey thing with eyes on waving stalks appeared to attach itself like a bloodleech to his knee.
"Music," Rhun said one last time, softly, with unexpected clarity. Then the sword slipped through his fingers and he sat in a puddle of blood beside the mutilated corpse of the singer, his balding head slewed awkwardly down and to one side, his white-and-gold court garments hopelessly soiled, weeping as though his heart was broken.
Dianora turned to Brandin. The King was motionless, standing exactly as he had been throughout, his hands relaxed at his sides. He gazed at the appalling scene in front of him with a frightening detachment.
"There is always a price," he said quietly, almost to himself, through the incessant screaming and tumult that filled the Audience Chamber. Dianora took one hesitant step towards him then, but he had already turned and, with dEymon quickly following, Brandin left the room through the door behind the dais.
With his departure the slithering, oleaginous creatures immediately disappeared, but not the mangled body of the singer or the pitiful, crumpled figure of the Fool. Dianora seemed to be alone near them, everyone else had surged back towards the doors. Isollas blood felt hot where it had landed on her skin.
People were tripping and pushing each other in their frantic haste to quit the room now that the King was gone. She saw the soldiers hustling Camena di Chiara away through a side door. Other soldiers came forward with a sheet to cover Isollas body. They had to move Rhun away to do it; he didnt seem to understand what was happening. He was still weeping, his face grotesquely screwed up like a hurt childs.
Dianora moved a hand to wipe at her cheek and her fingers came away streaked with blood. The soldiers placed the sheet over the singers body. One of them gingerly picked up the arm Rhun had severed and pushed it under the sheet as well. Dianora saw him do that. There seemed to be blood all over her face. On the very edge of losing all control she looked around for help, any kind of help.
"Come, my lady," said a desperately needed voice that was somehow by her side. "Come. Let me take you back to the saishan.”
"Oh, Scelto," she whispered. "Please. Please do that, Scelto.”
The news blazed through the dry tinder of the saishan setting it afire with rumor and fear. An assassination attempt from Ygrath. With Chiaran participation.
And it had very nearly succeeded.
Scelto hustled Dianora down the corridor to her rooms and with a bristling protectiveness slammed the door on the nervous, fluttering crowd that clung and hovered in the hallway like so many silk-clad moths. Murmuring continuously he undressed and washed her, and then wrapped her carefully into her warmest robe. She was shivering uncontrollably, unable to speak. He lit the fire and made her sit before it.
In docile submission she drank the mahgoti tea he prepared as a sedative. Two cups of it, one after the other. Eventually the trembling stopped. She still found it difficult to speak. He made her stay in the chair before the fire. She didnt want to leave it anyway.
Her brain felt battered, numb. She seemed to be utterly incapable of marshaling any understanding, of shaping an adequate response to what had just happened.
One thought only kept driving the others away, pounding in her head like the hammer of a heralds staff on the floor. A thought so impossible, so disabling, that she tried, with all she could, through the blinding pulse of an onrushing headache, to block it out. She couldnt. The hammering crashed through, again and again: she had saved his life.
Tigana had been a single pulsebeat away from coming back into the world. The pulsebeat of Brandin that the crossbow would have ended.
Home was a dream shed had yesterday. A place where children used to play. Among towers near the mountains, by a river, on curving sweeps of white or golden sand beside a palace at the edge of the sea.
Home was a longing, a desperate dream, a name in her dreams. And this afternoon she had done the one thing she could possibly have done to bar that name from the world, to lock it into a dream. Until all the dreams, too, died.
How was she to deal with that? How possibly cope with what it meant? She had come here to kill Brandin of Ygrath, to end his life that lost Tigana might live again. And instead . . .
The shivering started once more. Fussing and murmuring, Scelto built up the fire and brought yet another blanket for her knees and feet. When he saw the tears on her face he made a queer helpless sound of distress. Someone knocked loudly on her door sometime later and she heard Scelto driving them away with language she had never known him to use before.
Gradually, very slowly, she began to pull herself together. From the color of the light that gently drifted down through the high windows she knew that the afternoon would be waning towards dusk. She rubbed her cheeks and eyes with the backs of her hands. She sat up. She had to be ready when twilight came; twilight was when Brandin sent to the saishan.
She rose from her chair, pleased to find that her legs were steadier. Scelto rushed up, protesting, but when he saw her face he quickly checked himself. Without another word he led her through the inner doors and down that hallway to the baths. His ferocious glare silenced the attendants there. She had a sense that he would have struck them if they had spoken; she had never heard of him doing a single violent act. Not since he had killed a man and lost his own manhood.
She let them bathe her, let the scented oils soften her skin. There had been blood on it that afternoon.
The waters swirled around her and then away. The attendants washed her hair. After, Scelto painted the nails of her fingers and toes. A soft shade, dusty rose. Far from the color of blood, far from anger or grief.
Later she would paint her lips the same shade. She doubted they would make love, though. She would hold him and be held. She went back to her room to wait for the summons.
From the light she knew when evening had fallen. Everyone in the saishan always knew when evening fell. The day revolved towards and then away from the hour of darkness. She sent Scelto outside, to receive the word when it came.
A short time after he came back and told her that Brandin had sent for Solores.
Anger flamed wildly within her. It exploded like . . . like the head of Isolla of Ygrath in the Audience Chamber. Dianora could scarcely draw breath, so fierce was her sudden rage. Never in her life had she felt anything like this—this white hot caldron in her heart. After Tigana fell, after her brother was driven away, her hatred had been a shaped thing, controlled, channeled, driven by purpose, a guarded flame that shed known would have to burn a long time.
This was an inferno. A caldron boiling over inside her, prodigious, overmastering, sweeping all before it like a lava flow. Had Brandin been in her room at that moment she could have ripped his heart out with her nails and teeth—as the women tore Adaon on the mountainside. She saw Scelto take an involuntary backwards step away from her; she had never known him to fear her or anyone else before. It was not an observation that mattered now.
What mattered, all that mattered, the only thing, was that she had saved the life of Brandin of Ygrath today, trampling into muck and spattered blood the clear, unsullied memory of her home and the oath shed sworn in coming here so long ago. She had violated the essence of everything she once had been; violated herself more cruelly than had any man whod ever lain with her for a coin in that upstairs room in Certando.
And in return? In return, Brandin had just sent for Solores di Corte, leaving her to spend tonight alone.
Not, not a thing he should have done.
It did not matter that even within the fiery heat of her own blazing Dianora could understand why he might have done this thing. Understand how little need he would have tonight for wit or intelligence, for sparkle, for questions or suggestions. Or desire. His need would be for the soft, unthinking, reflexive gentleness that Solores gave. That she herself apparently did not. The cradling worship, tenderness, the soothing voice. He would need shelter tonight. She could understand: it was what she needed too, needed desperately, after what had happened.
But she needed it from him.
And so it came to be that, alone in her bed that night, sheltered by no one and by nothing, Dianora found herself naked and unable to hide from what came when the fires of rage finally died.
She lay unsleeping through the first and then through the second chiming of the bells that marked off the triads of the dark hours, but before the third chiming that heralded the coming of grey dawn two things had happened within her.
The first was the inexorable return of the single strand of memory shed always been careful to block out from among all the myriad griefs of the year Tigana was occupied. But she truly was unsheltered and exposed in the dark of that Ember Night, drifting terribly far from whatever moorings her soul had found.
While Brandin, on the far wing of the palace sought what comfort he could in Solores di Corte, Dianora lay as in an open space and alone, unable to deflect any of the images that now came sweeping back from years ago. Images of love and pain and the loss of love in pain that were far too keen—too icy keen a wind in the heart—to be allowed at any normal time.
But the finger of death had rested on Brandin of Ygrath that day, and she alone had guided it away, steering the King past the darkest portal of Morian, and tonight was an Ember Night, a night of ghosts and shadows. It could not be anything like a normal time, and it was not. What came to Dianora, terribly, one after another in unceasing progression like waves of the dark sea, were her last memories of her brother before he went away.
He had been too young to fight by the Deisa. No one under fifteen, Prince Valentin had proclaimed before riding sternly north to war. Alessan, the Princes youngest child, had been taken away south in hiding by Danoleon, the High Priest of Eanna, when word came that Brandin was coming down upon them.
That was after Stevan had been slain. After the one victory. They had all known; the weary men who had fought and survived, and the women and the aged and the children left behind—that Brandins coming would mark the end of the world they had lived in and loved.
They hadnt known then how literally true that was: what the Sorcerer-King of Ygrath could do and what he did. This they were to learn in the days and months that followed as a hard and brutal thing that grew like a tumor and then festered in the souls of those who survived.
The dead of Deisa are the lucky ones. So it was said, more and more often, in whispers and in pain in the year Tigana died, by those who endured the dying.
Dianora and her brother were left with a mother whose mind had snapped like a bowstring with the tidings of Second Deisa. Even as the vanguard of the Ygrathens entered the city itself, occupying the streets and squares of Tigana, the noble houses and the delicately colored Palace by the Sea, she seemed to let slip her last awareness of the world to wander, mute and gentle, through a space neither of her children could travel to with her.
Sometimes she would smile and nod at invisible things as she sat amid the rubble of their courtyard that summer, with smashed marble all around her, and her daughters heart would ache like an old wound in the rains of winter.
Dianora set herself to run the household as best she could, though three of the servants and apprentices had died with her father. Two others ran away not long after the Ygrathens came and the destruction began. She couldnt even blame them. Only one of the women and the youngest of the apprentices stayed with them.
Her brother and the apprentice waited until the long wave of burnings and demolition had passed, then they sought work clearing away rubble or repairing walls as a limited rebuilding started under Ygrathen orders. Life began to return towards a normality. Or what passed for normality in a city now called Lower Corte in a province of that name.
In a world where the very word Tigana could not be heard by anyone other than themselves. Soon they stopped using it in public places. The pain was too great: the twisting feeling inside that came with the blank look of incomprehension on the faces of the Ygrathens or the traders and bankers from Corte who had swarmed quickly down to seek what profit they could among the rubble and the slow rebuilding of a city. It was a hurt for which, truly, there was no name.
Dianora could remember, with jagged, sharp-edged clarity, the first time shed called her home Lower Corte. They all could, all the survivors: it was, for each of them, a moment embedded like a fish hook in the soul. The dead of Deisa, First or Second, were the lucky ones, so the phrase went that year.
She watched her brother come into a bitter maturity that first summer and fall, grieving for his vanished smile, laughter lost, the childhood too soon gone, not knowing how deeply the same hard lessons and absences were etched in her own hollow, unlovely face. She was sixteen in the late summer, he turned fifteen in the fall. She made a cake on his naming day, for the apprentice, the one old woman, her mother, her brother and herself. They had no guests; assembly of any kind was forbidden throughout that year. Her mother had smiled when Dianora gave her a slice of the dark cake—but Dia-nora had known the smile had nothing to do with any of them.
