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  speedneeder (雷)                 于  (Tue Nov  2 08:47:08 2004)  说道:

TIGANA
Guy Gavriel Kay

= A JASCAN production =
= Scanned November 2001 =
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All that you held most dear you will put by
and leave behind you; and this is the arrow the longbow of your exile first le
ts fly.
You will come to know how bitter as salt and stone
is the bread of others, how hard the way that goes up and down stairs that nev
er are your own.
Dante, The Paradiso

What can a flame remember? If it remembers a little less than is necessary, it
goes out; if it remembers a little more than is necessary, it goes out. If on
ly it could teach us, while it burns, to remember correctly.
George Seferis, "Stratis the Sailor Describes a Man"

PROLOGUE

BOTH MOONS WERE HIGH, DIMMING THE LIGHT OF ALL BUT the brightest stars. The ca
mpfires burned on either side of the river, stretching away into the night. Qu
ietly flowing, the Deisa caught the moonlight and the orange of the nearer fir
es and cast them back in wavery, sinuous ripples. And all the lines of light l
ed to his eyes, to where he was sitting on the riverbank, hands about his knee
s, thinking about dying and the life he'd lived.
There was a glory to the night, Saevar thought, breathing deeply of the mild s
ummer air, smelling water and water flowers and grass, watching the reflection
of blue moonlight and silver on the river, hearing the Deisa's murmurous flow
and the distant singing from around the fires. There was singing on the other
side of the river too, he noted, listening to the enemy soldiers north of the
m. It was curiously hard to impute any absolute sense of evil to those harmoni
zing voices, or to hate them quite as blindly as being a soldier seemed to req
uire. He wasn't really a soldier, though, and he had never been good at hating
.
He couldn't actually see any figures moving in the grass across the river, but
he could see the fires and it wasn't hard to judge how many more of them lay
north of the Deisa than there were here behind him, where his people waited fo
r the dawn.
Almost certainly their last. He had no illusions; none of them did. Not since
the battle at this same river five days ago. All they had was courage, and a l
eader whose defiant gallantry was almost matched by the two young sons who wer
e here with him.
They were beautiful boys, both of them. Saevar regretted that he had never had
the chance to sculpt either of them. The Prince he had done of course, many t
imes. The Prince called him a friend. It could not be said, Saevar thought, th
at he had lived a useless or an empty life. He'd had his art, the joy of it an
d the spur, and had lived to see it praised by the great ones of his province,
indeed of the whole peninsula.
And he'd known love, as well. He thought of his wife and then of his own two c
hildren. The daughter whose eyes had taught him part of the meaning of life on
the day she'd been born fifteen years ago. And his son, too young by a year t
o have been allowed to come north to war. Saevar remembered the look on the bo
y's face when they had parted. He supposed that much the same expression had b
een in his own eyes. He'd embraced both children, and then he'd held his wife
for a long time, in silence; all the words had been spoken many times through
all the years. Then he'd turned, quickly, so they would not see his tears, and
mounted his horse, unwontedly awkward with a sword on his hip, and had ridden
away with his Prince to war against those who had come upon them from over th
e sea.
He heard a light tread, behind him and to his left, from where the campfires w
ere burning and voices were threading in song to the tune a syrenya played. He
turned to the sound.
"Be careful," he called softly. "Unless you want to trip over a sculptor."
"Saevar?" an amused voice murmured. A voice he knew well.
"It is, my lord Prince," he replied. "Can you remember a night so beautiful?"

Valentin walked over—there was more than enough light by which to see—and sa
nk neatly down on the grass beside him. "Not readily," he agreed. "Can you see
? Vidomni's waxing matches Ilarion's wane. The two moons together would make o
ne whole."
"A strange whole that would be," Saevar said.
"Tis a strange night."
"Is it? Is the night changed by what we do down here? We mortal men in our fol
ly?"
"The way we see it is," Valentin said softly, his quick mind engaged by the qu
estion. "The beauty we find is shaped, at least in part, by what we know the m
orning will bring."
"What will it bring, my lord?" Saevar asked, before he could stop himself. Hal
f hoping, he realized, as a child hopes, that his dark-haired Prince of grace
and pride would have an answer yet to what lay waiting across the river. An an
swer to all those Ygrathen voices and all the Ygrathen fires burning north of
them. An answer, most of all, to the terrible King of Ygrath and his sorcery,
and the hatred that he at least would have no trouble summoning tomorrow.
Valentin was silent, looking out at the river. Overhead Saevar saw a star fall
, angling across the sky west of them to plunge, most likely, into the widenes
s of the sea. He was regretting the question; this was no time to be putting a
burden of false certitude upon the Prince.
Just as he was about to apologize, Valentin spoke, his voice measured and low,
so as not to carry beyond their small circle of dark.
"I have been walking among the fires, and Corsin and Loredan have been doing t
he same, offering comfort and hope and such laughter as we can bring to ease m
en into sleep. There is not much else we can do."
"They are good boys, both of them," Saevar offered. "I was thinking that I've
never sculpted either of them."
"I'm sorry for that," Valentin said. "If anything lasts for any length of time
after us it will be art such as yours. Our books and music, Orsaria's green a
nd white tower in Avalle." He paused, and returned to his original thought. "T
hey are brave boys. They are also sixteen and nineteen, and if I could have I
would have left them behind with their brother . . . and your son."
It was one of the reasons Saevar loved him: that Valentin would remember his o
wn boy, and think of him with the youngest prince, even now, at such a time as
this.
To the east and a little behind them, away from the fires, a trialla suddenly
began to sing and both men fell silent, listening to the silver of that sound.
Saevar's heart was suddenly full, he was afraid that he might shame himself w
ith tears, that they would be mistaken for fear.
Valentin said, "But I haven't answered your question, old friend. Truth seems
easier here in the dark, away from the fires and all the need I have been seei
ng there. Saevar, I am so sorry, but the truth is that almost all of the morni
ng's blood will be ours, and I am afraid it will be all of ours. Forgive me."

"There is nothing to forgive," Saevar said quickly, and as firmly as he could.
"This is not a war of your making, nor one you could avoid or undo. And besid
es, I may not be a soldier but I hope I am not a fool. It was an idle question
: I can see the answer for myself, my lord. In the fires across the river."
"And the sorcery," Valentin added quietly. "More that, than the fires. We coul
d beat back greater numbers, even weary and wounded as we are from last week's
battle. But Brandin's magic is with them now. The lion has come himself, not
the cub, and because the cub is dead there must be blood for the morning sun.
Should I have surrendered last week? To the boy?"
Saevar turned to look at the Prince in the blended moonlight, disbelieving. He
was speechless for a moment, then found his voice. "I would have gone home fr
om that surrender," he said, with resolution, "and walked into the Palace by t
he Sea, and smashed every sculpture I ever made of you."
A second later he heard an odd sound. It took him a moment to realize that Val
entin was laughing, because it wasn't laughter like any Saevar had ever heard.

"Oh, my friend," the Prince said, at length, "I think I knew you would say tha
t. Oh, our pride. Our terrible pride. Will they remember that most about us, d
o you think, after we are gone?"
"Perhaps," Saevar said. "But they will remember. The one thing we know with ce
rtainty is that they will remember us. Here in the peninsula, and in Ygrath, a
nd Quileia, even west over the sea, in Barbadior and its Empire. We will leave
a name."
"And we leave our children," Valentin said. "The younger ones. Sons and daught
ers who will remember us. Babes in arms our wives and grandfathers will teach
when they grow up to know the story of the River Deisa, what happened here, an
d, even more—what we were in this province before the fall. Brandin of Ygrath
can destroy us tomorrow, he can overrun our home, but he cannot take away our
name, or the memory of what we have been."
"He cannot," Saevar echoed, feeling an odd, unexpected lift to his heart. "I a
m sure that you are right. We are not the last free generation. There will be
ripples of tomorrow that run down all the years. Our children's children will
remember us, and will not lie tamely under the yoke."
"And if any of them seem inclined to," Valentin added in a different tone, "th
ere will be the children or grandchildren of a certain sculptor who will smash
their heads for them, of stone or otherwise."
Saevar smiled in the darkness. He wanted to laugh, but it was not in him just
then. "I hope so, my lord, if the goddesses and the god allow. Thank you. Than
k you for saying that."
"No thanks, Saevar. Not between us and not this night. The Triad guard and she
lter you tomorrow, and after, and guard and shelter all that you have loved,"

Saevar swallowed. "You know you are a part of that, my lord. A part of what I
have loved."
Valentin did not reply. Only, after a moment, he leaned forward and kissed Sae
var upon the brow. Then he held up a hand and the sculptor, his eyes blurring,
raised his own hand and touched his Prince's palm to palm in farewell. Valent
in rose and was gone, a shadow in moonlight, back towards the fires of his arm
y.
The singing seemed to have stopped, on both sides of the river. It was very la
te. Saevar knew he should be making his own way back and settling down for a f
ew snatched hours of sleep. It was hard to leave though, to rise and surrender
the perfect beauty of this last night. The river, the moons, the arch of star
s, the fireflies and all the fires.
In the end he decided to stay there by the water. He sat alone in the summer d
arkness on the banks of the River Deisa, with his strong hands loosely clasped
about his knees. He watched the two moons set and all the fires slowly die an
d he thought of his wife and children and the life's work of his hands that wo
uld live after him, and the trialla sang for him all night long.

PART ONE - A BLADE IN THE SOUL

Chapter 1
IN THE AUTUMN SEASON OF THE WINE, WORD WENT FORTH from among the cypresses and
olives and the laden vines of his country estate that Sandre, Duke of Astibar
, once ruler of that city and its province, had drawn the last bitter breath o
f his exile and age and died.
No servants of the Triad were by his side to speak their rituals at his end. N
ot the white-robed priests of Eanna, nor those of dark Morian of Portals, nor
the priestesses of Adaon, the god.
There was no particular surprise in Astibar town when these tidings came with
the word of the Duke's passing. Exiled Sandre's rage at the Triad and its cler
gy through the last eighteen years of his life was far from being a secret. An
d impiety had never been a thing from which Sandre d'Astibar, even in the days
of his power, had shied away.
The city was overflowing with people from the outlying distrada and far beyond
on the eve of the Festival of Vines. In the crowded taverns and khav rooms tr
uths and lies about the Duke were traded back and forth like wool and spice by
folk who had never seen his face and who would have once paled with justifiab
le terror at a summons to the Ducal court in Astibar.
All his days Duke Sandre had occasioned talk and speculation through the whole
of the peninsula men called the Palm—and there was nothing to alter that fac
t at the time of his dying, for all that Alberico of Barbadior had come with a
n army from that Empire overseas and exiled Sandre into the distrada eighteen
years before. When power is gone the memory of power lingers.
Perhaps because of this, and certainly because he tended to be cautious and ci
rcumspect in all his ways, Alberico, who held four of the nine provinces in an
iron grip and was vying with Brandin of Ygrath for the ninth, acted with a pr
ecise regard for protocol.
By noon of the day the Duke died, a messenger from Alberico was seen to have r
idden out by the eastern gate of the city. A messenger bearing the blue-silver
banner of mourning and carrying, no one doubted, carefully chosen words of co
ndolence to Sandre's children and grandchildren now gathered at their broad es
tate seven miles beyond the walls.
In The Paelion, the khav room where the wittier sort were gathering that seaso
n, it was cynically observed that the Tyrant would have been more likely to se
nd a company of his own Barbadian mercenaries—not just a single message-beare
r—were the living Sandreni not such a feckless lot. Before the appreciative,
eye-to-who-might-be-lis-tening, ripple of amusement at that had quite died awa
y, one itinerant musician—there were scores of them in Astibar that week—had
offered to wager all he might earn in the three days to come, that from the I
sland of Chiara would arrive condolences in verse before the Festival was over
.
"Too rich an opportunity," the rash newcomer explained, cradling a steaming mu
g of khav laced with one of the dozen or so liqueurs that lined the shelves be
hind the bar of The Paelion. "Brandin will be incapable of letting slip a chan
ce like this to remind Alberico— and the rest of us—that though the two of t
hem have divided our peninsula the share of art and learning is quite tilted w
est towards Chiara. Mark my words—and wager who will—we'll have a knottily r
hymed verse from stout Doarde or some silly acrostic thing of Camena's to puzz
le out, with Sandre spelled six ways and backwards, before the music stops in
Astibar three days from now."
There was laughter, though again it was guarded, even on the eve of the Festiv
al, when a long tradition that Alberico of Barbadior had circumspectly indulge
d allowed more license than elsewhere in the year. A few men with heads for fi
gures did some rapid calculations of sailing-time and the chances of the autum
n seas north of Senzio province and down through the Archipelago, and the musi
cian found his wager quickly covered and recorded on the slate on the wall of
The Paelion that existed for just such a purpose in a city prone to gambling.

But shortly after that all wagers and mocking chatter were forgotten. Someone
in a steep cap with a curled feather flung open the doors of the khav room, sh
outed for attention, and when he had it reported that the Tyrant's messenger h
ad just been seen returning through the same eastern gate from which he had so
lately sallied forth. That the messenger was riding at an appreciably greater
speed than hitherto, and that, not three miles to his rear was the funerary p
rocession of Duke Sandre d'Astibar being brought by his last request to lie a
night and a day in state in the city he once had ruled.
In The Paelion the reaction was immediate and predictable: men began shouting
fiercely to be heard over the din they themselves were causing. Noise and poli
tics and the anticipated pleasures of the Festival made for a thirsty afternoo
n. So brisk was his trade that the excitable proprietor of The Paelion began i
nadvertently serving full measures of liqueur in the laced khavs being ordered
in profusion. His wife, of more phlegmatic disposition, continued to short-me
asure all her patrons with benevolent lack of favoritism.
"They'll be turned back!" young Adreano the poet cried, decisively banging dow
n his mug and sloshing hot khav over the dark oak table of The Paelion's large
st booth. "Alberico will never allow it!" There were growls of assent from his
friends and the hangers-on who always clustered about this particular table.

Adreano stole a glance at the traveling musician who'd made the brash wager on
Brandin of Ygrath and his court poets on Chiara. The fellow, looking highly a
mused, his eyebrows quizzically arched, leaned back comfortably in the chair h
e had brazenly pulled up to the booth some time ago. Adreano felt seriously of
fended by the man, and didn't know whether his umbrage had been more aroused b
y the musician's so-casual assertion of Chiara's preeminence in culture, or by
his flippant dismissal of the great Camena di Chiara whom Adreano had been as
siduously imitating for the past half-year: both in the fashion of his verses
and the wearing of a three-layered cloak by day and night.
Adreano was intelligent enough to be aware that there might be a contradiction
inherent in these twinned sources of ire, but he was also young enough and ha
d drunk a more than sufficient quantity of khav laced with Senzian brandy, for
that awareness to remain well below the level of his conscious thoughts.
Which remained focused on this presumptuous rustic. The man had evidently jour
neyed into the city to saw or pluck for three days at some country instrument
or other in exchange for a handful of astins to squander at the Festival. How
did such a fellow dare sail into the most fashionable khav room in the Eastern
Palm and thump his rural behind down onto a chair at the most coveted table i
n that room? Adreano still carried painfully vivid memories of the long month
it had taken him—even after his first verses had appeared in print—to circle
warily closer, flinching inwardly at apprehended rebuffs, before he became a
member of the select and well-known circle that had a claim upon this booth.
He found himself actually hoping that the musician would presume to contradict
his opinion: he had a choice couplet already prepared, about rabble of the ro
ad spewing views on their betters in the company of their betters.
As if on cue to that thought, the fellow slumped even more comfortably back in
his chair, stroked a prematurely silvered temple with a long finger and said,
directly to Adreano, "This seems to be my afternoon for wagers. I'll risk eve
rything I'm about to win on the other matter that Alberico is too cautious to
ruffle the mood of the Festival over this. There are too many people in Astiba
r right now and spirits are running too high even with the half-measured drink
s they serve in here to people who should know better."
He grinned, to take some of the sting from the last words. "Far better for the
Tyrant to be gracious," he went on. "To lay his old enemy ceremoniously to re
st once and for all, and then offer thanks to whatever gods his Emperor overse
as is ordering the Barbadians to worship these days. Thanks and offerings, for
he can be certain that the geldings Sandre's left behind will be pleasingly s
wift to abandon the unfashionable pursuit of freedom that Sandre stood for in
un-gelded Astibar."
By the end of his speech he was not smiling, nor did the wide-set grey eyes lo
ok away from Adreano's own.
And here, for the first time, were truly dangerous words. Softly spoken, but t
hey had been heard by everyone in the booth, and suddenly their corner of The
Paelion became an unnaturally quiet space amid the unchecked din everywhere el
se in the room. Adreano's derisive couplet, so swiftly composed, now seemed tr
ivial and inappropriate in his own ears. He said nothing, his heart beating cu
riously fast. With some effort he kept his gaze on the musician's.
Who added, the crooked smile returning, "Do we have a wager, friend?"
Parrying for time while he rapidly began calculating how many astins he could
lay palms on by cornering certain friends, Adreano said, "Would you care to en
lighten us as to why a farmer from the distrada is so free with his money to c
ome and with his views on matters such as this?"
The other's smile widened, showing even white teeth. "I'm no farmer," he prote
sted genially, "nor from your distrada either. I'm a shepherd from up in the s
outh Tregea mountains and I'll tell you a thing." The grey eyes swung round, a
mused, to include the entire booth. "A flock of sheep will teach you more abou
t men than some of us would like to think, and goats . . . well, goats will do
better than the priests of Morian to make you a philosopher, especially if yo
u're out on a mountain in rain chasing after them with thunder and night comin
g on together."
There was genuine laughter around the booth, abetted somewhat by the release o
f tension. Adreano tried unsuccessfully to keep his own expression sternly rep
ressive.
"Have we a wager?" the shepherd asked one more time, his manner friendly and r
elaxed.
Adreano was saved the need to reply, and several of his friends were spared an
amount of grief and lost astins by the arrival, even more precipitous than th
at of the feather-hatted tale-bearer, of Nerone the painter.
"Alberico's given permission!" he trumpeted over the roar in The Paelion. "He'
s just decreed that Sandre's exile ended when he died. The Duke's to lie in st
ate tomorrow morning at the old Sandreni Palace and have a full-honors funeral
with all nine of the rites! Provided"—he paused dramatically—"provided the
clergy of the Triad are allowed in to do their part of it."
The implications of all this were simply too large for Adreano to brood much u
pon his own loss of face—young, overly impetuous poets had that happen to the
m every second hour or so. But these— these were great events! His gaze, for
some reason, returned to the shepherd. The man's expression was mild and inter
ested, but certainly not triumphant.
"Ah well," the fellow said with a rueful shake of his head, "I suppose being r
ight will have to compensate me for being poor—the story of my life, I fear."

Adreano laughed. He clapped the portly, breathless Nerone on the back and shif
ted over to make room for the painter. "Eanna bless us both," he said to him.
"You just saved yourself more astins than you have. I would have touched you t
o make a wager I would have just lost with your tidings."
By way of reply Nerone picked up Adreano's half-full khav mug and drained it a
t a pull. He looked around optimistically, but the others in the booth were gu
arding their drinks, knowing the painter's habits very well. With a chuckle th
e dark-haired shepherd from Tre-gea proffered his own mug. Self-taught never t
o query largesse, Nerone quaffed it down. He did murmur a thank-you when the k
hav was drained.
Adreano noted the exchange, but his mind was racing down unfamiliar channels t
o an unexpected conclusion.
"You have also," he said abruptly, addressing Nerone but speaking to the booth
at large, "just reaffirmed how shrewd the Barbadian sorcerer ruling us is. Al
berico has now succeeded, with one decree, in tightening his bonds with the cl
ergy of the Triad. He's placed a perfect condition upon the granting of the Du
ke's last wish. Sandre's heirs will have to agree—not that they'd ever not ag
ree to something—and I can't even begin to guess how many astins it's going t
o cost them to assuage the priests and priestesses enough to get them into the
San-dreni Palace tomorrow morning. Alberico will now be known as the man who
brought the renegade Duke of Astibar back to the grace of the Triad at his dea
th."
He looked around the booth, excited by the force of his own reasoning. "By the
blood of Adaon, it reminds me of the intrigues of the old days when everythin
g was done with this much subtlety! Wheels within the wheels that guided the f
ate line of the whole peninsula."
"Well, now," said the Tregean, his expression turning grave, "that may be the
cleverest insight we've had this noisy day. But tell me," he went on, as Adrea
no flushed with pleasure, "if what Alberico's done has just reminded you—and
others, I've no doubt, though not likely as swiftly—of the way of things in t
he days before he sailed here to conquer, and before Brandin took Chiara and t
he western provinces, then is it not possible"—his voice was low, for Adreano
's ears alone in the riot of the room—"that he has been outplayed at this gam
e after all? Outplayed by a dead man?"
Around them men were rising and settling their accounts in loud haste to be ou
tside, where events of magnitude seemed to be unfolding so swiftly. The easter
n gate was where everyone was going, to see the Sandreni bring their dead lord
home after eighteen years. A quarter of an hour earlier, Adreano would have b
een on his feet with the others, sweeping on his triple cloak, racing to reach
the gate in time for a good viewing post. Not now. His brain leapt to follow
the Tregean's voice down this new pathway, and understanding flashed in him li
ke a rushlight in darkness.
“You see, don’t you?" his new acquaintance said flatly. They were alone at t
he booth. Nerone had lingered to precipitously drain whatever khav had been le
ft unfinished in the rush for the doors and had then followed the others out i
nto the autumn sunshine and the breeze.
“I think I do,” Adreano said, working it out. “Sandre wins by losing.
“By losing a battle he never really cared about,” the other amended, a keenn
ess in his grey eyes. “I doubt the clergy ever mattered to him at all. They w
eren’t his enemy. However subtle Alberico may be, the fact is that he won thi
s province and Tregea and Ferraut and Certando because of his army and his sor
cery, and he holds the Eastern Palm only through those things. Sandre d’Astib
ar ruled this city and its province for twenty-five years through half a dozen
rebellions and assassination attempts that I’ve heard of. He did it with onl
y a handful of sometimes loyal troops, with his family, and with a guile that
was legendary even then. What would you say to the suggestion that he refused
to let the priests and priestesses into his death-room last night simply to in
duce Alberico to seize that as a face-saving condition today?
Adreano didn’t know what he would say. What he did know was that he was feeli
ng a zest, an exitement, that left him left him unsure whether what he wanted
just then was a sword in his hand or a quill and ink to write down the words t
hat were starting to tumble about inside him.
"What do you think will happen," he asked, with a deference that would have as
tonished his friends.
"I'm not sure," the other said frankly. "But I have a growing suspicion that t
he Festival of Vines this year may see the beginning of something none of us c
ould have expected."
He looked for a moment as if he would say more than that, but did not.
Instead he rose, clinking a jumble of coins onto the table to pay for his khav
. "I must go. Rehearsal-time: I'm with a company I've never played with before
. Last year's plague caused havoc among the traveling musicians— that's how I
got my reprieve from the goats."
He grinned, then glanced up at the wager board on the wall. "Tell your friends
I'll be here before sunset three days from now to settle the matter of Chiara
's poetic condolences. Farewell for now."
"Farewell," Adreano said automatically, and watched as the other walked from t
he almost empty room.
The owner and his wife were moving about collecting mugs and glasses and wipin
g down the tables and benches. Adreano signaled for a last drink. A moment lat
er, sipping his khav—unlaced this time to clear his head—he realized that he
'd forgotten to ask the musician his name.

Chapter 2

DEVIN WAS HAVING A BAD DAY.
At nineteen he had almost completely reconciled himself to his lack of size an
d to the fair-skinned boyish face the Triad had given him to go with that. It
had been a long time since he'd been in the habit of hanging by his feet from
trees in the woods near the farm back home in Asoli, striving to stretch a lit
tle more height out of his frame.
The keenness of his memory had always been a source of pride and pleasure to h
im, but a number of the memories that came with it were not. He would have bee
n quite happy to be able to forget the afternoon when the twins, returning hom
e from hunting with a brace of grele, had caught him suspended from a tree ups
ide down. Six years later it still rankled him that his brothers, normally so
reliably obtuse, had immediately grasped what he was trying to do.
"We'll help you, little one!" Povar had cried joyfully, and before Devin could
right himself and scramble away Nico had his arms, Povar his feet, and his bu
rly twin brothers were stretching him between them, cackling with great good h
umor all the while. Enjoying, among other things, the ambit of Devin's precoci
ously profane vocabulary.
Well, that had been the last time he actually tried to make himself taller. Ve
ry late that same night he'd sneaked into the snoring twins' bedroom and caref
ully dumped a bucket of pig slop over each of them. Sprinting like Adaon on hi
s mountain he'd been through the yard and over the farm gate almost before the
ir roaring started.
He'd stayed away two nights, then returned to his father's whipping. He'd expe
cted to have to wash the sheets himself, but Povar had done that and both twin
s, stolidly good-natured, had already forgotten the incident.
Devin, cursed or blessed with a memory like Eanna of the Names, never did forg
et. The twins might be hard people to hold a grudge against—almost impossible
, in fact—but that did nothing to lessen his loneliness on that farm in the l
owlands. It was not long after that incident that Devin had left home, apprent
iced as a singer to Menico di Ferraut whose company toured northern Asoli ever
y second or third spring.
Devin hadn't been back since, taking a week's leave during the company's north
ern swing three years ago, and again this past spring. It wasn't that he'd bee
n badly treated on the farm, it was just that he didn't fit in, and all four o
f them knew it. Farming in Asoli was serious, sometimes grim work, battling to
hold land and sanity against the constant encroachments of the sea and the ho
t, hazy, grey monotony of the days.
If his mother had lived it might have been different, but the farm in Asoli wh
ere Garin of Lower Corte had taken his three sons had been a dour, womanless p
lace—acceptable perhaps for the twins, who had each other, and for the kind o
f man Garin had slowly become amid the almost featureless spaces of the flatla
nds, but no source of nurture or warm memories for a small, quick, imaginative
youngest child, whose own gifts, whatever they might turn out to be, were not
those of the land.
After they had learned from Menico di Ferraut that Devin's voice was capable o
f more than country ballads it had been with a certain collective relief that
they had all said their farewells early one spring morning, standing in the pr
edictable greyness and rain. His father and Nico had been turning back to chec
k the height of the river almost before their parting words were fully spoken.
Povar lingered though, to awkwardly cuff his little, odd brother on the shoul
der.
"If they don't treat you right enough," he'd said, "you can come home, Dev. Th
ere's a place."
Devin remembered both things: the gentle blow which had been forced to carry m
ore of a burden of meaning down the years than such a gesture should, and the
rough, quick words that had followed. The truth was, he really did remember al
most everything, except for his mother and their days in Lower Corte. But he'd
been less than two years old when she'd died amongst the fighting down there,
and only a month older when Garin had taken his three sons north.
Since then, almost everything was held in his mind.
And if he'd been a wagering man—which he wasn't, having that much of careful
Asoli in his soul—he'd have been willing to put a chiaro or an astin down on
the fact that he couldn't recall feeling this frustrated in years. Since, if t
ruth were told, the days when it looked as if he would never grow at all.
What, Devin d'Asoli asked himself grimly, did a person have to do to get a dri
nk in Astibar? And on the eve of the Festival, no less!
The problem would have been positively laughable were it not so infuriating. I
t was the doing, he learned quickly enough—in the first inn that refused to s
erve him his requested flask of Senzio green wine —of the pinch-buttocked, jo
y-killing priests of Eanna. The goddess, Devin thought fervently, deserved bet
ter of her servants.
It appeared that a year ago, in the midst of their interminable jockeying for
ascendancy with the clergy of Morian and Adaon, Ean-na's priests had convinced
the Tyrant's token council that there was too much licentiousness among the y
oung of Astibar and that, more to the point of course, such license bred unres
t And since it was obvious that the taverns and khav rooms bred license . . .

It had taken less than two weeks for Alberico to promulgate and begin enforcin
g a law that no youth of less than seventeen years could buy a drink in Astiba
r.
Eanna's dust-dry priests celebrated—in whatever ascetic fashion such men cele
brated—their petty triumph over the priests of Morian and the elegant prieste
sses of the god: both of which deities were associated with darker passions an
d, inevitably, wine.
Tavern-keepers were quietly unhappy (it didn't do to be loudly unhappy in Asti
bar) though not so much for the loss of trade as for the insidious manner in w
hich the law was enforced. The promulgated law had simply placed the burden of
establishing a patron's age on the owner of each inn, tavern, or khav room. A
t the same time, if any of the ubiquitous Barbadian mercenaries should happen
to drop by, and should happen—arbitrarily—to decide that a given patron look
ed too young . . . well, that was one tavern closed for a month and one tavern
-keeper locked up for the same length of time.
All of which left the sixteen-year-olds in Astibar truly out of luck. Along wi
th, it gradually became evident through the course of a morning, one small, bo
yish-looking nineteen-year-old singer from Asoli.
After three summary ejections along the west side of the Street of the Temples
, Devin was briefly tempted to go across the road to the Shrine of Morian, fak
e an ecstasy, and hope they favored Senzian green here as a means of succoring
the overly ecstatic. As another, even less rational, option he contemplated b
reaking a window in Eanna's domed shrine and testing if any of the ball-less i
mbeciles inside could catch him in a sprint.
He forebore to do so, as much out of genuine devotion to Eanna of the Names as
to an oppressive awareness of how many very large and heavily armed Barbadian
mercenaries patrolled the streets of As-tibar. The Barbadians were everywhere
in the Eastern Palm of course, but nowhere was their presence so disturbingly
evident as it was in Astibar where Alberico had based himself.
In the end, Devin wished a serious head-cold on himself and headed west toward
s the harbor and then, following his unfortunately still-functioning sense of
smell, towards Tannery Lane. And there, made almost ill by the effluence of th
e tanner's craft, which quite overwhelmed the salt of the sea, he was given an
open bottle of green, no questions asked, in a tavern called The Bird, by a s
hambling, loose-limbed innkeeper whose eyes were probably inadequate to the da
rk shadows of his windowless, one-room establishment.
Even this nondescript, evil-smelling hole was completely full. Astibar was cra
mmed to overflowing for tomorrow's start of the Festival of Vines. The harvest
had been a good one everywhere but in Cer-tando, Devin knew, and there were p
lenty of people with astins or chiaros to spend, and in a mood to spend them t
oo.
There were certainly no free tables to be had in The Bird. Devin wedged himsel
f into a corner where the dark, pitted wood of the bar met the back wall, took
a judicious sip of his wine—watered but not unusually so, he decided—and co
mposed his mind and soul towards a meditation upon the perfidy and unreasonabl
eness of women.
As embodied, specifically, by Catriana d'Astibar these past two weeks.
He calculated that he had enough time before the late-afternoon rehearsal—the
last before their opening engagement at the city home of a small wine-estate
owner tomorrow—to muse his way through most of a bottle and still show up sob
er. He was the experienced trouper anyhow, he thought indignantly. He was a pa
rtner. He knew the performance routines like a hand knew a glove. The extra re
hearsals had been laid on by Menico for the benefit of the three new people in
the troupe.
Including impossible Catriana. Who happened to be the reason he had stormed ou
t of the morning rehearsal a short while before he knew that Menico planned to
call the session to a halt. How, in the name of Adaon, was he supposed to rea
ct when an inexperienced new female who thought she could sing—and to whom he
'd been genuinely friendly since she'd joined them a fortnight ago—said what
she'd said in front of everyone that morning?
Cursed with memory, Devin saw the nine of them rehearsing again in the rented
back room on the ground floor of their inn. Four musicians, the two dancers, M
enico, Catriana, and himself singing up front. They were doing Rauder's "Song
of Love," a piece rather predictably requested by the wine-merchant's wife, a
piece Devin had been singing for nearly six years, a song he could manage in a
stupor, a coma, sound asleep.
And so perhaps, yes, he'd been a little bored, a little distracted, had been l
eaning a little closer than absolutely necessary to their newest, red-headed f
emale singer, putting perhaps the merest shading of a message into his express
ion and voice, but still, even so ...
"Devin, in the name of the Triad," had snapped Catriana d'As-tibar, breaking u
p the rehearsal entirely, "do you think you can get your mind away from your g
roin for long enough to do a decent harmony? This is not a difficult song!"
The affliction of a fair complexion had hurtled Devin's face all the way to br
ight red. Menico, he saw—Menico who should have been sharply reprimanding the
girl for her presumption—was laughing helplessly, even more flushed than Dev
in was. So were the others, all of them.
Unable to think of a reply, unwilling to compromise the tattered shreds of his
dignity by yielding to his initial impulse to reach up and whack the girl acr
oss the back of her head, Devin had simply spun on his heels and left.
He'd thrown one reproachful glance at Menico as he went but was not assuaged:
the troupe-leader's ample paunch was quivering with laughter as he wiped tears
from his round, bearded face.
So Devin had gone looking for a bottle of Senzio green and a dark place to dri
nk it in on a brilliant autumn morning in Astibar. Having finally found the wi
ne and the tenuous comfort of shadows he fully expected to figure out, about h
alf a bottle from now, what he should have said to that arrogant red-maned cre
ature back in the rehearsal room.
If only she wasn't so depressingly tall, he thought. Morosely he filled his gl
ass again. Looking up at the blackened crossbeams of the ceiling he briefly co
ntemplated hanging himself from one of them: by the heels of course. For old t
ime's sake.
"Shall I buy you a drink?" someone said.
With a sigh Devin turned to cope with one of the more predictable aspects of b
eing small and looking very young while drinking alone in a sailor's bar.
What he saw was somewhat reassuring. His questioner was a soberly dressed man
of middle years with greying hair and lines of worry or laughter radiating at
his temples. Even so:
"Thank you," Devin said, "but I've most of my own bottle left and I prefer hav
ing a woman to being one for sailors. I'm also older than I look."
The other man laughed aloud. "In that case," he chuckled, genuinely amused, "y
ou can give me a drink if you like while I tell you about my two marriageable
daughters and the other two who are on their way to that age sooner than I'm r
eady for. I'm Rovigo d'Astibar, master of the Sea Maid just in from down the c
oast in Tregea."
Devin grinned and stretched across the bar for another glass: The Bird was far
too crowded to bother trying to catch the owner's rheumy eye, and Devin had h
is own reasons for not wanting to signal the man.
"I'll be happy to share the bottle with you," he said to Rovigo, "though your
wife is unlikely to be well pleased if you press your daughters upon a traveli
ng musician."
"My wife," said Rovigo feelingly, "would turn ponderous cartwheels of delight
if I brought home a cowherd from the Certandan grasslands for the oldest one."

Devin winced. "That bad?" he murmured. "Ah, well. We can at least drink to you
r safe return from Tregea, and in time for Festival by a fingernail. I'm Devin
d'Asoli bar Garin, at your service."
"And I at yours, friend Devin, not-as-young-as-you-look. Did you have trouble
getting a drink?" Rovigo asked shrewdly.
"I was in and out of more doorways than Morian of Portals knows, and as dry wh
en I left as when I'd entered." Devin rashly sniffed the heavy air; even among
the odors of the crowd and despite the lack of windows, the tannery stench fr
om outside was still painfully discernible. "This would not have been my first
or my tenth choice as a place for drinking a flask of wine."
Rovigo smiled. "A sensible attitude. Will I seem eccentric if I tell you I alw
ays come straight here when the Sea Maid is home from a voyage? Somehow the sm
ell speaks of land to me. Tells me I'm back."
"You don't like the sea?"
"I am quite convinced that any man who says he does is lying, has debts on lan
d, or a shrewish wife to escape from and—" He paused, pretending to have been
suddenly struck by a thought. "Come to think of it . . ." he added with exagg
erated reflectiveness. Then he winked.
Devin laughed aloud and poured them both more wine. "Why do you sail then?"
"Trade is good," Rovigo said frankly. "The Maid is small enough to slip into p
orts down the coast or around on the western side of Senzio or Ferraut that th
e bigger traders never bother with. She's also quick enough to make it worth m
y while running south past the mountains to Quileia. It isn't sanctioned, of c
ourse, with the trade embargo down there, but if you have contacts in a remote
enough place and you don't dawdle about your business it isn't too risky and
there's a profit to be made. I can take Barbadian spices from the market here,
or silk from the north, and get them to places in Quileia that would never ot
herwise see such things. I bring back carpets, or Quileian wood carvings, slip
pers, jeweled daggers, sometimes casks of buinath to sell to the taverns—what
ever's going at a good price. I can't do volume so I have to watch my margins,
but there's a living in it as long as insurance stays down and Adaon of the W
aves keeps me afloat. I go from here to the god's temple before heading home."

"But here first," Devin smiled.
"Here first." They touched glasses and drained them. Devin refilled both.
"What's news in Quileia?" he asked.
"As a matter of fact, I was just there," Rovigo said. "Tregea was a stop on th
e way back. There are tidings, actually. Marius won his combat in the Grove of
Oaks again this summer."
"I did hear about that," Devin said, shaking his head in rueful admiration. "A
crippled man, and he must be fifty years old by now. What does that make it—
six times in a row?"
"Seven," Rovigo said soberly. He paused, as if expecting a reaction.
"I'm sorry," Devin said. "Is there a meaning to that?"
"Marius decided there was. He's just announced that there will be no more chal
lenges in the Oak Grove. Seven is sacred, he's proclaimed. By allowing him thi
s latest triumph the Mother Goddess has made known her will. Marius has just d
eclared himself King in Quileia, no longer only the consort of the High Priest
ess."
"What?" Devin exclaimed, loudly enough to cause some heads to turn. He lowered
his voice. "He's declared ... a man ... I thought they had a matriarchy there
."
"So," said Rovigo, "did the late High Priestess."
Traveling across the Peninsula of the Palm, from mountain village to remote ca
stle or manor, to the cities that were the centers of affairs, musicians could
not help but hear news and gossip of great events. Always, in Devin's brief e
xperience, the talk had been only that: a way to ease the passing of a cold wi
nter's night around an inn fire in Certando, or to try to impress a traveler i
n a tavern in Corte with a murmured confiding that a pro-Barbadior party was r
umored to be forming in that Ygrathen province.
It was only talk, Devin had long since concluded. The two ruling sorcerers fro
m east and west across the seas had sliced the Palm neatly in half between the
m, with only hapless, decadent Senzio not formally occupied by either, looking
nervously across the water both ways. Its Governor remained paralytically una
ble to decide which wolf to be devoured by, while the two wolves still warily
circled each other after almost twenty years, each unwilling to expose itself
by moving first.
The balance of power in the peninsula seemed to Devin to have been etched in s
tone from the time of his first awareness. Until one of the sorcerers died—an
d sorcerers were rumored to live a very long time—nothing much would or could
come of khav room or great hall chatter.
Quileia, though, was another matter. One far beyond Devin's limited experience
to sort out or define. He couldn't even guess what might be the implications
of what Marius had now done in that strange country south of the mountains. Wh
at might flow from Quileia's having a more than transitory King, one who did n
ot have to go into the Oak Grove every two years and there, naked, ritually ma
imed, and unarmed, meet the sword-wielding foe who had been chosen to slay him
and take his place. Marius had not been slain, though. Seven times he had not
been slain.
And now the High Priestess was dead. Nor was it possible to miss the meaning i
n the way Rovigo had said that. A little overawed, Devin shook his head.
He glanced up and saw that his new acquaintance was staring at him with an odd
expression.
"You're a thoughtful young man, aren't you?" the merchant said.
Devin shrugged, suddenly self-conscious. "Not unduly. I don't know. Certainly
not with any insight. I don't hear news like yours every afternoon. What do yo
u think it will mean?"
One answer he was not to receive.
The tavern-keeper, who had quite efficiently succeeded in ignoring Rovigo's in
termittent signaling for another bottle of wine now strode to their end of the
bar, black anger visible on his features even in the darkened room.
"You!" he hissed. "Your name Devin?"
Taken aback, Devin nodded reflexive agreement. The tavern-keeper's expression
grew even more malevolent.
"Get out of here!" he rasped. "Your Triad-cursed sister's outside. Says your f
ather's ordered you home and—Morian blast you both!— that he's minded to tur
n me in for serving an underage. You gutter-spawned maggot, I'll teach you to
put me at risk of being shut down on the eve of the Festival!"
Before Devin could move, a full pitcher of soured black wine was flung into hi
s face, stinging like fire. He scrambled back, wiping at his streaming eyes, s
wearing furiously.
When he could see again it was to observe an extraordinary sight.
Rovigo—not a big man—had moved along the bar and had grabbed the 'keeper by
the collar of his greasy tunic. Without apparent effort he had the man pulled
halfway over the bar top, feet kicking ineffectually in mid-air. The collar wa
s twisted to a degree sufficient to cause the helpless tavern-owner's face to
begin turning a mottled shade of crimson.
"Goro, I do not like my friends being abused," Rovigo said calmly. "The lad ha
s no father here and I doubt he has a sister." He cocked an eyebrow at Devin w
ho shook his dripping head vehemently.
"As I say," Rovigo continued, not even breathing hard, "he has no sister here.
He is also patently not underage—as should be obvious to any tavern-owner no
t blinded by swilling buckets of his own slop after hours. Now, Goro, will you
placate me a little by apologizing to Devin d'Asoli, my new friend, and offer
ing him two bottles of corked vintage Certando red, by way of showing your sin
cere contrition? In return I may be persuaded to let you have a cask of the Qu
ileian buinath that's sitting on the Sea Maid even now. At an appropriate pric
e or course, given what you can extort for that stuff at Festival-time."
Goro's face had accomplished a truly dangerous hue. Just as Devin felt obliged
to caution Rovigo, the tavern-owner gave a jerky, convulsive nod and the merc
hant untwisted the collar a little. Goro dragged fetid tavern air into his lun
gs as if it were scented with Chiaran mountain tainflowers and spluttered a th
ree word apology to Devin.
"And the wine?" Rovigo reminded him kindly.
He lowered the other man—still without any evident exertion— enough for Goro
to fumble below the bar and resurface with two bottles of what certainly appe
ared to be Certandan red.
Rovigo let slip another notch of the tightened collar.
"Vintage?" he inquired patiently.
Goro twitched his head up and down.
"Well then," Rovigo declared, releasing Goro completely, "it appears we are qu
its. I suppose," he said, turning to Devin, "that you should go see who is pre
tending to be your sister outside."
"I know who it is," Devin said grimly. "Thank you, by the way. I'm used to fig
hting my own battles, but it's pleasant to have an ally now and again."
"It is always pleasant to have an ally," Rovigo amended. "But it seems obvious
to me that you aren't keen on dealing with this 'sister,' so I'll leave you t
o do it in private. Do let me once more commend my own daughters to your kind
remembrance. They've been quite well brought up, all things considered."
"I have no doubt of that at all," Devin said. "If I can do you a service in re
turn I will. I'm with the company of Menico di Ferraut and we're here through
the Festival. Your wife might enjoy hearing us perform. If you let me know you
've come I'll make sure you have good places at either of our public performan
ces, free of charge."
"I thank you. And if your path or your curiosity leads you southeast of town,
now or later in the year, our land is about five miles along the road on the r
ight-hand side. There's a small temple of Adaon just before and my gate has a
crest with a ship on it. One of the girls designed it. They are all," he grinn
ed, "very talented."
Devin laughed and the two men touched palms formally. Rovigo turned back to re
claim their corner of the bar. Devin, dismally aware that he was soaked with e
vil-smelling wine from light-brown hair to waist, with stains splotching his h
ose as well, walked outside clutching his two bottles of Certandan red. He squ
inted owlishly in the sunshine for a few seconds before spotting Catriana d'As
tibar on the other side of the lane, scarlet hair blazing in the light, a hand
kerchief pressed firmly beneath her nose.
Devin strode briskly into the road and almost collided with a tanner's cart. A
brief and satisfying exchange of opinions ensued. The tanner rumbled on and D
evin, vowing inwardly not to be put on the defensive this time, crossed the la
ne to where Catriana had been ex-pressionlessly observing the altercation.
"Well," he said caustically, "I do appreciate your coming all this way to apol
ogize, but you might have chosen a different way of finding me if you were sin
cere. I rather prefer my clothes unsaturated with spoiled wine. You will offer
to wash them for me, of course."
Catriana simply ignored all of this, looking him up and down coldly. "You are
going to need a wash and a change," she said, from behind the scented handkerc
hief. "I hadn't counted on that much of a reaction inside. But not having a su
rplus of astins to spend on bribes I couldn't think of a better way to get tav
ern-owners to bother looking for you." It was an explanation, Devin noted, but
not an apology.
"Forgive me," he said, with exaggerated contrition. "I must talk with Menico—
it seems we aren't paying you enough, in addition to all our other transgressi
ons. You must be used to better things."
She hesitated for the first time. "Must we discuss this in the middle of Tanne
ry Lane?" she said.
Without a word Devin sketched a performance bow and gestured for her to lead t
he way. She started walking away from the harbor and he fell in stride beside
her. They were silent for several minutes, until out of the range of the tanne
ry smells. With a faint sigh Catriana put away her handkerchief.
"Where are you taking me?" Devin asked.
Another transgression, it seemed. The blue eyes flashed with anger.
"In the name of the Triad where would I be taking you?" Catri-ana's voice drip
ped with sarcasm. "We are going to my room at the inn for a session of love-ma
king like Eanna and Adaon at the dawn of days."
"Oh, good," Devin snapped, his own anger rekindling. "Why don't we pool our fu
nds and buy another woman to come play Morian —just so I don't get bored, you
understand."
Catriana paled, but before she could open her mouth Devin grabbed her arm with
his free hand and swung her around to face him in the street. Looking up into
those blue eyes (and cursing the fact that he had to do that) he snapped:
"Catriana, what exactly have I done to you? Why do I deserve that sort of answ
er? Or what you did this morning? I've been pleasant to you from the day we si
gned you on—and if you're a professional you know that isn't always the case
in troupes on the road. If you must know, Marra, the woman you replaced, was m
y closest friend in the company. She died of the plague in Certando. I could h
ave made life very hard for you. I didn't and I'm not. I did let you know from
the first that I found you attractive. I'm not aware that there is a sin in t
hat if it is done with courtesy."
He released her arm, abruptly conscious that he had been gripping it very hard
and that they were in an extremely public place, even with the early-afternoo
n lull. Instinctively he looked around; thankfully there were no Barbadians pa
ssing just then. There was a familiar tight feeling in his chest, as of the ap
prehended return of pain, that always came with the thought of Marra. The firs
t true friend of his life. Two neglected children, with voices that were gifts
of Eanna, telling each other fears and dreams for three years in changing bed
s across the Palm at night. His first lover. First death.
Catriana, released, remained where she was, and there was a look in her own ey
es—perhaps at the naming of death—that made him abruptly revise his estimate
of her age downwards. He'd thought she was older than him; now he wasn't sure
.
He waited, breathing quickly after his outburst, and at length he heard her sa
y very softly, "You sing too well."
Devin blinked. It was not at all what he'd expected.
"I have to work very hard at performing," she went on, her face flushing for t
he first time. "Rauder is hard for me—all of his music. And this morning you
were doing the 'Song of Love' without even thinking about it, amusing the othe
rs, trying to charm me ... Devin, I have to concentrate when I sing! You were
making me nervous and I snap at people when I'm nervous."
Devin drew a careful breath and looked around the empty sunlit street for a mo
ment, thinking. He said, "Do you know . . . has anyone ever told you . . . tha
t it is possible and even useful to tell things like this to people—especiall
y the people who have to work with you?"
She shook her head. "Not for me. I've never been able to talk like that, not e
ver."
"Why do it now, then?" he risked. "Why did you come after me?"
A longer pause than before. A cluster of artisans' apprentices swept around th
e corner, hooting with reflexive ribaldry at the sight of the two of them stan
ding together. There was no malice in it though, and they went by without caus
ing any trouble. A few red and golden leaves skipped over the cobbles in the b
reeze.
"Something's happened," Catriana d'Astibar said, "and Menico told us all that
you are the key to our chances."
"Menico sent you after me?" It was almost completely improbable, after nearly
six years together.
"No," Catriana said, quickly shaking her head. "No, he said you'd be back in t
ime, that you always were. I was nervous though, with so much at stake. I coul
dn't just wait around. You'd left a little, urn, upset, after all."
"A little," Devin agreed gravely, noting that she finally had the grace to loo
k apologetic. He would have felt even more secure if he hadn't continued to fi
nd her so attractive. He couldn't stop himself from wondering—even now—what
her breasts would look like, freed from the stiffness of her high-cut bodice.
Marra would have told him, he knew, and even helped him with a conquest. They
had done that for each other, and shared the tales after, traveling through th
at last year on the road before Certando where she died.
"You had better tell me what's happened," he said, forcing his thoughts back t
o the present. There was danger in fantasies and in memories, both.
"The exiled Duke, Sandre, died last night," Catriana said. She looked around b
ut the street was empty again. "For some reason—no one is sure why—Alberico
is allowing his body to lie in state at the Sandreni Palace tonight and tomorr
ow morning, and then . . ."
She paused, the blue eyes bright. Devin, his pulse suddenly leaping, finished
it for her:
"A funeral? Full rites? Don't tell me!"
"Full rites! And Devin, Menico's been asked to audition this afternoon! We hav
e a chance to do the most talked-about performance in the whole of the Palm th
is year!" She looked very young now. And quite unsettlingly beautiful. Her eye
s were shining like a child's.
"So you came to get me," he murmured, nodding his head slowly "before I drank
myself into a useless stupor of frustrated desire." He had the edge now, for t
he first time. It was a pleasant turnabout, especially coupled with the real e
xcitement of her news. He began walking, forcing her to fall in stride with hi
m. For a change.
"It isn't like that," she protested. "It's just that this is so important. Men
ico said your voice would be the key to our hopes . . . that you were at your
best in the mourning rites."
"I don't know whether to be nattered by that, or insulted that you actually th
ought I'd be so unprofessional as to miss a rehearsal on the eve of the Festiv
al."
"Don't be either," Catriana d'Astibar said, with a hint of returning asperity.
"We don't have time for either. Just be good this afternoon. Be the best you'
ve ever been."
He ought to resist it, Devin knew, but his spirits were suddenly much too high
.
"In that case, are you sure we're not going to your room?" he asked blandly.
More than he could know hung in the balance for the moment that followed. Then
Catriana d'Astibar laughed aloud and freely for the first time.
"Now that," said Devin, grinning, "is much better. I honestly wasn't sure if y
ou had a sense of humor."
She grew quiet. "Sometimes I'm not sure either," she said, almost absently. Th
en, in a rather different voice: "Devin, I want this contract more than I can
tell you."
"Well of course," he replied. "It could make our careers."
"That's right," Catriana said. She touched his shoulder and repeated, "I want
this more than I can say."
He might have sought a promise in that touch had he been a little less percept
ive, and had it not been for the way she spoke the words. There was, in fact,
nothing at all of ambition in that tone, nor of desire in the way that Devin h
ad come to know desire.
What he heard was longing, and it reached towards a space inside him that he h
adn't known was there.
"I'll do what I can," he said after a moment, thinking, for no good reason, of
Marra and the tears he'd shed.
On the farm in Asoli they had known he was gifted with music quite early but i
t was an isolated place and none of them had a frame of reference whereby to p
roperly judge or measure such things.
One of Devin's first memories of his father—one that he summoned often becaus
e it was a soft image of a hard man—was of Garin humming the tune of some old
cradle song to help Devin fall asleep one night when he was feverish.
The boy—four perhaps—had woken in the morning with his fever broken, humming
the tune to himself with perfect pitch. Garin's face had taken on the complex
expression that Devin would later learn to associate with his father's memori
es of his wife. That morning though, Garin had kissed his youngest child. The
only time Devin could remember that happening.
The tune became a thing they shared. An access to a limited intimacy. They wou
ld hum it together in rough, untutored attempts at harmony. Later Garin bought
a scaled-down three string syrenya for his youngest child on one of his twice
-yearly trips to the market in Asoli town. After that there were actually a fe
w evenings Devin did like to remember, when he and his father and the twins wo
uld sing ballads of the sea and hills by the fire at night before bed. Escapes
from the drear, wet flatness of Asoli.
When he grew older he began to sing for some of the other farmers. At weddings
or naming days, and once with a traveling priest of Morian he sang counterpoi
nt during the autumn Ember Days on the "Hymn to Morian of Portals." The priest
wanted to bed him, after, but by then Devin was learning how to avoid such re
quests without giving offense.
Later yet, he began to be called upon in the taverns. There were no age laws f
or drinking in northern Asoli, where a boy was a man when he could do a day in
the fields, and a girl was a woman when she first bled.
And it had been in a tavern called The River in Asoli town itself on a market
day that Devin, just turned fourteen, had been singing "The Ride from Corso to
Corte" and had been overheard by a portly, bearded man who turned out to be a
troupe-leader named Menico di Ferraut and who had taken him away from the far
m that week and changed his life.
"We're next," Menico said, nervously smoothing his best satin doublet over his
paunch. Devin, idly picking out his earliest cradle song on one of the spare
syrenyae, smiled reassuringly up at his employer. His partner now, actually.
Devin hadn't been an apprentice since he was seventeen. Menico, tired of refus
ing offers to buy the contract of his young tenor had finally offered Devin jo
urneyman status in the GuiJd and a regular salary—after first making clear ho
w very much the young man owed him, and how loyalty was the only marginally ad
equate way to repay such a large debt of gratitude. Devin knew that, in fact,
and he liked Menico anyway.
A year later, after another sequence of offers from rival troupe-leaders durin
g the summer wedding season in Corte, Menico had made Devin a ten-percent part
ner in the company. After making the same speech, almost word for word, as the
last time.
The honor, Devin knew, was considerable; only old Eghano who played drums and
the Certandan deep strings, and who had been with Menico since the company was
formed, had another partnership share. Everyone else was an apprentice or a j
ourneyman on short-term contract. Especially now, when the aftermath of a plag
ue spring in the south had every troupe in the Palm short of bodies and scramb
ling to fill with temporary musicians, dancers, or singers.
A haunting thread of sound, barely audible, plucked Devin's attention away fro
m his syrenya. He looked over and smiled. Alessan, one of the three new people
, was lightly tracing the melody of the cradle song Devin had been playing. On
the shepherd pipes of Tregea it sounded unearthly and strange.
Alessan, black-haired, though greying at the temples, winked at him over the b
usyness of his fingers on the pipes. They finished the piece together, pipes a
nd syrenya, and humming tenor voice.
"I wish I knew the words," Devin said regretfully as they ended. "My father ta
ught me that tune as a child, but he could never remember how the words went."

Alessan's lean, mobile face was reflective. Devin knew little about the Tregea
n after two weeks of rehearsal other than that the man was extraordinarily goo
d on the pipes and quite reliable. As Menicc's partner, that was all that shou
ld matter to him. Alessan was seldom around the inn outside of practice-time,
but he was always there and punctual for the rehearsals slated.
"I might be able to dredge them up for you if I thought about it," he said, pu
shing a hand through his hair in a characteristic gesture. "It's been a long t
ime but I knew the words once." He smiled.
"Don't worry about it," Devin said. "I've survived this long without them. It'
s just an old song, a memento of my father. If you stay with us we can make it
a winter project to try to track them down."
Menico would approve of that last bit, he knew. The troupe-leader had declared
Alessan di Tregea to be a find, and cheap at the wages he'd asked.
The other man's expressive mouth crooked sideways, a little wryly. "Old songs
and memories of fathers are important," he said. "Is yours dead then?"
Devin made the warding sign with his hand out and two fingers curled down.
"Not last I heard, though I've not seen him in almost six years. Menico spoke
to him when he went through the north of Asoli last time, took him some chiaro
s for me. I don't go back to the farm."
Alessan considered that. "Dour Asolini stock?" he guessed. "No place for a boy
with ambition and a voice like yours?" His tone was shrewd.
"Almost exactly," Devin admitted ruefully. "Though I wouldn't have called myse
lf ambitious. Restless, more. And we weren't originally from Asoli in fact. Ca
me there from Lower Corte when I was a small child."
Alessan nodded. "Even so," he said. The man had a bit of a know-it-all manner,
Devin decided, but he could play the Tregean pipes. The way they might even h
ave sounded on Adaon's own mountain in the south.
In any case, they had no time to pursue the matter.
"We're on!" Menico said, hastily re-entering the room where they were waiting
amid the dust and covered furniture of the long-unused Sandreni Palace.
"We do the 'Lament for Adaon' first," he announced, telling them something the
y'd all known for hours. He wiped his palms on the side of his doublet. "Devin
that one's yours—make me proud, lad." His standard exhortation. "Then all of
us are together on the 'Circling of Years.' Catriana my love you are sure you
can go high enough, or should we pitch down?"
"I'll go high enough," Catriana replied tersely. Devin thought her tone spoke
to simple nervousness, but when her gaze met his for a second he recognized th
at earlier look again: the one that reached somewhere beyond desire towards a
shore he didn't know.
"I'd very much like to get this contract," Alessan di Tregea said just then, m
ildly enough.
"How extremely surprising!" Devin snapped, discovering as he spoke that he too
was nervous after all. Alessan laughed though, and so did old Eghano walking
through the door with them: Eghano who had seen far too much in too many years
of touring to ever be made edgy by a mere audition. Without saying a word, he
had, as he always had, an immediately calming effect on Devin.
"I'll do the best I can," Devin said after a moment and for the second time th
at afternoon, not really certain to whom he was saying it, or why.
In the end, whether because of the Triad or in spite of them—as his father us
ed to say—his best was enough.
The principal auditor was a delicately scented, extravagantly dressed scion of
the Sandreni, a man—in his late thirties, Devin guessed—who made it manifes
t, in his limp posture and the artificially exaggerated shadows that ringed hi
s eyes, why Alberico the Tyrant didn't appear to be much worried about the des
cendants of Sandre d'Astibar.
Ranged behind this diverting personage were the priests of Eanna and Morian in
white and smoke grey. Beside them, vivid by contrast, sat a priestess of Adao
n in crimson, with her hair cropped very short.
It was autumn of course, and the Ember Days were coming on: Devin wasn't surpr
ised by her hair. He was surprised to see the clergy there for the audition. T
hey made him uncomfortable—another legacy of his father—but this wasn't a si
tuation where he could allow that to affect him, and so he dismissed them from
his thoughts.
He focused on the Duke's elegant son, the only one who really mattered now. He
waited, reaching as Menico had taught him for a still point inside himself.
Menico cued Nieri and Aldine, the two thin dancers in their grey-blue, almost
translucent, chemises of mourning and their black gloves. A moment later, afte
r their first linked pass across the floor, he looked at Devin.
And Devin gave him, gave them all, the lament for Adaon's autumnal dying among
the mountain cypresses, as he never had before.
Alessan di Tregea was with him all the way with the high, heart-piercing grief
of the shepherd pipes and together the two of them seemed to lift and carry N
ieri and Aldine beyond the surface steps of their dance across the recently sw
ept floor and into the laconic, precise articulation of ritual that the "Lamen
t" demanded and was so rarely granted.
When they finished, Devin, traveling slowly back to the Sandreni Palace from t
he cedar and cypress slopes of Tregea where the god had died—and where he die
d again each and every autumn—saw that Sandre d'Astibar's son was weeping. Th
e tracks of his tears had smudged the carefully achieved shadowing around his
eyes—which meant, Devin realized abruptly, that he hadn't wept for any of the
three companies before them.
Marra, young and intolerantly professional would have been scornful of those t
ears, he knew: "Why hire a mongrel and bark yourself?" she would say when thei
r mourning rituals were interrupted or marked by displays from their patrons.

Devin had been less stern back then. And was even less so now since she'd died
and he had found himself rather desperately fighting back a shameful public g
rief when Burnet di Corte had led his company through her mourning rites in Ce
rtando as a gesture of courtesy to Menico.
Devin also knew, by the smoldering look the Sandreni scion gave him from withi
n the smeared dark rings around his eyes, and the scarcely less transparent gl
ance from Morian's fat-fingered priest— why in the name of the Triad were the
Triad so ill-served!—that though they might have just won the Sandreni contr
act he was going to have to be careful in this palace tomorrow. He made a ment
al note to bring his knife.
They had won the contract. The second number hardly mattered, which is why cun
ning Menico had begun with the "Lament." Afterwards Menico carefully introduce
d Devin as his partner when San-dre's son asked to meet him. He turned out to
be the middle son of three, named Tomasso. The only one, he explained huskily,
holding one of Devin's hands tightly between both his own, with an ear for mu
sic and an eye for dance adequate to choosing performers equal to so august an
occasion as his father's funeral rites.
Devin, used to this, politely retrieved his fingers, grateful for Menico's exp
erienced tact: presented as a partner he had some slight immunity from overly
aggressive wooers, even among the nobility. He was introduced to the clergy ne
xt, and promptly knelt before Adaon's priestess in red.
"Your sanction, sister-of-the-god, for what I sang, and for what I am asked to
do tomorrow."
Out of the corner of his eye he saw the priest of Morian clench his chubby, ri
nged fingers at his sides. He accepted the blessing and protection of Adaon—t
he priestess's index finger tracing the god's symbol on his brow—in the knowl
edge that he had successfully defused one priest's burgeoning desire. When he
rose and turned, it was to catch a wink—dangerous in that room and among that
company—from Alessan di Tregea, at the back with the others. He suppressed a
grin, but not his surprise: the shepherd was disconcertingly perceptive.
Menico's first price was immediately accepted by Tomasso d'As-tibar bar Sandre
, confirming in Devin's mind what a sorry creature he was to bear such a magni
ficent name and lineage.
It would have interested him—and led him a step or two further down the head
road towards maturity—to learn that Duke Sandre himself would have accepted t
he same price, or twice as much, and in exactly the same manner. Devin was not
quite twenty though, and even Menico, three times his age, would loudly curse
himself back at the inn amid the celebratory wine for not having quoted even
more than the extortionate sum he had just received in full.
Only Eghano, aged and placid, softly drumming two wooden spoons on their trest
le table, said, "Leave well enough. We need not hold out a greedy palm. There
will be more of these from now on. If you are wise you'll leave a tithe at eac
h of the temples tomorrow. We will earn it back with interest when they choose
musicians for the Ember Days."
Menico, in high good humor, swore even more magnificently than before, and ann
ounced a set intention to offer Eghano's wrinkled body as a tithe to the flesh
y priest of Morian instead. Eghano smiled toothlessly and continued his soft d
rumming.
Menico ordered them all to bed not long after the evening meal. They'd have an
early start tomorrow, pointing towards the most important performance of thei
r lives. He beamed benevolently as Aldine led Nieri from the room. The girls w
ould share a bed that night Devin was sure, and for the first time, he suspect
ed. He wished them joy of each other, knowing that they had come together magi
cally as dancers that afternoon and also knowing—for it had happened to him o
nce— how that could spill over into the candles of a late night in bed.
He looked around for Catriana but she had gone upstairs already. She'd kissed
him briefly on the cheek though, right after Menico's fierce embrace back in t
he Sandreni Palace. It was a start; it might be a start.
He bade good night to the others and went up to the single room that was the o
ne luxury he'd demanded of Menico's tour budget after Marra had died.
He expected to dream of her, because of the mourning rites, because of unslake
d desire, because he dreamt of her most nights. Instead he had a vision of the
god.
He saw Adaon on the mountainside in Tregea, naked and magnificent. He saw him
torn apart in frenzy and in flowing blood by his priestesses—suborned by thei
r womanhood for this one autumn morning of every turning year to the deeper se
rvice of their sex. Shredding the flesh of the dying god in the service of the
two goddesses who loved him and who shared him as mother, daughter, sister, b
ride, all through the year and through all the years since Eanna named the sta
rs.
Shared him and loved him except on this one morning in the falling season. Thi
s morning that was shaped to become the harbinger, the promise of spring to co
me, of winter's end. This one single morning on the mountain when the god who
was a man had to be slain. Torn and slain, to be put into his place which was
the earth. To become the soil, which would be nurtured in turn by the rain of
Ean-na's tears and the moist sorrowings of Morian's endless underground stream
s twisting in their need. Slain to be reborn and so loved anew, more and more
with each passing year, with each and every time of dying on these cypress-cla
d heights. Slain to be lamented and then to rise as a god rises, as a man does
, as the wheat of summer fields. To rise and then lie down with the goddesses,
with his mother and his bride, his sister and his daughter, with Eanna and Mo
rian under sun and stars and the circling moons, the blue one and the silver.

Devin dreamt, terribly, that primal scene of women running on the mountainside
, their long hair streaming behind them as they pursued the man-god to that hi
gh chasm above the torrent of Casadel.
He saw their clothing torn from them as they cried each other on to the hunt.
Saw branches of mountain trees, of spiny, bristling shrubs, claw their garment
s away, saw them render themselves deliberately naked for greater speed to the
chase, seizing blood-red berries of sonrai to intoxicate themselves against w
hat they would do high above the icy waters of Casadel.
He saw the god turn at last, his huge dark eyes wild and knowing, both, as he
stood at the chasm brink, a stag at bay at the deemed, decreed, perennial plac
e of his ending. And Devin saw the women come upon him there, with their flyin
g hair and blood flowing along their bodies and he saw Adaon bow his proud, gl
orious head to the doom of their rending hands and their teeth and their nails
.
And there at the end of the chase Devin saw that the women's mouths were open
wide as they cried to each other in ecstasy or anguish, in unrestrained desire
or madness or bitter grief, but in his dream there was no sound at all to tho
se cries. Instead, piercing through the whole of that wild scene among cedar a
nd cypress on the mountainside, the only thing Devin heard was the sound of Tr
egean shepherd pipes playing the tune of his own childhood fever, high and far
away.
And at the end, at the very last, Devin saw that when the women came upon the
god and caught him and closed about him at that high chasm over Casadel, his f
ace when he turned to his rending was that of Alessan.

Chapter 3

EVEN BEFORE THE COMING OF CAUTIOUS ALBERICO FROM OVERseas in Barbadior to rule
in Astibar, the city that liked to call itself "The Thumb that Rules the Palm
" had been known for a certain degree of asceticism. In Astibar the mourning r
ites were never done in the presence of the dead as was the practice in the ot
her eight provinces: such a procedure was regarded as excessive, too fevered a
n appeal to emotion.
They were to perform in the central courtyard of the Sandreni Palace, watched
from chairs and benches placed around the courtyard, and from the loggias abov
e, leading off the interior rooms on the two upper floors. In one of those roo
ms, marked by the appropriate hangings—grey-blue and black—lay the body of S
andre d'Astibar, coins over his eyes to pay the nameless doorman at the last p
ortal of Morian, food in his hands and shoes on his feet, for no one living co
uld know how long that final journey to the goddess was.
He would be brought down to the courtyard later, so that all those citizens of
his city and its distrada who wished to do so—and who were willing to brave
the recording eyes of the Barbadian mercenaries posted outside—could file pas
t his bier and drop blue-silver leaves of the olive tree in the single crystal
vase that stood on a plinth in the courtyard even now.
The ordinary citizens—weavers, artisans, shopkeepers, farmers, sailors, serva
nts, lesser merchants—would enter the palace later. They could be heard outsi
de now: gathered to hear the music of the old Duke's mourning rites. The peopl
e drifting into the courtyard in the meantime were the most extraordinary coll
ection of petty and high nobility, and of accumulated mercantile wealth that D
evin had ever seen in one place.
Because of the Festival of Vines, all the lords of the Astibar distrada had co
me into town from their country estates. And being in town they could hardly n
ot be present to see Sandre mourned—for all that many or most of them had bit
terly hated him while he ruled, and the fathers or grandfathers of some had pa
id for poison or hired blades thirty years ago and more in the hope that these
same rites might have taken place long since.
The two priests and Adaon's priestess were already in their scats, seeming, in
the manner of clergy everywhere, to be privy to a mystery that they collectiv
ely shielded from lesser mortals with the gravity of their repose.
Menico's company waited in a small room off the courtyard that Tomasso had ord
ered set aside for their use. All the usual amenities were there, and some tha
t were far from usual: Devin couldn't remember seeing blue wine offered to per
formers before. An extravagant gesture, that. He wasn't tempted though; it was
too early and he was too much on edge. To calm himself he walked over to Egha
no who was lazily drumming, as he always seemed to be, on a tabletop.
Eghano glanced up at him and smiled. "It's just a performance," he said in his
soft sibilant voice. "We do what we always do. We make music. We move on."
Devin nodded, and forced a smile in return. His throat was dry though. He went
to the side-tables, and one of the two hovering servants hastened to pour him
water in a gold and crystal goblet worth more than everything Devin owned in
the world. A moment later Menico signaled and they went out into the courtyard
.
The dancers began it, backed by hidden strings and pipes. No voices. Not yet.

If Aldine and Nieri had burned love candles late last night it didn't show—or
if it did, only in the concentration and intensity of their twinned movements
that morning.
Sometimes seeming to pull the music forward, sometimes following it, they look
ed—with their thin, whitened faces, their blue-grey tunics and the jet-black
gloves that hid their palms—truly otherworldly. Which was as Menico had train
ed his dancers to be. Not inviting or alluring as some other troupes approache
d this dance of the rites, nor a merely graceful prelude to the real performan
ce, as certain other companies conceived it. Menico's dancers were guides, col
d and compelling, towards the place of the dead and of mourning for the dead.
Gradually, inexorably, the slow grave movements, the expressionless, almost in
human faces imposed the silence that was proper on that restive, preening audi
ence.
And in that silence the three singers and four musicians came forward and bega
n the "Invocation" to Eanna of the Lights who had made the world, the sun, the
two moons and the scattered stars that were the diamonds of her diadem.
Rapt and attentive to what they were doing, using all the contrivances of prof
essional skill to shape an apparent artlessness, the company of Menico di Ferr
aut carried the lords and ladies and the merchant princes of Astibar with them
on a ruthlessly disciplined cresting of sorrow. In mourning Sandre, Duke of A
stibar, they mourned—as was proper—the dying of all the Triad's mortal child
ren, brought through Morian's portals to move on Adaon's earth under Eanna's l
ights for so short a time. So sweet and bitter and short a season of days.
Devin heard Catriana's voice reaching upwards towards the high place where Ale
ssan's pipes seemed to be calling her, cold and precise and austere. He felt,
even more than he heard, Menico and Eghano grounding them all with their deep
line. He saw the two dancers— now statues in a frieze, now whirling as captiv
es in the trap of time— and at the moment that was proper he let his own voic
e soar with the two syrenyae into the space that had been left for them to fil
l, in the middle range where mortals lived and died.
So Menico di Ferraut had shaped his approach to the seldom-performed Full Mour
ning Rites long ago, bringing forty years of art and a full, much-traveled lif
e to the moment that this morning had become. Even as he began to sing, Devin'
s heart swelled with pride and a genuine love for the rotund, unassuming leade
r who had guided them here and into what they were shaping.
They stopped, as planned, after the sixth stage, for their own sake and their
listeners'. Tomasso had spoken with Menico beforehand, and the nobles' progres
sion past Sandre's bier would now take place upstairs. After, the company woul
d finish with the last three rites, ending on Devin's "Lament," and then the b
ody would be brought down and the crowd outside admitted with their leaves for
the crystal vase.
Menico led them out from the courtyard amid a silence so deep it was their hig
hest possible accolade. They reentered the room that had been reserved for the
ir use. Caught up in the mood they themselves had created, no one spoke. Devin
moved to help the two dancers into the robes they wore between performances a
nd then watched as they paced the perimeter of the room, slender and cat-like
in their grace. He accepted a glass of green wine from one of the servants but
declined the offered plate of food. He exchanged a glance but not a smile —n
ot now—with Alessan. Drenio and Pieve, the syrenya-players, were bent over th
eir instruments, adjusting the strings. Eghano, pragmatic as ever, was eating
while idly drumming the table with his free hand. Menico walked by, restless a
nd distracted. He gave Devin a wordless squeeze on the arm.
Devin looked for Catriana and saw her just then leaving the room through an in
ner archway. She glanced back. Their glances met for a second, then she went o
n. Light, strangely filtered, fell from a high unseen window upon the space wh
ere she had been.
Devin really didn't know why he did it. Even afterwards when so much had come
to pass, flowing outwards in all directions like ripples in water from this mo
ment, he was never able to say exactly why he followed her.
Simple curiosity. Desire. A complex longing born of the look in her eyes befor
e and the strange, floating place of stillness and sorrow where they now seeme
d to be. None or some or all of these. He felt as if the world wasn't quite as
it had been before the dancers had begun.
He drained his wine and rose and he went through the same archway Catriana had
. Passing through, he too looked back. Alessan was watching him. There was no
judgment in the Tregean's glance, only an intent expression Devin could not un
derstand. For the first time that day he was reminded of his dream.
And because of that, perhaps, he murmured a prayer to Morian as he went on thr
ough the archway.
There was a staircase with a high, narrow, stained-glass window on the first-f
loor landing. In the many-colored fall of light he caught a glimpse of a blue-
silver gown swirling to the left at the top of the stairs. He shook his head,
struggling to clear it, to slip free of this eerie, dreamlike mood. And as he
did, an understanding slid into place and he muttered a curse at himself.
She was from Astibar. She was going upstairs as was entirely fit and proper to
pay her own farewell to the Duke. No lord or newly wealthy merchant was about
to deny her right to do so. Not after her singing this morning. On the other
hand, for a farmer's son from Asoli by way of Lower Corte to enter that upstai
rs room would be sheerest, ill-bred presumption.
He hesitated, and he would have turned back then, had it not been for the memo
ry that was his blessing and his curse and always had been. He had seen the ha
nging banners from the courtyard. The room where Sandre d'Astibar lay was to t
he right, not the left, at the top of these stairs.
Devin went up. He took care now, though still not knowing why, to be quiet. At
the landing he bore left as Catriana had done. There was a doorway. He opened
it. An empty room, long unused, dusty hangings on the walls. Scenes of a hunt
, the colors badly faded. There were two exits, but the dust came to his aid n
ow: he could see the neat print of her sandals going towards the door on the r
ight.
Silently Devin followed that trail through the warren of abandoned rooms on th
e first floor of the palace. He saw sculptures and objects of glass, exquisite
in their delicacy, marred by years of overlaid dust. Much of the furniture wa
s gone, much that remained was covered over. The light was dim; most of the wi
ndows were shuttered. A great many darkened, begrimed portraits of stern lords
and ladies gazed inimically down upon him as he passed.
He bore right and again right, tracing the path of Catriana's feet, careful to
keep from getting too close. She went straight on after that through the room
s along the outer side of the palace—none that offered onto the crowded balus
trades overlooking the courtyard. It was brighter in these rooms. He could hea
r murmuring voices off to his right and he realized that Catriana was walking
around to the far side of the room where Sandre lay in state.
At length he opened a door which proved to be the last. She was alone inside a
very large chamber, standing by the side of a huge fireplace. There were thre
e bronze horses on the mantelpiece and three portraits on the walls. The ceili
ng was gilded in what Devin knew would be gold. Along the outer wall where a l
ine of windows overlooked the street there were two long tables laden with foo
d and drink. This room, unlike the others, had been recently cleaned, but the
curtains were still drawn against the morning brightness and the crowd outside
.
In the thin, filtered light Devin closed the door behind him, deliberately let
ting the latch click shut. The sound was a loud report in the stillness.
Catriana wheeled, a hand to her mouth, but even in the half-light Devin could
see that what blazed in her eyes was fury and not fear.
"What do you think you are doing?" she whispered harshly.
He took a hesitant step forward. He reached for a witticism, a mild, deflectin
g remark to shatter the heavy spell that seemed to lie upon him, upon the whol
e of the morning. He couldn't find one.
He shook his head. "I don't know," he said honestly. "I saw you leave and I fo
llowed. It ... isn't what you think," he finished lamely.
"How would you know what I think?" she snapped. She seemed to calm herself by
an act of will. "I wanted to be alone for a few moments," Catriana said, contr
olling her voice. "The performance affected me and I needed to be by myself. I
can see that you were disturbed too, but can I ask you as a courtesy to leave
me to my privacy for just a little while?"
It was courteously said. He could have gone then. On any other morning he woul
d have gone. But Devin had already passed, half-knowingly, a portal of Morian'
s.
He gestured at the food on the tables and said, gravely, a quiet observation o
f fact and not a challenge or accusation, "This is not a room for privacy, Cat
riana. Won't you tell me why you are here?"
He braced for her rage to flare again, but once more she surprised him. Silent
for a long moment, she said at length, "You have not shared enough with me to
be owed an answer to that. Truly it will be better if you go. For both of us.
"
He could still hear muffled voices on the other side of the wall to the right
of the fireplace and the bronze horses. This strange room with its laden, sump
tuously covered tables and the grim portraits on the dark walls seemed to be a
chamber in some waking trance. He remembered Catriana singing that morning, h
er voice yearning upwards to where the pipes of Tregea called. He remembered h
er eyes as she paused in the doorway they'd both passed through. Truly he felt
as if he were not entirely awake, not in the world he knew.
And in that mood Devin heard himself say, over a sudden constriction in his th
roat, "Could we not begin then? Is there not a sharing we could start?"
Once more she hesitated. Her eyes were wide but impossible to read in the unce
rtain light. She shook her head though and remained where she was, standing st
raight and very still on the far side of the room.
"I think not," she said quietly. "Not on the road I'm on, Devin d'Asoli. But I
thank you for asking, and I will not deny that a part of me might wish things
otherwise. I have little time now though, and a thing I must do here. Please—
will you leave me?"
He had scarcely expected to find or feel so much regret, over and above all th
e nuances the morning had already carried. He nodded his head—there was nothi
ng else he could think of to do or say, and this time he did turn to go.
But a portal had indeed been crossed in the Sandreni Palace that morning and i
n exactly the moment that Devin turned they both heard voices again—but this
time from behind him.
"Oh, Triad!" Catriana hissed, snapping the mood like a fishbone. "I am cursed
in all I turn my hands to!" She spun back to the fireplace, her hands frantica
lly feeling around the underside of the mantelpiece. "For the love of the godd
esses be silent!" she whispered harshly.
The urgency in her voice made Devin freeze and obey.
"He said he knew who built this palace," he heard her mutter under her breath.
"That it should be right over—"
She stopped. Devin heard a latch click. A section of the wall to the right of
the fire swung slightly open to reveal a tiny cubbyhole beyond. His eyes widen
ed.
"Don't stand there gawking, fool!" Catriana whispered fiercely. "Quickly!" A n
ew voice had joined the others behind him; there were three now. Devin leaped
for the concealed door, slipped inside beside Catriana, and together they pull
ed it shut.
A moment later they heard the door on the far side of the room click open.
"Oh, Morian," Catriana groaned, from the heart. "Oh, Devin, why are you here?"

Addressed thusly, Devin found himself quite incapable of framing an adequate r
esponse. For one thing, he still couldn't say why he'd followed her; for anoth
er, the closet where they were hiding was only marginally large enough for the
two of them, and he became increasingly aware of the fact that Catriana's per
fume was filling the tiny space with a heady, unsettling scent.
If he had been half in a dream a moment ago he abruptly found himself wide awa
ke and in dangerous proximity to a woman he had seriously desired for the past
two weeks.
Catriana seemed to arrive, belatedly, at the same sort of awareness; he heard
her make a small sound in a register somewhat different from before. Devin clo
sed his eyes, even though it was pitch-black in the hidden closet. He could fe
el her breath tickling his forehead, and he was conscious of the fact that by
moving his hands only a very little he could encircle her waist.
He held himself carefully motionless, tilting back from her as best he could,
his own breathing deliberately shallow. He felt more than sufficiently a fool
for having created this ridiculous situation—he wasn't about to compound his
rapidly growing catalogue of sins by making a grope for her in the darkness.
Catriana's robe rustled gently as she shifted position. Her thigh brushed his.
Devin drew a ragged breath, which caused him to inhale more of her scent than
was entirely good for him, given his virtuous resolutions.
"Sorry," he whispered, though she was the one who'd moved. He felt beads of pe
rspiration on his brow. To distract himself he tried to focus on the sounds fr
om outside. Behind him the shuffling of feet and a steady, diffused murmur mad
e it clear that people were still filing past Sandre's bier.
To his left, in the room they'd just fled, three voices could be distinguished
. One was, curiously, almost recognizable.
"I had the servants posted with the body across the way—it gives us a moment
before the others come."
"Did you notice the coins on his eyes?" a much younger voice asked, crossing t
o the outer wall where the laden tables were. "Very amusing."
"Of course I noticed," the first man replied acerbically. Where had Devin hear
d that tone? And recently. "Who do you think spent an evening scrounging up tw
o astins from twenty years ago? Who do you think arranged for all of this?"
The third voice was heard, laughing softly. "And a fine table of food it is,"
he said lightly.
"That is not what I meant!"
Laughter. "I know it isn't, but it's a fine table all the same."
"Taeri, this is not a time for jests, particularly bad ones. We only have a mo
ment before the family arrives. Listen to me carefully. Only the three of us k
now what is happening."
"It is only us, then?" the young voice queried. "No one else? Not even my fath
er?"
"Not Gianno, and you know why. I said only us. Hold questions and listen, pup!
"
Just then Devin d'Asoli felt his pulse accelerate in a quite unmistakable way.
Partly because of what he was hearing, but rather more specifically because C
atriana had just shifted her weight again, with a quiet sigh, and Devin became
incredulously aware that her body was now pressed directly against his own an
d that one of her long arms had somehow slipped around his neck.
"Do you know," she whispered, almost soundlessly, mouth close to his ear, "I r
ather like the thought of this all of a sudden. Could you be very quiet?" The
very tip of her tongue, for just an instant, touched the lobe of his ear.
Devin's mouth went bone dry even as his sex leaped to full, painful erection w
ithin his blue-silver hose. Outside he could hear that voice he almost knew be
ginning a terse explanation of something involving pall-bearers and a hunting
lodge, but the voice and its explanations had abruptly been rendered definitiv
ely trivial.
What was not trivial, what was in fact of the vastest importance imaginable wa
s the undeniable fact that Catriana's lips were busy at his neck and ear, and
that even as his hands moved—as of their own imperative accord—to touch her
eyelids and throat and then drift downward to the dreamt-of swell of her breas
ts, her own fingers were nimble among the drawstrings at his waist, setting hi
m free.
'Oh, Triad!" he heard himself moan as her cool fingers stroked him, "Why didn'
t you tell me before that you liked it dangerous?" He twisted his head sharply
and their lips met fiercely for the first time. He began gathering the folds
of her gown up about her hips.
She settled back on a ledge against the wall behind her to make it easier for
him, her own breath now rapid and shallow as well.
"There will be six of us," Devin heard from the room outside. "By second moonr
ise I want you to be..."
Catriana's hands suddenly tightened in his hair, almost painfully, and at that
moment the last folds of her robe rode free of her hips and Devin's fingers s
lipped in among her undergarments and found the portal he'd been longing for.

She made a small unexpected sound and went rigid for just a second, before bec
oming extremely soft in his arms. His fingers gently stroked the deepest folds
of her flesh. She drew an awkward, reaching breath, then shifted again, very
slightly and guided Devin into her. She gasped, her teeth sinking hard into hi
s shoulder. For a moment, lost in astonished pleasure and sharp pain, Devin wa
s motionless, holding her close to him, murmuring almost soundlessly, not know
ing what he was saying.
"Enough! The others are here," the third voice outside rasped crisply.
"Even so," said the first. "Remember then, you two come your own ways from tow
n—not together!—to join us tonight. Whatever you do be sure you are not foll
owed or we are dead."
There was a brief silence. Then the door on the farthest side of the room open
ed and Devin, beginning now to thrust slowly, silently into Catriana, finally
recognized the voice he'd been hearing.
For the same speaker continued talking, but now he assumed the delicate, remem
bered, intonations of the day before.
"At last!" fluted Tomasso d'Astibar bar Sandre. "We feared dreadfully that you
'd all contrived to lose yourselves in these dusty recesses, never to be found
again!"
"No such luck, brother," a voice growled in reply. "Though after eighteen year
s it wouldn't have been surprising. I need two glasses of wine very badly. Sit
ting still for that kind of music all morning is cursed thirsty work."
In the closet Devin and Catriana clung to each other, sharing a breathless lau
ghter. Then a newer urgency came over Devin, and it seemed to him it was in he
r as well, and there was suddenly nothing in the peninsula that mattered half
so much as the gradually accelerating rhythm of the movements they made togeth
er.
Devin felt her fingernails splay outwards on his back. Feeling his climax gath
ering he cupped his hands beneath her; she lifted her legs and wrapped them ar
ound him. A moment later her teeth sank into his shoulder a second time and in
that moment he felt himself explode, silently, into her.
For an unmeasured, enervated space of time they remained like that, their clot
hing damp where it had been crushed against skin. To Devin the voices from the
two rooms outside seemed to come from infinitely far away. From other worlds
entirely. He really didn't want to move at all.
At length however, Catriana carefully lowered her legs to the ground to bear h
er own weight. He traced her cheekbones with a finger in the blackness.
Behind him the lords and merchants of Astibar were still shuffling past the bo
dy of the Duke so many had hated and some few had loved. To Devin's left the y
ounger generation of the Sandreni ate and drank, toasting an end to exile. Dev
in, wrapped close with Catriana, still sheathed within her warmth, could not h
ave hoped to find words to say what he was feeling.
Suddenly she seized one of his tracing fingers and bit it, hard. He winced, be
cause it hurt. She didn't say anything though.
After the Sandreni left, Catriana found the latch and they slipped out into th
e room again. Quickly they reorganized their clothes. Pausing only long enough
to seize a chicken-wing apiece, they hastily retraced their path back through
the rooms leading to the stairway. They met three liveried servants coming th
e other way and Devin, feeling exceptionally alert and alive now, claimed Catr
iana's fingers and winked at the servants as they passed.
She withdrew her hand a moment later.
He glanced over. "What's wrong?"
She shrugged. "I'd as soon it wasn't proclaimed throughout the Sandreni Palace
and beyond," she murmured, looking straight ahead.
Devin lifted his eyebrows. "What would you rather they thought about us being
upstairs? I just gave them the obvious, boring explanation. They won't even bo
ther to talk about it. This sort of thing happens all the time."
"Not to me," said Catriana quietly.
"I didn't mean it that way!" Devin protested, taken aback. But unfortunately t
hey were going down the stairs by then, and so it was with a quite unexpected
sense of estrangement that he paused to let her re-enter the room before him.

More than a little confused, he took his place behind Menico as they prepared
to go back out into the courtyard.
He had only a minor supporting role in the first two hymns and so he found his
thoughts wandering back over the scene just played out upstairs. Back, and th
en back again, with the memory that seemed to be his birthright focusing like
a beam of sunlight upon one detail then another, illuminating and revealing wh
at he had missed the first time around.
And so it was that by the time it was his own turn to step forward to end and
crown the mourning rites, seeing the three clergy leaning forward expectantly,
noting how Tomasso struck a pose of rapt atten-tiveness, Devin was able to gi
ve the "Lament for Adaon" an undivided soul, for he was confused no longer, bu
t quite decided in what he was going to do.
He began softly in the middle range with the two syrenyae, building and shapin
g the ancient story of the god. Then, when the pipes of Alessan came in, Devin
let his voice leap upward in response to them, as though in flight from mount
ain glen to crag to chasm brink.
He sang the dying of the god with a voice made pure in the caldron of his own
heart and he pitched the notes to rise above that courtyard and beyond it, out
among the streets and squares of high-walled Astibar.
High walls he intended to pass beyond that night—beyond, and then following a
trail he would find, into a wood where lay a hunting lodge. A lodge where pal
l-bearers were to carry the body of the Duke, and where a number of men—six,
the clear voice of his memory reminded him—were to gather in a meeting that C
atriana d'Astibar had just done the very best she could short of murder to pre
vent him learning about. He strove to turn the acrid taste of that knowledge i
nto grief for Adaon, to let it guide and infuse the pain of the "Lament."
Better for both of us, he remembered her saying, and he could recapture in his
mind the regret and the unexpected softness in her voice. But a certain kind
of pride at Devin's age is perhaps stronger than at any other age of mortal ma
n, and he had already decided, before even he began to sing, here in this crow
ded courtyard among the great of Astibar, that he was going to be the judge of
what was better, not she.
So Devin sang the rending of the god at the hands of the women, and he gave th
at dying on the Tregean mountain slope all he had to give it, making his voice
an arrow arching outwards to seek the heart of everyone who heard.
He let Adaon fall from the high cliff, he heard the sound of the pipes recede
and fall and he let his grieving voice spiral downward with the god into Casad
el as the song came to its end.
And so too, that morning, did a part of Devin's life. For when a portal of Mor
ian's has been crossed there is, as everyone knows, never a turning back.