Her brother had known it too. Preternaturally grave he had kissed his mother on the forehead and then his sister, and had gone out into the night. It was, of course, illegal to be abroad after nightfall, but something kept driving him out to walk the streets, past the random fires that still smoldered on almost every corner. It was as if he was daring the Ygrathen patrols to catch him. To punish him for having been fourteen in the season of war.
Two soldiers were knifed in the dark that fall. Twenty death-wheels were hoisted in swift response.
Six women and five children were among those bound aloft to die. Dianora knew most of them; there werent so very many people left in the city, they all knew each other. The screaming of the children, then their diminishing cries were things she needed shelter from in her nights forever after.
No more soldiers were killed.
Her brother continued to go out at night. She would lie awake until she heard him come in. He always made a sound, deliberately, so she would hear him and be able to fall asleep. Somehow, he knew she would be awake, though she had never said a word.
He would have been handsome, with his dark hair and deep brown eyes if he hadnt been so thin and if the eyes were not shadowed and ringed by sleeplessness and grief. There was not a great deal of food that first winter—most of the harvest had been burned, and the rest confiscated—but Dianora did the best she could to feed the five of them. About the look in his eyes there was nothing she could do. Everyone had that look that year. She could see it in her mirror.
The following spring the Ygrathen soldiers discovered a new form of sport. It had probably been inevitable that they would, one of the evil growths that sprang from the deep-sown seeds of Brandins vengeance.
Dianora remembered being at an upstairs window the day it began. She was watching her brother and the apprentice—no longer an apprentice, of course—walking through a sun-brightened early morning across the square on their way to the site where they were laboring. White clouds had been drifting by overhead, scudding with the wind. A small cluster of soldiers came from the opposite side and accosted the two boys. Her window was open to air the room and catch the freshness of the breeze; she heard it all.
The four traders reported that they were from Asoli. It was obvious from their clothing.
Which was bad, because with an audience the soldiers would now have to clearly establish their authority. What had been a game when done in private was something else now. Dianora wanted to turn away. She wanted her father back from the Deisa, she wanted Prince Valentin back and alive, her mother back from whatever country she wandered through.
She watched. To share it. To bear witness and remember, knowing even then that such things were going to matter, if anything mattered in the days and years to come.
The soldier with the drawn blade placed the tip of it very carefully against her brothers breast. The afternoon sunlight glinted from it. It was a working blade, a soldiers sword. There came a small sound from the people gathered around the edges of the square.
Her brother said, a little desperately, "They cannot hold the name. You know they cannot. You have destroyed us. Is it necessary to go on causing pain? Is it necessary?”
He is only fifteen, Dianora prayed, gripping the ledge like death, her hand a claw. He was too young to fight. He was not allowed. Forgive him this. Please.
The four Asolini traders, as one man, stepped quickly out of range. One of the soldiers—the one with the high laugh—shifted uncomfortably, as if regretting what this had come to. But there was a crowd gathered. The boy had had his fair chance. There was really no choice now.
The sword pushed delicately forward a short way and then withdrew. Through a torn blue tunic a welling of blood appeared and hung a moment, bright in the springtime light, as if yearning towards the blade, before it broke and slid downwards, staining the blue.
"The name," said the soldier quietly. There was no levity in his voice now. He was a professional, and he was preparing himself to kill, Dianora realized.
A witness, a memory, she saw her younger brother spread his feet then, as if to anchor himself in the ground of the square. She saw his hands clench into fists at his sides. She saw his head go back, lifting towards the sky.
And then she heard his cry.
He gave them what they demanded of him, he obeyed the command, but not sullenly or diffidently, and not in shame. Rooted in the land of his fathers, standing before the home of his family he looked towards the sun and let a name burst forth from his soul.
"Tigana!" he cried that all should hear. All of them, everyone in the square. And again, louder yet: "Tigana!" And then a third, a last time, at the very summit of his voice, with pride, with love, with a lasting, unredeemed defiance of the heart.
"TIGANA!”
Through the square that cry rang, along the streets, up to the windows where people watched, over the roofs of houses running westward to the sea or eastward to the temples, and far beyond all of these—a sound, a name, a hurled sorrow in the brightness of the air.
And though the four merchants could not cling to the name, though the soldiers could not hold it, the women at the windows and the children with them and the men riveted stone-still in street and square could hear it clearly, and clutch it to themselves, and they could gather and remember the pride at the base of that spiraling cry.
And that much, looking around, the soldiers could see plainly and understand. It was written in the faces gathered around them. He had done only what they themselves had ordered him to do, but the game had been turned inside out, it had turned out wrong in some way they could but dimly comprehend.
They beat him of course.
With their fists and feet and with the flats of their cared-for blades. Naddo too—for being there and so a part of it. The crowd did not disperse though, which would have been the usual thing when a beating took place. They watched in a silence unnatural for so many people. The only sound was that of the blows falling, for neither boy cried out and the soldiers did not speak.
When it was over they scattered the crowd with oaths and imprecations. Crowds were illegal, even though they themselves had caused this one to form. In a few moments everyone was gone. There were only faces behind half-drawn curtains at upstairs windows looking down on a square empty save for two boys lying in the settling dust, blood bright on their clothing in the clear light. There had been birds singing all around and all through what had happened. Dianora could remember.
She forced herself to remain where she was. Not to run down to them. To let them do this alone, as was their right. And at length she saw her brother rise with the slow, meditated movements of a very old man. She saw him speak to Naddo and then carefully help him to his feet. And then, as she had known would happen, she saw him, begrimed and bleeding and hobbling very badly, lead Naddo east without a backwards looks, towards the site where they were assigned to work that day.
She watched them go. Her eyes were dry. Only when the two of them turned the corner at the far end of the square and so were gone from sight did she leave her window. Only then did she loosen her white- clawed hold on the wood of the window-ledge. And only then, invisible to everyone with her curtains drawn, did she allow her tears to fall: in love, and for his hurts, and terrible pride.
When they came home that night she and the servant-woman heated water and drew baths for them and afterwards they dealt with the wounds and the black and purpling bruises as best they could.
Later, over dinner, Naddo told them he was leaving. That same night, he said. It was too much, he said, awkwardly twisting in his seat, speaking to Dianora, for her brother had turned his face away at Naddos first announcement.
There was no life to be made here, Naddo said with passionate urgency through a torn and swollen mouth. Not with the viciousness of the soldiers and the even more vicious taxes. If a young man, a young man such as himself, was to have any hope of doing something with his life, Naddo said, he had to get away. Desperately his eyes besought her understanding. He kept glancing nervously over to where her brother had now fully turned his back on both of them.
Where will you go, Dianora had asked him.
Asoli, hed told her. It was a hard, wet land, unbearably hot and humid in summer, everyone knew that. But there was room there for new blood. The Asolini made people welcome, hed heard, more so than in the Barbadian lands to the east. He would never ever go to Corte or Chiara. People from Tigana did not go there, he said. Her brother made a small sound at that but did not turn; Naddo glanced over at him again and swallowed, his Adams apple bobbing in his throat.
Three other young men had made plans, he said to Dianora. Plans to slip out from the city tonight and make their way north. Hed known about it for some time, he said. He hadnt been sure. He hadnt known what to do. What had happened this morning had made up his mind for him.
Eanna light your path, Dianora had said, meaning it. He had been a good apprentice and then a brave and loyal friend. People were leaving all the time. The province of Lower Corte was a bad place in a very bad time. Naddos left eye was completely swollen shut. He might easily have been killed that afternoon.
Later, when hed packed his few belongings and was ready to leave, she gave him some silver from her fathers hidden store. She kissed him in farewell. Hed begun weeping then. He commended himself to her mother and opened the front door. On the threshold hed turned back again, still crying.
Dianora didnt feel like a goddess, and her mirror offered no illusions: only a too thin face with enormous, staring eyes. She knew only that her happiness terrified her, and consumed her with guilt, and that her love for Baerd was the whole of her world. And what frightened her almost as much was seeing the same depth of love, the same astonished passion in him. Her heart misgave her constantly, even as they reached for their fugitive joy: too bright this forbidden flame in a land where any kind of brightness was lost or not allowed.
He came to her every night. The woman slept downstairs; their mother slept—and woke—in her own world. In the dark of Dianoras room they escaped into each other, reaching through loss and the knowledge of wrong in search of innocence.
He was still driven to go out some nights to walk the empty streets. Not as often as before, for which she gave thanks and sought a kind of justification for herself. A number of young men had been caught after curfew and killed on the wheels that spring. If what she was doing kept him alive she would face whatever judgment lay in wait for her in Morians Halls.
She couldnt keep him every night though. Sometimes a need she could not share or truly understand would drive him forth. He tried to explain. How the city was different under the two moons or one of them or the stars. How softer light and shadow let him see it as Tigana again. How he could walk silently down towards the sea and come upon the darkened palace, and how the rubble and ruin of it could somehow be rebuilt in his mind in darkness towards what it had been before.
He had a need for that, he said. He never baited the soldiers and promised her he never would. He didnt even want to see them, he said. They crashed into the illusions he wanted. He just needed to be abroad inside his memory of the city that had gone. Sometimes, Baerd told her, he would slip through gaps he knew in the harbor walls and walk along the beach listening to the sea.
By day he labored, a thin boy at a strong mans job, helping to rebuild what they were permitted to rebuild. Rich merchants from Corte—their ancient enemies—had been allowed to settle in the city, to buy up the smashed buildings and residential palaces very inexpensively, and to set about restoring them for their own purposes.
Baerd would come home at the end of a day sometimes with gashes and fresh bruises, and once the mark of a whip across his shoulders. She knew that if one company of soldiers had ended their sport with him there were others to pick it up. It was only happening here, shed heard. Everywhere else the soldiers restrained themselves and the King of Ygrath was governing with care, to consolidate his provinces against Barbadior.
In Lower Corte they were special, though. They had killed his son.
She would see those marks on Baerd and she had not the heart to ask him to deny himself his lost city at night when the need rose in him. Even though she lived a hundred terrors and died half a hundred deaths every time the front door closed behind him after dark—until she heard it open again and heard his loved, familiar footstep on the stairs, and then the landing, and then he came into her room to take and hold her in his arms.
It went on into summer and then it ended. It all ended, as her knowing heart had forewarned her from that first time in darkness, listening to the birds singing and the wind in the trees outside.
He came home no later than he usually did from walking abroad one night when blue Ilarion had been riding alone through a high lacework of clouds. It had been a beautiful night. She had sat up late by her window watching the moonlight falling on the rooftops. Shed been in bed when he came home though, and her heart had quickened with the familiar intermingling of relief and guilt and need. He had come into her room.