Chapter 4
ESCORTING HIS FATHER'S BIER OUT THE EASTERN GATE IN THE hour before sunset, To
masso bar Sandre settled his horse to an easy walk and allowed his mind to dri
ft for the first time in forty-eight intensely stressful hours.
The road was quiet. Normally it would have been clogged at this hour with peop
le returning to the distrada before curfew locked the city gates. Normally sun
down cleared the streets of Astibar of all save the patrolling Barbadian merce
naries and those reckless enough to defy them in search of women or wine or ot
her diversions of the dark.
This was not a normal time, however. Tonight and for the next two nights there
would be no curfew in Astibar. With the grapes gathered and the distrada's ha
rvest a triumphant one, the Festival of Vines would see singing and dancing an
d things wilder than those in the streets for all three nights. For these thre
e nights in the year Astibar tried to pretend it was sensuous, decadent Senzio
. No Duke in the old days—and not even dour Alberico now—had been foolish en
ough to rouse the people unnecessarily by denying them this ancient release fr
om the sober round of the year.
Tomasso glanced back at his city. The setting sun was red among thin clouds be
hind the temple-domes and the towers, bathing Astibar in an eerily beautiful g
low. A breeze had come up and there was a bite to it. Tomasso thought about pu
tting on his gloves and decided against it: he would have had to remove some o
f his rings and he quite liked the look of his gems in this elusive, transitor
y light. Autumn was very definitely upon them, with the Ember Days approaching
fast. It would not be long, a matter of days, before the first frost touched
those last few precious grapes that had been left on chosen vines to become—i
f all fell rightly—the icy clear blue wine that was the pride of Astibar.
Behind him the eight servants plodded stolidly along the road, bearing the bie
r and the simple coffin—bare wood save for the Ducal crest above—of Tomasso'
s father. On either side of them the two vigil-keepers rode in grim silence. W
hich was not surprising, given the nature of their errand and the complex, man
y-generationed hatreds that twisted between those two men.
Those three men, Tomasso corrected himself. It was three, if one chose to coun
t the dead man who had so carefully planned all of this, down to the detail of
who should ride on which side of his bier, who before and who behind. Not to
mention the rather more surprising detail of exactly which two lords of the pr
ovince of Astibar should be asked to be his escorts to the hunting lodge for t
he night-long vigil and from there to the Sandreni Crypt at dawn. Or, to put t
he matter rather more to the point, the real point: which two lords could and
should be entrusted with what they were to learn during the vigil in the fores
t that night.
At that thought Tomasso felt a nudge of apprehension within his rib cage. He q
uelled it, as he had taught himself to do over the years— unbelievable how ma
ny years—of discussing such matters with his father.
But now Sandre was dead and he was acting alone, and the night they had labore
d towards was almost upon them with this crimson waning of light. Tomasso, two
years past his fortieth naming day knew that were he not careful he could eas
ily feel like a child again.
The twelve-year-old child he had been, for example, when Sandre, Duke of Astib
ar, had found him naked in the straw of the stables with the sixteen-year-old
son of the chief groom.
His lover had been executed of course, though discreetly, to keep the matter q
uiet. Tomasso had been whipped by his father for three days running, the lash
meticulously rediscovering the closing wounds each morning. His mother had bee
n forbidden to come to him. No one had come to him.
One of his father's very few mistakes, Tomasso reflected, thinking back thirty
years in autumn twilight. From those three days he knew he could date his own
particular taste for the whip in love-making. It was one of what he liked to
call his felicities.
Though Sandre had never punished him that way again. Nor in any other direct m
anner. When it became clear—past the point of nursing any hope of discretion
that Tomasso's preferences were, to put it mildly, not going to be changed or
subdued, the Duke simply ceased to acknowledge the existence of his middle son
.
For more than ten years they went on that way, Sandre patiently trying to trai
n Gianno to succeed him, and spending scarcely less time with young Taeri—mak
ing it clear to everyone that his youngest son was next in line to his eldest.
For over a decade Tomasso simply did not exist within the walls of the Sandre
ni Palace.
Though he most certainly did elsewhere in Astibar and in a number of the other
provinces as well. For reasons that were achingly clear to him now, Tomasso h
ad set out through the course of those years to eclipse the memories of all th
e dissolute nobility that Astibar still told shocked tales about, even though
some of them had been dead four hundred years.
He supposed that he had, to a certain degree, succeeded.
Certainly the "raid" on the temple of Morian that Ember Night in spring so lon
g ago was likely to linger a while yet as the nadir or the paradigm (all came
down—or up—to perspective, as he'd been fond of saying then) of sacrilegious
debauchery.
The raid hadn't had any impact on his relationship with the Duke. There was no
relationship to impact upon ever since that morning in the straw when Sandre
had returned from his ride a destined hour too soon. He and his father simply
contrived not to speak to or even acknowledge each other, whether at family di
nners or formal state functions. If Tomasso learned something he thought Sandr
e should know—which was often enough, given the circles in which he moved and
the chronic danger of their times—he told his mother at one of their weekly
breakfasts together and she made sure his father heard. Tomasso also knew she
made equally sure Sandre was aware of the source of the tidings. Not that it m
attered, really.
She had died, drinking poisoned wine meant for her husband, in the final year
of the Duke's reign, still working, to the last morning of her life, towards a
reconciliation between Sandre and their middle child.
Greater romantics than were either the father or the son might have allowed th
emselves to think that, as the Sandreni family pulled tightly together in the
bloody, retaliatory aftermath of that poisoning, she had achieved her wistful
hope by dying.
Both men knew it was not so.
In fact, it was only the coming of Alberico from the Empire of Barbadior, with
his will-sapping sorcery and the brutal efficiency of his conquering mercenar
ies, that brought Tomasso and Sandre to a certain very late-night talk during
the Duke's second year of exile. It was Alberico's invasion and one further th
ing: the monumental, irredeemable, inescapable stupidity of Gianno d'Astibar b
ar Sandre, titular heir to the shattered fortunes of their family.
And to these two things there had slowly been added a third bitter truth for t
he proud, exiled Duke. It had gradually become more and more obvious, past all
denial, that whatever of his own character and gifts had been manifested in t
he next generation, whatever of his subtlety and perception, his ability to cl
oak his thoughts and discern the minds of others, whatever of such skills he h
ad passed on to his sons, had gone, all of it, to the middle child. To Tomasso
.
Who liked boys, and would leave no heir himself, nor ever a name to be spoken,
let alone with pride, in Astibar or anywhere else in the Palm.
In the deepest inward place where he performed the complex act of dealing with
his feelings for his father, Tomasso had always acknowledged—even back then,
and very certainly now on this last evening road Sandre would travel—that on
e of the truest measures of the Duke's stature as a ruler of men had emerged o
n that winter night so long ago. The night he broke a decade's stony silence a
nd spoke to his middle son and made him his confidant.
His sole confidant in the painfully cautious eighteen-year quest to drive Albe
rico and his sorcery and his mercenaries from Astibar and the Eastern Palm. A
quest that had become an obsession for both of them, even as Tomasso's public
manner became more and more eccentric and decayed, his voice and gait a parody
—a self-parody, in fact— of the mincing, lisping lover of boys.
It was planned, all of it, in late-night talks with his father on their estate
outside the city walls.
Sandre's parallel role had been to settle visibly and loudly into impotent, br
ooding, Triad-cursing exile, marked by querulous, blustering hunts and too muc
h drinking of his own wine.
Tomasso had never seen his father actually drunk, and he never used his own fl
uting voice when they were alone at night.
Eight years ago they had tried an assassination. A chef, traceable only to the
Canziano family, had been placed in a country inn in Ferraut near the provinc
ial border with Astibar. For over half a year idle gossip in Astibar had toute
d that inn as a place of growing distinction. No one remembered, afterwards, w
here the talk had begun: Tomasso knew very well how useful it was to plant cas
ual rumors of this sort among his friends in the temples. The priests of Moria
n, in particular, were legendary for their appetites. All their appetites.
A full year from the time they had set things in motion, Alberico of Barbadior
had halted on his way back from the Triad Games— exactly as Sandre had said
he would—to take his midday meal at a well-reputed inn in Ferraut near the As
tibar border.
By the time the sun went down at the end of that bright late-summer day every
person in that inn—servants, masters, stable-boys, chefs, children and patron
s—had had their backs, legs, arms and wrists broken and their hands cut off,
before being bound, living, upon hastily erected Barbadian sky-wheels to die.

The inn was razed to the ground. Taxes in the province of Ferraut were doubled
for the next two years, and for a year in Astibar, Tregea and Certando. Durin
g the course of the following six months every living member of the Canziano f
amily was found, seized, publicly tortured and burned in the Grand Square of A
stibar with their severed hands stuffed in their mouths so that the screaming
might not trouble Alberico or his advisers in their offices of state above the
square.
In this fashion had Sandre and Tomasso discovered that sorcerers cannot, in fa
ct, be poisoned.
For the next six years they had done nothing but talk at night in the manor-ho
use among the vineyards and gather what knowledge they could of Alberico himse
lf and events to the east in Barbadior, where the Emperor was said to be growi
ng older and more infirm with each passing year.
Tomasso began commissioning and collecting walking sticks with heads carved in
the shape of the male organs of sex. It was rumored that he'd had some of his
young friends model for the carvers. Sandre hunted. Gianno, the heir, consoli
dated a burgeoning reputation as a genial, uncomplicated seducer of women and
breeder of children, legitimate and illegitimate. The younger Sandreni were al
lowed to maintain modest homes in the city as part of Alberico's overall polic
y to be as discreet a ruler as possible—except when danger or civil unrest th
reatened him.
At which time children might die on sky-wheels. The Sandreni Palace in Astibar
remained very prominently shuttered, empty and dusty. A useful, potent symbol
of the fall of those who might resist the Tyrant. The superstitious claimed t
o see ghostly lights flickering there at night, especially on a blue-moon nigh
t, or on the spring or autumn Ember Nights when the dead were known to walk ab
road.
Then one evening in the country Sandre had told Tomasso, without warning or pr
eamble, that he proposed to die on the eve of the Festival of Vines two autumn
s hence. He proceeded to name the two lords who were to be his vigil-keepers,
and why. That same night he and Tomasso decided that it was time to tell Taeri
, the youngest son, what was afoot. He was brave, not stupid, and might be nec
essary for certain things. They also agreed that Gianno had somehow sired one
likely son, albeit illegitimate, and that Herado—twenty-one by then and showi
ng encouraging signs of spirit and ambition—was their best hope of having the
younger generation share in the unrest Sandre hoped to create just after the
time of his dying.
It wasn't, in fact, a question of who in the family could be trusted: family w
as, after all, family. The issue was who would be useful and it was a mark of
how diminished the Sandreni had become that only two names came readily to min
d.
It had been an entirely dispassionate conversation, Tomasso remembered, leadin
g his father's bier southeast between the darkening trees that flanked the pat
h. Their conversations had always been like that; this one had been no differe
nt. Afterwards though, he had been unable to fall asleep, the date of the Fest
ival two years away branded into his brain. The date when his father, so preci
se in his planning, so judicious, had decided he would die so as to give Tomas
so a chance to try again, a different way.
The date that had come now and gone, carrying with it the soul of Sandre d'Ast
ibar to wherever the souls of such men went. Tomasso made a warding gesture to
avert evil at that thought. Behind him he heard the steward order the servant
s to light torches. It grew colder as the darkness fell. Overhead a thin band
of high clouds was tinted a somber shade of purple by the last upward-angled r
ays of light. The sun itself was gone, down behind the trees. Tomasso thought
of souls, his father's and his own. He shivered.
The white moon, Vidomni, rose, and then, not long after, came blue Ilarion to
chase her hopelessly across the sky. Both moons were nearly full. The processi
on could have done without torches in fact, so bright was the twinned moonligh
t, but torchlight suited the task and his mood, and so Tomasso let them burn a
s the company cut off the road onto the familiar winding path through the Sand
reni Woods, to come at length to the simple hunting lodge his father had loved
.
The servants laid the bier on the trestles waiting in the center of the large
front room. Candles were lit and the two fires built up at opposite ends of th
e room. Food, they had set up earlier that day. It was quickly uncovered on th
e long sideboard along with the wine. The windows were opened to air the cabin
and admit the breeze.
At a nod from Tomasso the steward led the servants away. They would go on to t
he manor further east and return at daybreak. At vigil's end.
And so they were left alone, finally. Tomasso and the lords Nievole and Scalva
ia, so carefully chosen two years before.
"Wine, my lords?" Tomasso asked. "We will have three others joining us very sh
ortly."
He said it, deliberately, in his natural voice, dropping the artificial, fluti
ng tone that was his trademark in Astibar. He was pleased to see both of them
note the fact immediately, their glances sharpening as they turned to him.
"Who else?" growled bearded Nievole who had hated Sandre all his life. He made
no comment on Tomasso's voice, nor hid Scalvaia. Such questions gave too much
away, and these were men long skilled in giving away very little indeed.
"My brother Taeri and nephew Herado—one of Gianno's by-blows, and much the cl
everest." He spoke casually, uncorking two bottles of Sandreni red reserve as
he spoke. He poured and handed them each a glass, waiting to see who would bre
ak the small silence his father had said would follow. Scalvaia would ask, San
dre had said.
"Who is the third?" Lord Scalvaia asked softly.
Inwardly Tomasso saluted his dead father. Then, twirling his own glass gently
by the stem to release the wine's bouquet, he said, "I don't know. My father d
id not name him. He named the two of you to come here, and the three of us and
said there would be a sixth at our council tonight."
That word too had been carefully chosen.
"Council?" elegant Scalvaia echoed. "It appears that I have been misinformed.
I was naively of the impression that this was a vigil." Nievole's dark eyes gl
owered above his beard. Both men stared at Tomasso.
"A little more than that," said Taeri as he entered the room, Herado behind hi
m.
Tomasso was pleased to see them both dressed with appropriate sobriety, and to
note that, for all the suavely flippant timing of Taeri's entrance, his expre
ssion was profoundly serious.
"You will know my brother," Tomasso murmured, moving to pour two more glasses
for the new arrivals. "You may not have met Herado, Gianno's son."
The boy bowed and kept silent, as was proper. Tomasso carried the drinks over
to his brother and nephew.
The stillness lasted a moment longer, then Scalvaia sank down into a chair, st
retching his bad leg out in front of him. He lifted his cane and pointed it at
Tomasso. The tip did not waver.
"I asked you a question," he said coldly, in the famous, beautiful voice. "Why
do you call this a council, Tomasso bar Sandre? Why have we been brought here
under false pretenses?"
Tomasso stopped playing with his wine. They had come to the moment at last. He
looked from Scalvaia over to burly Nievole.
"The two of you," he said soberly, "were considered by my father to be the las
t lords of any real power left in Astibar. Two winters past he decided—and in
formed me—that he intended to die on the eve of this Festival. At a time when
Alberico would not be able to refuse him full rites of burial—which rites in
clude a vigil such as this. At a time when you would both be in Astibar, which
would allow me to name you his vigil-keepers."
He paused in the measured, deliberate recitation and let his glance linger on
each of them. "My father did this so that we might come together without suspi
cion, or interruption, or risk of being detected, to set in motion certain pla
ns for the overthrow of Alberico who rules in Astibar."
He was watching closely, but Sandre had chosen well. Neither of the two men to
whom he spoke betrayed surprise or dismay by so much as a flicker of a muscle
.
Slowly Scalvaia lowered his cane and laid it down on the table by his chair. T
he stick was of onyx and machial, Tomasso found himself noticing. Strange how
the mind worked at moments such as this.
"Do you know," said bluff Nievole from by the larger fire, "do you know that t
his thought had actually crossed my mind when I tried to hazard why your Triad
-cursed father—ah, forgive me, old habits die hard—" His smile was wolfish,
rather than apologetic, and it did not reach his narrowed eyes. "—Why Duke Sa
ndre would name me to hold vigil for him. He must have known how many times I
tried to hasten these mourning rites along in the days when he ruled."
Tomasso smiled in return, just as thinly. "He was certain you would wonder," h
e said politely to the man he was almost sure had paid for the cup of wine tha
t had killed his mother. "He was also quite certain you would agree to come, b
eing one of the last of a dying breed in Astibar. Indeed, in the whole of the
Palm."
Bearded Nievole raised his glass. "You flatter well, bar Sandre. And I must sa
y I do prefer your voice as it is now, without all the dips and flutters and w
risty things that normally go with it."
Scalvaia looked amused. Taeri laughed aloud. Herado was carefully watchful. To
masso liked him very much: though not, as he'd had to assure his father in one
diverting conversation, in his own particular fashion.
"I prefer this voice as well," he said to the two lords. "You will both have b
een deducing in the last few minutes, being who and what you are, why I have c
onducted certain aspects of my life in certain well-known ways. There are adva
ntages to being seen as aimlessly degenerate."
"There are," Scalvaia agreed blandly, "if you have a purpose that is served by
such a misconception. You named a name a moment ago, and intimated we might a
ll be rendered happier in our hearts were the bearer of that name dead or gone
. We will leave aside for the moment what possibilities might follow such a dr
amatic eventuality."
His gaze was quite unreadable; Tomasso had been warned it would be. He said no
thing. Taeri shifted uneasily but blessedly kept quiet, as instructed. He walk
ed over and took one of the other chairs on the far side of the bier.
Scalvaia went on, "We cannot be unaware that by saying what you have said you
have put yourselves completely in our hands, or so it might initially appear.
At the same time, I do surmise that were we, in fact, to rise and begin to rid
e back towards Astibar carrying word of treachery we would join your father am
ong the dead before we left these woods."
It was casually stated—a minor fact to be confirmed before moving on to more
important issues.
Tomasso shook his head. "Hardly," he lied. "You do us honor by your presence a
nd are entirely free to leave. Indeed, we will escort you if you wish, for the
path is deceptive in darkness. My father did suggest that I might wish to poi
nt out that although you could readily have us wristed and death-wheeled after
torture, it is exceedingly likely, approaching a certainty, that Alberico wou
ld then see compelling cause to do the same to both of you, for having been co
nsidered likely accomplices of ours. You will remember what happened to the Ca
nziano after that unfortunate incident in Ferraut some years ago?"
There was a smoothly graceful silence acknowledging all of this.
It was broken by Nievole. "That was Sandre's doing, wasn't it?" he growled fro
m by his fire. "Not the Canziano at all!"
"It was our doing," Tomasso agreed calmly. "We learned a great deal, I must sa
y."
"So," Scalvaia murmured drily, "did the Canziano. Your father always hated Fab
ro bar Canzian."
"They could not have been said to be on the best of terms," Tomasso said bland
ly. "Though I must say that if you focus on that aspect of things I fear you m
ight miss the point."
"The point you prefer us to take," Nievole amended pointedly.
Unexpectedly, Scalvaia came to Tomasso's aid. "Not fair, my lord," he said to
Nievole. "If we can accept anything as true in this room and these times it is
that Sandre's hatred and his desire had moved beyond old wars and rivalries.
His target was Alberico."
His icy blue eyes held Neivole's for a long moment, and finally the bigger man
nodded. Scalvaia shifted in his chair wincing at a pain in his afflicted leg.

"Very well," he said to Tomasso. "You have now told us why we are here and hav
e made clear your father's purpose and your own. For my own part I will make a
confession. I will confess, in the spirit of truth that a death vigil should
inspire, that being ruled by a coarse, vicious, overbearing minor lord from Ba
rbadior brings little joy to my aged heart. I am with you. If you have a plan
I would like to hear it. On my oath and honor I will keep faith with the Sandr
eni in this."
Tomasso shivered at the invocation of the ancient words. "Your oath and honor
are sureties beyond measure," he said, and meant it.
"They are indeed, bar Sandre," said Nievole, taking a heavy step forward from
the fire. "And I will dare to say that the word of the Nievolene has never bee
n valued at lesser coin. The dearest wish of my heart is for the Barbadian to
lie dead and cut to pieces—Triad willing, by my own blade. I too am with you—
by my oath and honor."
"Such terribly splendid words!" said an amused voice from the window opposite
the door.
Five faces, four white with shock and the bearded one flushing red, whipped ar
ound. The speaker stood outside the open window, elbows resting on the ledge,
chin in his hands. He eyed them with a mild scrutiny, his face shadowed by the
wood of the window frame.
"I have never yet," he said, "known gallant phrases from however august a line
age to succeed in ousting a tyrant. In the Palm or anywhere else." With an eco
nomical motion he hoisted himself upwards, swung his feet into the room and sa
t comfortably perched on the ledge. "On the other hand," he added, "agreeing o
n a cause does make a starting point, I will concede that much."
"You are the sixth of whom my father spoke?" Tomasso asked warily.
The man did look familiar now that he was in the light. He was dressed for the
forest not the city, in two shades of grey with a black sheepskin vest over h
is shirt, and breeches tucked into worn black riding boots. There was a knife
at his belt, without ornament.
"I heard you mention that," the fellow said. "I actually hope I'm not, because
if I am the implications are unsettling, to say the least. The fact is, I nev
er spoke to your father in my life. If he knew of my activities and somehow ex
pected me to find out about this meeting and be here . . . well, I would be so
mewhat flattered by his confidence but rather more disturbed that he would hav
e known so much about me. On the other hand," he said for a second time, "it i
s Sandre d'Astibar we're talking about, and I do seem to make six here, don't
I?" He bowed, without any visible irony, towards the bier on its trestles.
"You are, then, also in league against Alberico?" Nievole's eyes were watchful
.
"I am not," said the man in the window quite bluntly. "Alberico means nothing
to me. Except as a tool. A wedge to open a door of my own."
"And what is it lies behind that door?" Scalvaia asked from deep in his armcha
ir.
But in that moment Tomasso remembered.
"I know you!" he said abruptly. "I saw you this morning. You are the Tregean s
hepherd who played the pipes in the mourning rites!" Taeri snapped his fingers
as the recognition came home to him as well.
"I played the pipes, yes," the man on the window-ledge said, quite unruffled.
"But I am not a shepherd nor from Tregea. It has suited my purposes to play a
role, many different roles, in fact, for a great many years. Tomasso bar Sandr
e ought to appreciate that." He grinned.
Tomasso did not return the smile. "Perhaps then, under the circumstances, you
might favor us by saying who you really are." He said it as politely as the si
tuation seemed to warrant. "My father might have known but we do not."
"Nor, I'm afraid, shall you learn just yet," the other said. He paused. "Thoug
h I will say that were I to swear a vow of my own on the honor of my family it
would carry a weight that would eclipse both such oaths sworn here tonight."

It was matter-of-factly said, which made the arrogance greater, not less.
To forestall Nievole's predictable burst of anger Tomasso said quickly, "You w
ill not deny us some information surely, even if you choose to shield your nam
e. You said Alberico is a tool for you. A tool for what, Alessan not-of-Tregea
?" He was pleased to find that he remembered the name Menico di Ferraut had me
ntioned yesterday. "What is your own purpose? What brings you to this lodge?"

The other's face, lean and curiously hollowed with cheekbones in sharp relief,
grew still, almost masklike. And into the waiting silence that ensued he said
:
"I want Brandin. I want Brandin of Ygrath dead more than I want my soul's immo
rtality beyond the last portal of Morian."
There was a silence again, broken only by the crackle of the autumn fires on t
he two hearths. It seemed to Tomasso as if the chill of winter had come into t
he room with that speech.
Then: "Such terribly splendid words!" murmured Scalvaia lazily, shattering the
mood. He drew a shout of laughter from Nievole and Taeri, both. Scalvaia hims
elf did not smile.
The man on the window-ledge acknowledged the thrust with the briefest nod of h
is head. He said, "This is not, my lord, a subject about which I permit frivol
ity. If we are to work together it will be necessary for you to remember that.
"
"You, I am forced to say, are an overly proud young man," replied Scalvaia sha
rply. "It might be appropriate for you to remember to whom you speak."
The other visibly bit back his first retort. "Pride is a family failing," he s
aid finally. "I have not escaped it, I'm afraid. But I am indeed mindful of wh
o you are. And the Sandreni and my lord Nievole. It is why I am here. I have m
ade it my business to be aware of dissidence throughout the Palm for many year
s. At times I have encouraged it, discreetly. This evening marks the first ins
tance in which I have come myself to a gathering such as this."
"But you have already told us that Alberico is nothing to you." Tomasso inward
ly cursed his father for not having better prepared him for this very peculiar
sixth figure.
"Nothing in himself," the other corrected. "Will you allow me?" Without waitin
g for a reply he lifted himself down from the ledge and walked over to the win
e.
"Please," said Tomasso, belatedly.
The man poured himself a generous glass of the vintage red. He drained it, and
poured another. Only then did he turn back to address the five of them. Herad
o's eyes, watching him, were enormous.
"Two facts," the man called Alessan said crisply. "Learn them if you are serio
us about freedom in the Palm. One: if you oust or slay Alberico you will have
Brandin upon you within three months. Two: if Brandin is ousted or slain Alber
ico will rule this peninsula within that same period of time."
He stopped. His eyes—grey, Tomasso noticed now—moved from one to the other o
f them, challenging. No one spoke. Scalvaia toyed with the handle of his cane.

"These two things must be understood," the stranger went on in the same tone.
"Neither I in my own pursuit, nor you in yours, can afford to lose sight of th
em. They are the core truths of the Palm in our time. The two sorcerers from o
verseas are their own balance of power and the only balance of power in the pe
ninsula right now, however different things might have been eighteen years ago
. Today only the power of one keeps the magic of the other from being wielded
as it was when they conquered us. If we take them then we must take them both—
or make them bring down each other."
"How?" Taeri asked, too eagerly.
The lean face under the prematurely silvering dark hair turned to him and smil
ed briefly. "Patience, Taeri bar Sandre. I have a number of things yet to tell
you about carelessness before deciding if our paths are to join. And I say th
is with infinite respect for the dead man who seems—remarkably enough—to hav
e drawn us here. I'm afraid you are going to have to agree to submit yourselve
s to my guidance or we can do nothing together at all."
"The Scalvaiane have submitted themselves willingly to nothing and no one in l
iving memory or recorded history," that vulpine lord said, the texture of velv
et in his voice. "I am not readily of a mind to become the first to do so."
"Would you prefer," the other said, "to have your plans and your life and the
long glory of your line snuffed out like candles on the Ember Days because of
sheer sloppiness in your preparations?"
"You had better explain yourself," Tomasso said icily.
"I intend to. Who was it who chose a double-moon night at double moonrise to m
eet?" Alessan retorted, his voice suddenly cutting like a blade. "Why are no r
ear guards posted along the forest path to warn you if someone approaches—as
I just did? Why were no servants left here this afternoon to guard this cabin?
Have you even the faintest awareness of how dead the five of you would be—se
vered hands stuffed into your throats—were I not who I am?"
"My father . . . Sandre . . . said that Alberico would not have us followed,"
Tomasso stammered furiously. "He was absolutely certain of that."
"And he is likely to have been absolutely right. But you cannot let your focus
be so narrow. Your father—I am sorry to have to say it —was alone with his
obsession for too long. He was too intent upon Alberico. It shows in everythin
g you have done these past two days. What of the idly curious or the greedy? T
he petty informer who might decide to follow you just to see what happened her
e? Just to have a story to tell in the tavern tomorrow? Did you—or your fathe
r—give even half a thought to such things? Or to those who might have learned
where you planned to come and arranged to be here before you?"
There was a hostile silence. A log on the smaller fire settled with a crack an
d a shower of sparks. Herado jumped involuntarily at the sound.
"Will it interest you to know," the man called Alessan went on, more gently, "
that my people have been guarding the approaches to this cabin since you arriv
ed? Or that I've had someone in here since mid-afternoon keeping an eye on the
servants setting up, and who might follow them?"
"What?" Taeri exclaimed. "In here! In our hunting lodge!"
"For your protection and my own," the other man said, finishing his second gla
ss of wine. He glanced upwards to the shadows of the half-loft above, where th
e extra pallets were stored.
"I think that should do it, my friend," he called, pitching his voice to carry
. "You've earned a glass of wine after so long dry-throated among the dust. Yo
u may as well come down now, Devin."
It had actually been very easy.
Menico, purse jingling with more money than he had ever earned from a single p
erformance in his life, had graciously passed their concert at the wine-mercha
nt's house over to Burnet di Corte. Burnet, who needed the work, was pleased;
the wine-merchant, angry at first, was quickly mollified upon learning what Me
nico's hitherto unfinal-ized tariff would now have been in the aftermath of th
e sensation they'd caused that morning.
So, in the event, Devin and the rest of the company had been given the rest of
the day and evening off. Menico counted out for everyone an immediate bonus o
f five astins and benevolently waved them away to the various delights of the
Festival. He didn't even offer his usual warning lecture.
Already, just past noon, there were wine-stands on every corner, more than one
at the busier squares. Each vineyard in Astibar province, and even some from
farther afield in Ferraut or Senzio, had its vintages from previous years avai
lable as harbingers of what this year's grapes would offer. Merchants looking
to buy in quantity were sampling judiciously, early revelers rather less so.
Fruit vendors were also in abundance, with figs and melons and the enormous gr
apes of the season displayed beside vast wheels of white cheeses from Tregea o
r bricks of red ones from northern Cer-tando. Over by the market the din was d
eafening as the people of the city and its distrada canvassed the offerings of
this year's itinerant tradesmen. Overhead the banners of the noble houses and
of the larger wine estates flapped brightly in the autumn breeze as Devin str
ode purposefully towards what he'd just been told was the most fashionable kha
v room in Astibar.
There were benefits to fame. He was recognized at the doorway, his arrival exc
itedly announced, and in a matter of moments he found himself at the dark wood
en bar of The Paelion nursing a mug of hot khav laced with flambardion—no awk
ward questions asked about anyone's age, thank you very much.
It was the work of half an hour to find out what he needed to know about Sandr
e d'Astibar. His questions seemed entirely natural, coming from the tenor who
had just sung the Duke's funeral lament. Devin learned about Sandre's long rul
e, his feuds, his bitter exile, and his sad decline in the last few years into
a blustering, drunken hunter of small game, a wraith compared to what he once
had been.
In that last context, rather more specifically, Devin asked about where the Du
ke had liked to hunt. They told him. They told him where his favorite hunting
lodge had been. He changed the subject to wine.
It was easy. He was a hero of the hour and The Paelion liked heroes, for an ho
ur. They let him go eventually: he pleaded an artist's strained sensitivity af
ter the morning's endeavors. With the benefit of hindsight he now attached a d
eal more importance than he had at the time to glimpsing Alessan di Tregea at
a booth full of painters and poets. They were laughing about some wager concer
ning certain verses of condolence that had not yet arrived from Chiara. He and
Alessan had saluted each other in an elaborately showy, performers' fashion t
hat delighted the packed room.
Back at the inn, Devin had fended off the most ardent of the group who had wal
ked him home and went upstairs alone. He had waited in his room, chafing, for
an hour to be sure the last of them had gone. Having changed into a dark-brown
tunic and breeches, he put on a cap to hide his hair and a woolen overshirt a
gainst the coming chill of evening. Then he made his way unnoticed through the
now teeming crowds in the streets over to the eastern gate of the city.
And out, among several empty wagons, goods all sold, being ridden back to the
distrada by sober, prudent farmers who preferred to reload and return in the m
orning instead of celebrating all night in town spending what they'd just earn
ed.
Devin hitched a ride on a cart part of the way, commiserating with the driver
on the taxes and the poor rates being paid that year for lamb's wool. Eventual
ly he jumped off, feigning youthful exuberance and ran a mile or so along the
road to the east.
At one point he saw, with a grin of recognition, a temple of Adaon on the righ
t. Just past it, as promised, was the delicately rendered image of a ship on t
he roadside gate of a modest country house. Rovigo's home—what Devin could se
e of it, set well back from the road among cypress and olive trees—looked com
fortable and cared for.
A day ago, a different person, he would have stopped. But something had happen
ed to him that morning within the dusty spaces of the Sandreni Palace. He kept
going.
A half mile further on he found what he was looking for. He made sure he was a
lone and then quickly cut to his right, south into the woods, away from the ma
in road that led to the east coast and Ardin town on the sea.
It was quiet in the forest and cooler where the branches and the many-colored
leaves dappled the sunlight. There was a path winding through the trees and De
vin began to follow it, towards the hunting lodge of the Sandreni. From here o
n he redoubled his caution. On the road he was simply a walker in the autumn c
ountryside; here he was a trespasser with no excuse at all for being where he
was.
Unless pride and the strange, dreamlike events of the morning just past could
be called adequate excuses. Devin rather doubted it. At the same time, it rema
ined to be seen whether he or a certain manipulative red-headed personage was
going to dictate the shape and flow of this day and those to come. If she were
under the impression that he was so easy to dupe—a helpless, youthful slave
to his passions, blinded and deafened to anything else by the so-gracious offe
r of her body— well it was for this afternoon and this evening to show how wr
ong an arrogant girl could be.
What else the evening might reveal, Devin didn't know; he hadn't allowed himse
lf to slow down long enough to consider the question.
There was no one there when he came to the lodge, though he lay silently among
the trees for a long time to be certain. The front door was chained but Marra
had been very good with such devices and had taught him a thing or two. He pi
cked the lock with the buckle of his belt, went inside, opened a window, and c
limbed out to relock the chain. Then he slipped back in through the window, cl
osed it, and took a look around.
There was little option, really. The two bedchambers at the back would be dang
erous and not very useful if he wanted to hear. Devin balanced himself on the
broad arm of a heavy wooden chair and, jumping, managed to make it up to the h
alf-loft on his second attempt.
Nursing a shin bruised in the process he took a pillow from one of the pallets
stored up there and proceeded to wedge himself into the remotest, darkest cor
ner he could find, behind two beds and the stuffed head of an antlered corbin
stag. By lying on his left side, eye to a chink in the floorboards, he had an
almost complete view of the room below.
He tried to guide himself towards a mood of calm and patience. Unfortunately,
he soon became irrationally conscious of the fact that the glassy eye of the c
orbin was glitteringly fixed upon him. Under the circumstances it made him ner
vous. Eventually he got up, turned the chestnut head to one side and settled i
n to his hiding-place again.
And right about then, as the grimly purposeful activities of the day gave way
to a time when he could do nothing but wait, Devin began to be afraid.
He was under no real illusions: he was a dead man if they found him here. The
secrecy and tension in Tomasso bar Sandre's words and manner that morning made
that clear enough. Even without what Catriana had done in her own effort to o
verhear those words, and then to prevent him from doing so. For the first time
Devin began to contemplate where the rash momentum of his wounded pride had c
arried him.
When the servants came half an hour later to prepare the room they gave him so
me very bad moments. Bad enough, in fact, to make him briefly wish that he was
back home in Asoli guiding a plow behind a pair of stolid water buffaloes. Th
ey were fine creatures, water buffaloes, patient, uncomplaining. They plowed f
ields for you, and their milk made cheese. There was even something to be said
for the predictable grey skies of Asoli in autumn and the equally predictable
people. None of their girls, for example, were as irritatingly superior as Ca
triana d'Astibar who had got him into this. Nor would any Asolini servant, Dev
in was quite certain, ever have volunteered, as one Triad-blighted fool below
was doing even now, to bring down a pallet from the half-loft in case one of t
he vigil-keeping lords should grow weary.
"Goch, don't be more of a fool than you absolutely must be!" the steward snapp
ed officiously in reply. "They are here to keep a waking watch all night—a pa
llet in the room is an insult to them both. Be grateful you aren't dependent o
n your brain to feed your belly, Goch!"
Devin fervently seconded the sentiments of the insult and wished the steward a
long and lucrative existence. For the tenth time since the Sandreni servants
had entered the lower room he cursed Catriana, and for the twentieth time, him
self. The ratio seemed about right.
Finally the servants left; heading back for Astibar to bear the Duke's body he
re. The steward's instructions were painstakingly explicit. With idiots like G
och around, Devin thought spitefully, they had to be.
From where he lay, Devin could see the daylight gradually waning towards dusk.
He found himself softly humming his old cradle song. He made himself stop.
His mind turned back to the morning. To the long walk through empty, dusty roo
ms of the palace. To the hidden closet at the end. The sudden silken feel of C
atriana when her gown had drifted above her hips. He made himself stop that to
o.
It grew steadily darker. The first owl called, not far away. Devin had grown u
p in the country; it was a familiar sound. He heard some forest animal rooting
in the underbrush at the edge of the clearing. Once in a while a gusting of t
he wind would set the leaves to rustling.
Then, abruptly, there came a shining of white light through one of the drawn w
indow curtains and Devin knew that Vidomni was high enough to look down upon t
his clearing amid the tall trees of the wood, which meant that blue Ilarion wo
uld be rising even now. Which meant it would not be very much longer.
It wasn't. There was a wavering of torchlight and the sound of voices. The loc
k clinked, rattled, and the door swung open. The steward led in eight men carr
ying a bier. Eye glued to his crack in the floor, breathing shallowly, Devin s
aw them lay it down. Tomasso came in with the two lords whose names and lineag
e Devin had learned in The Paelion.
The servants uncovered and laid out the food and then they left, Goch stumblin
g on the threshold and banging his shoulder pleasingly on the doorpost. The st
eward, last to go, shrugged a discreet apology, bowed, and closed the door beh
ind him.
"Wine, my lords?" said Tomasso d'Astibar in the voice Devin had heard from the
secret closet. "We will have three others joining us very shortly."
And from then on they had said what they said and Devin heard what he heard, a
nd so gradually became aware of the magnitude of what he had stumbled upon, th
e peril he was in.
Then Alessan appeared at the window opposite the door.
Devin couldn't, in fact, see that window but he knew the voice immediately and
it was with disbelief bordering on stupefaction that he heard Menico's recrui
t of a fortnight ago deny being from Tregea at all and then name Brandin, King
of Ygrath as the everlasting target of his soul's hate.
Rash, Devin certainly was, and he would not have denied that he carried more t
han his own due share of impulsive foolishness, but he had not ever been less
than quick, or clever. In Asoli, small boys had to be.
So by the time Alessan named him, and invited him to come down, Devin's racing
mind had put two more pieces of the puzzle together and he adroitly took the
path offered him.
"All quiet, since mid-afternoon," he called out, extricating himself from his
corner and stepping past the corbin's antlers to the edge of the half-loft. "O
nly the servants were here, but they didn't do much of a job when they chained
the door—the lock was easy to pick. Two thieves and the Emperor of Barbadior
could have been up here without seeing each other or anyone down there being
the wiser."
He said it as coolly as he could. Then he lowered himself, with a deliberately
showy flip, to the ground. He registered the looks on the faces of five of th
e men there—all of whom most certainly recognized him—but his concentration,
and his satisfaction, lay in the brief smile of approval he received from Ale
ssan.
For the moment his apprehension was gone, replaced by something entirely diffe
rent. Alessan had claimed him, given him legitimacy here. He was clearly linke
d to the man who was controlling events in the room. And the events were on a
scale that spanned the Palm. Devin had to fight hard to control his growing ex
citement.
Tomasso went over to the sideboard and smoothly poured a glass of wine for him
. Devin was impressed with the composure of the man. He was also aware, from t
he exaggerated courtesy and the undeniable sparkle in bar Sandre's accentuated
eyes, that although the fluting voice might be faked, Tomasso, in certain mat
ters and propensities, was still very much what he was said to be. Devin accep
ted the glass, careful not to let their fingers touch.
"I wonder now," drawled Lord Scalvaia in his magnificent voice, "are we to be
treated to a recital here while we pass our vigil? There does seem to be a qua
ntity of musicians here tonight."
Devin said nothing, but following Alessan's example did not smile.
"Shall I name you a provincial grower of grapes, my lord?" There was real ange
r in Alessan's voice. "And call Nievole a grain-farmer from the southwestern d
istrada? What we do outside these walls has little to do with why we are here,
save in two ways only."
He held up a long finger. "One: as musicians we have an excuse to cross back a
nd forth across the Palm, which offers advantages I need not belabor." A secon
d finger shot up beside the first. "Two: music trains the mind, like mathemati
cs, or logic, to precision of detail. The sort of precision, my lords, that wo
uld have precluded the carelessness that has marked tonight. If Sandre d'Astib
ar were alive I would discuss it with him, and I might defer to his experience
and his long striving."
He paused, looking from one to another of them, then said, much more softly: "
I might, but I might not. It is a vanished tune, that one, never to be sung. A
s matters stand I can only say again that if we are to work together I must as
k you to accept my lead."
He spoke this last directly to Scalvaia who still lounged, elegant and express
ionless, in his deep chair. It was Nievole who answered, though, blunt and dir
ect.
"I am not in the habit of delaying my judgment of men. I think you mean what y
ou say and that you are more versed in these things than we are. I accept. I w
ill follow your lead. With a single condition."
"Which is?"
"That you tell us your name."
Devin, watching with rapacious intensity, anxious not to miss a word or a nuan
ce, saw Alessan's eyes close for an instant, as if to hold back something that
might otherwise have shown through them. The others waited through the short
silence.
Then Alessan shook his head. "It is a fair condition, my lord. Under the circu
mstances it is entirely fair. I can only pray you will not hold me to it thoug
h. It is a grief—I cannot tell you how much of a grief it is—but I am unable
to accede."
For the first time he appeared to be reaching for words, choosing them careful
ly. "Names are power, as you know. As the two tyrant-sorcerers from overseas m
ost certainly know. And as I have been made to know in the bitterest ways ther
e are. My lord, you will learn my name in the moment of our triumph if it come
s, and not before. I will say that this is imposed upon me; it is not a choice
freely made. You may call me Alessan, which is common enough here in the Palm
and happens to be truly the name my mother gave me. Will you be gracious enou
gh to let that suffice you, my lord, or must we now part ways?"
The last question was asked in a tone bereft of the arrogance that had infused
the man's bearing and speech from the moment of his arrival.
Just as Devin's earlier fear had given way to excitement, so now did excitemen
t surrender to something else, something he could not yet identify. He stared
at Alessan. The man seemed younger than before, somehow—unable to prevent thi
s almost naked showing of his need.
Nievole cleared his throat loudly, as if to dispel an aura, a resonance of som
ething that seemed to have entered the room like the mingled light of the two
moons outside. Another owl hooted from the clearing. Nievole opened his mouth
to reply to Alessan.
They never knew what he would have said, or Scalvaia.
Afterwards, on nights when sleep eluded him and he watched one or both moons s
weep the sky or counted the stars in Eanna's Diadem in a moonless dark, Devin
would let his clear memory of that moment carry him back, trying—for reasons
he would have found difficult to explain—to imagine what the two lords would
have done or said had all their briefly tangled fate lines run differently fro
m that lodge.
He could guess, analyze, play out scenarios in his mind, but he would never kn
ow. It was a night-time truth that became a queer, private sorrow for him amid
all that came after. A symbol, a displacement of regret. A reminder of what i
t was to be mortal and so doomed to tread one road only and that one only once
, until Morian called the soul away and Eanna's lights were lost. We can never
truly know the path we have not walked.
The paths that each of the men in that lodge were to walk, through their own p
rivate portals to endings near or far were laid down by the owl that cried a s
econd time, very clearly, just as Nievole began to speak.
Alessan flung up his hand. "Trouble!" he said sharply. Then: "Baerd?"
The door banged open. Devin saw a large man, his very long, pale-yellow hair h
eld back by a leather band across his brow. There was another leather thong ab
out his throat. He wore a vest and leggings cut in the fashion of the southern
highlands. His eyes, even by firelight, gleamed a dazzling blue. He carried a
drawn sword.
Which was punishable by death this close to Astibar.
"Let's go!" the man said urgently. "You and the boy. The others belong here—t
he youngest son and the grandson have easy explanations. Get rid of the extra
glasses."
"What is it?" Tomasso d'Astibar asked quickly, his eyes wide.
"Twenty horsemen on the forest path. Continue your vigil and be as calm as you
can—we won't be far away. We'll return after. Alessan, come on!"
The tone of his voice pulled Devin halfway to the door. Alessan was lingering
though, his eyes for some reason locked on those of Tomasso, and that look, wh
at was exchanged in it, became another one of the things that Devin never forg
ot, or fully understood.
For a long moment—a very long moment, it seemed to Devin, with twenty horseme
n riding through the forest and a drawn sword in the room—no one spoke. Then:

"It seems we will have to continue this extremely interesting discussion at a
later hour," Tomasso bar Sandre murmured, with genuinely impressive composure.
"Will you take a last glass before you go, in my father's name?"
Alessan smiled then, a full, open smile. He shook his head though. "I hope to
have a chance to do so later," he said. "I will drink to your father gladly, b
ut I have a habit I don't think even you can satisfy in the time we have."
Tomasso's mouth quirked wryly. "I've satisfied a number of habits in my day. D
o tell me yours."
The reply was quiet, Devin had to strain to hear.
"My third glass of a night is blue," Alessan said. "The third glass I drink is
always of blue wine. In memory of something lost. Lest on any single night I
forget what it is I am alive to do."
"Not forever lost, I hope," said Tomasso, equally softly.
"Not forever, I have sworn, upon my soul and my father's soul wherever it has
gone."
"Then there will be blue wine when next we drink after tonight," said Tomasso,
"if it is at all in my power to provide it. And I will drink it with you to o
ur fathers' souls."
"Alessan!" snapped the yellow-haired man named Baerd, "In Adaon's name, I said
twenty horsemen! Will you come?"
"I will," said Alessan. He hurled his wineglass and Devin's through the neares
t window into the darkness. "Triad guard you all," he said to the five in the
room. Then he and Devin followed Baerd into the moonlit shadows of the clearin
g.
With Devin in the middle they ran swiftly around to the side of the cabin fart
hest from the path that led to the main road. They didn't go far. His pulse po
unding furiously, Devin dropped to the ground when the other two men did so. P
eering cautiously out from under a cluster of dark-green serrano bushes they c
ould see the lodge. Firelight showed through the open windows.
A moment later Devin's heart lurched like a ship caught by a wave across its b
ows, as a twig cracked just behind him.
"Twenty-two riders," a voice said. The speaker dropped neatly to the ground on
Baerd's other side. "The one in the middle of them is hooded."
Devin looked over. And by the mingled light of the two moons saw Catriana d'As
tibar.
"Hooded?" Alessan repeated, on a sharply taken breath. "You are certain?"
"Of course I am," said Catriana. "Why? What does it mean?"
"Eanna be gracious to us all," Alessan murmured, not answering.
"I wouldn't be counting on it now," the man named Baerd said grimly. "I think
we should leave this place. They will search."
For a moment Alessan looked as if he would demur, but just then they heard a j
ingling of many riders from the path on the other side of the lodge.
Without another word spoken the four of them rose and silently moved away.
"This evening," murmured Scalvaia, "grows more eventful by the moment."
Tomasso was grateful for the elegant lord's equanimity. It helped steady his o
wn nerves. He looked over at his brother; Taeri seemed all right. Herado was w
hite-faced, however. Tomasso winked at the boy. "Have another drink, nephew. Y
ou look infinitely prettier with color in your cheeks. There is nothing to fea
r. We are here doing exactly what we have permission to be doing."
They heard the horses. Herado went over to the sideboard, filled a glass and d
rained it at a gulp. Just as he put the goblet down the door crashed loudly op
en, banging into the wall beside it, and four enormous, fully-armed Barbadian
soldiers strode in, making the lodge seem suddenly small.
"Gentlemen!" Tomasso fluted expertly, wringing his hands. "What is it? What br
ings you here, to interrupt a vigil?" He was careful to sound petulant, not an
gry.
The mercenaries didn't even deign to look at him, let alone reply. Two of them
quickly went to check the bedrooms and a third seized the ladder and ran up i
t to examine the half-loft where the young singer had been hiding. Other soldi
ers, Tomasso registered apprehensively, were taking up positions outside each
of the windows. There was a great deal of noise outside among the horses, and
a confusion of torches.
Tomasso abruptly stamped his foot in frustration. "What is the meaning of this
?" he shrilled as the soldiers continued to ignore him. "Tell me! I shall prot
est directly to your lord. We have Alberico's express permission to conduct th
is vigil and the burial tomorrow. I have it in writing under his seal!" He add
ressed the Barbadian captain standing by the door.
Again it was as if he hadn't even spoken so completely did they disregard him.
Four more soldiers came in and spread out to the edges of the room, their exp
ressions blank and dangerous.
"This is intolerable!" Tomasso whined, staying in character, his hands writhin
g about each other. "I shall ride immediately to Alber-ico! I shall demand tha
t you all be shipped straight back to your wretched hovels in Barbadior!"
"That will not be necessary," said a burly, hooded figure in the doorway.
He stepped forward and threw back the hood. "You may make your childish demand
of me right here," said Alberico of Barbadior, Tyrant of Astibar, Tregea, Fer
raut and Certando.
Tomasso's hands flew to his throat even as he dropped to his knees. The others
, too, knelt immediately, even old Scalvaia with his game leg. A black mind-cl
oak of numbing fear threatened to descend over Tomasso, trammeling all speech
and thought.
"My lord," he stammered, "I did not ... I could ... we could not know!"
Alberico was silent, gazing blankly down upon him. Tomasso fought to master hi
s terror and bewilderment. "You are most welcome here," he bleated, rising car
efully, "most welcome, most honored lord. You do us too much honor with your p
resence at my father's rites."
"I do," said Alberico bluntly. Tomasso received the full weight of a heavy scr
utiny from the small eyes, close-set and unblinking deep in the folds of the s
orcerer's large face. Alberico's bald skull gleamed in the firelight. He drew
his hands from the pockets of his robe. "I would have wine," he demanded, gest
uring with a meaty palm.
"But of course, of course."
Tomasso stumbled to obey, intimidated as always by the sheer, bulky physicalit
y of Alberico and his Barbadians. They hated him, he knew, and all his kind, o
ver and above everything else these conquerors felt about the people of the Ea
stern Palm whose world they now ruled. Whenever he faced Alberico Tomasso was
overwhelmingly conscious that the Tyrant could crack his bones with bare hands
and not think twice about having done so.
It was not a comforting line of thought. Only eighteen years of carefully scho
oling his body to shield his mind kept his hands steady as they carried a full
glass ceremoniously over to Alberico. The soldiers eyed his every movement. N
ievole was back by the larger fire, Taeri and Herado together by the small one
. Scalvaia stood, braced upon his cane, beside the chair in which he'd been si
tting.
It was time, Tomasso judged, to sound more confident, less guilty. "You will f
orgive me, my lord, for my ill judged words to your soldiers. Not knowing you
were here I could only guess they were acting in ignorance of your wishes."
"My wishes change," Alberico said in his heavy, unchanging voice. "They are li
kely to know of those changes before you, bar San-dre."
"Of course, my lord. But of course. They—"
"I wanted," said Alberico of Barbadior, "to look upon the coffin of your fathe
r. To look, and to laugh." He showed no trace of an inclination toward amuseme
nt. Tomasso's blood felt suddenly icy in his veins.
Alberico stepped past him and stood massively over the remains of the Duke. "T
his," he said flatly, "is the body of a vain, wretched, fatuous old man who de
creed the hour of his own death to no purpose. No purpose at all. Is it not am
using?"
He did laugh then—three short, harsh barks of sound that were more truly frig
htening than anything Tomasso had ever heard in his life. How had he known?
"Will you not laugh with me? You three Sandreni? Nievole? My poor, crippled, i
mpotent Lord Scalvaia? Is it not diverting to think how all of you have been b
rought here and doomed by senile foolishness? By an old man who lived too long
to understand how the labyrinthine twistings of his own time could be so easi
ly smashed through with a fist today."
His clenched hand crashed heavily down on the wooden coffin lid, splintering t
he carved Sandreni arms. With a faint sound of distress Scalvaia sank back int
o his chair.
"My lord," Tomasso gulped, gesticulating. "What can you possibly mean? What ar
e you—"
He got no further than that. Wheeling savagely Alberico slapped him meatily ac
ross the face with an open hand. Tomasso staggered backwards, blood spattering
from his ripped mouth.
"You will use your natural voice, son of a fool," the sorcerer said, the words
more terrifying because spoken in the same flat tone as before. "Will it at l
east amuse you to know how easy this was? To learn how long Herado bar Gianno
has been reporting to me?" And with those words the night came down.
The full black cloak of anguish and raw terror Tomasso had been fighting despe
rately to hold back. Oh, my father, he thought, stricken to his soul that it s
hould have been by family that they were now undone. By family. Family!
Several things happened then in an extremely short span of time.
"My lord!" Herado cried out in high-pitched dismay. "You promised! You said th
ey would not know! You told me—"
It was all he said. It is difficult to expostulate with a dagger embedded in y
our throat.
"The Sandreni deal with the scrapings of dirt under their own fingernails," sa
id his uncle Taeri, who had drawn the blade from the back of his boot. Even as
he spoke, Taeri pulled his dagger free of Herado and smoothly, part of one co
ntinuous motion, sheathed it in his own heart.
"One less Sandreni for your sky-wheels, Barbadian!" he taunted, gasping. "Tria
d send a plague to eat the flesh from your bones." He dropped to his knees. Hi
s hands were on the dagger haft; blood was spilling over them. His eyes sought
Tomasso's. "Farewell, brother," he whispered. "Morian grant our shadows know
each other in her Halls."
Something was clenched around Tomasso's heart, squeezing and squeezing, as he
watched his brother die. Two of the guards, trained to ward a very different s
ort of blow at their lord, stepped forward and flipped Taeri over on his back
with the toes of their boots.
"Fools!" spat Alberico, visibly upset for the first time. "I needed him alive.
I wanted both of them alive!" The soldiers blanched at the fury written in hi
s features.
Then the focus of the room went elsewhere entirely.
With an animal roar of mingled rage and pain Nievole d'Astibar, a very big man
himself, linked his two hands like a hammer or the head of a mace and swung t
hem full into the face of the soldier nearest to him. The blow smashed bones l
ike splintering wood. Blood spurted as the man screamed and crumpled heavily b
ack against the coffin.
Still roaring, Nievole grappled for his victim's sword.
He actually had it out and was turning to do battle when four arrows took him
in the throat and chest. His face went dully slack for an instant, then his ey
es widened and his mouth relaxed into a macabre smile of triumph as he slipped
to the floor.
And then, just then, with all eyes on fallen Nievole, Lord Scalvaia did the on
e thing no one had dared to do. Slumped deep in his chair, so motionless they
had almost forgotten him, the aged patrician raised his cane with a steady han
d, pointed it straight at Alberico's face, and squeezed the spring catch hidde
n in the handle.
Sorcerers cannot, indeed, be poisoned—a minor protective art, one that most o
f them master in their youth. On the other hand, they most certainly can be sl
ain, by arrow or blade, or any of the other instruments of violent death—whic
h is why such things were forbidden within a decreed radius of wherever Alberi
co might be.
There is also a well-known truth about men and their gods— whether of the Tri
ad in the Palm, or the varying pantheon worshiped in Barbadior, whether of mot
her goddess or dying and reviving god or lord of wheeling stars or single awes
ome Power above all of these in some rumored prime world far off amid the drif
ts of space.
It is the simple truth that mortal man cannot understand why the gods shape ev
ents as they do. Why some men and women are cut off in fullest flower while ot
hers live to dwindle into shadows of themselves. Why virtue must sometimes be
trampled and evil flourish amid the beauty of a country garden. Why chance, sh
eer random chance, plays such an overwhelming role in the running of the life
lines and the fate lines of men.
It was chance that saved Alberico of Barbadior then, in a moment that had his
name half spelled-out for death. His guards were intent upon the fallen men an
d on the taut, bleeding form of Tomasso. No one had spared a glance for the cr
ippled lord in his chair.
It was only the fact—mercilessly random—that that evening's Captain of the G
uard happened to have moved into the cabin on Scalvaia's side of the room that
changed the course of history in the Peninsula of the Palm and beyond. By thi
ngs so achingly small are lives measured and marred.
Alberico, turning in a white rage to snap an order at his captain, saw the can
e come up and Scalvaia's finger jerk upon the handle. Had he been facing strai
ght ahead or turning the other way he would have died of a sharpened projectil
e bursting into his brain.
It was toward Scalvaia that he turned though, and he was the mightiest wielder
of magic, save one, in the Palm in that hour. Even so, what he did—the only
single thing he could do—took all the power he had and very nearly more than
he could command. There was no time for the spoken spell, the focusing gesture
. The bolt that was his ending had already been loosed.
Alberico released his hold upon his body.
Watching in terror and disbelief, Tomasso saw the lethal bolt whip through a b
lurred oozing of matter and air where Alberico's head had been. The bolt smash
ed harmlessly into the wall above a window.
And in that same scintilla of time, knowing that an instant later would be an
instant too late—that his body could be unknit forever, his soul, neither liv
ing nor dead, left to howl impotently in the waste that lay in ambush for thos
e who dared essay such magic—Alberico summoned the lineaments of his form bac
k to himself.
It was a near thing.
He had a droop to his right eyelid from that day on, and his physical strength
was never again what it had been. When he was tired, ever after, his right fo
ot would have a tendency to splay outward as if retracing the strange release
of that momentary magic. He would limp then, much as Scalvaia had done.
Through eyes that fought to focus properly, Alberico of Barbadior saw Scalvaia
's silver-maned head fly across the room to bounce, with a sickening sound, on
the rush-strewn floor—decapitated by the belated sword of the Captain of the
Guard. The deadly cane, crafted of stones and metals Alberico did not recogni
ze, clattered loudly to the ground. The air seemed thick and viscous to the so
rcerer, unnaturally dense. He was conscious of a loose, rattling sound to his
breathing and a spasmodic trembling at the back of his knees.
It was another moment, etched in the rigid, stunned silence of the other men i
n the room, before he trusted himself to even try to speak.
"You are dung," he said, thickly, coarsely, to the ashen captain. "You are les
s than that. You are filth and crawling slime. You will kill yourself. Now!" H
e spoke as if there were sliding soil clogging and spilling from his mouth. Wi
th an effort he swallowed his saliva.
Ferociously straining to make his eyes work properly he watched as the blurry
form of his captain bowed jerkily and, reversing his sword, severed his own ju
gular with a swift, jagged slash. Alberico felt a froth of rage foaming and bo
iling through his mind. He fought to will an end to a palsied tremor in his le
ft hand. He could not.
There were a great many dead men in the room and he very nearly had been one o
f them. He didn't even entirely feel as if he lived —his body seemed to have
reassembled itself in not quite the same way as before. He rubbed with weak fi
ngers at the drooping eyelid. He felt ill, nauseous. The air was hard to breat
he. He needed to be outside, away from this suddenly stifling lodge of his ene
mies.
Nothing had come to pass as he'd expected. There was only one single element l
eft of his original design for the evening. One thing that might yet offer a k
ind of pleasure, that might redeem a little of what had gone so desperately aw
ry.
He turned, slowly, to look at Sandre's son. At the lover of boys. He dragged h
is mouth upwards into a smile, unaware of how hideous he looked.
"Bring him," he said thickly to his soldiers. "Bind him and bring him. There a
re things we can do with this one before we allow him to die. Things appropria
te to what he was."
His vision was still not working properly, but he saw one of his mercenaries s
mile. Tomasso bar Sandre closed his eyes. There was blood on his face and clot
hing. There would be more before they were done.
Alberico put up his hood and limped from the room. Behind him the soldiers lif
ted up the body of the dead captain and supported the man whose face had been
broken by Nievole.
They had to help the Tyrant mount his horse, which he found humiliating, but h
e began to feel better during the torchlit ride back to Astibar. He was utterl
y devoid of magic though. Even through the dulled sensations of his altered, r
eassembled body he could feel the void where his power should be. It would be
at least two weeks, probably more, before it all came back. If it all came bac
k. What he had done in the flashing of that instant in the lodge had drained m
ore from him than any act of magic ever had in his life.
He was alive though, and he had just shattered the three most dangerous famili
es left in the Eastern Palm. Even more, he had the middle Sandreni son here no
w as evidence, public proof of the conspiracy for the days to come. The perver
t who was said to relish pain. Alberico allowed himself a tiny smile within th
e recesses of his hood.
It was all going to be done by law, and openly, as had been his practice almos
t from the day he'd taken power here. No unrest born of arbitrary exercise of
might would be permitted to rear its dangerous head. They might hate him, of c
ourse they would hate him, but not one citizen of his four provinces would be
able to doubt the justice or deny the legitimacy of his response to this Sandr
eni plot.
Or miss the point of how comprehensive that response was about to be.
With the prudent caution that was the truest wellspring of his character, Albe
rico of Barbadior began thinking through his actions of the next hours and day
s. The high gods of the Empire knew this far peninsula was a place of constant
danger and needed stern governing, but the gods, who were not blind, could se
e that he knew how to give it what was needful. And it was growing more and mo
re possible that the Emperor's advisers back home, who were no more sightless
than the gods, would see the same things.
And the Emperor was old.
Alberico withdrew his thoughts from these familiar, too seductive channels. He
made himself focus on detail again; detail was everything in matters such as
this. The neat steps of his planning clicked into place like beads on a djarra
string as he rode. Drily, precisely, he assembled the orders he would give. T
he only commands that caused him an inward flicker of emotion were the ones co
ncerning Tomasso bar Sandre. These, at least, did not have to be made public a
nd they would not be. Only the confession and its revealing details needed to
be known outside his palace walls. Whatever took place in certain rooms underg
round could be extremely private indeed. He surprised himself a little with th
e anticipation he felt.
At one point he remembered that he'd wanted the hunting lodge torched when the
y left. Smoothly he adjusted his thinking on that. Let the lesser Sandreni and
their servants find the dead when they came at dawn. Let them wonder and fear
. The doubt would only last a little while.
Then he would cause everything to be made extremely clear.

Chapter 5
“OH,   MORIAN,"   ALESSAN   WHISPERED,   WISTFUL   REGRET   INfusing his voic
e. "I could have sent him to your judgment even now. A child could have put an
arrow in his eye from here."
Not this child, Devin thought ruefully, gauging the distance and the light fro
m where they were hidden among the trees north of the ribbon of road the Barba
dians had just ridden along. He looked with even more respect than before at A
lessan and the crossbow he'd picked up from a cache they'd looped past on the
way here.
"She will claim him when she is ready," Baerd said prosaically. "And you are t
he one who has spent his life saying that it will be to no good if either one
of them dies too soon."
Alessan grunted. "Did I shoot?" he asked pointedly.
Baerd's teeth flashed briefly in the moonlight. "I would have stopped you in a
ny case."
Alessan swore succinctly. Then, a moment later, relaxed into quiet amusement.
The two men had a manner with each other that spoke to long familiarity. Catri
ana, Devin saw, had not smiled. Certainly not at him. On the other hand, he re
minded himself, he was supposed to be the one who was angry. The present circu
mstances made it a little hard though. He felt anxious and proud and excited,
all at once.
He was also the only one of the four of them who hadn't noticed Tomasso, bound
at wrist and ankle to his horse.
"We'd better check the lodge," Baerd said as the transient mood slipped away.
"Then I think we will have to travel very fast. Sandre's son will name you and
the boy."
"We had better have a talk about the boy first," Catriana said in a tone that
made it suddenly very easy for Devin to reclaim his anger.
"The boy?" he repeated, raising his eyebrows. "I think you have evidence to th
e contrary." He let his gaze rest coldly on hers, and was rewarded to see her
flush and turn away. Briefly rewarded.
"Unworthy, Devin," Alessan said. "I hope not to hear that note from you again.
Catriana violated all I know of her nature in doing what she did this morning
. If you are intelligent enough to have come here you will be more than intell
igent enough to now understand why she did it. You might suspend your own prid
e long enough to think about how she is feeling."
It was mildly said, but Devin felt as if he had just been punched in the stoma
ch. Swallowing awkwardly, he looked from Alessan back to Catriana, but her gaz
e was fixed on the stars, away from and above them all. Finally, shamed, he lo
oked down at the darkened forest floor. He felt fourteen years old again.
"I don't particularly appreciate that, Alessan," he heard Catriana saying cold
ly. "I fight my own wars. You know it."
"Not to mention," Baerd added casually, "the dazzling inappro-priateness of yo
ur chastising anyone alive for having too much pride."
Alessan chose to ignore that. To Catriana he said, "Bright star of Eanna, do y
ou think I don't know how you can fight? This is different though. What happen
ed this morning cannot be allowed to matter. I can't have this becoming a batt
le between you if Devin is to be one of us."
"If he what?" Catriana wheeled on him. "Are you mad? Is it the music? Because
he can sing? Why should someone from Asoli possibly be—"
"Hold peace!" Alessan said sharply. Catriana fell abruptly silent. Not having
any good idea where to look or what to feel, Devin continued to simulate an in
tense interest in the loamy forest soil beneath his feet. His mind and heart w
ere whirling with confusion.
Alessan's voice was gentler when he resumed. "Catriana, what happened this mor
ning was not his fault either. You are not to blame him. You did what you felt
you had to do and it did not succeed. He cannot be blamed or cursed for follo
wing you as innocently as he did. If you must, curse me for not stopping him a
s he went through the door. I could have."
"Why didn't you then?" Baerd asked.
Devin remembered Alessan looking at him as he'd paused in the archway of that
inner door that had seemed a gateway to a land of dreaming.
"Yes, why?" he asked awkwardly, looking up. "Why did you let me follow?"
The moonlight was purely blue now. Vidomni was over west behind the tops of th
e trees. Only Ilarion was overhead among the stars, making the night strange w
ith her shining. Ghostlight, the country folk called it when the blue moon rod
e alone.
Alessan had the light behind him so his eyes were hidden. For a moment the onl
y sounds were the night noises of the forest: rustle of leaf in breeze, of gra
ss, the dry crackle of the woodland floor, quick flap of wings to a branch nea
r by. Somewhere north of them a small animal cried out and another answered it
.
Alessan said: "Because I knew the tune his father taught him as a child and I
know who his father is and he isn't from Asoli. Catriana, my dear, it isn't ju
st the music, whatever you may think of my own weaknesses. He is one of us, my
darling. Baerd, will you test him?"
On the most conscious, rational level, Devin understood almost none of this. N
onetheless he felt himself beginning to grow cold even as Alessan spoke. He ha
d a swooping sense, like the descent of a hunting bird, that he had come to wh
ere Morian's portal had led him, here in the shadows of this wood under the wa
xing blue moon.
Nor was he made easier when he turned to Baerd and saw the stricken look on th
e face of the other man. Even by the distorting moonlight he could see how pal
e Baerd had become.
"Alessan . . ." Baerd began, his voice roughened.
"You are dearer to me than anyone alive," Alessan said, calm and grave. "You h
ave been more than a brother to me. I would not hurt you for the world, and es
pecially not in this. Never in this. I would not ask unless I was sure. Test h
im, Baerd."
Still Baerd hesitated, which made Devin's own anxiety grow; he understood less
and less of what was happening. Only that it seemed to matter to the others,
a great deal.
For a long moment no one moved. Finally Baerd, walking carefully, as if holdin
g tightly to control of himself, took Devin by the arm and led him a dozen ste
ps further into the wood to a small clearing among a circle of trees.
Neatly he lowered himself to sit cross-legged on the ground. After a moment's
hesitation Devin did the same. There was nothing he could do but follow the le
ads he was being given; he had no idea where they were going. Not on the road
I'm on, he remembered Catriana saying in the palace that morning. He linked hi
s hands together to keep them steady; he felt cold, and it had little to do wi
th the chill of night.
He heard Alessan and Catriana following them but he didn't look back. For the
moment what was important was the enormous thing— whatever it was—that he co
uld see building in Baerd's eyes. The blond-haired man had appeared so effortl
essly competent until this moment and now, absurdly, he seemed to have become
terribly fragile. Someone who could be shattered with unsettling ease. Abruptl
y, and for the second time in that long day, Devin felt as if he were crossing
over into a country of dream, leaving behind the simple, denned boundaries of
the daylight world.
And in this mood, under the blue light of Ilarion, he heard Baerd begin the ta
le, so that it came to him that first time like a spell, something woven in wo
rds out of the lost spaces of his childhood. Which is what, in the end, it was
.
"In the year Alberico took Astibar," said Baerd, "while the provinces of Trege
a and Certando were each preparing to fight him alone, and before Ferraut had
fallen, Brandin, King of Ygrath came to this peninsula from the west. He saile
d his fleet into the Great Harbor of Chiara and he took the Island. He took it
easily, for the Grand Duke killed himself, seeing how many ships had come fro
m Ygrath. This much I suspect that you know."
His voice was low. Devin found himself leaning forward, straining to hear. A t
rialla was singing sweetly, sadly, from a branch behind him. Alessan and Catri
ana made no sound at all. Baerd went on.
"In that year the Peninsula of the Palm became a battleground in an enormous b
alancing game between Ygrath and the Empire of Barbadior. Neither thought it c
ould afford to give the other free rein here, halfway between the two of them.
Which is one of the reasons Brandin came. The other reason, as we learned aft
erward, had to do with his younger, most-beloved son, Stevan. Brandin of Ygrat
h sought to carve out a second realm for his child to rule. What he found was
something else."
The trialla was still singing. Baerd paused to listen, as if finding in its li
quescent voice, gentler even than the nightingale's, an echo to something in h
is own.
"The Chiarans, attempting to rally a resistance in the mountains, were massacr
ed on the slopes of Sangarios. Brandin took Asoli province soon after, and wor
d of his power ran before him. He was very strong in his sorcery, even stronge
r than Alberico, and though he had fewer soldiers than the Barbadians in the e
ast, his were more completely loyal and better trained. For where Alberico was
only a wealthy, ambitious minor lord of the Empire using hired mercenaries, B
randin ruled Ygrath and his were the picked soldiers of that realm. They moved
south through Corte almost effortlessly, defeating each province's army one b
y one, for none of us acted together in that year. Or after, naturally." Baerd
's voice wasn't quite detached enough for the irony he was trying for.
"From Corte, Brandin himself turned east with the smaller part of his army to
meet Alberico in Ferraut and pin him down there. He sent Stevan south to take
the last free province in the west and then cross over to join him in Ferraut
to meet the Barbadians in the battle that I think they all expected would shap
e the fate of the Palm.
"It was a mistake, though he could not really have known it then, eighteen yea
rs ago. Newly landed here, ignorant of the natures of the different provinces
in this peninsula. I suppose he wanted Stevan to have a taste of leadership on
his own. He gave him most of the army and his best commanders, relying on his
own sorcery to hold Alberico until the others joined him."
Baerd paused for a moment, his blue eyes focused inward. When he resumed, ther
e was a new timbre to his voice; it seemed to Devin to be carrying many differ
ent things, all of them old, and all of them sorrowful.
"At the line of the River Deisa," Baerd said, "a little more than halfway betw
een Certando and the sea at Corte, Stevan was met by the bitterest resistance
either of the invading armies was to find in the Palm. Led by their Prince—fo
r in their pride they had always named their ruler so—the people of that last
province in the west met the Ygrathens and held them, and beat them back from
the river with heavy losses on both sides.
"And Prince Valentin of that province . . . the province you know as Lower Cor
te, slew Stevan of Ygrath, Brandin's beloved son, on the bank of the river at
sunset after a bitter day of death."
Devin could almost taste the keenness of old grief in the words. He saw Baerd
glance over for the first time to where Alessan was standing. Neither man spok
e. Devin never took his own eyes away from Baerd. He concentrated as if his li
fe depended on his doing so, treating each word spoken as if it were a jeweled
mosaic piece to be set into the memory that was his own pride.
And right about then it seemed to Devin that a distant bell began to toll in s
ome recess of his mind. Ranging a warning. As might a village bell in a temple
of Adaon, summoning farmers urgently back from the fields. A far bell heard,
faint but clear, from over morning fields of waving yellow grain.
"Brandin knew what had happened immediately through his sorcery," Baerd said,
his voice like the rasp of a file. "He swept back south and west, leaving Albe
rico a free hand in Ferraut and Certando. He came down with the full weight of
his sorcery and his army and with the rage of a father whose son has been sla
in, and he met the remnant of his last foes where they had waited for him by t
he Deisa."
Once more Baerd looked over at Alessan. His face was bleak, ghostly in the moo
nlight. He said:
"Brandin annihilated them. He smashed them to pieces without mercy or respite.
Drove them helplessly before him back into their own country south of the Dei
sa and he burned every field and village through which he passed. He took no p
risoners. He had women slain in that first march, and children, which was not
a thing he'd done anywhere else. But nowhere else had his own child died. So m
any souls crossed over to Morian for the sake of the soul of Stevan of Ygrath.
His father overran that province in blood and fire. Before the summer was out
he had leveled all the glorious towers of the city in the foothills of the mo
untains—the one now called Stevanien. On the coast he smashed to rubble and s
and the walls and the harbor barriers of the royal city by the sea. And in the
battle by the river he took the Prince who had slain his son and later that y
ear had him tortured and mutilated and killed in Chiara."
Baerd's voice was a dry whisper now under the starlight and the light of the s
ingle moon. And with it there was still that bell warning of sorrows yet to co
me, tolling in Devin's mind, louder now. Baerd said:
"Brandin of Ygrath did something more than all of this. He gathered his magic,
the sorcerous power that he had, and he laid down a spell upon that land such
as had never even been conceived before. And with that spell he ... tore its
name away. He stripped that name utterly from the minds of every man and woman
who had not been born in that province. It was his deepest curse, his ultimat
e revenge. He made it as if we had never been. Our deeds, our history, our ver
y name. And then he called us Lower Corte, after the bitterest of our ancient
enemies among the provinces."
Behind him now Devin heard a sound and realized that Catriana was weeping. Bae
rd said, "Brandin made it come to pass that no one living could hear and then
remember the name of that land, or of its royal city by the sea or even of tha
t high, golden place of towers on the old road from the mountains. He broke us
and he ravaged us. He killed a generation, and then he stripped away our name
."
And those last words were not whispered or rasped into the autumn dark of Asti
bar. They were hurled forth as a denunciation, an indictment, to the trees and
the night and stars—the stars that had watched this thing come to pass.
The grief in that accusation clenched itself like a fist within Devin, more ti
ghtly than Baerd could ever have known. Than anyone could have known. For no o
ne since Marra had died really knew what memory meant to Devin d'Asoli: the wa
y in which it had come to be the touchstone of his soul.
Memory was talisman and ward for him, gateway and hearth. It was pride and lov
e, shelter from loss: for if something could be remembered it was not wholly l
ost. Not dead and gone forever. Marra could live; his dour, stern father hum a
cradle song to him. And because of this, because this was at the heart of wha
t Devin was, the old vengeance of Brandin of Ygrath smashed into him that nigh
t as if it had been newly wrought, pounding through to the vulnerable center o
f how Devin saw and dealt with the world, and it cut him like a fresh and kill
ing wound.
With an effort he forced himself to steadiness, willing the concentration that
would allow him to remember this. All of this. Which seemed to matter more th
an ever now. Especially now, with the echo of Baerd's last terrible words fadi
ng in the night. Devin looked at the blond-haired man with the leather bands a
cross his brow and about his neck, and he waited. He had been quick as a boy;
he was a clever man. He understood what was coming; it had fallen into place.

Older by far than he had been only an hour ago, Devin heard Alessan murmur fro
m behind him, "The cradle song I heard you playing was from that last province
, Devin. A song of the city of towers. No one not of that place could have lea
rned that tune in the way you told me you did. It is how I knew you as one of
us. It is why I did not stop you when you followed Catriana. I left it to Mori
an to see what might lie beyond that doorway."
Devin nodded, absorbing this. A moment later he said, as carefully as he could
, "If this is so, if I have properly understood you, then I should be one of t
he people who can still hear and remember the name that has been . . . otherwi
se taken away."
Alessan said, "It is so."
Devin discovered that his hands were shaking. He looked down at them, concentr
ating, but he could not make them stop.
He said, "Then this is something that has been stolen from me all my life. Wil
l you . . . give it back to me? Will you tell me the name of the land where I
was born?"
He was looking at Baerd by starlight, for Ilarion too was gone now, over west
beyond the trees. Alessan had said it was Baerd's to tell. Devin didn't know w
hy. In the darkness they heard the trialla one more time, a long, descending n
ote, and then Baerd spoke, and for the first time in his days Devin heard some
one say:
"Tigana."
Within him the bell he had been hearing, as if in a dream of unknown summer fi
elds, fell silent. And within that abrupt, absolute inner stillness a surge of
loss broke over him like an ocean wave. And after that wave came another, and
then a third—the one bearing love and the other a heart-deep pride. He felt
a strange light-headed dizzying sensation as of a summons rushing along the co
rridors of his blood.
Then he saw how Baerd was staring at him. Saw his face rigid and white, the fe
ar transparent even by starlight, and something else as well: bitterest thirst
—an aching, deprived hunger of the soul. And then Devin understood, and gave
to the other man the release he needed.
"Thank you," Devin said. He didn't seem to be trembling anymore. Around a diff
icult thickness in his throat he went on, for it was his turn now, his test:
"Tigana. Tigana. I was born in the province of Tigana. My name . . . my true n
ame is Devin di Tigana bar Garin."
Even as he spoke, something akin to glory blazed in Baerd's face. The fair-hai
red man squeezed his eyes tightly shut as if to hold that glory in, to keep it
from escaping into the dispersing dark, to clutch it fiercely to his need. De
vin heard Alessan draw an unsteady breath, and then, surprised, he felt Catria
na touch his shoulder and then withdraw her hand.
Baerd was lost in a place beyond speech. It was Alessan who said, "That is one
of the two names taken away, and the deepest. Tigana was our province and the
name of the royal city by the sea. The fairest city under Eanna's lights you
would have heard it named. Or perhaps, perhaps only the second most fair."
A thread of something that seemed to genuinely long to become laughter was in
his voice. Laughter and love together. For the first time Devin turned to look
up at him.
Alessan said, "If you were to have spoken with those from inland and south, in
the city where the River Sperion, descending from the mountain, begins its ru
n westward to find the sea, you would have heard it said that second way. For
we were always proud, and there was always rivalry between the two cities."
In the end, hard as he tried, his voice could only carry loss.
"You were born in that inland city, Devin, and so was I. We are children of th
at high valley and of the silver running of that mountain river. We were born
in Avalle. In Avalle of the Towers."
There was music in Devin's mind again, with that name, but this time it was di
fferent from the bells he'd heard before. This time it was a music that took h
im back a long way, all the way to his father and his childhood.
He said, "You do know the words then, don't you?"
"Of course I do," said Alessan gently.
"Please?" Devin asked.
But it was Catriana who answered him, in the voice a young mother might have u
sed, rocking her child to sleep on an evening long ago:
Springtime morning in Avalle And I don't care what the priests say: I'm going
down to the river today On a springtime morning in Avalle.
When I'm all grown up, come what may, I'll build a boat to carry me away And t
he river will take it to Tigana Bay And the sea even further from Avalle.
But wherever I wander, by night or by day, Where water runs swiftly or high tr
ees sway, My heart will carry me back and away To a dream of the towers of Ava
lle.
A dream of my home in Avalle.
The sweet sad words to the tune he'd always known drifted down to Devin, and w
ith them came something else. A sense of loss so deep it almost drowned the li
ght grace of Catriana's song. No breaking waves now, or trumpets along the blo
od: only the waters of longing. A longing for something taken away from him be
fore he'd even known it was his—taken so completely, so comprehensively he mi
ght have lived his whole life through without ever knowing it was gone.
And so Devin wept as Catriana sang. Small boys, young-looking for their age, l
earned very early in northern Asoli how risky it was to cry where someone migh
t see. But something too large for Devin to deal with had overtaken him in the
forest tonight.
If he understood properly what Alessan had just said, this song was one his mo
ther would have sung to him.
His mother whose life had been ripped away by Brandin of Ygrath. He bowed his
head, though not to shield the tears, and listened as Catriana finished that b
itter-sweet cradle song: a song of a child defying orders and authority, even
when young, who was self-reliant enough to want to build a ship alone and brav
e enough to want to sail it into the wideness of the world, never turning back
. Nor ever losing or forgetting the place where it all began.
A child very much as Devin saw himself.
Which was one of the reasons he wept. For he had been made to lose and forget
those towers, he'd been robbed of any dream he himself might ever have had of
Avalle. Or Tigana on its bay.
So his tears followed one another downward in darkness as he mourned his mothe
r and his home. And in the shadows of that wood not far from Astibar those two
griefs fused to each other in Devin and became welded in the forge of his hea
rt with what memory meant to him and the loss of memory: and out of that blazi
ng something took shape in Devin that was to change the running of his life li
ne from that night.
He dried his eyes on his sleeve and looked up. No one spoke. He saw that Baerd
was looking at him. Very deliberately Devin held up his left hand, the hand o
f the heart. Very carefully he folded his third and fourth fingers down so tha
t what showed was a simulacrum of the shape of the Peninsula of the Palm.
The position for taking an oath.
Baerd lifted his right hand and made the same gesture. They touched fingertips
together, Devin's small palm against the other man's larger, callused one.
Devin said, "If you will have me I am with you. In the name of my mother who d
ied in that war I swear I will not break faith with you."
"Nor I with you," said Baerd. "In the name of Tigana gone." There was a rustli
ng as Alessan sank to his knees beside them. "Devin, I should be cautioning yo
u," he said soberly. "This is not a thing in which to move too fast. You can b
e one with our cause without having to break your life apart to come with us."

"He has no choice," Catriana murmured, moving nearer on the other side. "Tomas
so bar Sandre will name you both to the torturers tonight or tomorrow. I'm afr
aid the singing career of Devin d'Asoli may be over just as it truly begins."
She looked down on the three men, her eyes unreadable in the darkness.
"It is over," Devin said quietly. "It ended when I learned my name." Catriana'
s expression did not change; he had no idea what she was thinking.
"Very well," said Alessan. He held up his own left hand, two fingers down. Dev
in met it with his right. Alessan hesitated. "An oath in your mother's name is
stronger for me than you could have guessed," he said.
"You knew her?"
"We both did," Baerd said quietly. "She was ten years older than us, but every
adolescent boy in Tigana was a little in love with Mi-caela. And most of the
grown men too, I think."
Another new name, and all the hurt that came with it. Devin's father had never
spoken it. His sons had never even known their mother's name. There were more
avenues to sorrow in this night than Devin could have imagined.
"We all envied and admired your father more than I can tell you," Alessan adde
d. "Though I was pleased that an Avalle man won her in the end. I can remember
when you were born, Devin. My father sent a gift to your naming day. I don't
remember what it was."
"You admired my father?" Devin said, stunned.
Alessan heard that and his voice changed. "Do not judge him by what he became.
You only knew him after Brandin smashed a whole generation and their world. E
nding their lives or blighting their souls. Your mother was dead, Avalle falle
n, Tigana gone. He had fought and survived both battles by the Deisa." Above t
hem Catriana made a small sound.
"I never knew," Devin protested. "He never told us any of that." There was a n
ew ache inside him. So many avenues.
"Few of the survivors spoke of those days," Baerd said.
"Neither of my parents did," said Catriana awkwardly. "They took us as far awa
y as they could, to a fishing village here in Astibar down the coast from Ardi
n, and never spoke a word of any of this."
"To shield you," Alessan said gently. His palm was still touching Devin's. It
was smaller than Baerd's. "A great many of the parents who managed to survive
fled so that their children might have a chance at a life unmarred by the oppr
ession and the stigma that bore down—that still bear down—upon Tigana. Or Lo
wer Corte as we must name it now."
"They ran away," said Devin stubbornly. He felt cheated, deprived, betrayed.
Alessan shook his head. "Devin, think. Don't judge yet: think. Do you really i
magine you learned that tune by chance? Your father chose not to burden you or
your brothers with the danger of your heritage, but he set a stamp upon you—
a tune, wordless for safety— and he sent you out into the world with somethin
g that would reveal you, unmistakably, to anyone from Tigana, but to no one el
se. I do not think it was chance. No more than Catriana's mother giving her da
ughter a ring that marked her to anyone born where she was born."
Devin glanced back. Catriana held out her hand for him to see. It was dark, bu
t his eyes had adjusted to that, and he could make out a strange, twining shap
e upon the ring: a man, half human, half creature of the sea. He swallowed.
"Will you tell me of him?" he asked, turning back to Alessan. "Of my father?"

Of stolid, dour Garin, grim farmer in a wet grey land. Who had, it now appeare
d, come from bright Avalle of the towers in the southern highlands of Tigana a
nd who had, in his youth, wooed and won a woman beloved of all who saw her. Wh
o had fought and lived through two terrible battles by a river and who had—if
Alessan was right in his last conjecture—very deliberately sent out into the
world his one quick, imaginative child capable of finding what he seemed to h
ave found tonight.
Who had also, Devin abruptly realized, almost certainly lied when he said he'd
forgotten the words to the cradle song. It was all suddenly very hard.
"I will tell you what I know of him, and gladly," Alessan said.
"But not tonight, for Catriana is right and we must get ourselves away before
dawn. Right now I will swear faith with you as Baerd has done. I accept your o
ath. You have mine. You are as kin to me from now until the ending of my days.
"
Devin turned to look up at Catriana. "Will you accept me?"
She tossed her hair. "I don't have much choice, do I?" she said carelessly. "Y
ou seem to have entangled yourself rather thoroughly here." She lowered her le
ft hand though as she spoke, two fingers curled. Her fingers met his own with
a light, cool touch.
"Be welcome," she said. "I swear I will keep faith with you, Devin di Tigana."

"And I with you. I'm sorry about this morning," Devin offered.
Her hand withdrew and her eyes flashed; even by starlight he could see it. "Oh
yes," she said sardonically, "I'm sure you are. It was very clear, all along,
how regrettable you found the experience!"
Alessan snorted with amusement. "Catriana, my darling," he said, "I just forba
de him to mention any details of what happened. How do I enforce that if you b
ring them up yourself?"
Without the faintest trace of a smile Catriana said, "I am the aggrieved party
here, Alessan. You don't enforce anything on me. The rules are not the same."

Baerd chuckled suddenly. "The rules," he said, "have not been the same since y
ou joined us. Why indeed should this be any differ-ent?"
Catriana tossed her head again but did not deign to reply.
The three men stood up. Devin flexed his knees to relieve the stiffness of sit
ting so long in one position.
"Ferraut or Tregea?" Baerd asked. "Which border?"
"Ferraut," Alessan said. "They'll have me placed as Tregean as soon as Tomasso
talks—poor man. If I'd been thinking clearly I would have shot him as they r
ode by."
"Oh, very clear thinking, that," Baerd retorted. "With twenty soldiers surroun
ding him. You would have had us all in chains in Astibar by now."
"You would have deflected my arrow," Alessan said wryly.
"Is there a chance he won't speak?" Devin interjected awkwardly. "I'm thinking
about Menico, you see. If I'm named . . ."
Alessan shook his head. "Everyone talks under torture," he said soberly. "Espe
cially if sorcery is involved. I'm thinking about Menico too, but there isn't
anything we can do about it, Devin. It is one of the realities of the life we
live. There are people put at risk by almost everything we do. I wish," he add
ed, "that I knew what had happened in that lodge."
"You wanted to check it," Catriana reminded him. "Can we afford the time?"
"I did, and yes, I think we can," said Alessan crisply. "There remains a piece
missing in all of this. I still don't know how Sandre d'Astibar could have ex
pected me to be the—"
He stopped there. Except for the drone of the cicadas and the rustling leaves
it was very quiet in the woods. The trialla had gone. Alessan abruptly raised
one hand and pushed it roughly through his hair. He shook his head.
"Do you know," he said to Baerd, in what was almost a conversational tone, "ho
w much of a fool I can be at times? It was in the palm of my hand all along!"
His voice changed. "Come on—and pray we are not too late!"
The fires had both died down in the Sandreni lodge. Only the stars shone above
the clearing in the woods. The cluster of Eanna's Diadem was well over west,
following the moons. A nightingale was singing, as if in answer to the trialla
of before, as the four of them approached. In the doorway Alessan hesitated f
or a moment then shrugged his shoulders in a gesture Devin already recognized.
Then he pushed open the door and walked through.
By the red glow of the embers they looked—with eyes accustomed by now to dark
ness—on the carnage within.
The coffin still rested on its trestles, although splintered and knocked awry.
Around it though, lay dead men who had been alive when they left this room. T
he two younger Sandreni. Nievole, a quiver of arrows in his throat and chest.
The body of Scalvaia d'Astibar.
Then Devin made out Scalvaia's severed head in a black puddle of blood a terri
ble distance away and he fought to control the lurch of sickness in his gorge.

"Oh, Morian," Alessan whispered. "Oh, Lady of the Dead, be gentle to them in y
our Halls. They died dreaming of freedom and before their time."
"Three of them did," came a harsh, desiccated voice from deep in one of the ar
mchairs. "The fourth should have been strangled at birth."
Devin jumped half a foot, his heart hammering with shock.
The speaker rose and stood beside the chair, facing them. He was entirely hidd
en in shadow. "I thought you would come back," he said.
The sixth man, Devin realized, struggling to understand, straining to make out
the tall, gaunt form by the faint glow of the embers.
Alessan seemed quite unruffled. "I'm sorry I kept you waiting then," he said.
"It took me too long to riddle this through. Will you allow me to express my s
orrow for what has happened?" He paused. "And my respect for you, my lord Sand
re."
Devin's jaw dropped open as if unhinged. He snapped it shut so hard he hurt hi
s teeth; he hoped no one had seen. Events were moving far too fast for him.
"I will accept the first," said the gaunt figure in front of them. "I do not d
eserve your respect though, nor that of anyone else. Once perhaps; not anymore
. You are speaking to an old vain fool—exactly as the Barbadian named me. A m
an who spent too many years alone, tangled in his own spun webs. You were righ
t in everything you said before about carelessness. It has cost me three sons
tonight. Within a month, less probably, the Sandreni will be no more."
The voice was dry and dispassionate, objectively damning, devoid of self-pity.
The tone of a judge in some dark hall of final adjudication.
"What happened?" Alessan asked quietly.
"The boy was a traitor." Flat, uninflected, final.
"Oh, my lord," Baerd exclaimed. "Family?"
"My grandson. Gianno's boy."
"The his soul is cursed," Baerd said, quiet and fierce. "He is in Morian's cus
tody now, and she will know how to deal with him. May he be trammeled in darkn
ess until the end of time."
The old man seemed not to have even heard. "Taeri killed him," he murmured, wo
nderingly. "I had not thought he was brave enough, or so quick. Then he stabbe
d himself, to deny them the pleasure of whatever they might have learned of hi
m. I had not thought he was so brave," he repeated absently.
Through the thick shadows Devin looked at the two bodies by the smaller fire.
Uncle and nephew lay so close to each other they seemed almost intertwined on
the far side of the coffin. The empty coffin.
"You said you waited for us," Alessan murmured. "Will you tell me why?"
"For the same reason you came back." Sandre moved for the first time, stiffly
making his way to the larger fire. He seized a small log and threw it on the g
uttering flame. A shower of sparks flew up. He nursed it, poking with the iron
until a tongue of flame licked free of the ash bed.
The Duke turned and now Devin could see his white hair and beard, and the bony
hollows of his cheeks. His eyes were set deep in their sockets, but they glea
med with a cold defiance.
"I am here," Sandre said, "and you are here because it goes on. It goes on wha
tever happens, whoever dies. While there is breath to be drawn and a heart wit
h which to hate. My quest and your own. Until we die they go on."
"You were listening, then," said Alessan. "From in the coffin. You heard what
I said?"
"The drug had worn off by sundown. I was awake before we reached the lodge. I
heard everything you said and a great deal of what you chose not to say," the
Duke replied, straightening, a chilly hauteur in his voice. "I heard what you
named yourself, and what you chose not to tell them. But I know who you are."

He took a step towards Alessan. He raised a gnarled hand and pointed it straig
ht at him.
"I know exactly who you are, Alessan bar Valentin, Prince of Tigana!"
It was too much. Devin's brain simply gave up trying to understand. Too many p
ieces of information were coming at him from too many different directions, co
ntradicting each other ferociously. He felt dizzy, overwhelmed. He was in a ro
om where only a little while ago he had stood among a number of men. Now four
of them were dead, with a more brutal violence than he had ever thought to com
e upon. At the same time, the one man he'd known to be dead—the man whose mou
rning rites he had sung that very morning—was the only man of Astibar left al
ive in this lodge.
If he was of Astibar!
For if he was, how could he have just spoken the name of Tigana, given what De
vin had just learned in the wood? How could he have known that Alessan was—an
d this, too, Devin fought to assimilate—a Prince? The son of that Valentin wh
o had slain Stevan of Ygrath and so brought Brandin's vengeance down upon them
all.
Devin simply stopped trying to put it all together. He set himself to listen a
nd look—to absorb as much as he could into the memory that had never failed h
im yet—and to let understanding come after, when he had time to think.
So resolved, he heard Alessan say, after a blank silence more than long enough
to reveal the degree of his own surprise and wonder: "Now I understand. Final
ly I understand. My lord, I thought you always a giant among men. From the fir
st time I saw you at my first Triad Games twenty-three years ago. You are even
more than I took you for. How did you stay alive? How have you hidden it from
the two of them all these years?"
"Hidden what?" It was Catriana, her voice so angry and bewildered it immediate
ly made Devin feel better: he wasn't the only one desperately treading water h
ere.
"He is a wizard," Baerd said flatly.
There was another silence. Then, "The wizards of the Palm are immune to spells
not directed specifically at them," Alessan added. "This is true of all magic
-users, wherever they come from, however they find access to their power. For
this reason, among others, Brandin and Alberico have been hunting down and kil
ling wizards since they came to this peninsula."
"And they have been succeeding because being a wizard has— alas!—nothing to
do with wisdom or even simple common sense," Sandre d'Astibar said in a corros
ive voice. He turned and jabbed viciously at the fire with the iron poker. The
blaze caught fully this time and roared into red light.
"I survived," said the Duke, "simply because no one knew. It involved nothing
more complex than that. I used my power perhaps five times in all the years of
my reign—and always cloaked under someone else's magic. And I have done noth
ing with magic, not a flicker, since the sorcerers arrived. I didn't even use
it to feign my death. Their power is stronger than ours. Far stronger. It was
clear from the time each of them came. Magic was never as much a part of the P
alm as it was elsewhere. We knew this. All the wizards knew this. You would ha
ve thought they would apply their brains to that knowledge, would you not? Wha
t good is a finding spell, or a fledgling mental arrow if it leads one straigh
t to a Barbadian death-wheel in the sun?" There was an acid, mocking bitternes
s in the old Duke's voice.
"Or one of Brandin's," Alessan murmured.
"Or Brandin's," Sandre echoed. "It is the one thing those two carrion birds ha
ve agreed upon—other than the dividing line running down the Palm—that their
s shall be the only magic in this land."
"And it is," said Alessan, "or so nearly so as to be the same thing. I have be
en searching for a wizard for a dozen years or more."
"Alessan!" Baerd said quickly.
"Why?" the Duke asked in the same moment.
"Alessan!" Baerd repeated, more urgently.
The man Devin had just learned to be the Prince of Tigana looked over at his f
riend and shook his head. "Not this one, Baerd," he said cryptically. "Not San
dre d'Astibar."
He turned back to the Duke and hesitated, choosing his words. Then, with an un
mistakable pride, he said, "You will have heard the legend. It happens to be t
rue. The line of the Princes of Tigana, all those in direct descent, can bind
a wizard to them unto death."
For the first time a gleam of curiosity, of an actual interest in something ap
peared in Sandre's hooded eyes. "I do know that story. The only wizard who eve
r guessed what I was after I came into my own magic warned me once to be wary
of the Princes of Tigana. He was an old man, and doddering by then. I remember
laughing. You actually claim that what he said was true?"
"It was. I am certain it still is. I have had no chance to test it though. It
is our primal story: Tigana is the chosen province of Adaon of the Waves. The
first of our Princes, Rahal, being born of the god by that Micaela whom we nam
e as mortal mother of us all. And the line of the Princes has never been broke
n."
Devin felt a complex stir of emotions working within himself. He didn't even t
ry to enumerate how many things were tangling themselves in his heart. Micaela
. He listened and watched, and set himself to remember.
And he heard Sandre d'Astibar laugh.
"I know that story too," the Duke said derisively. "That hoary, enfeebled excu
se for Tiganese arrogance. Princes of Tigana! Not Dukes, oh no. Princes/ Desce
nded of the god!" He thrust the poker toward Alessan. "You will stand here ton
ight, now, among the stinking reality of the Tyrants and of these dead men and
the world of the Palm today and spew that old lie at me? You will do that?"
"It is truth," said Alessan quietly, not moving. "It is why we are what we are
. It would have been a slight to the god for his descendants to claim a lesser
title. The gift of Adaon to his mortal son could not be immortality—that, Ea
nna and Morian forbade. But the god granted a binding power over the Palm's ow
n magic to his son, and to the sons and daughters of his son while a Prince or
a Princess of Tigana lived in that direct line. If you doubt me and would put
it to the test I will do as Baerd would have had me do and bind you with my h
and upon your brow, my lord Duke. The old tale is not to be lightly dismissed,
Sandre d'Astibar. If we are proud it is because we have reason to be."
"Not any more," the Duke said mockingly. "Not since Brandin came!"
Alessan's face twisted. He opened his mouth and closed it.
"How dare you!" Catriana snapped. Bravely, Devin thought.
Prince and Duke ignored her, rigidly intent on each other. San-dre's sardonic
amusement gradually receded into the deep lines etched in his face. The bitter
ness remained, in eyes and stance and the pinched line of his mouth.
Alessan said, "I had not expected that from you. Under all the circumstances."