He didnt come to bed. Instead, he sank into the chair shed sat in by the window. With a queer, numb feeling of dread she had struck tinder and lit her candle. She sat up and looked at him. His face was very white, she could see that even by candlelight. She said nothing. She waited.
"I was on the beach," Baerd said quietly. "I saw a riselka there.”
She had always known it would end. That it had to end.
She asked the instinctive question. "Did anyone else see her?”
He shook his head.
They looked at each other in silence. She was amazed at how calm she was, how steady her hands were upon the comforter. And in that silence a truth came home to her, one she had probably known for a long time. "You have only been staying for me, in any case," she said. A statement. No reproach in it. He had seen a riselka.
He closed his eyes. "You knew?”
"Yes," she lied.
"Im sorry," he said, looking at her. But she knew that this would be easier for him if she were able to hide how new and deathly cold this actually was for her. A gift; perhaps the last gift she would give him.
"Dont be sorry," she murmured, her hands lying still, where he could see them. "Truly, I understand." Truly, she did, though her heart was a wounded thing, a bird with one wing only, fluttering in small circles to the ground.
"The riselka—" he began. And halted. It was an enormous, frightening thing, she knew.
"She makes it clear," he went on earnestly. "The fork of the prophecy. That I have to go away." She saw the love for her in his eyes. She willed herself to be strong enough. Strong enough to help him go away from her. Oh, my brother, she was thinking. And will you leave me now?
She said, "I know she makes it clear, Baerd. I know you have to leave. It will be marked on the lines of your palm." She swallowed. This was harder than she could ever have imagined. She said, "Where will you go?" My love, she added, but not aloud, only inside, in her heart.
"Ive thought about that," he said. He sat up straighter now. She could see him taking strength from her calm. She clung to that with everything she had.
"Im going to look for the Prince." he said.
"What, Alessan? We dont even know if hes alive," she said in spite of herself.
"Theres word he is," Baerd said. "That his mother is in hiding with the priests of Eanna, and that the Prince has been sent away. If there is any hope, any dream for us, for Tigana, it will lie with Alessan.”
"Hes fifteen years old," she said. Could not stop herself from saying. And so are you, she thought.
Baerd, where did our childhood go?
By candlelight his dark eyes were not those of a boy. "I dont think age matters," he said. "This is not going to be a quick or an easy thing, if it can ever be done at all. He will be older than fifteen when the time comes.”
"So will you," she said.
"And so will you," Baerd echoed. "Oh, Dia, what will you do?" No one else but her father ever called her that. Stupidly it was the name that nearly broke her control.
She shook her head. "I dont know," she said honestly. "Look after mother. Marry. There is money for a while yet if Im careful." She saw his stricken look and moved to quell it. "You are not to worry about it, Baerd. Listen to me: you have just seen a riselka! Will you fight your fate to clear rubble in this city for the rest of your days? No one has easy choices anymore, and mine will not be as hard as most. I may," she had added, tilting her head defiantly, "try to think of some way to chase the same dream as you.”
It astonished her, looking back, that she had actually said this on that very night. As if she herself had seen the riselka and her own path had been made clear, even as Baerds forked away from her.
Lonely and cold in the saishan she was not half so cold or alone as she had been that night. He had not lingered once shed given her dispensation. She had risen and dressed and helped him pack a very few things. He had flatly refused any of the silver. She assembled a small satchel of food for his first sunrise on the long road alone. At the doorway, in the darkness of the summer night, they had held each other close, clinging without words. Neither wept, as if both knew the time for tears had passed.
She would never have dreamt Camena had such courage or so much passion in his heart. She had derided him as a poseur, a wearer of three-layered cloaks, a minor, trivial artist angling for ascension at court.
Not anymore. Yesterday afternoon had compelled a new shape to her image of him. Now that he had done what he had done, now that his body had been given to the torturers and then the wheel there was a question that could no more be buried than could her memories of Baerd. Not tonight. Not unsheltered as she was and so awake.
What, the thought came knifing home like a winter wind in the soul, did Camenas act make her?
What did it make of that long-ago quest a sixteen-year-old girl had so proudly set herself the night her brother went away? The night hed seen a riselka under moonlight by the sea and gone in search of his Prince.
She knew the answers. Of course she did. She knew the names that belonged to her. The names she had earned here on the Island. They burned like sour wine in a wound. And burning inside, even as she shivered, Dianora strove one more time to school her heart to begin the deathly hard, never yet successful, journey back to her own dominion from that room on the far wing of the palace where lay the King of Ygrath.
That night was different though. Something had changed that night, because of what had happened, because of the finality, the absoluteness of what she herself had done in the Audience Chamber.
Acknowledging that, trying to deal with it, Dianora began to sense, as if from a very great distance, her hearts slow, painful retreat from the fires of love. A returning, and then a turning back, to the memory of other fires at home. Fields burning, a city burning, a palace set aflame.
No comfort there of course. No comfort anywhere at all. Only an absolute reminder of who she was and why she was here.
And lying very still in darkness on an Ember Night when country doors and windows were all closed against the dead and the magic in the fields, Dianora told over softly to herself the whole of the old foretelling verse: One man sees a riselka his life forks there.
Two men see a riselka one of them shall die.
Three men see a riselka one is blessed, one forks, one shall die.
One woman sees a riselka her path comes clear to her.
Two women see a riselka one of them shall bear a child.
Three women see a riselka one is blessed, one is clear, one shall bear a child.
In the morning, she said to herself amid cold and fire and all the myriad confusions of the heart. In the morning it will begin as it should have begun and ended long ago.
The Triad knew how bitter, how impossible all choices had seemed to her. How faint and elusive had been her dream within these walls of making it all come right for all of them. But of one truth she was now, finally, certain: she had needed something to be made clear along the twisting paths to betrayal that seemed to have become her life—and from Brandins own lips she had learned how that clear path might be offered her.
In the morning she would begin.
Until then she could lie here, achingly awake and alone, as on another night at home so many years ago, and she could remember.

PART THREE - EMBER TO EMBER chapter 9
IT WAS COLD IN THE GULLY BY THE SIDE OF THE ROAD. THERE was a thin, sheltering line of birch trees between them and the gates of the Nievolene estate, but even so the wind was a knife whenever it picked up.
There had been snow last night, a rare thing this far north, even in midwinter. It had made for a white, chilled second night of riding from Ferraut town where they had started, but Alessan had refused to slow their pace. He had said increasingly little as the night wore on, and Baerd said little at the best of times.
Devin had swallowed his questions and concentrated on keeping up.
They had crossed the Astibar border in darkness and arrived at the Nievolene lands just after dawn.
The horses were tethered in a grove about a half mile to the southwest, and the three men had made their way to this gully on foot. Devin dozed off at intervals through the morning. The snow made the landscape strange and crisp and lovely when the sun was out, but around mid-afternoon the grey clouds had gathered heavily overhead and it was only cold now, not beautiful at all. It had snowed again, briefly, about an hour before.
When Devin heard the jingle of horses approaching through the greyness, he realized that the Triad, for once, were holding open palms toward them. Or that, alternatively, the goddesses and the god had decided to give them a chance to do something fatally rash. He pressed himself as flat as he could to the wet ground of the gully. He thought of Catriana and the Duke, warm and sheltered with Taccio in Ferraut.
Later that night under the cold white gaze of Vidomni in the clearing winter sky Alessan killed the man theyd been waiting for. By the time Devin heard the soft jingle of the soldiers horse, the Prince was no longer by his side and it had been mostly accomplished.
Devin heard a soft sound, more like a cough than a cry. The horse snorted in alarm, and Devin belatedly rose up to try to deal with the animal. By then, though, he realized that Baerd wasnt beside him either. When he finally clambered out of the ditch to the road, the soldier—wearing the insignia of the Second Company—was dead and Baerd had the horse under control. The man, obviously off duty, from the casual look of his uniform, had evidently been on his way back to the border fort. The Barbadian was a big man, they all were, but this ones face seemed very young under the moonlight.
They threw the body across his horse and made their way back to the Nievolene gates. They could hear the men of the First Company singing loudly from the manor-house along the curving drive. The sound carried a long way in the stillness of the wintry air. There were stars out now beside the moon; the clouds were breaking up. Baerd pulled the Barbadian off the horse and leaned him against one of the gate pillars. Alessan and Devin claimed the other dead man from where they had left him in the gully; Baerd tethered the Barbadians horse some distance off the road.
In silence, listening to the ragged singing from over in the manor-house, Devin climbed the outer wall of the Nievolene barn. By moonlight and by feel he deciphered hand and footholds in the cold. When he reached the window he looked over his shoulder and saw Ilarion, just rising in the east.
He slipped through and into the upper loft. Below, a horse whickered softly and Devin caught his breath. His heart thudding, he froze where he was, listening. There was no other response. In the sudden, seductive warmth of the barn he crawled cautiously forward and looked down.
The guard was comprehensively asleep. His uniform was unbuttoned and the lantern on the floor by his side illuminated an empty flask of wine. He must have lost a dice roll, Devin thought, to have been posted so boringly on guard against nothing here among the horses and the straw.
They left the guard where he was to be burned. The informer and the soldier from the Second Company they dragged towards one of the outbuildings. Baerd studied the situation carefully for a few moments, refusing to be rushed, then he placed the two bodies in a particular way, and wedged the door in front of them convincingly shut with what Devin assumed would later appear to be a dislodged beam.
The singing from the manor had gradually been fading away. Now it had come down to a single voice drunkenly caroling a melancholy refrain about love lost long ago. Finally that voice, too, fell silent.
Which was Alessans cue. At his signal they simultaneously set fire to the dry straw and wood in the guarded barn and two of the adjacent outbuildings, including the one where the dead men were trapped.
Then they fled. By the time they were off the property the Nievolene barns were an inferno of flame.
Horses were screaming.
There was no pursuit. They hadnt expected any. Alessan and Sandre had worked it out very carefully back in Ferraut. The charred bodies of the informer and the Second Company soldier would be found by Karaliuss men. The mercenaries of the First Company would draw the obvious conclusion.
They reclaimed their horses and headed west. They spent the night outside again in the cold taking turns on watch. It had gone very well. It seemed to have gone exactly as planned. Devin wished theyd been able to free the horses, though. Their screaming ran through his fitful dreams in the snow.
In the morning Alessan bought a cart from a farmer near the border of Ferraut and Baerd bargained with a woodcutter for a load of fresh-cut logs. They paid the new transit duty and sold the wood at the first fort across the border. They also bought some winter wool to carry to Ferraut town where they were to rejoin the others.