"You are in no position to have any idea what to expect from me," the Duke rep
lied, very low. "Under all the circumstances."
"Shall we part company now then?"
For a long moment something lay balanced in the air between them, a process of
weighing and resolution, complicated immeasurably by death and grief and rage
and the stiff, reflexive pride of both men. Devin, responding with his nerve-
endings to the tension, found that he was holding his breath.
"I would prefer not," said Sandre d'Astibar finally. "Not like this," he added
, as Devin drew breath again. "Will you accept an apology from one who is sunk
en as low as he has ever been?"
"I will," said Alessan simply. "And I would seek your counsel before we must,
indeed, part ways for a time. Your middle son was taken alive. He will name me
and Devin both tomorrow morning if not tonight."
"Not tonight," the Duke said, almost absently. "Alberico apprehends no danger
anymore. He will also be quite seriously debilitated by what happened here. He
will leave Tomasso until a time when he can enjoy what happens. When he is in
a mood to ... play."
"Tonight, tomorrow," said Baerd, his blunt voice jarring the mood. "It makes l
ittle difference. He will talk. We must be away before he does."
"Perhaps, perhaps not," Sandre murmured in the same strangely detached voice.
He looked at the four dead men on the floor. "I wish I knew exactly what happe
ned," he said. "Inside the coffin I could see nothing, but I can tell you that
Alberico used a magic here tonight so strong it is still pulsating. And he us
ed it to save his own life. Scalvaia did something, I don't know what, but he
came very near." He looked
at Alessan. "Near to giving Brandin of Ygrath dominion over the whole peninsul
a."
"You heard that?" Alessan said. "You agree with me?"
"I think I always knew it to be true, and I know I succeeded in denying it wit
hin myself. I was so focused on my own enemy here in Astibar. I needed to hear
it said, but once will be enough. Yes, I agree with you. They must be taken d
own together."
Alessan nodded, and some of his own rigidly controlled tension seemed to ease
away. He said, "There are those who still think otherwise. I value your agreem
ent."
He glanced over at Baerd, smiling a little wryly, then back to the Duke. "You
mentioned Alberico's use of magic as if it should have a meaning now for us. W
hat meaning then? We are ignorant in these matters."
"No shame. If you aren't a wizard you are meant to be ignorant." Sandre smiled
thinly. "The meaning is straightforward though: there is such an overflow of
magic spilling out from this room tonight that any paltry power of my own that
I invoke will be completely screened. I think I can ensure that your names ar
e not given to the torturers tomorrow."
"I see," said Alessan, nodding slowly. Devin did not see anything; he felt as
if he were churning along in the turbulent wake of information. "You can take
yourself through space? You can go in there and bring him out?" Alessan's eyes
were bright.
Sandre was shaking his head though. He held up his left hand, all five fingers
spread wide. "I never chopped two fingers in the wizard's final binding to th
e Palm. My magic is profoundly limited. I can't say I regret it—I would never
have been Duke of Astibar had I done so, given the prejudices and the laws go
verning wizards here—but it constrains what I am able to do. I can go in ther
e myself, yes, but I am not strong enough to bring someone else out. I can tak
e him something though."
"I see," said Alessan again, but in a different voice. There was a silence. He
pushed a hand through his disordered hair. "I am sorry," he said at length, s
oftly.
The Duke's face was expressionless. Above the white beard and the gaunt cheeks
his eyes gave nothing away at all. Behind him the fire crackled, sparks snapp
ing outward into the room.
"I have a condition," Sandre said.
"Which is?"
“That you allow me to come with you. I am now a dead man. Given to Morian. He
re in Astibar I can speak to no one, achieve nothing. If I am to preserve any
purpose now to the botched deception of my dying I must go with you. Prince of
Tigana, will you accept a feeble wizard in your entourage? A wizard come free
ly, not bound by some legend?"
For a long time Alessan was silent, looking at the other man, his hands quiet
at his sides. Then, unexpectedly, he grinned. It was like a flash of light, a
gleam of warmth cracking the ice in the room.
"How attached are you," he asked, in a quite unexpected tone of voice, "to you
r beard and your white hair?"
A second later Devin heard a strange sound. It took him a moment to recognize
that what he was hearing was the high, wheezing, genuine amusement of the Duke
of Astibar.
"Do with me what you will," Sandre said as his mirth subsided. "What will you
do—tinge my locks red as the maid's?"
Alessan shook his head. "I hope not. One of those manes is more than sufficien
t for a single company. I leave these matters to Baerd though. I leave a great
many things to Baerd."
"Then I shall place myself in his hands," Sandre said. He bowed gravely to the
yellow-haired man. Baerd, Devin saw, did not look entirely happy. Sandre saw
it too.
"I will not swear an oath," the Duke said to him. "I swore one vow when Alberi
co came, and it is the last vow I shall ever swear. I will say though that it
shall be my endeavor for the rest of my days to ensure that you do not regret
this. Will that content you?"
Slowly Baerd nodded. "It will."
Listening, Devin had an intuitive sense that this, too, was an exchange that m
attered, that neither man had spoken lightly, or less than the truth of his he
art. He glanced over just then at Catriana and discovered that she had been wa
tching him. She turned quickly away though, and did not look back.
Sandre said, "I think I had best set about doing what I have said I would. Bec
ause of the screening of Alberico's magic I must go and return from this room,
but I dare say you need not spend a night among the dead, however illustrious
they are. Have you a camp in the woods? Shall I find you there?"
The idea of magic was unsettling to Devin still, but Sandre's words had just g
iven him an idea, his first really clear thought since they'd entered the lodg
e.
"Are you sure you'll be able to stop your son from talking?" he asked diffiden
tly.
"Quite sure," Sandre replied briefly.
Devin's brow knit. "Well then, it seems to me none of us is in immediate dange
r. Except for you, my lord. You must not be seen."
"Until Baerd's done with him," Alessan interposed. "But go on."
Devin turned to him. "I'd like to say farewell to Menico and try to think of a
reason to give for leaving. I owe him a great deal. I don't want him to hate
me."
Alessan looked thoughtful. "He will hate you a little, Devin, even though he i
sn't that kind of man. What happened this morning is what a lifelong trouper l
ike Menico dreams about. And no explanation you come up with is going to alter
the fact that he needs you to make that dream a real thing now."
Devin swallowed. He hated what he was hearing, but he couldn't deny the truth
of it. A season or two of the fees Menico had said he could now charge would h
ave let the old campaigner buy the inn in Ferraut he'd talked about for so man
y years. The place where he'd always said he'd like to settle when the road gr
ew too stern for his bones. Where he could serve ale and wine and offer a bed
and a meal to old friends and new ones passing through on the long trails. Whe
re he could hear and retell the gossip of the day and swap the old stories he
loved. And where, on the cold winter nights, he could stake out a place by the
fire and lead whoever happened to be there into and out of all the songs he k
new.
Devin shoved his hands deep into the pockets of his breeches. He felt awkward
and sad. "I just don't like disappearing on him. All three of us at once. We'v
e got concerts tomorrow, too."
Alessan's mouth quirked. "I do seem to recall that," he said. "Two of them."
"Three," said Catriana unexpectedly.
"Three," Alessan agreed cheerfully. "And one the next day at the Woolguild Hal
l. I also have—it has just occurred to me—a substantial wager in The Paelion
that I expect to win."
Which drew an already predictable growl from Baerd. "Do you seriously think th
e Festival of Vines is going to blithely proceed after what has occurred tonig
ht? You want to go make music in Astibar as if nothing has happened? Music? I'
ve been down this road with you before, Alessan. I don't like it."
"Actually, I'm quite certain the Festival will go on." It was San-dre. "Alberi
co is cautious almost before he is anything else. I think tonight will redoubl
e that in him. He will allow the people their celebrations, let those from the
distrada scatter and go home, then slam down hard immediately after. But only
on the three families that were here, I suspect. It is, frankly, what I would
do myself."
"Taxes?" Alessan asked.
"Perhaps. He raised them after the Canziano poisoning, but that was different.
An actual assassination attempt in a public place. He didn't have much choice
. I think he'll narrow it this time—there will be enough bodies for his wheel
s among the three families here."
Devin found it unsettling how casually the Duke spoke of such things. This was
his kin they were discussing. His oldest son, grandchildren, nephews, nieces,
cousins—all to be fodder for Barbadian killing-wheels. Devin wondered if he
would ever grow as cynical as this. If what had begun tonight would harden him
to that degree. He tried to think of his brothers on a death-wheel in Asoli a
nd found his mind flinching away from the very image. Unobtrusively he made th
e warding sign against evil.
The truth was, he was upset just thinking about Menico, and that was merely a
matter of costing the man money, nothing more. People moved from troupe to tro
upe all the time. Or left to start their own companies. Or retired from the ro
ad into a business that offered them more security. There would be performers
who would be expecting him to go on his own after his success this morning. Th
at should have been a helpful thought, but it wasn't. Somehow Devin hated to m
ake it appear as if they were right.
Something else occurred to him. "Won't it look a bit odd, too, if we disappear
right after the mourning rites? Right after Alberico's unmasked a plot that w
as connected with them? We're sort of linked to the Sandreni now in a way. Sho
uld we draw attention to ourselves like that? It isn't as if our disappearance
won't be noticed."
He said it, for some reason, to Baerd. And was rewarded a moment later with a
brief, sober nod of acknowledgment.
"Now that cloth I will buy," Baerd said. "That does make sense, though I'm sor
ry to say it."
"A good deal of sense," Sandre agreed. Devin fidgeted a little as he came unde
r the scrutiny of those dark, sunken eyes. "The two of you"—the Duke gestured
at Devin and Catriana—"may yet redeem your generation for me."
This time Devin refused to look at the girl. Instead his glance went over to t
he corner where Sandre's grandson lay by the second, dying fire, his throat sl
ashed by a family blade.
Alessan broke the silence with a deliberate cough. "There is also," he said in
a curious tone, "another argument entirely. Only those who have spent as many
nights outdoors as I have can properly appreciate the depth—as it were—of m
y preference for a soft bed at night. In short," he concluded with a grin, "yo
ur eloquence has quite overcome me, Devin. Lead me back to Menico at the inn.
Even a bed shared with two syrenya-players who snore in marginal harmony is a
serious improvement over cold ground beside Baerd's relative silence."
Baerd favored him with a forbidding glare. One that Alessan appeared to weathe
r quite easily. "I will refrain," Baerd said darkly, "from a recitation of you
r own nocturnal habits. I will wait here alone for Duke Sandre to return. We'l
l have to burn this lodge tonight, for obvious reasons. There's a body that wi
ll otherwise be missing when the servants come back in the morning. We'll meet
the three of you by the cache three mornings from now, as early as you see fi
t to rise from your pillows. Assuming," he added with heavy sarcasm, "that sof
t city living doesn't prevent you from being able to find the cache."
"I'll find it if he gets lost," Catriana said.
Alessan looked from one to the other of them, his expression wounded. "That is
n't fair," he protested. "It is just the music. You both know that."
Devin hadn't. Alessan was still gazing at Baerd. "You know it is only the musi
c I'm going back for."
"Of course I know that," Baerd said softly. His expression changed. "I'm only
afraid that the music will kill us both one of these days."
Intercepting the look that passed between them then, Devin learned something n
ew and sudden and unexpected—on a night when he'd already learned more things
than he could easily handle—about the nature of bonding and about love.
"Go," said Baerd with a scowl, as Alessan still hesitated. Catriana was alread
y by the door. "We will meet you after the Festival. By the cache. Don't," he
added, "expect to recognize us."
Alessan grinned suddenly, and a moment later Baerd allowed himself to smile as
well. It changed his face a great deal. He didn't, Devin realized, smile very
often.
He was still thinking about that as he followed Alessan and Catri-ana out the
door and into the darkness of the wood again.

Chapter 6
IT HAPPENED, THE LONG PATH OF THAT DAY AND NIGHT DID not lead back to the inn
after all.
The three of them returned through the forest to the main road from Astibar to
Ardin town. They walked in silence along the road under the arch of the autum
n stars, cicadas loud in the woods on either side. Devin was glad of his woole
n overshirt; it was chilly now, there might be a frost tonight.
It was strange to be abroad in the darkness so late. When they were traveling
Menico was always careful to have his company quartered and settled by the din
ner hour. Even with the stern measures both Tyrants had taken against thieves
and brigands, the paths of the Palm were not often traveled by decent folk at
night.
Folk such as he himself had been, only this morning. He had been secure in his
niche and his calling, had even had—improbably enough —a triumph. He'd been
poised on the edge of a genuine success. And now he was walking a road in dar
kness having abandoned any such prospects or security, and having sworn an oat
h that marked him for a death-wheel, in Chiara if not here. Both places actual
ly, if Tomasso bar Sandre talked.
It was an odd, lonely feeling. He trusted the men he had joined— he even trus
ted the girl, if it came to that—but he didn't know them very well. Not like
he knew Menico or Eghano after so many years.
It occurred to him that the same dilemma applied to the cause he had just swor
n to make his own: he didn't know Tigana either, which was the whole point of
what Brandin of Ygrath had done with his sorcery. Devin was in the process of
changing his life for a story told under the moon, for a childhood song, an ev
ocation of his mother, something almost purely an abstraction for him. A name.

He was honest enough to wonder if he was doing this as much for the adventure
of it—for the glamor that Alessan and Baerd and the old Duke represented—as
for the depth of old pain and grief he'd learned about in the forest tonight.
He didn't know the answer. He didn't know how much Catriana fitted into his re
asons, how much his father did, or pride, or the sound of Baerd's voice speaki
ng his loss to the night.
The truth was that if Sandre d'Astibar could stop his son from talking, as he
had promised to do, then there was nothing to prevent Devin from carrying on e
xactly as he had for the past six years. From having the triumph and the rewar
ds that seemed to lie before him. He shook his head. It was astonishing in a w
ay, but that course, with Menico on the road, performing across the Palm—the
life he'd woken to this morning—seemed almost inconceivable to him now, as if
he'd already crossed to the other side of some tremendous divide. Devin wonde
red how often men did what they did, made the choices of their lives, for reas
ons that were clean and uncomplicated and easily understood as they were happe
ning.
He was jolted from his reverie by Alessan abruptly raising a hand in warning.
Without a word spoken the three of them slipped into the trees again beside th
e road. After a moment there was a flicker of torchlight to the west and Devin
heard the sound of a cart approaching. There were voices, male and female bot
h. Revelers returning home late, he guessed. There was a Festival going on. In
some ways it had begun to seem another irrelevance. They waited for the cart
to go by.
It did not. The horse was pulled up, with a soft slap and jingle of reins just
in front of where they were hiding. Someone jumped down, then they heard him
unlocking a chain on a gate.
"I really am hopelessly overindulgent," they heard him complain. "Every single
time I look at this excuse for a crest I am reminded that I should have had a
n artisan design it. There are limits, or there ought to be, to what a father
allows!"
Devin recognized the place and the voice in the same moment. An impulse, a str
iving back toward the ordinary and familiar after what had happened in the nig
ht, made him rise.
"Trust me," he whispered as Alessan threw him a glance. "This is a friend."
Then he stepped out into the road.
"I thought it was a handsome design," he said clearly. "Better than most artis
ans I know. And, to tell the truth, Rovigo, I remember you saying the same thi
ng to me yesterday afternoon in The Bird."
"I know that voice," Rovigo replied instantly. "I know that voice and I am exc
eedingly glad to hear it—even though you have just unmasked me before a shrew
ish wife and a daughter who has long been the bane of her father's unfortunate
existence. Devin d'Asoli, if I am not mistaken!"
He strode forward from the gate, seizing the cart lantern from its bracket. De
vin heard relieved laughter from the two women in the cart. Behind him, Alessa
n and then Catriana stepped into the road.
"You are not mistaken," Devin said. "May I introduce two of my company members
: Catriana d'Astibar and Alessan di Tregea. This is Rovigo, a merchant with wh
om I was sharing a bottle in elegant surroundings when Catriana arranged to ha
ve me assaulted and ejected yesterday."
"Ah!" Rovigo exclaimed, holding the lantern higher. "The sister!"
Catriana, lit by the widened cast of the flame, smiled demurely. "I needed to
talk to him," she said by way of explanation. "I didn't much want to go inside
that place."
"A wise and a providential woman," Rovigo approved, grinning. "Would that my c
lutch of daughters were half so intelligent. No one," he added, "should much w
ant to go inside The Bird unless they have a head-cold so virulent that it def
eats all sense of smell."
Alessan burst out laughing. "Well-met on a dark road, Master Rovigo—the more
so if you are the owner of a vessel called the Sea Maid."
Devin blinked in astonishment.
"I have indeed the great misfortune to own and sail that un-seaworthy excuse f
or a vessel," Rovigo admitted cheerfully. "How do you come to know it, friend?
"
Alessan seemed highly amused. "Because I was asked to seek you out if I could.
I have tidings for you from Ferraut town. From a somewhat portly, red-faced p
ersonage named Taccio."
"My esteemed factor in Ferraut!" Rovigo exclaimed. "Well met, indeed! By the g
od, where did you encounter him?"
"In another tavern, I am sorry to have to say. A tavern where I had been playi
ng music and he was . . . well, escaping retribution was his own phrase. We tw
o were, as it happened, the last patrons of the night. He wasn't in any great
hurry to return home, for what seemed to me prudent reasons, and we fell to ta
lking."
"It is never hard to fall to talking with Taccio," Rovigo assented.
Devin heard a giggle from the cart. It didn’t sound like the amusement of a p
onderous, unmarriageable daughter. He was beginning to take the measure of Rov
igo's attitude to his women. In the darkness he found himself grinning.
Alessan said, "The worthy Taccio explained his dilemma to me, and when I came
to mention that I had just joined the company of Menico di Ferraut and was bou
nd this way for the Festival he charged me to seek you out and carry verbal co
nfirmation of a letter he says he's had conveyed to you."
"Half a dozen letters," Rovigo groaned. "To it, then: your verbal confirmation
, friend Alessan."
"Good Taccio bade me tell you, and to swear it as true by the Triad's grace an
d the three fingers of the Palm"—Alessan's voice became a flawless parody of
a sententious stage messenger—"that did the new bed not arrive from Astibar b
efore the winter frosts, the Dragon that slumbers uneasily by his side would a
waken in wrath unimaginable and put a violent end to his life of care in your
esteemed service."
There was laughter and applause from the shadows of the cart. The mother, Devi
n decided, pursuing his earlier thought, didn't sound even remotely shrewish.

"Eanna and Adaon, who bless marriages together, forfend that such a thing shou
ld ever come to pass," Rovigo said piously. "The bed is ordered and it is made
and it is ready to be shipped immediately the Festival is over."
"Then the Dragon shall slumber at ease and Taccio be saved," Alessan intoned,
assuming the sonorous voice used for the "moral" at the end of a children's pu
ppet-show.
"Though why," came a mild, still-amused female voice from the cart, "all of yo
u should be so intimidated by poor Ingonida I honestly don't know. Rovigo, are
we bereft entirely of our manners tonight? Will we keep these people standing
in the cold and dark?"
"Absolutely not, my beloved," her husband exclaimed hastily. "Alix, it was onl
y the conjured vision of Ingonida in wrath that addled my brain." Devin found
that he couldn't stop grinning; even Catriana, he noticed, had relaxed her hab
itual expression of superior indifference.
"Were you going back to town?" Rovigo asked.
The first tricky moment—and Alessan left it to him. "We were," Devin said. "W
e'd taken a long walk to clear our heads and escape the noise, but were just a
bout ready to brave the city again."
"I imagine the three of you would have been besieged by admirers all night," R
ovigo said.
"We do seem to have achieved a certain notoriety," Alessan admitted.
"Well," said Rovigo earnestly, "all jesting aside, I could well understand if
you wanted to rejoin the celebrations—they were nowhere near their peak when
we left. It will go on all night, of course, but I confess I don't like leavin
g the younger ones alone too late, and my unfortunate oldest, Alais, suffers f
rom twitches and fainting spells when over-excited."
"How sad," said Alessan with a straight face.
"Father!" came a softly urgent protest from the cart.
"Rovigo, stop that at once or I shall empty a basin on you in your sleep," her
mother declared, though not, Devin judged, with any genuine anger.
"You see the way of things?" the merchant said, gesturing expressively with hi
s free hand. "I am hounded without respite even into my dreams. But, if you ar
e not entirely put off by the grievous stridency of my women and the prospect
of three more inside very nearly as unpleasant, you are all most welcome, most
humbly welcome to share a late repast and a quieter drink than you are likely
to find in Astibar tonight."
"And three beds if you care to honor us," Alix added. "We heard you play and s
ing this morning at the Duke's rites. Truly, it would be an honor if you joine
d us."
"You were in the palace?" Devin asked, surprised.
"Hardly," Rovigo murmured in a self-deprecating tone. "We were in the street o
utside among the crowd." He hesitated. "Sandre d'Astibar was a man I greatly h
onored and admired. The Sandreni lands are just east of my own small holding—
you have been walking by their woods even now. He was an easy-enough neighbor
to the very end. I wanted to hear his mourning sung . . . and when I learned t
hat my newest young friend's company had been selected to perform the rites, w
ell . . . Will you come in with us?"
This time Devin left it to Alessan.
Who said, still highly amused, his teeth flashing white in the darkness, "We c
ould not dream of refusing an offer so gracious. It will allow us to toast the
safe journey of Taccio's new bed and the restful slumbers of his Dragon!"
"Oh, poor Ingonida," said Alix from the cart, trying unsuccessfully not to lau
gh, "you are all so unfair!"
Inside, there was light and warmth and continuing laughter. There were also th
ree undeniably attractive young women whose names flew past Devin—amid scream
s and blushes—much too fast to be caught. The oldest of these three though—a
bout seventeen, he guessed—had a musical lilt to her voice and an exceptional
ly flirtatious glance.
Alais was different.
In the light of the hallway of her home the merchant's oldest daughter turned
out to be small and grave and slender. She had long, very straight black hair
and eyes of the mildest shade of blue Devin could remember seeing. Beside her,
Catriana's own blue gaze looked more challenging than ever and her tumbling r
ed hair resembled nothing so much as the mane of a lioness.
They were ushered by insistent female hands and voices into immensely comforta
ble chairs in a sitting-room furnished in shades of green and gold. A huge cou
ntry fire blazed on the hearth, repudiating the autumn chill. A large carpet i
n a design that was unmistakably Quileian, even to Devin's untutored eye, cove
red the floor. The seventeen-year-old—Selvena, it emerged—sank gracefully do
wn upon it at Devin's feet. She looked up at him and smiled. He received, and
chose to ignore, a quick, sardonic glance from Catriana as she took a seat -ne
arer to the fire. Alais was elsewhere for the moment, helping her mother.
Just then Rovigo reappeared, flushed and triumphant from some back room, carry
ing three bottles.
"I hope," he said, beaming down upon them, "that you all have a taste for Asti
bar's blue wine?"
And for Devin that simple question cast an entirely benevolent aura of fate ov
er his impulsive action in the darkness outside. He glanced over at Alessan, a
nd was rewarded with an odd smile that seemed to him to acknowledge many thing
s.
Rovigo quickly began uncorking and pouring the wine. "If any of my wretched fe
males are bothering you," he said over his shoulder, "feel free to swat them a
way like cats." A curl of blue smoke could be seen rising from each glass.
Selvena settled her gown more becomingly about her on the carpet, ignoring her
father's gibe with an ease that bespoke long familiarity with this sort of th
ing. Her mother—neat, trim, competent, a laughably far cry from Rovigo's desc
ription in The Bird—came in with Alais and an elderly household servant. In a
very short while a sideboard was covered with a remarkable variety of food.
Devin accepted a glass from Rovigo, savoring the icy-clean bouquet. He leaned
back in his chair and prepared to be extremely content for the next little whi
le. Selvena rose at a glance from her mother, but only to fill a plate of food
for Devin. She brought it back to him, smiling, and settled on the carpet aga
in, marginally nearer than before. Alais served Alessan and Catriana while the
two youngest daughters sank down on the floor by their father. He aimed a moc
k-ferocious cuff at each of them.
Devin doubted if he'd ever seen a man so obviously happy to be where he was. I
t must have shown in the amused irony of his glance, for Rovigo, catching the
look, shrugged.
"Daughters," he lamented, sorrowfully shaking his head.
" 'Ponderous cartwheels,' " Devin reminded him, looking pointedly at the merch
ant's wife. Rovigo winced. Alix, laughter-lines crinkling at her temples, had
overheard the exchange.
"He did it again, did he?" she said, tilting her head to one side. "Let me gue
ss: I was of elephantine proportions and formidably evil disposition, and the
four girls had scarcely enough good features among them to make up one passabl
y acceptable woman. Am I right?"
Laughing aloud, Devin turned to see Rovigo—not at all discomfited—beaming wi
th pride at his wife. "Exactly right," Devin said to Alix, "but I must say in
his defense that I've never heard anyone give such a description so happily."

He was rewarded with Alix's quick laughter and a wonderfully grave smile over
her shoulder from Alais, busy at the sideboard.
Rovigo raised his glass, moving it in small circles to make a pattern in the a
ir with the icy smoke. "Will you join me in drinking to the memory of our Duke
and to the glory of music? I don't believe in making idle toasts with blue wi
ne."
"Nor do I," Alessan said quietly. He lifted his own glass. "To memory," he sai
d very deliberately. "To Sandre d'Astibar. To music." Then he added something
else, under his breath, before sipping from the wine.
Devin drank, tasting, for only the third or fourth time in his life, the aston
ishingly rich, cold complexity of Astibar's blue wine. There was nothing like
it anywhere else in the Palm. And its price reflected that fact. He looked ove
r and saluted Rovigo with his glass.
"To all of you," Catriana said suddenly. "To kindness on a dark road." She smi
led—a smile without any edge or mockery to it. Devin was surprised, then deci
ded it was unfair for him to feel that way.
Not on the road I'm on, she'd said in the Sandreni Palace. And that was someth
ing he could understand now. For he too was on that road after all, despite wh
at she'd done to keep him from it. He tried to catch her eye but failed. She w
as talking to Alix, now seated beside her. Briefly reflective, Devin turned hi
s attention to his food.
A moment later Selvena touched his foot lightly. "Will you sing for us?" she a
sked with a delicious smile. She didn't move her hand. "Alais heard you, and m
y parents, but the rest of us have been here all day."
"Selvena!" Mother and older sister snapped the name together. Selvena flinched
as if struck but, Devin noticed, it was to her father that she turned, biting
her lip. He was looking at her soberly.
"Dear heart," he said, in a voice far removed from the raillery of before, "yo
u have a lesson to learn. Our friends make music for their livelihood. They ar
e our guests here tonight. One does not, light of my life, ask guests to work
in one's home." Selvena's eyes brimmed with tears. She lowered her head.
In the same serious tone Rovigo said to Devin, "Will you accept an apology? Sh
e meant it in good faith, I can assure you of that."
"I know she did," Devin protested, as Selvena sniffled softly at his feet. "Th
ere is no apology needed."
"Truly, none," Alessan added, setting his plate of food aside. "We make music
to live, indeed, but we also make music because doing so is most truly to live
. It is not work to play among friends, Rovigo."
Selvena wiped her eyes and looked up at him gratefully.
"I shall be happy to sing," Catriana said. She glanced briefly at Selvena. "Un
less of course it was only Devin you had in mind?"
Devin winced, even though the slash had not been directed at him. Selvena flin
ched again, badly flustered for the second time in as many minutes. Out of the
corner of his eye Devin saw an intriguing expression cross Alais's face.
Selvena began protesting earnestly that of course she'd meant all three of the
m. Alessan seemed amused by the entire exchange. Devin had a sudden intuition,
looking at him, that this relaxed, sociable man was at least as close to the
center of the Prince of Tigana as was the arrogantly precise figure he'd seen
in the forest cabin.
He escapes this way, he thought suddenly. And even as the idea entered his min
d he knew that it was true. He had heard the man play the "Lament for Adaon."

"Well," said Rovigo, smiling at Catriana, "if you are gracious enough to indul
ge a shameless child I blush to acknowledge as my own, it happens that I do ha
ve a set of Tregean pipes in the house—the Triad alone know why. I seem to re
member once having a doting father's fancy that one of these creatures might e
merge with a talent of some sort."
Alix, from several feet away, mimed a blow with a spoon at her husband. Unabas
hed, his good spirits restored, Rovigo sent the youngest girl off to fetch the
pipes while he set about refilling everyone's glass.
Devin caught Alais looking at him from the seat she'd taken next to the fire.
Reflexively he smiled at her. She didn't smile back, but her gaze, mild and se
rious, did not break away. He felt a small, unsettling skip to the rhythm of h
is heart.
As it turned out, after the meal was over he and Catriana sang for better than
an hour to Alessan's pipes. Part of the way through, as they began one of the
rousing old Certandan highland ballads, Rovigo left briefly and returned with
a linked pair of Senzian drums. Shyly at first, very softly, he joined in on
the refrain, proving as competent at that as at everything else Devin had seen
him do. Catriana favored him with a particularly dazzling smile. Rovigo neede
d no further encouragement to stay with them on the next song, and the next.
No man, Devin found himself thinking, should need more encouragement to do any
thing in the world than that look from those blue eyes. Not that Catriana had
ever favored him with anything remotely resembling such a glance. He found him
self feeling somewhat confused all of a sudden.
Someone—Alais evidently—had filled his glass a third time. He drank a little
more quickly than was good for him, given the legendary potency of blue wine,
and then he led the other three into the next number: the last one for the tw
o younger girls, Alix ruled, over protests.
He couldn't sing of Tigana, and he was certainly not about to sing of passion
or love, so he began the very old song of Eanna's making the stars and committ
ing the name of every single one of them to her
memory, so that nothing might ever be lost or forgotten in the deeps of space
or time.
It was the closest he could come to what the night had meant to him, to why, i
n the end, he had made the choice he had.
As he began it, he received a look from Alessan, thoughtful and knowing, and a
quick, enigmatic glance from Catriana as they joined with him. Rovigo's drums
fell silent this time as the merchant listened. Devin saw Alais, her black ha
ir backlit by the fire, watching him with grave concentration. He sang one who
le verse directly to her, then, in fidelity to the song, he sent his vision in
ward to where his purest music was always found, and he looked at no one at al
l as he sang to Eanna herself, a hymn to names and the naming of things.
Somewhere, part of the way through, he had a bright image in his mind of a blu
e-white star named Micaela aloft in a black night, and he let the keenness of
that carry him, high and soaring, up toward Catri-ana's harmony and then back
down softly to an end.
In the quiet of the mood so shaped, Selvena and the two younger girls went to
bed with surprising tranquility. A few moments later Alix rose as well, and so
, to Devin's disappointment, did Alais.
In the doorway she turned and looked at Catriana. "You must be very tired," Ro
vigo's daughter said. "If you like I can show you your room now. I hope you do
n't mind sharing with me. Selvena usually does, but she's in with the girls to
night."
Devin expected Catriana to demur, or worse, at this fairly transparent separat
ion of the women and the men. She surprised him again though, hesitating only
a second before rising. "I am tired, and I don't mind sharing at all," she sai
d. "It will remind me of home."
Devin, who had been smiling at the irony of the situation suddenly found the e
xpression less appropriate than he'd thought. Catriana had seen him grinning t
hough; he wished, abruptly, that she hadn't. She was sure to misunderstand. It
occurred to him, with a genuine sense of unreality, that they had made love t
ogether that morning.
For some time after the women had gone the three men sat in silence, each lost
in his own thoughts. Rovigo rose at length and refilled their glasses with th
e last of the wine. He put another log on the fire and watched until it caught
. With a sigh he sank back into his chair. Toying with his glass he looked fro
m one to the other of his guests.
It was Alessan who broke the silence though. "Devin's a friend," he said quiet
ly. "We can talk, Rovigo. Though I fear he's about to be extremely angry with
both of us."
Devin sat up abruptly and put aside his glass. Rovigo, a wry expression playin
g about his lips, glanced briefly over at him, and then returned Alessan's gaz
e tranquilly.
"I wondered," he said. "Though I suspected he might be with us now, given the
circumstances." Alessan was smiling too. They both turned to Devin.
Who felt himself going red. His brain raced frantically back over the events o
f the day before. He glared at Rovigo. "You didn't find me in The Bird by acci
dent. Alessan sent you. You had him follow me, didn't you?" he accused, turnin
g to the Prince.
The two men exchanged another glance before Alessan replied.
"I did," he admitted. "I had a certain suspicion that there would be funeral r
ites for Sandre d'Astibar coming up and that we might be asked to audition. I
couldn't afford to lose track of you, Devin."
"I'm afraid I was behind you most of the way down the Street of the Temples ye
sterday," Rovigo added. He had the grace to look embarrassed, Devin noted.
He was still furious though, and very confused. "You lied about The Bird then,
all that talk about going there whenever you came back from a journey."
"No, that part was true," Rovigo said. "Everything I said was true, Devin. Onc
e you were forced down to the waterfront you happened to end up in a place I k
now very well."
"And Catriana?" Devin pursued angrily. "What about her? How did she—"
"I paid a boy to run a message back to your inn when I saw that old Goro was l
etting you stay inside The Bird. Devin, don't be angry. There was a purpose to
all of this."
"There was," Alessan echoed. "You should understand some of it by now. The who
le reason Catriana and I were in Astibar with Men-ico's troupe was because of
what I expected to see happen with San-dre's death."
"Wait a minute!" Devin exclaimed. "Expected? How did you know he was going to
die?"
"Rovigo told me," Alessan said simply. He let a small silence register. "He ha
s been my contact in Astibar for nine years now. I formed the same impression
of him back then that you did yesterday, and about as quickly."
Devin, his mind reeling, looked over at the merchant, the casual friend he'd m
ade the day before. Who turned out to be not so casual at all. Rovigo put down
his glass.
"I feel the same way about Tyrants that you do," he said quietly. "Alberico he
re or Brandin of Ygrath ruling in Chiara and Corte and Asoli, and in that prov
ince Alessan comes from whose name I cannot hear or remember, hard as I might
try."
Devin swallowed. "And Duke Sandre?" he asked. "How did you know—?"
"I spied on them," Rovigo said calmly. "It wasn't hard. I used to monitor Toma
sso's comings and goings. They were wholly focused on Alberico, I was their ne
ighbor here in the distrada, it was easy enough to slip onto their land. I lea
rned of Tomasso's deception years ago, and —though I won't say it is a thing
I am proud of—last year I was outside their windows at the estate and at the
lodge on many different nights while they shaped the details of Sandre's death
."
Devin looked quickly over at Alessan. He opened his mouth to say something, th
en, without speaking, he closed it.
Alessan nodded. "Thank you," he said. He turned to Rovigo. "There are one or t
wo things here, as there have been before, that you are better off not knowing
, for your own safety and your family's. I think you know by now it isn't a ma
tter of trust, or any such thing."
"After nine years I think I do know that," Rovigo murmured. "What should I kno
w about what happened tonight?"
"Alberico arrived just after I joined Tomasso and the vigil-keepers in the lod
ge. Baerd and Catriana warned us and I had time to hide —with Devin, who had
made his way to the cabin on his own."
"On his own? How?" Rovigo asked sharply.
Devin lifted his head. "I have my own resources," he said with dignity. Out of
the corner of his eye he saw Alessan grin, and he suddenly felt ridiculous. S
heepishly he added, "I overhead the Sandreni talking upstairs between the two
sessions of the mourning rites."
Rovigo looked as if he had another question or three, but, with a glance at Al
essan, he held them in. Devin was grateful.
Alessan said, "When we went back to the cabin afterwards we found the vigil-ke
epers dead. Tomasso was taken. Baerd has remained behind to take care of a num
ber of things by the cabin tonight. He will burn it later."
"We passed the Barbadians as we left the city," Rovigo said quietly, absorbing
this. "I saw Tomasso bar Sandre with them. I feared for you, Alessan."
"With some cause," Alessan said drily. "There was an informer there. The boy,
Herado, Gianno's son was in the service of Alberico."
Rovigo's face registered shock. "Family? Morian damn him to darkness for that!
" he rasped harshly. "How could he do such a thing?"
Alessan gave his small characteristic shrug. "A great deal has broken down sin
ce the Tyrants came, would you not say?"
There was a silence as Rovigo fought to master his shock and rage. Devin cough
ed nervously and broke it: "Your own family," he asked. "Do they—"
"They know nothing of this," the merchant said, regaining his calm. "Neither A
lix nor any of the girls had ever seen Alessan or Catriana before tonight. I m
et Alessan and Baerd in Tregea town nine years ago and we discovered in the co
urse of a long night that we had certain dreams and certain enemies in common.
The told me something of what their purposes were, and I told them I was will
ing to assist in those pursuits as best I could without unduly endangering my
wife or daughters. I have tried to do that. I will continue to try. It is my h
ope to live long enough to be able to hear the oath Alessan offers when he dri
nks blue wine."
He spoke the last words quietly but with obvious passion. Devin looked at the
Prince, remembering the inaudible words he had murmured under his breath befor
e he drank.
Alessan gazed steadily at Rovigo. "There is one other thing you should know: D
evin is one of us in more than the obvious way. I learned that by accident yes
terday afternoon. He too was born in my own province before it fell. Which is
why he is here."
Rovigo said nothing.
"What is the oath?" Devin asked. And then, more diffidently, "Is it something
that I should know?"
"Not as anything that matters in the scheme of things. I only spoke a prayer o
f my own." Alessan's voice was careful and very clear. "I always do. I said: T
igana, let my memory of you be like a blade in my soul."
Devin closed his eyes. The words and the voice. No one spoke. Devin opened his
eyes and looked at Rovigo.
Whose brow was knotted in fierce, angry consternation.
"My friend, Devin should understand this," Alessan said to him gently. "It is
a part of the legacy he has taken on. What did you hear me say?"
Rovigo gestured with helpless frustration. "The same thing I heard the first t
ime this happened. That night nine years ago, when we switched to blue wine. I
heard you ask that the memory of something be a blade in you. In your soul. B
ut I didn't hear . . . I've lost the beginning again. The something."
"Tigana," Alessan said again. Tenderly, clear as chiming crystal.
But Devin saw Rovigo's expression grow even more baffled and dismayed. The mer
chant reached for his glass and drained it. "Will you . . . one more time?"
"Tigana," Devin said before Alessan could speak. To make this legacy, this gri
ef at the heart of things, more truly his own, as properly it was his own. For
the land was his or it had been, and its name was part of his own, and they w
ere both lost. Taken away.
"Let my memory of you be like a blade in my soul," he said, his voice falterin
g at the end though he tried hard to keep it as steady as Alessan's had been.

Wondering, disoriented, visibly distressed, Rovigo shook his head.
"And Brandin's magic is behind this?" he asked.
"It is," Alessan said flatly.
After a moment Rovigo sighed and leaned back in his chair. "I am sorry," he sa
id softly. "Forgive me, both of you. I should not have asked. I have opened a
wound."
"I was the one who asked," Devin said quickly.
"The wound is always open," said Alessan, a moment later.
There was an extraordinary compassion in Rovigo's face. It was difficult to re
alize that this was the same man who had been jesting about Senzian rustics as
husbands for his daughters. The merchant rose abruptly and became busy tendin
g to the fire again, though the blaze was doing perfectly well. While he did s
o Devin looked at Alessan. The other man met his gaze. They said nothing thoug
h. Alessan's eyebrows lifted a little, and he gave the small shrug Devin had c
ome to know.
"What do we do now, then?" asked Rovigo d'Astibar, returning to stand beside h
is chair. His color was high, perhaps from the fire. "I am as disturbed by thi
s as I was when we first met. I do not like magic. Especially this kind of mag
ic. It remains a matter of some . . . significance to me to be able to hear on
e day what I was just debarred from hearing."
Devin felt a rush of excitement run through him again: the other element to hi
s feelings this evening. His pique at having been deceived in The Bird was ent
irely gone. These two, and Baerd and the Duke, were men to be reckoned with, i
n every possible way, and they were shaping plans that might change the map of
the Palm, of the whole world. And he was here with them, he was one of them,
chasing a dream of freedom. He took a long drink of his blue wine.
Alessan's expression was troubled though. He looked, suddenly, as if he were b
urdened with a new and difficult weight. He leaned slowly back in his chair, h
is hand going through the tangle of his hair as he looked at Rovigo in silence
for a long time.
Turning from one man to the other, Devin felt abruptly lost again, his excitem
ent fading almost as quickly as it had come.
"Rovigo, have we not involved you enough already?" Alessan asked at length. "I
must admit this has become harder for me now that I have met your wife and da
ughters. This coming year may see a change in things, and I cannot even begin
to tell you how much more danger. Four men died in that cabin tonight, and I t
hink you know as well as I do how many will be death-wheeled in Astibar in the
weeks to come. It has been one thing for you to keep an ear open here and on
your travels, to quietly monitor Alberico's doings and Sandre's, for you and B
aerd and I to meet every so often and touch palms and talk, friend to friend.
But the shape of the tale is changing now, and I greatly fear to put you in da
nger."
Rovigo nodded. "I thought you might say something like that. I am grateful for
your concern. But Alessan, I made up my mind on this a long time ago. I ... w
ould not expect that freedom could be found or won without a price paid. You s
aid three days ago that the coming spring might mark a turning-point for all o
f us. If there are ways that I can help in the days to come you must tell me."
He hesitated, then: "One of the reasons I love my wife is that Alix would ech
o this were she with us and did she know."
Alessan's expression was still troubled. "But she isn't with us and she doesn'
t know," he said. "There have been reasons for that, and there will be more of
them after tonight. And your girls? How can I ask you to endanger them?"
"How can you decide for me, or them?" Rovigo replied softly, but without hesit
ation. "Where is our choice, our freedom, if you do that? I would obviously pr
efer not to do anything that will put them into actual danger, and I cannot af
ford to suspend my business entirely. But within these confines, is there no a
id I can offer that will make a difference?"
Finally understanding the source of Alessan's doubts, Devin kept grimly silent
. This was something to which he had attached no weight at all, while Alessan
had been wrestling with it all along. He felt chastened and sobered, and afrai
d now though not for himself.
There will be people put at risk by everything we do, the Prince had said in t
he forest, speaking of Menico. And now Devin was beginning to understand, pain
fully, the reality of that.
He didn't want these people hurt. In any way at all. His excitement quite gone
, Devin had driven home for him, for the first time, this one among the many a
ncillary sorrows that lay on the road he seemed to have found. He was brought
face-to-face with the distance that road imposed between them and, it now seem
ed, almost everyone they might meet. Even friends. Even people who might share
a part or all of their dream. He thought of Catriana in the palace again, and
he understood her even more now than he had an hour ago.
Watching, letting the growth of wisdom guide him into silence, Devin focused o
n Alessan's momentarily unguarded face and he saw him come hard to his decisio
n. He watched as the Prince took a deep, slow breath and so shouldered another
burden that was the price of his blood.
Alessan smiled, an odd, rueful smile. "Actually, there is," he said to Rovigo.
"There is something you can do now that will help." He hesitated, then, unexp
ectedly, the smile deepened and it reached his eyes. "Had you ever given any t
hought," he said in an elaborately casual voice, "to taking on some business p
artners?"
For just a moment Rovigo seemed nonplussed, then a quick, answering smile of u
nderstanding broadened across his face. I see," he said. "You need access to s
ome places."
Alessan nodded. "That, and there are more of us now, as well. Devin is with us
, and there may be others before spring. Things will be different from the yea
rs when it was only Baerd and I. I have been giving thought to this since Catr
iana joined us,"
His voice quickened, grew crisper. Devin remembered this tone from the cabin.
This was the man he'd first seen there. Alessan said, "In business together yo
u and I will have a more legitimate means of exchanging information and I'm go
ing to need information regularly this winter. As partners we have reason to b
e writing each other about any affairs that touch on trade. And of course all
affairs touch on trade."
"Indeed they do," said Rovigo, his eyes intent on Alessan's face.
"We can communicate directly if you have resources for that, or through Taccio
in Ferraut." He glanced over at Devin. "I know Tac-cio, by the way, that wasn
't a coincidence either. I assume you'd figured that out?" Devin hadn't even t
hought about it actually, but before he could speak Alessan had turned back to
Rovigo. "I assume you have a courier service you can trust?" Rovigo nodded.
Alessan said, "You see, the newest problem is that although we could still tra
vel as musicians, after this morning's performance we'd be notorious wherever
we went. Had I thought about it in time I'd have botched the music a little, o
r told Devin to be a little less impressive."
"No you wouldn't have," Devin said quietly. "Whatever other things you would h
ave done, ruining the music isn't one of them."
Alessan's mouth quirked as he acknowledged the hit. Rovigo smiled.
"Perhaps so," the Prince murmured. "It was special, wasn't it?"
There was a brief silence. Rovigo got up and put one more log on the fire.
Alessan said, "It all makes sense. There are certain places and certain activi
ties that would be awkward for us as performers. Especially well-known perform
ers. As merchants, we would have a new access to such places."
"Certain islands, perhaps?" Rovigo asked quietly, from by the fire.
"Perhaps," Alessan agreed. "If it comes to that. Though there it may be a matt
er of five of one hand, five of the other: artists are welcome at Brandin's co
urt on Chiara. This gives us another option, though, and I like having options
to work with. It has been necessary once or twice for a character I've assume
d to disappear, or die." His voice was quiet, matter-of-fact. He took a sip of
his wine.
After a moment he turned back to Rovigo. Who was now stroking his chin in a fi
ne imitation of a shrewdly avaricious businessman.
"Well," the merchant said in a greedy, wheedling voice, "you appear to have ma
de a most . . . intriguing proposal, gentlemen. I do have to ask one or two pr
eliminary questions. I've known Alessan for some time, but this particular iss
ue has never come up before, you understand." His eyes narrowed with exaggerat
ed cunning. "What, if anything, do you know about business?"
Alessan gave a sudden burst of laughter, then quickly grew serious again. "Hav
e you any money to hand?" he asked.
"I've my ship just in," Rovigo replied. "Cash from two days' transactions and
easy credit based on profits over the next few weeks. Why?"
"I would suggest buying a reasonable but not indiscreet amount of grain in the
next forty-eight hours. Twenty-four hours, actually, if you can."
Rovigo looked thoughtful. "I could do that," he said. "And my means are suffic
iently limited that no purchase I made would be large enough to be indiscreet.
I have a contact, too—the steward at the Nievolene farms by the Ferraut bord
er."
"Not from Nievole," Alessan said quickly.
Another silence. Rovigo nodded his head slowly. "I see," he said, startling De
vin again with his quickness. "You think we can expect some confiscation after
the Festival?"
"You can," Alessan said. "Among all the other even less pleasant things. Have
you another source for buying up grain?"
"I might." Rovigo looked from Alessan to Devin and back again. "Four partners,
then," he said crisply. "The three of you and Baerd. Is that right?"
Alessan nodded. "Almost right, but make it five partners. There is one other p
erson who should be brought in to divide our share, if that is all right with
you?"
"Why should it not be?" Rovigo shrugged. "That doesn't touch my share at all.
Will I meet this person?"
"I hope so, sooner or later," said Alessan. "I expect you will be happy with e
ach other."
"Fine," Rovigo said crisply. "The usual terms for a contraina association are
two-thirds to the one investing the funds, and one third to the ones who do th
e traveling and put in the time. Based on what you have just told me I will ac
cept that you are likely to be able to offer information which will be of real
value to our venture. I propose a half interest each way on all affairs were
jointly conduct. Is that acceptable?"
He was looking at Devin. With as much composure as he could manage, Devin repl
ied, "It is quite acceptable."
"It is more than fair," Alessan agreed. His expression was troubled again; he
looked as if he would go on.
"It is done, then," said Rovigo quickly. "No more to be said, Alessan. We will
go into town tomorrow to have the contraina formally drawn up and sealed. Whi
ch way do you plan to go after the Festival?"
"Ferraut, I think," said Alessan slowly. "We can discuss what comes after, but
I have something to do there, and an idea for some trade with Senzio we might
want to consider."
"Ferraut?" said Rovigo, ignoring the latter remarks. A smile slowly widened ac
ross his face. "Ferraut! That is splendid. Absolutely splendid! You can save u
s some money already. I'll give you a cart and all of you can take Ingonida he
r new bed!"
On the way upstairs Alais couldn't remember when she had last been so happy. N
ot that she was prone to moodiness like Selvena, but life at home tended to be
very quiet, especially when her father was away.
And now so many things seemed to be happening at once.
Rovigo was home after a longer trip than usual down the coast. Alix and Alais
were never at ease when he ventured south of the mountains into Quileia, no ma
tter how many times he reassured them of his caution. And on top of that, this
trip had come unsettlingly late in the season of autumn winds. But he was hom
e now, and palm to palm with his return had come the Festival of Vines. It was
her second one, and Alais had loved every moment of the day and night, absorb
ing with her wide, alert eyes all she saw. Drinking it in.
In the crowded square in front of the Sandreni Palace that morning she had sto
od extremely still, listening to a clear voice soar from the inner courtyard o
ut among the unnatural silence of the people gathered. A voice that lamented A
daon's death among the cedars of Tregea so bitterly, so sweetly, that Alais ha
d been afraid she would cry. She had closed her eyes.
It had been a source of astonished pride for her when Rovigo had casually ment
ioned to her and her mother having had a drink the day before with one of the
singers who were doing the Duke's mourning rites. He had even invited the youn
g man, he said, to come meet his four ungainly offspring. The teasing bothered
Alais not at all. She would have felt that something was wrong by now had Rov
igo spoken
about them in any other way. Neither she nor her sisters nursed any anxieties
about their father's affection. They had only to look at his eyes.
On the road home late at night, already badly unsettled by the thundering clat
ter of the Barbadian soldiers they had made way for at the city walls, she had
been truly frightened when a voice called out to them from the darkness near
their gate.
Then, when her father had replied, and she came gradually to understand who th
is was, Alais had thought her heart would stop from sheer excitement. She coul
d feel the tell-tale color rising in her cheeks.
When it became clear that the musicians were coming inside, it had taken a sup
reme act of self-control for her to regain the mien and composure proper to he
r parents' oldest, most trusted child.
In the house it became easier because the instant the two male guests stepped
through the doorway Selvena had gone into her predictable mating frenzy. A cou
rse of behavior so embarrassingly transparent to her older sister that it drov
e Alais straight back into her own habitual, detached watchfulness. Selvena ha
d been crying herself to sleep for much of the year because it looked more and
more as if she would still be unmarried when her eighteenth naming day came i
n the spring.
Devin, the singer, was smaller and younger-looking than she'd expected. But he
was neat and lithe, with an easy smile and quick, intelligent eyes under sand
y-brown hair that curled halfway over his ears. She'd expected him to be arrog
ant or pretentious, despite what her father had said, but she saw nothing of t
hat at all.
The other man, Alessan, looked about fifteen years older, perhaps more. His bl
ack, tangled hair was prematurely greying—silvering, actually—at the temples
. He had a lean, expressive face with very clear grey eyes and a wide mouth. H
e intimidated her a little, even though he was joking easily with her father r
ight from the start, in exactly the manner she knew Rovigo most enjoyed.
Perhaps that was it, Alais thought: few people she'd met could keep up with he
r father, in jesting or in anything else. And this man with the sharp, quizzic
al features appeared to be doing so effortlessly. She wondered, aware that the
thought was more than a little arrogant on her own part, how a Tregean musici
an could manage that. On the other hand, she reflected, she didn't know very m
uch about musicians at all.
Which made her even more curious about the woman. Alais thought Catriana was t
erribly beautiful. With her commanding height and the startlingly blue eyes un
der the blaze of her hair—like a second fire in the room—she made Alais feel
small and pale and bland. In a curious way that combined with Selvena's outra
geous flirtation to relax rather than unsettle her: this sort of activity, com
petition, exercise, was simply not something with which she was going to get i
nvolved. Watching closely, she saw Catriana register Selvena's soft flouncing
at Devin's feet and she intercepted the sardonic glance the red-haired singer
directed at her fellow musician.
Alais decided to go into the kitchen. Her mother and Menka might need help. Al
ix gave her a quick, thoughtful glance when she came in, but did not comment.

They quickly put a meal together. Back in the front room Alais helped at the s
ideboard and then listened and watched from her favorite chair next to the fir
e. Later she had genuine cause to bless Selvena's shamelessness. None of the r
est of them would have dreamt of asking their guests to sing.
This time she could see the singers so she kept her eyes open. Devin sang dire
ctly to her once near the end and Alais, her color furiously rising, forced he
rself not to look away. For the rest of that last song about Eanna naming the
stars she found her mind straying into channels unusual for her—the sort of t
hing Selvena speculated about at night all the time, in detail. Alais hoped th
ey would all attribute her color to the warmth of the fire.
She did wonder about one thing though, having been an observer of people for m
ost of her life. There was something between Devin and Catriana, but it certai
nly wasn't love, or even tenderness as she understood either of those things.
They would look at each other from time to time, usually when the other was un
aware, and the glances would be more challenging than anything else. She remin
ded herself again that the world of these people was farther removed from her
own than she could even imagine.
The younger ones said their good nights. Selvena doing so with a highly suspic
ious lack of protest, and touching, shockingly, fingertip to palm with both me
n in farewell. Alais caught a glance from her father, and a moment later she r
ose when her mother did.
It was impulse, nothing more, that led her to invite Catriana to come up with
her. Immediately the words were spoken, she realized how they must sound to th
e other woman—someone so independent
and obviously at ease in the company of men. Alais flinched inwardly at her ow
n provincial clumsiness, and braced herself for a rebuff. Cat-riana's smile, t
hough, was all graciousness as she stood.
"It will remind me of home," she said.
Thinking about that as the two of them went up the stairs past the lamps in th
eir brackets and the wall-hangings her grandfather had brought back south from
a voyage to Khardhun years and years ago, Alais tried to fathom what would le
ad a girl her own age to venture out among the rough and tumble of long roads
and uncertain lodging. Of late nights and men who would surely assume that if
she was among them she had to be available. Alais tried, but she honestly coul
dn't grasp it. Despite that, or perhaps because of it, something generous in h
er spirit opened out toward the other woman.
"Thank you for the music," she said shyly.
"Small return for your kindness," Catriana said lightly.
"Not as small as you think," Alais said. "Our room is over here. I'm glad this
reminds you of home . . . I hope it is a good memory." That was probing a lit
tle, but not rudely she hoped. She wanted to talk to this woman, to be friends
, to learn what she could about a life so remote from her own.
They stepped into the large bedroom. Menka had the fire going already and the
two bedspreads turned back. The deep-piled quilts were new this autumn, more c
ontraband brought back by Rovigo from Quileia where winters were so much harsh
er than here.
Catriana laughed a little under her breath, her eyebrows arching as she survey
ed the chamber. "Sharing a room does. This is rather more than I knew in a fis
herman's cottage." Alais flushed, fearful of having offended, but before she c
ould speak Catriana turned to her, eyes still very wide, and said casually, "T
ell me, will we need to tie your sister down? She seems to be in heat and I'm
worried about the two men surviving the night."
Alais went from feeling spoiled and insensitive to red-faced shock in one seco
nd. Then she saw the quick smile on the other woman's face and she laughed alo
ud in a release of anxiety and guilt.
"She's just terrible isn't she? She's vowed to kill herself in some dreadfully
dramatic way if she isn't married by the Festival next year."
Catriana shook her head. "I knew some girls like her at home. I've met a few o
n the road, too. I've never been able to understand it."
"Nor I," said Alais a little too quickly. Catriana glanced at her.
Alais ventured a hesitant smile. "I guess that's a thing we have in common?"
"One thing," the other woman said indifferently, turning away. She strolled ov
er to one of the woven pieces on the wall. "This is nice enough," she said, fi
ngering it. "Where did your father find it?"
"I made it," Alais said shortly. She felt patronized suddenly, and it irritate
d her.
It must have shown in her voice, for Catriana looked quickly back over her sho
ulder. The two women exchanged a look in silence. Catriana sighed. "I'm hard t
o make friends with," she said at length. "I doubt it's worth your effort."
"No effort," said Alais quietly. "Besides," she ventured, "I may need your hel
p tying Selvena down later."
Surprised, Catriana chuckled. "She'll be all right," she said, sitting on one
of the beds. "Neither of them will touch her while they are guests in your fat
her's house. Even if she slithers into their room wearing nothing but a single
red glove."
Shocked for the second time, but finding the sensation oddly enjoyable, Alais
giggled and sat down on her own bed, dangling her legs over the side. Catriana
's feet, she noticed ruefully, easily reached the carpet.
"She just might do that," she whispered, grinning at the image. "I think she e
ven has a red glove hidden somewhere!"
Catriana shook her head. "Then it's roping her down like a heifer or trusting
the men, I guess. But as I say, they won't do anything."
"You know them very well, I suppose," Alais hazarded. She still wasn't sure wh
ether any given remark would earn her a rebuff or elicit a smile. This was not
, she was discovering, an easy woman to deal with.
"Alessan, I know better," Catriana said. "But Devin's been on the road a long
time and I have no doubt he knows the rules." She glanced away briefly as she
said that last, her own color a little high.
Still wary of another rejection Alais said cautiously, "I have no idea about t
hat, actually. Are there rules? Do any of them ... do you have problems when y
ou travel?"
Catriana shrugged. "The kind of problems your sister's longing to find? Not fr
om the musicians. There's an unwritten code, or else the companies would only
get a certain kind of woman to tour and that would hurt the music. And the mus
ic really does matter to most of the troupes. The ones that last, anyway. Men
can be quite badly hurt for bothering a girl too much. Certainly they'll never
find work if it happens too often."
"I see," said Alais, trying to imagine it.
"You are expected to pair off with someone though," Catriana added. "As if it'
s the least you can do. Remove yourself as a temptation. So you find a man you
like, or some of the girls find a woman, of course. There's a fair bit of tha
t, too."
"Oh," said Alais, clasping her hands in her lap.
Catriana, who was really much too clever by half, flashed a glance of mingled
amusement and malice. "Don't worry," she said sweetly, looking pointedly at wh
ere Alais's hands had settled like a barrier. "That glove doesn't fit me."
Abruptly Alais put her hands to either side of her, blushing furiously.
"I wasn't particularly worried," she said, trying to sound casual. Then, goade
d by the other's mocking expression, she shot back: "What glove does fit you,
then?"
The other woman's amusement quickly disappeared. There was a small silence. Th
en: "You do have some spirit in you, after all," Catriana said judiciously. "I
wasn't sure."
"That," said Alais, moved to a rare anger, "is patronizing. How would you be s
ure of anything about me? And why would I let you see it?"
Again there was a silence, and again Catriana surprised her. "I'm sorry," she
said. "Truly. I'm really not very good at this. I warned you." She looked away
. "As it happens, you hit a nerve and I tend to lash out when that occurs."
Alais's anger, as quick to recede as it was slow to kindle, was gone even as t
he other woman spoke. This was, she reminded herself sternly, a guest in her h
ouse.
She had no immediate chance to reply though, or to try to mend the rift, becau
se just then Menka bustled importantly into the room with a basin of water hea
ted over the kitchen fire, followed by the youngest of Rovigo's apprentices wi
th a second basin and towels draped over both his shoulders. The boy's eyes we
re desperately cast downwards in a room containing two women as he carried the
basin and the towels carefully over to the table by the window.
The garrulous fuss Menka inevitably stirred up wherever she went broke the moo
d entirely—both the good and the bad parts of it, Alais thought. After the tw
o servants left, the women washed up in silence. Alais, stealing a glance at t
he other's long-limbed body, felt even more inadequate in her own small, white
softness and the sheltered life she'd lived. She climbed into bed, feeling as
if she'd like to begin the whole conversation over again.
"Good night," she said.
"Good night," Catriana replied, after a moment. Alais tried to read an invitat
ion to further conversation in her tone, but she wasn't sure. If Catriana want
ed to talk, she decided, she had only to say something.
They blew out their bedside candles and lay silently in the semi-darkness. Ala
is watched the red glow of the fire, curled her toes around the hot brick Menk
a had put at the foot of her bed, and thought ruefully that the distance to Se
lvena's side of the room had never seemed so great.
Sometime later, still unsleeping though the fire was down to its embers, she h
eard a burst of hilarity from the three men downstairs. The warm, carrying sou
nd of her father's laughter somehow worked its way into her and eased her dist
ress. He was home. She felt sheltered and safe. Alais smiled to herself in the
darkness. She heard the men come upstairs soon after, and go to their separat
e rooms.
She remained awake for a while, with an ear perked to catch the sound of her s
ister in the hallway—though she didn't really believe even Selvena would do t
hat. She heard nothing, and eventually she fell asleep.
She dreamt of lying on a hilltop in a strange place. Of a man there with her.
Lowering himself upon her. A mild moonless night glittering with stars. She la
y with him upon that windy height amid a scattering of dew-drenched summer flo
wers, and in the high, unknown place of that dreaming Alais was filled with co
mplex yearnings she could never have named aloud.
It was bitterly cold in the dungeon where they had thrown him at last. The sto
nes were damp and icy, they smelled of urine and feces. He'd only been allowed
to put back on his linen underclothing and his hose. There were rats in the c
ell. He couldn't see them in the blackness but he had been able to hear them f
rom the beginning and he'd been bitten twice already as he dozed.
Earlier, he had been naked. The new Captain of the Guard—the replacement for
the one who'd killed himself—had permitted his men to play with their prisone
r before locking him up for the night. They all knew Tomasso's reputation. Eve
ryone knew his reputation. He had made sure of that; it had been part of the p
lan.
So the guards had stripped him in the harsh brightness of the guardroom and th
ey had amused themselves coarsely, pricking him with their swords or with the
heated poker from the fire, sliding them around his flaccid sex, prodding him
in the buttocks or the belly. Bound and helpless, Tomasso had wanted only to c
lose his eyes and wish it all away.
For some reason it was the memory of Taeri that wouldn't let him do that. He s
till couldn't believe his younger brother was dead. Or that Taeri had been so
brave and so decisive at the end. It made him want to cry, thinking about it,
but he was not going to let the Barbadians see that. He was a Sandreni. Which
seemed to mean more to him now, naked and near the end, than it ever had befor
e.
So he kept his eyes open and he fixed them bleakly on the new captain. He did
his best to ignore the things they were doing to him, and the sniggering, brut
al suggestions as to what would happen tomorrow. They weren't very imaginative
actually. He knew the morning's reality was going to be worse. Intolerably wo
rse.
They hurt him a little with their blades and drew blood a few times, but nothi
ng very much—Tomasso knew they were under orders to save him for the professi
onals in the morning. Alberico would be present then, as well.
This was just play.
Eventually the captain grew tired of Tomasso's steady gaze, or else he decided
that there was enough blood flowing down the prisoner's legs, puddling on the
floor. He ordered his men to stop. Tomasso's bonds were cut and they gave him
back his undergarments and a filthy pest-infested strip of blanket and they t
ook him down the stairs to the dungeons of Astibar and they threw him into the
blackness of one of them.
The entrance was so low that even on his knees he'd scraped his head on the st
one when they pushed him in. More blood, he realized, as his hand came away st
icky. It didn't actually seem to matter very much.
He hated the rats though. He'd always been afraid of rats. He rolled the usele
ss blanket as tightly as he could and tried to use it as a feeble club. It was
hard though in the dark.
Tomasso wished he were a physically braver man. He knew what was coming in the
morning, and the thought, now that he was alone, turned his bowels to jelly.

He heard a sound, and realized a moment later that he was whimpering. He fough
t to keep control of himself. He was alone though, and in freezing darkness in
the hands of his enemies, and there were rats. He couldn't entirely keep the
sounds from coming. He felt as if his heart was broken, as if it lay in jagged
pieces at odd angles in his breast. Among the fragments he tried to assemble
a curse for Herado and his betrayal, but nothing seemed equal to what his neph
ew had done. Nothing seemed large enough to encompass it.
He heard another rat and lashed out blindly with his rolled weapon. He hit som
ething and heard a squeal. Again and again he pounded at the place of that sou
nd. He thought he had killed it. One of them. He was trembling, but the frenzy
of activity seemed to help him fight back his weakness. He didn't weep any mo
re. He leaned back against the damp slime of the stone wall, wincing because o
f his open cuts. He closed his eyes, though he couldn't see in any case, and h
e thought of sunlight.
It was then that he must have dozed, because he woke suddenly with a shout of
pain: one of the rats had bitten viciously at his thigh. He flailed about with
the blanket for a few moments, but he was shivering now and beginning to feel
genuinely ill. His mouth was swollen and pulpy from Alberico's blow in the ca
bin. He found it painful to swallow. He felt his forehead and decided he was f
everish.
Which is why, when he saw the wan light of a candle, he was sure he was halluc
inating. He was able to look around though by its glow. The cell was tiny. The
re was a dead rat near his right leg and there were two more living ones—big
as cats—near the door. He saw, on the wall beside him, a scratched-out image
of the sun with notches for days cut into the rim. It had the saddest face Tom
asso could ever remember seeing. He looked at it for a long time.
Then he looked back towards the glowing light and realized with certainty that
this was a hallucination, or a dream.
His father was holding the candle, dressed in the blue-silver robe of his buri
al, looking down with an expression different from any Tomasso could ever reme
mber seeing on his face.
The fever must be extreme, he decided; his mind was conjuring forth in this ab
yss an image of something his shattered heart so desperately desired. A look o
f kindness—and even, if one wanted to reach for the word, even of love—in th
e eyes of the man who'd whipped him as a child and then designated him as usef
ul for two decades of plotting against a Tyrant.
Which had ended tonight. Which would truly end, most horribly, for Tomasso in
the morning, amid pain he didn't even have the capacity to imagine. He liked t
his dream though, this fever-induced fantasy. There was light in it. It kept t
he rats away. It even seemed to ease the bone-numbing cold of the wet stones b
eneath him and against his back.
He lifted an unsteady hand towards the flame. Through a dry throat and torn, p
uffy lips he croaked something. What he wanted to say was, "I'm sorry," to the
dream-image of his father, but he couldn't make the words come right.
This was a dream though, his dream, and the image of Sandre seemed to understa
nd.
"You have nothing to be sorry for," Tomasso heard his dream-father say. So gen
tly. "It was my fault and only mine. Through all those years and at the end. I
knew Gianno's limitations from the start. I had too many hopes for you as a c
hild. It ... affected me too much. After."
The candle seemed to waver a little. A part of Tomasso, a corner of his heart,
seemed to be knitting itself slowly back together, even though this was only
a dream, only his own longing. A last feeble fantasy of being loved before the
y flayed him.
"Will you let me tell you how sorry I am for the folly that has condemned you
to this? Will you hear me if I tell you I have been proud of you, in my fashio
n?"
Tomasso let himself weep. The words were balm for the deepest ache he knew. Cr
ying made the light blur and swim though, and so he raised his shaking hands a
nd kept trying to wipe the tears away. He wanted to speak but his shattered mo
uth could not form words. He nodded his head though, over and over. Then he ha
d a thought and he raised his left hand—the heart hand, of oaths and fidelity
—toward this dream of his dead father's ghost.
And slowly Sandre's hand came down, as if from a long, long way off, from year
s and years away, seasons lost and forgotten in the turning of time and pride,
and father and son touched fingertips together.
It was a more solid contact than Tomasso had thought it would be. He closed hi
s eyes for a moment, yielding to the intensity of his feelings. When he opened
them his father's image seemed to be holding something out towards him. A via
l of some liquid. Tomasso did not understand.
"This is the last thing I can do for you," the ghost said in a strange, unexpe
ctedly wistful voice. "If I were stronger I could do more, but at least they w
ill not hurt you in the morning now. They will not hurt you any more, my son.
Drink it Tomasso, drink it and this will all be gone. All go away, I promise y
ou. Then wait for me Tomasso, wait if you can in Morian's Halls. I would like
to walk with you there."
Tomasso still did not understand, but the tone was so mild, so reassuring. He
took the dream-vial. Again it was more substantial than he'd expected it to be
.
His father nodded encouragement. With trembling hands Tomasso fumbled and remo
ved the stopper. Then with a last gesture—a final mocking parody of himself—
he raised it in a wide, sweeping, elaborate salute to his own powers of fantas
y and he drained it to the dregs, which were bitter.
His father's smile was so sad. Smiles are not supposed to be sad, Tomasso want
ed to say. He had said that to a boy once, in a temple of Morian at night, in
a room where he was not supposed to be. His head felt heavy. He felt as if he
were about to fall alseep, even though he already was asleep, and dreaming in
his fever. He really didn't understand. He especially didn't understand why hi
s father, who was dead, should ask him to wait in Morian's Halls.
He looked up again, wanting to ask about that. His vision seemed to be going c
ompletely strange on him though.
He knew this was so, because the image of his father, looking down upon him, s
eemed to be crying. There were tears in his father's eyes.
Which was impossible. Even in a dream.
"Farewell," he heard.
Farewell, he tried to say, in return.
He wasn't sure if he'd actually managed to form the word, or if he'd only thou
ght it, but just then a darkness more encompassing than he had ever known came
down over him like a blanket or a mantle, and the difference between the spok
en and the unspoken ceased to matter anymore.

PART TWO – DIANORA

Chapter 7
DIANORA COULD REMEMBER THE DAY SHE CAME TO THE Island.
The air that autumn morning had been much like it was today at the beginning o
f spring—white clouds scudding in a high blue sky as the wind had swept the T
ribute Ship through the whitecaps into the harbor of Chiara. Beyond harbor and
town the slopes mounting to the hills had been wild with fall colors. The lea
ves were turning: red and gold and some that clung yet to green, she remembere
d.
The sails of the Tribute Ship so long ago had been red and gold as well: color
s of celebration in Ygrath. She knew that now, she hadn't known it then. She h
ad stood on the forward deck of the ship to gaze for the first time at the spl
endor of Chiara's harbor, at the long pier where the Grand Dukes used to stand
to throw a ring into the sea, and from where Letizia had leaped in the first
of the Ring Dives to reclaim the ring from the waters and marry her Duke: turn
ing the Dives into the luck and symbol of Chiara's pride until beautiful Onest
ra had changed the ending of the story hundreds and hundreds of years ago, and
the Ring Dives had ceased. Even so, tvery child in the Palm knew that legend
of the Island. Young girls in each province would play at diving into water fo
r a ring and rising in triumph, with their hair shining wet, to wed a Duke of
power and glory.
From near the prow of the Tribute Ship, Dianora had looked up beyond the harbo
r and palace to gaze at the majesty of snow-crowned Sangarios rising behind th
em. The Ygrathen sailors had not disturbed her silence. They had allowed her t
o come forward to watch the Island approach. Once she'd been safely aboard shi
p and the ship away to sea they'd been kind to her. Women thought to have a re
al chance at being chosen for the saishan were always treated well on the Trib
ute Ships. It could make a captain's fortune in Brandin's court if he brought
home a hostage who became a favorite of the Tyrant.
Sitting now on the southern balcony of the saishan wing, looking out from behi
nd the ornately crafted screen that hid the women from gawkers in the square b
elow, Dianora watched the banners of Chiara and Ygrath flap in the freshening
spring breeze, and she remembered how the wind had blown her hair about her fa
ce more than twelve years ago. She remembered looking from the bright sails to
the slopes of the tree-clad hills running up to Sangarios, from the blue and
white of the sea to the clouds in the blue sky. From the tumult and chaos of l
ife in the harbor to the serene grandeur of the palace just beyond. Birds had
been wheeling, crying loudly about the three high masts of the Tribute Ship. T
he rising sun had been a dazzle of light striking along the sea from the east.
So much vibrancy in the world, so rich and fair and shining a morning to be a
live.
Twelve years ago, and more. She had been twenty-one years old, and nursing her
hatred and her secret like two of Morian's three snakes twining about her hea
rt.
She had been chosen for the saishan.
The circumstances of her taking had made it very likely, and Brandin's celebra
ted grey eyes had widened appraisingly when she was led before him two days la
ter. She'd been wearing a silken, pale-colored gown, she remembered, chosen to
set off her dark hair and the dark brown of her eyes.
She had been certain she would be chosen. She'd felt neither triumph nor fear,
even though she'd been pointing her life toward that moment for five full yea
rs, even though, in that instant of Brandin's choosing, walls and screens and
corridors closed around her that would define the rest of her days. She'd had
her hatred and her secret, and guarding the two of them left no room for anyth
ing else.
Or so she'd thought at twenty-one.
For all she'd seen and lived through, even by then, Dianora reflected twelve y
ears later on her balcony, she'd known very little— dangerously little—about
a great many things that mattered far too much.
Even out of the wind it was cool here on the balcony. The Ember Days were upon
them but the flowers were just beginning in the valleys inland and on the hil
l slopes, and the true onset of spring was some time off even this far north.
It had been different at home, Dianora remembered; sometimes there would still
be snow in the southern highlands when the springtime Ember Days had come and
passed.
Without looking backwards, Dianora raised a hand. In a moment the castrate had
brought her a steaming mug of Tregean khav. Trade restrictions and tariffs, B
randin was fond of saying in private, had to be handled selectively or life co
uld be too acutely marred. Khav was one of the selected things. Only in the pa
lace of course. Outside the walls they drank the inferior products of Corte or
neutral Senzio. Once a group of Senzian khav merchants had come as part of a
trade embassy to try to persuade him of improvements in the crop they grew and
the cup it brewed. Neutral, indeed, Brandin had said judiciously, tasting. So
neutral, it hardly seems to be there.
The merchants had withdrawn, consternated and pale, desperately seeking to div
ine the hidden meaning in the Ygrathen Tyrant's words. Senzians spent much of
their time doing that, Dianora had observed drily to Brandin afterward. He'd l
aughed. She'd always been able to amuse him, even in the days when she was too
young and inexperienced to do it deliberately.
Which thought reminded her of the young castrate attending her this morning. S
celto was in town collecting her gown for the reception that afternoon; her at
tendant was one of the newest castrates, sent out from Ygrath to serve the gro
wing saishan in the colony.
He was well trained already. Vencel's methods might be harsh, but there was no
denying that they worked. She decided not to tell the boy that the khav wasn'
t strong enough; he would very probably fall to pieces, which would be inconve
nient. She'd mention it to Scelto and let him handle the matter. There was no
need for Vencel to know: it was useful to have some of the castrates grateful
to her as well as afraid. The fear came automatically: a function of who she w
as here in the saishan. Gratitude or affection she had to work at.
Twelve years and more this spring, she thought again, leaning forward to look
down through the screen at the bustling preparations in the square for the arr
ival of Isolla of Ygrath later that day. At twenty-one she'd been at the peak,
she supposed, of whatever beauty she'd been granted. She'd had nothing of suc
h grace at fifteen and sixteen she remembered—they hadn't even bothered to hi
de her from the Ygrathen soldiers at home.
At nineteen she'd begun to be something else entirely, though by then she wasn
't at home and Ygrath was no danger to the residents of Barbadian-ruled Certan
do. Or not normally, she amended, reminding herself—though this was not, by a
ny means, a thing that really needed a reminder—that she was Dianora di Certa
ndo here in the saishan. And across in the west wing as well, in Brandin's bed
.
She was thirty-three years old, and somehow with the years that had slipped aw
ay so absurdly fast she was one of the powers of this palace. Which, of course
, meant of the Palm. In the saishan only Solores di Corte could be said to vie
with her for access to Brandin, and Solores was six years older than she was—
one of the first year's harvest of the Tribute Ships.
Sometimes, even now, it was all a little too much, a little hard to believe. T
he younger castrates trembled if she even glanced slantwise at them; courtiers
—whether from overseas in Ygrath or here in the four western provinces of the
Palm—sought her counsel and support in their petitions to Brandin; musicians
' wrote songs for her; poets declaimed and dedicated verses that spun into hyp
erbolic raptures about her beauty and her wisdom. The Ygrathens would liken he
r to the sisters of their god, the Chiarans to the fabled beauty of Onestra be
fore she did the last Ring Dive for Grand Duke Cazal—though the poets always
stopped that analogy well before the Dive itself and the tragedies that follow
ed.
After one such adjective-bestrewn eifort of Doarde's she'd suggested to Brandi
n over a late, private supper that one of the measures of difference between m
en and women was that power made men attractive, but when a woman had power th
at merely made it attractive to praise her beauty.
He'd thought about it, leaning back and stroking his neat beard. She'd been aw
are of having taken a certain risk, but she'd also known him very well by then
.
"Two questions," Brandin, Tyrant of the Western Palm, had asked, reaching for
the hand she'd left on the table. "Do you think you have power, my Dianora?"
She'd expected that. "Only through you, and for the little time remaining befo
re I grow old and you cease to grant me access to you." A small slash at Solor
es there, but discreet enough, she judged. "But so long as you command me to c
ome to you I will be seen to have power in your court, and poets will say I am
more lovely now than I ever was. More lovely than the diadem of stars that cr
owns the crescent of the girdled world ... or whatever the line was."
"The curving diadem, I think he wrote." He smiled. She'd expected a compliment
then, for he was generous with those. His grey eyes had remained sober though
, and direct. He said, "My second question: Would I be attractive to you witho
ut the power that I wield?"
And that, she remembered, had almost caught her out. It was too unexpected a q
uestion, and far too near to the place where her twin snakes yet lived, howeve
r dormant they might be.
She'd lowered her eyelashes to where their hands were twined. Like the snakes,
she thought. She backed away quickly from that thought. Looking up, with the
sly, sidelong glance she knew he loved, Dianora had said, feigning surprise: "
Do you wield power here? I hadn't noticed."
A second later his rich, life-giving laughter had burst forth. The guards outs
ide would hear it, she knew. And they would talk. Everyone in Chiara talked; t
he Island fed itself on gossip and rumor. There would be another tale after to
night. Nothing new, only a reaffirmation in that shouted laughter of how much
pleasure Brandin of Ygrath took in his dark Dianora.
He'd carried her to the bed then, still amused, making her smile and then laug
h herself at his mood. He'd taken his pleasure, slowly and in the myriad of wa
ys he'd taught her through the years, for in Ygrath they were versed in such t
hings and he was—then and now— the King of Ygrath, over and above everything
else he was.
And she? On her balcony now in the springtime morning sunlight Dianora closed
her eyes on the memory of how that night, and before that night—for years and
years before that night—and after, after even until now, her own rebel body
and heart and mind, traitors together to her soul, had slaked so desperate and
deep a need in him.
In Brandin of Ygrath. Whom she had come here to kill twelve years ago, twin sn
akes around the wreckage of her heart, for having done what he had done to Tig
ana which was her home.
Or had been her home until he had battered and leveled and burned it and kille
d a generation and taken away the very sound of its name. Of her own true name
.
She was Dianora di Tigana bren Saevar and her father had died at Second Deisa,
with an awkwardly-handled sword and not a sculptor's chisel in his hand. Her
mother's spirit had snapped like a water reed in the brutality of the occupati
on that followed, and her brother, whose eyes and hair were exactly like her o
wn, whom she had loved more than her life, had been driven into exile in the w
ideness of the world. He'd been fifteen years old.
She had no idea where he was all these years after. If he was alive, or dead,
or far from this peninsula where tyrants ruled over broken provinces that had
once been so proud. Where the name of the proudest of them all was gone from t
he memory of men.
Because of Brandin. In whose arms she had lain so many nights through the year
s with such an ache of need, such an arching of desire, every time he summoned
her to him. Whose voice was knowledge and wit and grace to her, water in the
dryness of her days. Whose laughter when he set it free, when she could draw i
t forth from him, was like the healing sun slicing out of clouds. Whose grey e
yes were the troubling, unreadable color of the sea under the first cold slant
ing light of morning in spring or fall.
In the oldest of all the stories told in Tigana it was from the grey sea at da
wn that Adaon the god had risen and come to Micaela and lain with her on the l
ong, dark, destined curving of the sand. Dianora knew that story as well as sh
e knew her name. Her true name.
She also knew two other things at least as well: that her brother or her fathe
r would kill her with their hands if either were alive to see what she had bec
ome. And that she would accept that ending and know it was deserved.
Her father was dead. Her heart would scald her at the very thought of her brot
her so, even if death might spare him a grief so final as seeing where she had
come, but each and every morning she prayed to the Triad, especially to Adaon
of the Waves, that he was overseas and so far away from where tidings might e
ver reach him of a Dianora with dark eyes like his own in the saishan of the T
yrant.
Unless, said the quiet voice of her heart, unless the morning might yet come w
hen she could find a way to do a thing here on the Island that would still, de
spite all that had happened—despite the intertwining of limbs at night and th
e sound of her own voice crying aloud in need assuaged—bring back another sou
nd into the world. Into the voices of men and women and children all over the
Palm, and south over the mountains in Quileia, and north and west and east bey
ond all the seas.
The sound of the name of Tigana, gone. Gone, but not, if the goddesses and the
god were kind—if there was any love left in them, or pity—not forever forgo
tten or forever lost.
And perhaps—and this was Dianora's dream on the nights she slept alone, after
Scelto had massaged and oiled her skin and had gone away with his candle to s
leep outside her door—perhaps it would come to pass that if she could indeed
find a way to do this thing, that her brother, far from home, would miraculous
ly hear the name of Tigana spoken by a stranger in a world of strangers, in so
me distant royal court or bazaar, and somehow he would know, in a rush of wond
er and joy, in the deep core of the heart she knew so well, that it was throug
h her doing that the name was in the world again.
She would be dead by then. She had no doubts as to that. Brandin's hate in thi
s one thing—in the matter of his vengeance for Stevan—was fixed and unaltera
ble. It was the one set star in the firmament of all the lands he ruled.
She would be dead, but it would be all right, for Tigana's name would be resto
red, and her brother would be alive and would know it had been she, and Brandi
n . . . Brandin would understand that she had found a way to do this thing whi
le sparing his life on all the nights, the numberless nights, when she could h
ave slain him while he slept by her side after love.
This was Dianora's dream. She used to be driven awake, tears cold on her cheek
s, by the intensity of the feelings it engendered. No one ever saw those tears
but Scelto though, and Scelto she trusted more than anyone alive.
She heard his quick light footsteps at the doorway and then briskly crossing t
he floor toward her balcony. No one else in the saishan moved like Scelto. The
castrates were notoriously prone to lassitude and to eating too much—the obv
ious substitutions for pleasure. Not Scelto, though. Slim as he'd been when sh
e met him, he still sought out those errands the other castrates strove to avo
id: trips up into the steep streets of the old town, or even farther north int
o the hills or partway up Sangarios itself in search of healing herbs or leave
s or simply meadow flowers for her room.
He seemed ageless, but he hadn't been young when Vencel assigned him to Dianor
a and she guessed that he must be sixty now. If Vencel ever died—a hard thing
to imagine, in fact—Scelto was certainly next in line to succeed him as head
of the saishan.
They had never spoken about it, but Dianora knew, as surely as she knew anythi
ng, that he would refuse the position if it were offered to him, in order to r
emain bound to her. She also knew—and this was the thing that touched her—th
at this would be true even if Brandin stopped sending for her entirely and she
became merely another aging ignored item of history in the saishan wing.
And this was the second thing she'd never expected to find when hate had carri
ed her through autumn seas to Chiara on the Tribute Ship: kindness and caring
and a friend behind the high walls and ornate screens of the place where women
waited among men who had lost their manhood.
Scelto's tread, rapid even after the long climb up the Great Staircase and the
n another flight up to the saishan, clicked across the mosaics of the balcony
floor behind her. She heard him murmur kindly to the boy and dismiss him.
He took another step forward and coughed once, to announce himself.
"Is it terribly hideous?" she asked without turning around.
"It will do," Scelto said, coming to stand beside her. She looked over, smilin
g to see his close-cropped grey hair, the thin, precise mouth, and the terribl
y broken hook of his nose. Ages ago, he'd said when she'd asked. A fight over
a woman back in Ygrath. He'd killed the other man, who happened to be a noble.
Which unfortunate fact had cost Scelto his sex and his liberty and brought hi
m here. Dianora had been more disturbed by the story than he seemed to be. On
the other hand, she remembered thinking, it had been new to her, while for him
it was only the familiar coinage of his life, from a long time past.
He held up the dark red gown they'd had made in the old town. From his smile w
hich matched her own Dianora knew it had been worth cajoling Vencel for the fu
nds to have this done. The head of the saishan would want a favor later, he al
ways did, but through such exchanges was the saishan run, and Dianora, looking
at the gown, had no regrets.
"What is Solores wearing?" she asked.
"Hala wouldn't tell me," Scelto murmured regretfully.
Dianora laughed aloud at the straight face he managed to maintain. "I'm quite
sure he wouldn't," she said. "What is she wearing?"
"Green," he said promptly. "High waisted, high neck. Two shades in pleats belo
w the waist. Gold sandals. A great deal of gold everywhere else. Her hair will
be up, of course. She has new earrings."
Dianora laughed again. Scelto allowed himself a tiny smile of satisfaction. "I
took the liberty," he added, "of purchasing something else while I was in tow
n."
He reached into a fold of his tunic and handed her a small box. She opened it
and wordlessly held up the gem inside. In the bright morning light of the balc
ony it dazzled and shone like a third red moon to join Vidomni and blue Ilario
n.
Scelto said, "I thought it would be better with the gown than anything Vencel
would offer you from the saishan jewels."
She shook her head wonderingly. "It is beautiful, Scelto. Can we afford this?
Will I have to go without chocolate for all of the spring and summer?"
"Not a bad idea," he said, ignoring her first question. "You ate two pieces th
is morning while I was gone."
"Scelto!" she exclaimed. "Stop that! Go spy on Solores and see what she's spen
ding her chiaros on. I have my habits and my pleasures, and none of them, so f
ar as I can see, are particularly evil. Do I look fat to you?"
Almost reluctantly he shook his head. "I have no idea why not," he murmured ru
efully.
"Well you keep thinking about it till you figure it out," she said with a toss
of her head. "In the meantime, that reminds me—the boy this morning was fine
, except that the khav was very weak. Will you speak to him about how I like i
t?"
"I did. I told him to make it a little weak."
"You what? Scelto, I absolutely—"
"You always begin drinking more khav at the end of winter, when the weather be
gins to turn, and every spring you always have trouble sleeping at night. You
know this is true, my lady. Either fewer cups or weaker khav. It is my duty to
try to keep you rested and tranquil."
Dianora was speechless for a second. "Tranquil!" she finally managed to exclai
m. "I might have frightened that poor child to the tips of his fingernails. I
would have felt terrible!"
"I had told him what to say," Scelto said placidly. "He would have blamed it o
n me."
"Oh, really. And what if I'd reported it directly to Vencel, instead?" Dianora
retorted. "Scelto, he would have had that boy starved and lashed."
Scelto's dignified little sniff conveyed quite clearly what he thought about t
he likelihood of her having done any such thing.
His expression was so wryly knowing that, against her will, Dianora found hers
elf laughing again. "Very well," she said, surrendering. "Then let it be fewer
cups, because I do like it strong, Scelto. It isn't worth the drinking otherw
ise. Besides, I don't think that's why I can't sleep at night. This season sim
ply makes me restless."
"You were taken as Tribute in the spring," he murmured. "Everyone in the saish
an is restless in the season they were taken." He hesitated. "I can't do anyth
ing about that, my lady. But I thought perhaps the khav might be making it wor
se." There was concern and affection in his brown eyes, almost as dark as her
own.
"You worry too much about me," she said after a moment.
He smiled. "Who else should I worry about?" There was a little silence; Dianor
a could hear the noises from far below in the square.
"Speaking of worrying," said Scelto in a transparent effort to change the mood
, "we may be concentrating too much on what Solores is doing. We may want to s
tart keeping an eye on the young one with the green eyes."
"lassica?" Dianora said, surprised. "What ever for? Brandin hasn't even called
her to him and she's been here a month already."
"Exactly," said Scelto. He paused, somewhat awkwardly, which piqued her curios
ity.
"What are you saying, Scelto?"
"I, um, have been told by Tesios who has been looking after her that he has ne
ver seen or heard of a woman in the saishan with such . . . control of her bod
y or such . . . capacity for the climax of love."
He was blushing furiously, which made Dianora abruptly self-conscious too. It
was a standard practice—with some quite unstan-dard variations—for the women
of the saishan to use their castrates to give them physical release if too mu
ch time went by between summonses to the other wing.
Dianora had never asked Scelto for such a service. Something about the very id
ea disturbed her: it seemed an abuse, in a way she couldn't articulate. He had
been a man, she reminded herself frequently, who had killed someone for love
of a woman. Their relationship, close as it was, had never entered that dimens
ion. It was strange, she thought, even amusing, how shy they could both become
at the very mention of the subject—and Triad knew it came up often enough in
the hothouse atmosphere of the saishan.
She turned back to the railing, looking down through the screen, to give him t
ime to regain his composure. Thinking about what he'd said though, she found h
erself feeling a certain amusement after all. She was already working out how
and when to tell Brandin about this.
"My friend," she said, "you may know me well, but in exactly the same way and
for many of the same reasons I know Brandin very well."
She glanced back at her castrate. "He is older than you, Scelto— he is almost
sixty-five—and for reasons I don't entirely understand he has said he must l
ive here in the Palm another sixty years or so. All the sorcery in the world w
ould surely not avail him to prolong his life that long if lassica is as ... e
xceptional as Tesios suggests. She would wear him out, however pleasantly, in
a year or two."
Scelto blushed again, and glanced quickly back over his shoulder. They were qu
ite alone though. Dianora laughed, partly out of genuine amusement, but more s
pecifically to mask the recurring sorrow she felt whenever this one lie had to
be told: the thing she still kept from Scelto. The one secret that mattered.