There was no point, Alessan said, in missing a chance at a profit. They did have responsibilities to their partners.
In fact, a disconcerting number of untoward events had ruffled the Eastern Palm in the autumn and winter that followed the unmasking of the Sandreni conspiracy. In themselves, none of them amounted to very much; collectively they unsettled and irritated Alberico of Barbadior to the point where his aides and messengers began finding their employment physically hazardous, in so far as their duties brought them into proximity with the Tyrant.
For a man noted for his composure and equanimity—even back in Barbadior when hed been only the leader of a middle-ranking family of nobility—Albericos temper was shockingly close to the surface all winter long.
It had begun, his aides agreed amongst each other, after the San-dreni traitor, Tomasso, had been found dead in the dungeons when they came to bring him to the professionals. Alberico, waiting in the room of the implements, had been terrifyingly enraged. Each of the guards—from Sifervals Third Company—had been summarily executed. Including the new Captain of the Guard; the previous one had killed himself the night before. Siferval himself was summoned back to Astibar from Certando for a private session with his employer that left him limp and shaking for hours afterwards.
No, the city was simply too sophisticated to fall for that. Anyone with the slightest sense of geography or economics could see what was really going on. How, by trumping up this "threat" from three of the five largest landowners in the distrada, Alberico was merely creating a sleek cover for an otherwise naked land grab.
It was only sheerest coincidence, of course, that the Sandreni estates were central, the Nievolene farms lay to the southwest along the Ferraut border, and Scalvaias vineyards were in the richest belt in the north where the best grapes for the blue wine were grown. An immensely convenient conspiracy, all the taverns and khav rooms agreed.
And every single conspirator was dead overnight, as well. Such swift justice! Such an accumulation of evidence against them! There had been an informer among the Sandreni, it was proclaimed. He was dead. Of course. Tomasso bar Sandre had led the conspiracy, they were told. He too, most unfortunately, was dead.
Led by Astibar itself all four provinces of the Eastern Palm reacted with bitter, sardonic disbelief.
They may have been conquered, ground under the heavy Barbadian heel, but they had not been deprived of their intelligence or rendered blind. They knew a Tyrants scheming when they saw it.
In the aftermath of the perverts inexplicable death, and the unanimous word from all four provinces that no one believed a word of what had happened, Alberico had abandoned his original, carefully measured response to the plot.
The lands were seized of course, but in addition all the living members of all three families were searched out and death-wheeled in Astibar. He hadnt expected there to be quite so many, actually, when he gave that order. The stench had been deplorable and some of the children lived an unconscionably long time on the wheels. It made it difficult to concentrate on business in the state offices above the Grand Square.
He raised taxes in Astibar and introduced, for the first time, transit duties for merchants crossing from one of his provinces to another, along the lines of the existing tariff levied for crossing from the Eastern to the Western Palm. Let them pay—literally—if they chose not to believe what had happened to him in that cabin.
He did more. Half the massive Nievolene grain harvest was promptly shipped home to Barbadior. For an action conceived in anger he considered that one to be inspired. It had pushed the price of grain down back home in the Empire, which hurt his familys two most ancient rivals while making him exceptionally popular with the people. In so far as the people mattered in Barbadior.
At the same time, here in the Palm, Astibar was forced to bring in more grain than ever from Certando and Ferraut, and with the new duties Alberico was going to rake a healthy cut of that inflated price as well.
He could almost have slaked his anger, almost have made himself happy, watching the effects of all this ripple through, if it wasnt that small things kept happening.
For one, his soldiers began to grow restless. With an increase in hardship came an increase in tension; more incidents of confrontation occurred. Especially in Tregea where there were always more incidents of confrontation. Under greater stress the mercenaries demanded—predictably—higher pay. Which, if he gave it to them, was going to soak up virtually everything he might gain from the confiscations and the new duties.
He sent a letter home to the Emperor. His first request in over two years. Along with a case of Astibar blue wine—from what were now his own estates in the north—he conveyed an urgent reiteration of his plea to be brought under the Imperial aegis. Which would have meant a subsidy for his mercenaries from the Treasury in Barbadior, or even Imperial troops under his command. As always, he stressed the role he alone played in blocking Ygrathen expansion in this dangerous halfway peninsula. He might have begun his career here as an independent adventurer, he conceded, with what he saw as a nice turn of phrase, but as an older, wiser man he wished to bind himself more tightly and more usefully to his Emperor than ever before.
As for wanting to be Emperor, and wanting the cloak of Imperial sanction thrown over him— however belatedly—well, such things surely did not have to be put into a letter?
He received, by way of reply, an elegant wall-hanging from the Emperors Palace, commendations on his loyal sentiments, and polite regret that circumstances at home precluded the granting of his request for financing. As usual. He was cordially invited to sail home to all suitable honors and leave the tiresome problems of that far land overseas to a colonial expert appointed by the Emperor.
That, too, was as usual. Turn your new territory over to the Empire. Surrender your army. Come home to a parade or two, then spend your days hunting and your money on bribes and hunting gear. Wait for the Emperor to die without naming a successor. Then knife and be knifed in the brawl to succeed him.
Alberico sent back sincerest thanks, deep regrets, and another case of wine.
Shortly thereafter, at the end of the fall, a number of men in the disgruntled, out-of-favor Third Company withdrew from service and took late-season ship for home. The commanders of the First and Second used that same week to formally present—purely coincidence of course—their new wage demands and to casually remind him of past promises of land for the mercenaries. Starting, it was suggested delicately, with their commanders.
Hed wanted to order the two of them throttled. Hed wanted to fry their greedy, wine-sodden brains with a blast of his own magic. But he couldnt afford to do it; added to which, exercising his powers was still a process of some real strain so soon after the encounter in the woods that had nearly killed him.
The encounter that no one in this peninsula even believed had taken place.
What he had done was smile at the two commanders and confide that he had already marked off in his mind a significant portion of the newly claimed Nievolene lands for one of them. Siferval, he said, more in sorrow than in anger, had been put out of the running by the conduct of his own men, but these two . . . well, it would be a hard choice. He would be watching them closely over the next while and would announce his decision in due course.
How long a while, exactly, had pursued Karalius of the First.
Truly, he could have killed the man even as he stood there, helmet under his arm, eyes hypocritically lowered in a show of deference. Oh, spring, perhaps, hed said airily, as if such matters should not be of great moment to men of good will.
Sooner would be better, had said Grancial of the Second, softly.
Alberico had chosen to let his eyes show just a little of what he felt. There were limits.
Sooner would let whichever of us you choose have time to see to the proper handling of the land before spring planting, Grancial explained hastily. A little ruffled, as he should be.
Perhaps it is so, Alberico had said, noncommittally. I will give thought to this.
"By the way," he added, as they reached the door. "Karalius, would you be good enough to send me that very competent young captain of yours? The one with the forked black beard. I have a special, confidential task that needs a man of his evident qualities." Karalius had blinked, and nodded.
It was important, very important, not to let them grow too confident, he reflected after they had gone and hed managed to calm himself. At the same time, only a genuine fool antagonized his troops. The more so, if he had ultimate plans to lead them home. By invitation of the Emperor, preferably, but not necessarily. Not, to be sure, necessarily.
On further reflection, triggered by that line of thought, he did raise taxes in Tregea, Certando, and Ferraut to match the new levels in Astibar. He also sent a courier to Siferval of the Third in the Cer- tandan highlands, praising his recent work in keeping that province quiet.
You lashed them, then enticed them. You made them fear you, and know that their fortunes could be made if you liked them enough. It was all a matter of balance.
Unfortunately, small things continued to go wrong with the balancing of the Eastern Palm as autumn turned into winter in the unusually cold weeks that followed.
Some cursed poet in Astibar chose that dank and rainy season to begin posting a series of elegies to the dead Duke of Astibar. The Duke had died in exile, the head of a scheming family, most of whom had been executed by then. Verses lauding him were manifestly treasonous.
It was difficult though. Every single writer brought in during the first sweep of the khav rooms denied authorship, and then—with time to prepare—every writer in the second sweep claimed to have written the verses.
Some advisers suggested peremptory wheels for the lot of them, but Alberico had been giving thought to a larger issue. To the marked difference between his court and the Ygrathens. On Chiara, the poets vied for access to Brandin, quivering like puppies at the slightest word of praise from him. They wrote paeans of exaltation to the Tyrant and obscene, scathing attacks on Alberico at request. Here, every writer in the Eastern Palm seemed to be a potential rabble-rouser. An enemy of the state.
Alberico swallowed his anger, lauded the technical skill of the verses, and let both sets of poets go free. Not before suggesting, however, as benignly as he could manage, that he would enjoy reading verses as well-crafted on one of the many possible themes of rich satiric possibility having to do with Brandin of Ygrath. He had managed a smile. He would be very pleased to read such verses, hed said, wondering if one of these cursed writers with their lofty airs could take a hint.
None did. Instead, a new poem appeared on walls all over the city two mornings later. It was about Tomasso bar Sandre. A lament about his death, and claiming—unbelievably—that his perverse sexuality had been a deliberately chosen path, a living metaphor for his conquered, subjugated land, for the perverse situation of Astibar under tyranny.
Hed had no choice after that, once hed understood what the poet was saying. Not bothering with inquiries again, hed had a dozen writers pulled at random out of the khav rooms that same afternoon, and then broken, wristed, and sky-wheeled among the still-crowded bodies of the families of the conspirators before sundown. He closed all khav rooms for a month. No more verses appeared.
In Astibar. But the same evening his new taxes were proclaimed in the Market Square in Tregea, a black-haired woman elected to leap to her death from one of the seven bridges in protest against the measures. She made a speech before she jumped, and she left behind— the gods alone knew how shed come into possession of them—a complete sheaf of the "Sandreni Elegies" from Astibar. No one knew who she was. They dragged the icy river for her body but it was never found. Rivers ran swiftly in Tregea, out of the mountains to the eastern sea.
The verses were all over that province within a fortnight, and had crossed to Certando and southern Ferraut before the first heavy snows of the winter began to fall.
Brandin of Ygrath sent an elegantly fur-clad courier to Astibar with an elegantly phrased note lauding the Elegies as the first decent creative work hed seen emanating from Barbadian territory. He offered Alberico his sincerest congratulations.
Alberico sent a polite acknowledgment of the sentiments and offered to commission one of his newly competent verse-makers to do a work on the glorious life and deeds in battle of Prince Valentin di Tigana.
Because of the Ygrathens spell, he knew, only Brandin himself would be able to read that last word, but only Brandin mattered.
He thought hed won that one, but for some reason the womans suicide in Tregea left him feeling too edgy to be pleased. It was too intense an action, harking back to the violence of the first year after hed landed here. Things had been quiet for so long, and this level of intensity—of very public intensity— never boded well. Briefly he even considered rolling back the new taxes, but that would look too much like a giving in rather than a gesture of benevolence. Besides, he still needed the money for the army.
Back home the word was that the Emperor was sinking more rapidly now, that he was seen in public less and less often. Alberico knew he had to keep his mercenaries happy.
In the dead of winter he made the decision to reward Karalius with fully half of the former Nievolene lands.
The night after the announcement was made public—among the troops first, then cried in the Grand Square of Astibar—the horse barn and several of the outbuildings of the Nievolene family estate were burned to the ground.
He ordered an immediate investigation by Karalius, then wished, a day later, that he hadnt. It seemed that they had found two bodies in the smoldering ruins, trapped by a fallen beam that had barred a door.
One was that of an informer linked to Grancial and the Second Company. The other was a Barbadian soldier: from the Second Company.
Karalius promptly challenged Grancial to a duel at any time and place of the latters choosing.
Grancial immediately named a date and place. Alberico quickly made it clear that the survivor of any such combat would be death-wheeled. He succeeded in halting the fight, but the two commanders stopped speaking to each other from that point on. There were a number of small skirmishes among men of the two companies, and one, in Tregea, that was not so small, leaving fifteen soldiers slain and twice as many wounded. Three local informers were found dead in Ferrauts distrada, stretched on farmers wagon-wheels in a savage parody of the Tyrants justice. They couldnt even retaliate—that would involve an admission that the men had been informers.
In Certando, two of SifervaFs Third Company went absent from duty, disappearing into the snow- white countryside, the first time that had ever happened. Siferval reported that local women did not appear to be involved. The men had been extremely close friends. The Third Company commander offered the obvious, disagreeable hypothesis.
Late in the winter Brandin of Ygrath sent another suave envoy with another letter. In it he profusely thanked Alberico for his offer of verses, and said hed be delighted to read them. He also formally requested six Certandan women, as young and comely as the one Alberico had so kindly allowed him to take from the Eastern Palm some years ago, to be added to his saishan. Unforgivably the letter somehow became public information.
Laughter was deadly.
To quell it, Alberico had six old women seized by Siferval in southwestern Certando. He ordered them blinded and hamstrung and set down under a couriers flag on the snow-clad border of Lower Corte between the forts at Sinave and Forese. He had Siferval attach a letter to one of them asking Brandin to acknowledge receipt of his new mistresses.
Let them hate him. So long as they feared.
On the way back east from the border, Siferval said in his report, he had followed an informers tip and found the two runaway soldiers living together at an abandoned farm. They had been executed on the site, with one of them—the appropriate one, Siferval had reported— castrated first, so that he could die as hed lived. Alberico sent his commendations.
The warrior from Khardhun continued laughing for a long time, seemingly oblivious to the stares he was receiving. His sculpted, black features registered genuine amusement.
The Khardhus smile faded. His eyes locked on those of the other man and Ettocio was suddenly very glad the warriors curved sword was checked with all the other weapons behind the bar.
"Ive been here some thirty years," the black man said softly. "About as long as youve been alive, Id wager. I was guarding merchant trains on this road when you were wetting your bed at night. And if lam a foreigner, well . . . last time I inquired, Khardhun was a free country. We beat back our invader, which is more than anyone here in the Palm can say!”
"You had magic!" the young fellow at the bar suddenly burst out, over the outraged din that ensued.
"We didnt! Thats the only reason! The only reason!”
The Khardhu turned to face the boy, his lip curling in contempt. "You want to rock yourself to sleep at night thinking thats the only reason, you go right ahead, little man. Maybe itll make you feel better about paying your taxes this spring, or about going hungry because theres no grain here in the fall. But if you want to know the truth Ill give it to you free of charge.”
The noise level had abated as he spoke, but a number of men were on their feet, glaring at the Khardhu.
Looking around the room, as if dismissing the boy at the bar as unworthy of his attention, he said very clearly, "We beat back Brandin of Ygrath when he invaded us because Khardhun fought as a country. As a whole. You people got whipped by Alberico and Brandin both because you were too busy worrying about your border spats with each other, or which Duke or Prince would lead your army, or which priest or priestess would bless it, or who would fight on the center and who on the right, and where the battlefield would be, and who the gods loved best. Your nine provinces ended up going at the sorcerers one by one, finger by finger. And they got snapped to pieces like chicken-bones. I always used to think," he drawled into what had become a quiet room, "that a hand fought best when it made a fist.”
He lazily signaled Ettocio for another drink.
Ettocio hadnt expected that, and neither had the others in the room. The mood grew grimly introspective. And, Ettocio realized, more dangerous as well, entirely at odds with the brightness of the spring outside, the cheerful warmth of the returned sun.
Ettocio had hoped the talk would settle down after that. It didnt. The youngster at the bar mumbled something about uniting in a common front—a remark that would have been merely insane if it wasnt so dangerous. Unfortunately—from Ettocios point of view, at any rate—the comment was overheard by the Ferraut wool-trader, and the mood of the room was so aroused by then that the subject wouldnt die.
It went on all afternoon, even after the boy left as well. And that night, with an entirely different crowd, Ettocio shocked himself by speaking up during an argument about ancestral primacy between an Astibarian wine-dealer and another Senzian. He made the same point the tall Khardhu had made—about nine spindly fingers that had been broken one by one because they never formed a fist. The argument made sense to him; it sounded intelligent in his own mouth. He noticed men nodding slowly even as he spoke. It was an unusual, flattering response—men had seldom paid any attention to Ettocio except when he called time in the tavern.
He rather liked the new sensation. In the days that followed he found himself raising the point whenever the opportunity arose. For the first time in his life Ettocio began to get a reputation as a thoughtful man.
Unfortunately, one evening in summer he was overheard by a Barbadian mercenary standing outside the open window. They didnt take away his license. There was a very high level of tension across the whole of the Palm by then. They arrested Ettocio and executed him on a wheel outside his own tavern, with his severed hands stuffed in his mouth.
A great many men had heard the argument by then, though. A great many had nodded, hearing it.
Devin joined the other four about a mile south of the crossroads inn on the dusty road leading to Certando. They were waiting for him. Catriana was alone in the first cart but Devin climbed up beside Baerd in the second.
Devin smiled up at him. Sandres teeth flashed white through the improbable black of his skin.
Dont expect to recognize us, Baerd had said when theyd parted in the Sandreni woods half a year ago. So Devin had been prepared. Somewhat, but not enough.
Baerds own transformation had been disconcerting but relatively mild: hed grown a short beard and removed the padding from the shoulders of his doublet. He wasnt as big a man as Devin had first thought.
Hed also somehow changed his hair from bright yellow to what he said was his natural dark brown. His eyes were brown now as well, not the bright blue of before.
What he had done to Sandre dAstibar was something else entirely. Even Alessan, whod evidently had years to get used to this sort of thing, gave a low whistle when he first saw the Duke. Sandre had become—amazingly—an aging black fighting man from Khardhun across the northern sea. One of a type that Devin knew had been common on the roads of the Palm twenty or thirty years ago in the days when merchants went nowhere except in company with each other, and Khardhu warriors with their wickedly curved blades were much in demand as insurance against outlaws.
Somehow, and this was the uncanny thing, with his own beard shaven and his white hair tinted a dark grey, Sandres gaunt, black face and deep-set, fierce eyes were exactly those of a Khardhu mercenary.
Which, Baerd had explained, had been almost the first thing hed noticed about the Duke when hed seen him in daylight. It was what had suggested the rather comprehensive disguise.
Alessans mouth had twisted in surprise and then amusement. "Not so, my dear," hed said. "Well stop at Borso, but this has nothing to do with her at all. If I didnt know better, if I didnt know your heart belonged only to Devin, Id say you sounded jealous, my darling.”
The gibe had entirely the desired effect. Catriana had stormed off, and Devin, almost as embarrassed himself, had quickly changed the subject. Alessan had a way of doing that to you. Behind the deep, effortless courtesy and the genuine camaraderie, there existed a line they learned not to try to cross. If he was seldom harsh, his jests— always the first measure of control—could sting memorably. Even the Duke had discovered that it was best not to press Alessan on certain subjects. Including this one, it emerged: when asked, Sandre said he knew as little as they did about what would happen come spring.
Thinking about it, as fall gave way to winter and the rains and then the snows came, Devin was deeply aware that Alessan was the Prince of a land that was dying a little more with each passing day.
Under the circumstances, he decided, the wonder wasnt that there were places they could not trespass upon but, rather, how far they could actually go before reaching the guarded regions that lay within.
One of the things Devin began to learn during that long winter was patience. He taught himself to hold his questions for the right time, or to restrain them entirely and try to work the answers for himself.
If fuller knowledge had to wait for spring, then he would wait. In the meantime he threw himself, with an unleashed, even an unsuspected passion, into what they were doing.
A blade had been planted in his own soul that starry autumn night in the Sandreni Woods.
Hed had no idea what to expect when theyd set out five days later with Rovigos horse-drawn cart and three other horses, bound for Ferraut town with a bed and a number of wooden carvings of the Triad.
Taccio had written Rovigo that he could sell Astibarian religious carvings at a serious profit to merchants from the Western Palm. Especially because, as Devin learned, duty was not levied on Triad-related artifacts: part of a successful attempt by both sorcerers to keep the clergy placated and neutralized.
Devin learned a great deal about trade that fall and winter, and about certain other things as well.
With his new, hard-won patience he would listen in silence as Alessan and the Duke tossed ideas back and forth on the long roads, turning the rough coals of a concept into the diamonds of polished plans. And even though his own dreams at night were of raising a surging army to liberate Tigana and storm the fabled harbor walls of Chiara, he quickly came to understand—on the cold paths of day—that theirs would have to be a wholly different approach.
Which was, in fact, why they were still in the east, not the west, and doing all they could—with the small glittering diamonds of Alessan and Sandres plans—to unsettle things in Albericos realm. Once Catriana confided to him—on one of the days when, for whatever reason, she deemed him worth speaking to—that Alessan was, in fact, moving much more aggressively than he had the year before when shed first joined them. Devin suggested it might be Sandres influence. Catriana had shaken her head. She thought that was a part of it, but that there was something else, a new urgency from a source she didnt understand.
Well find out in the spring, Devin had shrugged. Shed glared at him, as if personally affronted by his equanimity.
It had been Catriana though whod suggested the most aggressive thing of all as winter began: the faked suicide in Tregea. Along with the idea of leaving behind her a sheaf of the poems that that young poet had written about the Sandreni. Adreano was his name, Alessan had informed them, unwontedly subdued: the name was on the list of the twelve poets Rovigo had reported as being randomly death- wheeled during Albericos retaliation for the verses. Alessan had been unexpectedly disturbed by that news.