Of course she knew why Brandin needed to stay here in the Palm, why he needed
to use his sorcery to prolong his life here in what was surely a place of exil
e for him in a land of grief.
He had to wait for everyone born in Tigana to die.
Only then could he leave the peninsula where his son had been slain. Only then
would the full measure of the vengeance he had decreed be poured out on the b
loodied ground. For no one would be left alive in the world who had any true m
emory of Tigana before the fall, of Avalle of the Towers, the songs and the st
ories and the legends, all the long, bright history-It would truly be gone the
n. Wiped out. Seventy or eighty years wreaking as comprehensive an obliteratio
n as millennia had on the ancient civilizations no one could now recall. Whole
cultures that were now only an awkwardly pronounced name of a place, or a dec
iphered, pompous title—Emperor of All the Earth—on a broken pottery shard.
Brandin could go home after sixty years. He could do whatever he chose. By the
n she would be long dead and so too would be those from Tigana even younger th
an she, those born up to the very year of the conquest—the last inheritors.
The last children who could hear and read the name of the land that had been t
heir own. Eighty years, Brandin was giving himself. More than enough, given li
fespans in the Palm.
Eighty years to oblivion. To the broken, meaningless pottery shard. The books
were gone already, and the paintings, tapestries, sculptures, music: torn or s
mashed or burned in the terrible year after Valentin's fall when Brandin had c
ome down upon them in the agony of a father's loss, bringing them the reciproc
al agony of a conqueror's hate.
The worst year of Dianora's life. Seeing so much of beauty and splendor crumbl
e to rubble and dust or burn down to ashes of loss. She'd been fifteen, then s
ixteen. Still too young to comprehend the full reality of what was being eradi
cated. For her father's death and the destruction of his art—the works of his
hands and days—she could mourn bitterly. And so too for the deaths of friend
s and the sudden terrors of an occupied impoverished city. The larger losses,
the implications for the future, she couldn't really grasp back then.
Many in the city had gone mad that year.
Others had fled, taking their children away to try to shape a life far from th
e burning or the memory of burning, of hammers smashing into the statues of th
e Princes in the long covered loggia of the Palace by the Sea. Some had withdr
awn so far into themselves—a madness of another kind—that only the merest sp
ark was left within to make them eat and sleep and somehow walk through the wa
ste spaces of their days.
Her mother had been one of those.
On the balcony in Chiara so many years later, Dianora looked up at Scelto and
realized, from the blinking concern in his face, that she'd been silent for to
o long.
She forced a smile. She'd been here for a long time; she was good at dissembli
ng. At smiling when it was needful. Even with Scelto whom she hated to deceive
. And especially with Brandin, whom she had to deceive, or die.
"lassica is not a concern," she said mildly, resuming the conversation as if n
othing had happened. Indeed, nothing had happened— only old memories come bac
k. Nothing of weight or import in the world, nothing that mattered or could ma
tter. Only loss.
She said, skillfully laughing, "She is far too unintelligent to divert him and
too young to relax him as Solores does. I'm glad of your information though—
I think we can use it. Tell me, is Tesios growing weary tending her? Should I
speak to Vencel about assigning someone younger? Or perhaps more than one?"
She made him smile, even as he flushed again. It always seemed to go this way.
If she could make them smile or laugh it would brush away the clouds like a w
ind, a springtime or an autumn wind, leaving behind the high clear blue of the
sky.
Dianora wished, with an aching heart, that she'd known how to do that eighteen
years ago. For her mother and her brother. For both of them so long ago. No l
aughter then. No laughter anywhere, and the blue skies a mockery, looking down
upon ruin.
Vencel, more awesomely obese every time she saw him, approved Solores's gown,
Nesaia's, Chylmoene's, and then her own. Only the four of them—experienced en
ough to know how to cope with the exigencies of a formal reception—were going
down to the Audience Chamber. The envy in the saishan during the past week ha
d been acute enough to produce a scent, Scelto had said wryly more than once.
Dianora hadn't noticed; she was used to it.
Vencel's shrewd eyes widened from deep in the manifold creases of his dark fac
e as he studied her. She had the gem on her brow, set in a band of white gold
that held back her hair. Sprawled on his couch of pillows, the head of the sai
shan played with the billowing folds of his elephantine white robe. The sun sh
ining through the arch of a window behind him glinted distractingly from his b
ald head.
"I do not recall that stone among our treasures," he murmured in his high, dis
concerting voice. It was a voice so utterly inconsequential that it might lead
one to underestimate the speaker. Which, as a good many people had discovered
over the years, was a serious, sometimes a mortal mistake.
"It isn't," Dianora replied cheerfully. "Though after we return this afternoon
may I ask you to guard it in my name among the other treasures?"
Scelto's suggestion, that. Vencel could be corrupt and venal about a great man
y things, but not when it came to the formal aspects of his office. He was too
clever for that. Again, a truth some had paid the ultimate price to discover.

He nodded benignly now. "It seems a very fine stone from this distance." Obedi
ently, Dianora stepped nearer and inclined her head graciously to let him see
it more clearly. The scent of tainflowers that he always wore after winter's e
nd enveloped her. It was too sweet, but not unpleasant.
She had feared Vencel once—a fear mixed of physical revulsion at his grossnes
s and rumors of the things he liked to do with the younger castrates and some
of the women who were in the saishan for purely political reasons,,with no hop
e of ever seeing the outside world or the west wing of the palace and Brandin'
s chambers. Long ago though she and the saishan head had reached their underst
anding. Solores had the same unspoken pact with Vencel, and out of the delicat
e balance achieved thereby the three of them controlled, as best they could, t
heir enclosed, over-intense, incense-laden world of idle, frustrated women, an
d half-men.
With a surprisingly delicate finger Vencel touched the gem on her brow. He smi
led. "A good stone," he said again, this time in judgment. His breath was frag
rant. "I must talk to Scelto about it. I know about such things, you see. Vair
stones come from the north, you see. From my own land. They are mined in Khard
hun. For years and years I used to play with them as trinkets, a monarch's toy
s. In the days when I was more than I am now. For as you know, I have been a K
ing in Khardhun."
Dianora nodded gravely. For this too was a part of the unspoken terms of her r
elationship with Vencel. That however many times he might speak this wild fabr
ication of a lie—and he said it many times a day, in one variant or another—
she was to nod knowingly, reflectively, as if pondering the message hidden in
the grandeur of his fall.
Only in her rooms alone with Scelto could she give way to fits of girlish gigg
ling at the very thought of the vasty saishan head being more than he was now,
or at the subversive, deadly imitation Scelto could give of VencePs speech an
d gestures.
"You do that wonderfully," she might say innocently, as Scelto dressed her hai
r, or polished her curved slippers till they shone.
"It is a thing I know about, you see," he would reply if certain they were alo
ne, his voice pitched high above its normal range. He would gesticulate slowly
, expansively. "For as you are aware, I have been a King in Khardhun."
She would laugh like a little girl who knew just how naughty she was being, th
e more out of control because of that very fact.
She had asked Brandin about it once. His Khardhun campaign had been only a mar
ginal success, she learned. He was frank with her about such things by then. T
here was real magic in Khardhun, in that hot northern land across the sea, bey
ond the coastal villages and the desert wastes. A magic far greater than anyth
ing in the Peninsula of the Palm and equal to the sorcery of Ygrath.
Brandin had taken one city and established a tenuous control over some lands t
hat lay on the fringes of the great desert stretching north. There had been lo
sses though, serious losses she gathered. The Khardhu had long been celebrated
for their skill in battle, nor was this unknown in the Palm: many of them had
served as well-paid mercenaries in the warring provinces before the Tyrants h
ad come and made all such feuding irrelevant.
Vencel had been a herald captured late in the campaign, Brandin told her. He'd
already been unmanned: a thing they did to messengers in the north, for no re
ason Brandin had understood. It had been manifestly evident where the castrate
belonged when brought back to Ygrath. He had already, Brandin confirmed, been
enormous.
Dianora straightened as Vencel withdrew his finger from the red gleam of the v
airstone.
"Will you escort us down?" she asked. A ritual.
"I think not," he said judiciously, as if actually giving thought to the matte
r. "Perhaps Scelto and Hala can manage that office between them. I have some m
atters that need my attention here this afternoon, you see."
"I understand." Dianora glanced over at Solores and each of them raised a spre
ad palm in respectful salute. In fact, Vencel hadn't left the saishan wing in
at least five years. Even when he toured the rooms on this floor it was on a c
leverly contrived rolling platform of cushions. Dianora could not remember the
last time she'd actually seen him stand upright. Scelto and Solores's Hala at
tended to virtually all the formal out-of-saishan duties. Vencel believed in d
elegating.
They went down the stairway that led out from the saishan to the world. One fl
ight below they accepted the scrutiny—respectful but careful—of the two guar
ds posted outside the heavy bronze doors that barred access to and from the le
vel where the women were. Dianora responded to their cautious glances with a s
mile. One of them returned it shyly. The guards were changed often; she didn't
know either of these two, but a smile was a start at bonding and a friend nev
er hurt.
Scelto and Hala, dressed unobtrusively in brown, led the four women out of the
saishan wing along the main corridor of the palace to the Grand Staircase in
the center. There the two castrates paused to let the women precede them. With
some pride but not with hauteur— they were the captives and concubines of a
conqueror—Dianora and Solores led the way down the sweeping stair.
They were noticed of course. The women of the saishan were always noticed when
they came out. There were a number of people milling about in the marbled ves
tibule waiting to enter the Audience Chamber; they made way for the four of th
em. Some of the newer men smiled in a manner that had taken Dianora some time
to accept.
Others knew her better and their expressions were rather different. In the arc
hed doorway to the largest of the formal reception rooms she and Solores pause
d again side by side, this time entirely for effect—the blood-red gown beside
the green—and then walked together into the crowded room of state.
As she did so—every single time she did so—Dianora offered an inward voicing
of gratitude for the impulse that had led Brandin to change the rules for his
saishan here in the colony he now ruled.
In Ygrath, she knew, this would never have been allowed. For a man other than
the King or one of the castrates to see, let alone hold converse with a saisha
n woman was death for both of them. And, Vencel had told her once, for the hea
d of the saishan wing as well.
Things had been different here in Chiara almost from the start. Over the years
Dianora had learned enough to know that some of her gratitude should go to Do
rotea, Queen of Ygrath, and her decision to remain there with Girald, her elde
r son, and not accompany her husband into his self-imposed exile abroad. Dorot
ea's choice, or, depending on to whom one listened, Brandin's decision not to
demand the company of his Queen.
Somewhat instinctively Dianora always preferred the latter version of the stor
y, but she was wise enough to know why that was so, and this was one of the th
ings she never spoke about with Brandin. Not that the matter was taboo; he was
n't that kind of man. It was simply that she wasn't sure if or how she could d
eal with whatever answer he gave her if the question was ever asked.
In any case, with Dorotea remaining in Ygrath there were few high-born court l
adies willing to risk the seas and the Queen's displeasure in journeying to th
e colony in the Palm. Which meant an extreme scarcity of women at Brandin's ne
w court in Chiara, and this, in turn, led to a change in the role of the saish
an. The more so since—especially in the early years—Brandin had deliberately
ordered the Tribute Ships to search out daughters of distinguished houses in
Corte or Asoli. On Chiara he made the choices himself. From Lower Corte, which
had once borne a different name, he took no women at all, as a matter of abso
lute policy. The hatred there ran both ways and too deep, and the saishan was
not a place to let it fester.
He'd sent for only a few of the women from his saishan in Ygrath, leaving it l
argely intact. The politics were straightforward: control of the saishan was a
symbol that would confirm the status and authority of Girald, now ruling as R
egent of Ygrath in his father's name.
With such changes here in the colony, the new saishan was a very different pla
ce from the old; Vencel and Scelto had both told her that. It had another kind
of mood to it, a different character entirely.
It also had, among all those women from Corte and Chiara and Asoli and the han
dful from Ygrath, one woman named Dianora, from Certando. From Barbadian-ruled
Certando.
Or so everyone in the palace thought.
It had almost started a war, Dianora remembered.
In the days after her brother left home, sixteen-year-old Dianora di Tigana, d
aughter of a sculptor who had died in the war, and of a mother who had scarcel
y spoken since that day, resolved that she would point her own life towards th
e killing of the Tyrant on Chiara.
Hardening herself, the way she heard that men in battle were forced to do—the
way her father must have tried to do by the Deisa— she had begun preparing t
o leave her mother in the hollow, echoing house that had once been a place cro
wded with joy. Where the Prince of Tigana had walked in their courtyard, an ar
m flung about her father's shoulders, discussing and praising the works in pro
gress there.
Dianora could remember.
Entering the Audience Chamber she checked and approved her reflection in the w
all of gold-plated mirrors on the far side of the room, then her eyes sought,
instinctively, those of d'Eymon of Ygrath, the Chancellor. The second most pow
erful man in the court.
He was, predictably, already looking towards Solores and herself, his glance p
recisely as bleak as it always was. It was a look that had bothered Dianora wh
en first she came. She'd thought d'Eymon had taken a dislike to her, or, worse
, that he somehow suspected her. It wasn't long before she realized that he di
sliked and suspected virtually every person who entered this palace. Everyone
received the same glacial, appraising scrutiny. It had been exactly so, she ga
thered, in Ygrath as well. D'Eymon's loyalty to Brandin was fanatical and unwa
vering, and so was his zeal in protecting his King.
Over the years Dianora had developed a respect, grudging at first, and then le
ss so, for the grim Ygrathen. She counted it as one of her own triumphs that h
e seemed to trust her now. For years now—in fact —or she would never have be
en allowed to spend a night in Brandin's bed while he slept.
A triumph of deception, she thought, with an irony whose teeth were all direct
ed inward against herself.
D'Eymon made an economical circling motion with his head and then repeated the
gesture for Solores. It was what they had expected: they were to mingle and c
onverse. Neither of them was to take the chair set beside the Island Throne. T
hey did sometimes—and so had the beautiful, unlamented Chloese before her sur
prising, untimely death—but Brandin was quite punctilious when guests from Yg
rath were among them. At such times the seat beside him stood pointedly empty.
For Dorotea, his Queen.
Brandin had not yet entered the room of course, but Dianora saw Rhun, the slac
k-limbed balding Fool shamble towards one of the servers carrying wine. Rhun,
clumsy, grievously retarded, was clad sumptuously in gold and white, and so Di
anora knew that Brandin would be as well. It was an integral part of the compl
ex relationship of the Sorcerer Kings of Ygrath and their chosen Fools.
For centuries in Ygrath the Fool had served as shadow and projection for the K
ing. He was dressed like his monarch, ate next to him at public functions, was
there when honors were conferred or judgment passed. And every King's chosen
Fool was someone visibly, sometimes painfully afflicted or malformed. Rhun's w
alk was sluggish, his features twisted and deformed, his hands dangled at awkw
ard angles in repose, his speech was badly slurred. He recognized people in th
e court, but not invariably, and not always in the manner one might expect—wh
ich sometimes carried a message. A message from the King.
That part, Dianora didn't entirely comprehend, and doubted she ever would. She
knew that Rhun's dim, limited mind was mostly under his own control but she a
lso knew that that was not completely so. There was sorcery at work in this: t
he subtle magic of Ygrath.
This much she understood: that in addition to serving—very graphically—to re
mind their King of his mortality and his own limitations, the Fools of Ygrath,
dressed exactly like their lord, could sometimes also serve as a voice, an ex
ternal conduit, for the thoughts and emotions of the King.
Which meant that one could not always be sure whether Rhun's words and actions
—slurred or awkward as they might be—were his own, or an important revelatio
n of Brandin's mood. And that could be treacherous ground for the unwary.
Right now Rhun seemed smiling and content, bobbing and bowing jerkily at every
second person he encountered, his golden cap slipping off every time. He woul
d laugh though, as he bent to pick it up and set it again on his thinning hair
. Every so often an overanxious courtier, seeking to curry favor in any way he
could, would hastily stoop to pick up the fallen cap and present it to the Fo
ol. Rhun would laugh at that too.
Dianora had to admit that he made her uneasy, though she tried to hide that be
neath the real pity she felt for his afflictions and his increasingly evident
years. But the core truth for her was that Rhun was intimately tied to Brandin
's magic, he was an extension of it, a tool, and Brandin's magic was the sourc
e of all her loss and fear. And her guilt.
So over the years she had become adroit at avoiding situations where she might
find herself alone with the Fool; his guileless eyes— unnervingly similar to
Brandin's—gave her genuine trouble. They seemed, if she looked into them for
too long, to have no depth, to be only a surface, reflecting her image back t
o her in a fashion very different from that of the gold-plated mirrors, and at
such times she did not like what she was made to see.
From the doorway, with the polished grace of long experience, Solores drifted
to her right as Dianora moved left, smiling at people she knew. Nesaia and Chy
lmoene, chestnut- and amber-tressed, crossed the floor together, creating a pa
lpable stir where they passed.
Dianora saw the poet Doarde standing with his wife and daughter. The girl, abo
ut seventeen, was obviously excited. Her first formal reception, Dianora guess
ed. Doarde smiled unctuously across the room at her, and bowed elaborately. Ev
en at a distance, though, she could read the discomfiture in his eyes: a recep
tion on this scale for a musician from Ygrath had to be bitter gall for the mo
st senior poet in the colony. All winter he had preened with pride over his ve
rses that Brandin had sent east as a goad for the Barbadian when word had come
in the fall of the death of Sandre d'Astibar. Doarde had been insufferable fo
r months. Today though, Dianora could sympathize with him a little, even thoug
h he was a monumental fraud in her view.
She'd told Brandin as much once, only to learn that he found the poet's pompou
sness amusing. For genuine art, he'd murmured, he looked elsewhere.
And you destroyed it, she'd wanted to say.
Wanted so much to say. Remembering with an almost physical pain the broken hea
d and sundered torso of her father's last Adaon on the steps of the Palace by
the Sea. The one for which her brother, finally old enough, had served as mode
l for the young god. She remembered looking dry-eyed at the wreckage of that s
culpted form, wanting to weep and not knowing where her tears were anymore.
She glanced back at Doarde's daughter, at her young, scarcely contained exhila
ration. Seventeen.
Just after her own seventeenth naming day she had stolen half of the silver fr
om her father's hidden strongbox, begging pardon of his spirit and her mother'
s blessing in her heart, and asking the compassion of Eanna who saw all beneat
h the shining of her lights.
She'd gone without saying good-bye, though she had looked in a last time by ca
rried candlelight, upon the thin, worn figure of her mother, uneasily asleep i
n the wideness of her bed. Dianora was hardened, as for battle; she did not we
ep.
Four days later she'd crossed the border into Certando, having forded the rive
r at a lonely place north of Avalle. She'd had to be careful getting there—Yg
rathen soldiers were still ranging the countryside and in Avalle itself they w
ere hammering at the towers, bringing them down. Some yet stood, she could see
them from her crossing-place, but most were rubble by then, and what she saw
of Avalle was through a screen of smoke.
It wasn't even Avalle by then, either. The spell had been laid down. Brandin's
magic. The city where the pall of smoke and summer dust hung so heavily was n
ow called Stevanien. Dianora could remember not being able to understand how a
man could name the ugly wreckage of a place once so fair after a child he had
loved. Later that would become clearer to her: the name had nothing to do wit
h Brandin's memory of Stevan. It was solely for those living there, and elsewh
ere in what had been Tigana: a constant, inescapable reminder of whose death h
ad meant their ruin. The Tiganese now lived in a province named Lower Corte—a
nd Corte had been their bitterest foe for centuries. The city of Tigana was th
e city of Lower Corte now.
And Avalle of the Towers was Stevanien. The vengeance of the King of Ygrath we
nt deeper than occupation and burning and rubble and death. It encompassed nam
es and memory, the fabric of identity; it was a subtle thing, and merciless.
There were a number of refugees in the summer Dianora went east, but none had
anything remotely resembling her own fixed purpose and so most of them went mu
ch further away: to the far side of the Certandan grainlands, to Ferraut, Treg
ea, Astibar itself. Willing, anxious even, to live under the spreading tyranny
of the Barbadian lord in order to put as much distance as they could between
themselves and their images of what Brandin of Ygrath had done to their home.

But Dianora was clinging to those images, she was nursing them within her brea
st, feeding them with hate, shaping hatred with memory. Twin snakes inside her
.
She only went a handful of miles across the border into Certando. The late-sum
mer fields of corn had been yellow and tall, she remembered, but all the men w
ere gone, away to the north and east where Alberico of Barbadior, having caref
ully consolidated his conquests of Ferraut and Astibar, was now moving south.

He was master of Certando by the end of the fall, and had taken Borifort in Tr
egea—the last major stronghold to stand against him— by the following spring
after a winter siege.
Long before then Dianora had found what she was looking for, in the western hi
ghlands of Certando. A hamlet—twenty houses and a tavern—south of Sinave and
Forese, the two great forts that watched each other on either side of the bor
der that divided Certando from what she learned to call Lower Corte.
The land so near the southern mountains was not nearly as good as it was farth
er north. The growing season was shorter. Cold winds swept down from the Bracc
io and Sfaroni Ranges early in fall bringing snow soon after and a long white
winter. Wolves would howl in the wintry nights and sometimes in the morning st
range footmarks could be found in the deep snow—marks that came down from the
mountains and then returned.
Once, long ago, the village had been near to one of the roads forking northeas
t from the main highway down from the Sfaroni Pass —in the days when there wa
s still overland trade with Quileia to the south. That was why the ancient tav
ern was so large in a village now so small, why it had four rooms upstairs for
the travelers who had not come for a great many years.
Dianora hid her father's silver south of the village on a thickly wooded slope
away from the goatherd runs, and she went to work as a serving girl in the ta
vern. There was no money to pay her of course. She worked for her room and the
scanty board available that first summer and fall, and she labored in the fie
lds with the other women and the young boys to bring home what they could of t
he harvest.
She told them she was from the north, near Ferraut. That her mother was dead a
nd her father and brother had gone to war. She said her uncle had begun to abu
se her and so she had run away. She was good with accents and she had the nort
hern speech right enough for them to believe her. Or at least to ask no questi
ons. There were many transients in the Palm in those days, questions were seld
om pushed too far. She ate little and worked as hard as any in the fields. The
re was actually little enough to do in the inn, with the men away to war. She
slept in one of the rooms upstairs, she even had it to herself. They were kind
enough to her after their fashion, and given the nature of things in that tim
e.
When the light and the place were right—morning usually, and in certain of th
e higher fields—she could look away to the west across the border towards the
river and see the remaining towers and the smoke above what had been Avalle.
One morning, late in the year, she realized that she couldn't see anything any
more. That she hadn't, in fact, seen anything for some time. The last tower wa
s gone.
Around that time the men had begun to come home, beaten and weary. There was w
ork again in the kitchen and waiting on tables or behind the counter of the ba
r. She was also expected—and had been preparing herself for this as best she
could all through the fall—to take a man up to her room if he offered the goi
ng rate.
Every village seemed to need one such woman, and she was the obvious candidate
here. She tried to make herself not mind, but this was the most difficult thi
ng yet. She had a mission though, a reason for being here, a vengeance to enac
t, and this, even this, she would tell herself, going up the stairs with someo
ne, was a part of it. She hardened herself, but not always, and not quite enou
gh.
Perhaps that showed through. Several men asked her to marry them. One day she
caught herself thinking about one of them as she wiped down the tables after l
unch. He was quiet and kind, shy when he took her upstairs, and his eyes would
follow her movements in the tavern with a fierce concentration whenever he wa
s there.
That day was when she knew it was time for her to leave.
She was a little surprised to realize that almost three years had gone by. It
was spring.
She slipped away one night, again without a farewell, remembering her arrival
even as she went. Meadow flowers were blooming beside the path into the hills.
The air was clean and mild. By the mingled light of the two moons she found h
er buried silver and walked away without looking back, taking the road north t
owards the fort at Sinave. She was nineteen years old.
Nineteen, and sometime in the past two years she had grown beautiful. Her angu
lar boniness had softened, even as her face lost its last traces of girlhood.
It was oval, wide at the cheekbones, almost austere. It changed when she laugh
ed though—and for some reason she still knew how to laugh—becoming warm and
animated, the unexpected dance in her dark eyes seeming to promise things that
went deeper than amusement. Men who had seen her laughing or who had caused h
er to smile at them would encounter that look again in their dreams, or in the
memories that lay on the border of sleep and dream, years after Dianora had g
one away.
At Sinave the Barbadians disturbed her, with their oppressive size and careles
s, casual brutality. She forced herself to be calm and to linger there. Two we
eks would be enough she judged. She had to leave an impression and a memory.
A carefully constructed memory of an ambitious, pretty country girl from some
hamlet near the mountains. A girl usually silent during the tavern talk at nig
ht but who, when she did speak, told vivid, memorable tales of her home villag
e to the south. Told them with the distinctively laconic diction and round vow
els that would have marked her anywhere in the Palm as being from the highland
s of Certando.
The tales were usually sad—most stories were in those years—but once in a wh
ile Dianora would offer a wonderfully droll imitation of some highland rustic
voicing his considered opinion on great affairs in the wider world, and those
at the table where she was sitting would laugh for a long time.
She appeared to them to have some money, earned very likely in the way that pr
etty girls usually came to have some money. But she shared a room with another
woman at the better of the two hostelries within the walls of the fort, and n
either of them was ever seen to invite a man upstairs. Or to accept an invitat
ion to go elsewhere. The Barbadian soldiers might have been a problem—indeed
they had been over the winter—but orders had come from Astibar, and the merce
naries were under a tighter rein that spring.
What she wanted to do, Dianora confided one night to the loosely knit group of
young men and women she had joined, was to work in a tavern or dining-place t
hat saw a better class of person coming through its doors. She'd had two hands
full and more, thank you, of the other sort of inn, she declared.
Someone mentioned The Queen in Stevanien, across the border in Lower Corte.
With a heartfelt, inward sigh of relief Dianora began asking questions about i
t.
Questions to which she'd known the answers for three days; during which time s
he'd sat among these selfsame people every night planting subtle hints in the
hope that the name might emerge spontaneously. Subtlety, she'd finally decided
, was wasted among young Cer-tandans here on the border, and so she'd practica
lly had to drag the conversation over to the subject she wanted.
Now she listened, seemingly enraptured and wide-eyed, as two of her recent acq
uaintances animatedly described the newest, most elegant Ygrathen innovation i
n Lower Corte. A dining-place that boasted a master chef brought all the way f
rom Ygrath itself by the current Governor of Stevanien and its distrada. The G
overnor, it emerged, was notoriously fond of wine and food, and of good music
played in comfortable chambers. He had helped establish the new chef in a set
of rooms on the ground floor of a former banking-house, and now he basked in t
he reflected glory of the most elaborate, most luxurious eating-place in the P
alm. He dined there himself several times a week, Dianora learned.
For the second time.
She'd picked up all of this in gossip among the merchants during her days chec
king out the prices and styles of clothing available in Fort Sinave. She neede
d some things fit for the city, she knew. It might make a difference.
From the very first time she'd heard the name she'd realized that The Queen wo
uld be perfect for the next stage of her plan to change her past.
What she learned from the merchants was that no one from Lower Corte was allow
ed to dine here. Traders from Corte were cordially greeted, as were those from
farther afield, in Asoli or Chiara itself. Any Ygrathen, naturally, soldier,
merchant or whoever he might be—come to seek his fortune in the newest colony
—was graciously ushered in to salute the portrait of Queen Dorotea that hung
on the wall opposite the door. Even those merchants crossing the line that div
ided the Eastern Palm from the West were more than welcome to leave some of wh
atever currency they carried in The Queen.
It was only the King's true enemies, the denizens of Lower Corte, of Stevanien
itself, who were forbidden to stain or sully the ambience with their pustulen
t, heir-murdering presence.
They never did, Dianora learned from a Ferraut trader bound back north and eas
t with leather from Stevanien that he expected to sell at a profit, even with
that year's tariff levels. What the inhabitants of Stevanien had done in respo
nse to the ban was simply refuse to work for the new establishment. Neither as
servers or kitchen help or stable hands, nor even as musicians or artisans to
help decorate and maintain the splendid rooms.
The Governor, when he learned what was happening, had vowed in red-faced rage
to force the contemptible inhabitants to work wherever they were required by t
heir masters of Ygrath. Force them with dungeon and lash and a death-wheel or
three if needed.
The master chef, Arduini, had demurred.
One did not, Arduini had said, in a much-quoted display of artistic temperamen
t, build up and maintain an establishment of quality by using enforced, surly
labor. His standards were simply too high for that. Even the stable-boys at hi
s restaurant, said Arduini of Ygrath, were to be trained and willing, and to h
ave a certain style to them.
There had been widespread hilarity when that was reported: stylish stable-hand
s, indeed. But, Dianora learned, the amusement had turned to respect quite soo
n, because Arduini, pretentious or not, did know what he was doing. The Queen,
the Ferraut trader told her, was like an oasis amid the deserts of Khardhun.
In dispirited, broken Stevanien it cast a warm glow of Ygrathen civility and g
race. The merchant lamented, though discreetly on this side of the border, the
complete absence of any such traits in the Barbadians who had occupied his ow
n province.
But yes, he said, in response to Dianora's apparently casual question, Arduini
was still struggling with staff problems. Stevanien was a backwater, and a ba
ckwater, moreover, in the most oppressively taxed and militarily subjugated pr
ovince in the Palm. It was next to impossible to get people to travel there, o
r stay, and since none of the trickle of adventurers from Ygrath had come so f
ar from home to wash dishes or clear tables or tend to a stable—however styli
sh a stable it might be—there appeared to be a chronic need for workers from
elsewhere in the Palm.
In that moment Dianora had changed every plan she had. She cast the line of he
r life, with a silent prayer to Adaon, in the direction of this chance informa
tion. She had been intending, with some real apprehension, to go northwest to
Corte. That had always been the next-to-last destination in her plans. She had
seriously wondered, almost every night as she lay awake, whether three years
in Certando would be enough to shake off anyone pursuing the true history of h
er life. She'd had no good ideas about what else she could do, though.
Now she did.
And so it was that a few nights latSr, in the largest of the taverns in Fort S
inave, a cheerful crowd of young people watched their new friend drink more th
an was good for her for the first time since she'd arrived. More than one of t
he men saw cause for cautious optimism in that, with respect to possibilities
later in the evening.
"You've settled it then!" Dianora cried in her attractive, south-country voice
. She leaned for support against the shoulder of a bemused cartwright. "Hand t
o the new plow for me tomorrow. I'm over the border as soon as I can to visit
The Queen of Ygrath! Triad bless her days!"
Triad shelter and hold my soul, she was thinking as she spoke, absolutely sobe
r, cold to her bones with the sense of the words she was so glibly shouting.
They silenced her, laughing uproariously—in part to cover her words. In Barba
dian Certando it was a long way from the path of wisdom to thus salute Ygrath'
s Queen. Dianora giggled quite endearingly but she subsided. The cartwright an
d another man tried to see her up to her room afterwards, but found themselves
charmingly put off and drinking together amid off-duty mercenaries in the one
all-night tavern Fort Sinave possessed.
She was just a little too untutored, too country, to succeed in her ambitious
hopes, they agreed sagely. They also agreed, a few drinks later, that she had
the most extraordinarily appealing smile. Something about her eyes, what happe
ned to them when she was pleased.
In the morning Dianora was dressed and packed and waiting very early at the ma
in gate of the fort. She struck a bargain for passage to Stevanien with a plea
sant-enough middle-aged merchant from Senzio carrying Barbadian spices for the
luxury trade. His only reason for going to dreary, flattened Stevanien, she l
earned as they started west, was because of the new restaurant, The Queen. She
took that coincidence as a good omen, closing the fingers of her left hand ov
er the thumb three times to make the wish come true.
The roads were better than she remembered; certainly the merchants traveling t
hem seemed to feel safer. Rolling along in the cart, she asked the Senzian abo
ut it. He grinned sardonically.
"The Tyrants have cleaned out most of the highway brigands. Just a matter of p
rotecting their own interests. They want to make sure no one else robs us befo
re they do with their border tariffs and taxes." He spat, discreetly, into the
dust of the road. "Personally I preferred the brigands. There were ways of de
aling with them."
Not long after that she saw evidence of what he was talking about: they passed
two death-wheels beside the roadway, the bodies of would-be thieves spreadeag
led upon them, spiraling lazily in the sun, severed hands rotting in their mou
ths. The smell was very bad.
The Senzian stopped just across the border to do some dealing in the fort of F
orese. He also paid his transit duties there scrupulously, waiting patiently i
n line to have his cart examined and levied. The death-wheels, he pointed out
to her after, in the acerbic Senzian manner, were not reserved for highway thi
eves and captured wizards.
Thus delayed, they spent the night at a coach-house on the well-traveled road,
joining a party of Ferraut traders for dinner. Dianora excused herself early
and went to bed. She'd paid for a room alone and took the precaution of pushin
g an oak dresser in front of her door. Nothing disturbed her though, except he
r dreams. She was back in Tigana and yet she wasn't, because it wasn't there.
She whispered the name to herself like a talisman or a prayer before falling i
nto a restless sleep shot through with images of destruction from the burning
year.
They spent the second night at another inn beside the river, just outside the
walls of Stevanien, having arrived after sundown curfew closed the city gates.
They ate alone this time, and she talked to the Senzian until late. He was de
cent and sober, belying the cliches about his decadent province, and it was cl
ear that he liked her. She enjoyed his company, and she was even attracted to
his dry, witty manner. She went to bed alone though. This was not the village
in Certando: she had no obligations.
Or not those kinds of obligations. And as for pleasure, or the ordinary needs
of human interaction . . . she would have been honestly uncomprehending if any
one had mentioned them to her.
She was nineteen years old and in Tigana that-had-been.
In the morning, just inside the city walls, she bade farewell to the Senzian,
touching palm to palm only briefly. He seemed somewhat affected by the night b
efore but she turned and walked away before he could find whatever words his e
yes were reaching for.
She found a hostelry not far away, one where her family had never stayed. She
wasn't really worried about being recognized though; she knew how much she had
changed and how many girls named Dianora there were scattered across the Palm
. She paid in advance for three nights' lodging and left her belongings there.

Then she walked out into the streets of what had been Avalle of the Towers not
very long ago. Avalle, on the green banks of the Sper-ion just before the riv
er turned west to find the sea. There was an ache building in her as she went,
and what hurt most of all, she found, was how much the same a place could be
after everything had changed.
She went through the leather district and the wool district. She could remembe
r skipping along beside her mother when they had all come inland to Avalle to
see one of her father's sculptures ceremoniously placed in some square or logg
ia. She even recognized the tiny shop where she'd purchased her first grey lea
ther gloves, with coins hoarded from her naming day in the summer for just suc
h a thing.
Grey was a color for grown young women, not for little girls, the red-bearded
artisan had teased. I know, six-year-old Dianora had said proudly that autumn
long ago. Her mother had laughed. Once upon a time her mother had been a woman
who laughed. Dianora could remember.
In the wool quarter she saw women and girls working tirelessly, carding and sp
inning as they had for centuries in doorways open to the early-summer early-mo
rning light. Over by the river she could see and smell the dyeing sheds and ya
rds.
When Quileia beyond the mountains to the south had folded inward upon its matr
iarchy, hundreds upon hundreds of years ago, Avalle had lost a great deal. Mor
e perhaps than any other city in the Palm. Once poised directly on one of the
two main trade routes through the mountains, it had found itself in danger of
sudden inconsequentially. With a collective ingenuity bordering on genius the
city had decisively shifted its orientation and focus.
Within a generation that city of banking and trade to north and south had beco
me the principal center in all of the Palm for works in leather and for sumptu
ously dyed wool.
Hardly missing a beat, Avalle pursued its new prosperity and its pride. And th
e towers kept rising.
With a catch to her heart Dianora finally acknowledged that she had been caref
ully working her way around the edges of Stevanien, the outlying districts, th
e artisans' quarters, looking outwards only and into doorways. Not into the ce
nter, up towards the hill. Where the towers were gone.
And so, realizing that, she did look, standing stock still in the middle of a
wide square at the bottom of the street of the Woolguild. There was a small, v
ery beautiful temple of Morian fronting the square, done in marble of a muted
rose color. She gazed at it for a moment, then looked up and beyond.
And in that moment Dianora had a truth brought home to her with finality: how
something can seem quite unchanged in all the small surface details of existen
ce where things never really change, men and women being what they are, but ho
w the core, the pulse, the kernel of everything can still have become utterly
unlike what it had been before.
The wide beautiful streets seemed even wider than before. But that was because
they were almost empty. There was a muted swell of noise over to her left whe
re the riverside market still was, but the sound was not a fraction, her memor
y told her, not a fraction of what it had been in mornings that were lost.
There were too few people. Too many were gone, or dead, and the Ygrathen soldi
ers were all the more visible because of how empty the streets were. Dianora l
et her gaze travel past the temple up the line of the broad boulevard beside i
t towards the heart of the city.
We can and we will build wide and straight, the people of Avalle had said; eve
n in the very beginning, when towns everywhere else were tortuous warrens of t
wisty alleys and crooked lanes easy to defend. There will be no city like ours
in all the world, and if need comes for defense we will defend ourselves from
our towers.
Which were gone. The squat ugly skyline jarred Dianora with a painful disconti
nuity. It was as if the eye was tricked, looking ceaselessly for something it
knew had to be there.
From the earliest days of that broad, elegant city on the banks of the Sperion
towers had been associated with Avalle. Assertions of Tiganese pride—sheer a
rrogance they called it in the provinces of Corte and Chiara and Astibar. They
were symbols of internecine rivalry as well—as each noble family or wealthy
guild of bankers or traders or artisans thrust its own tower as high as and th
en higher than they could truly afford. Graceful or warlike, red stone or sand
y or grey, the towers of Avalle pushed up towards Eanna's heaven like a forest
within the city walls.
The domestic conflicts had actually become dangerous for a time, with murder a
nd sabotage not nearly uncommon enough, and the best masons and architects cla
iming stupefying fees. It had been the third Prince Alessan in Tigana by the s
ea who had put an end to the insanity in the simplest possible way more than t
wo hundred years ago.
He commissioned Orsaria, the most celebrated of the architects, to build for h
im a palace in Avalle. And that palace was to have a tower, said Prince Alessa
n, that would be—and would remain, by force of law—the highest in the city.

So it had been. The spire of the Prince's Tower, slender and graceful, wrapped
in bands of green and white to serve as a memory of the sea this far inland,
put an end to the competition for the summit of Avalle. And from then on also,
by that Prince Alessan's example which became custom and then tradition, the
princes and princesses of Tigana were born in Avalle, in the palace beneath th
at spire, to mark them as belonging to both of the cities-, to Tigana of the W
aves and Avalle of the Towers.
There had been over seventy towers once, Dianora knew, crowned in glory by tha
t green and white preeminence. Once? Four years ago.
What, Dianora thought, her vision hurting for that absence, is a person who mo
ves through her days as she has always moved, who speaks and walks and labors,
eats, makes love, sleeps, sometimes even finds access to laughter, but whose
heart has been cut out from her living body? Leaving no scar at all to be seen
. No wound by which to remember the sliding blade.
The rubble had all been cleared away. There was no smoke, save from over by th
e dyeworks, to mar the clear blue of the sky. The day was mild and bright, bir
ds sang a welcome to the coming warmth. There was nothing, nothing at all to s
how that there had ever been towers in this place. In this low, steadily dwind
ling town of Stevanien here in its remote corner of the Peninsula of the Palm,
in the most oppressed province of them all.
What is such a person? Dianora thought again. That person whose heart was gone
? She had no answer, how could she have an answer? Loss coiled to life within
her, and hate followed it again, as if both of them were new-born, colder and
sharper than before.
She walked up that wide boulevard into the center of Stevanien. She passed the
soldiers' barracks and the doors of the Governor's Palace. Not far away she f
ound The Queen. She was hired immediately. To start that same night. Help was
badly needed. Help was hard to find. Arduini of Ygrath, who did all his own hi
ring, decided that this pretty creature from Certando had a certain style to h
er. She would have to do something though, he admonished her, about that wretc
hedly vulgar highland accent. She promised to try.
Within six months she was speaking almost like a native of the city, he observ
ed. By then he had her out of the kitchen and into the front room waiting on t
ables, clad in the cream and dark-brown colors around which he had designed hi
s establishment. Colors that happened to suit her very well.
She was quiet, deft, unassuming, and polite. She remembered names and patrons'
preferences. She learned quickly. Four months later, in the spring before she
turned twenty-one, Arduini offered her the coveted position at the front of T
he Queen greeting guests and supervising the staff in the three rooms of dinin
g.
She astonished him by refusing. She astonished a great many people. But Dianor
a knew that this would be far too prominent a position for her own purposes. W
hich had not changed. If she was to travel north into Corte soon, and clearly
marked by now as being from Certando, she needed to have been associated with
The Queen, but not so very prominently. Prominent people had questions asked a
bout them, that much she knew.
So she feigned an attack of country-girl anxiety the night Arduini made his of
fer. She broke two glasses and dropped a platter. Then she spilled Senzian gre
en wine on the Governor himself.
Tearfully she went to Arduini and begged for more time to grow sure of herself
. He agreed. It helped that he was in love with her by then. He invited her, g
racefully, to become his mistress. In this, too, she demurred, pleading the in
evitable tension that such a liaison would elicit within the staff, badly dama
ging The Queen. It was the right argument; his establishment was Arduini's tru
e mistress.
In fact, Dianora had resolved to let no man touch her now. She was in Ygrathen
territory and she had a purpose. The rules had changed. She had tentatively d
ecided to leave in the fall, north towards Corte. She had been weighing possib
ilities and excuses for doing so when events had overtaken her so spectacularl
y.
Slowly circling the Audience Chamber, Dianora paused to greet Doarde's wife wh
om she liked. The poet seized the opportunity to present his daughter. The gir
l blushed, but dipped her head, hands pressed together, in a creditable manner
. Dianora smiled at her and moved on.
A steward caught up to her, bearing khav in a black chalice set with red gemst
ones. A gift, years ago, from Brandin. It was her trademark on occasions such
as this: she never drank anything stronger than khav at public receptions. Wit
h a guilty glance towards the doorway where she knew Scelto would be stationed
against the wall, she took a grateful sip of the hot drink. Praise the Triad
and the growers of Tregea, it was dark and rich and very strong.
"My dear lady Dianora, you are looking more magnificent than ever."
She turned, smoothly suppressing an expression of distaste. She had recognized
the voice: Neso of Ygrath, a minor nobleman from overseas who had recently ar
rived at Brandin's court on the first ship of the season, solely in the hope o
f becoming a major nobleman in the colony. He was, so far as Dianora had been
able to tell, talentless and venal.
She smiled radiantly at him and allowed him to touch her hand. "My dear Neso,
how kind of you to lie so skillfully to an aging woman."
She rather liked saying that sort of thing: for, as Scelto had shrewdly observ
ed once, if she was old, what did that make Solores?
Neso hastened to offer all the emphatic, predictable denials. He praised her g
own and the vairstone, noting with a courtier's eye and tongue how exquisitely
the stones of her chalice echoed her colors that day. Then, lowering his voic
e towards an unearned intimacy he asked her for the eighth time at least if sh
e happened to have heard anything further about the planned disposition of tha
t very trivial office of Taxing Master in north Asoli.
It was, in fact, a lucrative position. The incumbent had made his fortune, or
enough for his own purposes evidently, and was returning to Ygrath in a few we
eks. Dianora hated that sort of graft and she had even been bold enough to say
so to Brandin once. A little amused— which had irritated her—he had prosaic
ally pointed out how difficult it was to get men to serve in places as devoid
of attraction as the north of Asoli without offering them a chance at modest w
ealth.
His grey eyes beneath the thick dark eyebrows had rested upon her as she'd wre
stled and then finally come to terms with the depressing truth inherent in thi
s. She'd finally looked up and nodded a reluctant agreement. Which made him bu
rst into laughter.
"I am so relieved," chuckled Brandin of Ygrath, "that my clumsy reasoning and
government meet with your approval." She had gone red to the roots of her hair
, but then, catching his mood, had laughed herself at the absurdity of her pre
sumption. That had been several years ago.
Now all she did was try, discreetly, to see that positions such as this one di
d not go to the most transparently greedy of the motley crew of petty Ygrathen
courtiers from whom Brandin had to choose. Neso, she had resolved, was not ge
tting this posting if she could help it. The problem was that d'Eymon seemed,
for inscrutable reasons of his own, to be favoring Neso's appointment. She'd a
lready asked Scelto to see if he could find out why.
Now she let her smile fade to an earnestly benevolent look of concern as she g
azed at the sleek, plump Ygrathen. Lowering her voice but without leaning towa
rds him she murmured, "I am doing what I can. You should know that there seems
to be some opposition."
Neso's eyes narrowed on the far side of the curl of smoke rising from her khav
. With practiced subtlety they flicked past her right shoulder to where she kn
ew d'Eymon would still be standing by the King's door. Neso looked back at her
, eyebrows raised very slightly.
Dianora gave a small, apologetic shrug.
"Have you a ... suggestion?" Neso asked, his brow furrowed with anxiety.
"I'd start by smiling a little," she said with deliberate tartness. There was
no point in intriguing in such a way that the whole court knew of it.
Neso forced an immediate laugh and then applauded stagily as if she'd offered
an irresistible witticism.
"Forgive me," he said, smiling as ordered. "This matters a great deal to me."

It matters a great deal more to the people of Asoli, you greedy bloodleech, Di
anora thought. She laid a hand lightly on Neso's puffed sleeve.
"I know it does," she said kindly. "I will do what I can. If circumstances . .
. allow me to."
Neso, whatever he was, was no stranger to this sort of thing. Once more the fa
lse laugh greeted her nonexistent jest. "I hope to be able to assist the circu
mstances," he murmured.
She smiled again and withdrew her hand. It was enough. Scelto was going to rec
eive some more money that afternoon. She hoped it would come to a decent part
of the vairstone's cost. As for d'Eymon, she would probably end up talking dir
ectly to him later in the week. Or as directly as discussions ever got with th
at man.
Sipping at her khav she moved on. People came up to her wherever she went. It
was bad politics in Brandin's court not to be on good terms with Dianora di Ce
rtando. Conversing absently and inconsequentially she kept an ear pitched for
the discreet raps of the Herald's staff that would be Brandin's sole announcem
ent. Rhun, she noted, was making faces at himself in one of the mirrors and la
ughing at the effect. He was in high humor, which was a good sign. Turning the
other way she suddenly noticed a face she liked. One that was undeniably cent
ral to her own history.
In could be said, in many ways, to have been the Governor's own fault. So anxi
ous was he to assuage the evident frustration of Rhamanus, captain of that yea
r's Tribute Ship, that he ordered the Certandan serving-girl—who had apologiz
ed so very charmingly after the spilled-wine incident some time ago—to bring
rather more of The Queen's best vintages than were entirely good for any of th
em at the table.
Rhamanus, young enough to still be ambitious, old enough to feel his chances s
lipping away, had made some pointedly acid remarks earlier in the day on board
the river galley about the state of affairs in Stevanien and its environs. So
much of a backwater, so desultory in its collection of duties and taxes, he m
urmured a little too casually, that he wasn't even sure if the galley run upri
ver in spring was worthwhile . . . under the present administrative circumstan
ces.
The Governor, long past the point of ambition but needing a few more years her
e skimming his share of border tariffs and internal levies, along with the cri
minal justice fines and confiscations, had winced inwardly and cursed the conj
unctions of his planets. Why, when he strove so hard to be decent and unconten
tious in everything he did, to leave any waters he entered as unruffled as pos
sible, did he have so little luck?
Short of a massive midsummer military assertion there was no way to force more
money or goods out of this impoverished region. If Brandin had seriously want
ed to extract real wealth out of Stevanien he would have been better advised n
ot to have so successfully smashed the city and its distrada to its knees.
Not that the Governor would have even dreamt of letting such a furtive thought
come anywhere near his lips. But the reality was that he was doing the best h
e could. If he squeezed the leather or the wool guilds any harder than he was
they would simply start to fold. Stevanien, already thinly inhabited—and part
icularly bereft of men in their prime years—would become a town of ghosts and
empty squares. And he had explicit instructions from the King to prevent that
.
If the King's various orders and demands rammed so violently up against each o
ther, in such patent contradiction, what, in all fairness, was a middle-echelo
n administrator to do?
Not that such a plaint could be used with this bristly, unhappy Rhamanus. What
care would the captain have for the Governor's dilemmas? The Tribute Ship cap
tains were judged by what came home to Chiara in their holds. Their job was to
put as much pressure on the local administrators as they could—even to the p
oint, sometimes, of forcing them to surrender a portion of their own levies to
bring the contents of the ship nearer to the mark. The Governor had already r
esigned himself, dismally, to doing just that by the end of the week if the la
st hurried sweep of the distrada that he'd ordered didn't produce enough to sa
tisfy Rhamanus. It wouldn't, he knew. This was an ambitious captain he was dea
ling with, and there had been a tenuous harvest in Corte last fall—Rhamanus's
next stop.
His retirement estate in eastern Ygrath, on the promontory he'd already chosen
in his mind, seemed farther away this evening than ever before. He signaled f
or another round of wine for all of them, inwardly grieving for the blue-green
sea and the splendid hunting woods by the home he'd probably never be able to
build.
On the other hand (as they liked to say here), it appeared that his attempt to
soothe the ire of this Rhamanus had been unexpectedly successful. The Governo
r had asked his wonderful Arduini—the true and only joy there was for him in
this benighted place—to prepare an evening meal for them of an unforgettable
order.
"All of my meals are unforgettable," Arduini had bridled predictably, but had
been mollified by a judicious mixture of flattery, gold ygras, and a quiet rem
inder (almost certainly not the truth, the Governor reflected unrepentantly) t
hat their guest that evening had ready access to the ear of the King on Chiara
.
The meal had been an ascending series of revelations, the service prompt, soot
hing, and unobtrusive, the wines a sequence of complementary grace notes to Ar
duini's undeniable artistry. Rhamanus, a man who appeared to keep his trim phy
sique with some difficulty, had progressed from edginess through guarded appre
ciation, to increasing pleasure, ending up in a volubly expansive good humor.

Somewhere in the next-to-last bottle of dessert wine imported from back home i
n Ygrath he had also become quite drunk.
Which was the only explanation, the only possible explanation, for the fact th
at, after the dinner was over and The Queen closed for the night, he'd had the
ir evening's dark-haired waitress formally seized as Tribute for Brandin in Ch
iara and bundled directly onto the galley in the river.
The serving-girl. The serving-girl from Certando.
Certando, on the other side of the border, where Alberico of Barbadior held sw
ay, not, alas, Brandin of Ygrath.
The Governor of Stevanien had been awakened at dawn from a fitful, wine-fogged
slumber by a terrified, apologetic Clerk of the Council. Unclothed and withou
t so much as a whiff of his morning khav he had heard—through the ominous pou
nding of a colossal headache—the nature of the news.
"Stop that galley!" he roared, as the horrifying implications fought their way
through to register upon his slowly emerging consciousness. He had tried to r
oar, anyway. What came forth was a pitiful squeal that had been, nonetheless,
sufficiently explicit to send the clerk flying, his gown flapping in his haste
to obey.
They blocked the River Sperion, stopping Rhamanus just as he was raising ancho
r.
Unfortunately the Tribute captain then proceeded to reveal a stubbornness that
ran stupefyingly counter to the most rudimentary political good sense. He ref
used to surrender the girl. For one wild, hallucinatory moment of insanity the
Governor actually contemplated storming the galley.
The river galley of Brandin, King of Ygrath, Lord of Burrakh in Khardhun, Tyra
nt of the western provinces of the Peninsula of the Palm. Said galley then fly
ing—rather pointedly—Brandin's own device as well as the royal banner of Ygr
ath.
Death-wheels, the Governor reflected, were lovingly made for minor functionari
es who essayed such maneuvers.
Desperately, his brain curdling in the unfair brightness of the morning sunlig
ht by the river, the Governor tried to find a way of communicating reason to a
Tribute captain seized by the manifest throes of a midsummer madness.
"Do you want to start a war?" he shouted from the dock. He had to shout from t
he dock; they wouldn't let him on the galley. The wretched girl was nowhere to
be seen; stowed, doubtless in the captain's cabin. The Governor wished she we
re dead. He wished that he himself was dead. He wished, in the most grievous i
nner sacrilege of all, that Arduini the master chef had never set foot in Stev
anien.
"And why," Captain Rhamanus called blandly from the middle of the river, "shou
ld my doing my precise duty by my King cause any such a thing?"
"Has the sea salt rotted your miserable excuse for a brain?" the Governor scre
amed, ill-advisedly. The captain's brow darkened. The Governor pushed on, drip
ping with sweat in the sun.
"She's a Certandan, in the name of the seven holy sisters of the god! Do you h
ave any idea how easy it will be to goad Alberico into starting a border war o
ver this?" He mopped at his brow with the square of red cloth a servant belate
dly produced.
Rhamanus, cursedly composed despite having drunk at least as much as the Gover
nor the night before, seemed unimpressed.
"As far as I'm concerned," he pronounced airily, the words drifting over the w
ater, "she's living in Stevanien, she's working in Stevanien, and she was take
n in Stevanien. By my reckoning that makes her perfectly suitable for the sais
han, or whatever our King, in his wisdom, decides to do with her." He leveled
a finger suddenly at the Governor. "Now clear the river of these boats or I wi
ll ram and sink them in the name of each of the seven sisters and the King of
Ygrath. Unless," he added, leaning forward, lowering his hand to the railing,
"you would care to farspeak Chiara and have the King settle this himself?"
They had a saying here in the colony: naked between a fist and a fist. It was
an exact phrase for the place where that insidious, cleverly calculated, vicio
usly unfair proposition put the man to whom it was addressed. A phrase that de
scribed in precise and graphic terms where the Governor of Stevanien abruptly
felt himself to be. The red cloth swabbed repeatedly, and ineffectually, at hi
s forehead and neck.
One did not farspeak the King without, it had been painstakingly impressed upo
n all the regional administrators in the Western Palm, very compelling reason.
The power demanded of Brandin to sustain such a link with his non-sorcerous u
nderlings was considerable.
One most particularly did not willingly undertake such a course of action in t
he very early morning hours when the King might be asleep. Most relevant of al
l, perhaps, one did not hasten to bespeak the  mental presence of one's monarc
h with a mind clogged and befuddled with the miasmic aftermath of wine, and ov
er an issue that—in essence—might be seen to involve no more than the Tribut
e seizure of a common farm girl.
That was one of the fists.
The other was war on the border. With the brain-battering possibility of more
than that. For who, in the name of the sisters and the god, knew how the devio
us pagan mind of Alberico of Barbadior worked? How he might regard—or decide
to regard—an incident such as this? Despite Rhamanus's glib analysis, the fac
t that the girl worked in The Queen made it obvious that she wasn't really a L
ower Cortean. In the name of the sisters, they couldn't even seize a Lower Cor
tean for tribute! They weren't allowed to, by order of the King. To take the w
oman, she had to be Certandan. If Rhamanus wanted to argue she was a resident
of Stevanien, well that made her a Lower Cortean which meant that they couldn'
t take her! Which meant that ... he didn't know what that meant. The Governor
held out his sopping kerchief and it was exchanged for a fresh one. His brain
felt as if it was frying in the sun.
All he had wanted out of his declining years in service was the quiet, mildly
lucrative postings his family's long, if fairly minor, support of Brandin's or
iginal claim to succession in Ygrath had earned them. That was it. All he want
ed. With a decent house on that eastern promontory one day where he could watc
h the sun come up out of the sea and go hunting in the woods with his dogs. So
very much to ask?
Instead, a fist and a fist.
He briefly considered washing his hands of the whole affair—and let the curse
d inhabitants of this peninsula chew on that for a phrase! —letting the imbec
ilic Tribute captain row his galley down the river just as he pleased. In fact
, he realized, lamentably too late, if he had stayed in bed and pretended he'd
not received the message in time he would have been entirely blameless in thi
s affair of a drunken captain's blunder. He closed his eyes, tasting the exqui
site, vanished sweetness of such a possibility.
Too late. He was standing by the riverside in the blinding light and the heat
of the sun, and half of Stevanien had heard what he and Rhamanus had just shou
ted back and forth across the water.
With a small, diffident prayer to his own patron gods of food and forest, and
a poignantly clear image of that seaside estate, the Governor chose his fist.

"Let me on board then," he said as briskly as he could manage. "I'm not about
to farspeak the King while standing on this dock. I want a chair and some quie
t and an extremely strong mug of whatever passes for khav on a galley."
Rhamanus was visibly nonplussed. The Governor was able to derive a certain sou
r pleasure from that.
They gave him everything he asked for. The woman was taken below deck and he w
as left alone in the captain's cabin. He took a deep breath and then several m
ore. He drank the khav, scalding his tongue which, as much as anything else, w
oke him up. Then, for the first time in three years of office, he narrowed his
mind down to a pinpoint image as Brandin had taught him, and he framed, quest
ion-ingly, the name of the King in his thoughts.
With profoundly unsettling speed Brandin's crisp, cool, always slightly mockin
g voice was in his head. It was dizzying. The Governor fought to keep his comp
osure. As carefully but as quickly as he could —speed mattered, they had all
been taught—he outlined the situation they faced. He apologized twice, en rou
te, but dared not risk the time required for a third, however much his lifetim
e's instincts bade him to. What good were a career diplomat's lifetime instinc
ts when enmeshed in sorcery? He felt sick to his stomach with the strain and t
he discontinuity of the farspeaking.
Then, with a surging of his spirit, with glory, with paeans of praise to twent
y different deities chorusing within him, the Governor of Stevanien was given
to understand that his King was not angered. More: that he had been exactly co
rrect in this farspeaking. That the political timing could not be better for s
uch a testing of Alberico's resolve. That, accordingly, Rhamanus should indeed
be allowed to take the girl as Tribute but, and the King stressed this, very
clearly identified as a Certandan. A Certandan who happened to be in Lower Cor
te. That fact was to be their claim of authority: no evasions about her being
a resident of Stevanien or some such thing. They would see what sort of spirit
this minor Barbadian sorcerer had after all.
The Governor had done well, the King said.
The image of the house by the sea grew almost incandescently vivid in the back
of the Governor's mind even as he heard himself babbling—silently over the l
ink Brandin made—his most abject protestations of love and obedience. The Kin
g cut him short.
"We must end now," he said, "Do go easier on the wine down there." Then he was
gone. The Governor sat alone in the captain's cabin for a long time, trying t
o reassure himself that Brandin's last tone had been amused, not reproving. He
was fairly certain it was. He was almost sure.
A very tense period had ensued. The galley was allowed to leave that same morn
ing. In the fortnight that followed the King had far-spoken him twice. Once to
order the border garrison at Forese quietly increased but not by so much as t
o amount to further provocation in itself. The Governor spent an anguished sle
epless night trying to calculate what number of soldiers would suit that comma
nd.
Reinforcements from the city of Lower Corte arrived up the river to supplement
his own forces in Stevanien. Later he was instructed by the King to watch for
a possible Barbadian envoy from Certando, and to greet such a one with utmost
cordiality, referring all questions to Chiara for resolution. He was also war
ned to be on full alert for a retaliatory border raid from Sinave—and to anni
hilate any and all Barbadian troops that might venture into Lower Corte. The G
overnor had very little personal experience at annihilation but he swore to ob
ey.
Merchants, he was told, were to be advised to delay their plans to travel east
for a little while; no orders, nothing official, merely a piece of advice a p
rudent businessman might wish to heed. Most did.
In the end nothing happened.
Alberico chose to entirely ignore the affair. Short of a willingness to have t
hings escalate a long way there was nothing else he could do without losing fa
ce. For a while there was speculation he might punish some merchant or itinera
nt musician from the Western Palm who happened to be in his provinces, but the
re was no sign of this either. The Barbadians simply treated the girl as havin
g been an established resident of Lower Corte—exactly as Rhamanus had so blit
hely opined the morning he'd seized her.
In the Ygrathen provinces, though, the girl was deliberately described as Cert
andan from the start—the woman from Barbadian territory that Brandin had seiz
ed, mocking Alberico all the while. She was said to be beautiful as well.
Rhamanus made his slow progression home through the rest of that summer and in
to the early fall. The galley took them downriver and all the collected inland
tributes were transferred to the great Tribute Ship itself with its broad, fi
lling sails. Slowly it made its way up the coast, collecting taxes and tariffs
at the designated places in Corte and Asoli.
The harvest had indeed been bad in Corte, they had to struggle to meet the quo
tas there. Twice they rested at anchor for long periods while the captain led
a company to an inland post. And all the while Rhamanus searched for women who
might be useful as more than hostages or symbols of Ygrath's manifest dominan
ce. Women who might credit the saishan itself and so make the career of a cert
ain Tribute captain who was just about ready for a landside posting after twen
ty years at sea.
Three possibilities were found. One was of noble birth, her existence revealed
by an informer. She was taken only after her father's manor in Corte had been
, somewhat regretfully, burned to the ground.
At length, in the autumn turning of the year, beautiful even in flat, unlovely
Asoli when the rains chose to relent, the Tribute Ship slipped through the tr
icky passages of the Strait of Asoli and entered the waters of the Chiaran Sea
. A few days later, red and gold sails billowing triumphantly, it had sailed i
nto the Great Harbor of the Island, celebrated in song for more years than cou
ld be counted.
The Tribute Ship of Rhamanus had carried gold and gems and silver and coinage
of various kinds. It bore leather from Stevanien and wood carvings from Corte
and great huge wheels of saull cheese from the west coast of Asoli. They had s
pices and herbs and knives, stained glass and wool and wine. There were two wo
men from Corte and one from Asoli, and besides these three there was another w
oman and this one was different. This one was the dark-haired, brown-eyed beau
ty known throughout the peninsula by the time their voyage ended as the woman
who'd come near to starting a war.
Dianora di Certando, her name was.
Dianora, who had intended to come to the Island from the very first, from the
earliest glimmerings of her plan when she had sat alone before a dead fire one
summer night in her father's silent house. Who had hardened herself—as men i
n battle were said to have to do—to the thought of being captured and brought
here and locked for life inside the saishan of the Tyrant. She had worked it
out that far five years ago, a girl with death in her heart, with a father dea
d and a brother gone and a mother gone even farther away: images of all three
of them rising in her dreams from the ashes of the burning in her land.
And death was still there, still with her on that ship. She still had those dr
eams, but with them now, as fabled Chiara drew nearer under the brightness of
the sky was something else: a bemused, an almost numbed incredulity at how the
line of her life had run. How things had fallen out so completely wrong, and
yet so precisely as she had planned from the first.
She had tried to see that as an omen, closing her left hand three times over h
er thumb to make her wish come true, as she entered that new world.

Chapter 8

IT WAS STRANGE,  DIANORA THOUGHT,  STILL MOVING THROUGH
the crowded Audience Chamber as spring sunlight filtered down on Brandin's cou
rt from the stained-glass windows above, how the so clear portents of youth we
re alchemized by time into the many-layered ambiguities of adult life.
Sipping from her jeweled cup she considered the alternative. That she had simp
ly allowed things to become nuanced and difficult. That the real truths were e
xactly the same as they had been on the day she arrived. That all she was doin
g 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 th
e edges of her awareness. Not today. Not in any daytime. Those thoughts belong
ed 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 t
o wake her in the morning.
Night thoughts, and this was bright day, in a very public place.
So she walked over towards the man she'd recognized and let her smile reach he
r eyes. Balancing her chalice gracefully she sketched a full Ygrathen salute t
o the portly, soberly dressed personage with three heavy gold chains about his
neck.
"Greetings," she murmured, straightening and moving nearer. "This is a surpris
e. It is rare indeed that the so-busy Warden of the Three Harbors deigns to sp
are a moment from his so-demanding affairs to visit old friends."
Unfortunately Rhamanus was as hard to ruffle or disconcert as he had ever been
. Dianora had been trying to get a rise out of him ever since the night he'd h
ad her bundled like a brown heifer out of the street in front of The Queen and
onto the river galley.
Now he simply grinned, heavier with the years gone by and, latterly, his shore
-bound duties, but unmistakably the man who'd brought her here.
One of the few men from Ygrath she genuinely liked.
"Not so much flavor from you, girl," he mock-growled. "It is not for idle wome
n who do nothing all day but put their hair up and down and up again for exerc
ise to criticize those of us who have stern and arduous tasks that shorten our
nights and put grey in our hair."
Dianora laughed. Rhamanus's thick black curls—the envy of half the saishan—s
howed not a trace of grey. She let her gaze linger expressively on his dark lo
cks.
"I'm a liar," Rhamanus conceded with untroubled equanimity, leaning forward so
only she could hear. "It's been a dead-quiet winter. Not much to do at all. I
could have come to visit but you know how much I hate these goings-on at cour
t. My buttons pop when I bow."
Dianora laughed again and gave his arm a quick squeeze. Rhamanus had been kind
to her on the ship, and courteous and friendly ever since, even when she'd be
en merely another new body— if a slightly notorious one—in the saishan of th
e King. She knew he liked her and she also knew, from d'Eymon himself, that th
e former Tribute Ship captain was an efficient and a fair administrator.
She had helped him get the posting four years ago. It was a high honor for a s
eaman, supervising harbor rules and regulations at the three main ports of Chi
ara itself. It was also, to judge from Rhamanus's slightly threadbare clothing
, a little too near the seat of power for any real gains to be extracted.
Thinking, she clicked her tongue against her upper teeth, a habit Brandin teas
ed her about. He claimed it always signaled a request or a suggestion. He knew
her very well, which frightened her at least as much as it did anything else.

"This is the merest thought," she said now to Rhamanus quietly, "but would you
have any interest at all in living in north Asoli for a few years? Not that I
want to get rid of you. It's a dreadful place, everyone knows that, but there
are opportunities and I'd as soon a decent man reaped them as some of the gre
edy clutch that are hovering about here."
"The taxing office?" he asked, very softly.
She nodded. His eyes widened slightly but, schooled to discretion, he gave no
other sign of interest or surprise.
What he did do, an instant later, was glance quickly beyond her shoulder towar
ds the throne. Dianora was already turning by then, an inexplicable sense, alm
ost an antenna, having alerted her.
So she was facing the Island Throne and the doorway behind it by the time the
herald's staff rapped the floor twice, not loudly, and Brandin came into the r
oom. He was followed by the two priests, and the priestess of Adaon. Rhun sham
bled 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, wouldn't be found in
having twenty heralds deafen a room by proclaiming one's 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 collecti
vely poised as if on the edge of a cliff for the past ten minutes, waiting. No
w, just as collectively, the court plummeted into obeisance. Not one person in
the whole crowded room was still speaking by the time the herald's muted staf
f of office proclaimed the King. In the silence the two discreet raps on the m
arbled floor sounded like echoing thunder.
Brandin was in high good humor. Dianora could have told that from halfway acro
ss the room, even if she hadn't had a hint from Rhun already. Her heart was be
ating 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 intertwined, in
him.
He looked to d'Eymon first, as always, and received the other's expressionless
bow, sketched low in the Ygrathen fashion. Then, as always, he turned and smi
led at Solores.
Then at Dianora. Braced as she was, as she always tried to be, she still could
not quite master what happened to her when the grey eyes found and held her o
wn. His glance was like a touch, a gliding presence, fiery and glacial both—a
s Brandin was.
And all this from a look across a very crowded room.
Once, in bed, years before, she had dared to ask him a question that had long
troubled her.
"Is there sorcery involved when you love me here, or when we first meet in a p
ublic place?"
She hadn't known what answer she wanted, or what to expect by way of reaction.
She'd thought he might be flattered by the implication, or at least amused. Y
ou could never be sure with Brandin though, his mind ran through too many diff
erent channels and with too much subtlety. Which is why questions, especially
revealing ones, were dangerous. This had been important to her though: if he s
aid yes she was going to try to use that to kindle her killing anger again. Th
e anger she seemed to have lost here in the strange world that was the Island.

Her expression must have been very grave; he turned on his pillow, head proppe
d on one hand to regard her from beneath level brows. He shook his head.
"Not in any way you are thinking. Nothing that I control or shape with my magi
c, other than the matter of children. I will not have any more heirs, you know
that." She did know that; all his women did. He said, after a pause, carefull
y, "Why do you ask? What happens to you?"
For a second she thought she'd heard uncertainty in his voice, but one could n
ever be sure of such things with Brandin. "Too much," she'd answered. "Too muc
h happens." And she'd been speaking, for that one time, the unshielded truth o
f a no longer innocent heart. There was an acute understanding in his clear ey
es. Which frightened her. She moved herself—moved by all the layers of her ne
ed—to slide over against his body again and then above and upon it that it mi
ght begin once more, the whole process. All of it: betrayal and memory mixed w
ith yearning, as in the amber-colored wine the Triad were said to drink—too p
otent for mortals to taste.
"Are you truly serious about that posting in Asoli?" Rhamanus's voice was soft
. Brandin had not gone to the throne but was making a relaxed circuit of the r
oom—more evidence of his benign mood. Rhun, with his lopsided smile, shambled
in his wake.
"I confess I had never even given it a thought," the former Tribute captain ad
ded.
With an effort Dianora forced her thoughts back to him. For a second she had f
orgotten her own query. Brandin did that to her. It was not a good thing, she
thought. For many reasons it was not a good thing.
She turned again to Rhamanus. "I'm quite serious," she said. "But I'm not sure
if you would want the position—even if it were possible. You have more statu
s where you are, and this is Chiara, after all. Asoli can offer you some chanc
e at wealth, but I think you have an idea what would be involved. What matters
to you, Rhamanus?"
It was more bluntly put than courtesy would have deemed appropriate, especiall
y with a friend.
He blinked, and fingered one of his chains of office.
"Is that what it comes down to?" he asked hesitantly. "Is that how you see it?
Can a man not perhaps be moved by the prospect of a new challenge, or even—a
t the risk of sounding foolish—by the desire to serve his King?"
Her turn to blink.
"You shame me," she said simply, after a moment. "Rhamanus, I swear you do." S
he stilled his quick protests with a hand on his sleeve. "Sometimes I wonder w
hat is happening to me. All the intriguing that goes on here."
She heard footsteps approaching and what she said next was spoken as much to t
he man behind as to the one in front of her. "Sometimes I wonder what this cou
rt is doing to me."
"Should I be wondering as well?" asked Brandin of Ygrath.
Smiling, he joined them. He did not touch her. He very seldom touched the sais
han women in public, and this was an Ygrathen reception. They knew his rules.
Their lives were shaped by his rules.
"My lord," she said, turning and sketching her salutation. She kept her voice
airily provocative. "Do you find me more cynical than I was when this terrible
man brought me here?"
Brandin's amused glance went from her to Rhamanus. It was not as if he'd neede
d 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 not
iced, perhaps because the subject had come up with Rhamanus, that there was as
much grey in his beard now as black.
He nodded judiciously, simulating a deep concern over the question. "I would h
ave to say so, yes. You have grown cynically manipulative in almost exactly th
e same proportion as the terrible man has grown fat."
"So much?" Dianora protested. "My lord, he is very fat!"
Both men chuckled. Rhamanus patted his belly affectionately.
"This," he said, "is what happens when you feed a man cold salt meat for twent
y years at sea and then expose him to the delights of the King's city."
"Well then," said Brandin, "we may have to send you away somewhere until you a
re sleek as a seal again."
"My lord," said Rhamanus instantly, "I am yours to command in all things." His
expression was sober and intense.
Brandin registered that and his tone changed as well. "I know that," he murmur
ed. "I would that I had more of you at court. At both of my courts. Portly or
sleek, Rhamanus, I am not unmindful of you, whatever our Dianora may think."
Very high praise, a promise of sorts, and a dismissal for the moment. Bright-e
yed, Rhamanus bowed formally and withdrew. Brandin walked a couple of paces aw
ay, Rhun shuffling along beside him. Dianora followed, as she was expected to.
Once out of earshot of anyone but the Fool, Brandin turned to her. He was, sh
e was sorry to see, suppressing a smile.
"What did you do? Offer him north Asoli?"
Dianora heaved a heartfelt sigh of frustration. This happened all the time. "N
ow that," she protested, "is unfair. You are using magic."
He let the smile come. She knew that people were watching them. She knew what
they would say amongst each other.
"Hardly," Brandin murmured. "I wouldn't waste it or drain myself on something
so transparent."
"Transparent!" she bridled.
"Not you, my cynical manipulator. But Rhamanus was too serious too quickly whe
n I jested about posting him away. And the only position of significance curre
ntly available is north Asoli and so . . ."
He let the sentence trail off. Laughter lingered in his eyes.
"Would he be such a bad choice?" Dianora asked defiantly. It was genuinely dis
concerting how easily Brandin could sound the depths of things. If she allowed
herself to dwell on that she could become frightened again.
"What do you think?" he asked by way of reply.
"I? Think?" She lifted her plucked eyebrows in exaggerated arches. "How should
a mere object of the King's occasional pleasure venture to have an opinion on
such matters?"
"Now that," said Brandin nodding briskly, "is an intelligent observation. I sh
all have to consult Solores, instead."
"If you get an intelligent observation out of her," Dianora said tartly, "I sh
all hurl myself from the saishan balcony into the sea."
"All the way across the harbor square? A long leap," said Brandin mildly.
"So," she replied, "is an intelligent observation for Solores."
And at that he laughed aloud. The court was listening. Everyone heard. Everyon
e would draw their own conclusions, but they would all be the same conclusion
in the end. Scelto, she reflected, was likely to receive discreet contribution
s from sources other than Neso of Ygrath before the day was out.
"I saw something interesting on the mountain this morning," Brandin said, his
amusement subsiding. "Something quite unusual."
This, she realized, was why he'd wanted to speak to her alone. He'd been up on
Sangarios that morning; she was one of the few who knew about it. Brandin kep
t this venture quiet, in case he should fail. She'd 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 t
he first day which was the Day of the Dead.
There were Ember Days in autumn as well, halfway through the year, when the ti
me of mourning came for Adaon slain on his mountain in Tregea, when the sun be
gan to fade as Eanna mourned and Morian folded in upon herself in her Halls un
derground. But the spring days inspired a colder dread, especially in the coun
tryside, because so much depended upon what would follow them. Winter's passin
g, the season of sowing, and the hope of grain, of life, in the summer's fulln
ess 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 i
n 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 create
d 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 Tria
d 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 t
he night's 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 al
l islands were worlds unto themselves, that to come to an island was to come t
o another world. A truth known under the stars and moons, if not always rememb
ered 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 othe
r in a dawn race up to the summit of San-garios, there to pluck a blood-dark s
prig of sonrai, the intoxicating berries of the mountain, under the watchful e
ye of the priests of Morian who had kept vigil on the peak all night long amon
g 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 hunt
ed down and slain on his mountain by the women six months later on the first o
f the Ember Days of fall.
Not anymore. Not for a long time. Now the young champion was likely to find hi
mself 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 hadn't laughed. He didn't find the ritual amusing. In fact, six years ago t
he King of Ygrath had elected to run the course himself, the morning before th
e actual race. He had done it again three years past. No small achievement, re
ally, for a man of his years, considering how hard and how long the runners tr
ained for this. Dianora didn't know what to find more whimsical: the fact that
Brandin would do this thing, in such secrecy, or the ebullient masculine prid
e he'd felt both times he'd made it up to the summit of Sangarios and down aga
in.
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.
"Something unusual," Brandin repeated. "I had of course outstripped the guards
running with me."
"Of course," she murmured, giving him a sidelong glance.
He grinned. "I was alone on the path part of the way up. The trees were still
very thick on either side, mountain ash, mostly, some sejoias."
"How interesting," she said.
This time he quelled her with a look. Dianora bit her lip and schooled her exp
ression dutifully.
"I looked over to my right," Brandin said, "and saw a large grey rock, almost
like a platform at the edge of the trees. And sitting on the rock there was a
creature. A woman, I would swear, and very nearly human."
"Very nearly?"
She wasn't teasing anymore. Within the actual archway of a portal of Morian we
sometimes do know that a thing of importance is happening.
"That's what was unusual. She certainly wasn't entirely human. Not with green
hair and such pale skin. Skin so white I swear I saw blue veins beneath, Diano
ra. And her eyes were unlike any I've ever seen. I thought she was a trick of
light—the sun filtering through trees. But she didn't move, or change in any
way, even when I stopped to look at her."
And now Dianora knew exactly where she was.
The ancient creatures of water and wood and cave went back in time as far as t
he Triad did almost, and from the description she knew what he had seen. She k
new other things as well and was suddenly afraid.
"What did you do?" she asked, as casually as she could.
"I wasn't sure what to do. I spoke; she didn't answer. So I took a step toward
s her and as soon as I did she leaped down from the rock and backed away. She
stopped among the trees. I held out my open palms, but she seemed to be startl
ed by that, or offended, and a moment later she fled."
"Did you follow?"
"I was about to, but by then one of the guards had caught up to me."
"Did he see her?" she asked. Too quickly.
Brandin gave her a curious look. "I asked. He said no, though I think he would
have answered that way, regardless. Why do you ask?"
She shrugged. "It would have confirmed she was real," she lied.
Brandin shook his head. "She was real. This was no vision. In fact," he added,
as if the thought had just occurred to him, "she reminded me of you."
"With . . . what was it? Green skin and blue hair?" she replied, letting her c
ourt instincts guide her now. Something large was happening here though. She l
abored to hide the turmoil she felt. "I thank you so much my gracious lord. I
suppose if I talked to Scelto and Vencel we could achieve the skin color, and
blue hair should be easy enough. If it excites you so dramatically . . ."
He smiled but did not laugh. "Green hair, not blue," he said, almost absently.
"And she did, Dianora," he repeated, looking at her oddly. "She did remind me
of you. I wonder why. Do you know anything about such creatures?"
"I do not," she said. "In Certando we have no tales of green-haired women in t
he mountains." She was lying. She was lying as well as she could, wide-eyed an
d direct. She could scarcely believe what she had just heard, what he had seen
.
Brandin's good humor was still with him.
"What mountain tales do you have in Certando?" he queried, smiling expectantly
.
"Stories of hairy things that walk on legs like tree stumps and eat goats and
virgins in the night."
His smile broadened. "Are there any?"
"Goats, yes," she said with a straight face. "Fewer virgins. Hairy creatures w
ith such specific appetites are not an incentive to chastity. Are you sending
out a party to search for this creature?" A question so important she held her
breath awaiting his reply.
"I think not," Brandin said. "I suspect such things are only seen when they wa
nt to be."
Which, she knew for a fact, was absolutely true.
"I haven't told anyone but you," he added unexpectedly.
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 t
hese tidings. She badly needed to be alone to think. A vain hope. She wouldn't
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 o
f her mind.
"Thank you, my lord," she murmured, aware that they had been talking privately
for some time. Aware, as ever, of how that would be construed.
"In the meantime," Brandin suddenly said, in a quite different tone, "you stil
l have not yet asked me how I did on the run. Solores, I have to tell you, mad
e it her first question."
Which carried them back to familiar ground.
"Very well," she said, feigning indifference. "Do tell me. Halfway? Three-quar
ters?"
A glint of royal indignation nickered in the grey eyes. "You are presumptuous
sometimes," he said. "I indulge you too much. I went, if you please, all the w
ay to the summit and came down again this morning with a cluster of sonrai ber
ries. I will be extremely interested to see if any of tomorrow's runners are u
p and down as quickly."
"Well," she said quickly, unwisely, "they won't have sorcery to help them."
"Dianora, have done!"
And that tone she recognized and knew she'd gone too far. As always at such mo
ments 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 lice
nse 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 counter
balance to Solores's soft, unquestioning, undemanding shelter. The two of them
, in turn, balancing d'Eymon's ascetic exercise of politics and government.
And all three of them in orbit around the star that Brandin was. The voluntari
ly exiled sun, removed from the heavens it knew, from the lands and seas and p
eople, 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 invi
olate. When she did it was likely to be over something as apparently trivial a
s this. It was such a paradox for her how he could shrug off or laugh at or ev
en invite her caustic commentary on court and colony—and yet bridle like a bo
y with affronted pride if she teased about his ability to run up and down a mo
untain 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. S
he was also an impostor, living an ongoing lie while her country slowly died a
way 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.
"This amuses me," she said, reaching for self-possession, knowing precisely wh
at his need in her was, even now. Especially now. "You profess to be pleased,
even touched, by Solores's doubtlessly agitated query about your mountain run.
The first thing she asked, you say. How she must have wondered whether or not
you succeeded! And yet when I—knowing as surely as I know my own name that y
ou were up on the summit this morning—treat it lightly, as something small, n
ever in doubt . . . why then the King grows angry. He bids me sternly to have
done! But tell me, my lord, in all fairness, which of us, truly, has honored y
ou more?"
For a long time he was silent and she knew that the court would be avidly mark
ing the expression on his face. For the moment she cared nothing for them. Or
even for her past, or his encounter on the mountainside. There was one specifi
c chasm here that began and ended in the depths of the grey eyes that were now
searching her own.
When he spoke it was in a different voice again, but this tone she happened to
know exceedingly well and, in spite of everything that had just been said, an
d in spite of where they were and who was watching them, she felt herself go w
eak suddenly. Her legs trembled, but not with fear now.
"I could take you," said Brandin, King of Ygrath, thickly, his face flushed, "
on the floor of this room right now before all of my gathered court."
Her throat was dry. She felt a nerve flutter beneath the skin of her wrist. He
r 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—spa
rk to spark like the onset of a blaze. The jeweled khav chalice trembled in he
r 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 wi
th both hands, clinging to self-control.
"Better tonight, surely," she said again, overwhelmed as always by what was ha
ppening 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 lo
rd, at your age you should marshal your strength. You did run partway up a hil
l 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 herald's staff resoun
ding as it struck the floor by the double doors at the southern end of the Aud
ience Chamber.
Standing most of the way towards the throne, Dianora had time to observe the s
tately progress of the woman Brandin had called the finest musician in Ygrath.
The assembled court of Chiara was lined several rows deep, flanking the appro
ach to the King.
"A handsome woman still," murmured Neso of Ygrath, "and she's fifty years old
if she's 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 wais
t with a slender gold chain. Her hair, brown with hints of grey, was cut unfas
hionably short—although the spring and summer fashion might change after toda
y, Dianora thought. The colony always took its cue in these matters from Ygrat
h.
Isolla walked confidently, not hurrying, down the aisle formed by the courtier
s. Brandin was already smiling a welcome. He was always immensely pleased when
one or another of Ygrath's 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 a
n artifact of immeasurable worth, Dianora saw—with genuine surprise—the poet
Camena di Chiara, clad in his ubiquitous triple-layered cloak. There were mur
murs from the assembly: she wasn't the only one caught off guard by this.
Instinctively she threw a glance across the aisle to where Doarde stood with h
is wife and daughter. She was in time to see the spasm of hate and fear that f
lickered across his face as his younger rival approached. An instant later the
revealing expression was gone, replaced by a polished mask of sneering disdai
n at Camena's 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 Isol
la 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 Iso
lla—and Ygrathen artists—by serving as a bearer for her.
The politics of art, Dianora decided, was at least as complex as that of provi
nces and nations.
Isolla had stopped, as was proper, about fifteen steps from the dais of the Is
land 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 tur
ned from monarch and musician back to the poet bearing the lute. Camena had st
opped a further half a dozen paces behind Isolla and had knelt on the marble f
loor.
What detracted from the grace of the tableau was the dilation of his eyes. Nil
th leaves, Dianora concluded instantly. He's drugged himself. She saw beads of
perspiration on the poet's brow. It was not warm in the Audience Chamber.
"You are most welcome, Isolla," Brandin was saying with genuine pleasure. "It
has been far too long since we have seen you, or heard you play."
Dianora saw Camena make a small adjustment in the way he held the lute. She th
ought he was preparing to open the case. It did not look like an ordinary lute
though. In fact—
Afterwards she was able to know one thing only with certainty: it had been the
story of the riselka that made her so sharp to see. The story, and the fact t
hat Brandin wasn't certain if the second man—his guard—had seen her or not.