There was other information in the letter from Rovigo, aside from the usual covering business details.
It had been held for them in a tavern in north Tregea that served as a mail drop for many of the merchants in the northeast. They had been heading south, spreading what rumors they could about unrest among the soldiers. Rovigos latest report suggested, for the second time, that an increase in taxes might be imminent, to cover the mercenaries newest pay demands. Sandre, who seemed to know the Tyrants mind astonishingly well, agreed.
After dinner, when they were alone around the fire, Catriana had made her proposal. Devin had been incredulous: hed seen the height of the bridges of Tregea and the speed of the river waters below. And it was winter by then, growing colder every day.
Alessan, still upset by the news from Astibar, and evidently of the same mind as Devin, vetoed the idea bluntly. Catriana pointed out two things. One was that she had been brought up by the sea: she was a better swimmer than any of them, and better than any of them knew.
The second thing was that—as Alessan knew perfectly well, she said—a leap such as this, a suicide, especially in Tregea, would fit seamlessly into everything they were trying to achieve in the Eastern Palm.
"That," Devin remembered Sandre saying after a silence, "is true, Im sorry to say.”
Alessan had reluctantly agreed to go to Tregea itself for a closer look at the river and the bridges.
Four evenings later Devin and Baerd had found themselves crouched amid twilight shadows along the riverbank in Tregea town, at a point that seemed to Devin terribly far away from the bridge Catriana had chosen. Especially in the windy cold of winter, in the swiftly gathering dark, beside the even more swiftly racing waters that were rushing past them, deep and black and cold.
While they waited, he had tried, unsuccessfully, to sort out his complex mixture of feelings about Catriana. He was too anxious though, and too cold.
He only knew that his heart had leaped, moved by some odd, tripled conjunction of relief and admiration and envy when she swam up to the bank, exactly where they were. She even had the wig in one hand, so it would not be tangled up somewhere, and found. Devin stuffed it into the satchel he carried while Baerd was vigorously chafing Catrianas shivering body and bundling her into the layers of clothing theyd carried. As Devin looked at her—shaking uncontrollably, almost blue with the cold, her teeth chattering—he had felt his envy slipping away. What replaced it was pride.
She was from Tigana, and so was he. The world might not know it yet, but they were working together—however elliptically—to bring it back.
The following morning their two carts had slowly rattled out of town, going north and west to Ferraut again with a full load of mountain khav. A light snow had been falling. Behind them the city was in a state of massive ferment and turmoil because of the unknown dark-haired girl from the distrada who had killed herself. After that incident Devin had found it increasingly hard to be sharp or petty with Catriana.
Most of the time. She did continue to indulge herself in the custom of deciding that he was invisible every once in a while.
It had become difficult for him to convince himself that they had actually made love together; that he had really felt her mouth soft on his, or her hands in his hair as she gathered him into her.
They never spoke of it, of course. He didnt avoid her, but he didnt seek her out: her moods swung too unpredictably, he never knew what response hed get. A newly patient man, he let her come to ride a cart or sit before a tavern fire with him when she wanted to. She did, sometimes.
In Ferraut town that winter for the third time, after the leap in Tregea, they had all been wonderfully fed by Ingonida—still in raptures over the bed theyd brought her. Taccios wife continued to display a particularly solicitous affection for the Duke in his dark disguise—a detail which Alessan took some pleasure in teasing Sandre about when they were alone. In the meantime, the rotund, red-faced Taccio copiously wined them all.
There had been another mail packet waiting from Rovigo in As-tibar. Which, when opened, proved to contain two letters this time, one of which gave off—even after its time in transit—an extraordinary effusion of scent.
Alessan, his eyebrows elaborately arched, presented this pale-blue emanation to Devin with infinite suggestiveness. Ingonida crowed and clasped her hands together in a gesture doubtless meant to signify romantic rapture. Taccio, beaming, poured Devin another drink.
The perfume, unmistakably, was Selvenas. Devins expression, as he took cautious possession of the envelope, must have been revealing because he heard Catriana giggle suddenly. He was careful not to look at her.
Selvenas missive was a single headlong sentence—much like the girl herself. She did, however, make one vivid suggestion that induced him to decline when the others asked innocently if they might peruse his communication.
In fact, though, Devin was forced to admit that his interest was rather more caught by the five neat lines Alais had attached to her fathers letter. In a small, businesslike hand she simply reported that shed found and copied another variant of the "Lament for Adaon" at one of the gods temples in Astibar and that she looked forward to sharing it with all of them when they next came east. She signed it with her initial only.
In the body of the letter Rovigo reported that Astibar was very quiet since the twelve poets had been executed among the families of the conspirators in the Grand Square. That the price of grain was still going up, that he could usefully receive as much green Senzian wine as they could obtain at current prices, that Alberico was widely expected to announce, very soon, a beneficiary among his commanders for the greater part of the confiscated Nievolene lands, and that his best information was that Senzian linens were still underpriced in Astibar but might be due to rise.
Alessan quarreled with the sardonic Khardhu warrior in a dozen different inns and taverns on the road, and hired him a dozen different times. Sometimes Devin played a role, sometimes Baerd did. They were careful not to repeat the performance anywhere. Catriana kept a precise log of where they had been and what they had said and done there. Devin had assured her they could rely on his memory, but she kept her notes nonetheless.
In public the Duke now called himself "Tomaz." "Sandre" was an uncommon-enough name in the Palm, and for a mercenary from Khardhun it would be sufficiently odd to be a risk. Devin remembered growing thoughtful when the Duke had told them his new name back in the fall. Hed wondered what it was like to have had to kill his son. Even to outlive his sons. To know that the bodies of everyone even distantly related to himself were being spreadeagled alive on the death-wheels of Barbadior. He tried to imagine how all of that would feel.
Life, the processes of living and what it did to you, seemed to Devin to grow more painfully complex all through that fall and winter. Often he thought of Marra, arbitrarily cut off on the way to her maturity, to whatever she had been about to become. He missed her with a dull ache that could grow into something heavy and difficult at times. She would have been someone to talk to about such things. The others had their own concerns and he didnt want to burden them. He wondered about Alais bren Rovigo, if she would have understood these things he was wrestling with. He didnt think so; she had lived too sheltered, too secluded a life for such thoughts to trouble her. He dreamt of her one night though, an unexpectedly intense series of images. The next morning he rode beside Catriana in the lead cart, unwontedly quiet, stirred and unsettled by the nearness of her, the crimson fall of her hair in the pale winter landscape.
Sometimes he thought about the soldier in the Nievolene barn— who had lost a roll of dice and carried a jug of wine to a lonely place away from the singing, and had had his throat slit there while he slept. Had that soldier been born into the world only to become a rite of passage for Devin di Tigana?
That was a terrible thought. Eventually, mulling it over through the long, cold winter rides, Devin worked his way through to deciding it was untrue. The man had interacted with other people through his days. Had caused pleasure and sorrow, doubtless, and had surely known both things. The moment of his ending was not what denned his journey under Eannas lights, or however that journey was named in the Empire of Barbadior.
It was difficult to sort out though. Had Stevan of Ygrath lived and died so that his fathers grief might work the destruction of a small province and its people and their memories? Had Prince Valentin di Tigana been born only to swing the killing blade that caused this to happen? And what about his youngest son then?
And what about the youngest son of the Asolini farmer who had fled from Avalle when it became Stevanien? Truly, it was hard to puzzle through.
In Senzio one morning, with the first elusive hints of spring softening the northern air, Baerd had come back from the celebrated weapons market with a bright, beautifully balanced sword for Devin.
There was a black jewel in the hilt. He offered no explanation, but Devin knew it had to do with what had happened in the Nievolene barn. The gift did nothing to answer any of his new questions, but it helped him nonetheless.
In the second cart beside Baerd he felt gloriously, importantly alive. Ahead of them the glint of afternoon sunlight in Catrianas hair was doing something strange and wonderful to his blood. He was aware of Baerd giving him a curious scrutiny, and caught a half-smile playing across the others face. He didnt care. He was even glad. Baerd was his friend.
Devin began a song. A very old ballad of the road, "The Song of the Wayfarer": Im a long way from the house where I was born And this is just another winding trail, But when the sun goes down both of the moons will rise And Eannas stars will hear me tell my tale . . .
Alessan, whatever his mood might be, was almost always ready to join in a song and, sure enough, Devin had the Tregean pipes with him by the second verse. He looked over and caught a wink from the Prince riding beside them.
Catriana glanced back at them reprovingly. Devin grinned at her and shrugged, and Alessans pipes suddenly spun into a wilder dance of invitation. Catriana tried and failed to suppress a smile. She joined them on the third verse and then led them into the next song.
Later, in the summer, Devin would revive that image of the five of them in the first hour of the long ride south and the memory would make him feel very old.
He was young that day. In a way they all were, briefly—even Sandre, joining in on the choruses he knew in a passable baritone voice, reborn into his new identity, with a new hope to his long, unfading dream.
Devin took the third song back from Catriana, and sent his high clear voice along the road before them to lead the way down the sunlit, winding trail to Certando, to the Lady of Castle Borso, whoever she might be, and to whatever it was that Alessan had to find in the highlands.
First though, nearing sundown, they overtook a traveler on the road.
In itself that wasnt unusual. They were still in Ferraut, in the populated country north of Fort Ciorone where busy highways from Tregea and Corte met the north-south road they were on. Solitary travelers, on the other hand, were sufficiently rare for Devin to join Baerd in scanning the sides of the road to see if others were hidden in ambush.
A routine precaution, but they were in country where thieves would not survive long and in any case it was still daylight. Then as they drew nearer Devin saw the small harp slung over the mans back. A troubadour. Devin grinned; they were almost always good company.
The man had turned and was waiting for them to catch up. The deep bow he offered Catriana as she pulled the lead cart to a halt beside him was of such courtly grace it almost looked like a parody on the lonely road.
"Ive been enjoying the sound of you for the last mile," he said, straightening. "I must say Im enjoying the sight of you even more." He was tall, no longer young, with long, greying hair and quick eyes. He gave Catriana the sort of smile for which the troubadours of the Palm were notorious. His teeth were white and even in a leathery face.
"Heading south with the spring?" she asked, smiling politely at his flattery. "The old route?”
"I am indeed," he replied. "The old route at the usual time. And Id hate to tell someone as young and beautiful as you how many years Ive been doing it.”
Devin jumped down from beside Baerd and strolled closer to the man to confirm something. "I could probably guess," he said, grinning, "because I think I remember you. We did a wedding season in
Certando together. Did you play harp for Burnet di Corte two years ago?”