One man meant a fork in the path. Two men meant a death.
Either way, something was to happen. And now it did.
All eyes but hers were on Brandin and Isolla. Only Dianora saw Camena slip the
velvet cover off the lute. Only Dianora saw that it was not, in fact, a lute.
And only she had heard Brandin's tale of the riselka.
"Die, Isolla of Ygathl" Camena screamed hoarsely; his eyes bulged as he hurled
the velvet away and leveled the crossbow he carried.
With the lightning reaction of a man half his years Brandin reflexively threw
out his hand to cast a sorcerer's shield around the threatened singer.
Exactly as he was expected to, Dianora realized.
"Brandin, no!" she screamed. "It's you!"
And seizing the gape-mouthed Neso of Ygrath by the near shoulder she propelled
herself and him both into the aisle.
The crossbow bolt, aimed meticulously to the left of Isolla on a line for Bran
din's heart, buried itself instead in the shoulder of a stupefied Neso. He shr
ieked in pain and shock.
Her momentum drove Dianora stumbling to her knees beside Isolla. She looked up
. And for the rest of her days never forgot the look she met in the singer's e
yes.
She turned away from it. The emotion, the hatred was too raw. She felt physica
lly ill, trembling with aftershock. She forced herself to stand; she looked at
Brandin. He hadn't even lowered his hand. There was still the shimmer of a pr
otective barrier around Isolla.
Who had never been in danger at all.
The guards had Camena by now. He'd been dragged to his feet. Dianora had never
seen anyone look so white. Even his eyes were white, from the drug. For a mom
ent 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 almo
st absolute. No one dared to move. Dianora had a sense that the court wasn't e
ven breathing. No one wanted the slightest attention drawn to them.
On the mosaic-inlaid floor Neso moaned again in fear and pain, breaking the ta
bleau. Two soldiers knelt to tend to him. Dianora was still afraid she was goi
ng to be sick; she couldn't make her hands stop trembling. Isolla of Ygrath ha
d not moved.
She could not move, Dianora realized: Brandin was holding her in a mindlock li
ke a flower pressed flat on a sheet. The soldiers lifted Neso and helped him f
rom the room. Dianora stepped back herself, leaving Isolla alone before the Ki
ng. Fifteen very proper paces away.
"Camena was a tool," Brandin said softly. "Chiara has virtually nothing to do
with this. Do not think that I am unaware of that, I can offer you nothing now
but an easier death. You must tell me why you did this." His voice was rigidl
y measured, careful and uninflected. Dianora had never heard such a tone from
him. She looked at Rhun: the Fool was weeping, tears streaking his distorted f
eatures.
Brandin lowered his hand, freeing Isolla to move and speak.
The blazing flash of hatred left her features. In its place was a defiant prid
e. Dianora wondered if she had actually thought the deception would work. If a
fter the King had been slain she had really expected to walk freely from this
room. And if not—if she had not expected to do so—what did that mean?
Holding herself very straight, Isolla gave part of an answer. "I am dying," sh
e said to Brandin. "The physicians have given me less than a season before the
growth inside reaches my brain. Already there are songs I can no longer remem
ber. Songs that have been mine for forty years."
"I am sorry to hear it," said Brandin formally, his courtesy so perfect it see
med a violation of human nature. He said, "All of us die, Isolla. Some very yo
ung. Not all of us plot the death of our King. You have more to tell me before
I may grant you release from pain."
For the first time Isolla seemed to waver. She lowered her gaze from his eeril
y serene grey eyes. Only after a long moment did she say, "You had to have kno
wn that there would be a price for what you did."
"Exactly what is it that I did?"
Her head came up. "You exalted a dead child above the living one, and revenge
above your wife. And more highly than your own land. Have you spared a thought
, a fraction of a thought, for any of them while you pursued your unnatural ve
ngeance for Stevan?"
Dianora's heart thudded painfully. It was a name not spoken in Chiara. She saw
Brandin's lips tighten in a way she had seen only a handful of times. But whe
n he spoke his voice was as rigidly controlled as before.
"I judged that I had considered them fairly. Girald has governance in Ygrath a
s he was always going to have. He even has my saishan, as a symbol of that. Do
rotea I invited here several times a year for the first several years."
"Invited here that she might wither and grow old while you kept yourself young
. A thing no Sorcerer-King of Ygrath has ever done before, lest the gods punis
h the land for that impiety. But for Ygrath you never spared a thought, did yo
u? 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 un
natural! It is all unnatural, and there is a price to be paid."
"There is always a price," he said softly. "A price for everything. Even for l
iving. I had not expected to pay it in my own family." There was a silence. "I
solla, I must extend my years to do what I am here to do."
"Then you pay for it," Isolla repeated, "and Girald pays and Dorotea. And Ygra
th."
And Tigana, Dianora thought, no longer trembling, her own ache come back like
a wound in her. Tigana pays too; in broken statues and fallen towers, in child
ren slain and a name gone.
She watched Brandin's face. And Rhun's.
"I hear you," the King said at length to the singer. "I have heard more than y
ou have chosen to say. I need only one thing further. You must tell me which o
f them did this." It was said with visible regret. Rhun's ugly face was screwe
d up tightly, his hands gestured with a random helplessness.
"And why," said Isolla, drawing herself up and speaking with the frigid hauteu
r of one who had nothing left to lose, "should you imagine their purposes to b
e at odds in this? Why the one or the other, King of Ygrath?" Her voice rang o
ut, harsh as the message it bore.
Slowly he nodded. The hurt was clear in him now; Dianora could see it in the w
ay he stood and spoke, however much he controlled himself. She didn't even nee
d to look at Rhun.
"Very well," Brandin said. "And you, Isolla? What could they have offered to m
ake you do this thing. Can you really hate me so much?"
The woman hesitated only for an instant. Then, as proudly, as defiantly as bef
ore, she said, "I can love the Queen so much."
Brandin closed his eyes. "How so?"
"In all the ways that you forsook when you chose exile here and love of the de
ad over the heart and the bed of your wife."
In any normal, any halfway normal time there would have been a reaction to thi
s from the court. There would have had to be. Dianora heard nothing though, on
ly 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 woman's 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 c
hoice 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 preeminen
ce within Dianora. Behind the King she could see d'Eymon; his face was a sickl
y grey. He met her eyes for only an instant then quickly looked away. Later sh
e 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 a
fter this nothing would be quite the same.
For a great many reasons.
Brandin said, "I think you have told me what I had need to know."
"The Chiaran acted alone," Isolla volunteered unexpectedly. She gestured at Ca
mena, in the bone-cracking grip of the soldiers behind her. "He joined us when
he visited Ygrath two years ago. Our purposes appeared to march together this
far."
Brandin nodded. "This far," he echoed quietly. "I thought that might be the ca
se. Thank you for confirming it," he added gravely.
There was a silence. "You promised me an easy death," Isolla said, holding her
self very straight.
"I did," Brandin said. "I did promise you that." Dianora stopped breathing. Th
e King looked at Isolla without expression for what seemed an unbearably long
time.
"You can have no idea," he said at last, in a voice little above a whisper, "h
ow happy I was that you had come to make music for me again."
Then he moved his right hand, in exactly the same casual gesture he would use
to dismiss a servant or a petitioner.
Isolla's head exploded like an overripe fruit smashed with a hammer. Dark bloo
d 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 Isolla's 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 s
lashes, 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 fro
m his mouth and nose. With one savage butcher's blow he severed an arm from th
e woman's torso. Something dark and green and blind appeared to undulate from
the stump of Isolla's shoulder, leaving a trail of glistening black slime. Beh
ind Dianora someone gagged with horror.
"Stevan!" she heard Rhun cry brokenly. And amid nausea and chaos and terror, a
n overwhelming pity suddenly laid hard siege to her heart. She looked at the f
rantically laboring Fool, clad exactly like the King, bearing a King's sword.
Spittle flew from his mouth.
"Music! Stevan! Music! Stevan!" Rhun shouted obsessively, and with each slurre
d, ferocious articulation of the words his slender, jeweled court sword went u
p 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 wit
h 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 sw
ord slipped through his fingers and he sat in a puddle of blood beside the mut
ilated 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 sc
ene in front of him with a frightening detachment.
"There is always a price," he said quietly, almost to himself, through the inc
essant screaming and tumult that filled the Audience Chamber. Dianora took one
hesitant step towards him then, but he had already turned and, with d'Eymon q
uickly following, Brandin left the room through the door behind the dais.
With his departure the slithering, oleaginous creatures immediately disappeare
d, but not the mangled body of the singer or the pitiful, crumpled figure of t
he Fool. Dianora seemed to be alone near them, everyone else had surged back t
owards the doors. Isolla's 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 Chia
ra away through a side door. Other soldiers came forward with a sheet to cover
Isolla's body. They had to move Rhun away to do it; he didn't seem to underst
and what was happening. He was still weeping, his face grotesquely screwed up
like a hurt child's. Dianora moved a hand to wipe at her cheek and her fingers
came away streaked with blood. The soldiers placed the sheet over the singer'
s 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 h
elp, 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 ru
mor 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 pro
tectiveness slammed the door on the nervous, fluttering crowd that clung and h
overed 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 s
topped. She still found it difficult to speak. He made her stay in the chair b
efore the fire. She didn't want to leave it anyway.
Her brain felt battered, numb. She seemed to be utterly incapable of marshalin
g 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 h
ammer of a herald's 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 couldn't. The ha
mmering crashed through, again and again: she had saved his life.
Tigana had been a single pulsebeat away from coming back into the world. The p
ulsebeat of Brandin that the crossbow would have ended.
Home was a dream she'd had yesterday. A place where children used to play. Amo
ng 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 d
ream. Until all the dreams, too, died.
How was she to deal with that? How possibly cope with what it meant? She had c
ome here to kill Brandin of Ygrath, to end his life that lost Tigana might liv
e again. And instead . . .
The shivering started once more. Fussing and murmuring, Scelto built up the fi
re and brought yet another blanket for her knees and feet. When he saw the tea
rs on her face he made a queer helpless sound of distress. Someone knocked lou
dly on her door sometime later and she heard Scelto driving them away with lan
guage 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 th
e backs of her hands. She sat up. She had to be ready when twilight came; twil
ight was when Brandin sent to the saishan.
She rose from her chair, pleased to find that her legs were steadier. Scelto r
ushed up, protesting, but when he saw her face he quickly checked himself. Wit
hout 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 man
hood.
She let them bathe her, let the scented oils soften her skin. There had been b
lood on it that afternoon. The waters swirled around her and then away. The at
tendants washed her hair. After, Scelto painted the nails of her fingers and t
oes. 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 m
ake 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 alway
s 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 fie
rce was her sudden rage. Never in her life had she felt anything like this—th
is white hot caldron in her heart. After Tigana fell, after her brother was dr
iven away, her hatred had been a shaped thing, controlled, channeled, driven b
y purpose, a guarded flame that she'd known would have to burn a long time.
This was an inferno. A caldron boiling over inside her, prodigious, overmaster
ing, 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 t
he women tore Adaon on the mountainside. She saw Scelto take an involuntary ba
ckwards 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 l
ife of Brandin of Ygrath today, trampling into muck and spattered blood the cl
ear, unsullied memory of her home and the oath she'd sworn in coming here so l
ong ago. She had violated the essence of everything she once had been; violate
d herself more cruelly than had any man who'd 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 c
ould 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 s
uggestions. Or desire. His need would be for the soft, unthinking, reflexive g
entleness that Solores gave. That she herself apparently did not. The cradling
worship, tenderness, the soothing voice. He would need shelter tonight. She c
ould understand: it was what she needed too, needed desperately, after what ha
d happened.
But she needed it from him.
And so it came to be that, alone in her bed that night, sheltered by no one an
d by nothing, Dianora found herself naked and unable to hide from what came wh
en the fires of rage finally died.
She lay unsleeping through the first and then through the second chiming of th
e bells that marked off the triads of the dark hours, but before the third chi
ming 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 she'd alway
s been careful to block out from among all the myriad griefs of the year Tigan
a 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 S
olores 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 a
nd pain and the loss of love in pain that were far too keen—too icy keen a wi
nd 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 alon
e 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 an
ything 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 l
ast memories of her brother before he went away.
He had been too young to fight by the Deisa. No one under fifteen, Prince Vale
ntin had proclaimed before riding sternly north to war. Alessan, the Prince's
youngest child, had been taken away south in hiding by Danoleon, the High Prie
st 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 know
n; the weary men who had fought and survived, and the women and the aged and t
he children left behind—that Brandin's coming would mark the end of the world
they had lived in and loved.
They hadn't 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 month
s that followed as a hard and brutal thing that grew like a tumor and then fes
tered 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 Ygrath
ens 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 s
lip her last awareness of the world to wander, mute and gentle, through a spac
e neither of her children could travel to with her.
Sometimes she would smile and nod at invisible things as she sat amid the rubb
le of their courtyard that summer, with smashed marble all around her, and her
daughter's 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 th
e servants and apprentices had died with her father. Two others ran away not l
ong after the Ygrathens came and the destruction began. She couldn't even blam
e 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 demo
lition had passed, then they sought work clearing away rubble or repairing wal
ls 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 grea
t: the twisting feeling inside that came with the blank look of incomprehensio
n 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 s
low 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 she'd
called her home Lower Corte. They all could, all the survivors: it was, for e
ach 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 fifte
en 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 Dia
nora gave her a slice of the dark cake—but Dia-nora had known the smile had n
othing to do with any of them.
Her brother had known it too. Preternaturally grave he had kissed his mother o
n the forehead and then his sister, and had gone out into the night. It was, o
f 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. T
o punish him for having been fourteen in the season of war.
Two soldiers were knifed in the dark that fall. Twenty death-wheels were hoist
ed in swift response. Six women and five children were among those bound aloft
to die. Dianora knew most of them; there weren't 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 af
ter.
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 b
e able to fall asleep. Somehow, he knew she would be awake, though she had nev
er said a word.
He would have been handsome, with his dark hair and deep brown eyes if he hadn
't 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 h
arvest 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 spr
ang from the deep-sown seeds of Brandin's vengeance.
Dianora remembered being at an upstairs window the day it began. She was watch
ing her brother and the apprentice—no longer an apprentice, of course—walkin
g 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, sc
udding 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 f
reshness of the breeze; she heard it all.
"Help us!" one of the soldiers bleated with a smirk she could see from her win
dow. "We're lost," he moaned, as the others quickly surrounded the boys. He dr
ew sly chuckles from his fellows. One of them elbowed another in the ribs.
"Where are we?" the soldier begged.
Eyes carefully lowered, her brother named the square and the streets leading f
rom it.
"That's no good!" the soldier complained. "What good are street names to me? I
don't even know what cursed town I'm in!" There was laughter; Dianora winced
at what she heard in it.
"Lower Corte," the apprentice muttered quickly, as her brother kept silent. Th
ey noticed the silence though.
"What town? You tell me," the spokesman said more sharply, prodding her brothe
r in the shoulder.
"I just told you. Lower Corte," the apprentice intervened loudly. One of the s
oldiers cuifed him on the side of the head. The boy staggered and almost fell;
he refused to lift a hand to touch his head.
Her pulse pounding with fright, Dianora saw her brother look up then. His dark
hair gleamed in the morning sunlight. She thought he was going to strike the
soldier who had dealt that blow. She thought he was going to die. She stood up
at her window, her hands clenched on the ledge. There was a terrible silence
in the square below. The sun was very bright.
"Lower Corte," her brother said, as though he were choking on the words.
Laughing raucously the soldiers let them go.
For that morning.
The two boys became the favorite victims of that company, which patrolled thei
r district between the Palace by the Sea and the center of town where the thre
e temples stood. None of the temples of the Triad had been smashed, only the s
tatuary that stood outside and within them. Two had been her father's work. A
young, seductively graceful Morian, and a huge, primal figure of Eanna stretch
ing forth her hands to make the stars.
The boys began leaving the house earlier and earlier as spring wore on, taking
roundabout routes in an attempt to avoid the soldiers. Most mornings, though,
they were still found. The Ygrathens were bored by then; the boys' very effor
ts to elude them offered sport.
Dianora used to go to that same upstairs window at the front of the house when
they left by way of the square, as if by watching whatever happened, sharing
it, she could somehow spread the pain among three, not two, and so ease it for
them. The soldiers almost always accosted them just as they reached the squar
e. She was watching on the day the game changed to something worse.
It was afternoon that time. A half-day of work only, because of a Triad holida
y—part of the aftermath to the springtime Ember Days. The Ygrathens, like the
Barbadians to the east, had been scrupulous not to tamper with the Triad and
their clergy. After their lunch the two boys went out to do an afternoon's wor
k.
The soldiers surrounded them in the middle of the square. They never seemed to
tire of their sport. But that afternoon, just as the leader began his familia
r litany of being lost a group of four merchants came trudging up the hill fro
m the harbor and one of the soldiers had an inspiration born of sheerest malic
e.
"Stop!" he rasped. The merchants did, very abruptly. One obeyed Ygrathen comma
nds in Lower Corte, wherever one might be from.
"Come here," the soldier added. His fellows made way for the merchants to stan
d in front of the boys. A premonition of something evil touched Dianora in tha
t moment like a cold finger on her spine.
The four traders reported that they were from Asoli. It was obvious from their
clothing.
"Good," the soldier said. "I know how grasping you lot are. Now listen to me.
These brats are going to name their city and their province to you. If you can
tell me what they say, on my honor and in the name of Brandin, King of Ygrath
, I'll give the first man who says the name back to me twenty gold ygras."
It was a fortune. Even from where she sat, high up and screened behind her win
dow, Dianora could see the Asoli traders react. That was before she closed her
eyes. She knew what was coming and how it was going to hurt. She wanted her f
ather alive in that moment with a longing so acute she almost wept. Her brothe
r was down there though, among soldiers who hated them. She forced back her te
ars and opened her eyes. She watched.
"You," said the soldier to the apprentice—they always started with him—"your
province had another name once. Tell them what it was."
She saw the boy—Naddo was his name—go white with fear or anger, or both. The
four merchants, oblivious to that irrelevance, leaned forward, straining with
anticipation. Dianora saw Naddo look at her brother for guidance, or perhaps
for dispensation.
The soldier saw the glance. "None of that!" he snapped. Then he drew his sword
. "For your life, say the name." Naddo, very clearly, said, "Tigana."
And of course not one of the merchants could say back the word he spoke. Not f
or twenty golden ygras or twenty times so many. Dianora could read the bafflem
ent, the balked greed in their eyes, and the fear that confronting sorcery alw
ays brought.
The soldiers laughed and jostled each other. One of them had a shrill cackle l
ike a rooster. They turned to her brother.
"No," he said flatly before they could even command him. "You have had your sp
ort. They cannot hear the name. We all know it— what is left to prove?"
He was fifteen, and much too thin, and his dark-brown hair was too long over h
is eyes. It had been over a month since she'd cut it for him; she'd been meani
ng to do so all week. One of her hands was squeezing the window-ledge so tight
ly that all the blood had rushed away; it was white as ice. She would have cut
it off to change what was happening. She noticed other faces at other windows
along the street and across the square. Some people had stopped down below as
well, seeing the large clustering of men, sensing the sudden tension that had
taken shape.
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 some
thing else now. Dianora wanted to turn away. She wanted her father back from t
he Deisa, she wanted Prince Valentin back and alive, her mother back from what
ever 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 h
er brother's breast. The afternoon sunlight glinted from it. It was a working
blade, a soldier's sword. There came a small sound from the people gathered ar
ound the edges of the square.
Her brother said, a little desperately, "They cannot hold the name. You know t
hey cannot. You have destroyed us. Is it necessary to go on causing pain? Is i
t 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 regrettin
g what this had come to. But there was a crowd gathered. The boy had had his f
air chance. There was really no choice now.
The sword pushed delicately forward a short way and then withdrew. Through a t
orn blue tunic a welling of blood appeared and hung a moment, bright in the sp
ringtime light, as if yearning towards the blade, before it broke and slid dow
nwards, 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 t
o anchor himself in the ground of the square. She saw his hands clench into fi
sts 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 sullenl
y or diffidently, and not in shame. Rooted in the land of his fathers, standin
g 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 su
mmit 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 p
eople watched, over the roofs of houses running westward to the sea or eastwar
d to the temples, and far beyond all of these—a sound, a name, a hurled sorro
w 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 th
e men riveted stone-still in street and square could hear it clearly, and clut
ch 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 t
hemselves had ordered him to do, but the game had been turned inside out, it h
ad 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, w
hich would have been the usual thing when a beating took place. They watched i
n 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 fe
w 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 ha
d been birds singing all around and all through what had happened. Dianora cou
ld remember.
She forced herself to remain where she was. Not to run down to them. To let th
em do this alone, as was their right. And at length she saw her brother rise w
ith the slow, meditated movements of a very old man. She saw him speak to Nadd
o and then carefully help him to his feet. And then, as she had known would ha
ppen, she saw him, begrimed and bleeding and hobbling very badly, lead Naddo e
ast without a backwards looks, towards the site where they were assigned to wo
rk that day.
She watched them go. Her eyes were dry. Only when the two of them turned the c
orner at the far end of the square and so were gone from sight did she leave h
er window. Only then did she loosen her white-clawed hold on the wood of the w
indow-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 pu
rpling 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 Naddo's 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 eve
n 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. De
sperately 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, he'd told her. It was a hard, wet land, unbearably hot and humid in sum
mer, everyone knew that. But there was room there for new blood. The Asolini m
ade people welcome, he'd heard, more so than in the Barbadian lands to the eas
t. He would never ever go to Corte or Chiara. People from Tigana did not go th
ere, he said. Her brother made a small sound at that but did not turn; Naddo g
lanced over at him again and swallowed, his Adam's apple bobbing in his throat
.
Three other young men had made plans, he said to Dianora. Plans to slip out fr
om the city tonight and make their way north. He'd known about it for some tim
e, he said. He hadn't been sure. He hadn't 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 appren
tice 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. Naddo's left eye w
as completely swollen shut. He might easily have been killed that afternoon.
Later, when he'd packed his few belongings and was ready to leave, she gave hi
m some silver from her father's hidden store. She kissed him in farewell. He'd
begun weeping then. He commended himself to her mother and opened the front d
oor. On the threshold he'd turned back again, still crying.
"Goodbye," he'd said, in anguish, to the figure staring stonily into the fire
on the front-room hearth. Seeing the look on Naddo's face Dianora silently wil
led her brother to turn around. He did not. Deliberately he knelt and laid ano
ther log on the fire.
Naddo stared at him a moment longer, then he turned to look at Dianora, failed
to achieve a tremulous, tearful smile, and slipped out into the dark and away
.
Much later, when the fire had been allowed to die, her brother went out as wel
l. Dianora sat and watched the embers slowly fade, then she looked in on her m
other and went to bed. When she lay down it seemed to her that a weight was pr
essing upon her body, far heavier than the quilted comforter.
She was awake when he came in. She always was. She heard him step loudly on th
e landing as was his habit, to let her know he was safely home, but she didn't
hear the next sound, which should have been the opening and closing of his be
droom door.
It was very late. She lay still for another moment, surrounded and mastered by
all the griefs of the day. Then, moving heavily, as if drugged or in a waking
dream, she rose and lit a candle. She went to her door and opened it.
He was standing in the hallway outside. And by the flickering of the light she
bore she saw the river of tears that was pouring without surcease down his br
uised, distorted face. Her hands began to shake. She could not speak.
"Why didn't I say goodbye to him?" she heard him say in a strangled voice. "Wh
y didn't you make me say goodbye to him?" She had never heard so much hurt in
him. Not even when word had come that their father had died by the river.
Her heart aching, Dianora put the candle down on a ledge that once had held a
portrait bust of her mother by her father. She crossed the narrow distance and
took her brother in her arms, absorbing the hard racking of his sobs. He had
never cried before. Or never so that she could see. She guided him into her ro
om and lay down beside him on her bed, holding him close. They wept together,
thus, for a very long time. She could not have said how long.
Her window was open. She could hear the breeze sigh through the young leaves o
utside. A bird sang, and another answered it from across the lane. The world w
as a place of dreaming or of sorrow, one or both of those. One or both. In the
sanctuary of night she slowly pulled his tunic over his head, careful of his
wounds, and then she slipped free of her own robe. Her heart was beating like
the heart of a captured forest creature. She could feel the race of his pulse
when her fingers touched his throat. Both of the moons had set. The wind was i
n all the leaves outside. And so.
And so in all that darkness, dark over and about and close-gathered around the
m, the full dark of moonless night and the darkness of their days, the two of
them sought a pitiful illicit shelter in each other from the ruin of their wor
ld.
"What are we doing?" her brother whispered once.
And then, a space of time later when pulsebeats had slowed again, leaving them
clinging to each other in the aftermath of a headlong, terrifying need, he ha
d said, one hand gentle in her hair, "What have we done?"
And all these long years later, alone in the saishan on the Island as this mos
t hidden memory came back, Dianora could remember her reply.
"Oh, Baerd," she'd said. "What has been done to us?"
It lasted from that first night through the whole of spring and into the summe
r. The sin of the gods, it was named, what they did. For Adaon and Eanna were
said to have been brother and sister at the beginning of time, and Morian was
their child.
Dianora didn't 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 th
e whole of her world. And what frightened her almost as much was seeing the sa
me depth of love, the same astonished passion in him. Her heart misgave her co
nstantly, even as they reached for their fugitive joy: too bright this forbidd
en 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—an
d woke—in her own world. In the dark of Dianora's room they escaped into each
other, reaching through loss and the knowledge of wrong in search of innocenc
e.
He was still driven to go out some nights to walk the empty streets. Not as of
ten as before, for which she gave thanks and sought a kind of justification fo
r herself. A number of young men had been caught after curfew and killed on th
e wheels that spring. If what she was doing kept him alive she would face what
ever judgment lay in wait for her in Morian's Halls.
She couldn't 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 ligh
t and shadow let him see it as Tigana again. How he could walk silently down t
owards 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 bee
n before.
He had a need for that, he said. He never baited the soldiers and promised her
he never would. He didn't even want to see them, he said. They crashed into t
he illusions he wanted. He just needed to be abroad inside his memory of the c
ity that had gone. Sometimes, Baerd told her, he would slip through gaps he kn
ew in the harbor walls and walk along the beach listening to the sea.
By day he labored, a thin boy at a strong man's job, helping to rebuild what t
hey were permitted to rebuild. Rich merchants from Corte—their ancient enemie
s—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 t
heir own purposes.
Baerd would come home at the end of a day sometimes with gashes and fresh brui
ses, and once the mark of a whip across his shoulders. She knew that if one co
mpany of soldiers had ended their sport with him there were others to pick it
up. It was only happening here, she'd heard. Everywhere else the soldiers rest
rained themselves and the King of Ygrath was governing with care, to consolida
te 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 den
y himself his lost city at night when the need rose in him. Even though she li
ved 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 lov
ed, familiar footstep on the stairs, and then the landing, and then he came in
to 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 h
ad forewarned her from that first time in darkness, listening to the birds sin
ging and the wind in the trees outside.
He came home no later than he usually did from walking abroad one night when b
lue Ilarion had been riding alone through a high lacework of clouds. It had be
en a beautiful night. She had sat up late by her window watching the moonlight
falling on the rooftops. She'd been in bed when he came home though, and her
heart had quickened with the familiar intermingling of relief and guilt and ne
ed. He had come into her room.
He didn't come to bed. Instead, he sank into the chair she'd sat in by the win
dow. With a queer, numb feeling of dread she had struck tinder and lit her can
dle. 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 hom
e to her, one she had probably known for a long time. "You have only been stay
ing for me, in any case," she said. A statement. No reproach in it. He had see
n a riselka.
He closed his eyes. "You knew?"
"Yes," she lied.
"I'm sorry," he said, looking at her. But she knew that this would be easier f
or 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.
"Don't 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, s
he 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.
"I've thought about that," he said. He sat up straighter now. She could see hi
m taking strength from her calm. She clung to that with everything she had.
"I'm going to look for the Prince." he said.
"What, Alessan? We don't even know if he's alive," she said in spite of hersel
f.
"There's word he is," Baerd said. "That his mother is in hiding with the pries
ts 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."
"He's 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 don't think age matte
rs," he said. "This is not going to be a quick or an easy thing, if it can eve
r 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 he
r control.
She shook her head. "I don't know," she said honestly. "Look after mother. Mar
ry. There is money for a while yet if I'm careful." She saw his stricken look
and moved to quell it. "You are not to worry about it, Baerd. Listen to me: yo
u have just seen a riselka! Will you fight your fate to clear rubble in this c
ity 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, "tr
y 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 c
lear, even as Baerd's forked away from her.
Lonely and cold in the saishan she was not half so cold or alone as she had be
en that night. He had not lingered once she'd 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 sunris
e 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 b
oth knew the time for tears had passed.
"If the goddesses love us, and the god," Baerd said, "we will surely meet agai
n. I will think of you each and every day of my life. I love you, Dianora."
"And I you," she'd said to him. "I think you know how much. Eanna light your p
ath and bring you home." That was all she'd said. All she could think to say.

After he'd gone she had sat in the front room wrapped in an old shawl of her m
other's, gazing sightlessly at the ashes of last night's fire until the sun ca
me up:
By then the hard kernel of her own plan had been formed.
The plan that had brought her here, all these years after, to this other lonel
y bed on an Ember Night of ghosts when she should not have had to be alone. Al
one with all her memories, with the reawakening they carried, and the awarenes
s of what she had allowed to happen to her here on the Island. Here in Brandin
's court. Here with Brandin.
And so it was that two things came to Dianora that Ember Night in the saishan.

The memories of her brother had been the first, sweeping over her in waves, im
age after image until they ended with the ashes of that dead fire.
The second, following inexorably, born of that same long-ago year, born of mem
ory, of guilt, of the whirlwind hurts that came with lying here alone and so t
erribly exposed on this night of all nights ... the second thing, spun forth f
rom all these interwoven things, was, finally, the shaping of a resolution. A
decision, after so many years. A course of action she now knew she was going t
o take. Had to take, whatever might follow.
She lay there, chilled, hopelessly awake, and she was aware that the cold she
felt came far more from within than without. Somewhere in the palace, she knew
, the torturers would be attending to Camena di Chiara who had tried to kill a
Tyrant and free his home. Who had done so knowing he would die and how he wou
ld die.
Even now they would be with him, administering their precise measures of pain.
With a professional pride in their skill they would be breaking his fingers o
ne by one, his wrists and his arms. His toes and ankles and legs. They would b
e doing it carefully, even tenderly, solicitously guarding the beat of his hea
rt, so that after they had broken his back—which was always the last—they co
uld strap him alive on a wheel and take him out to the harbor square to die in
the sight of his people.
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 mi
nor, 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 t
he torturers and then the wheel there was a question that could no more be bur
ied 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 Camena
's 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 he'd seen a riselka un
der 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 h
er. 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 ti
me to school her heart to begin the deathly hard, never yet successful, journe
y 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 herse
lf had done in the Audience Chamber. Acknowledging that, trying to deal with i
t, Dianora began to sense, as if from a very great distance, her heart's 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 palac
e set aflame.
No comfort there of course. No comfort anywhere at all. Only an absolute remin
der of who she was and why she was here.
And lying very still in darkness on an Ember Night when country doors and wind
ows 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 conf
usions 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 f
aint and elusive had been her dream within these walls of making it all come r
ight 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 se
emed to have become her life—and from Brandin's 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 a
t 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 e
ven 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 wh
ere 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 l
ands 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. De
vin dozed off at intervals through the morning. The snow made the landscape st
range 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 beauti
ful at all. It had snowed again, briefly, about an hour before.
When Devin heard the jingle of horses approaching through the greyness, he rea
lized 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 g
round of the gully. He thought of Catriana and the Duke, warm and sheltered wi
th Taccio in Ferraut.
A company of about a dozen Barbadian mercenaries materialized out of the grey
landscape. They were laughing and singing in boisterous exuberance. Their hors
es' breath and their own made white puffs of smoke in the cold. Flat in the gu
lly Devin watched them go by. He heard Baerd's soft breathing beside him. The
Barbadians stopped at the gates of what had once been Nievolene lands. They we
ren't anymore, of course; not since the confiscations of the fall. The company
leader dismounted and strode to the locked gates. With a flourish that drew c
heers and laughter from his men he unlocked the iron gates with two keys on an
ornate chain.
"First Company," Alessan murmured under his breath. His first words in hours.
"He chose Karalius. Sandre said he would."
They watched the gates swing open and saw the horses canter through. The last
man locked the iron gates behind him.
Baerd and Alessan waited another few moments then rose to their feet. Devin st
ood up as well, wincing at how stiff he felt.
"We'll need to find the tavern in the village," Baerd said, his voice so unusu
ally grim that Devin glanced sharply at him in the growing gloom. The other ma
n's features were unreadable.
"Not to go inside, though," Alessan said. "What we do here, we do unknown."
Baerd nodded. He pulled a much-creased paper from an inner pocket of his sheep
skin vest. "Shall we start with Rovigo's man?"
Rovigo's man turned out to be a retired mariner who lived in the village a mil
e to the east. He told them where the tavern was. He also, for a fairly signif
icant sum of money, gave them a name: that of a known informer for Grancial an
d his Second Company of Barbadians. The old sailor counted his money, spat onc
e, meaningfully, then told them where the man lived, and something of his habi
ts.
Baerd killed the informer, strangling him two hours later as he walked along a
country lane from his small farm towards the village tavern. It was full-dark
by then. Devin helped him carry the body back towards the Nievolene gates and
hide it in the gully.
Baerd didn't speak, and Devin could think of nothing to say. The informer was
a paunchy, balding man of middle years. He didn't look especially evil. He loo
ked like a man surprised on the way to his favorite tavern. Devin wondered if
he'd had a wife and children. They hadn't asked Rovigo's man about that; he wa
s just as happy they hadn't.
They rejoined Alessan at the edge of the village. He was keeping watch on the
tavern from there. Without speaking he pointed to a large dun-colored horse am
ong those tethered outside the inn. A soldier's horse. The three of them doubl
ed back west half a mile and lay down to wait again, prone and watchful by the
side of the road.
Devin realized he wasn't cold anymore, or tired; he hadn't had time to think a
bout such things.
Later that night under the cold white gaze of Vidomni in the clearing winter s
ky Alessan killed the man they'd been waiting for. By the time Devin heard the
soft jingle of the soldier's 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 a
larm, and Devin belatedly rose up to try to deal with the animal. By then, tho
ugh, he realized that Baerd wasn't beside him either. When he finally clambere
d out of the ditch to the road, the soldier—wearing the insignia of the Secon
d 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 b
ack to the border fort. The Barbadian was a big man, they all were, but this o
ne's 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 ma
nor-house along the curving drive. The sound carried a long way in the stillne
ss of the wintry air. There were stars out now beside the moon; the clouds wer
e 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 wh
ere they had left him in the gully; Baerd tethered the Barbadian's horse some
distance off the road.
Some distance, but not too far. This one was meant to be found later.
Alessan touched Devin briefly on the shoulder. Using the skills Marra had taug
ht him—it seemed several lifetimes ago—Devin picked the two elaborate locks.
He was glad to be able to make a contribution. The locks were showy but not d
ifficult. The arrogant Nievolene had not had much fear of trespassers.
Alessan and Baerd each shouldered a body and carried them through. Devin swung
the gates silently shut and they entered the grounds. Not toward the manor th
ough. They let the pale moonlight lead them over the snow to the barns.
There they found trouble. The largest barn was locked from the inside, and Bae
rd pointed silently, with a grimace, to a spill of torchlight that showed from
under the double doors. He mimed the presence of a guard.
The three of them looked up. There was, clearly illuminated by Vidomni's glow,
a single small window open, high up on the eastern side.
Devin looked from Alessan to Baerd and then back to the Prince. He looked at t
he bodies of the two men already dead.
He pointed to the window and then to himself.
After a long moment Alessan nodded his head.
In silence, listening to the ragged singing from over in the manor-house, Devi
n climbed the outer wall of the Nievolene barn. By moonlight and by feel he de
ciphered 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 an
d Devin caught his breath. His heart thudding, he froze where he was, listenin
g. 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 lante
rn on the floor by his side illuminated an empty flask of wine. He must have l
ost a dice roll, Devin thought, to have been posted so boringly on guard again
st nothing here among the horses and the straw.
He went down the ladder without a sound. And in the flickering light of that b
arn, amid the smell of hay and animals and spilled red wine Devin killed his f
irst man, plunging his dagger into the Barbadian's throat as the man slept. It
was not the way his dreams of valiant deeds had ever had him doing this.
It took him a moment to fight back the churning nausea that followed. It's the
smell of the wine, he tried to tell himself. There was also more blood than h
e'd thought there would be. He wiped his blade clean before he opened the door
for the other two.
"Well done," Baerd said, taking in the scene. He briefly laid a hand on Devin'
s shoulder.
Alessan said nothing, but by the wavering light Devin read a disquieting compa
ssion in his eyes.
Baerd had already set about doing what they had to do.
They left the guard where he was to be burned. The informer and the soldier fr
om the Second Company they dragged towards one of the outbuildings. Baerd stud
ied 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 the
m convincingly shut with what Devin assumed would later appear to be a dislodg
ed beam.
The singing from the manor had gradually been fading away. Now it had come dow
n to a single voice drunkenly caroling a melancholy refrain about love lost lo
ng ago. Finally that voice, too, fell silent.
Which was Alessan's cue. At his signal they simultaneously set fire to the dry
straw and wood in the guarded barn and two of the adjacent outbuildings, incl
uding the one where the dead men were trapped. Then they fled. By the time the
y were off the property the Nievolene barns were an inferno of flame. Horses w
ere screaming.
There was no pursuit. They hadn't 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 Karalius's men. The mercenaries o
f the First Company would draw the obvious conclusion.
They reclaimed their horses and headed west. They spent the night outside agai
n in the cold taking turns on watch. It had gone very well. It seemed to have
gone exactly as planned. Devin wished they'd been able to free the horses, tho
ugh. 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. Th
ey also bought some winter wool to carry to Ferraut town where they were to re
join the others.
There was no point, Alessan said, in missing a chance at a profit. They did ha
ve responsibilities to their partners.
In fact, a disconcerting number of untoward events had ruffled the Eastern Pal
m in the autumn and winter that followed the unmasking of the Sandreni conspir
acy. In themselves, none of them amounted to very much; collectively they unse
ttled and irritated Alberico of Barbadior to the point where his aides and mes
sengers began finding their employment physically hazardous, in so far as thei
r duties brought them into proximity with the Tyrant.
For a man noted for his composure and equanimity—even back in Barbadior when
he'd been only the leader of a middle-ranking family of nobility—Alberico's t
emper 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 t
errifyingly enraged. Each of the guards—from Siferval's Third Company—had be
en summarily executed. Including the new Captain of the Guard; the previous on
e had killed himself the night before. Siferval himself was summoned back to A
stibar from Certando for a private session with his employer that left him lim
p and shaking for hours afterwards.
Alberico's fury had seemed to border on the irrational. He had clearly, his ai
des decided, been radically unsettled by whatever had happened in the forest.
Certainly he didn't look well; there was something odd about one of his eyes,
and his walk was peculiar. Then, in the days and weeks that followed, it becam
e manifest, as the local informers for each of the three companies began to br
ing in their reports, that Astibar town simply did not believe—or chose not t
o believe—that anything had happened in the forest, that there had been any S
andreni conspiracy at all.
Certainly not with the Lords Scalvaia and Nievole, and most certainly not led
by Tomasso bar Sandre. People were commenting cynically all over the city, the
word came. Too many of them knew of the bone-deep hatreds that divided those
three families. Too many knew the stories about Sandre's middle son, the alleg
ed leader of this alleged plot. He might kidnap a boy from a temple of Morian,
Astibar was saying, but plot against a Tyrant? With Nievole and Scalvaia?
No, the city was simply too sophisticated to fall for that. Anyone with the sl
ightest sense of geography or economics could see what was really going on. Ho
w, by trumping up this "threat" from three of the five largest landowners in t
he 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 ce
ntral, the Nievolene farms lay to the southwest along the Ferraut border, and
Scalvaia's vineyards were in the richest belt in the north where the best grap
es for the blue wine were grown. An immensely convenient conspiracy, all the t
averns 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 amon
g 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 bitt
er, sardonic disbelief. They may have been conquered, ground under the heavy B
arbadian heel, but they had not been deprived of their intelligence or rendere
d blind. They knew a Tyrant's scheming when they saw it.
Tomasso bar Sandre as a skilled, deadly plotter? Astibar, reeling under the ec
onomic impact of the confiscations, and the horror of the executions, still fo
und itself able to mock. And then there arrived the first of the viciously fun
ny verses from the west—from Chiara itself— written by Brandin himself some
said, though rather more likely commissioned from one of the poets who hovered
about that court. Verses lampooning Alberico as seeing plots hatching in ever
y barnyard and using them as an excuse to seize fowls and vegetable gardens al
l over the Eastern Palm. There were also a few, not very subtle sexual innu-en
dos thrown in for good measure.
The poems, posted on walls all over the city—and then in Tregea and Certando
and Ferraut—were torn down by the Barbadians almost as fast as they went up.
Unfortunately they were memorable rhymes, and people didn't need to read or he
ar them more than once . . .
Alberico would later acknowledge to himself that he'd lost control a little. H
e would also admit inwardly that a great deal of his rage stemmed from a fierc
e indignation and the aftermath of fear.
There had been a conspiracy led by that mincing Sandreni. They had very nearly
killed him in that cursed cabin in the woods.
This once, he was telling the absolute truth. There was no pretense or decepti
on. He had every claim of justice on his side. What he didn't have was a confe
ssion, or a witness, or any evidence at all. He'd needed his informer alive. O
r Tomasso. He'd wanted Tomasso alive. His dreams that first night had been sho
t through with vivid images of Sandre's son, bound and stripped and curved inv
itingly backwards on one of the machines.
In the aftermath of the pervert's inexplicable death, and the unanimous word f
rom all four provinces that no one believed a word of what had happened, Alber
ico 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 hadn't expe
cted 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 o
ffices 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 o
f 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 h
im in that cabin.
He did more. Half the massive Nievolene grain harvest was promptly shipped hom
e 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 family's two most ancient rivals while making him exceptionally popu
lar 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 goin
g to rake a healthy cut of that inflated price as well.
He could almost have slaked his anger, almost have made himself happy, watchin
g the effects of all this ripple through, if it wasn't that small things kept
happening.
For one, his soldiers began to grow restless. With an increase in hardship cam
e an increase in tension; more incidents of confrontation occurred. Especially
in Tregea where there were always more incidents of confrontation. Under grea
ter stress the mercenaries demanded—predictably—higher pay. Which, if he gav
e 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. Alo
ng 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, h
e stressed the role he alone played in blocking Ygrathen expansion in this dan
gerous halfway peninsula. He might have begun his career here as an independen
t adventurer, he conceded, with what he saw as a nice turn of phrase, but as a
n 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 throw
n 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 Emperor's Palac
e, 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 Emper
or.
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 you
r 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 f
or home. The commanders of the First and Second used that same week to formall
y present—purely coincidence of course—their new wage demands and to casuall
y remind him of past promises of land for the mercenaries. Starting, it was su
ggested delicately, with their commanders.
He'd wanted to order the two of them throttled. He'd wanted to fry their greed
y, wine-sodden brains with a blast of his own magic. But he couldn't 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 alrea
dy 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 b
een 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 ne
xt 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 a
rm, eyes hypocritically lowered in a show of deference. Oh, spring, perhaps, h
e'd said airily, as if such matters should not be of great moment to men of go
od 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 han
dling 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 th
is.
"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 th
e 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 refle
cted after they had gone and he'd managed to calm himself. At the same time, o
nly a genuine fool antagonized his troops. The more so, if he had ultimate pla
ns to lead them home. By invitation of the Emperor, preferably, but not necess
arily. Not, to be sure, necessarily.
On further reflection, triggered by that line of thought, he did raise taxes i
n Tregea, Certando, and Ferraut to match the new levels in Astibar. He also se
nt a courier to Siferval of the Third in the Cer-tandan highlands, praising hi
s recent work in keeping that province quiet.
You lashed them, then enticed them. You made them fear you, and know that thei
r fortunes could be made if you liked them enough. It was all a matter of bala
nce.
Unfortunately, small things continued to go wrong with the balancing of the Ea
stern Palm as autumn turned into winter in the unusually cold weeks that follo
wed.
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, t
he head of a scheming family, most of whom had been executed by then. Verses l
auding 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 wr
iter in the second sweep claimed to have written the verses.
Some advisers suggested peremptory wheels for the lot of them, but Alberico ha
d been giving thought to a larger issue. To the marked difference between his
court and the Ygrathen's. On Chiara, the poets vied for access to Brandin, qui
vering like puppies at the slightest word of praise from him. They wrote paean
s of exaltation to the Tyrant and obscene, scathing attacks on Alberico at req
uest. Here, every writer in the Eastern Palm seemed to be a potential rabble-r
ouser. An enemy of the state.
Alberico swallowed his anger, lauded the technical skill of the verses, and le
t both sets of poets go free. Not before suggesting, however, as benignly as h
e could manage, that he would enjoy reading verses as well-crafted on one of t
he 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 verse
s, he'd said, wondering if one of these cursed writers with their lofty airs c
ould 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 claimin
g—unbelievably—that his perverse sexuality had been a deliberately chosen pa
th, a living metaphor for his conquered, subjugated land, for the perverse sit
uation of Astibar under tyranny.
He'd had no choice after that, once he'd understood what the poet was saying.
Not bothering with inquiries again, he'd had a dozen writers pulled at random
out of the khav rooms that same afternoon, and then broken, wristed, and sky-w
heeled among the still-crowded bodies of the families of the conspirators befo
re 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 S
quare 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 s
he jumped, and she left behind— the gods alone knew how she'd come into posse
ssion 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 fo
und. 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 elegan
tly phrased note lauding the Elegies as the first decent creative work he'd se
en emanating from Barbadian territory. He offered Alberico his sincerest congr
atulations.
Alberico sent a polite acknowledgment of the sentiments and offered to commiss
ion 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 Ygrathen's spell, he knew, only Brandin himself would be able t
o read that last word, but only Brandin mattered.
He thought he'd won that one, but for some reason the woman's suicide in Trege
a left him feeling too edgy to be pleased. It was too intense an action, harki
ng back to the violence of the first year after he'd landed here. Things had b
een 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 t
hat 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 outbu
ildings of the Nievolene family estate were burned to the ground.
He ordered an immediate investigation by Karalius, then wished, a day later, t
hat he hadn't. It seemed that they had found two bodies in the smoldering ruin
s, trapped by a fallen beam that had barred a door. One was that of an informe
r 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 l
atter's choosing. Grancial immediately named a date and place. Alberico quickl
y made it clear that the survivor of any such combat would be death-wheeled. H
e succeeded in halting the fight, but the two commanders stopped speaking to e
ach other from that point on. There were a number of small skirmishes among me
n of the two companies, and one, in Tregea, that was not so small, leaving fif
teen soldiers slain and twice as many wounded.
Three local informers were found dead in Ferraut's distrada, stretched on farm
er's wagon-wheels in a savage parody of the Tyrant's justice. They couldn't ev
en retaliate—that would involve an admission that the men had been informers.

In Certando, two of SifervaFs Third Company went absent from duty, disappearin
g into the snow-white countryside, the first time that had ever happened. Sife
rval reported that local women did not appear to be involved. The men had been
extremely close friends. The Third Company commander offered the obvious, dis
agreeable hypothesis.
Late in the winter Brandin of Ygrath sent another suave envoy with another let
ter. In it he profusely thanked Alberico for his offer of verses, and said he'
d be delighted to read them. He also formally requested six Certandan women, a
s 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 Cer
tando. He ordered them blinded and hamstrung and set down under a courier's fl
ag on the snow-clad border of Lower Corte between the forts at Sinave and Fore
se. He had Siferval attach a letter to one of them asking Brandin to acknowled
ge 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 foll
owed an informer's tip and found the two runaway soldiers living together at a
n abandoned farm. They had been executed on the site, with one of them—the ap
propriate one, Siferval had reported— castrated first, so that he could die a
s he'd lived. Alberico sent his commendations.
It was an unsettling winter though. Things seemed to be happening to him inste
ad of moving to a measure he dictated. Late at night, and then at other times
as well, more and more as the Palm gradually turned towards a distant rumor of
spring, Alberico found himself thinking about the ninth province that no one
yet controlled, the one just across the bay. Senzio.
The grey-eyed merchant was making a great deal of sense. Even as he found hims
elf reluctantly agreeing with the man, Ettocio wished the fellow had chosen so
meone else's roadside tavern for his midday repast. The talk in the room was v
eering in dangerous directions and, Triad knew, enough Barbadian mercenaries u
sed the main highway between Astibar and Ferraut towns. If one of them stopped
in here now, he would be unlikely in the extreme to indulge the current tenor
of the conversation as merely an excess of springtime energy. Ettocio's licen
se would probably be gone for a month. He kept glancing nervously towards the
door.
"Double taxation now!" the lean man was saying bitterly as he pushed a hand th
rough his hair. "After the kind of winter we've just had? After what he did to
the price of grain? So we pay at the border, and now we pay at the gates of a
town, and where in the name of Morian is profit?"
There were truculent murmurs of agreement all around the room. In a tavern ful
l of merchants on the road, agreement was predictable. It was also dangerous.
Ettocio, pouring drinks, was not the only man keeping an eye on the door. The
young fellow leaning on the bar looked up from his crusty roll and wedge of co
untry cheese to give him an unexpectedly sympathetic look.
"Profit?" a wool-merchant from northern Ferraut said sarcastically. "Why shoul
d Barbadior care if we make a profit?"
"Exactly!" The grey eyes flashed in vigorous agreement. "The way I hear it, al
l he wants to do is soak the Palm for everything he can, in preparation for a
grab at the Emperor's Tiara back in Barbadior!"
"Shush!" Ettocio muttered under his breath, unable to stop himself. He took a
quick, rare pull at a mug of his own beer and moved along the bar to close the
window. It was a shame, because the spring day was glorious outside, but this
was getting out of hand.
"Next thing you know," the lean trader was saying now, "he'll just go right ah
ead and seize the rest of our land like he's already started to do in Astibar.
Any wagers we're servants or slaves within five years?"
One man's contemptuous laughter rode over the snarling chorus of response trig
gered by that. The room fell abruptly silent as everyone turned to confront th
e person who appeared to find this observation diverting. Expressions were gri
m. Ettocio nervously wiped down the already clean bartop in front of him.
The warrior from Khardhun continued laughing for a long time, seemingly oblivi
ous to the stares he was receiving. His sculpted, black features registered ge
nuine amusement.
"What," said the grey-eyed one coldly, "is so very funny, old man?"
"You are," said the old Khardhu cheerfully. He grinned like a death's head. "A
ll of you. Never seen so many blind men in one room before."
"You care to explain exactly what that means?" the Ferraut wool-merchant raspe
d.
"You need it explained?" the Khardhu murmured, his eyes wide in mock surprise.
"Well, now. Why in the name of your gods or mine or his should Alberico bothe
r trying to enslave you?" He jabbed a bony finger towards the trader who'd sta
rted all this. "If he tried that my guess is there's still enough manhood in t
he Eastern Palm—barely —that you might take offense. Might even . . . rise u
p!" He said that last in an exaggerated parody of a secretive whisper.
He leaned back, laughing again at his own wit. No one else did. Ettocio looked
nervously at the door.
"On the other side of the coin," the Khardhu went on, still chuckling, "if he
just slowly squeezes you dry with taxes and duties and confiscations he can ge
t to exactly the same place without making anyone mad enough to do anything ab
out it. I tell you, gentlemen," he took a long pull at his beer, "Alberico of
Barbadior's a smart man."
"And you," said the grey-eyed man leaning across his own table, bristling with
anger, "are an arrogant, insolent foreigner!"
The Khardhu's smile faded. His eyes locked on those of the other man and Ettoc
io was suddenly very glad the warrior's curved sword was checked with all the
other weapons behind the bar.
"I've been here some thirty years," the black man said softly. "About as long
as you've been alive, I'd wager. I was guarding merchant trains on this road w
hen you were wetting your bed at night. And if lam a foreigner, well . . . las
t time I inquired, Khardhun was a free country. We beat back our invader, whic
h is more than anyone here in the Palm can say!"
"You had magic!" the young fellow at the bar suddenly burst out, over the outr
aged din that ensued. "We didn't! That's 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 that's the only reason, you go right
ahead, little man. Maybe it'll make you feel better about paying your taxes th
is spring, or about going hungry because there's no grain here in the fall. Bu
t if you want to know the truth I'll 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 hi
s attention, he said very clearly, "We beat back Brandin of Ygrath when he inv
aded us because Khardhun fought as a country. As a whole. You people got whipp
ed 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 an
d 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 bes
t when it made a fist."
He lazily signaled Ettocio for another drink.
"Damn your insolent Khardhu hide," the grey-eyed man said in a strangled voice
. Ettocio turned from the bar to look at him. "Damn you forever to Morian's da
rkness for being right!"
Ettocio hadn't expected that, and neither had the others in the room. The mood
grew grimly introspective. And, Ettocio realized, more dangerous as well, ent
irely at odds with the brightness of the spring outside, the cheerful warmth o
f the returned sun.
"But what can we do?" the young fellow at the bar said plaintively, to no one
in particular.
"Curse and drink and pay our taxes," said the wool-merchant bitterly.
"I must say, I do sympathize with the rest of you," said the lone trader from
Senzio smugly. It was an ill-advised remark. Even Ettocio, notoriously slow to
rouse, was irritated.
The young man at the bar was positively enraged.
"Why you, you ... I don't believe it! What right do you have—" He hammered th
e bar in incoherent fury. The plump Senzian smiled in the superior manner all
of them seemed to have.
"What right indeed!" The grey eyes were icy as they returned to the fray. "Las
t time I looked, Senzio traders all had their hands jammed so deep in their po
ckets paying tribute money east and west that they couldn't even get their equ
ipment out to please their wives!"
A raucous, bawdy shout of laughter greeted that. Even the old Khardhu smiled t
hinly.
"Last / looked," said the Senzian, red-faced, "the Governor of Senzio was one
of our own, not someone shipped in from Ygrath or Barbadior!"
"What happened to the Duke?" the Ferraut merchant snapped. "Senzio was so cowa
rdly your Duke demoted himself to Governor so as not to upset the Tyrants. Are
you proud of that?"
"Proud?" the lean merchant mocked. "He's got no time to be proud of anything.
He's too busy looking both ways to see which emissary from which Tyrant he sho
uld offer his wife to!"
Again, coarse, bitter laughter.
"You've a mean tongue for a conquered man," the Senzian said coldly. The laugh
ter stopped. "Where are you from that you're so quick to cut at other men's co
urage."
"Tregea," said the other quietly.
"Occupied Tregea," the Senzian corrected viciously. "Conquered Tregea. With it
s Barbadian Governor."
"We were the last to fall," the Tregean said a little too defiantly. "Borifort
held out longer than anywhere else."
"But it fell," the Senzian said bluntly, sure of his advantage now. "I wouldn'
t be so quick to talk about other men's wives. Not after the stories we all he
ard about what the Barbadians did there. And I also heard that most of your wo
men weren't that unwilling to be—"
"Shut your filthy mouth!" the Tregean snarled, leaping to his feet. "Shut it,
or I'll close it for you permanently, you lying Senzian scum!"
A babble of noise erupted, louder than any before. Furiously clanging the bell
over the bar, Ettocio fought to restore order.
"Enough!" he roared. "Enough of this, or you're all out of here right now!" A
dire threat, and it quelled them.
Enough for the Khardhu warrior's sardonic laughter to be audible again. The ma
n was on his feet. He dropped coins on the table to pay his account, and surve
yed the room, still chuckling, from his great height.
"See what I mean?" he murmured. "All these stick-like little fingers jabbing a
nd poking away at each other. You've always done that, haven't you? Guess you
always will. Until there's nothing left here but Barbadior and Ygrath."
He swaggered to the bar to claim his sword.
"You," said the grey-eyed Tregean suddenly, as Ettocio handed over the curved,
sheathed blade. The Khardhu turned slowly.
"You know how to use that thing as well as you use your mouth?" the Tregean as
ked.
The Khardhu's lips parted in a mirthless smile. "It's been reddened once or tw
ice."
"Are you working for anyone right now?"
Insolently, appraisingly, the Khardhu looked down on the other man. "Where are
you going?"
"I've just changed my plans," the other replied. "There's no money to be made
up in Ferraut town. Not with double duties to be paid. I reckon I'll have to g
o farther afield. I'll give you going rates to guard me south to the Certandan
highlands."
"Rough country there," the Khardhu murmured reflectively.
The Tregean's face twitched with amusement. "Why do you think I want you?" he
asked.
After a moment the smile was returned. "When do we go?" the warrior said.
"We're gone," the Tregean replied, rising and paying his own account. He claim
ed his own short sword and the two of them walked out together. When the door
opened there was a brief, dazzling flash of sunlight.
Ettocio had hoped the talk would settle down after that. It didn't. The youngs
ter at the bar mumbled something about uniting in a common front—a remark tha
t would have been merely insane if it wasn't so dangerous. Unfortunately—from
Ettocio's point of view, at any rate—the comment was overheard by the Ferrau
t wool-trader, and the mood of the room was so aroused by then that the subjec
t wouldn't die.
It went on all afternoon, even after the boy left as well. And that night, wit
h an entirely different crowd, Ettocio shocked himself by speaking up during a
n argument about ancestral primacy between an Astibarian wine-dealer and anoth
er Senzian. He made the same point the tall Khardhu had made—about nine spind
ly fingers that had been broken one by one because they never formed a fist. T
he argument made sense to him; it sounded intelligent in his own mouth. He not
iced men nodding slowly even as he spoke. It was an unusual, flattering respon
se—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 li
fe 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 didn't take away his license. There wa
s a very high level of tension across the whole of the Palm by then. They arre
sted Ettocio and executed him on a wheel outside his own tavern, with his seve
red hands stuffed in his mouth.
A great many men had heard the argument by then, though. A great many had nodd
ed, hearing it.
Devin joined the other four about a mile south of the crossroads inn on the du
sty 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.
"Bubbling like a pot of khav," he said cheerfully in response to a quizzical e
yebrow, Alessan rode up on one side. He'd buckled on his sword, Devin saw. Bae
rd's bow was on the cart, just behind the seat and within very quick reach. De
vin had had occasion, several times in six months, to see just how quick Baerd
's reach could be. Alessan smiled over at him, riding bareheaded in the bright
afternoon.
"I take it you stirred the pot a little after we left?"
Devin grinned. "Didn't need much stirring. The two of you have that routine do
wn like professional players by now."
"So do you," said the Duke, cantering up on the other side of the cart. "I par
ticularly admired your spluttering anger this time. I thought you were about t
o throw something at me."
Devin smiled up at him. Sandre's teeth flashed white through the improbable bl
ack of his skin.
Don't expect to recognize us, Baerd had said when they'd parted in the Sandren
i woods half a year ago. So Devin had been prepared. Somewhat, but not enough.

Baerd's own transformation had been disconcerting but relatively mild: he'd gr
own a short beard and removed the padding from the shoulders of his doublet. H
e wasn't as big a man as Devin had first thought. He'd also somehow changed hi
s 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 d'Astibar was something else entirely. Even Alessan
, who'd evidently had years to get used to this sort of thing, gave a low whis
tle when he first saw the Duke. Sandre had become—amazingly—an aging black f
ighting man from Khardhun across the northern sea. One of a type that Devin kn
ew 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 Khardh
u 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 whi
te hair tinted a dark grey, Sandre's gaunt, black face and deep-set, fierce ey
es were exactly those of a Khardhu mercenary. Which, Baerd had explained, had
been almost the first thing he'd noticed about the Duke when he'd seen him in
daylight. It was what had suggested the rather comprehensive disguise.
"But how?" Devin remembered gasping.
"Lotions and potions," Alessan had laughed.
It turned out, as Baerd explained later, that he and the Prince had spent a nu
mber of years in Quileia after Tigana's fall. Disguises of this sort—coloring
s for skin and hair, even tints for eyes—were a perfected, important art sout
h of the mountains. They assumed a central role in the Mysteries of the Mother
Goddess, and in the less secret rites of the formal theater, and they had pla
yed pivotal, complex parts in the tumultuous religion-torn history of Quileia.

Baerd did not say what he and Alessan had been doing there, or how he had come
to learn this secret craft or possess the implements of it.
Catriana didn't know either, which made Devin feel somewhat better. They'd ask
ed Alessan one afternoon, and had received, for the first time, an answer that
was to become routine through the fall and winter.
In the spring, Alessan told them. In the spring a great deal would be made cle
arer, one way or another. They were moving towards something of importance, bu
t they would have to wait until then. He was not going to discuss it now. Befo
re the Ember Days of spring they would leave their current Astibar—Tregea—Fe
rraut loop and head south across the wide grainlands of Certando. And at that
point, Ales-san had said, a great many things might change. One way or another
, he'd repeated.
He hadn't smiled, saying any of this, though he was a man with an easy smile.

Devin remembered how Catriana had tossed her hair then, with a knowing, almost
an angry look in her blue eyes.
"It's Alienor, isn't it?" she demanded, virtually an accusation. "It's that wo
man at Castle Borso."
Alessan's mouth had twisted in surprise and then amusement. "Not so, my dear,"
he'd said. "We'll stop at Borso, but this has nothing to do with her at all.
If I didn't know better, if I didn't know your heart belonged only to Devin, I
'd 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 genuin
e camaraderie, there existed a line they learned not to try to cross. If he wa
s seldom harsh, his jests— always the first measure of control—could sting m
emorably. Even the Duke had discovered that it was best not to press Alessan o
n 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 d
ying a little more with each passing day. Under the circumstances, he decided,
the wonder wasn't that there were places they could not trespass upon but, ra
ther, 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. H
e 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 Sandr
eni Woods.
He'd had no idea what to expect when they'd set out five days later with Rovig
o's 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 f
rom the Western Palm. Especially because, as Devin learned, duty was not levie
d on Triad-related artifacts: part of a successful attempt by both sorcerers t
o 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 sile
nce as Alessan and the Duke tossed ideas back and forth on the long roads, tur
ning the rough coals of a concept into the diamonds of polished plans. And eve
n though his own dreams at night were of raising a surging army to liberate Ti
gana and storm the fabled harbor walls of Chiara, he quickly came to understan
d—on the cold paths of day—that theirs would have to be a wholly different a
pproach.
Which was, in fact, why they were still in the east, not the west, and doing a
ll they could—with the small glittering diamonds of Alessan and Sandre's plan
s—to unsettle things in Alberico's realm. Once Catriana confided to him—on o
ne of the days when, for whatever reason, she deemed him worth speaking to—th
at Alessan was, in fact, moving much more aggressively than he had the year be
fore when she'd first joined them. Devin suggested it might be Sandre's influe
nce. 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 didn't understand.

We'll find out in the spring, Devin had shrugged. She'd glared at him, as if p
ersonally affronted by his equanimity.
It had been Catriana though who'd suggested the most aggressive thing of all a
s winter began: the faked suicide in Tregea. Along with the idea of leaving be
hind her a sheaf of the poems that that young poet had written about the Sandr
eni. 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 Alberico's 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 co
vering 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 h
ad been heading south, spreading what rumors they could about unrest among the
soldiers. Rovigo's latest report suggested, for the second time, that an incr
ease in taxes might be imminent, to cover the mercenaries' newest pay demands.
Sandre, who seemed to know the Tyrant's mind astonishingly well, agreed.
After dinner, when they were alone around the fire, Catriana had made her prop
osal. Devin had been incredulous: he'd seen the height of the bridges of Trege
a 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 th
at she had been brought up by the sea: she was a better swimmer than any of th
em, and better than any of them knew.
The second thing was that—as Alessan knew perfectly well, she said—a leap su
ch as this, a suicide, especially in Tregea, would fit seamlessly into everyth
ing they were trying to achieve in the Eastern Palm.
"That," Devin remembered Sandre saying after a silence, "is true, I'm 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 twiligh
t 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 r
acing waters that were rushing past them, deep and black and cold.
While they waited, he had tried, unsuccessfully, to sort out his complex mixtu
re 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 so
mewhere, and found. Devin stuffed it into the satchel he carried while Baerd w
as vigorously chafing Catriana's shivering body and bundling her into the laye
rs of clothing they'd carried. As Devin looked at her—shaking uncontrollably,
almost blue with the cold, her teeth chattering—he had felt his envy slippin
g 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 no
rth 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 t
urmoil because of the unknown dark-haired girl from the distrada who had kille
d herself. After that incident Devin had found it increasingly hard to be shar
p or petty with Catriana. Most of the time. She did continue to indulge hersel
f 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 mad
e love together; that he had really felt her mouth soft on his, or her hands i
n his hair as she gathered him into her.
They never spoke of it, of course. He didn't avoid her, but he didn't seek her
out: her moods swung too unpredictably, he never knew what response he'd get.
A newly patient man, he let her come to ride a cart or sit before a tavern fi
re 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 they
'd brought her. Taccio's wife continued to display a particularly solicitous a
ffection for the Duke in his dark disguise—a detail which Alessan took some p
leasure in teasing Sandre about when they were alone. In the meantime, the rot
und, red-faced Taccio copiously wined them all.
There had been another mail packet waiting from Rovigo in As-tibar. Which, whe
n 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 t
o Devin with infinite suggestiveness. Ingonida crowed and clasped her hands to
gether in a gesture doubtless meant to signify romantic rapture. Taccio, beami
ng, poured Devin another drink.
The perfume, unmistakably, was Selvena's. Devin's expression, as he took cauti
ous possession of the envelope, must have been revealing because he heard Catr
iana giggle suddenly. He was careful not to look at her.
Selvena's missive was a single headlong sentence—much like the girl herself.
She did, however, make one vivid suggestion that induced him to decline when t
he others asked innocently if they might peruse his communication.
In fact, though, Devin was forced to admit that his interest was rather more c
aught by the five neat lines Alais had attached to her father's letter. In a s
mall, businesslike hand she simply reported that she'd found and copied anothe
r variant of the "Lament for Adaon" at one of the god's temples in Astibar and
that she looked forward to sharing it with all of them when they next came ea
st. She signed it with her initial only.
In the body of the letter Rovigo reported that Astibar was very quiet since th
e 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 usefu
lly 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 t
hat his best information was that Senzian linens were still underpriced in Ast
ibar but might be due to rise.
It was the news about the Nievolene lands that triggered the next stage of spa
rk-to-spark discussion between Alessan and the Duke.
And those sparks had led to the blaze.
The five of them did a fast run along the well-maintained highway north to Sen
zio with more of the religious artifacts. They bought green wine with their pr
ofit on the statuettes, bargained successfully for a quantity of linens—Baerd
, somewhat surprisingly had emerged as their best negotiator in such matters—
and doubled quickly back to Taccio, paying the huge new duties at both the pro
vincial border forts and the city-walls.
There had been another letter waiting. Among the various masking pieces of bus
iness news, Rovigo reported that an announcement on the Nievolene lands was ex
pected by the end of the week. His source was reliable, he added. The letter h
ad been written five days before.
That night Alessan, Baerd, and Devin had borrowed a third horse from Taccio—w
ho was deeply happy to be told nothing on theif intentions—and had set out on
the long ride to the Astibar border and then across to a gully by the road th
at led to the Nievolene gates.
They were back seven days later with a new cart and a load of unspun country w
ool for Taccio to sell. Word of the fire had preceded them. Word of the fire w
as everywhere, Sandre reported. There had already been a number of tavern braw
ls in Ferraut town between men of the First and Second Companies.
They left the new cart with Taccio and departed, heading slowly back towards T
regea. They didn't need three carts. They were partners in a modest commercial
venture. They made what slight profit they could, given the taxes and duties
that trammeled them. They talked about those taxes and duties a great deal, of
ten in public. Sometimes more frankly than their listeners were accustomed to
hearing.
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 Devi
n played a role, sometimes Baerd did. They were careful not to repeat the perf
ormance 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 mem
ory, 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 t
hem his new name back in the fall. He'd 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 M
arra, 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 somethin
g heavy and difficult at times. She would have been someone to talk to about s
uch things. The others had their own concerns and he didn't want to burden the
m. He wondered about Alais bren Rovigo, if she would have understood these thi
ngs he was wrestling with. He didn't think so; she had lived too sheltered, to
o 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 be
side 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, col
d winter rides, Devin worked his way through to deciding it was untrue. The ma
n had interacted with other people through his days. Had caused pleasure and s
orrow, doubtless, and had surely known both things. The moment of his ending w
as not what denned his journey under Eanna's lights, or however that journey w
as named in the Empire of Barbadior.
It was difficult to sort out though. Had Stevan of Ygrath lived and died so th
at his father's grief might work the destruction of a small province and its p
eople and their memories? Had Prince Valentin di Tigana been born only to swin
g the killing blade that caused this to happen? And what about his youngest so
n 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 no
rthern air, Baerd had come back from the celebrated weapons market with a brig
ht, 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 question
s, but it helped him nonetheless. Baerd began giving him lessons during their
midday breaks on the road.
Devin worried about Baerd, in part because he knew that Alessan did.
His first impression in the cabin had been mostly wrong: a big, blond man, int
imidatingly cool and competent. But Baerd was dark-haired and not actually lar
ge at all and, though his competence ran to such an astonishing number of thin
gs that it could still be intimidating after six months, he wasn't really cool
. Only guarded, careful. Closed tightly around the kernel of the hurt he had l
ived with for a long time.
In some ways, Devin realized, Alessan had it easier than Baerd. The Prince cou
ld find a temporary release in talk, in laughter, and most of all, and almost
always, in music. Baerd seemed to have no release at all; he walked through a
world shaped and reshaped every single moment around the knowledge that Tigana
was gone.
It would drive him out at night sometimes, away from sleep, or from a fire the
y'd built up by a road. He would rise without warning, neatly, quietly, and go
out into the darkness alone.
Devin would watch Alessan watching Baerd as he went away.
"I knew a man like him once," Sandre said gravely one night after Baerd had le
ft a warm room in a tavern for a fog-shrouded winter night in the Tregean hill
s near Borifort. "He used to have to go away by himself to fight off a need to
kill."
"That would be a part of it," Alessan had said.
Thoughts of winter, mood of a winter's night.
But it was spring now, and as the sap of the earth rose green-gold to the warm
ing light so did Devin feel his own mood lifting to the stir and quickening of
the world through which they rode.
Wait for springtime, Alessan had said amid the browns and reds of autumn trees
and the bare, harvested vines. And spring was upon them now, with the Ember D
ays approaching fast and at last—at long last—they were on the road for Cert
ando and whatever answers lay there. Devin could not quell and did not want to
quell the sense rising within him like sap in the green woods that whatever w
as going to happen was going to begin to happen soon.
In the second cart beside Baerd he felt gloriously, importantly alive. Ahead o
f them the glint of afternoon sunlight in Catriana's 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 other's face. He didn't
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":

I'm a long way from the house where I was born And this is just another windin
g trail, But when the sun goes down both of the moons will rise And Eanna's st
ars 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. H
e 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 Alessan's 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 t
hen 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 i
n on the choruses he knew in a passable baritone voice, reborn into his new id
entity, with a new hope to his long, unfading dream.
Devin took the third song back from Catriana, and sent his high clear voice al
ong the road before them to lead the way down the sunlit, winding trail to Cer
tando, to the Lady of Castle Borso, whoever she might be, and to whatever it w
as that Alessan had to find in the highlands.
First though, nearing sundown, they overtook a traveler on the road.
In itself that wasn't unusual. They were still in Ferraut, in the populated co
untry 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 suf
ficiently rare for Devin to join Baerd in scanning the sides of the road to se
e 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 sa
w the small harp slung over the man's 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 offer
ed Catriana as she pulled the lead cart to a halt beside him was of such court
ly grace it almost looked like a parody on the lonely road.
"I've been enjoying the sound of you for the last mile," he said, straightenin
g. "I must say I'm enjoying the sight of you even more." He was tall, no longe
r 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 whi
te 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 I'd hate to t
ell someone as young and beautiful as you how many years I've 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 rem
ember 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. "I'm 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 ag
ain. I thought those were professional voices behind me. You are?"
"Devin d'Asoli." The lie came easily. "I was with Menico di Ferraut for a few
years."
"And have clearly moved on to other, better things," Erlein said, glancing at
their laden carts. "Is Menico still on the road? Is he any fatter than he was?
"
"Yes to both," Devin said, concealing the guilt that still assailed him when h
e thought of his former troupe-leader. "So is Burnet last I heard."
"Rot him," Erlein said mildly. "He owes me money."
"Well," Alessan said, looking down from his horse, "we can't do anything about
that but if you like we can run you up to Ciorone and a bed before curfew. Yo
u can ride with Baerd," he added quickly, as Erlein glanced at the empty seat
beside Catriana.
"I would be most profoundly grateful—" Erlein began.
"I don't like Fort Ciorone," Sandre broke in suddenly. "They cheat you there a
nd too many people learn what you're carrying and where you're going. Too many
of the wrong kind of people. It's a mild night coming—I think we're better o
ff out here."
Devin glanced over at the Duke in surprise. This was the first time he'd offer
ed any such opinion.
"Well, really Tomaz, I don't see why—" Alessan began.
"You hired me, merchant," Sandre growled. "You wanted me to do a job for you a
nd I'm doing it. You don't want to listen, pay me now and I'll find someone wh
o will." His eyes were fierce within the hollows of his blackened face.
And his tone was one that none of them could mistake. Whatever it was, Sandre
had a reason for what he was doing.
"A little courtesy if you please," Alessan snapped, turning his horse to face
the Duke's. "Or I will indeed turn you away and let you carry your old bones b
ack to find someone else idiot enough to put up with you. I have managed," he
said, swinging back to Erlein, "to find the most arrogant Khardhu on the roads
of the Palm."
"They are all arrogant," the troubadour replied with a shake of his head. "Com
es with the curved swords."
Alessan laughed. So too, following his lead, did Devin. "There's a good hour o
f daylight left," Baerd said in a complaining voice. "We can make the Fort eas
y. Why sleep on the ground?"
Alessan sighed. "I know," he said. "But I'm sorry. We're new to this run and T
omaz isn't. I suppose we ought to listen to him or we're wasting his fee, aren
't we?" He looked back at Erlein and shrugged. "There goes your ride to Cioron
e."
"Can't lose what you never had," the troubadour smiled. "I'll manage."
"You're welcome to share our fire," Devin interjected, trusting that he'd read
the Duke's brief glance correctly. He still wasn't sure what Sandre was doing
.
Surprisingly, Erlein flushed; he looked somewhat embarrassed. "As to that, I t
hank you, but I've nothing with me to bring to table or hearth."
"You have been on the road a long time," Sandre said in a quieter voice. "I ha
ven't heard a Palm-born use that phrase in years. It's a lost tradition, that
one."
"You have a harp, don't you?" Catriana said, at just the right moment and in h
er sweetest voice. She glanced directly at Erlein for an instant, then demurel
y lowered her eyes again.
"I do," said the troubadour after a moment, affirming the obvious. He was devo
uring Catriana with his gaze.
"Then you are far from empty-handed," Alessan said crisply. "Devin and my sist
er both sing, as you've heard, and I can manage these pipes a little bit. A ha
rp will go gentle after dinner under the stars."
"Say no more," said Erlein. "You'll be better company by a long go than my mou
th talking wisdom with only my own ears to hear."
Alessan laughed again.
"There's trees over west, and a stream beyond them, if I remember rightly," Sa
ndre said. "A good place to camp."
Before anyone else could say a word Erlein di Senzio had jumped up and settled
himself at Catriana's side. Devin, his mouth agape, closed it quickly at Sand
re's hidden, urgent gesture.
Catriana pulled west off the road to lead them toward the trees the Duke had p
ointed 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 brief
ly 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 Catria
na.
Devin didn't understand. An oath? he thought, confused.
Sandre lowered his hand but his eyes remained locked on the Prince's. There wa
s 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 w
izard. 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 reme
mbered 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. Fo
r 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 b
anks 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 s
leeping-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 minut
es, no more than that, with three rabbits and a plump, wingless grele.
"I'm impressed," Erlein said from beside Catriana and the horses. His eyes wer
e wide. "I'm very impressed."
"I'm buying your music for later," Baerd said with a rare smile. The one he u
sually reserved for bargaining sessions at town fairs.
Devin had been watching Erlein as unobtrusively as he could. When he could man
age to focus on the troubadour's left hand—which never seemed to be still for
more than an instant—there did seem to be an odd blurring, an occluding of a
ir around it.
He had been waiting for Baerd to come back, now he waited no longer.
"You," he said, grinning at the returning hunter, "look like something that sh
ould be hunted yourself. 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.
"I wouldn't talk, scamp," he shot back, tossing his prey over to Sandre by the
wood gathered for the fire. "Not the way you look yourself. Or are you delibe
rately trying to be scruffy to scare away Alienor at Borso?"
Alessan laughed. So did Erlein.
"Nothing scares away Alienor," the troubadour chuckled. "And that one is exact
ly the right age for her."
"What 'right age'?" Alessan grinned slyly. "Over twelve and not yet buried sui
ts her fine."
"I don't like that," Catriana said primly as the five men laughed.
"Sorry," Alessan said trying to keep a straight face, as she stepped in front
of him, hands firmly on her hips.
"You are not at all sorry, but you should be!" Catriana snapped. "You know ver
y well I don't like that kind of talk. How do you think it makes me look? And
you only do it when you're idle. Do something useful. Cut Devin's hair. He doe
s look awful, even worse than usual."
"Me?" Devin squeaked in protest. "My hair? What do you mean? It's Baerd, not m
e! What about him? He's the one who—"
"You all need a haircut," Catriana pronounced with a blunt finality that admit
ted of no rebuttal. Her cold scrutiny rested critically on Erlein's shaggy man
e for a second. She opened her mouth, hesitated, then closed it, in a brillian
t miming of polite restraint. Erlein flushed. His right hand went uneasily to
tug at his shoulder-length strands.
His left hand never stopped playing restlessly with some pebbles he'd gathered
by the stream.
"I think," Devin said spitefully, "that you've just insulted our guest. That s
hould make him feel properly welcome here."
"I didn't say a word, Devin," she flared.
"You didn't have to," Erlein said ruefully. "Those magnificent eyes were somew
hat less than pleased with what they saw."
"My sister's eyes are almost never pleased with what they see," Alessan grunte
d. He was crouched beside one of the packs and after a moment's rummaging pull
ed out a scissors and a comb. "I am fairly obviously being ordered to duty her
e. There's half an hour of light left. Who's first victim?"
"Me," said Baerd quickly. "You aren't touching me in twilight, I'll tell you t
hat much."
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 man's hair. Catr
iana 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 per
fect, of course.
Oh, Marian, Devin thought, a heady blend of excitement and pride racing throug
h him. They are all so good.
"Later," was all he said, lounging casually on the ground. "We've got enough f
or now and I'm next with Alessan."
"No you're not," Alessan called from by the river, picking up Sandre's gambit.
"Get the wood, Devin. There isn't enough light to do three of you. I'll cut y
ours tomorrow, and Erlein's now if he wants. Catriana will just have to endure
you looking fearsome for one more night."
"As if a haircut's going to change that!" she called from the other side of th
e clearing. Erlein and Baerd laughed.
Grumbling, Devin stood up and ambled off toward the trees.
Behind him he heard Erlein's voice.
"I'd be grateful to you," the troubadour was saying to Alessan. "I'd hate to h
ave 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 wher
e the horses were tethered. He stood up and walked over to the riverbank. He s
at down on the rock in front of Alessan. The sun was a red disk, westering bey
ond the stream.
Carrying an armful of wood, Devin looped quietly around in the growing shadow
s to where Catriana stood among the horses. She heard him come up but continue
d brushing the brown mare. Her eyes never left the two men by the river.
Neither did Devin's. Squinting into the setting sun it seemed to him as if Ale
ssan and the troubadour had become figures in some timeless landscape. Their v
oices 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 Erlein's hair.
"I don't even remember," the troubadour confessed.
"Well," Alessan laughed, bending to wet his comb in the stream, "on the road w
e don't exactly have to keep up with court fashions. Tilt a little this way. Y
es, good. Do you brush it across in front or straight back?"
"Back, by preference."
"Fine." Alessan's hands moved up to the crown of Erlein's head, the scissors f
lashing as they caught the last of the sun. "That's an old-fashioned look, but
troubadours are supposed to look old-fashioned, aren't they? Part of the char
m. You are bound by Adaon 's name and my own. I am Alessan, Prince of Tigana,
and wizard you are mine!"
Devin took an involuntary step forward. He saw Erlein try, re-flexively, to je
rk away. But the hand of binding held his head, and the scissors, so busy a mo
ment before, were now sharp against his throat. They froze him for an instant
and an instant was enough.
"Rot your flesh!" Erlein screamed as Alessan released him and stepped back. Th
e wizard sprang from the stone as if scalded, and wheeled to face the Prince.
His face was contorted with rage.
Fearing for Alessan, Devin began moving toward the river, reaching for his bla
de. Then he saw that Baerd had an arrow already notched to his bow, and traine
d on Erlein's heart. Devin slowed his rush and then stopped. Sandre was right
beside him, the curved sword drawn. He caught a glimpse of the Duke's dark fac
e and in it—though he couldn't be absolutely sure in the uncertain light—he
thought he read fear.
He turned back to the two men by the river. Alessan had laid down the scissors
and comb neatly on the rock. He stood still, hands at his sides, but his brea
th was coming quickly.
Erlein was literally shaking with fury. Devin looked at him and it was as if a
curtain had been drawn back. In the wizard's eyes hatred and terror vied for
domination. His mouth worked spasmodically. He raised his left hand and pointe
d 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 wizard's 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." A
lessan's voice was quiet, almost detached, as if this was all happening to som
eone else entirely. Only then did Devin realize that the wizard's 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 children's children for what you have don
e 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 Erlein's face. "Every true Prince of Tigana,"
the wizard said with bitter intensity, "has known since the beginning how awfu
l 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 re
gain 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 generat
ions stretching back to the dawn of records in this peninsula? And you, a puli
ng princeling without even a land to rule have just casually—viciously—set y
our hands upon my life!"
"Not casually. And only because I have no home. Because Tigana is dying and wi
ll 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 w
ith my own destiny!"
Watching Alessan's face Devin saw how that cry shafted into him. For a long mo
ment there was silence by the river. Devin saw the Prince draw air into his lu
ngs 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 blo
od.
"I will not lie and say that I am sorry," Alessan said finally, choosing his w
ords 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 h
ate me, and I can tell you that I grieve for what necessity demands."
"It demands nothing!" Erlein replied, shrill and unrelenting in his righteousn
ess. "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 a
nyone with honor."
"Honor!" Erlein spat the word. "And how does honor bind a man of Senzio to Tig
ana's fate? What Prince compels a free man to a sure death at his side and the
n speaks of honor?" He shook his head. "Call it naked power and have done."
"I will not," the Duke replied in his deep voice. It was quite dark now; Devin
could no longer see his hooded eyes. From behind them all he heard the sounds
of Baerd beginning to light the fire. Overhead the first stars were emerging
in the blue-black cloak of the sky. Away west, across the stream, there was a
last hint of crimson along the line of the horizon.
"I will not," Sandre said again. "The honor of a ruler, and his duty, lies in
his care for his land and his people. That is the only true measure. And the p
rice, part of the price of that, comes when he must go against his own soul's
needs and do such things that will grieve him to the very bones of his hands.
Such things," he added softly, "as the Prince of Tigana has just done to you."

But Erlein's 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 someon
e lost and afraid.
There was a silence. Behind them the fire caught with a rush, and the orange g
low spun outward, illuminating Erlein's taut rage and Sandre's gaunt, dark fac
e, 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. B
ut I will claim no credit for that. Be not deceived: I am no Khardhu. My name
is Sandre d'Astibar, once Duke of that province. I know a little about power."

Erlein's mouth fell open.
"I am also a wizard," Sandre added matter-of-factly. "Which is how you were kn
own: by the thin spell you use to mask your hand."
Erlein closed his mouth. He stared fixedly at the Duke as if seeking to penetr
ate 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 mag
ic found me. I was also the son and heir of Tellani, Duke of Astibar. I made m
y choice: I turned my back on magic and embraced the rule of men. I used my ve
ry 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 cours
e. What did you do? Kill your son in the dungeon?"
"I did." The voice was level, giving nothing away at all.
"You could have cut two fingers and brought him out."
"Perhaps."
Devin looked over sharply at that, startled.
"I don't know. I made my choice long ago, Erlein di Senzio." And with those qu
iet words another shape of pain seemed to enter the clearing, almost visible a
t the edges of the firelight.
Erlein forced a corrosive laugh. "And a fine choice it was!" he mocked. "Now y
our Dukedom is gone and your family as well, and you've been bound as a slave
wizard to an arrogant Tiganese. How happy you must be!"
"Not so," said Alessan quickly from by the river.
"I am here by my own choice," Sandre said softly. "Because Tigana's cause is A
stibar's and Senzio's and Chiara's—it is the same for all of us. Do we die as
willing victims or while trying to be free? Do we skulk as you have done all
these years, hiding from the sorcerers? Or can we not join palm to palm—for o
nce in this folly-ridden peninsula of warring provinces locked into their prid
e—and drive the two of them away?"
Devin was deeply stirred. The Duke's words rang in the firelit dark like a cha
llenge to the night. But when he ended, the sound they heard was Erlein di Sen
zio clapping sardonically.
"Wonderful," he said contemptuously. "You really must remember that for when y
ou find an army of simpletons to rally. You will forgive me if I remain unmove
d 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 b
een laws that constrained me, and one government ruling where I might have wis
hed for another. But the roads are safer now than they ever were when this man
ruled in Astibar or that one's 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 Br
andin of Ygrath's spell on the name of Tigana was not the first and last thoug
ht of my days!"
"We will," Alessan said then in an unnaturally flat voice. "We will all forgiv
e you for that. Nor will we seek to persuade you to change your views now. I w
ill tell you this, though: the freedom you speak of will be yours again when T
igana's name is heard in the world once more. It is my hope—vain, perhaps—th
at you will work with us willingly in time, but until then I can say that the
compulsion of Adaon's gift will suffice me. My father died, and my brothers di
ed by the Deisa, and the flower of a generation with them, fighting for freedo
m. I have not lived so bitterly or striven so long to hear a coward belittle t
he 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 roa
ds, 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 beg
inning to break. "You have been the worst thing I know, a willing subject of t
wo 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 t
o soil your breeches if a sorcerer or one of their Trackers came within ten mi
les of your little screening spell. You were free to walk past death-wheels wi
th your fellow wizards rotting on them, and free to turn your back and continu
e 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 towa
rds the two of them and then stop himself. He remembered that Sandre had not b
elieved that this was possible.
Now he saw. They all saw, by the light of the stars and the fire Baerd had mad
e.
Erlein fought. Understanding next to nothing, unnerved by almost all that was
happening, Devin gradually became aware that a horrible struggle was taking pl
ace 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 ben
t slowly downward. His shoulders hunched as if resisting some overmastering as
sault. 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, pressin
g 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 o
pen.
Devin looked away in pity and terror just before the wizard's scream ripped th
e night apart. In the same moment Catriana took two quick running steps and bu
ried her head against Devin's shoulder.
That cry of pain, the scream of a tormented animal, hung in the air between fi
re 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 river's soft murmur, and Erlein di Sen
zio's choked, ragged breathing.
Without speaking Catriana straightened and released her grip on Devin's arm. H
e glanced at her but she didn't meet his eye. He turned back to the wizard.
Erlein was still on his knees before Alessan in the new spring grass by the ri
verbank. His body still shook, but with weeping now. When he lifted his head D
evin could see the tracks of tears and sweat and the staining mud from his han
ds. Slowly Erlein raised his left hand and stared at it as if it was something
alien that didn't 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 Ilari
on, waning back to a crescent, had risen in the east. Ghostlight, Devin though
t, and wished he hadn't.
"Honor!" Erlein di Senzio said, scarcely audible.
Alessan had not moved since giving his command. He looked down on the wizard h
e 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 t
he fire. The meat was already cooking. Caught in a vortex of emotion, Devin sa
w 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 Duke's
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 fire's glo
w. Looking over at his dark outline, Sandre murmured that a younger man would
very likely have refused to eat. "He's a survivor that one," the Duke added. "
Any wizard who's 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. "He'll
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 t
he river. He couldn't even imagine what this must feel like. Or rather, he cou
ld almost imagine it, and the sensation disturbed him.
He became aware that Catriana was looking at him and he turned to her. This ti
me she didn't look away. Her expression, too, was strange; Devin realized she
must be feeling the same edginess and sense of unreality that he was. He sudde
nly remembered, vividly, the feel of her head against his shoulder an hour ago
. At the time he'd hardly registered the fact, so intent had he been on Erlein
. He tried to smile reassuringly, but he didn't think he managed it.
"Troubadour, you promised us harp music!" Sandre called out abruptly. The wiza
rd in the darkness didn't respond. Devin had forgotten about that. He didn't f
eel much like singing and he didn't think Catriana did either.
So, in the event, what happened was that Alessan expressionlessly claimed his
Tregean pipes and began to make music alone beside the fire.
He played beautifully, with a pared-down economy of sound— melodies so sweetl
y offered that Devin, in his current mood, could almost imagine Eanna's stars
and the blue crescent of the one moon pausing in their movements overhead so a
s not to have to wheel inexorably away from the grace of that music.
Then a short while later Devin realized what Alessan was doing and he felt, ab
ruptly, as if he was going to cry. He held himself very still, to keep control
, and he looked at the Prince across the red and orange of the flames.
Alessan's eyes were closed as he played, his lean face seemed almost hollowed
out, the cheekbones showing clearly. And into the sounds he made he seemed to
pour, as from a votive temple bowl, both the yearning that drove him, and the
decency and care that Devin knew lay at the root of him. But that wasn't it, t
hat wasn't what was making Devin want to cry: Every song that Alessan was play
ing, every single tune, achingly high and sweet, heartbreakingly clear, one af
ter another, was a song from Senzio.
A song for Erlein di Senzio, cloaked in bitterness and the shadows of night by
the riverbank alone.
I will not say I am sorry, Alessan had told the wizard as the sun had set. But
I can tell you that I grieve.
And the night, listening to the music the Prince of Tigana made upon his pipes
, Devin learned the diiference between the two. He watched Alessan, and then h
e watched the others as they looked at the Prince, and it was when he was gazi
ng at Baerd that the need to weep did grow too strong. His own griefs rose to
the call of the mountain pipes. Grief for Alessan and overmastered Erlein. For
Baerd and his haunted night walking. For Sandre and his ten fingers and his d
ead son. For Catriana and himself, all their generation, rootless and cut off
from what they were in a world without a home. For all the myriad accumulation
s of loss and what men and women had to do in order to seek redress.
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 Devin's glass in sile
nce. She'd 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 gl
ass 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 d
own himself, wrapping it around him. He found himself thinking about his fathe
r 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 sle
eping-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 r
eaching out in what she did, and that tonight might even mark a chance to begi
n the healing of what lay badly between them, but he was too drained to know w
hat to do or say among all these complicated sorrows.
He said good-night to her, softly, but she did not reply. He wasn't sure if sh
e'd heard him, but he didn't 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 s
teadily into the flames. Devin wondered what he saw there. He wondered, but he
didn't 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 f
or Baerd, but Baerd had gone away, to walk alone in the night.
Alessan hadn't moved, or opened his eyes. He was still playing, lonely and hig
h and sorrowful, when Devin fell asleep.
He woke to Baerd's 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 he'd gone to bed at all.
"I need your help," Baerd murmured. "Come."
Shivering, Devin rolled out of his blankets and began pulling on his boots. Th
e moon was down. He looked east but there was no sign of dawn along the horizo
n. It was very still. Sleepily he shrugged into the woolen vest Alais had sent
him by way of Taccio in Ferraut. He had no idea how long he'd been asleep or
what time it was.
He finished dressing and went to relieve himself in the trees by the river. Hi
s breath smoked in the frosty air. Spring was coming, but it wasn't quite here
yet, not in the middle of the night. The sky was brilliantly clear and full o
f stars. It would be a beautiful day later when the sun came. Right now he shi
vered, and did up the drawstrings of his breeches.
Then he realized that he hadn't seen Erlein anywhere.
"What happened?" he whispered to Alessan as he returned to the camp. "You said
you could call him back."
"I did," the Prince said shortly. Standing closer Devin could see now how wear
y he looked. "He fought it so hard that he passed out just now. Somewhere out
there." He gestured south and west.
"Come on," Baerd said again. "Bring your sword."
They had to cross the stream. The icy cold water drove all the sleep out of De
vin. He gasped with the shock of it.
"I'm sorry," Baerd said. "I'd have done it alone, but I don't know how far awa
y he is or what else is out here in this country. Alessan wants him back in ca
mp before he revives. It made sense to have two men."
"No, no, that's fine," Devin protested. His teeth were chattering.
"I suppose I could have woken the old Duke from his rest. Or Catriana could ha
ve helped me."
"What? No, really, Baerd. I'm fine. I'm—"
He stopped, because Baerd was laughing at him. Belatedly Devin caught on to th
e teasing. It warmed him in a curious way. This way, in fact, the first time h
e'd 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 yea
rs. He straightened his shoulders and, walking as tall as he could, followed B
aerd west into the darkness.
They found Erlein di Senzio at the edge of a cluster of olive trees on a slope
, about an hour's walk from the camp. Devin swallowed awkwardly when he saw wh
at had happened. Baerd whistled softly between his teeth; it wasn't a pretty s
ight.
Erlein was unconscious. He had tied himself to one of the tree-trunks and appe
ared to have knotted the rope at least a dozen times. Bending down, Baerd held
up the wizard's waterflask. It was empty: Erlein had soaked the knots to tigh
ten them. His pack and his knife lay together on the ground, a deliberate dist
ance out of reach.
The rope was frayed and tangled. It looked as if a number of knots had been un
done, but five or six still held.
"Look at his fingers," Baerd said grimly. He drew his dagger and began cutting
the rope.
Erlein's 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 Alessan's summons. What had he hoped for, Devin wonder
ed. That the Prince would assume he had somehow escaped and would therefore fo
rget about him?
Devin doubted, in fact, if what Erlein had done carried any such weight of rat
ional thought. It was defiance, pure and simple, and one had to acknowledge—n
ot even grudgingly—the ferocity of it. He helped Baerd cut through the last o
f the bonds. Erlein was breathing, but showed no signs of consciousness. His p
ain 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 scream
s 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 t
he grey-haired troubadour. Why was he making this so hard for them? Why forcin
g Alessan to shoulder so much more pain of his own?
Unfortunately, he knew some of the answers to that, and they were not comforti
ng.
"Will he try to kill himself?" he asked Baerd abruptly.
"I don't think so. As Sandre said, this one is a survivor. I don't think he'll
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 didn't expect the ro
pe though."
Devin took Erlein's pack and gear and Baerd's bow and quiver and sword. Baerd
slung the unconscious wizard over his shoulder with a grunt and they started b
ack 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—S
andre had it burning again. Devin dropped the gear and weapons and went back t
o the river with a basin for water. When he returned Catriana and the Duke beg
an cleaning and wrapping Erlein's 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. Wasn't the binding of the rope his
real struggle to be free? He looked over and saw Ales-san gazing down at Erle
in. He could read absolutely nothing in the Prince's 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 p
ale, delicate hue, a promise. It glinted and sparkled on the water of the stre
am and turned the budding leaves green-gold on the trees. The air was filled w
ith 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 ban
dages on his hands. Erlein glanced over at the saddled horses and the two cart
s, packed and ready for the road.
His gaze swung back and steadied on Alessan's face. The two men, so improbably
bound, looked at each other without speaking. Then Alessan smiled. A smile De
vin knew. It opened his stern face to warmth and lit the slate-grey of his eye
s.
"Had I known," Alessan said, "that you hated Tregean pipes quite that much I h
onestly wouldn't 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 han
ds 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.

chapter 10

FIVE DAYS LATER, ON THE EVE OF THE EMBER DAYS OF SPRING,
they came to Castle Borso.
All that last afternoon as they moved south Devin had been watching the mounta
ins. Any child raised in the watery lowlands of Asoli could not help but be aw
ed by the towering southland ranges: the Braccio here in Certando, the Parravi
east towards Tregea and, though he'd never seen them, the rumor of the snow-c
lad Sfaroni, highest of all, over west where Tigana once had been.
It was late in the day. Far to the north on that same afternoon Isolla of Ygra
th lay dead and dismembered under a bloody sheet in the Audience Chamber of th
e palace on Chiara.
The sun setting behind a thrust spur of the mountains dyed the peaks to burgun
dy and red and a somber purple hue. On the very highest summits the snow still
shone and dazzled in the last of the light. Devin could just make out the lin
e of the Braccio Pass as it came down: one of the three fabled passes that had
linked—in some seasons, and never easily—the Peninsula of the Palm with Qui
leia to the south.
In the old days, before the Matriarchy had taken deep root in Quileia there ha
d been trade across the mountains, and the brooding piety of the springtime Em
ber Days had also presaged a quickening and stir of commercial life with the p
romise of the passes opening again. The towns and fortress-castles here in the
southern highlands had been vibrant and vital then. Well-defended too, becaus
e where a trade caravan could cross, so could an army. But no King of Quileia
had ever been secure enough on his throne to lead an army north; not with the
High Priestesses standing by at home to see him fail or fall. Here in Certando
the private armies had mostly bloodied their blades and arrows against each o
ther, in savage southland feuds that ranged over generations and became the st
uff of legend.
And then the Quileian Matriarchy had come to power after all, in the time of A
chis and Pasitheia, several hundred years ago. Quileia under the priestesses h
ad folded inward upon itself like a flower at dusk and the caravans ended.
The southland cities dwindled into villages, or, if flexible and energetic eno
ugh, they changed their character and turned their faces northward and to othe
r things, as Avalle of the Towers had done in Tigana. Here in the Certandan hi
ghlands the mighty lords who had once held glittering court in their huge warl
ike castles became living anachronisms. Their forays and battles with each oth
er—once integral to the flow of events in the Palm—became more and more inco
nsequential, though not the less bitter or vicious for that.
To Devin, touring with Menico di Ferraut, it had sometimes seemed that every s
econd ballad they sang was of some lord or younger son pursued by enemies amon
g these crags; or of ill-fated southland lovers divided by the hatred of their
fathers; or of the bloody deeds of those fathers, untamed as hawks in their s
tern high castles among these foothills of the Braccio.
And of those ballads, whether wild with battle and blood and villages set afir
e, or lamenting parted lovers drowning themselves in silent pools hidden in th
e misty hills—of all those songs, half again, it seemed to Devin, were of the
Borso clan and set in and around the massive, piled, grim splendor of Castle
Borso hard under Braccio Pass.
There hadn't been any new ballads for a long time, very few in fact since the
Quileian caravans had stopped. But of fresh stories and rumors there had been
many in the past two decades. A great many. In her own particular way, and in
her own lifetime, Alienor of Castle Borso had already become a legend among th
e men and women of the road.
And if these newer stories were about love, as so many of the older songs had
been, they had little to do with anguished youth bewailing fate on windswept c
rags, and rather more to tell about certain changes within Castle Borso itself
. About deep woven carpets and tapestries, about imported silk and lace and ve
lvet, and profoundly disconcerting works of art in rooms that had once seen ha
rd men plan midnight raids at trestle-tables, while unruly hunting dogs had fo
ught for flung bones among the rushes of the floor.
Riding beside Erlein in the second cart, Devin dragged his gaze away from the
last shining of light on the peaks and looked at the castle they were nearing.
Tucked into a fold of hills, with a moat around it and a small village just b
eyond, Borso was already in shadow. Even as he watched, Devin saw lights being
lit in the windows. The last lights until the end of the Ember Days.
"Alienor is a friend," was all that Alessan had volunteered. "An old friend."

That much, at least, was evident from the greeting she gave him when her senes
chal—tall and stooped, with a magnificent white beard— ushered them gravely
into the firelit warmth of the Great Hall.
Alessan's color was unusually high when the lady of the castle unlaced her lon
g fingers from his hair and withdrew her lips from his own. She hadn't hurried
the encounter. Neither, even more interestingly, had he. Alienor stepped back
, smiling a little, to survey his companions.
She favored Erlein with a nod of recognition. "Welcome back, troubadour. Two y
ears, is it?"
"Even so, my lady. I am honored that you remember." Erlein's bow harkened back
to an earlier age, to the manner they'd seen before Alessan had bound him.
"You were alone then, I remember. I am pleased to see you now in such splendid
company."
Erlein opened his mouth and then closed it without replying. Alienor glanced a
t Alessan, a fleeting inquiry in her very dark eyes.
Receiving no response she turned to the Duke and the curiosity in her face sha
rpened. Thoughtfully she laid a finger against her cheek and tilted her head s
lightly to one side. The disguised Sandre endured her scrutiny impassively.
"Very well done," said Alienor of Borso, softly so the servants and the senesc
hal by the doors could not hear. "I imagine that Baerd has the whole Palm taki
ng you for a Khardhu. I wonder who you really are, under all of that." Her smi
le was quite ravishing.
Devin didn't know whether to be impressed or unsettled. An instant later that
particular dilemma was rendered irrelevant.
"You don't know?" said Erlein di Senzio loudly. "A terrible oversight. Allow m
e the introduction. My lady, may I present to you the—"
He got no further.
Devin was the first to react, which surprised him, thinking about it afterward
s. He'd always been quick though, and he was closest to the wizard. What he di
d—the only thing he could think of to do—was pivot sharply and bury his fist
as hard as he could in Erlein's belly.
As it was, he was only a fraction of a second ahead of Catriana on Erlein's ot
her side. She had leaped to clap her hand over the wizard's mouth. The force o
f Devin's blow doubled Erlein over with a grunt of pain. This in turn had the
unintended effect of throwing Catriana off balance and stumbling forward. To b
e smoothly caught and braced by Alienor.
The whole thing had taken perhaps three seconds.
Erlein sank to his knees on the opulent carpet. Devin knelt beside him. He hea
rd Alienor dismissing her servants from the room.
"You are a fool!" Baerd snarled at the wizard.
"He certainly is," Alienor agreed in a rather different tone, all exaggerated
petulance and flounce. "Why would anyone think I'd want the burden of knowing
the true identity of a disguised Khardhu warrior?" She was still holding Catri
ana around the waist, quite unnecessarily. Now she let her go, with an amused
expression at the girl's rapid retreat.
"You are an impetuous creature, aren't you?" she murmured silk-ily.
"Not especially," said Catriana hardily, stopping a few feet away.
Alienor's mouth quirked. She looked Catriana up and down with an expert eye. "
I am horribly jealous of you," she pronounced at length. "And I would be, even
if you had that hair chopped off and those eyes sewn shut. What magnificent m
en you are traveling with!"
"Are they?" Catriana's voice was indifferent, but her color was suddenly high.

"Are they?" Alienor echoed sharply. "You mean you haven't established that for
yourself? Dear child, what have you been doing with your nights? Of course th
ey are! Don't waste your youth, my dear."
Catriana looked at her levelly. "I don't think I am," she said. "But I doubt w
e'd have the same thoughts on that subject."
Devin winced, but Alienor's answer was mild. "Perhaps not," she agreed, unruff
led. "But, in truth, I think the overlap would actually be greater than you im
agine." She paused. "You may also find as you get older that ice is for deaths
and endings, not for beginnings. Any kind of beginnings. On the other hand, I
will ensure," she added, with a smile that was all kindness, "that you have a
sufficiency of blankets to keep you warm tonight."
Erlein groaned, dragging Devin's attention away from the two women. He heard C
atriana say, "I thank you for your solicitude," but he missed her expression.
From the tone he could hazard a guess at what it would be.
He supported Erlein's head as the wizard labored to get his wind back. Alienor
simply ignored them. She was greeting Baerd now with a friendly civility—a t
one that was cheerfully matched, Devin noted instinctively, by Baerd's own man
ner towards her.
"I'm sorry," he whispered to Erlein. "I couldn't think of anything else."
Erlein waved a feeble, still-unhealed hand. He'd insisted on removing the band
ages before they'd entered the castle. "I'm sorry," he wheezed, surprising Dev
in considerably. "I forgot about the servants." He wiped his lips with the bac
k of one hand. "I won't achieve much for myself if I get us all killed. Not my
idea of freedom, that. Nor, frankly, is this posture my notion of middle-aged
dignity. Since you knocked me down you can kindly help me up." For the first
time Devin heard a faint note of amusement in the troubadour's voice. A surviv
or, Sandre had said.
As tactfully as he could he helped the other man stand.
"The extremely violent one," Alessan was saying drily, "is Devin d'Asoli. He a
lso sings. If you are very good he may sing for you."
Devin turned away from Erlein, but perhaps because he'd been distracted by wha
t had just happened he was quite unprepared to deal with the gaze he now encou
ntered.
There is no possible way, he found himself thinking, that this woman is forty
years old. He reflexively sketched the performer's bow Menico had taught him,
to cover his confusion. She was almost forty and he knew it: Alienor had been
widowed two years after she'd been wed, when Cornaro of Borso had died in the
Barbadian invasion of Certando. The stories and descriptions of the beautiful
widow in her southland castle had begun very shortly after that.
They didn't come even near to catching what she was—what he saw standing befo
re him in a long gown of a blue so deep it was nearly black. Her hair was blac
k, worn high upon her head and held by a diadem of white gold studded with gem
s. A few tendrils of hair had been artlessly allowed to fall free, framing the
perfect oval of her face. Her eyes were indigo, almost violet under the long
lashes, and her mouth was full and red and smiling a private smile as she look
ed at Devin.
He forced himself to meet that look. Doing so, he felt as though all the sluic
e-gates in his veins had been hurled open and his blood was a river in flood,
racing through a steep wild course at an ever-increasing speed. Her smile grew
deeper, more private, as if she could actually see that happening inside him,
and the dark eyes grew wider for an instant.
"I suppose," said Alienor di Certando, before turning back to Alessan, "that I
shall have to try to be very good then, if that will induce you to sing for m
e."
Her breasts were full and high, Devin saw, could not help but see. The gown wa
s cut very low and a diamond pendant hung against her skin, drawing the eye li
ke a blue-white fire.
He shook his head, fighting to clear it, a little shocked at his own reaction.
This was ridiculous, he told himself sternly. He had been overheated by the s
tories told, his imagination rendered unruly by the opulent, sensuous furnishi
ngs in the room. He looked upwards for distraction and then wished he hadn't.

On the ceiling someone not a stranger to the act of love had painted Adaon's p
rimal coupling with Eanna. The face of the goddess was very clearly that of Al
ienor and the painting showed—just as clearly—that she was in the very momen
t of rapture when the stars had streamed into being from her ecstasy.
There were indeed stars streaming all across the background of the ceiling fre
sco. It was, however, difficult to look at the background of the fresco. Devin
forced his eyes down. What helped him reclaim his composure was meeting Catri
ana's glance just then: a mingled look of caustic irony and a second thing he
couldn't quite recognize. For all her own splendor and the wild crimson glory
of her hair, Catriana looked exceptionally young just then. Almost a child, De
vin thought sagely, not yet fully realized or accomplished in her womanhood.
The lady of Castle Borso was complete in what she was, from her sandaled feet
to the band in her lustrous hair. Her nails, Devin noticed belatedly, were pai
nted the same blue-black dangerous color as her gown.
He swallowed, and looked away again.
"I expected you yesterday," Alienor was saying to Alessan. "I was waiting for
you and I'd made myself beautiful for you but you didn't come."
"Just as well, then," Alessan murmured, smiling. "Had I seen you any more beau
tiful than you are now I might never have found the strength to leave."
Her mouth curled mischievously. She turned to the others. "You see how the ma
n torments me? Not a quarter of an hour in my home and he speaks of leaving. A
m I well served in such a friend?"
The question was addressed, as it happened, directly to Devin. His throat was
dry; her glance did disruptive things to the orderly flow of messages from bra
in to tongue. He essayed a smile, suspecting rather that the expression produc
ed fell somewhere between the fatuous and the imbecilic.
Wine, Devin thought desperately. He was in serious need of an effective glass
of something.
As if summoned by an art of timing more subtle than wizardry three servants in
blue livery reappeared, each bearing seven glasses on a tray. Two of the tray
s, Devin saw, bore a red wine that was almost certainly Certandan.
The wine in the third set of glasses was blue.
Devin turned to Alessan. The Prince was looking at Alienor with an expression
that spoke to something private and shared far in the past. For a moment her o
wn expression and demeanor altered: as if she had laid aside for an instant th
e reflexive spinning of her webs of enticement. And Devin, a far more percepti
ve man than he had been six months before, thought he saw the hint of a sadnes
s in her eyes.
Then she spoke and he was certain that he'd seen it. In some subtle way it cal
med him, and shed a different, milder light on the mood in the room.
"It is not a thing I am likely to forget," she said softly to Alessan, gesturi
ng towards the blue wine.
"Nor I," he replied. "Since it began here."
She was silent a moment, eyelids lowered. Then the moment passed. Alienor's ey
es were sparkling again when they lifted. "I have the usual collection of lett
ers for you. But one is very recent," she said. "Brought two days ago by a ver
y young priest of Eanna who was terrified of me the whole time he was here. He
wouldn't even stay the night though he only arrived at sunset. I swear he rod
e out so fast he must have feared I'd have his robe off if he lingered for a m
eal."
"And would you have?" Alessan grinned.
She made a face. "Unlikely. Eanna's sort are seldom worth the trouble. Though
he was pretty. Almost as pretty as Baerd, come to think of it."
Baerd, quite unperturbed, simply smiled. Alienor's glance lingered flirtatious
ly on him. There too, Devin noted. An exchange that spoke to events and things
shared a long way back. He felt young suddenly, and out of his depth.
"Where is the new message from?" Alessan asked.
Alienor hesitated. "West," was all she said. She glanced at the rest of them w
ith a veiled question in her eyes.
Alessan noted it. "You may speak freely. I trust every man and woman here." He
was careful not to even look at Erlein. Devin did look, but if he'd expected
a reaction from the wizard he was disappointed.
With a gesture Alienor dismissed her servants. The old seneschal had already w
ithdrawn to see to the preparation of their rooms. When they were alone Alieno
r walked over to a writing-table by one of the four blazing fireplaces and cla
imed a sealed envelope from a drawer. She came back and gave it to Alessan.
"It is from Danoleon himself," she said. "From your own province whose name I
cannot yet hear or say."
And that, Devin had not expected at all.
"Forgive me," Alessan murmured. He strode quickly toward the nearest fire, tea
ring the letter open as he went. Alienor became very busy offering glasses of
the red wine. Devin took a long drink from his. Then he noticed that Baerd had
not touched his wine and that his gaze was fixed on Alessan across the room.
Devin followed the look. The Prince had finished reading. He was standing rigi
dly, staring into the fire.
"Alessan?" Baerd said.
Alienor turned swiftly at that. Alessan did not move; seemed not to have even
heard.
"Alessan?" Baerd said again, more urgently. "What is it?"
Slowly the Prince of Tigana turned from the flames to look at them. Or not rea
lly at them, Devin amended inwardly. At Baerd. There was something bleak and c
old in his face. Ice is for endings, Devin thought involuntarily.
"It is from Danoleon, I'm afraid. From the Sanctuary." Alessan's voice was fla
t. "My mother is dying. I will have to start home tomorrow."
Baerd's face had gone as white as Alessan's. "The meeting?" he said. "The meet
ing tomorrow?"
"That first," Alessan said. "After the meeting, whatever happens, I must ride
home."
Given the shock of that news and the impact Alessan's words and manner had on
all of them, the knock on Devin's chamber door late that night came as a disor
ienting surprise.
He had not been asleep. "Wait," he called softly and struggled quickly into hi
s breeches. He pulled a loose shirt on over his head and padded in his stockin
gs across the floor, wincing at the cold of the stones where the carpeting end
ed. His hair disordered, feeling rumpled and confused, he opened the door.
In the hallway outside, holding a single candle that cast weird, flickering sh
adows along the corridor wall was Alienor herself.
"Come," was all she said. She did not smile and he could not see her eyes behi
nd the flame. Her robe was a creamy white, lined with fur. It was fastened at
the throat but Devin could discern the swell of her breasts beneath. Her hair
had been loosened, tumbling over her shoulders and down her back in a black ca
scade.
Devin hesitated, his mouth dry again, his mind scattered and lagging. He put u
p a hand to try to straighten the hopeless tangle of his hair.
She shook her head. "Leave it like that," she said. Her free hand with the lon
g dark nails came up and pushed through his brown curls. "Leave it," she said
again, and turned.
He followed her. Her and the single candle and the unleashed chaos of his bloo
d down a long corridor then a shorter one, through an angled sequence of empty
public rooms then up a curving flight of stairs. At the top of the stairs an
orange spill of light came from beyond a pair of open doors. Devin passed thro
ugh those doors behind the Lady of Castle Borso. He had time to register the b
laze of the fire, the rich, intricate hangings on the walls, the profusion of
extravagant carpets on the floor, and the huge canopied bed strewn with pillow
s of all colors and sizes. A lean hunting dog, grey and graceful, regarded him
from by the fire but did not rise.
Alienor laid her candle down. She closed the two doors and turned to him, lean
ing back against the polished wood. Her eyes were enormous, uncannily black. D
evin felt his pulse like a hammer. The rush of his blood seemed loud in his ve
ins.
"I am burning up," Alienor said.
Somewhere a part of him, where proportion lived and irony took shape, wanted t
o protest, even to be amused at such a pronouncement. But as he looked at her
he saw the quickening draw of her breathing and how shallow it was, saw the de
ep flush of her coloring . . . one of his hands as if of its own will came up
and touched her cheek. It was burning hot.
With a sound deep in her throat Alienor trapped his hand with one of her own a
nd sank her teeth in the flesh of his palm.
And with that pain desire was loosed in Devin as it never had been in his life
. He heard an oddly distorted sound and realized it had come from him. He took
a half-step toward her and she was in his arms. Her fingers locked and twiste
d in his hair and her mouth met his with an avidness, a hunger that raked the
rising fires of his own need to a point where awareness fled and drifted far a
way.
Everything was gone, or going. Tigana. Alessan, Alais, Catriana. His memories.
Memory itself, that was his most sure anchor and his pride. Even the memory o
f the hallways to this room, the roads and years and rooms, all the other room
s that led to this one. And her.
He tore at the fastenings of her robe and buried his face between her breasts
as they spilled free. She gasped, and her hands clawed at his shirt until it c
ame away. He felt her nails tear the skin along his back. He twisted his head
and bit her then and tasted blood. He heard her laugh.
Never, ever, had he done such a thing before.
Somehow they seemed to be on the bed among the colored splay of the pillows. A
nd then Alienor was naked above him, impaled on his sex, her mouth descending
to his own as the two of them surged together through the arc of an act that s
trove to cast the world away. As far away as it could be hurled.
For an instant Devin thought he understood. In some unthinking flash of viscer
al illumination he thought he grasped why Alienor did this. The nature of her
need, which was not what it seemed to be. Given another moment, a still place
in the firmament, he could have reached out to put a name to it, a frame for t
he blurred awareness. He reached . . .
She cried out with her climax. Her hands slid along his skin, curving down. De
sire obliterated thought, any straining towards thought. With a racking twist
he virtually threw her to one side and swung himself above her, never leaving
the warm shelter between her thighs. Cushions scattered around them, fell on t
he floor. Her eyes were tightly shut, her mouth forming soundless words.
Devin began to drive himself into her as if to drive away all the demons and t
he hurts, all the brutal deadening truths that were the world of the Palm in t
heir day. His own climax when it came left him shuddering and limp, lost to wh
ere he was, only dimly clinging to what he knew to be his name.
He heard her whispering it softly, over and over. She moved gently out from un
der him. He rolled over on his back, eyes closed. He felt her fingers glide al
ong his skin. He could not move. She was playing with his hands, caressing and
guiding them out from his sides. Her lips and fingers danced down his chest a
nd belly, over his satiated sex and further down, exploring along his thighs a
nd legs, and down.
By the time he was aware of what she'd done he was bound hand and foot to the
four posts of her bed, spreadeagled beneath her. His eyes flew open, startled
and alarmed. He struggled. Uselessly—he was held in bonds of silk looped and
knotted.
"That," said Alienor in a husky voice, "was a wonderful beginning to a night.
Shall I teach you something now?" She reached, naked and magnificent, flushed
and scored with his marks upon her, and brought something up from the floor be
side the bed. His eyes grew wide when he saw what it was she held.
"You are binding me against my will," Devin said, a little desperately. "This
is not my idea of how to come together in love." He twisted hard again, at sho
ulder and hip; the silken bonds held firm.
Alienor's answering smile was luminous. She was more beautiful in that moment
than he could ever have imagined a woman being. In the huge dark pools of her
eyes something stirred, primal and dangerous and terrifyingly arousing. He fel
t, improbably soon, a quickening in his sex. She saw it. Her smile deepened. O
ne long fingernail stroked lightly, almost meditatively along his gathering tu
mescence.
"It will be," murmured his dark lady, the Lady of Castle Borso. Her lips parte
d showing the sharp white teeth behind. He registered the taut firmness of her
nipples as she opened her legs to straddle him again. He saw her caress what
she had claimed from the carpet by the bed. Beyond her, by the fire, the wolfh
ound had its handsome head raised, watching them.
"It will be," Alienor said again. "Trust me. Let me teach you now, and show yo
u, this, and then this, and soon it will be your idea of how to come together.
Oh yes, Devin, it will be very soon."
She moved upon his body and the candlelight was deflected and then hidden as s
he came down over him. He struggled but only for a moment for his heart was po
unding again and desire was overwhelmingly upon him, just as Alienor was, just
as her own complex needs could be seen rising in her again, in the darkness o
f her eyes before they closed, in her movements above him, and in the ragged,
reaching, upward straining of her breath.
And before the night was over, before the half of it had passed, with the last
candles of winter burning down, she had proven herself right, terribly, over
and over again. And at the end even, she was the one who lay bound and open be
tween the four pillars of the world that was her bed and Devin was no longer q
uite sure of who he was that he should be doing to her the things he was. The
things that made her whisper and then cry aloud his name as she did, over and
again. But he did know that she had changed him and had found a place within h
im where his need to seek oblivion was equal to her own.
The candle on his side of the bed burned out some time later. There was a smal
l, scented drifting of smoke. The pattern of light and shade in the room chang
ed; neither of them was asleep, they both noticed it. The fire was down to its
embers; the dog still lay before it, its magnificent head stretched out on it
s paws.
"You had better go," Alienor said, stroking his near shoulder absently. "While
there's a candle for you to carry. It is easy to lose your way in the dark."

"You observe the Ember Days?" he asked, a little surprised at such piety. "No
fires?"
"No fires," she said ruefully. "Half my household staif would leave me, and I
don't even want to guess at what the tenant farmers or the villagers would do.
Storm the castle. Call down some ancient curse with ears of corn soaked in bl
ood. These are the southern highlands, Devin—they take their rites seriously
up here."
"As seriously as you take yours?"
She smiled at that and stretched like a cat. "I suppose so. The fanners will d
o things tonight and tomorrow that I prefer not to know about." With a sinuous
motion she curled downwards towards the foot of the bed and reached for somet
hing on the carpet by the bedposts. Her body was a smooth, candlelit curve of
white flesh, with the marks he had made on her still showing red.
She straightened and handed him his breeches. It felt abrupt, a dismissal, and
Devin gave her a long stare, not moving. She met the look, but her eyes were
neither hard nor dismissive.
"Don't be angry," Alienor said softly. "You were too splendid to be leaving in
anger. I'm telling you truths: I do observe the Ember rites and it is hard to
find your way back without a light." She hesitated a moment, then added, "And
I have always slept alone since my husband died."
Devin said nothing. He rose and dressed. His shirt he found halfway between th
e bed and the doors. It was shredded so badly it should have been amusing. He
wasn't amused though. In fact, he was angry— or some feeling beyond anger, or
beside it, a more complex thing. Lying naked and uncovered among the scattere
d pillows of her bed, Alienor watched him clothe himself. He looked at her, ma
rveling still at her feline magnificence and even—despite the change of mood—
even aware of how easy it would be for her to stir his desire again.
But as he gazed at her a dormant thought surfaced from wherever thought had be
en driven in the primitive frenzy of the last few hours. He arranged the shirt
as best he could and walked over to claim one of the candles in a brass holde
r.
She had turned on her side to follow his movements, her head now resting on on
e hand, the black hair tumbling about her, her body offered to his sight as a
gift, a glory in the shifting light. Her eyes were wide and direct, her smile
generous, even kind.
"Good-night," she said. "I don't know whether you know it, but you are welcome
back should you choose to come one day."
He hadn't expected that. He knew, without having to be told, that she was hono
ring him with this. But his thought, his disquiet from before was strong now a
nd intermingled with other images, so that, although he smiled in return and n
odded, it was neither pride nor honor that he felt.
"Good-night," he said and turned to go.
At the doors he stopped and, as much because he had remembered Alessan saying
that the blue wine had begun with her as for any other single reason that he k
new—then or later—Devin turned back to her. She had not moved. He looked, dr
inking in the opulence of the chamber and the proffered beauty of the woman on
the bed. Even as he stood there another candle died on the far side of the ro
om.
"Is this what happens to us?" Devin said then, quietly, reaching for words to
frame this new, hard thought. "When we are no longer free. Is this what happen
s to our love?"
He could see her eyes change, even from this distance and in this wavering of
light and dark. For a long time she looked back at him.
"You are clever," she said finally. "Alessan has chosen well in you."
He waited.
"Ah!" said Alienor throatily, simulating astonishment. "He actually wants an a
nswer. A true answer from a lady in her castle at the edge of the world." It m
ay have been a trick of the uncertain light, but she seemed to look away then,
beyond where Devin stood, even beyond the tapestried walls of her room.
"It is one of the things that happens to us," she said at last. "A kind of ins
urrection in the dark that somehow stands against the laws of day that bind us
and cannot be broken now."
Devin thought about it.
"Possibly that," he agreed softly, working it through. "Or else an admission s
omewhere in the soul that we deserve no more than this, nothing that goes deep
er. Since we are not free and have accepted that."
He saw her flinch then, and close her eyes.
"Did I deserve that?" she asked.
A terrible sadness passed over Devin. He swallowed with some difficulty. "No,"
he said. "No, you didn't."
Her eyes were still closed when he left the room.
He felt heavy and burdened, beyond merely tired; laden with the weight of his
thoughts, slowed by them. He stumbled going down the stairwell and had to flin
g out his free hand to brace himself against the stone wall. The motion left t
he candle unguarded and it went out.
It was very dark then. The castle was utterly still. Moving carefully, Devin r
eached the bottom of the stairs and he put the spent flame down on a ledge the
re. At intervals, high in the walls, tall thin windows let slanting moonlight
fall across the corridor but the angle and the hour did not allow for any real
illumination.
Briefly he considered going back for another candle but then, after standing s
till a moment to let his eyes adjust, Devin set out along what he thought to b
e the way they had come.
He was lost very soon, though not really alarmed. In his present mood there se
emed to be something apposite about padding thus silently down the darkened ha
llways of this ancient highland castle in the dead of night, the stones cold a
gainst his feet.
There are no wrong turnings. Only paths we had not known we were meant to walk
,
Who had told him that? The words had come unbidden to his mind from some reces
s of memory. He turned into an unfamiliar corridor and passed through a long r
oom hung with paintings. Part of the way through, he found a voice for the wor
ds: it had been the old priest of Morian at the goddess's temple by his family
's farm in Asoli. He had taught the twins and then Devin how to read and do su
ms, and when it appeared that the youngest boy, the small one, could sing he h
ad given Devin his first lessons in the rudiments of harmony.
No wrong turnings, Devin thought again. And then, with a shiver he could not s
uppress, he remembered that this was not just the nadir of a night, it was the
end of winter, the first of the Ember Days—when the dead were said to walk a
broad.
The dead. Who were his dead? Marra. His mother, whom he had never known. Tigan
a? Could a country, a province, be said to have died? Could it be lost and mou
rned like a living soul? He thought of the Barbadian he had slain in the Nievo
lene barn.
He did quicken his pace then, over the dark, sporadically moonlit stones of th
e vast and silent castle.
It seemed to Devin that he walked for an endless time—or a time outside of ti
me—passing no one, hearing nothing save for his own breathing or the soft tre
ad of his feet, before he finally recognized a statue in an alcove. He had adm
ired it by torchlight earlier in the evening. He knew his room was just ahead
and around a corner to the right. Somehow he had come entirely the wrong way a
long the whole far wing of Castle Borso.
He also knew, from earlier in the evening, that the room directly opposite the
small fine statue of the bearded archer drawing a bow, was Catriana's.
He looked up and down the corridor but saw only greater and lesser shadows amo
ng the bands of white moonlight falling from above. He listened, and heard no
sound. If the dead were abroad they were silent.
No wrong turnings, Ploto the priest had told him long ago.
He thought of Alienor, lying with her eyes closed among her bright cushions an
d all her candles and he was sorry for what he'd said to her at the end. He wa
s sorry for many things. Alessan's mother was dying. His own was dead.
Ice is for deaths and endings, Alienor had said to Catriana in the hall.
He was cold, and very sad. He moved forward and ended the silence, knocking ge
ntly on Catriana's door.
She'd had a restless night, for many reasons. Alienor had disturbed her: both
the unbridled sensuousness that emanated from the woman, and the obviously clo
se, unknown past she shared with Alessan and Baerd.
Catriana hated unknown things, information hidden from her. She still didn't k
now what Alessan was going to do tomorrow, what this mysterious meeting in the
highlands was all about, and ignorance made her uneasy and even, on a less ac
knowledged level, afraid.
She wished she could be more like Devin sometimes, matching his seemingly tran
quil acceptance of what he could or could not know. She has seen him storing a
way the pieces of what he did leam and patiently waiting to receive another pi
ece, and then putting them together like the tiles of a children's puzzle game
.
Sometimes she admired that, sometimes it made her wild and contemptuous to see
him so accepting of Alessan's occasional reticence or Baerd's chronic reserve
. Catriana needed to know. She had been ignorant for so much of her life, shie
lded from her own history in that tiny fishing village in Astibar. She felt th
at there was so much lost time to be regained. Sometimes it made her want to w
eep.
That was how she'd been feeling this evening before drifting into a shallow, u
neasy sleep and a dream of home. She often dreamt of home since she'd left, es
pecially of her mother.
This time she saw herself walking through the village just after sunrise, pass
ing the last house—Tendo's, she even saw his dog—and then rounding the famil
iar curve of the shore to where her father had bought a derelict cottage and r
epaired it and raised a family.
In her dream she saw the boat already far out, trawling among the early-mornin
g swell of the sea. It seemed to be springtime. Her mother was in the doorway
of the cottage mending nets in the good light of the sunrise. Her eyes had bee
n going bad for years and it was hard for her to work with her needle in the e
venings. Catriana had gradually taken over the night-time needlework in her la
st year at home.
It was a beautiful morning in the dream. The stones of the beach gleamed and t
he breeze was fresh and light off the water. All the other boats were out as w
ell, taking advantage of the morning, but it was easy to tell which one was th
eir own. Catriana walked up the path and stood by the newly mended porch, wait
ing for her mother to look up and see her and leap to her feet with a cry, and
fold her daughter in her arms.
Her mother did glance up from her work, but only to gaze seaward, squinting to
ward the light, to check the position of their boat. An old habit, a nervous o
ne, and one that had probably done much to hurt her eyes. She'd a husband and
three sons in that small boat though.
She didn't see her daughter at all. Catriana realized with a queer pain that s
he was invisible here. Because she had gone, because she had left them and was
n't there any longer. There was more grey, she saw, in her mother's hair, and
her heart ached as she stood there in mild sunlight to see how worn and hard h
er mother's hands were, and how tired the kind face was. She had always though
t of her mother as a young woman, until Tiena, the baby, had died in the plagu
e six years ago. Things had changed after that.
It isn't fair, she thought, and in the dream she cried aloud and was not heard
.
Her mother sat on a wooden chair on the porch in the early light, working on t
he nets, occasionally looking up to check the position of one small boat among
so many bobbing on this alien eastern sea so far from the one she'd loved.
Catriana woke, her body twisting violently away from all the hurts embedded in
that image. She opened her eyes, waiting for her heartbeat to slow, lying und
er several blankets in a room in Castle Borso. Alienor's castle.
Alienor, who was the same age as Catriana's worn, tired mother. It truly was n
ot fair. Why should she be carrying such guilt, seeing such sad, hurtful image
s in her sleep, for having gone away? Why, when it was her mother who had give
n her the ring when she was fourteen, in the year the baby died. The ring that
marked her as from Tigana and by the sea for anyone who knew the ancient symb
ols, and for no one else.
The ring that had so marked her for Alessan bar Valentin two years ago when he
and Baerd had seen her selling eels and fresh-caught telanquy in Ardin town j
ust up the coast from the village.
She had not been a trusting person at eighteen. She could not have said, then
or now, why she'd trusted the two of them and joined them for that walk uprive
r out of town when the market was done. If pushed to an answer she would have
said that there was something about Baerd that had reassured her.
It was on that walk that they had told her about her ring and about Tigana, an
d the axis of her life had tilted another way. A new running of time had begun
from that moment, and with it the need to know.
At home that evening after dinner, after the boys had gone to bed, she told he
r parents that she now knew where they were from, and what her ring meant. And
she asked her father what he was going to do to help her bring Tigana back, a
nd what he had been doing all these years. It was the only time in her life sh
e'd ever seen her mild, innocuous father in a rage, and the only time he'd eve
r struck her.
Her mother wept Her father stormed about the house in the awkward manner of a
man unused to raging, and he swore upon the Triad that he'd not taken his wife
and daughter away before the Ygrathen invasion and the fall only to be sucked
back into that ancient grief now.
And thus had Catriana learned the second thing that had changed her life.
The youngest of the boys had begun crying. Her father had stomped out then, sl
amming the door, rattling the windows. Catriana and her mother had looked at e
ach other in silence a long time while a frightened child gradually subsided i
n the loft above their heads. Catriana held up her hand and showed the ring sh
e'd worn for the past four years. She had looked a question with her eyes, and
her mother had nodded once, not weeping now. The embrace they exchanged was o
ne they both expected to be their last.
Catriana had found Alessan and Baerd at the best-known of the inns in Ardin to
wn. It had been a bright night, she remembered, both moons high and nearly ful
l. The night watchman at the inn had leered at her and groped when she sidled
by him up the stairs toward the room he'd identified.
She had knocked and Alessan had opened to her name. His grey eyes, even before
she spoke, had been curiously dark, as if anticipating a burden or a grief.
"I am coming with you," she had said. "My father was a coward. We fled before
the invasion. I intend to make that up. I will not sleep with you though. I've
never slept with any man. Can I trust you both?"
Awake in Castle Borso she blushed in the darkness, remembering that. How impos
sibly young she must have sounded to them. Neither man had laughed though, or
even smiled. She would never forget that.
"Can you sing?" was all that Alessan had said.
She fell asleep again, thinking about music, about all the songs
she'd sung with him, crossing the Palm for two years. This time when she dream
t it was about water—about swimming in the sea at home, her greatest, sweetes
t joy. Diving for shells at summer twilight among the startled flashing fish,
feeling the water wrap her like a second skin.
Then without warning or transition the dream changed and she was on the bridge
in Tregea again in a gathering of winter dark and wind, more terrified than s
he had imagined a soul could be. Only herself to blame, her own pride, her gna
wing, consuming, unslaked need to make redress for the fact that they had fled
. She saw herself mount and balance on the railing again, saw the racing, blac
k tumultuous water far below, heard, even over the loud rush of the river, the
pounding of her heart . . .
And woke a second time just before the nightmare of her leap. Woke because wha
t she had heard as the beat of her heart was a knocking at her door.
"Who is it?" she called.
"Devin. Will you let me come in?"
Abruptly she sat up in bed and pulled the topmost blanket to her chin.
"What is it?" she called.
"I'm not sure, actually. May I come in?"
"The door isn't locked," she said finally. She made sure the blankets were cov
ering her, but the room was so dark it didn't really matter.
She heard him enter, but saw only the outline of his form.
"Thank you," he said. "You should lock your door, you know."
She wondered if he had any idea how much she hated being told things like that
. "The only person likely to be roaming tonight was our hostess, and she was u
nlikely to be coming for me. There's a chair to your left."
She heard him reach for it and sink back with a sigh into the deep armchair. "
I suppose that's true enough," he said in a drained voice. "And I'm sorry, you
don't really need me to be telling you how to take care of yourself."
She listened for irony but heard none. "I seem to have managed tolerably well
without your guidance," she said mildly.
He was silent. Then: "Catriana, I honestly don't know why I'm here. I'm in suc
h a strange mood tonight. I feel ridiculously sad."
There was something extremely odd in his voice. She hesitated a moment, then,
carefully adjusting the blankets, reached over to strike a flint.
"You light fires on the Ember Days?" he asked.
"Evidently."
She lit the candle by her bed. Then, somewhat regretting the waspishness of th
at reply, added, "My mother used to light one—just one, as a reminder to the
Triad, she used to say. Though I only understood what she meant after I met Al
essan."
"That's strange. So did my father," Devin said wonderingly. "I've never though
t about that. I never knew why he did it. My father was not a man who explaine
d things."
She turned to look at him, but he was deep in the chair and the wings hid his
face.
"A reminder of Tigana?" she said.
"It would have to have been. As if ... as if the Triad didn't deserve full dev
otion or observance because of what they'd allowed." He paused, then in a medi
tative tone added, "It's another example of our pride, isn't it? Of that Tigan
ese arrogance Sandre always talks about. We make bargains with the Triad, we b
alance scales with them: they take away our name, we take away a part of their
rites."
"I suppose so," she said, though it didn't really strike her that way. Devin t
alked like this sometimes. She didn't see the action as one of pride, or barga
ining, just as a reminder to the self of how great a wrong had come to pass. A
reminder, like Alessan's blue wine.
"My mother is not a proud woman," she said, surprising herself.
"I don't know what mine was like," he said in that tightened voice. "I don't e
ven know if I could say that my father is proud. I guess I don't know very muc
h about him either." He really did sound peculiar.
"Devin," she said sharply, "lean forward. Let me look at you." She checked her
blankets; they covered her to the chin.
Slowly he shifted forward: the candlelight spilled across his wildly dishevele
d hair, the torn shirt and the visible scratches and marks of teeth. She felt
a quick surge of anger, and then a slower, deeper anxiety that had nothing to
do with him. Or not directly.
She masked both reactions behind a sardonic laugh. "She was roaming, I see. Yo
u look like you've been to war."
With an effort he managed a brief smile, but there was something somber in his
eyes: she could read it even by candlelight.
It unsettled her. "What is it then?" she pursued with broad sarcasm, "You tire
d her out and came here wanting more? I can tell you—"
"No," he said quickly. "No, it isn't that. It is ... hardly that, Catriana. It
has been a ... difficult night."
"You certainly look as if it was," she retorted, her hands gripping the blanke
ts.
He pushed on doggedly. "Not that way. It's so strange. So complicated. I think
I learned something there. I think—"
"Devin, I really don't want the details!" She was angry with herself for how e
dgy this sort of thing made her feel.
"No, no. Not like that, though yes, there was that at the beginning. But . . .
" He drew a breath. "I think what I learned was something about what the Tyran
ts have done to us. Not just Brandin, and not just in Tigana. Alberico too. Bo
th of them, and to all of us."
"Such insight," she mocked, reflexively. "She must be even more skillful than
you imagined."
Which silenced him. He leaned back in the chair again and she couldn't see his
face. In the quiet that followed her breathing grew calmer.
"I'm sorry," she said at length. "I didn't mean that. I'm tired. I've had some
bad dreams tonight. What do you want from me, Devin?"
"I'm not sure," he said. "I guess, to be a friend."
Again she felt pushed and uneasy. She resisted an instinctive, nervous urge to
suggest he go write a letter to one of Rovigo's daughters. She said, "I've ne
ver been good at that, even as a child."
"Nor I," he said, shifting forward again. He had pushed his hair into a sembla
nce of order. He said, "It is more than that between you and I though. You hat
e me sometimes, don't you."
She felt her heart thump. "We do not have to discuss this, Devin. I don't hate
you."
"Sometimes you do," he pursued in that strange, dogged tone. "Because of what
happened in the Sandreni Palace." He paused, and drew a shaky breath. "Because
I was the first man you ever made love with."
She closed her eyes. Tried, unsuccessfully, to will that last sentence not to
have been spoken. "You knew?"
"Not then. I figured it out later."
Pieces of another puzzle. Patiently putting it together. Figuring her out. She
opened her eyes and gazed bleakly at him. "And is it your idea that discussin
g this interesting subject will make us friends?"
He winced. "Probably not. I don't know. I thought I'd tell you I want to be."
There was a silence. "I honestly don't know, Catriana. I'm sorry."
Surprisingly, her shock and anger had both passed. She saw him slump back agai
n, exhausted, and she did the same, reclining against the wooden headboard of
her bed. She thought for a while, marveling at how calm she felt.
"I don't hate you, Devin," she said finally. "Truly, I don't. Nothing like tha
t. It is an awkward memory, I won't deny that, but I don't think it has ever h
indered us in what we have to do. Which is what really matters, isn't it?"
"I suppose so," he said. She couldn't see his face. "If that is all that matte
rs."
"I mean, it's true what I said before: I've always been bad at making friends.
"
"Why?"
Pieces of the puzzle again. But she said, "As a girl, I'm not sure. Maybe I wa
s shy, perhaps proud. I never felt easy in our village, even though it was the
only home I'd ever known. But since Baerd named Tigana for me, since I heard
the name, that has been all there is in the world for me. All that counts for
anything at all."
She could almost hear him thinking about that.
He said, "Ice is for endings."
Which is exactly what Alienor had said to her. He went on, "You are still a li
ving person, Catriana. With a heart, a life to live, access to friendship, eve
n to love. Why are you sealing yourself down to the one thing only?"
And she heard herself reply: "Because my father never fought. He fled Tigana l
ike a coward before the battles at the river."
She could have ripped her tongue bleeding from her mouth, out at the very root
, the moment she had spoken.
"Oh," he said.
"Not a word, Devin! Don't say a word!"
He obeyed, sitting very still, almost invisible in the depths of his chair. Ab
ruptly she blew out the candle; she didn't want light now. And then, because i
t was dark, and because he was so obligingly silent she was gradually able to
regain control of herself. To move past the meaning of this moment without wee
ping. It took a long time in the darkness but eventually she was able to draw
a long, steady breath and know she was all right.
"Thank you," she said, not entirely sure what she was thanking him for. Mostly
, the silence.
There was no reply. She waited a moment then softly called his name. Again no
answer. She listened, and eventually was able to make out the steady rise and
fall of his breathing in sleep.
She had enough of a sense of irony to find that amusing. He had evidently had
a difficult night though, and not just in the obvious ways.
She thought about waking him and sending him back to his own room. It would mo
st certainly raise eyebrows if they were seen leaving here together in the mor
ning. She discovered, though, that she didn't really care. She also realized t
hat she minded less than she'd expected that he'd figured out the one truth ab
out her and had just learned another. About her father, but really more about
herself. She wondered about that, why it didn't bother her more.
She considered putting one of the blankets over him but resisted the impulse.
For some reason she didn't really want him waking in the morning and knowing s
he'd done that. Rovigo's daughters did that sort of thing, not she. Or no: the
younger daughter would have had him in this bed and inside her by now, strang
e moods and exhaustion notwithstanding. The older? Would have woven a new quil
t at miraculous speed and tucked it around him with a note attached as to the
lineage of the sheep that had given the wool and the history of the pattern sh
e'd chosen.
Catriana smiled to herself in the darkness and settled back to sleep. Her rest
lessness seemed to have passed and she did not dream again. When she woke, jus
t after dawn, he was gone. She didn't learn until later just how far.

chapter 11

ELENA STOOD BY THE OPEN DOOR OF MATTIO'S HOUSE LOOKING up the dark road to the
moat and the raised drawbridge, watching the candles flicker and go out one b
y one in the windows of Castle Borso. At intervals people walked past her into
the house, offering only a nod or a brief greeting if anything at all. It was
a night of battle that lay ahead of them, and everyone arriving was aware of
that.
From the village behind her there came no sound at all, and no light. All the
candles were long snuffed out, fires banked, windows covered over, even the ch
inks at the base of doors blocked by cloth or rags. The dead walked on the fir
st of the Ember Nights, everyone knew that.
There was little noise from within the house behind her, though fifteen or twe
nty people must have arrived by now, crowding into Mattio's home at the edge o
f the village. Elena didn't know how many more Walkers were yet to join them h
ere, or later, at the meeting-place; she did know that there would be too few.
There hadn't been enough last year, or the year before that, and they had los
t those battles very badly. The Ember Night wars were killing the Walkers fast
er than young ones like Elena herself were growing up to replace them. Which i
s why they were losing each spring, why they would almost certainly lose tonig
ht.
It was a starry night, with only the one moon risen, the white crescent of Vid
omni as she waned. It was cold as well, here in the highlands at the very begi
nning of spring. Elena wrapped her arms about herself, gripping her elbows wit
h her hands. It would be a different sky, a different feel to the night entire
ly, in only a few hours, when the battle began.
Carenna walked in, giving her quick warm smile, but not stopping to talk. It w
as not a time for talking. Elena was worried about Carenna tonight; she had ju
st had a child two weeks before. It was too soon for her to be doing this. But
she was needed, they were all needed, and the Ember Night wars did not tarry
for any man or woman, or for anything that happened in the world of day.
She nodded in response to a couple she didn't know. They followed Carenna past
her into the house. There was dust on their clothing; they had probably come
from a long way east, timing their arrival here for after the sundown closing
of the doors and windows in the town and in all the lonely farmhouses out in t
he night of the fields. Behind all those doors and windows, Elena knew, the pe
ople of the southern highlands would be waiting in darkness and praying.
Praying for rain and then sun, for the earth to be fruitful through spring and
summer to the tall harvest of fall. For the seedlings of grain, of corn, to n
ourish when sown, take root and then rise, yellow and full of ripened promise,
from the dark, moist, giving soil. Praying —though they knew nothing within
their wrapped dark homes of what would actually happen tonight—for the Night
Walkers to save the fields, the season, the grain, save and succor all their l
ives.
Elena instinctively reached up to finger the small leather ornament she wore a
bout her neck. The ornament that held the shriveled remnant of the caul in whi
ch she had been born, as all the Walkers had been—sheathed in the transparent
birthing sac as they came crying from the womb.
A symbol of good fortune, birthwomen named the caul elsewhere in the Palm. Chi
ldren born sheathed in that sac were said to be destined for a life blessed by
the Triad.
Here at the remote southern edges of the peninsula, in these wild highlands be
neath the mountains, the teachings and the lore were different. Here the ancie
nt rites went deeper, further back, were passed from hand to hand, from mouth
to mouth down from their beginnings long ago. In the highlands of Certando a c
hild born with a caul was not said to be guarded from death at sea, or naively
named for fortune.
It was marked for war.
For this war, fought each year on the first of the Ember Nights that began the
spring and so began the year. Fought in the fields and for the fields, for th
e not yet risen seedlings that were hope and life and the offered promise of e
arth renewed. Fought for those in the great cities, cut off from the truths of
the land, ignorant of such things, and fought for all the living here in Cert
ando, huddled behind their walls, who knew only enough to pray and to be afrai
d of sounds in the night that might be the dead abroad.
From behind Elena a hand touched her shoulder. She turned to see Mattio lookin
g quizzically at her. She shook her head, pushing her hair back with one hand.

"Nothing yet," she said.
Mattio did not speak, but the pale moonlight showed his eyes bleak above the f
ull black beard. He squeezed her shoulder, out of a habit of reassurance more
than anything else, before turning to go back inside.
Elena watched him go, heavy-striding, solid and capable. Through the open door
way she saw him sit down again at the long trestle-table, across from Donar. S
he gazed at the two of them for a moment, thinking about Verzar, about love an
d then desire.
She turned away again to look out into the night toward the huge brooding outl
ine of the castle in whose shadow she had spent her whole life. She felt old s
uddenly, far older than her years. She had two small children sleeping with he
r mother and father tonight in one of those shut-up cottages where no lights b
urned. She also had a husband sleeping in the burying field—a casualty, one o
f so many, of the terrible battle a year ago when the numbers of the Others se
emed to have grown so much larger than ever before and so cruelly, malevolentl
y triumphant.
Verzar had died a few days after that defeat, as all the victims of the night
battles did.
Those touched by death in the Ember Night wars did not fall in the fields. The
y acknowledged that cold, final touch in their souls— like a finger on the he
art, Verzar had said to her—and they came home to sleep and wake and walk thr
ough a day or a week or a month before yielding to the ending that had claimed
them for its own.
In the north, in the cities, they spoke of the last portal of Morian, of longe
d-for grace in her dark Halls. Of priestly intercessions invoked with candles
and tears.
Those born with the caul in the southern highlands, those who fought in the Em
ber wars and saw the shapes of the Others who came to battle there, did not sp
eak in such a way.
Not that they would ever be so foolish as to deny Morian of Portals or Eanna o
r Adaon; only that they knew that there were powers older and darker than the
Triad, powers that went beyond this peninsula, beyond even, Donar had once tol
d her, this very world with its two moons and its sun. Once a year the Night W
alkers of Certando would have—would be forced to have—a glimpse of these tru
ths under a sky that was not their own.
Elena shivered. There would be more claimed for death tonight, she knew, and s
o fewer to fight the next year, and fewer the next. And where it would end she
did not know. She was not educated in such things. She was twenty-two, a moth
er and a widow and a wheelwright's daughter in the highlands. She was also a c
hild born with the caul of the Night Walkers into a time when all the battles
were being lost, year by year.
She was also known to have the best eyesight in the dark of all of them, which
is why Mattio had placed her here by the door, watching the road for the one
Donar had said might come.
It was a dry season; the moat, as he'd expected, was shallow. Once, long ago,
the lords of Castle Borso had been pleased to keep their moat stocked with cre
atures that could kill a man. Baerd didn't expect to find such things; not now
, not for a long time now.
He waded across, hip-deep, under the high stars and the thin light of Vidomni
in the sky. It was cold, but it had been many years since the elements bothere
d him much. Nor did it disturb him to be abroad on an Ember Night. Indeed, it
had become a ritual of his own over the years: knowing that all across the Pal
m the holy days were observed and marked by people waiting in silent darkness
behind their walls offered him a deepened sense of the solitude his soul seeme
d to need. He was profoundly drawn to this sense of moving through a scarcely
breathing world that lay as if crouched in primitive darkness under the stars
with no mortal fires cast back at the sky—only whatever flames the Triad crea
ted for themselves with lightning out of the heavens.
If there were ghosts and spirits awake in the night he wanted to see them. If
the dead of his past were walking abroad he wanted to beg their forgiveness.
His own pain was spun of images that would not let him go. Images of vanished
serenity, of pale marble under moonlight such as this, of graceful porticos sh
aped of harmonies a man might spend a lifetime studying to understand, of quie
t voices heard and almost understood by a drowsy child in another room, of sur
e, confident laughter following, then morning sunlight in a known courtyard an
d a steady, strong, sculptor's hand upon his shoulder. A father's hand.
Then fire and blood and ashes on the wind, turning the noon sun red.
Smoke and death, and marble hammered into fragments, the head of the god flyin
g free, to bounce like a boulder on scorched earth and then be ground remorsel
essly down into powder like fine sand. Like the sand on the beaches walked in
the dark later that year, infinite and meaningless by the cold uncaring sea.
These were the bleak visitants, the companions of his nights, these and more,
endlessly, through almost nineteen years. He carried, like baggage, like a car
t yoked to his shoulders, like a round stone in his heart, images of his peopl
e, their world destroyed, their name obliterated. Truly obliterated: a sound t
hat was drifting, year by year, further away from the shores of the world of m
en, like some tide withdrawing in the grey hour of a winter dawn. Very like su
ch a tide, but different as well, because tides came back.
He had learned to live with the images because he had no choice, unless it was
a choice to surrender. To die. Or retreat into madness as his mother had. He
defined himself by his griefs; he knew them as other men knew the shape of the
ir own hands.
But the one thing that could drive him awake, barred utterly from the chambers
of sleep or any kind of rest, what could force him abroad now, as he had been
driven abroad as a boy in a ruined place, was, in the end, none of these thin
gs. Neither a flash of splendor gone, nor an image of death and loss. It was,
instead, over and above everything else, the remembrance of love among those a
shes of ruin.
Against the memory of a spring and summer with Dianora, with his sister, his b
arriers could not hold in the dark.
And so Baerd would go out into the nights across the Palm, doubly moonlit, or
singly, or dark with only stars. Among the heathered summer hills of Ferraut,
or through the laden vineyards of autumn in Astibar or Senzio, along snow-mant
led mountain slopes in Tregea, or here, on an Ember Night at the beginning of
spring in the highlands.
He would go out to walk in the enveloping dark, to smell the earth, feel the s
oil, listen to the voice of winter's wind, taste grapes and moonlit water, lie
motionless in a forest tree to watch the night predators at their hunt. And o
nce in a great while, when waylaid or challenged by brigand or mercenary, Baer
d would kill. A night predator in his own incarnation, restless and soon gone.
Another kind of ghost, a part of him dead with the dead of the River Deisa.
In every corner of the mainland Palm except his own, which was gone, he had do
ne these things for years upon years, feeling the slow turning of the seasons,
learning the meaning of night in this forest and that field, by this dark riv
er, or on that mountain ridge, reaching out or back or inward all the time tow
ard a release that was ever and again denied.
He had been here in the highlands many times before on this same Ember Night.
He and Alessan went back a long way and had shared a great deal with Alienor o
f Borso, and there was the other, larger reason why they came south to the mou
ntains at the beginning of every second year. He thought of the news from the
west. From home. He remembered the look on Alessan's face reading Danoleon's l
etter and his heart misgave him. But that was for tomorrow, and more Alessan's
burden than his own, however much he might want— as he always wanted—to eas
e or share the weight.
Tonight was his own, and it called to him. Alone in the darkness, but hand in
hand with a dream of Dianora, he walked away from the castle. Always before he
had gone west and then south from Borso, curving his way into the hills thems
elves below the Braccio Pass. Tonight, for no reason he knew, his footsteps le
d him the other way, southeast. They carried him along the road to the edge of
the village that lay beneath the castle walls and there, as he passed a house
with an unexpectedly open door, Baerd saw a fair-haired woman standing in the
moonlight as if she had been waiting for him and he stopped.
Sitting at the table, resisting the temptation to count their numbers one more
time, trying to appear as if all were as normal as it could be on this night
of war, Mattio heard Elena call his name and then Donar's from outside the hou
se. Her voice was soft, as it always was, but his senses were pitched toward h
er, as they had been for years. Even before poor Verzar had died.
He glanced across the table at Donar, but the older man was already reaching f
or his crutches and rising to swing on his one leg toward the door. Mattio fol
lowed. A number of the others looked over at them, edgy and apprehensive. Matt
io forced himself to smile reassuringly. Carenna caught his eye and began spea
king soothingly to a few of the more visibly nervous people.
Not at all easy himself, Mattio stepped outside with Donar and saw that someon
e had come. A dark-haired man, neatly bearded and of middle height, stood moti
onless before Elena, glancing from her to the two of them, not speaking. He ha
d a sword slung in a scabbard on his back in the Tregean fashion.
Mattio looked over at Donar whose face was quite impassive. For all his experi
ence of Ember Night wars and of Donar's gift he could not repress a shiver.
"Someone may come," their one-legged leader had said yestereve. And now someon
e was indeed here in the moonlight in the very hour before battle. Mattio look
ed over at Elena; her eyes had not left the stranger. She was standing very st
raight, slender and motionless, hands holding her elbows, hiding fear and wond
er as best she could. But Mattio had spent years watching her, and he could se
e that her breathing was shallow and fast. He loved her for her stillness, and
for wanting to hide her fear.
He glanced at Donar again, and then stepped forward, extending two open palms
to the stranger. Calmly he said, "Be welcome, though it is not to be abroad."

The other man nodded. His feet were planted wide and solid on the earth. He lo
oked as though he knew how to use his sword. He said, "Nor, as I understand th
e highlands, is it a night to have doors and windows open."
"Why would you think you understand the highlands?" Mattio said. Too quickly.
Elena still had not looked away from this man. There was an odd expression on
her face.
Moving a little nearer to stand beside her, Mattio realized that he had seen t
his man before. This was one who had come several times to the Lady's castle.
A musician, he seemed to remember, or a merchant of some sort. One of those la
ndless men who endlessly crossed and recrossed the roads of the Palm. His hear
t, which had lifted to see the sword, sank a little.
The stranger had not responded to his sharp retort. He appeared, as much as th
e moonight revealed, to be giving the matter thought. Then he surprised Mattio
.
"I'm sorry," he said. "If I am trespassing upon a custom in ignorance, forgive
me. I walk for reasons of my own. I will leave you to your peace."
He actually turned away then, clearly intending to leave.
"No!" Elena said urgently.
And in the same moment Donar spoke for the first time.
"There is no peace tonight," he said in the deep voice they all trusted so muc
h. "And you are not trespassing. I thought someone might come along this road.
Elena was watching for you."
And at that the stranger turned. His eyes seemed wider in the dark, and someth
ing new, cooler, more appraising, gleamed in them now.
"Come for what?" he asked.
There was a silence. Donar shifted his crutches and swung forward. Elena moved
to one side to let him stand in front of the stranger. Mattio looked across a
t her; her hair was falling over one shoulder, white-gold in the moonlight. Sh
e never took her eyes from the dark-haired man.
Who was gazing steadily at Donar. "Come for what?" he repeated, mildly enough.

Still Donar hesitated, and in that moment Mattio realized with a shock that th
e miller, their Elder, was afraid. A sickening lurch of apprehension rose in M
attio, for he suddenly understood what Donar was about to do.
And then Donar did it. He gave them away to one from the north.
"We are the Night Walkers of Certando," he said, his voice steady and deep. "A
nd this is the first of the Ember Nights of spring. This is our night. I must
ask you: wherever you were born, was there a mark . . . did the birthwomen who
attended declare a blessing found?" And slowly he reached a hand inside his s
hirt and drew forth the leather sac he wore there, holding the caul that had m
arked him at his birth.
Out of the side of his eye Mattio saw Elena biting her lower lip. He looked at
the stranger, watched him absorb what Donar had said, and he began gauging hi
s chances of killing the man if it should come to that.
This time the silence stretched. The muted sounds from the house behind them s
eemed loud. The dark-haired man's eyes had grown wide now, and his head was li
fted high. Mattio could see that he was weighing what lay behind what had just
been revealed.
Then, still not speaking, the stranger moved one hand to his throat and reachi
ng inside his shirt he brought out, so that the three of them could see, by st
arlight and moonlight, the small leather sac he too wore.
Mattio heard a small sound, a release of breath, and realized belatedly that h
e had made it himself.
"Earth be praised!" Elena murmured, unable to stop herself. She had closed her
eyes.
"Earth, and all that springs from it and returns," Donar added. His voice, ama
zingly, trembled.
They left it for Mattio to finish. "Returns, to spring forth again in the cycl
e that has no end," he said, looking at the stranger, at the sac he bore, almo
st identical to Mattio's own, to Elena's, to Donar's, to the one they all carr
ied, every one of them.
It was with the words of invocation spoken in sequence by the three of them th
at Baerd finally understood what he had stumbled upon.
Two hundred years ago, in a time of seemingly unending plagues, a time of harv
est failures, of violence and blood, the Carlozzini heresy had taken root here
in the south. And from the highlands it had begun to spread throughout the Pa
lm, gaining momentum and adherents with frightening speed. And against Carlozz
i's central teaching: that the Triad were younger deities, subject to and agen
ts of an older, darker set of powers, the priesthood of the Palm had grimly an
d in concert set their hands.
Faced with such rare and absolute unity among the clergy, and caught up in the
panic of a decade of plague and starvation, the Dukes and Grand Dukes and eve
n Valcanti, Prince of Tigana, had seen themselves as having no choice. The Car
lozzini had been hunted down and tried and executed all across the peninsula,
by whatever means executions were conducted in each province in that time.
A time of violence and blood. Two hundred years ago.
And now he was standing here showing the leather that held the caul of his bir
th, and speaking to three who had just declared themselves to be Carlozzini.
And more. Night Walkers, the one-legged old man had said. The vanguard, the se
cret army of the sect. Chosen in some way that no one knew. But now he did kno
w, they had shown him. It occurred to him that he might be in danger now, havi
ng been granted this knowledge, and indeed, the bigger, bearded man seemed to
be holding himself carefully, as if prepared for violence.
The woman who had stood watch was weeping though. She was very beautiful, thou
gh not in the way of Alienor, whose every movement, every spoken word might hi
nt at a feline undercurrent of danger. This woman was too young, too shy, he c
ould not make himself believe in a threat from her. Not weeping as she was. An
d all three of them had spoken words of thanks, of praise. His instincts were
on guard, but not in a way that warned of immediate danger. Deliberately Baerd
forced his muscles to relax. He said, "What have you to tell me, then?"
Elena wiped the tears from her face. She looked at the stranger again, absorbi
ng his square, neat, quiet solidity, his reality, the improbable fact that he
was here. She swallowed with difficulty, painfully aware of the racing of her
heart, trying to move past the moment when she had seen this man emerge from n
ight and shadow to stand before her. And then the long interval when they had
faced each other in the moonlight before she had impulsively reached out to to
uch his hand, to be sure that he was real. And had only then called for Mattio
and Donar. Something odd seemed to be happening to her. She made herself conc
entrate on what Donar was saying.
"What I tell you now gives you power of life and death over a great many peopl
e," he said softly. "For the priesthood still want us destroyed and the Tyrant
in Astibar will bide by what the clergy say in such things. I think you know
this."
"I know this," the dark-haired one echoed, equally quietly. "Will you say why
you are confiding in me?"
"Because tonight is a night of battle," Donar said. "Tonight I lead the Night
Walkers into war, and yesterday at sunset I fell into a sleep and dreamt of a
stranger coming to us. I have learned to trust my dreams, though not to know w
hen they will come."
Elena saw the stranger nod, calm, unruffled, acknowledging this as easily as h
e had acknowledged her presence in the road. She saw that his arms were ridged
with muscle under his shirt, and that he held himself as a man who had known
fighting in his days. There seemed to be a sadness in his face, but it was rea
lly too dark to tell so much, and she chided herself for letting her imaginati
on run free at such a time.
On the other hand, he was abroad and alone on an Ember Night. Men without grie
fs of their own would never do such a thing, she was certain. She wondered whe
re he was from. She was afraid to ask.
"You are the leader then, of this company?" he said to Donar.
"He is," Mattio cut in sharply. "And you would do well not to dwell upon his i
nfirmity." From the defiance of his tone it was clear he had misinterpreted th
e question. Elena knew how protective he was of Donar; it was one of the thing
s she most respected in him. But this was too huge, too important a moment for
misunderstandings. She turned to him and shook her head urgently.
"Mattio!" she began, but Donar had already laid a hand on the blacksmith's arm
, and in that moment the stranger smiled for the first time.
"You leap at a slight that is not meant," he said. "I have known others, as ba
dly injured or worse, who led armies and governed men. I seek only to find my
bearings. It is darker here for me than it is for you."
Mattio opened his mouth and then closed it. He made a small, awkward gesture o
f apology with his shoulders and hands. It was Donar who replied.
"I am Elder of the Walkers, yes," he said. "And so mine, with Mattio's aid, is
leadership in battle. But you must know that the war we are to fight tonight
is not like any battle you might know. When we come out again from this house
it will be under a different sky entirely than the one above us now. And under
that sky, in that challenging world of ghosts and shadows, few of us will app
ear as we do here."
The dark-haired man shifted uneasily for the first time. He glanced downward,
almost reluctantly, to look at Donar's hands.
Donar smiled, and held out his left hand, five fingers spread wide.
"I am not a wizard," he said softly. "There is magic here, yes, but we step in
to it and are marked for it, we do not shape it. This is not wizardry."
The stranger nodded at length. Then said, with careful courtesy, "I can see th
at. I do not understand it, but I can only assume you are telling me these thi
ngs to a purpose. Will it please you now to tell me what that is?"
And so Donar said then, finally, "Because we would ask aid of you in our battl
e tonight."
In the silence that followed, Mattio spoke, and Elena had an idea how much pri
de he swallowed in saying: "We have need. Very great need."
"Who do you fight?" the other man said.
"We call them the Others," Elena said herself, as neither Donar nor Mattio spo
ke. "They come to us year by year. Generation after generation."
"They come to ruin the fields and blight the seedlings and the harvest," Donar
said. "For two hundred years the Night Walkers of Certando would battle them
on this Ember Night, and for all this time we were able to hold them in check
as they come upon us from the west."
Mattio said, "For almost twenty years now, though, it has grown worse and wors
e for us. And on the last three Ember Nights we have been very badly beaten. M
any of us have died. And Certando's droughts have grown worse; you will know a
bout that, and about the plagues here. They have—"
But the stranger had flung up a hand suddenly, a sharp, unexpected gesture.
"Almost twenty years? And from the west?" he said harshly. He came a step near
er and turned to Donar. "The Tyrants came almost twenty years ago. And Brandin
of Ygrath landed in the west."
Donar's gaze was steady as he leaned on his crutches looking at the other man.
"This is true," he said, "and it is a thought that has occurred to some of us
, but I do not think it signifies. Our battles on this night each year go far
beyond the daily concerns of who governs in the Palm in a given generation, an
d how they govern, and from where they come."
"But still—" the stranger began.
"But still," Donar said, nodding his head, "there are mysteries to this that a
re beyond my power to grasp. If you discern a pattern that I do not . . . who
am I to question or deny that it might be true?"
He reached up to his neck and touched the leather sac. "You carry the mark we
all bear, and I dreamt your presence here tonight. Notwithstanding that, we ha
ve no claim upon you, none at all, and I must tell you that death will be ther
e to meet us in the fields when the Others come. But I can also tell you that
our need goes beyond these fields, beyond Certando, and even, I think, beyond
this Peninsula of the Palm. Will you fight with us tonight?"
The stranger was silent a long time. He turned away and looked upwards then, a
t the thin moon and stars, but Elena had a sense that his truer vision was inw
ards, that he was not really looking up at the lights.
"Please?" she heard herself say. "Will you please?"
He made no sign that he had even heard her. When he turned back it was to look
at Donar once more.
He said, "I understand little of this. I have my own battles to fight, and peo
ple to whom I owe a sworn allegiance, but I hear no evil in you, and no untrut
h, and I would see for myself the shape these Others take. If you dreamt my co
ming here I will let myself be guided by your dream."
And then, as her eyes began brimming with tears again, Elena saw him turn to h
er. "Yes, I will," he said levelly, not smiling, his dark eyes grave. "I will
fight with you tonight. My name is Baerd."
And so it seemed that he had heard her, after all.
Elena mastered her tears, standing as straight as she could. There was a tumul
t, a terrible chaos, rising within her though, and in the midst of that chaos
it seemed to Elena that she heard a sound, as of a single note plucked on her
heart. Beyond Donar, Mattio said something but she didn't hear what it was. Sh
e was looking at this stranger, and realizing, as his gaze met her own, that s
he had been right before, that her instincts had not misled. There was so deep
a sadness in him it could not possibly be missed by any man or woman with eye
s to see, even in night and shadow.
She looked away, and then closed her eyes tightly for a moment, trying to hold
back something of her heart for herself, before it all went seeking in the ma
gic and the strangeness of this night. Oh, Verzar, she thought. Oh, my dead lo
ve.
She opened her eyes again and took a careful breath. "I am Elena," she said. "
Will you come in and meet the others?"
"Yes," said Mattio gruffly, "come in with us, Baerd. Be welcome in my home." T
his time she heard the hurt that came through in his voice, though he tried to
mask it. She winced inwardly at that sound, caring for him, for his strength
and his generosity, hating so much to give sorrow. But this was an Ember Night
and the tides of the heart could scarcely be ruled even by the light of day.

Besides, she had a very grave doubt, already, as the four of them turned to go
into the house, whether there would be any joy for her to find in what had ju
st happened to her. Any joy in this stranger who had come to her out of darkne
ss, in answer to or called by Donar's dream.
Baerd looked at the cup that the woman named Carenna had just placed in his ha
nds. It was of earthenware, rough to the touch, chipped at one edge, the unpai
nted color of red soil.
He looked from Carenna to Donar, the older, maimed man—the Elder, they called
him—to the bearded one, to the other girl, Elena. There was a kind of light
in her face as she looked back at him, even in the shadows of this house, and
he turned away from that as something —perhaps the one thing—he could not de
al with. Not now, perhaps not ever in his life. He cast his gaze out over the
company assembled there. Seventeen of them. Nine men, eight women, all holding
their own cups, waiting for him. There would be more at the meeting-place, Ma
ttio had said. How many more they could not tell.
He was being reckless, he knew. Swept away by the power of an Ember Night, by
the undeniable truth of Donar's dream, the fact that they had been waiting for
him. By, if he were honest with himself, the look in Elena's eyes when he had
first come up to her. A complex tempting of fate, that aspect of it, somethin
g he seldom did.
But he was doing it now, or about to do it. He thought of Ales-san, and of all
the times he'd chided or derided the Prince, his brother of the soul, for let
ting his passion for music take him down one dangerous path or another. What w
ould Alessan say now, or quick-tongued Catriana? Or Devin? No, Devin would say
nothing: he would watch, with that careful, focused attention, and come to hi
s own conclusions in his own time. Sandre would call him a fool.
And perhaps he was. But something had responded deep within him to the words D
onar had spoken. He had borne the caul of his birth in leather all his life, a
minor, a trivial superstition. A charm against drowning, he had been told as
a child. But it was more here, and the cup he held in his hands would mark his
acceptance of that.
Almost twenty years, Mattio had said.
The Others from the west, Donar had said.
There might be little in it, or a great deal, or nothing at all, or everything
.
He looked at the woman, Elena, and he drained the cup to the lees.
It was bitter, deathly bitter. For one panicked, irrational moment he feared h
e was undone, poisoned, a blood sacrifice in some unknown Carlozzini rite of s
pring.
Then he saw the sour face Carenna made as she drank from her own cup, and saw
Mattio wince ruefully at the taste of his, and the panic passed.
The long table had been put away, lifted from its trestles. Pallets had been s
pread about the room for them to lie upon. Elena moved towards him and gesture
d, and it would have been ungracious to hold back. He walked with her toward o
ne wall and took the pallet she offered him. She sat down, unspeaking, on the
one beside it.
Baerd thought of his sister, of that clear image of walking hand in hand with
Dianora down a dark and silent road, only the two of them abroad in the wide w
orld.
Donar the miller swung himself towards the pallet on Baerd's other side. He le
aned his crutches against the wall and subsided on the mat.
"Leave your sword here," he said. Baerd raised his eyebrows. Donar smiled, a h
ieratic expression, devoid of mirth. "It will be useless where we are going. W
e will find our weapons in the fields."
Baerd hesitated a moment longer; then, aware of even greater recklessness, of
a mystic folly he could not have explained, he slipped the back-scabbard over
his head and laid it against the wall beside Donar's crutches.
"Close your eyes," he heard Elena saying from beside him. "It is easier that w
ay." Her voice sounded oddly distant. Whatever he had drunk was beginning to a
ct upon him. "It will feel like sleep," she said, "but it will not be. Earth g
rant us grace, and the sky her light." It was the last thing he heard.
It was not sleep. Whatever it was, it was not sleep, for no dream could be thi
s vivid, no dream-wind this keen in his face.
He was in an open field, wide and fallow and dark, with the smell of spring so
il, and he had no memory at all of coming here. There were a great many people
—two hundred perhaps, or more—in the field with him, and he had no memory of
any of them either. They must have come from other villages in the highlands,
from gatherings in other homes like Mattio's.
The light was strange. He looked up.
And Baerd saw that the moon in the sky was round and large and full, and it wa
s green like the first green-gold of spring. It shone with that green and gold
en light among stars in constellations he had never seen. He wheeled around, d
izzied, disoriented, his heart pounding, searching for a pattern that he knew
in the heavens. He looked south, to where the mountains should be, but as far
as his eyes could track in the green light he saw level fields stretching away
, some fallow, some fully ripe with summer grain in a season that should only
be spring. No mountains at all. No snow-clad peaks, no Braccio Pass with Quile
ia beyond. He spun again. No Castle Borso to north or east. Or west?
West. With a sudden premonition he turned to look there. Low hills rose and fe
ll in seemingly endless progression. And Baerd saw that the hills were bare of
trees, of grass, bare of flower and shrub and bush, bleak and waste and barre
n.
"Yes, look there," Donar's deep voice said from behind him, "and understand wh
y we are here. If we lose tonight the field in which we stand will be desolate
as those hills next year when we come back. The Others are down into these gr
ainlands now. We have lost the battles of those hills over the past years. We
are fighting in the plain now, and if this goes on, one Ember Night not far fr
om now our children or their children will stand with their backs to the sea a
nd lose the last battle of our war."
"And?" Baerd's eyes were still on the west, on the grey, stony ruin of the hil
ls.
"And all the crops will fail. Not just here in Certando. And people will die.
Of hunger or of plague."
"All over the Palm?" He could not look away from the desolation that he saw. H
e had a vision of a lifeless world looking like that. He shivered. It was sick
ening.
"The Palm and beyond, Baerd. Make no mistake, this is no local skirmish, no ba
ttle for a small peninsula. All over this world, and perhaps beyond, for it is
said that ours is not the only world scattered by the Powers among time and t
he stars."
"Carlozzi taught this?"
"Carlozzi taught this. If I understand his teaching rightly, our own troubles
here are bound up with even graver dangers elsewhere; in worlds we have never
seen or will see, except perhaps in dream."
Baerd shook his head, still looking out at the hills in the west. "That is too
remote for me. Too difficult. I am a worker in stone and a sometime merchant
and I have learned how to fight, against my will and inclination, over many ye
ars. I live in a peninsula overrun by enemies from overseas. That is the level
of evil I can grasp."
He turned away from the western hills then and looked at Donar. And despite th
e warning they'd given him, his eyes widened with amazement. The miller stood
on two sound legs; his grey, thinning hair had become a thick dark brown like
Baerd's own, and he stood with his broad shoulders straight and his head held
high, a man in his prime.
A woman came up to them, and Baerd knew Elena, for she was not greatly changed
. She seemed older here though, less frail; her hair was shorter, though still
white-gold despite the strangeness of the light. Her eyes, he saw, were a ver
y deep blue.
"Were your eyes that same color an hour ago?" he asked.
She smiled, pleased and shy. "It was more than an hour. And I don't know what
I look like this year. It changes a little for me every time. What color are t
hey now?"
"Blue. Extremely blue."
"Well then, yes, they have always been blue. Perhaps not extremely blue, but b
lue." Her smile deepened. "Shall I tell you what you look like?" There was an
incongruity, a lightness in her voice. Even Donar had an amused expression pla
ying about his lips.
"Tell me."
"You look like a boy," she said with a little laugh. "A fourteen-or fifteen-ye
ar-old boy, beardless now and much too thin and with a shock of brown hair I w
ould love to cut if we had but half a chance."
Baerd felt his heart thud like a mallet in his breast. It actually seemed to s
top for an instant before beginning again, laboriously, to beat. He turned sha
rply away from the others, looking down at his hands. They did seem different.
Smoother, less lined. And a knife scar he'd got in Tregea five years ago was
not there. He closed his eyes, feeling suddenly weak.
"Baerd?" Elena said behind him, concerned. "I'm sorry. I did not mean to—"
He shook his head. He tried to speak but found that he could not. He wanted to
reassure her, her and Donar, that it was all right, but he seemed, unbelievab
ly, to be weeping, for the first time in almost twenty years.
For the first time since the year he had been a fourteen-year-old boy forbidde
n to go to war by his Prince's orders and his father's. Forbidden to fight and
die with them by the red banks of the River Deisa when all the shining had co
me to an end.
"Be easy, Baerd," he heard Donar saying, deep and gentle. "Be easy. There is a
lways a strangeness here."
Then a woman's hands were briefly upon his shoulders and then reaching around
him from behind to meet and clasp at his chest. Her cheek rested against his b
ack and she held him so, strong and sharing and generous, while he brought his
hands up to cover his face as he cried.
Above them on the Ember Night the full moon was green-gold and around them the
strange fields were fallow, or newly sown, or full with ripened grain before
the planting-time, or utterly bare and desolate and lost, in the west.
"They are coming," someone said, walking up to them. "Look. We had best claim
our weapons."
He recognized Mattio's voice. Elena released him and stepped back. Baerd wiped
his eyes and looked to the west again.
And he saw then that the Ember war was giving him another chance. A chance to
make right what had gone so bitterly wrong in the world the summer he was four
teen.
Over the hills from the west, far off yet but unnaturally clear in the unnatur
al light, the Others were coming: and they were clad, all of them, in the live
ry of Ygrath.
"Oh, Morian!" he whispered on a sharply taken breath.
"What do you see?" Mattio said.
Baerd turned. The man was leaner, and his black beard was differently trimmed,
but he was recognizably the same. "Ygrathens," he said on a rising note of ex
citement. "Soldiers of the King of Ygrath. You may never have seen them here,
this far east, but that is exactly what they are, your Others."
Mattio looked suddenly thoughtful. He shook his head, but it was Donar who spo
ke.
"Be not deceived, Baerd. Remember where we are, what I have told you. You are
not in our peninsula, this is no battle of the day against your invaders from
overseas."
"I see them, Donar. I know what I see."
"And shall I tell you that what I see out there are hideous shapes in grey and
dun, naked and hairless, dancing and coupling with each other as they mock us
with their numbers?"
"And the Others for me are different again," Mattio said bluntly, almost angri
ly. "They are large, larger than men, with fur on their spines running down in
to a tail like the mountain cats. They walk upon two legs but they have claws
on their hands, and razored teeth in their mouths."
Baerd wheeled again, his heart hammering, looking west in the eerily lucid gre
en light of wherever they were. But still, in the middle distance, pouring dow
n out of the hills, he saw soldiers with weapons: swords and pikes and the und
ulating knives of Ygrath.
He turned to Elena, a little desperate.
"I do not like to name what I see," she murmured, lowering her eyes. "They fri
ghten me too much. They are creatures of my childhood fears. But it is not wha
t you are seeing, Baerd. Believe me. Believe us. You may see the Others in the
shape of your heart's hate, but this is not the battle of your daytime world.
"
He shook his head in fierce denial. There was a deep surging in his spirit, a
rushing of blood in his veins. The Others were nearer now, hundreds of them, s
treaming out of the hills.
"I am always fighting the same battle," he said to her. To her and the two men
. "All my life. Wherever I am. And I know what I see out there. I can tell you
that I am fifteen years old now, not fourteen or I could not be here. They wo
uld not have allowed me." A thought struck him. "Tell me: is there a stream we
st of us, a river below where they are descending now?"
"There is," Donar said. "Do you want to join battle there?"
A red, fierce joy was running through Baerd, wild and uncontrollable.
"I do," he said. "Oh, I do. Mattio, where do we claim our weapons?"
"There." Mattio pointed southeast to a small nearby field where tall stalks of
corn were growing, in defiance of what should have been the season. "Come. Th
ey will be at your stream very soon."
Baerd did not speak. He followed Mattio's lead. Elena and Donar went with them
. Other men and women were in that field of corn already and Baerd saw that th
ey were reaching down to pluck a stalk to be their weapon in the night. It was
uncanny, incredible, but he was beginning to take a part of the measure of th
is place, to understand the magic that was at work here, and a corner of his m
ind, which worked outside and around the stern logic of day, grasped that the
tall yellow grain that was so endangered was the only weapon possible tonight.
They would fight for the fields with grain in their hands.
He stepped in among the others in that cornfield, careful of where he walked,
and he bent down and grasped a stalk for himself. It came free easily, even wi
llingly to his hand in that green night. He walked out on to fallow ground aga
in and hefted it in his hand and swung it cautiously, and he saw that already
the stalk had stiffened like metal forged. It sliced through the air with a ke
en whistling sound. He tested it with a finger and drew blood. The stalk had g
rown as sharp as any blade he'd ever held, and as true to his hand, and it was
many-edged like the fabled blades of Quileia, centuries ago.
He looked away to the west. The Ygrathens were descending the nearest of the h
ills. He could see the glint of their weapons under the moon. This is not a dr
eam, he told himself. Not a dream.
Donar was beside him, grim and unwavering. Mattio stood beyond, a passionate d
efiance in his face. Men and women were gathering behind them and all around,
and all of them held corn swords in their hands, and all of them looked the sa
me: stern and resolute and unafraid.
"Shall we go?" Donar said then, turning to look out upon them all. "Shall we g
o and fight them for the fields and for our people? Will you come with me now
to the Ember war?"
"For the fields!" the Night Walkers cried, and raised their living swords alof
t to the sky.
What Baerd di Tigana bar Saevar cried he cried only in his heart and not aloud
, but he went forward with all of them, a stalk of corn like a long blade in h
is hand, to do battle under the pale green moon of that enchanted place.
When the Others fell, scaly and grey, blind and crawling with maggots, there w
as never any blood. Elena understood why that was so, Donar had told her years
ago: blood meant life, and their foes tonight were the enemies, the opposite,
of any kind of life. When they fell to the corn swords nothing flowed from th
em, nothing seeped away into the earth.
There were so many of them. There always were, swirling in a grey mass like sl
ugs, pouring down out of the hills and swarming into the stream where Donar an
d Mattio and Baerd had come to make their stand.
Elena prepared herself to fight, amid the loud, whirling, green-tinted chaos o
f the night. She was frightened, but she knew she could deal with that. She re
membered how deathly afraid she'd been in her first Ember war, wondering how s
he—she who could scarcely have even lifted a sword in the daytime world—coul
d possibly battle such hideous creatures as the nightmare ones she saw.
But Donar and Verzar had assuaged her fears: here in this green night of magic
it was the soul and the spirit that mattered, here it was courage and desire
that shaped and drove the bodies in which they found themselves. Elena felt so
much stronger on the Ember Nights, so much more lithe and quick. That had fri
ghtened her, too, the first time and even afterward: under this green moon she
was someone who could kill. It was a realization she had to deal with, an adj
ustment to be made. They all did, to one degree or another. None of them were
exactly what they were under the sun or the two moons of home. Donar's body on
this night of war reached backwards, further every year, toward a lost image
of what he once had been.
Just as Baerd's very clearly, reached back as well, more than one might have g
uessed or expected. Fifteen, he had said. Not fourteen, or he would not have b
een allowed. She didn't understand that, but she had no time to puzzle such th
ings out. Not now. The Others were in the stream, and now they were trying to
clamber out, clad in the hideous shapes her mind gave them.
She dodged a scything axe-blow from a creature dripping with water as it scram
bled up the bank towards her, and as she did she gritted her teeth and slashed
downward with an instinctive deadliness she would have never known was hers.
She felt her blade, her living sword, crunch hard through scaly armor and bury
itself in the maggot-infested body of her foe.
She pulled the weapon free with an effort, hating what she had done, but hatin
g the Others more, infinitely more. She turned—barely in time to block anothe
r ascending blow and withdraw a step before two new, gapejawed assailants on h
er right. She lifted her blade in a desperate attempt to ward.
Then suddenly only one of the Others was standing there. Then neither of them.

She lowered her sword and looked at Baerd. At her stranger on the road, her pr
omise given by the night. He smiled grimly at her, tight-lipped, standing over
the bodies of the Others he had just killed. He smiled, and he had saved her
life, but he said nothing to her at all. He turned and went forward to the edg
e of the river. She watched him go, saw his boy's body stride into the thickne
ss of battle, and she wasn't sure whether to give way to a rush of hope becaus
e of his deadly skill or to grieve for the look in his too young eyes.
Again, no time for such thoughts. The river seethed and boiled now with the ch
urning of the Others as they waded into it. Screams of pain, cries of rage and
fury cut the green night like blades of sound. She saw Donar along the bank t
o the south swinging his sword two-handed in wheeling circles of denial. Saw M
attio beside him, slashing and stabbing, neat-footed among the fallen bodies,
absolute in his courage. All about her the Night Walkers of Certando plunged i
nto the caldron of their war.
She saw a woman fall, then another, swarmed over and hacked down by the creatu
res from the west. She cried out herself then, in fury and revulsion, and she
moved back up to the edge of the river, running to where Carenna was, her swor
d swinging forward, her blood—her blood which was life, and the promise of li
fe—raging with the need to drive them back. Back now, tonight, and then again
a year from now, and after that, and again and again on each of these Ember N
ights, that the spring sowing might be fruitful, that the earth be allowed to
bear its bounty in the fall. This year and the next year, and the next.
In the midst of that chaos of noise and motion, Elena glanced up. She checked
the height of the still-climbing moon, and then—she could not stop herself—s
he looked to the nearest of the devastated hills beyond the stream, apprehensi
on clutching at her heart. There was no one there. Not yet.
There would be, though. She was almost certain there would be. And then? She p
ulled herself back from that. What would happen would happen. Around her there
was war, here and now, and more than enough terror in the Others massed befor
e her, surging up out of the river on either side.
She tore her thoughts from the hill and struck downwards, hard, feeling her bl
ade bite into a scabrous shoulder. She heard the Other make a wet, bubbly soun
d. She jerked her sword free and spun left barely in time to block a sideways
blow, scrambling to keep her footing. Carenna's free hand braced her from behi
nd; she didn't even have time to look but she knew who it was.
It was wild under the unknown stars, under the green light of that moon, it wa
s frenzy and chaos; there was screaming and shouting everywhere now, and the r
iverbank was muddy, slippery and treacherous. Elena's Others were wet and grey
, dark with their parasites and open sores. She clenched her teeth and fought,
letting this Ember Night body's grace be guided by her soul, the stalk that w
as her sword dancing with a life that seemed to come from within itself as muc
h as it did from her. She was splashed with mud and water, and she was sure th
ere must be blood, but there was no time to check, no time now to do anything
at all but parry and hammer and slash, and fight to keep one's footing on the
slope of the riverbank, for to fall would be to die.
She was aware, in scattered, hallucinatory flashes, of Donar beside her and Ca
renna for a time. Then she saw him stride away with a handful of others to que
ll a movement to the south. Baerd came up on her left at one point, guarding h
er open side, but when she glanced over again—and now the moon was very high—
she saw he was gone. Then she saw where. He was in the river, not waiting for
the Others to come to him. He was attacking them in the water, screaming incoh
erent words she could not understand. He was slim and young and very beautiful
, and deadly. She saw bodies of the Others piling before his feet like grey sl
udge blocking the stream. He would be seeing them differently, she knew. He ha
d told them what he saw: he would be seeing soldiers of Ygrath, of Brandin, th
e Tyrant in the west.
His blade seemed almost to vanish in a blur, it moved so fast. Knee-deep in th
e stream he stood rooted like a tree and they could not force him back, or sur
vive in front of him. The Others were falling back from him there, scrambling
to withdraw, trying to work their way around their own dead to get further dow
n the stream. He was driving them away, battling alone in the water, the moonl
ight strange on his face and strange on the living stalk that was his sword, a
nd he was a fifteen-year-old boy. Only that. Elena's heart ached for him, even
as she fought an overwhelming weariness.
She willed herself to hold her own ground, north of where he was, up on the mu
ddy bank. Carenna was further south along the river now, fighting beside Donar
. Two men and a woman from another village came up beside Elena, and together
the four of them fought for their stretch of slippery ground, trying to move i
n concert, to be of one mind.
They were not fighters, not trained for battle. They were farmers and farmers'
wives, millers and blacksmiths and weavers, masons and serving-girls, goather
ds in the hills of the Braccio Range. But each and every one of them had been
born with a caul in the highlands and named in childhood for Carlozzi's teachi
ngs and for the Ember war. And under the green moon—which had passed its apex
and would be setting now—the passion of their souls taught their hands to sp
eak for life with the blades the tall grain had become.
So the Night Walkers of Certando did battle by that river, fighting for the de
epest, oldest dream of the widespreading country fields beyond all the high ci
ty walls. A dream of Earth, of the life-giving soil, rich and moist and flouri
shing in its cycle of seasons and years; a dream of the Others driven back, an
d farther back, and finally away, one bright year none of them would live to s
ee.
And there came a time, amid the tumult and the frenzy, the loud, blurred, spin
ning violence by the river, when Elena and her three companions forged a respi
te for themselves. She had a moment to look up and she saw that the stream was
thinning of foes. That the Others were milling about, disorganized and confus
ed west of the river. She saw Baerd splash further into the water, hip-deep no
w, crying for the enemy to come to him, cursing them in a voice so tormented i
t was scarcely knowable as his own.
Elena could barely stand. She leaned on her sword, sucking in air with heaving
sobs, utterly spent. She looked over and saw that one of the men who had foug
ht beside her was down on one knee, clutching his right shoulder. He bled from
an ugly, ragged wound. She knelt beside him, tearing weakly at her clothing f
or a strip to bind it with. He stopped her though.
He stopped her and touched her shoulder and, mutely, he pointed across the str
eam. She looked where he pointed, away to the west, fear rising in her again.
And hi that moment of seeming victory Elena saw that the crown of the nearest
hill was not empty anymore. That there was something standing there.
"Look!" a man cried just then, from further down the river. "He is with them a
gain! We are undone!"
Other voices took up that cry along the riverbank, in grief and horror and col
d fear, for they saw, they all saw now, that the shadow figure had come. Withi
n the darkest spaces of her heart Elena had known that he would.
Just as he almost always had these last years. Fifteen years, twenty; though n
ever before that, Donar had said. When the moon began to set, green and full,
just when—so much of the time—it seemed as if they might have a chance to fo
rce the Others back, that dark figure would appear, to stand wrapped in fog an
d mist as hi a shroud at the back of the enemy ranks.
And it was this figure the Walkers would see come forward in the years of thei
r defeats, when they were retreating, having been driven back. It was he who w
ould step onto the bitterly contested places of battle, the lost fields, and c
laim them for his own. And blight and disease and desolation spread where he p
assed, wherever he walked upon the earth.
He stood now on the nearest of the wasted hills west of the river, clouds of o
bscuring mist rising and flowing all around him. Elena could not discern his f
ace—none of them ever had—but from within that smoke and darkness she saw hi
m raise his hands and stretch them out toward them, reaching, reaching for the
Walkers on the riverbank. And as he did Elena felt a sudden shaft of coldness
come into her heart, a terrible, numbing chill. Her legs began to tremble. Sh
e saw that her hands were shaking and it seemed that there was nothing she cou
ld do, nothing at all, to hold her courage to her.
Across the stream the Others, his army or his allies or the amorphous projecti
ons of his spirit, saw him stretch his arms toward the battlefield. Elena hear
d a sudden savage exultation in their cries; she saw them massing west of the
river to come at them again. And she remembered, weary and spent, with a grim
despair reaching into her heart, that this was exactly how it had been last ye
ar, and the spring before that, and the spring before as well. Her spirit ache
d with the knowledge of loss to come, even as she fought to find a way to read
y her exhausted body to face another charge.
Mattio was beside her. "No!" she heard him gasp, with a dull, hopeless insiste
nce, blindly fighting the power of that figure on the hill. "Not this time! No
t! Let them kill me! Not retreat again!"
He could scarcely speak, and he was bleeding, she saw. There was a gash in his
right side, another along his leg. When he straightened to move to the river
she saw that he was limping. He was doing it though, he was moving forward, ev
en into the face of what was being leveled at them. Elena felt a sob escape he
r dry throat.
And now the Others were coming again. The wounded man beside her struggled gam
ely up from his knees, holding his sword in his left hand, his useless right a
rm dangling at his side. Further along the bank she saw men and women as badly
wounded or worse. They were all standing though, and lifting their blades. Wi
th love, with a shafting of pride that was akin to pain, Elena saw that the Ni
ght Walkers were not retreating. None of them. They were ready to hold this gr
ound, or to try. And some of them were going to die now she knew, many of them
would die.
Then Donar was beside her, and Elena flinched at what she saw in his white fac
e. "No," he said. "This is folly. We must fall back. We have no choice. If we
lose too many tonight it will be even worse next spring. I have to play for ti
me, to hope for something that will make a change." The words sounded as if th
ey were scraped from his throat.
Elena felt herself beginning to cry, from exhaustion as much as anything else.
And even as she was nodding from within the abyss of her weariness, trying to
let Donar see her understanding, her support, wanting to ease the rawness of
his pain, even as the Others drew near again, triumphant, hideous, unwearied,
she abruptly realized that Baerd wasn't with them on the bank. She wheeled tow
ard the river, looking for him, and so she saw the miracle begin.
He was never in any doubt, none at all. From the moment the mist-wrapped figur
e appeared on the black hill Baerd knew what it was. In an odd way he had know
n this even before the shadow-figure came. It was why he was here, Baerd reali
zed. Donar might not know it, but this was why the Elder had had a dream of so
meone coming, why Baerd's steps that night had taken him to the place where El
ena was watching in the dark. It seemed to have been a long time ago.
He couldn't see the figure clearly but that didn't matter, it really didn't. H
e knew what this was about. It was as if all the sorrows and the lessons and t
he labors of his life, his and Alessan's together, had brought him to this riv
er under this green moon that someone here might know exactly what the figure
on the black hill was, the nature of its power. The power the Night Walkers ha
d not been able to withstand because they could not understand.
He heard a splash behind him and knew instinctively that it would be Mattio. W
ithout turning he handed him his strange sword. The Others—the Ygrathens of h
is dreams and hate—were massing again on the western bank.
He ignored them. They were tools. Right now they did not matter at all. They h
ad been beaten by the courage of Donar and the Walkers; only the shadow-figure
signified now, and Baerd knew what was needed to deal with that. Not a prowes
s of blades, not even with these swords of grain. They were past that now.
He drew a deep breath, and he raised his hands from his sides and pointed up a
t that shrouded figure on the hill, exactly as the figure was pointing down at
them. And with his heart full to overflowing with old grief and a young certa
inty, conscious that Alessan would say it better, but knowing that this had be
come his task, and knowing also what had to be done, Baerd cried aloud in the
strangeness of that night:
"Be gone! We do not fear you! I know what you are and where your power lies! B
e gone or I shall name you now and cut your strength apart—we both know the p
ower of names tonight!"
Gradually the raucous cries subsided on the other side of the river, and the m
urmurs of the Walkers faded. It grew very still, deathly still. Baerd could he
ar Mattio's labored, painful breathing just behind him. He didn't look back. H
e waited, straining to penetrate the mist that wrapped the figure on the hill.
And as he stared it seemed to him, with a surge in his heart, that the uprais
ed arms were lowered slightly. That the concealing mist dissipated a very litt
le.
He waited no longer.
"Be gone!" he cried again, more loudly yet, a ringing sureness in his voice no
w. "I have said I know you and I do. You are the spirit of the violators here.
The presence of Ygrath in this peninsula, and of Barbadior. Both of them! You
are tyranny in a land that has been free. You are the blight and the ruin in
these fields. You have used your magic in the west to shape a desecration, to
obliterate a name. Yours is a power of darkness and shadow under this moon, bu
t I know you and can name you, and so all your shadows are gone/"
He looked, and even as he was speaking the words that came to him he saw that
they were true! It was happening. He could see the mist drifting apart, as if
taken by a wind. But even in the midst of joy something checked him: a knowled
ge that the victory was only here, only in this unreal place. His heart was fu
ll and empty at one and the same time. He thought of his father dying by the D
eisa, of his mother, of Dianora, and Baerd's hands went flat and rigid at his
sides, even as he heard the murmurs of disbelieving hope rising at his back.
Mattio whispered something in a choked voice. Baerd knew it would be a prayer.