The sharp eyes looked him up and down. "I did," the troubadour admitted after a moment. "Im Erlein di Senzio and I was with damned Burnet for a season all right. Then he cheated me of my wages and I decided I was happier on my own again. I thought those were professional voices behind me. You are?”
Catriana pulled west off the road to lead them toward the trees the Duke had pointed out. Devin heard her giggle at something the troubadour said.
He was looking at Sandre though. So were Baerd and Alessan.
The Duke glanced at Erlein whose back was to the four of them, then very briefly he held up his left hand with the third and fourth fingers carefully curled down. He gazed at Alessan deliberately and then back to the man beside Catriana.
Devin didnt understand. An oath? he thought, confused.
Sandre lowered his hand but his eyes remained locked on the Princes. There was an odd, challenging expression in them. Alessan had suddenly gone pale.
And in that moment Devin understood.
"Oh, Adaon," Baerd whispered on a rising note, as Devin leaped up on the cart beside him. "I do not believe this!”
Neither did Devin.
What Sandre was telling them, quite plainly, was that Erlein di Senzio was a wizard. One who had cut two fingers in his linking to the magic of the Palm.
And Alessan bar Valentin was a Prince of the blood of Tigana. Which meant, if the old tale of Adaon and Micaela was true, that he could bind a wizard to his service. Sandre had not believed it back in the cabin in the fall. Devin remembered that.
But now he was giving Alessan his chance. Which explained the challenge in his gaze.
A chance, or at least the beginnings of a chance. Thinking as fast as he ever had in his life, Devin turned to Baerd. "Follow my lead when we get there," he said softly. "I have an idea." Only later would he have time to reflect what a change six months had made. Only six months, one Ember season to another.
For him to speak so to Baerd, speak and be listened to ...
There was indeed a stream, as Sandre had known, or guessed. Not far from its banks they halted the carts. The usual twilight routine began. Catriana seeing to the horses, Devin to wood for the fire. Alessan and the Duke laid out the sleeping-rolls and organized the cooking gear and the food they carried.
Baerd took his bow and disappeared into the trees. He was back in twenty minutes, no more than that, with three rabbits and a plump, wingless grele.
You are going to terrify every civilized merchant we meet. You need a haircut before you are fit for society, my friend.”
Baerd was very quick.
Erlein watched with interest as Alessan led Baerd over to a rock by the stream and proceeded—quite competently, in fact—to trim the other mans hair. Catriana went back to the horses, though not before offering Erlein another quick, enigmatic glance. Sandre stacked the wood for the fire and began skinning the rabbits and the grele, humming tunelessly to himself.
"More wood, lad," he said abruptly to Devin, without looking up. Which was perfect, of course.
Oh, Marian, Devin thought, a heady blend of excitement and pride racing through him. They are all so good.
"Later," was all he said, lounging casually on the ground. "Weve got enough for now and Im next with Alessan.”
"No youre not," Alessan called from by the river, picking up Sandres gambit. "Get the wood, Devin.
There isnt enough light to do three of you. Ill cut yours tomorrow, and Erleins now if he wants. Catriana will just have to endure you looking fearsome for one more night.”
"As if a haircuts going to change that!" she called from the other side of the clearing. Erlein and Baerd laughed.
Grumbling, Devin stood up and ambled off toward the trees.
Behind him he heard Erleins voice.
"Id be grateful to you," the troubadour was saying to Alessan. "Id hate to have another woman look at me the way your sister just did.”
"Ignore her," Devin heard Baerd laugh as he strode back toward the fire.
"She is impossible to ignore," Erlein said in a voice pitched to carry to where the horses were tethered. He stood up and walked over to the riverbank. He sat down on the rock in front of Alessan. The sun was a red disk, westering beyond the stream.
Carrying an armful of wood, Devin looped quietly around in the growing shadows to where Catriana stood among the horses. She heard him come up but continued brushing the brown mare. Her eyes never left the two men by the river.
Neither did Devins. Squinting into the setting sun it seemed to him as if Alessan and the troubadour had become figures in some timeless landscape. Their voices carried with an unnatural clarity in the quiet of the gathering twilight.
"When was this last done for you?" he heard Alessan ask casually, his scissors busy in the long grey tangles of Erleins hair.
Erlein was literally shaking with fury. Devin looked at him and it was as if a curtain had been drawn back. In the wizards eyes hatred and terror vied for domination. His mouth worked spasmodically. He raised his left hand and pointed it at Alessan in a gesture of violent negation.
And Devin saw, quite clearly now, that his third and fourth fingers had indeed been chopped off. The ancient mark of a wizards binding to his magic and the Palm.
"Alessan?" Baerd said.
"It is all right. He cannot do anything with his power now against my will." Alessans voice was quiet, almost detached, as if this was all happening to someone else entirely. Only then did Devin realize that the wizards gesture had been an attempt to cast a spell. Magic. He had never thought to be so near it in his life. The skin prickled at the back of his neck, and not because of the twilight breeze.
Slowly Erlein lowered his hand and slowly his trembling stopped. "Triad curse you," he said, low and cold. "And curse the bones of your ancestors and blight the lives of your children and your childrens children for what you have done to me." It was the voice of someone wronged, brutally, grievously.
Alessan did not flinch or turn away. "I was cursed almost nineteen years ago, and my ancestors were, and whatever children I or any of my people might have. It is a curse I have set my life to undo while time yet allows. For no other reason have I bound you to me.”
There was something terrible in Erleins face. "Every true Prince of Tigana," the wizard said with bitter intensity, "has known since the beginning how awful a gift the god gave them. How savage a power over a free, a living soul. Do you even know—" He was forced to stop, white-faced, his hands clenched, to regain control of himself. "Do you even know how seldom this gift has been used.”
"Twice," Alessan said calmly. "Twice, to my knowledge. The old books recorded it so, though I fear all the books have been burned now.”
"Twice!" Erlein echoed, his voice skirling upwards. "Twice in how many generations stretching back to the dawn of records in this peninsula? And you, a puling princeling without even a land to rule have just casually—viciously—set your hands upon my life!”
"Not casually. And only because I have no home. Because Tigana is dying and will be lost if I do not do something.”
"And what part of that little speech gives you rights over my life and death?”
"I have a duty," Alessan replied gravely. "I must use what tools come to hand.”
"I am not a tool!" Erlein cried from the heart. "I am a free and living soul with my own destiny!”
Watching Alessans face Devin saw how that cry shafted into him. For a long moment there was silence by the river. Devin saw the Prince draw air into his lungs carefully, as if steadying himself under yet another burden, a new weight joined to those he already carried. Another part added to the price of his blood.
"I will not lie and say that I am sorry," Alessan said finally, choosing his words with care. "I have dreamt of finding a wizard for too many years. I will say—and this is true—that I understand what you have said and why you will hate me, and I can tell you that I grieve for what necessity demands.”
"It demands nothing!" Erlein replied, shrill and unrelenting in his righteousness. "We are free men.
There is always a choice.”
"Some choices are closed to some of us." It was, surprisingly, Sandre.
He moved forward to stand a little in front of Devin. "And some men must make choices for those who cannot, whether through lack of will or lack of power." He walked nearer to the other two, by the dark, quiet rushing of the stream. "Just as we may choose not to slay the man who is trying to kill our child, so Alessan may have chosen not to bind a wizard who might be needed by his people. His children.
Neither refusal, Erlein di Senzio, is a true alternative for anyone with honor.”
But Erleins voice shot back, unpersuaded, contemptuous. "And how," he snarled, "does a bought sword from Khardhun presume to use the word honor or to speak about the burdens of a prince?" He wanted the words to hurt, Devin could see, but what came through in the inflections of his voice was the sound of someone lost and afraid.
There was a silence. Behind them the fire caught with a rush, and the orange glow spun outward, illuminating Erleins taut rage and Sandres gaunt, dark face, the bones showing in high relief. Beyond them both, Devin saw, Alessan had not moved at all.
Sandre said, "The Khardhu warriors I have known were deeply versed in honor. But I will claim no credit for that. Be not deceived: I am no Khardhu. My name is Sandre dAstibar, once Duke of that province. I know a little about power.”
Erleins mouth fell open.
"I am also a wizard," Sandre added matter-of-factly. "Which is how you were known: by the thin spell you use to mask your hand.”
Erlein closed his mouth. He stared fixedly at the Duke as if seeking to penetrate his disguise or find confirmation in the deep-hooded eyes. Then he glanced downwards, almost against his will.
Sandre already had the fingers of his left hand spread wide. All five fingers.
"I never made the final binding," he said. "I was twelve years old when my magic found me. I was also the son and heir of Tellani, Duke of Astibar. I made my choice: I turned my back on magic and embraced the rule of men. I used my very small power perhaps five times in my life. Or six," he amended.
"Once, very recently.”
"Then there was a conspiracy against the Barbadian," Erlein murmured, his rage temporarily set aside as he wrestled with this. "And then . . . yes, of course. What did you do? Kill your son in the dungeon?”
Devin was deeply stirred. The Dukes words rang in the firelit dark like a challenge to the night. But when he ended, the sound they heard was Erlein di Senzio clapping sardonically.
"Wonderful," he said contemptuously. "You really must remember that for when you find an army of simpletons to rally. You will forgive me if I remain unmoved by speeches about freedom tonight. Before the sun went down I was a free man on an open road. I am now a slave.”
"You were not free," Devin burst out.
"And I say I was!" Erlein snapped, rounding fiercely on him. "There may have been laws that constrained me, and one government ruling where I might have wished for another. But the roads are safer now than they ever were when this man ruled in Astibar or that ones father in Tigana—and I carried my life where I wanted to go. You will all have to forgive my insensitivity if I say that Brandin of Ygraths spell on the name of Tigana was not the first and last thought of my days!”
"We will," Alessan said then in an unnaturally flat voice. "We will all forgive you for that. Nor will we seek to persuade you to change your views now. I will tell you this, though: the freedom you speak of will be yours again when Tiganas name is heard in the world once more. It is my hope—vain, perhaps— that you will work with us willingly in time, but until then I can say that the compulsion of Adaons gift will suffice me. My father died, and my brothers died by the Deisa, and the flower of a generation with them, fighting for freedom. I have not lived so bitterly or striven so long to hear a coward belittle the shattering of a people and their heritage.”
"Coward!" Erlein exclaimed. "Rot you, you arrogant princeling! What would you know about it?”
"Only what you have told us yourself," Alessan replied, grimly now. "Safer roads, you said. One government where you might have wished for another." He took a step toward Erlein as if he would strike the man, his composure finally beginning to break. "You have been the worst thing I know, a willing subject of two tyrants. Your idea of freedom is exactly what has let them conquer us, and then hold us.