The Others were milling about in disarray west of the stream. Even as Baerd wa
tched, motionless, his hands held outwards, his heart in turmoil, more of the
shadows cloaking their leader lifted and spread, beginning to blow away over t
he brow of the hill. For one moment Baerd thought he saw the figure clearly. H
e thought he saw it bearded and slim, and of medium height, and he knew which
of the Tyrants that one would be, which one had come from the west. And someth
ing rose within him at that sight, crashing through to the surface like a wave
breaking against his soul.
"My sword!" he rasped. "Quickly!"
He reached back. Mattio placed it in his hand. In front of them the Others wer
e starting to fall back, slowly at first, then faster, and suddenly they were
running. But that didn't even matter; that didn't matter at all.
Baerd looked up at the figure on the hill. He saw the last of the shadows blow
ing away and he lifted his voice once more, crying aloud the passion of his so
ul: "Stay for me! If you are Ygrath, if you are truly the sorcerer of Ygrath I
want you now! Stay for me—I am coming! In the name of my home and of my fath
er I am coming for you now! I am Baerd di Tigana bar Saevar!"
Wildly, still screaming his challenge, he splashed forward and clambered out o
f the stream, scrambling up the other bank. The ruined earth felt cold as ice
through his wet boots. He realized that he had entered a terrain that had no r
eal place for life, but tonight, now, with that figure before him on the hill,
that didn't matter either. It didn't matter if he died.
The army of the Others was in flight, they were throwing down their weapons as
they ran. There was no one to gainsay him. He glanced up again. The moon seem
ed to be setting unnaturally fast. It looked as if it was resting now, round a
nd huge, on the very crown of the black hill. Baerd saw the figure standing th
ere silhouetted against that green moon; the shadows were gone, almost he saw
it clearly again across the dead lands between.
Then he heard a long laugh of mockery, as if in response to his crying of his
name. It was the laughter of his dreams, the laughter of the soldiers in the y
ear of the fall. Still laughing, not hurrying at all, the shadow-figure turned
and stepped down from the crown of the hill and away to the west.
Baerd began to run.
"Baerd, wait!" he heard the woman, Carenna, cry from behind him. "You must not
be on the wastelands when the moon goes down! Come back! We have won!"
They had won. But he had not, whatever the Walkers of the highlands might thin
k, or say. His battle, his and Alessan's, was no nearer resolution than it had
been before tonight. Whatever he had done for the Night Walkers of Certando,
this night's victory was not his, it could not be. He knew that in his heart.
And his enemy, the image of his soul's hate, knew that as well as he and was l
aughing at him even now just out of sight beyond the brow of that low hill.
"Stay for me!" Baerd screamed again, his young, lost voice ripping through the
night.
He ran, flashing over the dead earth, his heart bursting with the need for spe
ed. He overtook stragglers among the army and he killed them as he ran, not ev
en breaking stride. It hardly mattered, it was only for the Walkers in their w
ar, for next year. The Others scattered north and south, away from him, from t
he line that led to the hill.
Baerd reached the slope and went straight up, scrabbling for a foothold on the
cold waste ground. Then he breasted the hill with a surge and a gasp.
And he stood upon the summit, exactly where the shadow-figure had stood, and h
e looked away to the west, toward all the empty valleys and ruined hills beyon
d, and saw nothing. There was no one there at all.
He turned quickly north and then south, his chest heaving, and saw that the ar
my of the Others, too, seemed to have entirely melted away. He spun back to th
e west and then he understood.
The green moon had set.
He was alone in this wasteland under a clear, high dome of brilliant, alien st
ars and Tigana was no nearer to coming back than it had ever been. And his fat
her was still dead and would never come back to him, and his mother and sister
were dead, or lost somewhere in the world.
Baerd sank to his knees on the ruined hill. The ground was cold as winter. It
was colder. His sword slipped from his suddenly nerveless fingers. He looked a
t his hands by starlight, at the slim hands of the boy he had been, and then h
e covered his face with those hands for the second time in that Ember Night, a
nd he wept as though his heart were breaking now and not broken long ago.
Elena reached the hill and began to climb. She was breathless from running but
the slope was not steep. Mattio had grabbed her arm when she started to enter
the river. He had said it might mean death to be among the ruined lands after
moonset, but Donar had told her it would be all right now. Donar had been una
ble to stop smiling since Baerd had made the shadow-figure withdraw. There was
a stunned, incredulous glory in his face.
Most of the Walkers had gone back, wounded and weary, intoxicated with triumph
, to the field where they had claimed their weapons. From there they would be
drawn home before sunrise. So it had always happened.
Carefully avoiding Mattio's eyes, Elena had crossed the river and come after B
aerd. Behind her as she went she could hear the singing begin. She knew what w
ould follow in the sheltering hollows and the darkness of that field after an
Ember victory. Elena felt her pulse accelerate with the very thought. She coul
d guess what Mattio's face would have revealed as she walked away from him int
o the river and then across. In her heart she offered him an apology, but her
stride as she went did not falter, and then, halfway to the hill, she began to
run, suddenly afraid for the man she sought, and for herself, alone in all th
is wide dark emptiness.
Baerd was sitting on the crown of the hill, where the shadow-figure had stood
in front of the setting moon just before he fled. He glanced up as she approac
hed, and a queer, frightened expression flickered for an instant across his fa
ce in the starlit dark.
Elena stopped, uncertain.
"It is only me," she said, trying to catch her breath.
He was silent a moment. "I'm sorry," he said. "I wasn't expecting anyone. For
a moment ... for a moment you looked almost exactly like a ... like something
I saw once as a boy. Something that changed my life."
Elena didn't know what to say to that. She had thought no further than getting
here. Now that she had found him she was suddenly unsure of herself again. Sh
e sat down on the dead earth facing him. He watched her, but said nothing else
.
She took a deep breath and said, bravely, "You should have expected someone. Y
ou should have known that I would come." She swallowed hard, her heart poundin
g.
For a long moment Baerd was very still, his head tilted a little to one side,
as if listening to the echo of her words. Then he smiled. It lit up his young,
too thin face and the hollow, wounded eyes.
"Thank you," he said. "Thank you for that, Elena." It was the first time he'd
used her name. In the distance they could hear the singing from the cornfield.
Overhead the stars were almost impossibly bright in the black arch of the sky
.
Elena felt herself flushing. She glanced down and away from his direct gaze. S
he said, awkwardly, "After all, it is dangerous here in the dead lands, and yo
u wouldn't have known. Not having been here before. With us, I mean. You would
n't even know how to get back home."
"I have an idea," he said gravely. "I imagine we have until sunrise. And in an
y case, these aren't the dead lands anymore. We won them back tonight. Elena,
look at the ground where you walked."
She turned to look back. And caught her breath in wonder and delight to see th
at along the path she'd taken to this hill white flowers were blooming in what
had been barren earth.
Even as she watched she saw that the flowers were spreading in all directions
from where she had passed. Tears sprang to her eyes and spilled over, gliding
unheeded down her cheeks, making her vision blur. She had seen enough though,
she understood. This was the Earth's response to what they had done tonight. T
hose delicate white flowers coming to life under the stars were the most beaut
iful things she had seen in all her days.
Quietly, Baerd said, "You have caused this, Elena. Your being here. You must t
each Donar and Carenna and the others this. When you win the Ember war it is n
ot only a matter of holding the line of battle. You must follow the Others and
drive them back, Elena. It is possible to regain lands lost in battle years b
efore."
She was nodding. Hearing in his words an echo of something known and forgotten
long ago. She spoke the memory: "The land is never truly dead. It can always
come back. Or what is the meaning of the cycle of seasons and years?" She wipe
d her tears away and looked at him.
His expression in the darkness was much too sad for a moment such as this. She
wished she knew a way to dispel that sorrow, and not only for tonight. He sai
d, "That is mostly true, I suppose. Or true for the largest things. Smaller th
ings can die. People, dreams, a home."
Impulsively Elena reached forward and took his hand. It was fine and slender a
nd it lay in hers quietly but without response. In the distance, east of the r
iver, the Night Walkers were singing songs to celebrate and welcome the spring
, to cry the blessing of the season on the crops that summer would see. Elena
wished with all her heart that she were wiser, that she might have an answer t
o what lay so deeply and hurtfully inside this man.
She said, "If we die that is part of the cycle. We come back in another form."
But that was Donar's thought, his way of speaking, not her own.
Baerd was silent. She looked at him, but she could find nothing within her to
say that wouldn't sound wrong, or be someone else's words. So instead, thinkin
g it might somehow help him to speak, she asked, "You said you knew the shadow
-figure. How, Baerd? Can you tell me?" It was a strange, almost an illicit ple
asure to speak his name.
He smiled at her then, gently. He had a gentle face, especially young as it wa
s now. "Donar had all the clues himself, and Mattio, all of you. You had been
losing for twenty years or so they told me. Donar said I was too much tied to
the transitory battles of day, do you remember?"
Elena nodded.
"He wasn't wholly wrong," Baerd went on. "I saw Ygrathen soldiers here, and th
ey were not truly so of course. I understand that now. Dearly as I might have
wished them to be. But I wasn't wholly wrong either." For the first time his h
and put an answering pressure on her own. "Elena, evil feeds on itself. And th
e evils of day, however transitory, must add to the power of what you face her
e on the Ember Nights. They must, Elena, it cannot but be so. Everything conne
cts. We cannot afford to look only at our own goals. That is the lesson the de
arest friend of my life has taught me. The Tyrants in our peninsula have shape
d a wrong that goes deeper than who governs in a given year. And that evil has
spilled over into this battlefield where you fight Darkness in the name of Li
ght."
"Darkness adding to Darkness," she said. She wasn't certain what had led her t
o say that.
"Exactly," Baerd said. "Exactly so. I understand your battles here now, how fa
r they go beyond my own war in the daylight world. But going far beyond doesn'
t mean there is no connection. That was Donar's mistake. It was before him all
along, if only he could have seen."
"And the naming," Elena asked. "What did the naming have to do with it?"
"Naming has everything to do with it," Baerd said quietly. He withdrew his han
d from hers and rubbed it across his eyes. "Names matter even more here in thi
s place of magic than they do at home where we mortals live and die." He hesit
ated. And after a silence made deeper by the singing far away, he whispered, "
Did you hear me name myself?"
It seemed almost a silly question. He had cried it at the top of his voice. Al
l of them had heard. But his expression was too intense for her to do anything
but answer.
"I did," she said. "You named yourself Baerd di Tigana bar Saevar."
And moving very slowly then, very deliberately, Baerd reached for and claimed
her hand, and brought it to his lips, as though she were the lady of one of th
e highland castles, and not only the wheelwright's widowed daughter from the v
illage below Borso.
"Thank you," he said, in a queer voice. "Thank you so much. I thought ... I th
ought it might possibly be different tonight. Here."
The back of her hand was tingling where his lips had touched her and her pulse
was suddenly erratically fast. Fighting for composure, Elena asked, "I don't
understand. What did I do?"
His sorrow was still there, but somehow it seemed gentler now, less naked in h
is face. He said, quite calmly, "Tigana is the name of a land that was taken a
way. Its loss is part of the evil that brought the shadow-figure to this hill,
and to all your other battlefields for twenty years now. Elena, you won't und
erstand this completely, you can't, but believe me when I tell you that you co
uld not have heard the name of that land back in your village, whether by the
light of day or under the two moons. Not even if I spoke it to you from as nea
r as we are now, or cried it louder than I did within the stream."
And now, finally, she did understand. Not the difficult sum of what he was try
ing to convey, but the thing that mattered more for her: the source of his gri
ef, of that look in the dark of his eyes.
"And Tigana is your home," she said. Not a question. She knew.
He nodded. Very calm. He was still holding her hand, she realized. "Tigana is
my home," he echoed. "Men call it Lower Corte now."
She was silent a long moment, thinking hard. Then, "You must speak of this to
Donar," she said. "Before morning takes us back. There may be something he kno
ws about such matters, something he can do to help. And he will want to help."

Something flickered in his face. "I'll do that," he said. "I'll speak to him b
efore I go."
They were both silent then. Before I go. Elena pushed that away as best she co
uld. She became aware that her mouth was dry and her heart was still pounding,
almost as it had in battle. Baerd did not move. He looked so young. Fifteen,
he had said. She glanced away, uncertain again, and saw that all around them n
ow the hill itself was covered with a carpet of white flowers.
"Look!" she said, delighted and awed.
He looked around, and smiled then, from the heart.
"You brought them with you," he said.
Below them and east, in the field of corn across the river only a few voices w
ere still singing. Elena knew what that would mean. This was the first of the
Ember Nights of spring. The beginning of the year, of the cycle of sowing and
harvest. And tonight they had won the Ember war. She knew what would be happen
ing among the men and women in that field. Overhead, the stars seemed to have
come nearer, to be almost as close to them as the flowers.
She swallowed, and summoned her courage again. She said: "There are other thin
gs that are different about tonight. Here."
"I know," Baerd said softly.
And then he moved, finally, and was on his knees before her among all the youn
g white flowers. He released her palm then, but only to take her face between
his two hands, so carefully it seemed as if he feared she might break or bruis
e to his touch. Over the rapidly growing thunder of her pulse, Elena heard him
whisper her name once, as if it were a kind of prayer, and she had time to an
swer with his—with all of his name, as a gift—before he lowered his mouth to
hers.
She could not have spoken after that, for desire and need crashed over her and
bore her away as something—a chip of wood, a fragment of bark—carried by a
huge and rushing wave. Baerd was with her, though. They were together here in
this place, and then they were naked among the newly sprung white flowers of t
hat hill.
And as she drew him down and into her, feeling the keenness of longing and an
aching tenderness, Elena looked up for a moment past his shoulder at all the c
ircling, luminous stars of the Ember Night. And it came to her as a wonderful
and joyous thought that every single diamond of those stars would have a name.

Then Baerd's rhythm changed above her, and her own awakened desire with it, an
d all thoughts scattered from her like dust strewn between those stars. She mo
ved her head so her mouth could seek and find his own and she closed her arms
around him and gathered him to her and closed her eyes, and they let that high
wave carry them into the beginning of spring.

chapter 12

THE COLD AND A CRAMPED STIFFNESS WOKE DEVIN ABOUT AN hour before sunrise. It t
ook him a moment to remember where he was. It was still dark in the room. He m
assaged his neck and listened to Catriana's quiet breathing from under her bla
nkets in the bed. A rueful expression crossed his face.
It was strange, he reflected, twisting his head from side to side to try to ea
se the soreness, how only a few hours in a soft armchair could leave one feeli
ng more knotted and uncomfortable than a whole night out on cold ground
He felt surprisingly awake though, given the night he'd just had and the fact
that he couldn't have been asleep for more than three hours or so. He consider
ed going back to his own bed but realized that he wasn't going to be able to s
leep any more that night. He decided to go down to the kitchens and see if any
of the household staff could be induced to make him a pot of khav.
He left the room, concentrating on closing the door silently behind him. So mu
ch so that when he saw Alessan standing in the hallway watching him from in fr
ont of his own door he jumped involuntarily.
The Prince walked over, eyebrows arched.
Devin shook his head firmly. "We just talked. I slept in the chair. Got a kink
in my neck to show for it."
"I'm sure," Alessan murmured.
"No, really," Devin insisted.
"I'm sure," Alessan repeated. He smiled. "I believe you. If you had essayed mo
re I would have heard screaming—yours with an unpleasant injury, most likely.
"
"Very likely," Devin agreed. They walked away from Catriana's door.
"How was Alienor though?"
Devin felt himself going red. "How . . . ?" he began, then gradually became aw
are of the condition of his clothing and the amused scrutiny Alessan was givin
g him,
"Interesting," he offered.
Alessan smiled again. "Come downstairs with me and help solve a problem. I nee
d some khav for the road anyhow."
"I was on the way to the kitchens myself. Give me two minutes to change my clo
thes."
"Not a bad idea," Alessan murmured, eyeing the torn shirt. "I'll meet you down
there."
Devin ducked into his own chamber and quickly changed. For good measure he pul
led on the vest Alais had sent him. Thinking of her, of her sheltered, quiet i
nnocence, took him back—by polarity—to what had happened last night. He stoo
d stock-still in the middle of his room for a moment and tried to properly gra
sp what he had done, and had done to him.
Interesting, he had just called it. Language. The process of sharing with word
s seemed such a futile exercise sometimes. A remnant of the sadness he'd felt,
leaving Alienor, washed back over him and it picked up Catriana's sorrows too
. He felt as if he'd been washed up by the sea on some grey beach at a bleak h
our.
"Khav," Devin said aloud. "Or I'll never get out of this mood."
On the way downstairs he realized, belatedly, what Alessan had meant by "for t
he road." His meeting, wherever it was, was today— the encounter they'd been
pointing toward for half a year.
And after that he would be riding west. To Tigana. Where his mother lay dying
in a Sanctuary of Eanna.
Wide awake, his mind snapping from night reflections into the sharper agitatio
ns of the day, Devin followed a glow of light to the huge kitchens of Castle B
orso and he paused in the arched doorway, looking within.
Sitting by the roaring fire, Alessan was carefully sipping steaming khav from
an oversized mug. In a chair beside him Erlein di Senzio was doing the same. T
he two men were both gazing into the flames while all around them there was al
ready a purposeful stir and bustle in the kitchen.
Devin stood in the doorway a moment, unnoticed, and found himself looking clos
ely at the two men. In their silent gravity they seemed to him to be a part of
a frieze, a tableau, emblematic in some complex way of all such pre-dawn hour
s for those on the long roads.
Neither man was a stranger to this hour, Devin knew, to sitting thus before a
castle kitchen fire among the servants in the last dark hour before dawn, easi
ng into wakefulness and a fugitive warmth, preparing for the road again and wh
atever turnings it might offer in the day that had not yet begun.
It seemed to Devin that Alessan and Erlein, sitting together as they were, wer
e bonded in some way that went beyond the harsh thing that had happened by tha
t twilit stream in Ferraut. It was a linkage that had nothing to do with Princ
e and wizard, it was shaped of the things they each had done. The same things
done. Memories they would each have and could share, if these two men could tr
uly share anything after what had happened between them.
For years they had each been traveling. There had to be so many images that ov
erlapped and could evoke the same mood, emotions, the same sounds and smells.
Like this one: darkness outside, the edge of grey dawn and the castle stir the
sun would bring, chill of the corridors and knowledge of wind outside the wal
ls, cut by the crackle and roar of the kitchen fire; the reassuring steam and
smell rising from their cradled mugs; sleep and dream receding, the mind slowl
y turning forward to the day that lay ahead swathed in ground mist. Looking at
their stillness amid the bustle of the kitchen Devin felt another return of t
he sadness that seemed to be his legacy from this long strange night in the hi
ghlands.
Sadness, and a distinct stir of longing. Devin realized that he wanted that sh
ared history for himself, wanted to be a part of that self-contained, accompli
shed fraternity of men who knew this scene so well. He was young enough to sav
or the romance of it, but old enough —especially after this past winter and h
is time with Menico—to guess at the price demanded for those memories and the
contained, solitary, competent look of the two men in front of him.
He stepped through the doorway. A pretty servant noticed him and smiled shyly.
Without a word she brought him a scalding mug of khav. Alessan glanced over a
t him and hooked a third chair with his long leg, pulling it into a position n
ear him by the fire. Devin walked over and sank gratefully down near the warmt
h. His stiffened neck was still bothering him.
"I didn't even have to be charming," Alessan reported cheerfully. "Erlein was
already here and had started in on a fresh pot of khav. There were people in t
he kitchen all night to keep the fires going. Couldn't have lit new ones on an
Ember Day."
Devin nodded, sipping carefully and with intense gratitude from his steaming m
ug. "And the other question you mentioned?" he asked guardedly, with a glance
at Erlein.
"Solved," the Prince said promptly. He seemed unnaturally bright, brittle as k
indling. "Erlein's going to have to come with me. We've established that I can
't let him get too far away or my summons won't work. And if that's the case,
well he simply has to go where I go. All the way west. We really do seem to be
tied together, don't we?" He flashed his teeth in a smile at the wizard. Erle
in didn't bother to respond; he continued to sip his drink, gazing expressionl
essly into the fire.
"Why were you up so early?" Devin asked him, after a moment.
Erlein made a sour face. "Slavery doesn't agree with my rest," he mumbled into
his khav.
Devin elected to ignore that. There were times when he really did feel sorry f
or the wizard, but not when Erlein trotted out his reflexive self-pity.
A thought struck Devin. He turned to Alessan. "Is he going to your meeting thi
s morning, too?"
"I suppose," Alessan said with apparent carelessness. "A small reward for his
loyalty and the long ride he'll have afterward. I expect to travel without sto
pping very much." His tone was genuinely odd; too deliberately casual, as if d
enying the very possibility of strain.
"I see," Devin said, as neutrally as he could manage. He turned his gaze to th
e fire and kept it there.
There was a silence. When it stretched, Devin looked back and saw Alessan look
ing at him.
"Do you want to come?" the Prince asked.
Did he want to come? For half a year, from the moment Devin and Sandre had joi
ned the other three, Alessan had been telling them that everything they wanted
to achieve would point toward and wait upon a meeting in these southern highl
ands on the first of the Ember Days.
Did he want to come?
Devin coughed, spilling some khav on the stone floor. "Well," he said, "not if
I'm in the way, naturally. Only if you think I could be useful and if maybe I
could . . ."
He trailed off because Alessan was laughing at him.
Even Erlein had been roused from his sulk to a faint, reluctant snort of amuse
ment. The two older men exchanged a glance.
"You are a terrible liar," the wizard said to Devin.
"He's right," Alessan said, still chuckling. "But never mind. I don't actually
think you can be useful—it isn't in the nature of what I have to do. But I'm
certain you won't do any harm and you and Erlein can keep each other entertai
ned. It'll be a very long ride."
"What? To the meeting?" Devin asked, startled.
Alessan shook his head. "Only two or three hours there, depending on the state
of the pass this morning. No, Devin, I'm inviting you west with me." His voic
e altered. "Home."
"Pigeon!" the balding, burly-chested man cried, though they were still some di
stance away. He sat in a massive oak chair set squarely down in the middle of
the Braccio Pass. There had been early spring flowers blooming on the lower sl
opes but not very many this far up. On either side of the path piled rock and
stone yielded to forest. Further up, to the south, there was only rock and sno
w.
Carrying-poles were attached to the oak chair and six men stood behind it in b
urgundy livery. Devin thought they were servants, but when he came nearer he s
aw from their weapons that he was wrong: these were soldiers, and guards.
"Pigeon," the man in the chair repeated loudly. "You have risen in the world!
You bring companions this time!"
It was with a genuine sense of disorientation that Devin realized that the chi
ldish name and the raucous, carrying words were addressed to Alessan.
Who had the oddest look to his face all of a sudden. He said nothing by way of
reply though as they rode up to the seven men in the pass. Alessan dismounted
; behind him Devin and Erlein did the same. The man in the chair did not rise
to greet them, but his bright, small eyes followed every move that Alessan mad
e. His enormous hands were motionless on the carved arms of the chair. He wore
at least six rings; they sparkled in the light of the morning sun. He had a h
ooked much-broken nose in a leathery, weather-beaten face that showed two livi
d scars. One was an old wound, slanting down his right cheek in a white line.
The other, much more recent, raked redly across his forehead to the greying, r
eceding hairline above his left ear.
"Company for the ride," Alessan said mildly. "I wasn't sure if you'd come. The
y both sing. Could have consoled me on the way back. The young one is Devin, t
he other is Erlein. You've grown monstrous fat in a year."
"And why should I not grow fat?" the other roared in delight. "And how dare yo
u doubt that I would come! Have I ever not kept faith with you?" The tone was
boisterous in the extreme, but Devin saw that the small eyes were alert and ve
ry watchful.
"Not ever," Alessan agreed calmly. His own febrile manner had gone, to be repl
aced by an almost preternatural calm. "But things have changed since two years
ago. You don't need me anymore. Not since last summer."
"Not need you!" the big man cried. "Pigeon, of course I need you. You are my y
outh, my memory of what I was. And my talisman of fortune in battle."
"No more battles though," said Alessan quietly. "Will you allow me to offer my
humblest congratulations?"
"No!" the other growled. "No, I will not allow you. No such mewling courtly cl
aptrap from you. What I want is for you to come here and hug me and stop this
imbecilic maundering! Who are we to be cluttering like this? The two of us!"
And with the last words he propelled himself upright with a ferocious push of
his two muscled arms. The huge oak chair rocked backwards. Three of the liveri
ed guards sprang to balance it.
The big man took two awkward, crippled, hopping steps forward as Alessan strod
e to meet him. And in that moment Devin abruptly realized—a bucket of ice dow
n the length of his spine—who this scarred, maimed man had to be.
"Bear!" said Alessan, laughter catching in his throat. He threw his arms fierc
ely about the other man. "Oh, Marius, I truly didn't know if you would come."

Marius.
Stupefied by more than altitude and a sleepless night, Devin saw the self-crow
ned King of Quileia—the crippled man who'd killed seven armed challengers bar
e-handed hi the sacred grove—lift the Prince of Tigana clean off his feet and
kiss him loudly on both cheeks. He lowered a red-faced Alessan to the path an
d held him at arms' length for a close scrutiny.
"It is true," he said at length as Alessan's grin faded. "I can see it. You re
ally did doubt me. I should be outraged, Pigeon. I should be wounded and hurt.
What did Pigeon Two say?"
"Baerd was sure you would be here," Alessan admitted ruefully. "I'm afraid I o
we him money."
"At least one of you has grown up enough to have some sense,"
Marius growled. Then something seemed to register with him. "What? You two you
ng scamps were wagering on me? How dare you!" He was laughing, but the blow he
suddenly clapped on Alessan's shoulder made the other man stagger.
Marius hobbled back to his chair and sat down. Again Devin was struck by the a
ll-embracing nature of the glance he turned on them. Only for an instant did i
t flit over Devin himself, but he had the uncanny sense that Marius had, in th
at one second, sized him up quite comprehensively, that he would be recognized
and remembered should they meet by chance even a decade hence.
He experienced a weird, fleeting moment of pity for the seven warriors who had
had to battle this man, bringing merely swords or spears, and armor and two g
ood legs to meet him in a night grove.
Those arms like tree-trunks and the message in those eyes told Devin all he ne
eded to know about which way the balance would have tilted in those battles de
spite the ritual maiming—the severed ankle tendons—of the consort who was su
pposed to die in the grove, to the greater glory of the Mother Goddess and her
High Priestess.
Marius had not died. For anyone's greater glory. Seven times he had not died.
And now, since that seventh time, there was a true King in Quileia again and t
he last High Priestess was dead. It had been Rovigo, Devin remembered suddenly
, who had first given him that news. In a rancid tavern called The Bird, eithe
r half a year or half a lifetime ago.
"You must have been slipping or lazy or already fat last summer in the Grove,"
Alessan was saying. He gestured toward the scar on Marius's forehead. "Tonali
us should never have been able to get that close to you with a blade."
The smile on the face of the King of Quileia was not, in truth, a pleasant thi
ng to see. "He didn't," Marius said grimly. "I used our kick-drop from the twe
nty-seven tree and he was dead before we both hit the ground. The scar is a fa
rewell token from my late wife in our last encounter. May the sacred Mother of
us all guard her ever-blessed spirit. Will you take wine and a midday meal?"

Alessan's grey eyes blinked. "We would be pleased to," he said.
"Good," said Marius. He gestured to his guards. "In that case, while my men at
tend to laying things out for us you can tell me, Pigeon, and I hope you will
tell me, why you hesitated just now before accepting that invitation."
It was Devin's turn to blink; he hadn't even registered the pause.
Alessan was smiling though. "I wish," he said, with a wry twist of his mouth,
"that you would miss something once in a while." Marius smiled thinly, but did
not speak. "I have a long ride ahead of me. At least three days, flat out. So
meone I must get to, as soon as I can."
"More important than me, Pigeon? I am desolated."
Alessan shook his head. "Not more important, or I wouldn't be here now. More c
ompelling perhaps. There was a message from Da-noleon waiting for me at Borso
last night. My mother is dying."
Marius's expression changed swiftly. "I am deeply sorry," he said. "Alessan, t
ruly I am." He paused. "It could not have been easy for you to come here first
, knowing that."
Alessan gave his small characteristic shrug. His eyes moved away from Marius,
gazing past him up the pass toward the high peaks beyond. The soldiers had fin
ished spreading a quite extravagant golden cloth over the level ground in fron
t of the chair. Now they began laying out multi-colored cushions upon it and p
utting down baskets and dishes of food.
"We will break bread together," Marius said crisply, "and discuss what we are
here to discuss—then you must go. You trust this message? Is there danger for
you in returning?"
Devin hadn't even thought about that.
"I suppose there is," Alessan said indifferently. "But yes, I trust Danoleon.
Of course I do. He took me to you in the first place."
"I am aware of that," Marius said mildly. "I remember him. I also know that un
less things have greatly changed he is not the only priest in that Sanctuary o
f Eanna, and your clergy in the Palm have not been noted for their reliability
."
Alessan gave his shrug again. "What can I do? My mother is dying. I've not see
n her in almost two decades, Bear." His mouth crooked. "I don't think I am lik
ely to be recognized by many people, even without Baerd's disguises. Would you
not say I have changed somewhat since I was fourteen?" There was a slight cha
llenge in the words.
"Somewhat," Marius said quietly. "Not so much as one might think. You were a g
rown man even then, in many ways. So was Baerd when he came to join you."
Again Alessan's eyes seemed to drift away up the line of the pass, as if chasi
ng a memory or a far-off image to the south. Devin had an acute sense that the
re was much more being said here than he was hearing.
"Come," Marius said, levering his hands on the chair arms. "Will you join me o
n our carpet in the meadow?"
"Stay in the chair!" Alessan rapped sharply. His expression remained incongruo
usly benign and untroubled. "How many men came here with you, Bear?"
Marius had not moved. "A company to the foothills. These six through the pass.
Why?"
Moving easily, smiling carelessly, Alessan sat down on the cloth at the King's
feet. "Hardly wise, to bring so few up here."
"There is little enough danger. My enemies are too superstitious to venture in
to the mountains. You know that, Pigeon. The passes were named as taboo long a
go when they shut down trade with the Palm."
"In that case," Alessan said, still smiling, "I am at a loss to explain the bo
wman I just saw behind a rock up the trail."
"You are certain?" Marius's voice was as casual as Alessan's, but there was su
ddenly ice in his eyes.
"Twice now."
"I am deeply distressed," said the King of Quileia. "Such a person is unlikely
to be here for any reason other than to kill me. And if they are breaking the
mountain taboo I am going to be forced to rethink a number of assumptions. Wi
ll you take some wine?" He gestured, and one of the men in burgundy poured wit
h a hand that trembled slightly.
"Thank you," Alessan murmured. "Erlein, can you do anything here without it be
ing known?"
The wizard's face went pale, but he too kept his voice level. "Not any sort of
attack. It would take too much power, and there is nothing here to screen it
from any Tracker in the highlands."
"A shield for the King?"
Erlein hesitated.
"My friend," Alessan said gravely, "I need you and I am going to continue to n
eed you. I know there is danger in using your magic—for all of us. I must hav
e honest answers though, to make intelligent decisions. Pour him some wine," h
e said to the Quileian soldier.
Erlein accepted a glass and drank. "I can do a low-level screen behind him aga
inst arrows." He stopped. "Do you want it? There is some risk."
"I think I do," Alessan said. "Put up the shield as unobtrusively as you can."

Erlein's mouth tightened but he said nothing. His left hand moved very slightl
y from side to side. Devin could see the two missing fingers now, but nothing
else happened, so far as he could tell.
"It is done," Erlein said grimly. "The risk will increase the longer I hold it
up." He drank again from his wine.
Alessan nodded, accepting a wedge of bread and a plateful of meat and cheese f
rom one of the Quileians. "Devin?"
Devin had been waiting. "I see the rock," he said quietly. "Up the path. On th
e right side. Arrow range. Send me home."
"Take my horse. There's a bow in the saddle."
Devin shook his head. "He may notice—and I'm not good enough with the bow any
how. I'll do what I can. Can you arrange to be noisy in about twenty minutes?"

"We can be very noisy," said Marius of Quileia. "The climb back up and around
will be easier to your left as you go down, just past the point where this pat
h bends. I'd very much like this person alive, by the way."
Devin smiled. Marius suddenly roared with laughter and Alessan followed suit.
Erlein was silent as Alessan swept an imperious hand out toward Devin.
"If you forgot it then you can fetch it, thimble-brain! We'll be here, enjoyin
g our meal. We may leave something for you."
"It wasn't my fault!" Devin protested loudly, letting his smile fade to petula
nce. He turned back to where the horses were tethered. Shaking his head, visib
ly disconsolate, he mounted his grey and rode down the path along which they h
ad come.
As far as the bend in the trail.
He dismounted and tethered the horse. After a moment's thought he left his swo
rd where it was, hanging from the saddle. He was aware that it was a decision
that might cost him his life. He'd seen the wooded slopes beside the pass thou
gh; a sword would be awkward and noisy when he began to climb.
Cutting to the west he soon found himself among the trees. He doubled back sou
th and up, as far off the line of the pass as the terrain allowed. It was hard
, sweaty going, and he had to hurry, but Devin was fit and he'd always been qu
ick and agile—compensations for a lack of size. He scrambled up the steep slo
pes, weaving among mountain trees and dark serrano bushes, grasping roots wedg
ed deep into the slanting soil.
Part of the way up, the trees briefly gave out before a short, steep cliff to
the south and west. He could go up or he could go around, angling back toward
the pass. Devin tried to guess his bearings but it was difficult—no sounds re
ached him this far off the trail. He couldn't be sure if he was already above
the place where the Quileian cloth was spread for lunch. Twenty minutes, he'd
told them. He gritted his teeth, offered a quick prayer to Adaon, and began to
climb the rock. It occurred to him that there was something profoundly incong
ruous about an Asolini farmer's son from the northern marshes struggling up a
cliff-face in the Braccio Range.
He wasn't an Asolini farmer's son though. He was from Tigana and his father wa
s, and his Prince had asked him to do this thing.
Devin skittered sideways along the rock-face trying not to dislodge any pebble
s. He reached an outcrop of stone, changed grip, hung free for a second, and t
hen boosted himself straight up and onto it. He scrambled quickly across some
level ground, dropped flat on his stomach and, breathing hard, looked up to th
e south.
And then straight down. He caught his breath, realizing how lucky he'd been. T
here was a single figure hiding behind a boulder almost directly below him. De
vin had quite certainly been visible on the last part of his climb where the c
liff-face broke clear of the trees. His silence had served him well though, fo
r the figure below was oblivious to him, avidly intent on the group feasting o
n the path. Devin couldn't see them, but their voices carried to him now. The
sun moved behind a cloud and Devin instinctively flattened himself, just as th
e assassin glanced up to gauge the change in the light.
For an archer it would matter, Devin knew. It was a long shot, downhill and pa
rtly screened by the guards. There would also be time, most likely, for only o
ne arrow. He wondered if the tips were poisoned. Probably, he decided.
Very carefully he started crawling uphill, trying to work his way further arou
nd behind the assassin. His brain was racing as he slipped into a higher stand
of trees. How was he going to get close enough to deal with an archer?
Just then he heard the sound of Alessan's pipes followed, a measure later, by
Erlein's harp. A moment after that a number of voices started in on one of the
oldest, most rollicking highland ballads of all. About a legendary band of mo
untain outlaws who had ruled these hills and crags with arrogant impunity unti
l they were surprised and defeated by Quileia and Certando together.
Thirty brave men rode apace from the north And forty Quileians met them side b
y side. There in the mountains each pledged to the other And Gan Burdash high
in his roost defied!
The booming voice of Marius led the others into the refrain. By then Devin had
remembered something and he knew what he was going to try to do. He was aware
that there was more than an element of lunacy in his planning, but he also kn
ew he didn't have much time, or many options.
His heart was pounding. He wiped his hands dry on his breeches and began movin
g more quickly through the trees along the line of the ridge he'd climbed. Beh
ind him was the singing; beneath him now, perhaps fifteen feet east of this hi
gher ridge and twenty feet below was an assassin with a bow. The sun came out
from behind the clouds.
Devin was above and behind the Quileian now. Had he been carrying a bow and be
en at all accomplished with one he would have had the other at his mercy.
Instead, what he had was a knife, and a certain pride and trust in his own coo
rdination, and a tall giant of a mountain pine tree rising all the way up to h
is ridge from just behind the boulder that sheltered the archer. He could see
the other clearly now, clad in a masking green for the mountain trail, with a
strung bow and half a dozen arrows to hand.
Devin knew what he had to do. He also knew—because there had been woods at ho
me, if not mountain passes—that he could not climb down that tree with any ho
pe of silence. Not even with the loud, seriously off-key voices screening his
sounds from below.
Which left, so far as he could judge, only the one option. Others might have p
lanned it better, but others weren't on this ridge. Devin wiped his damp palms
very carefully dry again and began concentrating on a large branch that stret
ched out and away from the others. The only one that might do him any good. He
tried to calculate angle and distance as best he could, given an almost total
lack of experience at this particular maneuver. What he was about to try was
not a thing one did for practice, anywhere.
He checked the hang of the dagger in his belt, wiped his hands one last time,
and stood up. Absurdly, the flash of memory that came to him then was of the d
ay his brothers had surprised him hanging upside down from a tree, trying to s
tretch his height.
Devin smiled tightly and stepped to the edge of the cliff. The branch looked a
bsurdly far away, and it was only half of the way down to the level of the pas
s. He swore an inward oath that if he survived this Baerd was going to teach h
im how to use a bow properly.
From the path below he heard the ragged voices swirling erratically towards th
e climax of the ballad:
Gan Burdash ruled in the mountain heights
And with his band he ranged from crag to glen,
But seventy brave men tracked him to his lair
And when the moons had set the peaks were free again!
Devin jumped. Air whistled past his face. The branch flew up to meet him, blur
red, very fast. He stretched his hands, clutched it, swung. Only a little. Onl
y enough to change his angle of descent, cut his momentum. Bring him directly
down upon the killer behind the rock.
The branch held, but the leaves crackled loudly as he pivoted. He'd known they
would. The Quileian flung a startled glance skyward and grappled for the bow.

Not nearly fast enough. Screaming at the top of his lungs, Devin plummeted lik
e some hunting bird of these high places. By the time his target began to move
Devin was already there.
Our kick-drop from the twenty-seven tree, he thought.
Falling, he tilted his torso so that it angled sideways across the upper body
of the Quileian and he kicked out hard with both feet as he did. The impact wa
s sickening. He felt his legs make jarring contact, even as he crashed into th
e other, driving all the air from his own lungs.
They smashed into the ground together, tumbling and rolling away from the base
of the boulder. Devin gasped agonizingly for breath, he felt the world sway a
nd rock wildly in his sight. He gritted his teeth and groped for his dagger.
Then he realized it was not necessary.
Dead before we both hit the ground, Marius had said. With a shuddering heave D
evin forced air into his tortured lungs. There was an odd, knifing pain runnin
g up his right leg. He forced himself to ignore it. He rolled free of the unco
nscious Quileian and struggled, gasping and wheezing, for another breath of pr
ecious air. And then he looked.
The assassin was a woman. Under all the circumstances, not a great surprise. S
he was not dead. Her forehead appeared to have glanced off the rock under the
impact of his sprawling descent. She was lying on her side, bleeding heavily f
rom a scalp wound. He had probably broken a number of her ribs with his kick.
She had a profusion of cuts and scrapes from their tumble down the slope.
So, Devin noted, did he. His shirt was torn and he was badly scratched again,
for the second time in half a day. There was a joke, something that ought to b
e amusing in that, but he couldn't reach to it. Not yet.
He seemed to have survived though. And to have done what he'd been asked to do
. He managed to draw one full, steadying breath just as Alessan and one of the
Quileian soldiers came sprinting up the path. Erlein was just behind them, De
vin saw with surprise.
He started to stand, but the world spun erratically and he had to be braced by
Alessan. The Quileian guard flipped the assassin over on her back. He stood s
taring down upon her and then spat, very deliberately, into her bleeding face.

Devin looked away.
His eyes met Alessan's. "We saw you jump from down there. You're really suppos
ed to have wings before trying that sort of thing," the Prince said. "Didn't a
nyone ever tell you?"
The expression in the grey eyes belied the lightness of his tone. "I feared fo
r you," he added softly.
"I couldn't think of anything else to do," Devin said apologetically. He was a
ware of a deep pride beginning to well up within him. He shrugged. "The singin
g was driving me mad. I had to do something to stop it."
Alessan's smile widened. He reached an arm around and squeezed Devin's shoulde
r. Baerd had done that too, in the Nievolene barn.
It was Erlein who laughed at the joke. "Come back down," the wizard said. "I'l
l have to clean out those cuts for you."
They helped him descend the slope. The Quileian carried the woman and her bow.
Devin saw that it was made of a very dark wood, almost black, and was carved
into a semblance of a crescent moon.
From one end of it there hung a gathered and twisted lock of greying hair. He
shivered. He had a fair idea of whose it would be.
Marius was on his feet, one hand on the back of his chair, as he watched them
come down. His eyes barely flicked over the four men and the carried assassin.
They locked, cold and grim, on the black curve of the moon bow. He looked fri
ghtening.
And the more so, Devin thought, because not at all afraid.
"I think we are past the need to dance in words around each other," Alessan sa
id. "I would like to tell you what I need and you will tell me if you can do i
t and that will be all we need say."
Marius held up a hand to stop him.
He had now joined the three of them among the cushions on the golden cloth. Th
e dishes and baskets had been cleared away. Two of the Quileians had taken the
woman back up over the pass to where the rest of their company waited. The ot
her four were posted some distance away. The sun was high, as high as it would
get at noon this far south, this early in the spring. It had turned into a mi
ld, generous day.
"This Bear is a very bad word-dancer, Pigeon," the King of Quileia said soberl
y. "You know that. You probably know something else: how much it will grieve m
e to deny you any request at all. I would like to do this differently. I would
like to tell you what I cannot do, so you will not ask it and force me to ref
use."
Alessan nodded. He remained silent, watching the King.
"I cannot give you an army," Marius said flatly. "Not yet, and perhaps never.
I am too green in power, too far from the stability I need at home to lead or
even order troops over these mountains. There are several hundreds of years of
tradition I have to set about changing in very little time. I am not a young
man anymore, Pigeon."
Devin felt a leap of excitement within himself and struggled to master it. Thi
s was too serious an occasion for childlike feelings. He could hardly believe
he was here, though, so close to—at the very heart of—something of this magn
itude. He stole a sidelong glance at Erlein and then looked more closely: the
same quick spark of interest was in the other's face. For all his years and hi
s long travels, Devin seriously doubted if the troubadour-wizard had ever been
so near to great events.
Alessan was shaking his head. "Bear," he said, "I would never ask you for that
. For our sake as much as for your own. I will not have my name remembered as
the man who first invited the newly awakened might of Quileia north into the P
alm. If an army ever ventures from Quileia through these passes—and I hope we
are both long dead before such a day—the wish of my heart will be for it to
be slaughtered and driven back with losses so bloody that no King in the south
ever tries again."
"If there is a King in the south and not another four hundred years of the Mot
her and her priestesses. Very well," Marius said, "then tell me what it is you
do need."
Alessan's legs were neatly crossed, his long fingers laced in his lap. He look
ed for all the world as if he was discussing nothing of greater moment than, p
erhaps, the sequence of songs for an evening's performance.
Except that his fingers, Devin saw, were so tightly squeezed together they wer
e white.
"A question first," Alessan said, controlling his voice. "Have you received le
tters offering to open trade?"
Marius nodded. "From both of your Tyrants. Gifts, messages of felicitation, an
d generous offers to reopen the old trade routes by sea and land."
"And each urged you to scorn the other as being untrustworthy and unstable in
his power."
Marius was smiling faintly now. "Are you intercepting my mail, Pigeon? Each di
d exactly that."
"And what," Alessan asked, direct as an arrow, "have you replied?" For the fir
st time, unmistakably, there was a taut cord of tension in his voice.
Marius heard it too. "Nothing yet," he said, his smile fading. "I want a few m
ore messages from each of them before I move."
Alessan looked down and seemed to notice his clenched fingers for the first ti
me. He unlaced them and ran a hand, predictably, through his hair.
"You will have to move, though," he said with some difficulty. "You will obvio
usly need trade. In your position you have to begin showing Quileia some of th
e benefits you can offer. Traffic north will be the quickest way, won't it?" T
here was an awkward kind of challenge in his tone.
"Of course," Marius said simply. "I have to do it. Why else am I King? It is o
nly a question of timing—and with what happened this morning I think my timin
g has just been moved up."
Alessan nodded, as if he'd known all this already.
"What will you do, then?" he asked.
"Open the passes for both of them. No preferences, no tariffs for either. I wi
ll let Alberico and Brandin send me all the gifts and goods and envoys they wa
nt. I'll let their trade make me truly a King—a King who brings new prosperit
y to his people. And I need to start doing it soon. Immediately, I now suspect
. I have to put Quileia so firmly on a new path that the old one recedes as fa
st as I can make it. Otherwise I'll die having done nothing but live somewhat
longer than most Year Kings, and the priestesses will be in power again before
my bones are picked clean underground."
Alessan closed his eyes. Devin became aware of the rustling of leaves all arou
nd them and the sporadic calling of birds. Then Alessan looked up at Marius ag
ain, the grey eyes wide and calm, and he said, bluntly:
"My request: that you give me six months before deciding on trade. And somethi
ng else, in that interval."
"The time alone is a great deal," Marius said very softly. "But tell me the re
st, Pigeon. The something else."
"Three letters, Bear. I need three letters sent north. First letter: you say y
es to Brandin, conditionally. You ask for time to consolidate your own positio
n before exposing Quileia to outside influences. You make it clear that your i
nclination toward him is based on his appearing stronger than Alberico, more l
ikely to endure. Second letter: you reject, sorrowfully, all overtures from As
tibar. You write Alberico that you are intimidated by Brandin's threats. That
you would dearly love to trade with the Empire of Barbadior, need to trade wit
h them, but the Ygrathen seems too strong in the Palm for you to risk offendin
g him. You wish Alberico all good fortune. You ask him to keep in contact with
you, discreetly. You say you will be watching events in the north with close
interest. You have not yet given Brandin a final decision, and will delay as l
ong as you can. You send your warmest regards to the Emperor."
Devin was lost. He reverted to his trick of the winter: listen, remember, thin
k about it later. Marius's eyes were bright though, and the cold, unsettling s
mile was back.
"And my third letter?" he asked.
"Is to the Governor of the Province of Senzio. Offering immediate trade, no ta
riffs, first choice of prime goods, secure anchorage in your harbors for their
ships. Expressing deep admiration for Senzio's brave independence and enterpr
ise in the face of adversity." Alessan paused. "And this third letter, natural
ly—"
"Will be intercepted by Alberico of Barbadior. Pigeon, do you know what you wo
uld be setting in motion? How incredibly dangerous a game this is?"
"Wait a minute!" Erlein di Senzio suddenly interjected, starting to rise.
"You be silent!" Alessan literally snarled the command in a voice Devin had ne
ver heard him use.
Erlein's mouth snapped shut. He subsided, breathing harshly, his eyes coals of
anger and burgeoning understanding. Alessan didn't even look at him. Neither
did Marius. The two of them sat on a golden carpet high in the mountains, seem
ingly oblivious to the existence of anything in the world but each other.
"You do know, don't you?" Marius said finally. "You know exactly." There was a
certain wonder in his voice.
Alessan nodded. "I've had enough time to think about it, Triad knows. Once the
trade routes open I think my province and its name are lost. With what you ca
n offer him, Brandin will be a hero in the west, not a Tyrant. He will be so s
ecure that there will be nothing I can do, Bear. Your Kingship may be my undoi
ng. And my home's."
"Are you sorry you helped me to it?"
Devin watched Alessan wrestle with that. There were currents of emotion runnin
g here, far beneath the surface of what he could see and understand. He listen
ed, and remembered.
"I should be sorry," Alessan murmured at length. "In a way it is a kind of tre
achery that I am not. But no, how can I possibly regret what we worked so hard
to achieve?" His smile was wistful.
Marius said, "You know I love you, Pigeon. Both of you."
"I know. We both know."
"You know what I am facing back home."
"I do. I have reason to remember."
In the silence that followed Devin felt a sadness come over him, an echo of hi
s mood at the end of the night. A sense of the terrible spaces that always see
med to lie between people. The gulfs that had to be crossed for even a simple
touching.
And how much wider those gulfs must be for men such as these two, with their l
ong dreams and the burdens of being who they were, and what. How hard it seeme
d, how brutally hard, for hands to reach out across so much history and such a
weight of responsibility and loss.
"Oh, Pigeon," said Marius of Quileia, his voice little more than a whisper, "y
ou may have been an arrow shot from the white moon into my heart eighteen year
s ago. I love you as my son, Alessan bar Valen-tin. I will give you six months
and your three letters. Build a bonfire to my memory if you hear that I have
died."
Even with what little he understood, on the uttermost edges of this, Devin fel
t a lump gather in his throat, making it difficult to swallow. He looked at th
e two of them and he couldn't have said which man he admired more in that mome
nt. The one who had asked, knowing what he asked, or the one who had given, kn
owing what he gave. He had an awareness though, humbling, inescapable, of how
far yet he had to travel—a distance he might never traverse—before he could
name himself a man after the fashion of these two.
"Does either of you have any idea," Erlein di Senzio broke into the stillness,
his voice grim as death, "how many innocent men and women may be butchered be
cause of what you are about to do?"
Marius said nothing. Alessan wheeled on the wizard though.
"Have you any idea," he said, his eyes like chips of grey ice, "how close I am
to killing you for saying that?" Erlein paled but did not draw back. Nor did
his own eyes flinch away.
"I did not ask to be born into this time, charged by my birth with trying to s
et it right," Alessan said, his voice held tightly again as if under a leash.
"I was the youngest child. This should have been my brothers' burden, either o
r both of them. They died by the Deisa. Among the lucky ones." Bitterness crac
ked through for a moment.
And was beaten back. "I am trying to act for the whole of the Palm. Not just f
or Tigana and her lost name. I have been reviled as a traitor and a fool for d
oing so. My mother has cursed me because of this. I will accept that from her.
To her I will hold myself accountable for blood and death and the destruction
of what Tigana was if I fail. I will not hold myself subject to your judgment
, Erlein di Senzio! I do not need you to tell me who or what is at risk in thi
s. I need you to do what I tell you, nothing more! If you are going to die a s
lave you might as well be mine as anyone else's. You are going to fight with m
e, Senzian. Whether through your will or against it you are going to fight wit
h me for freedom!"
He fell silent. Devin felt himself trembling, as if a titanic thunderstorm had
shaken the sky above the mountains and gone.
"Why do you let him live?" Marius of Quileia asked.
Alessan fought to collect himself. He seemed to consider the matter. "Because
he is a brave man in his own way," he answered at length. "Because it is true
that his people will be placed in great danger by this. Because I have wronged
him by his lights, and by my own. And because I have need of him."
Marius shook his large head. "It is bad to have need of a man."
"I know, Bear."
"He may come back to you, even years later, and ask you for something very lar
ge. Something your heart will not let you refuse."
"I know, Bear," said Alessan. The two men looked at each other, sitting motion
less on the golden carpet.
Devin turned away, feeling like an intruder on that exchange of glances. In th
e stillness of that pass below the heights of the Braccio Range birdsong rang
out with piercing sweetness and, looking up to the south, Devin saw that the l
ast of the high white clouds had drifted apart, revealing the dazzle of sunlit
snow on the peaks. The world seemed to be a place of more beauty and more pai
n than he could ever have imagined it to be.
When they rode back down from the pass Baerd was waiting for them a few miles
south of the castle, alone on his horse among the green of the foothills.
His eyes widened when he saw Devin and Erlein, and a rare amusement was visibl
e even behind his beard, as Alessan pulled to a halt in front of him.
"You," said Baerd, "are even worse at these things than I am, despite everythi
ng you say."
"Not worse. As bad, perhaps," Alessan said, ruefully ducking his head. "After
all, your only reason for refusing to come was so that he wouldn't feel any ex
tra pressure to—"
"And after lashing me verbally for that, you go and take two complete stranger
s to reduce the pressure even more. I stand my ground: you are worse than I am
."
"Lash me verbally," Alessan said.
Baerd shook his head. "How is he?"
"Well enough. Under strain. Devin stopped an assassination attempt up there."

"What?" Baerd glanced quickly at Devin, noting the torn shirt and hose and the
scrapes and cuts.
"You are going to have to teach me how to use a bow," Devin said. "There's les
s wear and tear."
Baerd smiled. "I will. First chance we have." Then something seemed to occur t
o him. "An assassination?" he said to Alessan. "In the mountains? Surely not!"

Alessan's expression was grim. "I'm afraid so. She carried a moon bow with a l
ock of his hair. The mountain taboo has obviously been lifted—at least for th
e purposes of murder."
Baerd's features creased with concern. He sat on his horse quietly a moment, t
hen: "So he had no option really. He needs to act immediately. He said no?"
"He said yes. We have six months and he will send the letters." Alessan hesita
ted. "He asked us to build a bonfire to his memory if he dies."
Baerd suddenly turned his horse away. He sat staring fixedly off to the west.
The late-afternoon sun was shedding an amber glow over the heather and bracken
of the hills.
"I love that man," Baerd said, still gazing into the distance.
"I know," said Alessan. Slowly, Baerd turned back to him. They exchanged a loo
k in silence.
"Senzio?" said Baerd.
Alessan nodded. "You will have to explain to Alienor how to set up in the inte
rception. These two will come west with me. You and Catriana and the Duke go n
orth and then into Tregea. We start reaping what we've sown, Baerd. You know t
he timing as well as I do, and you'll know what to do until we meet again, who
we'll want from the east. I'm not sure about Rovigo—I'll leave that to you."

"I'm not happy about separate roads," Baerd murmured.
"Neither am I, if you must know. If you have an alternative I'd be grateful to
hear it."
Baerd shook his head. "What will you do?"
"Speak to some people on the way. See my mother. After that it depends on what
I find. My own reaping in the west before summer comes."
Baerd glanced briefly at Devin and Erlein. "Try not to let yourself be hurt,"
he said.
Alessan gave his shrug. "She's dying, Baerd. And I've hurt her enough in eight
een years."
"You have not!" the other replied with sudden anger. "You only wound yourself
if you think that way."
Alessan sighed. "She is dying unknown and alone in a Sanctuary of Eanna in a p
rovince called Lower Corte. She is not in the Palace by the Sea in Tigana. Do
not say she has not been hurt."
"But not by you!" Baerd protested. "Why do you do this to yourself?"
Again the shrug. "I have made certain choices in a dozen years since we came b
ack from Quileia. I am willing to accept that others may disagree with those c
hoices." His eyes flicked to Erlein. "Leave it, Baerd. I promise not to let th
is unbalance me, even without you there. Devin will help if I need help."
Baerd grimaced behind his beard and looked as if he would pursue the matter fu
rther, but when he spoke again it was in a different voice. "You think this is
it, then? You think it truly might happen now?"
"I think it has to happen this summer or it never will. Unless, I suppose, som
eone does kill Marius in Quileia and we go back to stasis here, with nothing a
t all to work with. Which would mean that my mother and a great many other peo
ple were right. In which case you and I will simply have to sail into Chiara h
arbor and storm the palace walls alone and kill Brandin of Ygrath and watch th
e Palm become an outpost of Barbadior's Empire. And what price Tigana then?"
He checked himself. Then continued in a lower voice: "Marius is the one wild c
ard we have ever had, the one thing I've been waiting for and working for all
these years. And he's just agreed to let us play him as we need. We have a cha
nce. It may not hurt to do some praying, all of us, in the days to come. This
has been long enough in arriving."
Baerd was very still. "Long enough," he echoed finally, and something in his v
oice sent a chill into Devin. "Eanna light your path through the Ember Days an
d beyond." He paused, glanced at Erlein. "All three of you."
Alessan's expression spoke a world of things. "And yours, the three of you," w
as all he said though, before he turned his horse and started away to the west
.
Following him, Devin glanced back once and saw that Baerd had not moved. He sa
t astride his horse watching them, and the sunlight fell on his hair and beard
burnishing them back toward the golden color Devin remembered from their firs
t meeting. He was too far away for his expression to be discerned.
Devin raised a hand in farewell, palm spread wide and then, surprised and glad
dened, saw Erlein abruptly do the same.
Baerd lifted one arm high in salute to them, then twitched his horse's reins a
nd turned north to ride away.
Alessan, setting a steady pace into the setting sun, did not look back at all.

PART FOUR - THE PRICE OF BLOOD

chapter 13
TIME BEFORE DAWN—SHE WASN'T SURE WHAT HOUR IT was—Dianora rose from bed and
walked to the windows overlooking her balcony. In the end, she had not slept a
ll night. Neither, as it happened, had her brother, a very long way to the sou
th, fighting in the Ember war and then sharing the beginning of spring on a hi
lltop won from the Darkness.
She herself had shared nothing with anyone that night, lying alone in her bed,
visited by ghosts and memories. Now she looked out upon a cold darkness that
had little in it of springtime or the promise of growth to come. The late star
s still shone though the moon had long since set. A wind blew in from off the
sea. She could just make out the banners flapping from the masts of the ships
in the harbor beyond the Ring Dive pier.
One of those ships was newly in from Ygrath. It had carried Isolla the singer
here. It would not carry her back.
"Khav, my lady?" Scelto said quietly from behind her.
She nodded without turning. "Please. And then come sit with me, we have someth
ing to talk about." If she moved quickly enough, she thought, if she set it al
l in motion without giving herself time for hesitation or fear, she might poss
ibly do this thing. Otherwise she was lost.
She could hear Scelto bustling efficiently in the small kitchen that was a par
t of her suite of rooms. The fire had been kept going all night. Ygrath might
not observe the same spring and autumn rituals as the Palm, but Brandin had se
ldom interfered with local customs or religion, and Dianora never lit a new fl
ame on any of the Ember Days. Neither did most of the women in the saishan, if
it came to that. The eastern wing of the palace would be a dark place after s
unset for two more nights.
She thought about stepping out on the balcony, but it looked much too cold. Th
ere were no signs of life yet down below. She thought about Camena di Chiara.
At sunrise they would probably bring him out, his bones broken, to die on a wh
eel in the sight of the people. She turned her mind away from that image too.

"Here is the khav," Scelto said. "I made it very strong," he added awkwardly.

She did turn at that, and her heart ached a little to see the helpless worry i
n his eyes. She knew how he would have grieved for her last night. The marks o
f sleeplessness were in his face; she supposed they were in her own as well. S
he could guess how she must look this morning. She forced a smile and accepted
the mug he offered. It was warm to her hand and comforting, even before she d
rank.
She sat in one of the chairs by the window and motioned him to the other. He h
esitated a moment and then sat down. She was silent, weighing her words. She r
ealized, abruptly, that she had no idea how to do this subtly. So much, she th
ought wryly, for the cynical manipulator of the court.
Taking a deep breath, she said, "Scelto, I need to be out on the mountain this
morning alone. I know all of the difficulties, but I have my reasons and they
are important. How can we arrange it?"
His smooth brow furrowed. He said nothing though, and she realized that he was
thinking about an answer to her question, not trying to judge or understand i
t. She had feared a different sort of reaction, but realized, belatedly, that
she should not have. Never with him.
He said, "It will depend on whether they do the mountain run today."
Her heart swelled with love for him. He hadn't even asked her reasons. "Why wo
uld they not run it?" she asked stupidly, and realized the answer even as he r
eplied.
"Camena," he said. "I don't know if the King will allow the spring run on the
same day as an execution. If they are doing the race then you will be invited
to come watch the ending from the King's pavilion in the meadow as you always
are."
"I have to be alone," she repeated. "And up the mountain."
"Alone with me," he modified. It was almost a plea.
She sipped her khav. This was the difficult part. "Some of the way, Scelto," s
he said. "There is a thing I must do there by myself. I will have to leave you
partway up."
She watched him wrestle with that. Before he could speak she added, "I would n
ot say this if it were not necessary. There is no one I would rather have by m
y side."
She did not say what it was necessary for and she saw him fighting to hold bac
k the question. He did hold it back though, and she knew what it would have co
st him.
He rose. "I'll have to find out what is happening then. I'll be back soon. If
they are running we will at least have an excuse to be outside. If they aren't
, we'll have to think further on this."
She nodded gratefully and watched him go, neat and trim, infinitely reassuring
in his competence. She finished her khav, looking out the window. It was stil
l dark outside. She walked into the other room to wash and dress herself, doin
g so with some care, knowing it might matter today. She chose a simple brown w
oolen robe, and belted it at the waist. This was an Ember Day, not a time for
splendor of apparel. There was a hood to hide her hair; that too might matter.

By the time she was done Scelto had returned. He had a queer expression on his
face.
"They are running," he said. "And Camena is not going to be executed on the wh
eel."
"What happened to him?" she asked, feeling an instinctive dread.
Scelto hesitated. "The word is being put about that he has been granted a merc
iful death already. Because the actual conspiracy was from Ygrath and Camena w
as merely a victim, a tool."
She nodded. "And what has really happened."
Scelto's face was troubled. "This may be a thing you were better not to know,
my lady."
It probably was, she thought. But she had come too far in the night, and had t
oo far yet to go. This was no morning for sheltering, or trying to seek shelte
r. "Perhaps," was all she said. "But I would prefer you to tell me, Scelto."
He said, after a moment: "I have been told that he is going to be . . . altere
d. Rhun is growing old and the King must have a Fool. It is necessary to have
one in readiness, and it can take a long time, depending on the circumstances.
"
The circumstances, Dianora thought, sickened. Such as whether the Fool-in-wait
ing had been a healthy, gifted, normal young man with a love of his home.
Even understanding what the Fools of Ygrath were to their Kings, even grasping
that Camena had forfeited his life by what he had done yesterday, she still c
ould not stop her stomach from turning at the implications of Scelto's words.
She remembered Rhun hacking at Isolla's body yesterday. She remembered Brandin
's face. She forced her mind away from that. She couldn't afford to think abou
t Brandin this morning. In fact, she was better off not thinking about anythin
g at all.
"Have I been summoned yet?" she asked tersely.
"Not yet. You will be." She could hear tension in his voice; the news about Ca
mena had evidently disturbed him as well.
"I know I will," she said. "I don't think we can wait though. If I go out with
the others it will be impossible to slip away. What do you think would happen
if we two tried to walk down together now?"
Her tone was steady and calm; Scelto's face grew thoughtful. "We can try," he
said after a moment.
"Then come."
Her fear was very simple: if she waited too long, or considered this too much
she would be paralyzed by doubt. The thing was to move, and to keep on moving,
until she reached a certain place.
What would happen then, if anything, she would leave to the Triad's grace.
Her heart beating rapidly, she followed Scelto out of her rooms and into the m
ain saishan corridor. The first thin streaks of light were showing now through
the windows at the eastern end. The two of them went the other way, passing t
wo young castrates who were moving toward Vencel's rooms. Dianora looked strai
ght at them. She was pleased—for the first time—to see fear spark in the eye
s of both of the boys. Today fear was a weapon, a tool, and she would need all
the tools she could find.
Scelto led her, not hurrying, down the wide stairway towards the double doors
that led to the outside world. She caught up to him just as he rapped. When th
e guard outside opened she stepped through without waiting for his challenge o
r Scelto's announcement. She fixed him with a cool glance as she went by, and
saw his eyes widen as he recognized her. She began walking down the long hallw
ay. As she went past the other guard she saw that he was the young one she'd s
miled at yesterday. Today she did not smile.
Behind her she heard Scelto speak one quick, cryptic sentence, and then anothe
r in answer to a question. Then she heard his footsteps coming down the corrid
or. A moment later the door swung shut behind them. Scelto caught up to her.
"I think it will take a brave man to stop you today," he said quietly. "They a
ll know what happened yesterday. It is a good morning to be trying this."
It was the only morning she would ever be trying this, Dianora thought.
"What did you tell them?" she asked, continuing to walk.
"The only thing I could think of. You are going to a meeting with d'Eymon abou
t what happened yesterday."
She slowed a little, considering that, and as she did, the glimmerings of a pr
oper plan came to her, like the first faint illumination of the sun rising in
the east above the mountains.
"Good," she said, nodding her head. "Very good, Scelto. That is exactly what I
'm doing." Two other guards walked past them, taking no notice at all. "Scelto
," she said, when they were alone again, "I need you to find d'Eymon. Say I wa
nt to speak with him alone before we all go out this afternoon for the end of
the race. Tell him I'll be waiting in the King's Garden two hours from now."
Two hours might or might not be enough; she didn't know. But somewhere in the
vast expanse of the King's Garden on the north side of the palace she knew the
re was a gate that led out to the meadows, and then the slopes of Sangarios be
yond.
Scelto stopped, forcing her to do the same.
"You are going to go without me, aren't you?" he said.
She would not lie to him. "I am," she said. "I expect to be back in time for t
hat meeting. After you give him the message go back to the saishan. He doesn't
know we're out already, so he'll have to send for me. Make sure the message g
oes directly to you, I don't care how."
"They usually do," he said quietly, clearly unhappy.
"I know that. When he does send we'll have our excuse for being out. Two hours
from now come back down yourself. I should be in the garden with him. Look fo
r us there."
"And if you aren't?"
She shrugged. "Stall. Hope. I have to do this, Scelto, I told you."
He looked at her a moment longer, and then nodded his head once. They went on.
Just before reaching the sweep of the Grand Staircase on their left Scelto tu
rned right and they went down a smaller stairwell to the ground level. It brou
ght them out into another east-west corridor. There was no one there. The pala
ce was only just beginning to stir.
She looked over at Scelto. Their eyes met. For a fleeting moment she was sorel
y tempted to confide in him, to make an ally of a friend.
What could she say, though? How explain in the middle of a dawn corridor the d
ark night and the train of years that had led her here?
She put a hand on his shoulder and squeezed. "Go now," she said. "I'll be all
right."
Without looking back she walked alone a little way down the hallway, pushed op
en two glass doors leading to the labyrinth of the King's Garden, and went out
into the grey, cold beginning of dawn.
It hadn't always been known as the King's Garden, nor had it always been as wi
ld as it was now. The Grand Dukes of Chiara had shaped this pleasure ground fo
r themselves over successive generations, and it had changed over the years as
tastes and styles in the Island court had changed.
When Brandin of Ygrath had first arrived it had been a glittering exercise in
topiary: hedges artfully trimmed in the shapes of birds and animals, trees pre
cisely spaced and arranged throughout the enormous walled expanse of the garde
n, wide walks with sculpted benches at easy intervals, each one under a sejoia
planted for fragrance and shade. There had been one tidy box-hedged maze with
a lover's seat at the center, and rows and rows of flowers carefully arrayed
in complementary colors.
Tame and boring, the King of Ygrath had labeled it the first time he walked th
rough.
Within two years the garden had changed again. A great deal this time. The wal
kways were less wide now, dappled and overhung with leaves in summer and fall.
They twisted seemingly at random through the densely planted groves of trees—
brought down with some labor from the mountain slopes and the forests on the n
orth side of the Island. Some of the sculpted benches remained, and the thick
and fragrant flower beds, but the bird hedges and the animal bushes had been t
he first things to go, and the neat, symmetrically pruned shrubs and serrano b
ushes had been allowed to grow out, higher and darker, like the trees. The maz
e was gone: the whole of the garden was a maze now.
An underground stream had been tapped and diverted and now the sound of runnin
g water was everywhere. There were leafy pools one might stumble upon, with ov
erhanging trees for shade in the summer's heat. The King's Garden was a strang
e place now, not overgrown and most certainly not neglected, but deliberately
shaped to give a sense of stillness and isolation and even, at times, of dange
r.
Times such as this, with the dawn wind still cold and the scarcely risen sun j
ust beginning to warm the air. Only the earliest buds were on the branches of
the trees, and only the first flowers of the season— anemones and wild caiana
roses—adding flashes of color to the wan morning. The winter trees stood tal
l and dark against the grey sky.
Dianora shivered and closed the glass doors behind her. She took a deep breath
of the sharp air and looked up at the clouds piled high above the mountain, h
iding the peak of Sangarios. Over to the east the clouds were beginning to bre
ak up; it would be a mild day later. Not yet though. She stood at the edge of
the wildness of an end-of-winter garden and tried to guide herself towards ste
adiness and calm.
She knew there was a gate in the northern wall, but she wasn't sure she rememb
ered where. Brandin had showed it to her one summer's night years ago when the
y had walked for miles aimlessly amid fireflies and the drone of crickets and
the sound of unseen water splashing in the darkness beyond the torchlit paths.
He had brought her to a gate he'd stumbled upon one day, half-hidden by climb
ing vines and a rose bush. He had shown it to her in the darkness, with torche
s behind them and blue Ilarion overhead.
He had held her hand that night as they walked, she remembered, and talked to
her about herbs and the properties of flowers. He had told her an Ygrathen fai
ry tale of a forest princess born in some far distant otherworld, on an enchan
ted bed of snow-white flowers that bloomed only in the dark.
Dianora shook her head, pushing the memory away, and set off briskly down one
of the smaller, pebbly paths leading northeast through the trees. After twenty
strides she could no longer see the palace when she looked back. Overhead the
birds were beginning to sing. It was still cold. She put up her hood, feeling
, as she did so, like the brown-robed priestess of some unknown sylvan god.
And thinking so, she prayed to the god she did know and to Morian and Eanna, t
hat the Triad might send her wisdom and the clear heart she had come out this
Ember morning to find. She was intensely aware of what day this was.
At almost exactly the same moment, Alessan, Prince of Tigana was riding out fr
om Castle Borso in the Certandan highland towards a meeting in the Braccio Pas
s that he thought might change the world.
Dianora walked past a bed of anemones, much too small and delicate yet to pick
. They were white, which made them Eanna's. The red ones were Morian's, except
in Tregea where they were said to be stained by the blood of Adaon on his mou
ntain. She stopped and looked down at the flowers, their fragile petals shaken
by the breeze; but her thoughts were back with Brandin's fairy tale of the fa
r away princess born under summer stars, cradled on such flowers.
She closed her eyes then, knowing that this would not do.
And slowly, deliberately, searching out pain as a spur, a goad, she built up a
mental image of her father riding away, and then of her mother, and then of B
aerd among the soldiers in the square. When she opened her eyes to go on there
were no fairy tales in her heart.
The paths twisted hopelessly, but the main cloud mass was to the north over th
e mountain and she kept that in front of her as best she could. It was strange
to be wandering like this, almost lost among the trees, and Dianora realized,
with a start, that it had been a great many years since she'd last been so al
one.
She had only two hours and a long way to go. She quickened her pace. A little
later the sun came up on her right and the next time she looked up part of the
sky was blue above her and gulls were wheeling against that blue. She pushed
back her hood and shook her long hair free, and just then she saw the thick, h
igh grey stone of the northern wall through a screen of oh've trees.
Vines and clumps of laren moss were growing along the wall, purple and dark gr
een. The path ended at the olives, forking east and west. She stood a moment,
irresolute, trying to orient herself within a memory of summer and torches at
night. Then she shrugged and went west, because her heart always did that.
Ten minutes later, winding past a pool and a ruffled reflection of white cloud
s within it, Dianora came to the gate.
She stopped, suddenly cold again, though the morning was warmer now with the s
un. She looked at the arched shape and the rusted iron hinges. The gate was ve
ry old; there seemed to have been something carved on it once, but whatever im
age or symbol had been there was almost entirely worn away. The gate was overg
rown with ivy and vines. The rose bush she remembered was bare yet on this fir
st day of spring, but the thorns were long and sharp. She saw the heavy bolt,
as rusted as the hinges. There was no lock, but she was suddenly uncertain whe
ther she would even be able to move the corroded bolt. She wondered who had la
st gone through this gate into the meadows beyond. Who and when and why. She t
hought about climbing, and looked up. The wall was ten feet high, but she thou
ght there might be hand and toeholds there. She was about to move forward when
she heard a sound behind her.
Thinking about it afterwards she tried to understand why she hadn't been more
frightened than she was. Somewhere in her mind, she decided, she must have tho
ught that this might happen. The grey rock on the mountainside had been only a
starting point. There was no reason in the world to expect that she might fin
d that rock, or find what she needed there.
She turned in the King's Garden, alone among the trees and the earliest flower
s, and saw the riselka combing her long green hair beside a pool.
They are only found when they want to be, she remembered. And then she had ano
ther thought and she looked quickly around to see if anyone else was there.
They were quite alone in the garden though, or in this part of the garden. The
riselka smiled, as if reading Dianora's mind. She was naked, small and very s
lender, but her hair was so long it almost served her as a robe. Her skin was
as translucent as Brandin had said it had been and the eyes were enormous, alm
ost frighteningly so, pale as milk in the pale white face.
She looks like you, Brandin had said. Or, no. She reminded me of you, was what
he'd said. And in an eerie, chilling fashion Dianora had a sense of what he m
eant. She had a memory of herself in the year Tigana fell, too thin and pale,
her eyes almost as huge as these in the hollows of her face.
Brandin had never seen or known her then.
shivered. The riselka's smile deepened. There was nothing of Warmth in her, or
comfort. Dianora didn't know if she had expected either of those. She didn't
really know what she had expected to find. She had come for the clear path of
the old foretelling verse, and it seemed that if she was to find it, it would
be here among the intricately winding ways of the King's Garden.
The riselka was beautiful, heartbreakingly so, in a fashion that had little to
do with mortal beauty. Dianora's mouth was dry. She didn't even try to speak.
She stood very still in her plain brown robe, her owrx dark hair unbound and
falling down her back, and she watched the riselka lay a bone-white comb down
on the stone bench by the pool and motion to her.
Slowly, her hands beginning to tremble, Dianora walked off the path and under
an arch of trees to stand before that pale, elusive creature of legend. She wa
s so near she could see the green hair shine in the soft morning light. The pa
le eyes had shadings to them, and depth. The riselka lifted one hand, its fing
ers longer and more slender than any mortal's could be, and she brought it up
to Dianora's face and touched her.
The touch was cool, but not so cold as she might have feared. Gently, the rise
lka stroked her cheek and throat. And then, the hieratic, alien smile deepenin
g again, she slipped her hand further down, undid a button of Dianora's robe,
and reached within to touch her breasts. One, and then the other, not hurrying
, smiling that entirely secret smile all the while.
Dianora was trembling; she could not make herself stop. Incredulous and afraid
, she felt her body respond involuntarily to the exploration of that touch. Sh
e could see the riselka's childlike breasts half-hidden beneath the curtain of
hair. Her knees were weak suddenly. The riselka's smile showed small, sharp,
very white teeth. Dianora swallowed, feeling a hurt inside her she could not e
ven begin to understand. She shook her head mutely, unable to speak. She felt
herself beginning to weep.
The riselka's smile faded. She withdrew her hand and, almost apologetically it
seemed, did up the robe again. She reached, as gently as before, and touched
one of the tears on Dianora's cheek. Then she brought her finger to her lips a
nd tasted it.
She is a child, Dianora thought suddenly, a thought cast up on the beach of he
r mind as if by a tide. And even as it came to her, she knew that this was tru
e, however many years this creature might have lived. She wondered if this was
the same slender, numinous figure Baerd had met under moonlight by the sea th
e night he went away.
The riselka touched and then tasted another tear. Her eyes were so large Diano
ra had a sense that she could fall into them and never come out again. It was
a deeply seductive imagining, a pathway to oblivion. She looked for another mo
ment and then slowly, with an effort, shook her head again.
"Please?" she said then, whispered it, needing, and afraid of her need. Afraid
that words or need or longing—anything—could drive a riselka away.
The green-haired creature turned, and Dianora's hands clenched at her sides. B
ut the riselka looked back over her shoulder, grave now, unsmiling, and Dianor
a understood that she was to follow.
They came to the edge of the pool. The riselka was looking down into the water
and so Dianora did the same. She saw a reflection of blue sky overhead, of a
single white gull slicing across the space above the pool, dark green cypresse
s like sentinels and the branches of other trees not yet in leaf. And even as
she looked, she realized, with a chill like winter come back too soon, what wa
s wrong. The wind was blowing above them and all around, she could hear it amo
ng the trees and feel it on her face and in her hair, but the water of the poo
l was like the glass of her mirror, absolutely calm, unruffled by so much as a
tendril of the breeze or any movement in its own depths.
Dianora drew back from the edge and turned to the riselka. The creature was lo
oking at her, the green hair lifted by the breeze and blown back from her smal
l white face. The eyes were darker now, cloudy, and she no longer looked like
a child. She looked like a power of the natural world, or an emissary of such
a power, and not one with any warmth for mortal man or woman. No kindness or s
helter there. But Dianora, fighting a rising fear, reminded herself that she h
ad not come here for shelter, but for a signing of her road, and she saw then
that the riselka held a small white stone in her hand, and she saw her throw t
hat stone into the pool.
No ripples. No movement at all. The stone sank without a trace of its passage.
But the surface of the water changed soon after, and darkened, and then the r
eflections were gone. No cypresses. No morning circle of sky overhead. No bare
trees framing the slant of gulls. The water had grown too dark, it cast nothi
ng back. But Dianora felt the riselka take her hand and draw her gently but in
exorably back to the edge of the pool, and she looked down, having come out fr
om the saishan to find this truth, this signing. And in the dark waters she sa
w a reflection.
Not herself or the riselka, nor anything at all of the King's Garden on this f
irst of the Ember Days. Instead, an image of another season, late spring or su
mmer, another place, bright with color, a great many people gathered, and, som
ehow, she could even hear the sound of them in the image, and beneath that sou
nd, constantly, was the surge and sigh of waves.
And in the depths of the pool Dianora saw an image of herself, clad in a robe
green as the riselka's hair, moving alone between those gathered people. And t
hen she saw, in the pool, where her steps were leading her.
Fear touched her in that moment with an icy hand for one second and then was g
one. She felt her racing heartbeat slow, and then grow slower yet. A deep calm
came over her. And a moment later, not without its burden of sorrow, came acc
eptance. For years her nights had known dreams of such an ending. This morning
she had come out of the saishan looking for this certainty. And now, above th
is pool, her path came clear to her at last and Dianora saw that it led to the
sea.
The sounds of gathered people faded away, and then all the images, the bright
sun of summer. The pool was dark again giving nothing back at all.
Some time later, it might have been moments or hours, Dianora looked up again.
The riselka was still beside her. Dianora looked into the pale eyes, so much
lighter than the enchanted waters but seemingly as deep, and she saw herself a
s a child again, so many years ago. Yet not so many, a blink of an eye or the
moment it took an autumn leaf to fall, as this creature would measure time.
"Thank you," she whispered. And: "I understand."
And she stood very still, not flinching at all, as the riselka rose up on tipt
oe and kissed her, soft as the wing of a butterfly, upon the lips. There was n
o hint of desire this time, in the giving or receiving. This was the aftermath
, the consummation had come and gone. The riselka's mouth tasted of salt. The
salt, Dianora knew, of her own tears. She no longer felt any fear at all; only
a quiet sadness like a smooth stone in the heart.
She heard a ripple of sound and turned back to the pool. The cypresses were re
flected again, their images ruffled and broken now by the movement of the wate
r in the wind.
When she looked away again, pushing her hair back from her face, she saw that
she was alone.
When she came back out to the open space before the palace doors d'Eymon was w
aiting for her, dressed formally in grey, his Seal of Office about his neck. H
e was sitting on one of the stone benches, his staff resting beside him. Scelt
o hovered by the doors, and Dianora saw the flash of relief he could not hide
when she came out from among the trees.
She stopped and looked at the Chancellor allowing a slight smile to show on he
r face. It was artifice of course, but an act she could do unconsciously by no
w. In d'Eymon's normally inscrutable expression she read edginess and anger, a
nd other signs of what had happened yesterday. He would probably be spoiling f
or a fight, she guessed. It was difficult, amazingly difficult, to switch back
to the manners and affairs of state. It was also something that had to be don
e.
"You were late," she said mildly, walking towards him. He had risen, with perf
ect courtesy, as she approached. "I went walking in the garden. There are anem
ones beginning already."
"I was precisely on time," d'Eymon said.
She might once have been intimidated, but not now. He would be wearing the Sea
l as an attempt to reinforce his authority, but she knew how badly yesterday w
ould have unsettled him. She was fairly certain he would have offered to kill
himself last night; he was a man for whom the old traditions mattered. In any
case, she was armored against him: she had seen a riselka this morning.
"Then I must have been early," she said carelessly. "Forgive me. It is good to
see you looking so well after yesterday's . . . confusions. Have you been wai
ting long?"
"Long enough. You wanted to talk about yesterday, I gather. What is it?" Diano
ra didn't think she had ever heard an inconsequential remark from d'Eymon, let
alone a pleasantry.
Refusing to be rushed she sat down on the bench he had just vacated and brushe
d her brown robe smooth over her knees. She clasped her fingers in her lap and
looked up, letting her expression grow suddenly as cold as his own.
"He almost died yesterday," she said flatly, deciding only in that moment what
her tack would be. "He would have died. Do you know why, Chancellor?" She did
n't wait for his answer. "The King almost died because your people were too co
mplacent or too slovenly to bother searching a party of Ygrathens. What did yo
u think? That danger could only come from the Palm? I expect yesterday's guard
s to be dealt with, d'Eymon. And soon."
The use of his name and not his title was deliberate. He opened his mouth and
closed it, visibly biting back a swift retort. She was pushing things, Triad k
new how hard she was pushing with this, but if ever there was going to be a ch
ance for her to do so, this would be it. D'Eymon's face was white with anger a
nd shock. He took a deep breath to control himself.
"They have been dealt with already," he said. "They are dead."
She hadn't expected that. She managed, with an effort, to keep her discomfitur
e out of her eyes. "There is more," she went on pressing her advantage. "I wan
t to know why Camena di Chiara was not watched when he went to Ygrath last yea
r."
"He was watched. What would you have had us do? You know who was behind yester
day's attack. You heard."
"We all heard. Why did you not know about Isolla and the Queen?" This time the
bite she put into the words was real, not merely tactical.
For the first time she saw a flicker of hesitation in his eyes. He fingered hi
s Seal, then seemed to become aware that he was doing so and dropped his hand
to his side. There was a brief silence.
"I did know," he said finally. His eyes met her own, a question in them like a
n angry challenge.
"I see," said Dianora a moment later, and looked away. The sun was higher now,
slanting across most of the clearing. If she moved a little along the bench i
ts warmth would fall upon her. The harsh, unspoken question in d'Eymon's eyes
hung in the air: Would you have told the King, knowing these things about his
Queen?
Dianora was silent, tracking implications to their endings. With this admissio
n, she realized, d'Eymon was hers, if he hadn't already been so after his fail
ure yesterday and what she had done to save the King. She was also, she though
t, in fairly immediate danger as a consequence. The Chancellor was not a man t
o be treated lightly, ever. Most of the saishan had their suspicions as to how
Chloese di Chiara had died ten years ago, and why.
She looked up, and let her rising anger keep the anxiety from showing. "Wonder
ful," she said acidly. "Such efficient security. And now, of course, because o
f what I was forced to do your pet courtier Neso simply has to receive the pos
ting in Asoli, doesn't he. With a wound of honor earned saving the life of the
King. How marvelously clever of you, d'Eymon!"
She had miscalculated. For the first time he smiled, a narrow, mirthless expre
ssion. "Is that what this is about?" he asked softly.
She bit back a swift denial. It was not inconvenient for him to think so, she
realized.
"Among other things," she admitted, as if grudgingly. "I want to know why you
have been favoring him for the Asoli posting. I had been meaning to talk to yo
u about this."
"I thought as much," he said, a measure of his usual complacency returning. "I
have also been keeping track of some—not all, I have no doubt—of the gifts
Scelto has been receiving in your name these past weeks. That was a splendid n
ecklace yesterday, by the way. Did Neso's money pay for it? In an attempt to h
ave you win me over to his side?"
He was immensely well-informed, and he was shrewd. She had always known these
things. It was never wise to underestimate the Chancellor.
"It helped pay for it," she said briefly. "You haven't answered my question. W
hy do you favor him? You must know what sort of man he is."
"Of course I know," d'Eymon replied impatiently. "Why do you think I want him
out of here? I want him posted to Asoli because I don't trust him at court. I
want him away from the King and in a place where he can be killed without undu
e inconvenience. I trust that answers your question?"
She swallowed. Never, ever underestimate him, she told herself again. "It does
," she said. "Killed by whom?"
"That should be obvious. It will be put about that the Asolini did it themselv
es. I expect it will not take Neso long to give them cause."
"Of course. And then?"
"And then the King will investigate and find that Neso was guilty of gross cor
ruption, which we need not doubt he will be. We execute some man or other for
the murder but the King declares his firm renunciation of Neso's methods and g
reed. He appoints a new Taxing Master and promises fairer measures in the futu
re. I think that should quiet affairs in north Asoli for a time."
"Good," said Dianora, trying to ignore the casual indifference of that some ma
n or other. "And very tidy. I have only one thing to add: the new officer will
be Rhamanus." She was taking another risk, she knew. When it came down to bed
rock, she was a captive and a concubine, and he was the Chancellor of Ygrath a
nd of the Western Palm. On the other hand, there were other ways to measure th
e balance here, and she fought to focus on those.
D'Eymon looked coolly down at her. She kept her gaze on his, her eyes wide and
disingenuous.
"It has long amused me," he said at length, "that you so favored the man who c
aptured you. One would think you hadn't minded, that you wanted to come."
Perilously, uncannily near to the mark, but she could see he was baiting her,
not serious in his thrust. She forced herself to relax, and smiled. "How could
I mind being here? I'd never have had a chance at pleasant meetings such as t
his. And in any case," she let her tone change, "I do favor him, yes. On behal
f of the people of this peninsula I do. And you know that that will always be
my concern, Chancellor. He is a decent man. There are not many such Ygrathens,
I'm afraid."
He was silent a moment. Then: "There are more than you think." But before she
could manage to interpret either his words or the surprising voice in which th
ey were spoken, he added, "I seriously thought of having you poisoned last nig
ht. Either that, or suggesting you be freed and made a citizen of Ygrath."
"What extremes, my dear!" She could feel herself growing cold though. "Didn't
you teach us all that balance is everything?"
"I did," he said soberly, not rising to her bait. He never did. "Have you any
idea what you've done to the equilibrium at this court?"
"What," she said with real asperity, "would you have preferred me to do yester
day?"
"That is not at all the point. Obviously." There was a rare spot of color in h
is cheeks. When he resumed, though, it was in his usual tones. "I was thinking
of Rhamanus for Asoli myself. It shall be as you suggest. In the meantime, I
very nearly forgot to mention that the King has sent for you. I intercepted th
e message before it reached the saishan. He will be waiting in the library."
She shot to her feet, as agitated as he must have known she would be. "How lon
g ago?" she asked quickly.
"Not very. Why? You don't seem to mind being late. There are anemones in the g
arden, you could tell him that."
"I could tell him some other things as well, d'Eymon." Anger almost choked her
. She fought for control.
"And so could I. And so, I suppose, could Solores. We seldom do, do we? The ba
lance, as you have just pointed out, is everything. That is why I should still
be very careful, Dianora, despite what happened yesterday. The balance is all
. Do not forget it."
She tried to think of a response, a last word, but failed. Her mind was whirli
ng. He had spoken of killing her, of freeing her, had agreed with her choice f
or Asoli, and then threatened her again. All in a span of minutes! And all the
while the King had been waiting for her, and d'Eymon had known.
She turned, abruptly and dismally conscious of her nondescript robe and the fa
ct that she had no time to go back up to the saishan and change. She could fee
l herself flushing with anger and anxiety.
Scelto had evidently overheard the Chancellor's last remarks. His eyes above t
he broken nose were vividly concerned and apologetic, though with d'Eymon inte
rcepting the message there was nothing he could have done.
She stopped by the palace doors and looked back. The Chancellor stood alone in
the garden leaning upon his stick, a tall, gray, thin figure against the bare
trees. The sky above him had turned overcast again. Of course it has, Dianora
thought spitefully.
Then she remembered the pool and her mood changed. What did these court maneuv
ers matter, in the end? D'Eymon was only doing what he had to do, and so now,
would she. She had seen her path. She found herself able to smile, letting tha
t inner quiet descend upon her again, though with a stone of sorrow at its cen
ter still. She sank low in a very formal curtsey. D'Eymon, taken aback, sketch
ed an awkward bow.
Dianora turned and went through the doors that Scelto was holding for her. She
went back down the corridor and up the stairs, along a north-south hallway an
d past two heavy doors. She stopped in front of the third pair of doors. Out o
f reflex and habit more than anything else she checked her reflection in the b
ronze shield that hung on the wall. She adjusted her robe and pushed both hand
s through her hopelessly wind-blown hair.
Then she knocked on the library doors and entered, holding hard to her calm an
d the vision of the pool, a round stone of knowledge and sorrow in her heart t
hat she hoped would anchor it in her breast and keep it from flying away.
Brandin was standing with his back to the door looking at a very old map of th
e then known world that hung above the larger of the fires. He did not turn. S
he looked up at the map. On it, the Peninsula of the Palm and even the larger
land mass of Quileia beyond the mountains running all the way south to the Ice
, were dwarfed by the size of Barbadior and its Empire to the east and by Ygra
th to the west overseas.
The velvet window curtains of the library were drawn against the morning light
and a fire was blazing, which bothered her. She found it difficult to deal wi
th flames on an Ember Day. Brandin held a fire-iron in one hand. He was dresse
d as carelessly as she, in black riding clothes and boots. His boots were mudd
y; he must have been out riding very early.
She put the encounter with d'Eymon behind her, but not the riselka in the gard
en. This man was the center of her life; whatever else had changed that had no
t, but the riselka's vision had offered her a path, and Brandin had let her li
e alone and awake all last night.
She said, "Forgive me, my lord. I was with the Chancellor this morning and he
chose to only just now tell me you were waiting here." "Why were you meeting w
ith him?" The nuanced, familiar voice was only mildly interested. He seemed en
grossed in the map.
She did not lie to the King. "The Taxing Master question in Asoli. I wanted to
know why he favored Neso."
There was a faint hint of amusement in his voice. "I'm sure d'Eymon told you s
omething plausible." He turned finally, and gazed at her for the first time. H
e looked exactly the same as he always did, and she knew what always happened
when their glances first met.
But she had seen a riselka an hour ago and something seemed to have changed. H
er calm did not leave her; her heart stayed home. She closed her eyes for an i
nstant, but more to acknowledge the meaning of that change and the passing of
a long truth than anything else. She felt that she would weep, for many reason
s, if she were not extremely careful now.
Brandin sank into a chair by the fire. He looked tired, as much as anything. I
t showed only in small ways, but she had known him a long time. "I will have t
o give it to Neso now," he said. "I think you know that. I'm sorry."
Some things, it seemed, had not changed: always that grave, unexpected courtes
y when he spoke to her of such things. What need had the King of Ygrath to apo
logize to her for choosing one of his courtiers over another? She moved into t
he room, clinging to her resolution, and at his gesture she took the chair opp
osite his. Brandin's eyes rested on her with an odd, almost a detached scrutin
y. She wondered what he would see.
She heard a sound from the far end of the room and, glancing over, saw Rhun si
tting by the second fire, aimlessly leafing through a picture-book. His presen
ce reminded her of something, and she felt her anger suddenly come back.
"Of course you have to offer it to Neso," she said. "Asoli is his prize for ga
llantry in the service of his King." He scarcely responded. Briefly his mouth
quirked, his expression mildly ironic; he still seemed preoccupied though, onl
y half attending to what she said.
"Gallantry, courage. They'll call it something of that sort," he said absently
. "Not getting out of the way in time, it really was. D'Eymon was already arra
nging last night to have word spread that it was Neso who saved my life."
She would not rise to that. She refused. She didn't even understand why he was
saying this to her.
She said, instead, looking across the room at Rhun, not at the King: "That mak
es sense, and you must surely know that I don't care. What I do not understand
is why you are putting out lies about Camena's fate." She took a breath, and
then plunged ahead. "I know the truth. It is such an ugly, vicious thing to do
. If you must prepare a Fool to follow Rhun, why mar a whole man and a healthy
one? Why do such a thing?"
He did not answer for a long time and she was afraid to look at him. Rhun, too
far away to hear, and nonetheless stopped leafing through his book and was lo
oking over at them.
"As it happens, there are precedents," was what Brandin said at length, his to
ne still mild. But then, a moment later, he added, "I should probably have tak
en Scelto away from you a long time ago. You both learn too much, too quickly.
"
She opened her mouth, but no words came out. What could she say? She had asked
for this. For exactly this.
But then, glancing out of the corner of her eye, she saw that Brandin was smil
ing. An odd smile, and there was something strange about his eyes as he looked
at her. He said, "As it also happens, Scelto would have been right this morni
ng, but his tidings are wrong by now."
"What do you mean?" She felt the stirrings of a genuine uneasiness. There was
a strangeness to his manner this morning that she could not lay a finger on. I
t was more than tiredness though, she knew that much.
"I rescinded yesterday's orders after my ride," Brandin said quietly. "Camena
is probably dead by now. An easy death. Exactly as word has been put about."
She discovered that her hands were clutching each other in her lap. She said f
atuously, without thinking, "Is this true?"
He only raised his eyebrows, but she felt herself flush deep red. "I have no n
eed to deceive you, Dianora. I told them to arrange for witnesses among the Ch
iarans, so there would be no doubt. What would confirm it for you: shall I hav
e his head sent to your rooms?"
She looked down again, thinking of Isolla's head bursting like a smashed fruit
. She swallowed; he had done that with a gesture of his hand. She looked back
at the King. Mutely she shook her head. What happened on that ride? What was h
appening here?
Then, abruptly, she remembered what else had occurred to him yesterday. On the
mountainside, at a place where a grey rock stood beside the runners' track. O
ne man sees a riselka: his path forks there. Brandin turned back towards the f
ire, one leg crossed over the other. He laid the point of the iron down on the
hearthstone, leaning it against his chair.
"You haven't asked me why I changed the orders. That's unlike you, Dianora."
"I'm afraid to," she said, truthfully.
He glanced over at that, his dark brows level now, the gray eyes intimidating
with their intelligence. "That's unlike you as well."
"You aren't very . . . like yourself either this morning."
"Fair enough," he said quietly. He looked at her for a moment in silence, then
seemed to consider something else. "Tell me, did d'Eymon make things difficul
t for you just now? Did he ... warn you, or threaten?"
It wasn 't sorcery, she told herself fiercely. Not mind-reading. It was only B
randin being what he was, aware of all the nuances that affected those in thei
r orbits around him.
"Not directly," she said awkwardly. Once she might have seen this as an opport
unity, but the mood this morning was so strange. "He was . . . upset about yes
terday. Afraid, I think, of balances shifting here at the court. Once word is
safely out that it was Neso who saved your life I think the Chancellor will be
easier. It won't be a difficult story for him to spread; things happened very
fast. I doubt anyone saw it clearly."
This time, Brandin's smile as he listened was one she knew and cherished: equa
l to equal, their minds sharing the track of a complex thought. But when she f
inished, his expression changed.
"I did," he said. "I saw it clearly."
She looked away and down again, at her hands in her lap. Your path is clear no
w, she told herself as sternly as she could. Remember that. She had been offer
ed a vision of herself in green beside the sea. And her heart was her own now
after last night. There was a stone holding it there, safe within her breast.