You called yourself free? You were only free to hide . . . and to soil your breeches if a sorcerer or one of their Trackers came within ten miles of your little screening spell. You were free to walk past death- wheels with your fellow wizards rotting on them, and free to turn your back and continue on your way.
Not anymore, Erlein di Senzio. By the Triad, you are in it now! You are in it as deep as any man in the Palm! Hear my first command: you are to use your magic to conceal your fingers exactly as before.”
"No," said Erlein flatly.
Alessan said nothing more. He waited. Devin saw the Duke take a half-step towards the two of them and then stop himself. He remembered that Sandre had not believed that this was possible.
Now he saw. They all saw, by the light of the stars and the fire Baerd had made.
Erlein fought. Understanding next to nothing, unnerved by almost all that was happening, Devin gradually became aware that a horrible struggle was taking place within the wizard. It could be read in his rigid, straining stance and his gritted teeth, heard in the rasp and wheeze of his shortening breath, seen in tightly closed eyes and the suddenly clenched fingers at his sides.
"No," Erlein gasped, once and then again and again, with more effort each time. "No, no, no!" He dropped to his knees as if felled like a tree. His head bent slowly downward. His shoulders hunched as if resisting some overmastering assault. They began to shake with erratic spasms. His whole body was trembling.
"No," he said again in a high, cracked whisper. His hands spread open, pressing flat against the ground. In the red firelight his face was a mask of staring agony. Sweat poured down it in the chill of night. His mouth suddenly gaped open.
Devin looked away in pity and terror just before the wizards scream ripped the night apart. In the same moment Catriana took two quick running steps and buried her head against Devins shoulder.
That cry of pain, the scream of a tormented animal, hung in the air between fire and stars for what seemed an appallingly long time.
Afterwards Devin became aware of the intensity of the silence, broken only by the occasional crackle of the fire, the rivers soft murmur, and Erlein di Senzios choked, ragged breathing.
Without speaking Catriana straightened and released her grip on Devins arm. He glanced at her but she didnt meet his eye. He turned back to the wizard.
Erlein was still on his knees before Alessan in the new spring grass by the riverbank. His body still shook, but with weeping now. When he lifted his head Devin could see the tracks of tears and sweat and the staining mud from his hands. Slowly Erlein raised his left hand and stared at it as if it was something alien that didnt even belong to him. They all saw what had happened, or the illusion of what had happened.
Five fingers. He had cast the spell.
An owl suddenly called, short and clear from north along the river, nearer to the trees. Devin became aware of a change in the sky. He looked up. Blue Ilarion, waning back to a crescent, had risen in the east.
Ghostlight, Devin thought, and wished he hadnt.
"Honor!" Erlein di Senzio said, scarcely audible.
Alessan had not moved since giving his command. He looked down on the wizard he had bound and said, quietly, "I did not enjoy that, but I suppose we needed to go through it. Once will be enough, I hope.
Shall we eat?”
He walked past Devin and the Duke and Catriana to where Baerd was waiting by the fire. The meat was already cooking. Caught in a vortex of emotion, Devin saw the searching look Baerd gave Alessan.
He turned back in time to see Sandre reaching out a hand to help Erlein rise.
For a long moment Erlein ignored him, then, with a sigh, he grasped the Dukes forearm and pulled himself erect.
Devin followed Catriana back toward the fire. He heard the two wizards coming after them.
Dinner passed in near silence. Erlein took his plate and glass and went to sit alone on the rock by the stream at the very farthest extent of the fires glow. Looking over at his dark outline, Sandre murmured that a younger man would very likely have refused to eat. "Hes a survivor that one," the Duke added.
"Any wizard whos lasted this long has to be.”
"Will he be all right then," Catriana asked softly. "With us?”
"I think so," Sandre answered, sipping his wine. He turned to Alessan. "Hell try to run away tonight though.”
"I know," the Prince said.
"Do we stop him?" It was Baerd.
Alessan shook his head. "Not you. I will. He cannot leave me unless I let him. If I call he must return.
I have him . . . tethered to my mind. It is a queer feeling.”
Queer indeed, Devin thought. He looked from the Prince to the dark figure by the river. He couldnt even imagine what this must feel like. Or rather, he could almost imagine it, and the sensation disturbed him.
He became aware that Catriana was looking at him and he turned to her. This time she didnt look away. Her expression, too, was strange; Devin realized she must be feeling the same edginess and sense of unreality that he was. He suddenly remembered, vividly, the feel of her head against his shoulder an hour ago. At the time hed hardly registered the fact, so intent had he been on Erlein. He tried to smile reassuringly, but he didnt think he managed it.
Catriana went to the baggage and she opened and poured another bottle of wine. The third glass. And as always, it was blue. She filled Devins glass in silence. Shed scarcely spoken a word all night, but he felt closer to her than he had in a long time. He drank slowly, watching the cold smoke rise from his glass and drift away in the cool night. The stars overhead were like icy points of fire and the moon was as blue as the wine and as far away as freedom, or a home.
Devin finished his glass and put it down. He reached for his blanket and lay down himself, wrapping it around him. He found himself thinking about his father and of the twins for the first time in a long time.
A few moments later Catriana lay down not far away. Usually she spread her sleeping-roll and blanket on the far side of the fire from where he was, next to the Duke. Devin was wise enough now to know that there was a certain kind of reaching out in what she did, and that tonight might even mark a chance to begin the healing of what lay badly between them, but he was too drained to know what to do or say among all these complicated sorrows.
He said good-night to her, softly, but she did not reply. He wasnt sure if shed heard him, but he didnt say it again. He closed his eyes. A moment later he opened them again, to look at Sandre across the fire. The Duke was gazing steadily into the flames. Devin wondered what he saw there. He wondered, but he didnt really want to know, Erlein was a shadow, a darker place in the world against the dark by the riverbank. Devin lifted himself on one elbow to look for Baerd, but Baerd had gone away, to walk alone in the night.
Alessan hadnt moved, or opened his eyes. He was still playing, lonely and high and sorrowful, when Devin fell asleep.
He woke to Baerds firm hand on his shoulder. It was still dark and quite cold now. The fire had been allowed to die to ember and ash. Catriana and the Duke were still asleep, but Alessan was standing behind Baerd. He looked pale but composed. Devin wondered if hed gone to bed at all.
He stopped, because Baerd was laughing at him. Belatedly Devin caught on to the teasing. It warmed him in a curious way. This way, in fact, the first time hed ever been out alone in the night with Baerd. He chose to see it as another level of trust, of welcoming. Little by little he was beginning to feel more of a part of what Alessan and Baerd had been trying to achieve for so many years. He straightened his shoulders and, walking as tall as he could, followed Baerd west into the darkness.
They found Erlein di Senzio at the edge of a cluster of olive trees on a slope, about an hours walk from the camp. Devin swallowed awkwardly when he saw what had happened. Baerd whistled softly between his teeth; it wasnt a pretty sight.
Erlein was unconscious. He had tied himself to one of the tree-trunks and appeared to have knotted the rope at least a dozen times. Bending down, Baerd held up the wizards waterflask. It was empty: Erlein had soaked the knots to tighten them. His pack and his knife lay together on the ground, a deliberate distance out of reach.
The rope was frayed and tangled. It looked as if a number of knots had been undone, but five or six still held.
"Look at his fingers," Baerd said grimly. He drew his dagger and began cutting the rope.
Erleins hands were shredded into raw strips. Dried blood covered both of them. It was brutally clear what had happened. He had tried to make it impossible for himself to yield to Alessans summons. What had he hoped for, Devin wondered. That the Prince would assume he had somehow escaped and would therefore forget about him?
Devin doubted, in fact, if what Erlein had done carried any such weight of rational thought. It was defiance, pure and simple, and one had to acknowledge—not even grudgingly—the ferocity of it. He helped Baerd cut through the last of the bonds. Erlein was breathing, but showed no signs of consciousness. His pain must have been devastating, Devin realized, with a flashing memory of the wizard beaten to his knees and screaming by the river. He wondered what screams the night had heard, here in this wild and lonely place.
He felt an awkward mixture of respect and pity and anger as he gazed down at the grey-haired troubadour. Why was he making this so hard for them? Why forcing Alessan to shoulder so much more pain of his own?
Unfortunately, he knew some of the answers to that, and they were not comforting.
"Will he try to kill himself?" he asked Baerd abruptly.
"I dont think so. As Sandre said, this one is a survivor. I dont think hell do this again. He had to run once—to test the limits of what would happen to him. I would have done the same thing." He hesitated. "I didnt expect the rope though.”
Devin took Erleins pack and gear and Baerds bow and quiver and sword. Baerd slung the unconscious wizard over his shoulder with a grunt and they started back east. It was slower going back.
On the horizon in front of them when they reached the stream the first grey of false dawn was showing, dimming the glow of the late-rising stars.
The others were up and waiting for them. Beard laid Erlein down by the fire—Sandre had it burning again. Devin dropped the gear and weapons and went back to the river with a basin for water. When he returned Catriana and the Duke began cleaning and wrapping Erleins mangled hands. They had opened his shirt and turned up the sleeves, revealing angry weals where he had writhed against the ropes in his struggle to be free.
Or is that backwards, Devin thought grimly. Wasnt the binding of the rope his real struggle to be free? He looked over and saw Ales-san gazing down at Erlein. He could read absolutely nothing in the Princes expression.
The sun rose, and shortly after that Erlein woke.
They could see him register where he was.
"Khav?" Sandre asked him casually. The five of them were sitting by the fire, eating breakfast, drinking from steaming mugs. The light from the east was a pale, delicate hue, a promise. It glinted and sparkled on the water of the stream and turned the budding leaves green-gold on the trees. The air was filled with birdsong and the leap and splash of trout in the stream.
Erlein sat up slowly and looked at them. Devin saw him become aware of the bandages on his hands.
Erlein glanced over at the saddled horses and the two carts, packed and ready for the road.
His gaze swung back and steadied on Alessans face. The two men, so improbably bound, looked at each other without speaking. Then Alessan smiled. A smile Devin knew. It opened his stern face to warmth and lit the slate-grey of his eyes.
"Had I known," Alessan said, "that you hated Tregean pipes quite that much I honestly wouldnt have played them.”
A moment later, horribly, Erlein di Senzio began to laugh. There was no joy in that sound, nothing infectious, nothing to be shared. His eyes were squeezed shut and tears welled out of them, pouring down his face.
No one else spoke or moved. It lasted for a long time. When Erlein had finally composed himself he wiped his face on his sleeve, careful of his bandaged hands and looked at Alessan again. He opened his mouth, about to speak, and then closed it again.
"I know," Alessan said quietly to him. "I do know.”
"Khav?" Sandre said again, after a moment.
This time Erlein accepted a mug, cradling it awkwardly in both muffled hands. Not long after they broke camp and started south again.