Brandin said, "It would be easy to tell the Neso story, I agree. But I did a g
reat deal of thinking last night and then on my ride this morning. I'll be tal
king to d'Eymon later today, after we watch the runners come home. The tale th
at goes around will be the true one, Dianora."
She wasn't sure she had heard him rightly, and then she was sure, and somethin
g seemed to reach a brim and then spill over a little, like an overflowing win
eglass inside her.
"You should go riding more often," she mumbled. He heard. He laughed softly bu
t she didn't look up. She had a very strong sense that she couldn't afford to
look up.
"Why?" she asked, intent on her interlocked fingers. "Why to both things, then
: Camena's fate, and now this?"
He was silent so long that eventually she did glance up, cautiously. He had tu
rned back to the fire though, and was prodding it with the iron. On the far si
de of the room Rhun had closed his book and was now standing beside his table
looking over at the two of them. He was dressed in black, of course. Exactly l
ike the King.
"Did I ever tell you," said Brandin of Ygrath, very softly, "the legend my nur
se used to tell me as a child about Finavir?"
Her mouth was dry again. Something in his tone, the way he was sitting, the di
scontinuity of his reply.
"No," she said. She tried to think of something witty to add, but failed.
"Finavir, or Finvair," he went on, not really waiting for her response, not lo
oking over at her. "When I grew older and looked in the books of such tales it
was written either way, and hi one or two other fashions sometimes. That ofte
n happens with the stories that come from before the days when we wrote things
down."
He leaned the iron against the chair arm again and sat back, still gazing into
the flames. Rhun had walked a little nearer to them, as if drawn by the story
. He was leaning against one of the heavy window draperies now, kneading a bun
ched fold of it in both hands.
Brandin said, "In Ygrath the tale is sometimes told and sometimes believed tha
t this world of ours, both here in the southern lands and north beyond the des
erts and the rain forests—whatever lies there —is but one of many worlds the
gods sent into Time. The others are said to be far off, scattered among the s
tars, invisible to us."
"There has been such a belief here as well," Dianora said quietly when he paus
ed. "In Certando. In the highlands they once had a teaching that was much the
same, though the priests of the Triad burned people for saying as much." It wa
s true; there had been mass burnings for the Carlozzini heresy in the plague y
ears, long ago.
Brandin said, "We never burned or wheeled people for that thought. They were l
aughed at sometimes, but that is another thing.
What my nurse used to tell me was what her mother told her, and her mother's m
other before, I have no doubt: that some of us are born over and again into va
rious of these worlds until, at the last, if we have earned it by the manner o
f our lives, we are born a final time into Finavir or Finvair which is the nea
rest of all the worlds to where the true gods dwell."
"And after that?" she asked. His quiet words seemed to have become a part of t
he unfolding spell of this day.
"After, no one knew, or would tell me. Nor did any of the parchments and books
I read when I grew older." He shifted in his seat, his beautiful hands restin
g on the carved arms of the chair. "I never liked my nurse's legend of Finavir
. There are other kinds of stories, some of them quite different and many of t
hem I loved, but for some reason that one stayed with me. It bothered me. It s
eemed to make our lives here merely a prelude, inconsequential in themselves,
of importance only for where they would lead us next. I have always needed to
feel that what I am doing matters, here and now."
"I think I would agree with you," she said. Her own hands were gentle in her l
ap now; he had shaped a different mood. "But why are you telling me this, if y
ou have never liked the story?"
The simplest of questions.
And Brandin said, "Because during the nights this past year and more I have ha
d recurring dreams of being reborn far away from all of this, in Finavir." He
looked straight at her then for the first time since beginning the tale, and h
is grey eyes were calm and his voice was steady as he said: "And in all of tho
se dreams you have been at my side and nothing has held us apart, and no one h
as come between."
She had had no warning. None at all, though perhaps the clues had been there a
ll along and she too blind to see. And suddenly she was blind now, helpless te
ars of shock and wonder overflowing in her eyes and a desperate, urgent hammer
ing that she knew to be her heart.
Brandin said, "Dianora, I needed you so much last night I frightened myself. I
did not send for you only because I had to somehow try to come to terms with
what happened to me when you blocked Camena's arrow. Solores was a court decep
tion, no more than that: so they might not think me unmanned by danger. I spen
t the whole night pacing or at my desk, trying to riddle out where my life has
now come. What it means that my wife and only living son should try to kill m
e, and fail only because of you. And thinking about that, consumed by it, I on
ly realized near dawn that I had left you alone all night. My dear, will you e
ver forgive me for that?"
I want time to stop, she was thinking, wiping vainly at her tears, trying to s
ee him clearly. I want never to leave this room, I want to hear these words sp
oken over and over, endlessly, until I die.
"I made a decision on my ride," he said. "I was thinking about what Isolla had
said and I was finally able to accept that she was right. Since I will not, s
ince I cannot possibly change what I am committed to doing here, I must be pre
pared to pay all of the price myself, not through others in Ygrath."
She was shaking, quite unable to stop her tears. He had not touched her, or ev
en moved towards her. Behind him Rhun's face was a twisted mask of pain and ne
ed, and something else. The thing she sometimes saw there, and could not face.
She closed her eyes.
"What will you do?" she whispered. It was hard to speak.
And then he told her. All of it. Named for her the fork in the road he had cho
sen. She listened, her tears falling more slowly now, welling up from an over-
full heart, and at length she came to understand that the wheel was coming ful
l circle.
Listening to Brandin's grave voice over the crackle of flames on an Ember Day,
Dianora saw only images of water in her mind. The dark waters of the pool in
the garden, and the vision of the sea she'd been given there. And though she h
ad no gift of foreknowing she could see where his words were taking them, taki
ng them all, and now she understood the showing of the pool.
She searched her heart and knew, with an enormous grief, that it was his, it h
ad not come back to her after all. Yet even so, and most terribly of all, she
knew what was about to come, what she was going to do.
She had dreamt on other nights alone through her years in the saishan of findi
ng a path like the one that was opening for her now with the words he spoke. A
t one point, listening to him, thinking thus, she could bear the physical dist
ance between them no longer. She moved from her chair to the carpet at his fee
t and laid her head in his lap. He touched her hair and began stroking it, dow
n and down, ceaselessly, as he spoke of what had come to him in the night and
on his ride; spoke of being willing, finally, to accept the price of what he w
as doing here in the Palm; and spoke to her about the one thing she could neve
r have made herself ready for. About love.
She wept quietly, she could not stop weeping as his words continued to flow, a
s the fire slowly died on the hearth. She wept for love of him, and for her fa
mily and her home, for the innocence she had lost to the years and for all tha
t he had lost, and she wept most bitterly of all for the betrayals yet to come
. All the betrayals that lay waiting outside this room where time, which would
not stop, was going to carry them.

chapter 14

“RIDE!” ALESSAN CRIED,  POINTING TOWARDS A GAP IN THE hills. "There's a vill
age beyond!"
Devin swore, lowered his head over his horse's neck, and dug his heels into th
e animal's flanks, following Erlein di Senzio west towards the gap and the low
red disk of the sun.
Behind him, thundering out of the brown twilight hills, were at least eight, p
ossibly a dozen brigands of the highlands. Devin hadn't looked back, after the
ir first startled glimpse of the outlaws and the shouted command to halt.
He didn't think they had a chance, however close this village might be. They h
ad been riding at a bone-jarring pace for hours and the horses Alienor had giv
en them were tired. If this was to be a flat-out race against fresh-mounted ou
tlaws they were probably dead. He gritted his teeth and rode, ignoring the ach
e in his leg and the sting of reopened cuts from his leap in the mountains ear
lier that day.
The wind whistled past him as they rode. He saw Alessan turn in his saddle, an
arrow notched to his fully drawn bow. The Prince fired backwards once and the
n again into the twilight, his muscles ridged and corded with the effort. An i
mprobable, desperate attempt at such speed in the wind.
Two men screamed. Devin quickly looked back and saw one of them fall. A handfu
l of erratic arrows dropped well short of the three of them.
"They've slowed!" Erlein rasped, glancing back as well. "How far to this villa
ge!"
"Through the gap and twenty minutes beyond! Ride!" Alessan did not shoot again
, bending low to urge more speed from his own grey. They fled into the wind al
ong the track of the sun, between the shadowy bulk of two heathery hills and i
nto the gap between.
They didn't get out.
Just where the path bent to follow the curve of the encroaching ridges eight r
iders were waiting in a line across the gap, bows calmly leveled at the three
of them.
They pulled their horses to rearing halts. Devin flung a glance back over his
shoulder and saw the pursuing outlaws entering the pass behind them. There was
one riderless horse, and another man clutched at his shoulder where an arrow
was still embedded.
He looked at Alessan, saw the desperate, defiant look in the Prince's eye.
"Don't be a fool!" Erlein snapped. "You can't run through and you can't kill t
his many men."
"I can try," Alessan said, his eyes darting across the defile and up the steep
hills on either side, wild to find a way out. He had stopped his horse though
, and did not raise the bow.
"Straight into a trap. What a splendid ending to two decades of dreaming!" His
voice was corrosively bitter, raw with self-laceration.
It was true though, Devin realized, rather too late. This pass between the hil
ls was a natural place for an ambush, and the Triad knew there were enough out
laws hi the wilds of southern Certando, where even the Barbadian mercenaries s
eldom went, and honest men were never abroad this close to the fall of night.
On the other hand, they hadn't had much choice, given how far they had to go,
and how fast.
It didn't seem as if they were going to get there. Or anywhere. There was stil
l enough light to make out the outlaws, and their appearance did not reassure.
Their clothing might be random and carelessly worn, but the horses were far f
rom the beaten-down creatures most brigands rode. The men in front of them loo
ked disciplined, and the weaponry leveled at the three of them was formidable.
This had also been, very clearly, a carefully laid trap.
One man rode a few paces forward from the silent line. "Release your bows," he
said with easy authority. "I don't like talking with armed men."
"Neither do I," Alessan replied grimly, staring at the man. But a moment later
he let his bow fall to the ground. Beside Devin, Erlein did the same.
"And the boy," the outlaw leader said, still softly. He was a big man of middl
e years, with a large face and a full beard that showed deep red in the waning
light. He wore a dark wide-brimmed hat that hid his eyes.
"I don't carry a bow," Devin said shortly, letting fall his sword. There was m
ocking laughter at that from the men in front of them.
"Magian, why were your men in arrow range?" The bearded man said, more loudly
now. He himself had not laughed. "You knew my instructions. You know how we do
this."
"I didn't think we were," came an angry voice behind them, amid a clattering o
f hooves. Their pursuers had come up. The trap was closed, before and behind.
"He fired a long way in half-light and wind. He was lucky, Ducas."
"He wouldn't have had a chance to be lucky if you had done your job properly.
Where's Abhar?"
"Took an arrow in the thigh and fell. Torre's gone back to bring him."
"Waste," the red-bearded man scowled. "I don't like waste." He was a dark, bul
ky presence, silhouetted against the low sun. Behind him the other seven rider
s kept their bows leveled.
Alessan said, "If waste offends you, you won't like this evening's work at all
. We have nothing to give you beyond our weapons. Or our lives, if you are the
sort who kill for pleasure."
"Sometimes," the man named Ducas said, not raising his voice. He sounded unset
tlingly calm, Devin thought, and very much in control of his band. "Will my tw
o men die? Do you use poisoned arrows?"
Alessan's expression was contemptuous. "Not even against the Barbadians. Why?
Do you?"
"Sometimes," the outlaw leader said again. "Especially against the Barbadians.
These are the highlands, after all." He smiled for the first time, a cold, wo
lfish grin. Devin had a sudden sense that he wouldn't want to have this man's
memories, or his dreams.
Alessan said nothing. It was growing darker in the pass. Devin saw him glance
over at Erlein, a sharp query in his face. The wizard shook his head, a minute
, almost invisible gesture. "Too many," he whispered. "And besides—"
"The grey-haired one is a wizard!" came an emphatic voice from the line beyond
Ducas.
A chunky, round-faced man moved his horse forward beside the leader's. "Don't
even think of it," he continued, looking straight at Erlein. "I could block an
ything you tried." Startled, Devin glanced at the man's hands, but at this dis
tance it was too dark for him to see if two fingers were missing. They would h
ave to be though.
They had come upon another wizard; much good it would do them.
"And precisely how long do you think it would take a Tracker to find you then?
" Erlein was saying, his voice silken. "With the back-spill of magic from the
both of us leading to this place?"
"There are a sufficiency of arrows trained on your heart and throat," the lead
er interjected, "to ensure that such an event would not happen. But I confess
this grows more interesting every moment. An archer and a wizard riding abroad
on an Ember Day. Aren't you afraid of the dead? What does the boy do?"
"I'm a singer," Devin said grimly. "Devin d'Asoli, lately from the company of
Menico di Ferraut, if that means anything to you." The thing, obviously, was t
o keep the talk going somehow. And he had heard stories—wishful thinking on t
he road, perhaps—of outlaw bands sparing musicians in exchange for a night of
song. Something occurred to him: "You thought we were Barbadians, didn't you?
From a distance. That's why you laid the trap."
"A singer. A clever singer," Ducas murmured. "If not clever enough to stay ind
oors on an Ember Day. Of course we thought you were Barbadians. Who in the eas
tern peninsula but Barbadians and outlaws would be abroad today? And all of th
e outlaws for twenty miles around are part of my band."
"There are outlaws and outlaws," Alessan said softly. "But if you were hunting
Barbadian mercenaries you are men with the same hearts as ours. I can tell yo
u—and I do not lie, Ducas—that if you hinder us here, or kill us, you will b
e giving such comfort to Barbadior —and to Ygrath—as they could not have eve
r dreamt of asking of you." There was, not surprisingly, a silence. The cold w
ind knifed into the pass, stirring the young grasses in the growing dark.
"You have a rather large opinion of yourself, it appears," Ducas said at lengt
h, thoughtfully. "Perhaps I should know why. I think it is time for you to tel
l me exactly who you are, and where you are riding at dusk on an Ember Day, an
d I will draw my own conclusions."
"My name is Alessan. I am riding west. My mother is dying and has summoned me
to her side."
"How devoted of you," Ducas said. "But one name tells me nothing, and west is
a big place, my friend with the bow. Who are you and where are you riding?" Th
e voice was an uncoiled whip this time. Devin jumped. Behind Ducas seven bowst
rings were drawn back.
Devin, his heart pounding, saw Alessan hesitate. The sun was almost gone now,
a red disk cut in half by the horizon beyond the pass. The wind seemed to be b
lowing harder, promising a chilly night to come after this first day of spring
.
There was a chill in Devin as well. He glanced at Erlein, and discovered that
the wizard was staring at him, as if waiting. Alessan had not yet spoken. Duca
s shifted meaningfully in his saddle.
Devin swallowed and, knowing that however hard this was for him, it had to be
easier than it would be for Alessan, he said: "Tigana. He is from Tigana, and
so am I."
He was careful to look straight at the outlaw wizard as he spoke, not at Ducas
or the other riders. He saw out of the corner of his eye that Alessan was doi
ng the same thing, so as not to have to see the blank look of incomprehension
they both knew would follow. The wizard would be different. Wizards could hear
the name.
A murmur rose from the gathered men, before them and behind. And then one man
spoke aloud amid the shadows of falling dusk in that lonely place. A voice fro
m the line behind them.
"By the blood of the god!" that voice cried from the heart. Devin wheeled arou
nd. A man had dismounted and was striding quickly forward to stand in front of
them. Devin saw that the man was small, not much bigger than himself, perhaps
thirty years old or a little more, and that he was moving awkwardly and clear
ly in pain, with Alessan's arrow in his arm.
Ducas was looking at his wizard. "Sertino, what is this?" he said, with an edg
e in his voice. "I do not—"
"Sorcery," the wizard said bluntly.
"What? His?" Ducas nodded towards Erlein.
"No, not his." It was the wounded man who spoke, his eyes never leaving Alessa
n's face. "Not this poor wizard's. It is real sorcery, this. It is the power o
f Brandin of Ygrath that keeps you from hearing the name."
With an angry motion Ducas swept his hat off, revealing a balding dome with a
fringe of bright red hair. "And you, Naddo? How do you hear it, then?"
The man on the ground swayed unsteadily on his feet before replying. "Because
I was born there too, and so I'm immune to the spell, or another victim of it,
whichever you prefer." Devin heard the tautness in his voice, as of someone h
olding hard to his self-control. He heard the man called Naddo say, looking up
at Alessan. "You have been asked for your name, and you only gave him a part.
Will you tell us the rest? Will you tell me?" It was hard to see his eyes now
, but his voice told an old story.
Alessan was sitting on his horse with an easiness, even after a day in the sad
dle, that seemed to deny even the possibility of weariness, or the tension of
where they were. But then his right hand came up and pushed once, unconsciousl
y, through his already tangled hair, and Devin, seeing the familiar gesture, k
new that whatever he himself was feeling now, it was doubled and redoubled in
the man he followed.
And then in the stillness of that pass, with the only other sounds the whistle
of wind between the hills and the stirring of the horses on the young grass,
he heard: "My name is Alessan di Tigana bar Valen-tin. If you are as old as yo
u appear to be, Naddo di Tigana, you will know who I am."
With a prickling of hairs on his neck and a shiver he could not control, Devin
saw Naddo drop to his knees on the cold ground even before the last words wer
e spoken.
"Oh, my Prince!" the wounded man cried in a raw voice. And covering his face w
ith his one good hand, he wept.
"Prince?" said Ducas, very softly. There was a restive movement among the outl
aws. "Sertino, you will explain this to me!"
Sertino the wizard looked from Alessan to Erlein, and then down at the weeping
man. A curious, almost a frightened, expression crossed his pale, round face.

He said, "They are from Lower Corte. It had a different name before Brandin of
Ygrath came. He has used his sorcery to take that name away. Only people born
there, and wizards because of our own magic, can hear the true name. That is
what is happening here."
"And 'Prince'? Naddo called him that."
Sertino was silent. He looked over at Erlein, and there was still that odd, un
easy look on his face. He said, "Is it true?"
And Erlein di Senzio, with an ironic half-smile, replied, "Just don't let him
cut your hair, brother. Unless you like being bound into slavery."
Sertino's mouth fell open. Ducas slapped his knee with his hat. "Now that," he
snapped, "I do not understand at all. There is too much of this I do not unde
rstand. I want explanations, from all of you!" His voice was harsh, much loude
r than before. He did not look at Alessan though.
"I understand it well enough, Ducas," came a voice from behind them. It was Ma
gian, the captain of the group that had driven them into the gap. He moved his
horse forward as they turned to look at him. "I understand that we have made
our fortunes tonight. If this is the Prince of a province Brandin hates then a
ll we need do is take him west to Fort Forese across the border and turn him o
ver to the Ygrathens there. With a wizard to boot. And who knows, one of them
probably likes boys in his bed, too. Singing boys." His smile was a wide loose
thing in the shadows.
He said, "There will be rewards. Land. Perhaps even . . ."
He said nothing more than that. Ever. In rigid disbelief Devin saw Magian's mo
uth fall open and his eyes grow briefly wide, then the man slid slowly sideway
s off his horse to fall with a clatter of sword and bow on the ground beside E
rlein.
There was a long-handled dagger in his back.
One of the outlaws from the line behind him, not hurrying at all, dismounted a
nd pulled the dagger free. He wiped it carefully clean on the dead man's surco
at before sheathing it again at his belt.
"Not a good idea, Magian's," he said quietly, straightening to look at Ducas.
"Not a good idea at all. We aren't informers here, and we don't serve the Tyra
nts."
Ducas slapped his hat back on his head, visibly fighting for control. He took
a deep breath. "As it happens, I agree. But as it also happens, Arkin, we have
a rule here about weapons drawn against each other."
Arkin was very tall, almost gaunt, and his long face was white, Devin saw, eve
n among the shadows of dusk. He said, "I know that, Ducas. It is wasteful. I k
now. You will have to forgive me."
Ducas said nothing for a long time. Neither did anyone else. Devin, looking pa
st the dead man, saw the two wizards gazing fixedly at each other in the shado
ws.
Arkin was still looking at Ducas.
Who finally broke the silence. "You are fortunate that I agree with you," he s
aid.
Arkin shook his head. "We would not have stayed together this long otherwise."

Alessan neatly dismounted from his horse. He walked over towards Ducas, ignori
ng the arrows still trained on him. "If you are hunting Barbadians," he said q
uietly, "I have some idea as to why. I am doing the same thing, in my own way.
" He hesitated. "You can do as your dead man suggested: turn me in to Ygrath,
and yes, I suspect there would be a reward. Or you can kill us here, and have
done with us. You can also let us go our own way from this place. But there is
one other, quite different thing you can do."
"Which is?" Ducas seemed to have regained his self-control. His voice was calm
again, as it had been at the beginning.
"Join me. In what I seek to do."
"Which is?"
"To drive both Tyrants from the Palm before this summer is out."
Naddo looked up suddenly, a brightness in his face. "Really, my lord? We can d
o this? Even now?"
"There is a chance," Alessan said. "Especially now. For the first time there i
s a chance." He looked back at Ducas. "Where were you born?"
"In Tregea," the other man said after a pause. "In the mountains."
Devin had a moment to think about how completely things had shifted here, that
Alessan should be asking the questions now. He felt a stirring within him, of
hope renewed and of pride.
The Prince was nodding his head. "I thought it might be so. I have heard the s
tories of a red-headed Captain Ducas who was one of the leaders at Borifort in
Tregea during the Barbadian siege there. They never found him after the fort
fell." He hesitated. "I could not help but notice the color of your hair."
For a moment the two men were motionless as in a tableau, one on the ground th
e other on his horse. Then, quite suddenly, Ducas di Tregea smiled.
"What is left of my hair," he murmured wryly, sweeping off his hat again with
a wide gesture.
Releasing his reins he swung down off his horse and, striding forward, held ou
t an open palm to Alessan. Who met both—the smile and offered hand—with his
own.
Devin found himself gasping with the rush of relief that swept over him, and t
hen cheering wildly at the top of his voice with twenty outlaws in that dark C
ertandan pass.
What he noticed though, even as the cheering reached a crescendo, was that nei
ther wizard was shouting. Erlein and Sertino sat very still, almost rigid on t
heir horses, as if concentrating on something. They gazed at each other, expre
ssions identically grim.
And because he noticed, because he seemed to be becoming the sort of man who s
aw things like this, Devin was the first to fall silent, and he had even insti
nctively raised a hand to quiet the others. Ales-san and Ducas lowered their l
inked palms and gradually, as silence returned to the pass, everyone looked at
the wizards.
"What is it?" Ducas said.
Sertino turned to him. "Tracker. Northeast of us, quite close. I just felt the
probe. He'll not find me though, I've done no magic for a long time."
"I have," said Erlein di Senzio. "Earlier today, in the Braccio Pass. Only a l
ight spell, a screen for someone. Evidently it was enough. There must have bee
n a Tracker in one of the southern forts."
"There almost always is," Sertino said flatly.
"What," Ducas said, "were you doing in the Braccio Pass?"
"Gathering flowers," Alessan said. "I'll tell you later. Right now we have Bar
badians to deal with. How many will be with the Tracker?"
"Not less than twenty. Probably more. We have a camp in the hills south of her
e. Shall we run for it?"
"They'll follow," Erlein said. "He's got me traced. The spill of my magic will
mark me for another day at least."
"I don't much feel like hiding in any case," Alessan said softly.
Devin turned quickly to look at him. So did Ducas. Awkwardly, Naddo rose to hi
s feet.
"How good, exactly, are your men here?" Alessan said, a challenge in his tone
and in the grey eyes.
And in the shadows of what was now almost full-dark Devin saw the Tregean outl
aw leader's teeth suddenly flash. "They are good enough, and to spare, to deal
with a score of Barbadians. This will be more than we've ever tackled, but we
've never fought beside a Prince before. I think," he added, in a meditative v
oice, "that I too am grown tired of hiding, suddenly."
Devin looked over at the wizards. It was hard to make out their features in th
e dark, but Erlein said, in a hard-edged voice: "Alessan, the Tracker will hav
e to be killed immediately, or he'll send an image of this place back to Alber
ico."
"He will be," said Alessan quietly. And in his voice, too, there was a new not
e. The presence of something Devin had never heard. A second later he realized
that it was death.
Alessan's cloak flapped in a gust of wind. Very deliberately he drew his hood
over his face.
The hard thing for Devin was that Alberico's Tracker turned out to be twelve y
ears old.
They sent Erlein riding west out of the pass, as the lure. He was the one bein
g followed. He had Sertino di Certando, the other wizard, and two other men wi
th them, one of whom was the wounded Naddo, who insisted on being of use even
though he could not fight. They had taken the arrow from his arm and bandaged
it as best they could. It was clear that he was in difficulty, but even more c
lear that in the presence of Alessan he was not about to give way to that.
A short while later, under the stars and the low eastward crescent of Vidomni,
the Barbadians entered the pass. There were twenty-five of them, and the Trac
ker. Six carried torches, which made things easier. Though not for them.
Alessan's arrow and Ducas's met in the Tracker's breast, fired from slopes on
opposite sides of the defile. Eleven of the mercenaries fell under that first
rain of arrows before Devin found himself galloping furiously down with Alessa
n and half a dozen other men out of their concealment in hollows in the pass.
They angled to close the western exit, even as Ducas and nine men sealed off t
he eastern end the Barbadians had entered from.
And so on that Ember Night, in the company of outlaws in the highlands of Cert
ando far from his lost home, Alessan bar Valentin, Prince of Tigana, fought th
e first true battle of his long war of return. After the drawn-out years of ma
neuvering, a subtle gathering of intelligence and the delicate guiding of even
ts, he drew blade against the forces of a Tyrant in that moonlit pass.
No subterfuge, no hidden manipulation anymore from the wings of the stage. Thi
s was battle, for the time had come.
Marius of Quileia had made a promise to him that day, against wisdom and exper
ience and beyond hope. And with Marius's promise everything had changed. The w
aiting was over. He could loosen the rigid bonds that had held his heart so ti
ghtly leashed all these years. Tonight in this pass he could kill: in memory o
f his father and his brothers and all the dead of the River Deisa and after, i
n that year when he himself had not been permitted to die.
They had spirited him away and hidden him in Quileia south of the mountains, w
ith Marius, then a captain of the High Priestess's guard. A man with his own r
easons for fostering and concealing a young Prince from the northlands. That h
ad been almost nineteen years ago, when the hiding had begun.
He was tired of hiding. The time of running was over now; the season of war ha
d begun. True, it was Barbadior, not Ygrath, whose soldiers drew blade against
them now, but in the end it was all the same. Both Tyrants were the same. He
had been saying that for all the years since he'd come back north to the penin
sula with Baerd. It was a truth hammered into shape like metal on the hard for
ge of his heart. They had to take them both, or be no nearer freedom than befo
re.
And in the Braccio Pass this morning the taking had begun. The keystone had be
en set in the arch of his design. And so tonight in this dark defile he could
unbind his pent-up passion, his own long memories of loss, and set his sword a
rm free.
Devin, laboring to keep up with the Prince, rode into his first combat with ra
w panic and exhilaration vying for mastery in his breast. He did not shout as
most of the outlaws did; he was concentrating as much as anything else on igno
ring the ache in his wounded leg. He gripped the dark sword Baerd had bought f
or him, holding it with the blade curving upwards as he had been taught in win
try morning lessons that seemed unimaginably remote from this night's happenin
gs.
He saw Alessan drive straight into the circled ranks of the mercenaries, unswe
rving as one of his arrows, as if to put behind him in this one act of direct
response all the years when such a thing was not allowed.
Frantically, gritting his teeth, Devin followed in Alessan's wake. He was alon
e though, and half a dozen lengths behind, when a yellow-bearded Barbadian loo
med up beside him, enormous on his horse. Devin cried out in shock. Only some
blind survival instinct and the reflexes he had been born with saved his life.
He pulled his horse hard to the left, veering for a space he saw, and then le
aning back to his right, as low to the ground as he could manage, he cut upwar
ds with all his strength. He felt a searing pain in his wounded leg and almost
fell. The windrush of the Barbadian's blade sliced empty air where Devin's he
ad had been. A heartbeat later Devin felt his own wickedly curved sword cleave
through leathery armor and into flesh.
The Barbadian screamed, a liquid, bubbling sound. He swayed wildly on his moun
t as his sword fell from his grasp. He brought one hand to his mouth in a curi
ously childlike gesture. Then, like the slow toppling of a mountain tree, he s
lid sideways in his saddle and crashed to the ground.
Devin had already pulled his sword free. Wheeling his horse in a tight circle,
he looked for adversaries. No one was coming though. Alessan and the others w
ere ahead of him, pounding against the mercenaries, driving to meet Ducas and
Arkin's group pressing forward from the east.
It was almost over, Devin realized. There was nothing, really, for him to do.
With a complex mixture of emotions that he didn't even try to understand just
then, he watched the Prince's blade rise and fall three times and he saw three
Barbadians die. One by one the six torches dropped to the ground and were ext
inguished. And then— only moments after they had ridden into the pass, it see
med to Devin —the last of the Barbadians had been cut down and slain.
It was then that he saw what was left of the Tracker and realized how young he
had been. The body had been hideously trampled in the melee. It lay twisted a
nd splayed unnaturally. Somehow the face had been spared, though for Devin, lo
oking down, that was actually the worst thing. The two arrows were still embed
ded in the child's body, though the upper shaft of one of them had been broken
off.
Devin turned away. He stroked the horse Alienor had given him, and whispered t
o it. Then he forced himself to ride back towards the man he'd killed. This wa
s not the same as the sleeping soldier in the Nievolene barn. It was not, he t
old himself. This had been open warfare and the Barbadian had been armed and a
rmored, and he had swung his massive blade seeking Devin's life. Had the Barba
dians and the Tracker come upon him and Alessan and Erlein alone in the wilder
ness Devin had no illusions, none at all, as to what their fate would have bee
n.
It was not the same as in the barn. He said it within himself once again, as h
e gradually became aware of the eerie, disorienting calm that seemed to have d
escended upon the pass. The wind still blew, as cold as before. He glanced up,
and realized belatedly that Alessan had quietly ridden to his side and was al
so looking down at the man Devin had slain. Both horses stamped and snorted, m
ade restless by the frenzy just past and the smell of blood.
"Devin, believe me, I am sorry," Alessan murmured softly, so that no one else
would hear. "It is hardest the first time, and I gave you no chance to prepare
."
Devin shook his head. He felt drained, almost numb. "You didn't have much choi
ce. Maybe it was better this way." He cleared his throat awkwardly. "Alessan,
you have larger things to worry about. I chose freely in the Sandren Woods las
t fall. You aren't responsible for me."
"In a way I am."
"Not in a way that matters. I made my own choice." "Doesn't friendship matter?
"
Devin was silent, rendered suddenly diffident. Alessan had a way of doing that
to you. After a moment the Prince added, almost as an afterthought, "I was yo
ur age when I came back from Quileia."
For a moment he seemed about to add something, but in the end he did not. Devi
n had an idea of what he meant though, and something kindled quietly within hi
m like a candle.
For a moment longer they looked down at the dead man. Only a crescent, Vidomni
's pale light was still bright enough to show the staring pain in his face.
Devin said, "I chose freely, and I understand the need, but I don't think I'm
ever going to get used to this."
"I know I never have," said Alessan. He hesitated. "Either one of my brothers
would have been so much better at what I was kept alive to do."
Devin turned then, trying to read the expression on the Prince's face in the s
hadows. After a moment he said, "I never knew them, but will you allow me to s
ay that I doubt it? Truly I doubt it, Alessan." After a moment the Prince touc
hed his shoulder. "Thank you. There are those who would disagree, I'm afraid.
But thank you, nonetheless."
And with those words he seemed to remember something, or be recalled to someth
ing. His voice changed. "We had better ride. I must speak with Ducas, and then
we'll have to catch up with Erlein and go on. We've a lot of ground to cover
yet." He looked at Devin apprais-ingly. "You must be exhausted. I should have
asked before: how is your leg? Can you ride?"
"I'm fine," Devin protested quickly. "Of course I can ride." Someone behind th
em laughed sardonically. They both turned. To discover that Erlein and the oth
ers had, in fact, returned to the pass.
"Tell me," the wizard said to Alessan, sharp mockery in his voice, "what did y
ou expect him to say? Of course he'll tell you he can ride. He'd ride all nigh
t, half-dead, for you. So would this one"—he gestured towards Naddo behind hi
m—"on barely an hour's acquaintance. I wonder, Prince Alessan, how does it fe
el to have such a power over the hearts of men?"
Ducas had ridden over while Erlein was speaking. He said nothing though, and i
t was too dark now with the torches extinguished, to make out anyone's feature
s clearly. One had to judge by the words, and the inflections given them.
Alessan said quietly, "I think you know my answer to that. In any case, I'm un
likely to think too highly of myself with you around to point these things out
to me." He paused, then added, "Triad for-fend you would ever volunteer to ri
de all night in any cause but your own."
"I," said Erlein flatly, "have no choice in the matter anymore. Or have you fo
rgotten?"
"I have not. But I've no mind to repeat that quarrel now, Erlein. Ducas and hi
s men have just put their lives at risk to save your own. If you—"
"To save my own! I would never have been at risk if you hadn't compelled me to
—"
"Erlein, enough! We have a great many things to do and I am not of a mind to d
ebate."
In the darkness Devin saw Erlein sketch a mocking bow on horseback. "I most hu
mbly cry your pardon," he said in an exaggerated tone. "You really must let me
know when you are of a mind to debate. You'll concede it is an issue of some
importance to me."
Alessan was silent for what seemed a long time. Then, mildly, he said, "I thin
k I can guess what is behind this now. I understand. It is meeting another wiz
ard, isn't it? With Sertino here you feel what has happened to you the more."

"Don't pretend you understand me, Alessan!" said Erlein furiously.
Still calmly, Alessan said, "Very well then, I won't. In some ways I may never
understand you and how you have lived you life—I told you that the evening w
e met. But for now this issue is a closed one. I will be prepared to discuss i
t the day the Tyrants are gone from the Palm. Not before."
"You will be dead before that. We will both be dead."
"Don't touch him!" Alessan said sharply. Belatedly Devin saw the Naddo had rai
sed his good hand to strike the wizard. More quietly the Prince added, "If we
are both dead, then our spirits can wrangle in Morian's Halls, Erlein. Until t
hen, no more. We will have a great deal to do together in the weeks to come."

Ducas coughed. "As to that," he said, "we two also had better speak. There is
a fair bit I'd like to know before I go further than this night's work, much a
s it has pleased me."
"I know," said Alessan, turning to him in the dark. He hesitated. "Will you ri
de with us for a little. Only as far as the village. You and Naddo, because of
his arm."
"Why there, and why because of the arm? I don't understand," Ducas said. "You
should know that we are not much welcome in the village. For obvious reasons."

"I can guess. It won't matter. Not on an Ember Night. You will understand when
we get there. Come. I want my good friend Erlein di Senzio to see something.
And I suppose Sertino had better join us too."
"I wouldn't miss this for all the blue wine in Astibar," said the pudgy Certan
dan wizard. It was interesting, at another time it might even have been amusin
g, to note what a healthy distance he continued to keep between himself and th
e Prince. The words he spoke were facetious, but his tone was deadly serious.

"Come on then," said Alessan brusquely. He turned his horse past Erlein's, alm
ost brushing against the other man, and started west out of the pass. The ones
he had named began to follow. Ducas spoke a few terse commands to Arkin, too
low for Devin to hear. Arkin hesitated for a moment, clearly torn, wanting to
come with his leader. But then, without speaking, he turned his horse the othe
r way. When Devin glanced back a moment later, he saw that the outlaws were ri
fling the Barbadians' bodies for weapons.
He turned to look over his shoulder again a few moments later but they were in
open country by then, with the hills in shadow to the south and east and a gr
assy plain rolling north of them. The entrance to the pass could no longer eve
n be seen. Arkin and the others would be gone from within it soon, Devin knew,
leaving only the dead. Only the dead for the scavengers; one of them killed b
y his own sword, and another one a child.
The old man lay on his bed in the darkness of an Ember Night and the always da
rkness of his own affliction. Far from sleep, he listened to the wind outside
and to the woman in the other room clicking her prayer beads and intoning the
same litany over and over.
"Eanna love us, Adaon preserve us, Morian guard our souls. Eanna love us, Adao
n preserve us, Morian guard our souls. Eanna love us . . ."
His hearing was very good. It was a compensation most of the time, but sometim
es—as tonight, with the woman praying like a demented thing—it was a curse o
f a particularly insidious kind. She was using her old beads; he could tell th
e thin, quick sound even through the wall separating their chambers. He had ma
de her a new ring of beads of rare, polished tanchwood three years ago for her
naming day. Most of the time she used that ring, but not on the Ember Days. T
hen she went back to her old beads and she prayed aloud for most of three days
and nights.
In the earliest years here he had slept those three nights in the barn with th
e two boys who had brought him here, so much did her unceasing litany disturb
him. But he was old now, his bones creaked and ached on windy nights such as t
his, so he kept to his own bed under piled blankets and endured her voice as b
est he could.
"Eanna love us always, Adaon preserve us from all perils, Morian guard our sou
ls and shelter us. Eanna love us . . ."
The Ember Days were a time of contrition and atonement, but they were also a t
ime when one was to count and give thanks for one's gifts. He was a cynical ma
n, for sufficient and varied reasons, but he would not have called himself unr
eligious, and he would not, in fact, have said he'd lived a life unblessed, de
spite the blindness of almost two decades. He had lived much of his life in we
alth and near to power. The length of his days was a blessing, and so too was
the lifelong grace of his hands with wood. Only a form of play at first, a div
ersion, it had become something more than that in the years since they had com
e here.
There was also his other gift of skill, though few people knew of that. Had it
been otherwise he would never have been able to shape a quiet life in this hi
ghland village, and a quiet life was essential because he was hiding. Still.
The very fact of his survival on the long, sightless journey all those years a
go was a blessing of a special kind. He was under no illusions: he would never
have survived without the loyalty of his two young servants. The only ones th
ey had allowed to stay with him. The only ones who had wanted to stay.
They weren't young nor were they servants any longer. They were farmers on lan
d they owned with him. No longer sleeping on the front-room floor in their fir
st small farmhouse nor out in the barn as they had in the earliest years, but
in their own homes with wives beside them and children near by. Lying in darkn
ess he offered thanks for that, as gratefully as for anything he had ever been
given himself.
Either of them would have let him sleep in their home these three nights, to e
scape the unending drone of the woman in the other room, but he would not pres
ume to ask so much. Not on the Ember Nights, not on any night. He had his own
sense of what was appropriate, and besides, he liked his own bed more and more
with the passing years.
"Eanna love us as her children, Adaon preserve us as his children . . ."
He wasn't, clearly, going to be able to fall asleep. He thought about getting
up to polish a staff or a bow, but he knew Menna would hear him, and he knew s
he would make him pay for profaning an Ember Night with labor. Watery porridge
, sour wine, his slippers cruelly moved from where he laid them down.
"They were in my way," she would say when he complained. Then, when fires were
allowed again: burnt meat, undrinkable khav, bitter bread. For a week, at lea
st. Menna had her own ways of letting him know what mattered to her. After all
the years they had their tacit understandings much as any old couple did, tho
ugh of course he had never married her.
He knew who he was, and what was appropriate, even in this fallen state, far f
rom home, from the memory of wealth or power. Here on this small farm-holding
bought with gold fearfully hidden on his person during that long, blind journe
y seventeen years ago, sure that a murderous pursuit was riding close behind.

He had survived, though, and the boys. Coming to this village on a day in autu
mn long ago: strangers arriving in a dark time. A time when so many people had
died and so many others were brutally uprooted all across the Palm in the wak
e of the Tyrants' coming. But the three of them had somehow endured, had even
managed to make the land put forth a living for them in good years. In Certand
o's bad years latterly he had had to deplete his dwindled reserve of gold, but
what else was it for, at this point?
Really, what else would it be for? Menna and the two boys—they were no longer
boys, of course—were his heirs. They were all he could claim as family now.
They were all he had, if one didn't count the dreams that still came in his ni
ghts.
He was a cynical man, having seen a great deal in the days before his darkness
came, and after, in a different way of seeing, but he was not so burdened by
irony as to defeat wisdom. He knew that exiles always dreamt of home and that
the sorely wronged never really forgot. He had no illusions about being unique
in this.
"Eanna love us, Adaon preserve us from—Triad save us!"
Menna fell silent, very abruptly. And for the same reason the old man sat sudd
enly upright in bed, wincing at a sharp protest from his spine. They had both
heard it: a sound outside in the night. In the Ember Night, when no one should
be abroad.
Listening carefully he caught it again: the sound, delicate and faint, of pipe
s playing in the darkness outside, passing by their walls. Concentrating, the
old man could make out footsteps. He counted them. Then, his heart beating dan
gerously fast, he swung out of bed as quickly as he could and began to dress.

"It is the dead!" Menna wailed in the far room. "Adaon preserve us from vengef
ul ghosts, from all harm. Eanna love us! The dead have come for us. Morian of
Portals guard our souls!"
Despite his agitation the old man paused to note that Menna, even in her fear,
still included him in prayers. For a moment he was genuinely moved. In the ne
xt moment he ruefully acknowledged the inescapable fact that the succeeding tw
o weeks of his life—at least— were likely to be sheerest domestic torment.
He was going outside, of course. He knew exactly who this was. He finished dre
ssing and reached for his favorite stick by the door. He moved as quietly as h
e could, but the walls were thin and Menna's hearing almost as good as his own
: there was no point in trying to slip out unheard. She would know what he was
doing. And would make him pay the price.
Because this had happened before. On Ember Nights and other nights for almost
ten years now. Sure of foot inside the house he went to the front door and use
d his stick to roll back the chink-blocker on the floor. Then he opened the do
or and went out. Menna was praying again already: "Eanna love me, Adaon preser
ve me, Morian guard my soul." The old man smiled a wintry smile. Two weeks, at
least. Watery porridge in the morning. Burnt, tasteless khav. Bitter mahgoti
tea. He stood still for a moment, still smiling faintly, breathing the crisp,
cool air. Mercifully, the wind had died down a little, his bones felt fine. Li
fting his face to the night breeze he could almost taste the spring to come.
He closed the door carefully behind him and began tapping his way with the sti
ck along the path towards the barn. He had carved this stick when he still had
his sight. Many times he had carried it in the palace, an affectation at a di
ssolute court. He had never expected to need it in this way. Its head was the
head of an eagle with the eyes lovingly detailed, wide and fiercely defiant.
Perhaps because he had killed for the second time in his life that night, Devi
n was remembering that other much larger barn from the winter just past, in As
tibar.
This one was far more modest. Only two milk cows and a pair of plow horses sta
bled. It was well-made though, and warm, with the smell of the animals and cle
an straw. The walls had no chinks to admit the knife of wind, the straw was fr
eshly piled, the floor swept clean, the tools along the walls neatly laid and
stacked.
In fact, if he wasn't careful, the smell and the feel of this barn would take
him much further back than last winter: back to their own farm in Asoli, which
he tried never to think about. He was tired though, bone tired, after two sle
epless nights, and so he supposed he was vulnerable to such memories. His righ
t knee ached fiercely, where he had twisted it on the mountain. It was swollen
to twice its normal size and sharply sensitive to touch. He'd had to walk slo
wly, making a real effort not to limp.
No one spoke. No one had spoken since they had reached the outskirts of this v
illage of some twenty homes. The only sound for the last few moments after the
y tethered the horses and began to walk had been Alessan's pipes softly playin
g. Playing—and Devin wondered if he alone knew this, or if Naddo recognized i
t too—a certain nursery melody from Avalle.
Here in the barn Alessan was still playing, as gently as before. The tune was
one more thing that seemed to be trying to carry Devin back to his family. He
resisted: if he went that way in the condition he was in right now he would pr
obably end up crying.
Devin tried to imagine how the haunting, elusive melody would sound to anyone
huddled inside the walls of their lightless homes on this Ember Night. A compa
ny of ghosts passing by, that was what they would seem to be. The dead abroad,
following a small, forgotten tune. He remembered Catriana singing in the Sand
reni Woods:
But wherever I wander, by night or by day, Where water runs swiftly or high tr
ees sway, My heart will carry me back and away To a dream of the towers of Ava
lle.
He wondered where she was tonight. And Sandre. Baerd. He wondered if he would
ever see any of them again. Earlier this evening, pursued into the pass, he ha
d thought he was about to die. And now, two hours later, they had killed twent
y-five Barbadians with those same outlaws who had pursued them, and three of t
he outlaws were here with them in this unknown barn listening to Alessan play
a cradle song.
He didn't think he would understand the strangeness of life if he lived to be
a hundred years old.
There was a sound outside and the door swung open. Devin stiffened involuntari
ly. So did Ducas di Tregea, a hand reaching for his sword. Alessan looked at t
he door, but his fingers never faltered on the pipes and the music continued.

An old man, slightly stooped, but with a leonine combed-back mane of white hai
r, stood for a moment, backlit by the sudden moonlight, before he stepped insi
de and pushed the door closed behind him with a stick he carried. After that i
t was dark again in the barn and hard to see for a few moments.
No one spoke. Alessan did not even look up again. Tenderly, with feeling, he f
inished the tune. Devin looked at him as he played and wondered if he was the
only man here who understood what music meant to the Prince. He thought about
what Alessan had been through in this past day alone, about what it was he was
riding towards, and something complicated and awkward stirred in his heart as
he listened to the wistful ending of the song. He saw the Prince set his pipe
s aside with a motion of regret. Laying down his release, taking up the burden
s again. All the burdens that seemed to be his legacy, the price of his blood.

"Thank you for coming, old friend," he said now, quietly, to the man in the do
orway.
"You owe me, Alessan," the old man said in a clear strong voice. "You have con
demned me to sour milk and spoiled meat for a month."
"I was afraid of that," Alessan said in the darkness. Devin could hear affecti
on and an unexpected amusement in his voice. "Menna has not changed, then?"
The other man snorted. "Menna and change do not coexist," he said. "You are wi
th new people, and a friend is missing. What has happened? Is he all right?"
"He is fine. A half-day's ride east. There is much to tell. I came with some r
eason, Rinaldo."
"So much is clear to me. One man with a leg that is torn inside. Another with
an arrow wound. The two wizards are not happy but I can do nothing about their
missing fingers and neither is ill. The sixth man is now afraid of me, but he
need not be."
Devin gasped with astonishment. Beside him Ducas swore aloud.
"Explain this!" he growled furiously. "Explain everything!"
Alessan was laughing. So, more softly, was the man he had called Rinaldo. "You
are a spoiled and petty old man," the Prince said, still chuckling, "and you
enjoy shocking people simply for the sake of doing it. You should be ashamed o
f yourself."
"There are so few pleasures left to me in my age," the other retorted. "Would
you deny me this one too? There is much to tell, you say? Tell me."
Alessan's voice grew sober. "I had a meeting in the mountains this morning."
"Ah, I was wondering about that! And what follows?"
"Everything, Rinaldo. Everything follows. This summer. He said yes. We will ha
ve the letters. One to Alberico, one to Brandin, and one to the Governor of Se
nzio."
"Ah," said Rinaldo again. "The Governor of Senzio." He said it softly, but cou
ld not quite disguise the excitement in his voice. He took a step forward into
the room. "I never dreamt I would live to see this day. Alessan, we are going
to act?"
"We have already begun. Ducas and his men joined with us tonight in battle. We
killed a number of Barbadians and a Tracker pursuing a wizard with us."
"Ducas? That is who this is?" The old man gave a low whistle, a curiously inco
ngruous sound. "Now I know why he is afraid. You have your share of enemies in
this village, my friend."
"I am aware of that," said Ducas drily.
"Rinaldo," Alessan said, "do you remember the siege of Borifort when Alberico
first came? The stories about a red-bearded captain, one of the leaders of the
Tregeans there? The one who was never found?"
"Ducas di Tregea? This is he?" Again the whistle. "Well met then, Captain, tho
ugh not, as a matter of fact, for the first time. If I remember rightly, you w
ere in the company of the Duke of Tregea when I paid a formal visit there some
twenty years ago."
"A visit from where?" Ducas asked, visibly struggling to get his bearings. Dev
in sympathized: he was doing the same thing, and he knew rather more than the
red-bearded man did. "From . . . from Alessan's province?" Ducas hazarded.
"Tigana? But of course," Erlein di Senzio interjected harshly. "Of course he i
s. This is just another petty injured lordling from the west. Is that why you
brought me here, Alessan? To show how brave an old man can be? You will forgiv
e me if I choose to pass on this lesson."
"I didn't hear the beginning of that." It was Rinaldo, speaking softly to the
wizard. "What did you say?"
Erlein fell silent, turning from Alessan to the man by the door. Even in darkn
ess Devin could see his sudden confusion.
"He named my province," Alessan said. "They both think you are from my home."

"An outrageous slander," Rinaldo said calmly. He swung his large, handsome hea
d towards Ducas and Erlein. "I am vain enough to have thought you might know m
e by now. My name is Rinaldo di Senzio."
"What! Senzio?" Erlein exclaimed, shocked out of his own composure. "You can't
be!"
There was a silence.
"Who, exactly, is this presumptuous man?" Rinaldo asked, of no one in particul
ar.
"My wizard, I'm afraid," Alessan replied. "I have bound him to me with Adaon's
gift to the line of our Princes. I spoke to you of that once, I think. His na
me is Erlein. Erlein di Senzio."
"Ah!" said Rinaldo letting his breath out slowly. "I see. A bound wizard and a
Senzian. That explains his anger." He moved another few steps forward, sweepi
ng his stick over the ground in front of him.
It was in that moment that Devin realized that Rinaldo was blind. Ducas regist
ered it in the same moment: "You have no eyes," he said.
"No," Rinaldo said equably. "I used to, of course, but they were judged inappr
opriate for me by my nephew, at the suggestion of both Tyrants seventeen years
ago this spring. I had the temerity to oppose Casalia's decision to lay down
his Ducal status and become a Governor instead."
Alessan was staring fixedly at Erlein as Rinaldo spoke. Devin followed his gla
nce. The wizard looked more confused than Devin had ever seen him.
"I do know who you are, then," he said, almost stammering.
"Of course you do. Just as I know you, and knew your father, Erlein bar Alein.
I was brother to the last real Duke of Senzio and am uncle to the craven disg
race who styles himself Casalia, Governor of Senzio now. And I was as proud to
be the one as I am shamed to call myself the other."
Visibly fighting for control, Erlein said, "But then you knew what Alessan was
planning. You knew about those letters. He told you. You know what he intends
to do with them! You know what it will mean for our province! And you are sti
ll with him? You are helping him?" His voice rose erratically at the end.
"You stupid, petty little man," Rinaldo said slowly, spacing the words for wei
ght, his own voice hard as stone. "Of course I am helping him. How else are we
to deal with the Tyrants? What other battleground is possible in the Palm tod
ay but our poor Senzio where Barbadior and Ygrath circle each other like wolve
s and my crapulous nephew drowns himself in drink and spills his seed in the b
acksides of whores! Do you want freedom to be easy, Erlein bar Alein? Do you t
hink it drops like acorns from trees in the fall?"
"He thinks he is free," Alessan said bluntly. "Or would be, if it wasn't for m
e. He thinks he was free until he met me by a river in Ferraut last week."
"Then I have nothing more to say to him," said Rinaldo di Senzio, with contemp
t.
"How did you . . . how did you find this man?" It was Sertino, speaking to Ale
ssan. The Certandan wizard still kept to the far side of the room from the Pri
nce, Devin noted.
"Finding such men has been my labor for twelve years and more now," Alessan sa
id. "Men and women from my home or yours, from Astibar, Tregea ... all over th
e peninsula. People I thought could be trusted and who might have reason to ha
te the Tyrants as much as I. And a desire to be free that matched my own. Trul
y free," he said, looking at Erlein again. "Masters of our own peninsula."
With a faint smile he turned to Ducas. "As it happened, you hid yourself well,
friend. I thought you might be alive, but had no idea where. We lived in Treg
ea on and off for more than a year but no one we spoke to knew, or would say a
nything about your fate. I had to be terribly clever tonight to lure you into
finding me instead."
Ducas laughed at that, a deep sound in his chest. Then, sobering, he said, "I
wish it had happened earlier."
"So do I. You have no idea how much. I have a friend I think will take to you
as much as you will to him."
"Shall I meet him?"
"In Senzio, later this spring, if events fall right. If we can make them fall
right."
"If that is so, you had best start by telling us how you need them to fall," R
inaldo said prosaically. "Let me tend to your two wounded while you tell what
we should know."
He moved forward, tapping the ground ahead of him as he came up to Devin. "I a
m a Healer," he explained gravely, the sharpness gone from his voice. "Your le
g is bad and needs dealing with. Will you let me try?"
"So that is how you knew us," Ducas said, wonder in his voice again. "I have n
ever known a true Healer before."
"There are not many of us and we tend not to announce ourselves," Rinaldo said
, the empty sockets of his eyes fixed on nothingness. "That was so even before
the Tyrants came: it is a gift with limits and a price. Now we keep ourselves
hidden for the same reason the wizards do, or almost the same: the Tyrants ar
e happy to seize us, and force us serve them until they wear us out."
"Can they do that?" Devin asked. His voice was hoarse. He realized that he had
n't spoken for a long time. He cringed at the thought of what he would sound l
ike if he tried to sing tonight. He couldn't remember the last time he had bee
n so exhausted.
"Of course they can," said Rinaldo simply. "Unless we choose to die on their d
eath-wheels instead. Which has been known to happen."
"I will be happy to learn of any difference between that coercion and what thi
s man has done to me," Erlein said coldly.
"And I will be happy to tell you," Rinaldo shot back, "as soon as I finish my
work." To Devin he said, "There should be straw behind you. Will you lie down
and let me see what I can do?"
In a few moments Devin found himself prone on a bed of straw. With an old man'
s gingerly caution Rinaldo knelt beside him. The Healer began rubbing his palm
s slowly against each other.
Over his shoulder Rinaldo said, "Alessan, I'm serious. Talk while I work. Begi
n with Baerd. I would like to know why he isn't with you."
"Baerd!" a voice interrupted. "Is that your friend? Baerd bar Saevar?" It was
Naddo, the wounded man. He stumbled forward to the edge of the straw.
"Saevar was his father, yes," Alessan said. "You knew him?"
Naddo was so distraught he could scarcely speak. "Knew him? Of course I knew h
im. I was ... I ..." He swallowed hard. "I was his father's last apprentice. I
loved Baerd as ... as an older brother. I ... we ... parted badly. I went awa
y in the year after the fall."
"So did he," Alessan said gently, laying a hand on Naddo's trembling shoulder.
"Not long after you did. I know who you are now, Naddo. He has often spoken t
o me of that parting. I can tell you that he grieved for the manner of it. Tha
t he still does. I expect he will tell you himself when you meet."
"This is the friend you mentioned?" Ducas asked softly.
"It is."
"He has spoken to you of me?" Naddo's voice skirled high with wonder.
"He has."
Alessan was smiling again. Devin, weary as he was, found himself doing the sam
e. The man before them sounded remarkably like a young boy just then.
"Do you . . . does he know what happened to his sister? To Dianora?" Naddo ask
ed.
Alessan's smile faded. "We do not. We have searched for a dozen years, and ask
ed in a great many places, wherever we find survivors of the fall. There are s
o many women of that name. She went away herself, some time after he left in s
earch of me. No one knows why, or where she went, and the mother died not long
after. They are . . . their loss is the deepest hurt I know in Baerd."
Naddo was silent; a moment later they realized that he was fighting back tears
. "I can understand that," he said finally, his voice husky. "She was the brav
est girl I ever knew. The bravest woman.
And if she wasn't really beautiful she was still so very . . ." He stopped for
a moment, struggling for composure, and then said quietly: "I think I loved h
er. I know I did. I was thirteen years old that year."
"If the goddesses love us, and the god," Alessan said softly, "we will find he
r yet."
Devin hadn't known any of this. There seemed to be so many things he hadn't kn
own. He had questions to ask, maybe even more than Ducas had. But just then Ri
naldo, on his knees beside him, stopped rubbing his palms together and leaned
forward.
"You need rest quite badly," he murmured, so softly none of the others could h
ear. "You need sleep as much as your leg needs care." As he spoke he laid one
hand gently on Devin's forehead and Devin, for all his questions and all his p
erturbation, felt himself suddenly beginning to drift, as on a wide calm sea t
owards the shores of sleep, far from where men were speaking, from their voice
s and their grief and their need. And he heard nothing more at all of what was
said in the barn that night.

Chapter 15

THREE DAYS LATER AT SUNRISE THEY CROSSED THE BORDER south of the two forts and
Devin entered Tigana for the first time since his father had carried him away
as a child.
Only the most struggling musicians came into Lower Corte, the companies down o
n their luck and desperate for engagements of any kind, however slight the pay
, however grim the ambience. Even so long after the Tyrants had conquered, the
itinerant performers of the Palm knew that Lower Corte meant bad luck and wor
se wages, and a serious risk of falling afoul of the Ygrathens, either inside
the province or at the borders going in or out.
It wasn't as if the story wasn't known: the Lower Corteans had killed Brandin'
s son, and they were paying a price in blood and money and brutally heavy oppr
ession for that. It did not make for a congenial setting, the artists of the r
oads agreed, talking it over in taverns or hospices in Ferraut or Corte. Only
the hungry or the newly begun ventured to take the ill-paying, risk-laden jobs
in that sad province in the southwest. By the time Devin had joined him Menic
o di Ferraut had been traveling for a very long time and had more than enough
of a reputation to be able to eschew that particular one of the nine provinces
. There was sorcery involved there too; no one really understood it, but the t
ravelers of the road were a superstitious lot and, given an alternative, few w
ould willingly venture into a place where magic was known to be at work. Every
one knew the problems you could find in Lower Corte. Everyone knew the stories
.
So this was the first time for Devin. Through the last hours of riding in dark
ness he had been waiting for the moment of passage, knowing that since they ha
d glimpsed Fort Sinave north of them some time ago, the border had to be near,
knowing what lay on the other side.
And now, with the first pale light of dawn rising behind them, they had come t
o the line of boundary cairns that stretched north and south between the two f
orts, and he had looked up at the nearest of the old, worn, smooth monoliths,
and had ridden past it, had crossed the border into Tigana.
And he found to his dismay that he had no idea what to think, how to respond.
He felt scattered and confused. He had shivered uncontrollably a few hours ago
when they saw the distant lights of Sinave in darkness, his imagination restl
essly at work. I’ll be home soon, he had told himself. In the land where I wa
s born.
Now, riding west past the cairn, Devin looked around compulsively, searching,
as the slow spread of light claimed the sky and then the tops of hills and tre
es and finally bathed the springtime world as far as he could see.
It was a landscape much like what they had been riding through for the past tw
o days. Hilly, with dense forests ranging in the south on the rising slopes, a
nd the mountains visible beyond. He saw a deer lift its head from drinking at
a stream. It froze for a minute, watching them, and then remembered to flee.
They had seen deer in Certando, too.
This is home! Devin told himself again, reaching for the response that should
be flowing. In this land his father had met and wooed his mother, he and his b
rothers had been born, and from here Garin di Tigana had fled northward, a wid
ower with infant sons, escaping the killing anger of Ygrath. Devin tried to pi
cture it: his father on a cart, one of the twins on the seat beside him, the o
ther—they must have taken turns—in the back with what goods they had, cradli
ng Devin in his arms as they rode through a red sunset darkened by smoke and f
ires on the horizon.
It seemed a false picture in some way Devin could not have explained. Or, if n
ot exactly false, it was unreal somehow. Too easy an image. The thing was, it
might even be true, it might be exactly true, but Devin didn't know. He couldn
't know. He had no memories: of that ride, of this place. No roots, no history
. This was home, but it wasn't. It wasn't really even Tigana through which the
y rode. He had never even heard that name until half a year ago, let alone any
stories, legends, chronicles of its past.
This was the province of Lower Corte; so he had known it all his life.
He shook his head, edgy, profoundly unsettled. Beside him Erlein glanced over,
an ironic smile playing about his lips. Which made Devin even more irritable.
Ahead of them Alessan was riding alone. He hadn't said a word since the borde
r.
He had memories, Devin knew, and in a way that he was aware was odd or even tw
isted he envied the Prince those images, however painful they might be. They w
ould be rooted and absolute and shaped of this place which was truly his home.

Whatever Alessan was feeling or remembering now would have nothing of the unre
al about it. It would all be raw, brutally actual, the trampled fabric of his
own life. Devin tried, riding through the cheerful birdsong of a glorious spri
ng morning, to imagine how the Prince might be feeling. He thought that he cou
ld, but only just: a guess more than anything else. Among other things, perhap
s first of all things, Alessan was going to a place where his mother was dying
. No wonder he had urged his horse ahead; no wonder he wasn't speaking now.
He is entitled, Devin thought, watching the Prince ride, straight-backed and s
elf-contained in front of them. He's entitled to whatever solitude, whatever r
elease he needs. What he carries is the dream of a people, and most of them do
n't even know it.
And thinking so, he found himself drawn out of his own confusion, his struggli
ng adjustment to where they were. Focusing on Alessan he found his avenue to p
assion again to the burning inward response to what had happened here—and was
still happening. Every hour of every day in the ransacked, broken-down provin
ce named Lower Corte.
And somewhere in his mind and heart—fruits of a long winter of thought, and o
f listening in silence as older and wiser men spoke— Devin knew that he was n
ot the first and would not be the last person to find in a single man the defi
ning shape and lineaments for the so much harder love of an abstraction or a d
ream.
It was then, looking all around at the sweep of land under the wide arch of a
high blue sky, that Devin felt something pluck at the strings of his heart as
if it were a harp. As if he were. He felt the drumming of his horse's hooves o
n the hard earth, following fast behind the Prince, and it seemed to Devin tha
t that drumming was with the harp-strings as they galloped.
Their destiny was waiting for them, brilliant in his mind like the colored pav
ilions on the plain of the Triad Games that took place every three years. What
they were doing now mattered, it could make a difference. They were riding at
the very center of events in their time. Devin felt something pull him forwar
d, lifting and bearing him into the riptide, the maelstrom of the future. Into
what his life would have been about when it was over.
He saw Erlein glance over again, and this time Devin smiled back at him. A gri
m, fierce smile. He saw the habitual, reflexive irony leave the wizard's lean
face, replaced by a flicker of doubt. Devin almost felt sorry for the man agai
n.
Impulsively he guided his horse nearer to Erlein's brown and leaned over to sq
ueeze the other man's shoulder.
"We're going to do it!" he said brightly, almost gaily.
Erlein's face seemed to pinch itself together. "You are a fool," he said terse
ly. "A young, ignorant fool." He said it without conviction though, an instinc
tive response.
Devin laughed aloud.
Later he would remember this moment too. His words, Erlein's, his laughter und
er the bright, blue cloudless sky. Forests and the mountains on their left and
in the distance before them now the first glimpse of the Sperion, a glinting
ribbon flowing swiftly north before beginning its curve west to find the sea.

The Sanctuary of Eanna lay in a high valley set within a sheltering and isolat
ing circle of hills south and west of the River Sperion and of what had been A
valle. It was not far from the road that had once borne such a volume of trade
back and forth from Tigana and Quileia through the high saddleback of the Sfa
roni Pass.
In all nine provinces Eanna's priests and Morian's, and the priestesses of Ada
on had such retreats. Founded in out-of-the way parts of the peninsula—someti
mes dramatically so—they served as centers of learning and teaching for the n
ewly initiated clergy, repositories of wisdom and of the canons of the Triad,
and as places of withdrawal, where priests and priestesses who chose might lay
down the pace and burdens of the world outside for a time or for a lifetime.

And not just the clergy. Members of the laity would sometimes do the same, if
they could afford "contributions" that were judged as appropriate offerings fo
r the privilege of sheltering for a space of days or years within the ambit of
these retreats.
Many were the reasons that led people to the Sanctuaries. It had long been a j
est that the priestesses of Adaon were the best birth doctors in the Palm, so
numerous were the daughters of distinguished or merely wealthy houses that ele
cted to sojourn at one of the god's retreats at times that might otherwise hav
e been inconvenient for their families. And, of course, it was well known that
an indeterminately high percentage of the clergy were culled from the living
offerings these same daughters left behind when they returned to their homes.
Girl children stayed with Adaon, the boys went to Morian. The white-robed prie
sts of Eanna had always claimed that they would have nothing to do with such g
oings-on, but there were stories belying that, as well.
Little of this had changed when the Tyrants came. Neither Brandin nor Alberico
was so reckless or ill-advised as to stir up the clergy of the Triad against
their rule. The priests and the priestesses were allowed to do as they had alw
ays done. The people of the Palm were granted their worship, odd and even prim
itive as it might seem to the new rulers from overseas.
What both Tyrants did do, with greater or lesser success, was play the rival t
emples against each other, seeing—for it was impossible not to see—the tensi
ons and hostilities that rippled and flared among the three orders of the Tria
d. There was nothing new in this: every Duke, Grand Duke, or Prince in the pen
insula had sought, in each generation, to turn this shifting three-way frictio
n to his own account. Many patterns might have changed with the circling of ye
ars, some things might change past all recognition, and some might be lost or
forgotten entirely, but not this one. Not this delicate, reciprocal dance of s
tate and clergy.
And so the temples still stood, and the most important ones still flourished t
heir gold and machial, their statuary, and their cloth-of-gold vestments for s
ervices. Save in one place only: in Lower Corte, where the statues and the gol
d were gone and the libraries looted and burned. That was part of something el
se though, and few spoke of it after the earliest years of the Tyrants. Even i
n this benighted province, the clergy were otherwise allowed to continue the p
recisely measured round of their days in city and town, and in their Sanctuari
es.
And to these retreats came a great variety of men and women from time to time.
It was not only the awkwardly fecund who found reason to ride or be carried a
way from the turbulence of their lives. In times of strife, whether of the sou
l or the wider world, the denizens of the Palm always knew that the Sanctuarie
s were there, perched in snowbound precipitous eyries or half-lost in their mi
sty valleys.
And the people knew as well that—for a price—such a withdrawal into the regi
men, the carefully modulated hours of retreats such as this one of Eanna in it
s valley, could be theirs. For a time. For a lifetime. Whoever they might have
been in the cities beyond the hills.
Whoever they might have been.
For a time, for a lifetime, the old woman thought, looking out the window of h
er room at the valley in sunlight at spring's return. She had never been able
to keep her thoughts from going back. There was so much waiting for her in the
past and so little here, now, living through the agonizingly slow descent of
the years. Season after season falling to the earth like shot birds, arrows in
their breasts, through this lifetime that was her own, and her only one.
A lifetime of remembering, by curlew's cry at dawn or call to prayer, by candl
elight at dusk, by sight of chimney smoke rising straight and dark into winter
's wan gray light, by the driving sound of rain on roof and window at winter's
end, by the creak of her bed at night, by call to prayer again, by drone of p
riests at prayer, by a star falling west in the summer sky, by the stern cold
dark of the Ember Days ... a memory within each and every motion of the self o
r of the world, every sound, each share of color, each scent borne by the vall
ey wind. A remembrance of what had been lost to bring one to this place among
the white-robed priests with their unending rites and their unending pettiness
, and their acceptance of what had happened to them all.
Which last is what had nearly killed her in the early years. Which, indeed, sh
e would say—had said last week to Danoleon—was killing her now, whatever the
priest-physician might say about growths in her breast.
They had found a Healer in the fall. He had come, anxious, febrile, a lank, sl
oppy man with nervous motions and a flushed brow. But he had sat down beside h
er bed and looked at her, and she had realized that he did have the gift, for
his agitation had settled and his brow had cleared. And when he touched her—h
ere, and here—his hand had been steady and there had been no pain, only a not
unpleasant weariness.
He had shaken his head though in the end, and she had read an unexpected grief
in his pale eyes, though he could not have known who she was. His sorrow woul
d be for simple loss, for defeat, not caring who it was who might be dying.
"It would kill me," he said quietly. "It has come too far. I would die and I w
ould not save you. There is nothing I can do."
"How long?" she had asked. Her only words.
He told her half a year, perhaps less, depending on how strong she was.
How strong? She was very strong. More so than any of them guessed save perhaps
Danoleon, who had known her longest by far. She sent the Healer from the room
, and asked Danoleon to leave, and then the one slow servant the priests had a
llowed to the woman they knew only as a widow from an estate north of Stevanie
n.
As it happened she had actually known the woman whose identity she had assumed
; had had her as one of the ladies of her court for a time. A fair-haired girl
, green eyes and an easy manner, quick to laugh. Melina bren Tonaro. A widow f
or a week; less than that. She had killed herself in the Palace by the Sea whe
n word came of Second Deisa.
The deception was a necessary shielding of identity: Danoleon's suggestion. Al
most nineteen years ago. They would be looking for her and for the boy, the Hi
gh Priest had said. The boy he was taking away, he would soon be safely gone,
their dreams carried in his person, a hope living so long as he lived. She had
been fair-haired herself, in those days. It had all happened such a long time
ago. She had become Melina bren Tonaro and had come to the Sanctuary of Eanna
in its high valley above Avalle.
Above Stevanien.
Had come, and had waited. Through the changing seasons and the unchanging year
s. Waited for that boy to grow into a man such as his father had been, or his
brothers, and then do what a descendant in direct line of Micaela and the god
should know he had to do.
Had waited. Season after season; shot birds falling from the sky.
Until last autumn, when the Healer had told her the cold large thing she had a
lready guessed for herself. Half a year, he had said. If she was strong.
She had sent them from her room and lain in her iron bed and looked out at the
leaves on the valley trees. The change of colors had come. She had loved that
once; her favorite season for riding. As a girl, as a woman. It had occurred
to her that these would be the last fall leaves she would ever see.
She had turned her mind from such thoughts and had begun to calculate. Days an
d months, and the numbering of the years. She had done the arithmetic twice, a
nd a third time to be sure of it. She said nothing to Danoleon, not then. It w
as too soon.
Not until the end of winter, with all the leaves gone and ice just beginning t
o melt from the eaves, did she summon the High Priest and instruct him as to t
he letter she wanted sent to the place where she knew—as he knew, alone of al
l the priests—her son would be on the Ember Days that began this spring. She
had done the calculations. Many times.
She had also timed it very well, and not by chance. She could see Danoleon wan
ting to protest, to dissuade, to speak of dangers and circumspection. But the
ground was out from under his feet, she could see it in the way his large hand
s grew restless and the way his blue eyes moved about the room as if seeking a
n argument on the bare walls. She waited patiently for him to meet her gaze at
last, as she knew he would, and then she saw him slowly bow his head in accep
tance.
How did one deny a mother, dying, a message to her only living child? An entre
aty to that child to come bid her farewell before she crossed over to Morian.
Especially when that child, the boy he himself had guided south over the mount
ains so many years ago, was her last link to what she had been, to her own bro
ken dreams and the lost dreams of her people?
Danoleon promised to write the letter and have it sent. She thanked him and la
y back in her bed after he went out. She was genuinely weary, genuinely in pai
n. Hanging on. It would be half a year just past the Ember Days of spring. She
had done the numbers. She would be alive to see him if he came. And he would
come; she knew he would come to her.
The window had been open a little though it was still cold that day. Outside,
the snow had lain in gentle drifting folds in the valley and up the slopes of
the hills. She had looked out upon it but her thoughts, unexpectedly, had been
of the sea. Dry-eyed, for she had not wept since everything fell, not once, n
ot ever, she walked her memory-palaces of long ago and saw the waves come in t
o break and fall on the white sands of the shore, leaving shells and pearls an
d other gifts along the curving beach.
So Pasithea di Tigana bren Serazi. Once a princess in a palace by the sea; mot
her of two dead sons, and of one who yet lived. Waiting, as winter near the mo
untains turned to spring in that year.
"Two things. First, we are musicians," said Alessan. "A newly formed company.
Secondly: do not use my name. Not here." His voice had taken on the clipped, h
ard cadences Devin remembered from the first night in the Sandreni lodge when
this had all begun for him.
They were looking down on a valley running west in the clear light of afternoo
n. The Sperion lay behind them. The uneven, narrow road had wound its way for
hours up around the shoulders of an ascending sequence of hills until this hig
hest point. And now the valley unrolled before them, trees and grass touched b
y the earliest green-gold of spring. A tributary stream, swift-running with th
e melting snows, slanted northwest out of the foothills, flashing with light.
The temple dome in the midst of the Sanctuary gleamed silver in the middle dis
tance.
"What name, then?" Erlein asked quietly. He seemed subdued, whether because of
Alessan's tone or the awareness of danger, Devin did not know.
"Adreano," the Prince said, after a moment. "I am Adreano d'Astibar today. I w
ill be a poet for this reunion. For this triumphant, joyous homecoming."
Devin remembered the name: the young poet death-wheeled by Alberico last winte
r, after the scandal of the "Sandreni Elegies." He looked closely at the Princ
e for a moment and then away: this was not a day to probe. If he was here for
any reason it was to try, somehow, to make things easier for Alessan. He didn'
t know how he was going to go about doing that though. He felt badly out of hi
s depth again, his earlier rush of excitement fading before the grimness of th
e Prince's manner.
South of them, towering above the valley, the peaks of the Sfaroni Range loome
d, higher even than the mountains above Castle Borso. There was snow on the pe
aks and even on the middle slopes; winter did not retreat so swiftly this high
up, this far south. Below them though, north of the contoured foothills, in t
he sheltered eastwest running of the valley Devin could see green buds swellin
g on the trees. A grey hawk hung in an updraft for a moment, almost motionless
, before wheeling south and down to be lost against the backdrop of the hills.
Down on the valley floor the Sanctuary seemed to lie within its walls like a
promise of peace and serenity, wrapped away from all the evils of the world.
Devin knew it was not so.
They rode down, not hurrying now, for that would have been unusual in three mu
sicians come here at midday. Devin was keenly, anxiously aware of danger. The
man he was riding behind was the last heir to Tigana. He wondered what Brandin
of Ygrath would do to Alessan if the Prince was betrayed and taken after so m
any years. He remembered Marius of Quileia in the mountain pass: Do you trust
this message?
Devin had never trusted the priests of Eanna in his whole life. They were too
shrewd, by far the most subtle of the clergy, by far the most apt to steer eve
nts to their own ends, which might lie out of sight, generations away. Servant
s of a goddess, he supposed, might find it easier to take the longer view of t
hings. But everyone knew that all across the peninsula the clergy of the Triad
had their own triple understanding with the Tyrants from abroad: their collec
tive silence, their tacit complicity, bought in exchange for being allowed to
preserve the rites that mattered more to them, it seemed, than freedom in the
Palm.
Even before meeting Alessan, Devin had had his own thoughts about that. On the
subject of the clergy his father had never been shy about speaking his mind.
And now Devin remembered again Garin's single candle of defiance twice a year
on the Ember Nights of his childhood in Asoli. Now that he had begun to think
about it, there seemed to be a great many nuances to the flickering lights of
those candles in the dark. And more shadings to his own stolid father than he
had ever guessed. Devin shook his head; this was not the time to wander down t
hat path.
When the hill track finally wound its way down to the valley floor, a wider, s
moother road began, slanting towards the Sanctuary in the middle of the valley
. About half a mile away from the stone outer walls, a double row of trees beg
an on either side of the approach. Elms, coming into early leaf. Beyond them o
n either side Devin saw men working in the fields, some lay servants and some
of them priests, clad not in the white of ceremony, but in nondescript robes o
f beige, beginning the labors that the soil demanded at winter's end. One man
was singing, a sweet, clear tenor voice.
The eastern gates of the Sanctuary complex were open before them, simple and u
nadorned save for the star-symbol of Eanna. The gates were high though, Devin
noted, and of heavy wrought iron. The walls that enclosed the Sanctuary were h
igh as well, and the stone was thick. There were also towers—eight of them—c
urving forward at intervals around the wide embrace of the walls. This was cle
arly a place built, however many hundreds of years ago, to withstand adversity
. Set within the complex, rising serenely above everything else, the dome of E
anna's temple shone in the sunlight as they rode up to the open gates and pass
ed within.
Just inside Alessan pulled his horse to a halt. From ahead of them and some di
stance over to the left they heard the unexpected sound of children's laughter
. In an open, grassy field set beyond a stable and a large residence hall a do
zen young boys in blue tunics were playing maracco with sticks and a ball, sup
ervised by a young priest in the beige work-robes.
Devin watched them with a sudden sharp sadness and nostalgia. He could remembe
r, vividly, going into the woods near their farm with Povar and Nico when he w
as five years old, to cut and carry home his first maracco stick. And then the
hours—minutes more often —snatched from chores when the three of them would
seize their sticks and one of the battered succession of balls Nico had patie
ntly wound together out of layers and layers of cloth, to whoop and slash thei
r way about in the mud at the end of the barnyard, pretending they were the As
olini team at the upcoming Triad Games.
"I scored four times one game in my last year of temple schooling," Erlein di
Senzio said in a musing voice. "I've never forgotten it. I doubt I ever will."

Surprised and amused, Devin glanced over at the wizard. Alessan turned in his
saddle to look back as well. After a moment the three men exchanged a smile. I
n the distance the children's shouts and laughter gradually subsided. The thre
e of them had been seen. It was unlikely that the appearance of strangers was
a common event here, especially so soon after the melting of the snow.
The young priest had left the playing field and was making his way over, as wa
s an older man with a full black leather apron over his robes of beige, coming
from where the sheep and goats and cows were kept in pens on the other side o
f the central avenue. Some distance in front of them lay the arched entrance t
o the temple and beside it on the right and a little behind, the smaller dome
of the observatory—for in all her Sanctuaries the priests of Eanna tracked an
d observed the stars she had named.
The complex was enormous, even more so than it had seemed from above on the hi
ll slopes. There were a great many priests and servants moving about the groun
ds, entering and leaving the temple itself, working among the animals, or in t
he vegetable gardens Devin could see beyond the observatory. From that directi
on as well came the unmistakable clanging of a blacksmith's forge. Smoke rose
up there, to be caught and carried by the mild breeze. Overhead he saw the haw
k again, or a different one, circling lazily against the blue.
Alessan dismounted and Devin and Erlein did the same just as the two priests c
ame up to them, at almost exactly the same moment. The younger one, sandy-hair
ed and small like Devin, laughed and gestured at himself and his colleague.
"Not much of a greeting party, I'm afraid. We weren't expecting visitors this
early in the year, I must admit. No one even noticed you riding down. Be welco
me though, be most welcome to Eanna's Sanctuary, whatever the reason you have
come to us. May the goddess know you and name you hers." He had a cheerful man
ner and an easy smile.
Alessan returned the smile. "May she know and surely name all who dwell within
these walls. To be honest, we wouldn't have been certain how to deal with a m
ore official greeting. We haven't actually worked out our entrance routines ye
t. And as for early in the year— well, everyone knows new-formed companies ha
ve to get moving sooner than the established ones or they are likely to starve
."
"You are musical performers?" the older priest asked heavily, wiping his hands
on the leather apron he wore. He was balding and brown and grizzled, and ther
e was a gap where two of his front teeth ought to have been.
"We are," said Alessan with some attempt at a grand manner. "My name is Adrean
o d'Astibar. I play the Tregean pipes, and with me is Erlein di Senzio, the fi
nest harp player in all of the peninsula. And I must tell you truly, you haven
't heard singing until you've listened to our young companion Devin d'Asoli."

The younger priest laughed again. "Oh, well done! I should bring you along to
the outer school to give a lesson to my charges in rhetoric."
"I'd do better to teach the pipes," Alessan smiled. "If music is part of your
program here."
The priest's mouth twitched. "Formal music," he said. "This is Eanna, not Mori
an, after all."
"Of course," said Alessan hastily. "Very formal music for the young ones board
ing here. But for the servants of the goddess themselves . . . ?" He arched on
e of his dark eyebrows.
"I will admit," said the sandy-haired young priest, smiling again, "to a prefe
rence for Rauder's early music myself."
"And no one plays it better than we," Alessan said smoothly. "I can see we hav
e come to the right place. Should we make our obeisance to the High Priest?"
"You should," said the older man, not smiling. He began untying the apron-stri
ngs at his back. "I'll take you to him. Savandi, your charges are about to com
mit assault upon each other or worse. Have you no control at all over them?"
Savandi spun to look, swore feelingly in a quite unpriestly fashion, and began
running towards the games field shouting imprecations. From this distance it
did indeed seem to Devin that the maracco sticks were being used by Savandi's
young charges in a fashion distinctly at variance with the accepted rules of t
he game.
Devin saw Erlein grinning as he watched the boys. The wizard's lean face chang
ed when he smiled. When the smile was a true one, not the ironic, slipping-sid
eways expression he so often used to indicate a sour, superior disdain.
The older priest, grim-faced, pulled his leather apron over his head, folded i
t neatly, and draped it over one of the bars of the adjacent sheepfold. He bar
ked a name Devin could not make out and another young man—a servant this time
—hastily emerged from the stables on their left.
"Take their horses," the priest ordered bluntly. "See that their goods are bro
ught to the guest house."
"I'll keep my pipes," Alessan said quickly.
"And I my harp," Erlein added. "No lack of trust, you understand, but a musici
an and his instrument..."
This priest was somewhat lacking in Savandi's comfortable manner. "As you will
," was all he said. "Come. My name is Torre, I am the porter of this Holy Sanc
tuary. You must be brought to the High Priest." He turned and set off without
waiting for them, on a path going around to the left of the temple.
Devin and Erlein looked at each other and exchanged a shrug. They followed Tor
re and Alessan, passing a number of other priests and lay servants, most whom
smiled at them, somewhat making up for their dour, self-appointed guide.
They caught up to the other two as they rounded the southern side of the templ
e. Torre had stopped, Alessan beside him. The balding porter looked around, qu
ite casually, then said, almost as casually:

420 TIGANA
"Trust no one. Speak truth to none but Danoleon or myself. These are his words
. You have been expected. We thought it would be another night, perhaps two be
fore you came, but she said it would be today."
"Then I have proved her right. How gratifying," said Alessan in an odd voice.

Devin felt suddenly cold. Off to their left, in the games field, Savandi's boy
s were laughing again, lithe shapes clad in blue, running after a white ball.
From within the dome he could hear, faintly, the sound of chanting. The end of
the afternoon invocations. Two priests in formal white came along the path fr
om the opposite direction, arm in arm, disputing animatedly.
"This is the kitchen, and this the bakehouse," Torre said clearly, pointing as
he spoke. "Over there is the brewhouse. You will have heard of the ale we mak
e here, I have no doubt."
"Of course we have," murmured Erlein politely, as Alessan said nothing.
The two priests slowed, registered the presence of the strangers and their mus
ical instruments, and went on. "Just over there is the High Priest's house," T
orre continued, "beyond the kitchen and the outer school."
The other two priests, resuming their argument, swept briskly around the curve
of the path that led to the front of the temple.
Torre fell silent. Then, very softly, he said: "Eanna be praised for her most
gracious love. May all tongues give her praise. Welcome home my Prince. Oh, in
the name of love, be welcome home at last."
Devin swallowed awkwardly, looking from Torre to Alessan. An uncontrollable sh
iver ran along his spine: there were tears, bright-sparkling in the brilliant
sunlight, in the porter's eyes.
Alessan made no reply. He lowered his head, and Devin could not see his eyes.
They heard children's laughter, the final notes of a sung prayer.
"She is still alive then?" Alessan asked, looking up at last.
"She is," said Torre emotionally. "She is still alive. She is very—" He could
not finish the sentence.
"There is no point in the three of us being careful if you are going to spill
tears like a child," Alessan said sharply. "Enough of that, unless you want me
dead."
Torre gulped. "Forgive me," he whispered. "Forgive me, my lord."
"No! Not 'my lord'. Not even when we are alone. I am Adreano d'Astibar, musici
an." Alessan's voice was hard. "Now take me to Danoleon."
The porter wiped quickly at his eyes. He straightened his shoulders. "Where do
you think we are going?" he snapped, almost managing his earlier tone again.
He spun on his heel and strode up the path.
"Good," Alessan murmured to the priest, from behind. "Very good, my friend." T
railing them both, Devin saw Torre's head lift at the words. He glanced at Erl
ein but this time the wizard, his expression thoughtful, did not return the lo
ok.
They passed the kitchens and then the outer school where Sa-vandi's charges—c
hildren of noblemen or wealthy merchants, sent here to be educated—would stud
y and sleep. All across the Palm such teaching was a part of the role of the c
lergy, and a source of a goodly portion of their wealth. The Sanctuaries vied
with each other to draw student boarders—and their fathers' money.
It was silent within the large building now. If the dozen or so boys on the ga
mes-field with Savandi were all the students in the complex, then Eanna's Sanc
tuary in Lower Corte was not doing very well.
On the other hand, Devin thought, who of those left in Lower Corte could affor
d Sanctuary schooling for their children now? And what shrewd businessman from
Corte or Chiara, having bought up cheap land here in the south, would not sen
d his son home to be educated? Lower Corte was a place where a clever man from
elsewhere could make money out of the ruin of the inhabitants, but it was not
a place to put down roots. Who wanted to be rooted in the soil of Brandin's h
ate?
Torre led them up the steps of a covered portico and then through the open doo
rway of the High Priest's house. All doors seemed to be open to the spring sun
shine, after the shuttered holiness of the Ember Days just past.
They stood in a large, handsome, high-ceilinged sitting-room. A huge fireplace
dominated the southwestern end and a number of comfortable chairs and small t
ables were arranged on a deep-piled carpet. Crystal decanters on a sideboard h
eld a variety of wines. Devin saw two bookcases on the southern wall but no bo
oks. The cases had been left to stand, disconcertingly empty. The books of Tig
ana had been burned. He had been told about that.
Arched doorways in both the eastern and western walls led out to porches where
the sunlight could be caught in the morning and at eve.
On the far side of the room there was a closed door, almost certainly leading
to the bedchamber. There were four cleverly designed, square recesses in the w
alls and another smaller one above the fire where statues would once have stoo
d. These too were gone. Only the ubiquitous silver stars of Eanna served for p
ainted decoration on the walls.
The door to the bedroom opened and two priests came out.
They seemed surprised, but not unduly so, to see the porter waiting with three
visitors. One man was of medium height and middle years, with a sharp face an
d close-cropped salt-and-pepper hair. He carried a physician's tray of herbs a
nd powders in front of him, supported on a thong about his neck.
It was at the other man that Devin stared, though. It was the other man who ca
rried the High Priest's staff of office. He would have commanded attention eve
n without it, Devin thought, gazing at the figure of what had to be Danoleon.

The High Priest was an enormous man, broad-shouldered with a chest like a barr
el, straight-backed despite his years. His long hair and the beard that covere
d half his chest were both white as new snow, even against the whiteness of hi
s robe. Thick straight eyebrows met in the middle of a serene brow and above e
yes as clear and blue as a child's. The hand he wrapped about the massive staf
f of office held it as if it were no more than a cowherd's hazel switch.
If they were like this, Devin thought, awed, looking up at the man who had bee
n High Priest of Eanna in Tigana when the Ygrathens came, if the leaders were
all like this then there were truly great men here before the fall.
They couldn't have been so different from today; he knew that rationally. It w
as only twenty years ago, however much might have changed and fallen away. But
even so, it was hard not to feel daunted in the commanding presence of this m
an. He turned from Danoleon to Alessan: slight, unprepossessing, with his diso
rderly, prematurely silvered hair and cool, watchful eyes, and the nondescript
, dusty, road-stained riding clothes he wore.
But when he turned back to the High Priest he saw that Danoleon was squeezing
his own eyes tightly shut as he drew a ragged breath. And in that moment Devin
realized, with a thrill that was oddly akin to pain, where, despite all appea
rances, the truth of power lay between these men. It was Danoleon, he remember
ed, who had taken the boy Alessan, the last prince of Tigana, south and away i
n hiding across the mountains all those years ago.
And would not have seen him again since that time. There was grey in the hair
of the tired man who stood before the High Priest now. Danoleon would be seein
g that, trying to deal with it. Devin found himself hurting for the two of the
m. He thought about the years, all the lost years that had tumbled and spun an
d drifted like leaves or snow between these two, then and now.
He wished he were older, a wiser man with a deeper understand-big. There seeme
d to be so many truths or realizations of late, hovering at the edge of his aw
areness, waiting to be grasped and claimed, just out of reach.
"We have guests," Torre said in his brusque manner. "Three musicians, a newly
formed company."
"Hah!" the priest with the medicine-tray grunted with a sour expression. "Newl
y formed? They'd have to be to venture here and this early in the year. I can'
t remember the last time someone of any talent showed up in this Sanctuary. Ca
n you three play anything that won't clear a room of people, eh?"
"It depends on the people," said Alessan mildly.
Danoleon smiled, though he seemed to be trying not to. He turned to the other
priest. "Idrisi, it is just barely possible that if we offered a warmer welcom
e we might be graced with visitors happier to display their art." The other ma
n grunted what might or might not have been an apology under the scrutiny of t
hat placid blue gaze.
Danoleon turned back to the three of them. "You will forgive us," he murmured.
His voice was deep and soothing. "We have had some disconcerting news recentl
y, and right now we have a patient in some pain. Idrisi di Corte, here, our ph
ysician, tends to be distressed when such is the case."
Privately, Devin doubted if distress had much to do with the Cortean priest's
rudeness, but he kept his peace. Alessan accepted Danoleon's apology with a sh
ort bow.
"I am sorry to hear that," he said to Idrisi. "Is it possible we might be of a
id? Music has long been known as a sovereign ease for pain. We should be happy
to play for any of your patients." He was ignoring for the moment, Devin note
d, the news Danoleon had mentioned. It was unlikely to be an accident that Dan
oleon had given them Idrisi's formal name—making clear that he was from Corte
.
The physician shrugged. "As you please. She is certainly not sleeping, and it
can do no harm. She is almost out of my hands now, in any case. The High Pries
t has had her brought here against my will.
Not that I can do very much anymore. In truth she belongs to Morian now." He t
urned to Danoleon. "If they tire her out, fine. If she sleeps it is a blessing
. I will be in the infirmary or in my garden. I'll check in here tonight, unle
ss I have word from you before."
"Will you not stay to hear us play, then?" Alessan asked. "We might surprise y
ou."
Idrisi grimaced. "I have no leisure for such things. Tonight in the dining hal
l, perhaps. Surprise me." He flashed a small, unexpected smile, gone as quickl
y as it appeared, and went past them with brisk, irritated strides out the doo
r.
There was a short silence.
"He is a good man," Danoleon said softly, almost apologetically.
"He is a Cortean," Torre muttered darkly.
The High Priest shook his handsome head. "He is a good man," he repeated. "It
angers him when people die in his care." His gaze went back to Alessan. His ha
nd shifted a little on his staff. He opened his mouth to speak.
"My lord, my name is Adreano d'Astibar," Alessan said firmly. "This is Devin .
. . d'Asoli, whose father Garin you may perhaps remember from Stevanien." He
waited. Danoleon's blue eyes widened, looking at Devin. "And this," Alessan fi
nished, "is our friend Erlein di Senzio, who plays harp among other gifts of h
is hands."
As he spoke those last words, Alessan held up his left palm with two fingers c
urled down. Danoleon looked quickly at Erlein, and then back to the Prince. He
had grown pale, and Devin was suddenly made aware that the High Priest was a
very old man.
"Eanna guard us all," Torre whispered from behind them.
Alessan looked pointedly around at the open archways to the porches. "This par
ticular patient is near death then, I take it?"
Danoleon's gaze, Devin thought, seemed to be devouring Alessan. There was an a
lmost palpable hunger in it, the need of a starving man. "I'm afraid she is,"
he said keeping his tone steady only with an obvious effort. "I have given her
my own chamber that she might be able to hear the prayers in the temple. The
infirmary and her own rooms are both too far away."
Alessan nodded his head. He seemed to have himself on a tightly held leash, hi
s movements and his words rigidly controlled. He lifted the Tregean pipes in t
heir brown leather sheath and looked down at them.
"Then perhaps we should go in and make music for her. It sounds as if the afte
rnoon prayers are done."
They were. The chanting had stopped. In the fields behind the house the boys o
f the outer school were still running and laughing in the sunlight. Devin coul
d hear them through the open doorways. He hesitated, unsure of himself, then c
oughed awkwardly and said: "Perhaps you might like to play alone for her? The
pipes are soothing, they may help her fall asleep."
Danoleon was nodding his head in anxious agreement, but Ales-san turned back t
o look at Devin, and then at Erlein. His expression was veiled, unreadable.
"What?" he said at length. "Would you abandon me so soon after our company is
formed?" And then, more softly: "There will be nothing said that you cannot kn
ow, and some things, perhaps, that you should hear."
"But she is dying," Devin protested, feeling something wrong here, something o
ut of balance. "She is dying and she is—" He stopped himself.
Alessan's eyes were so strange.
"She is dying and she is my mother," he whispered. "I know. That is why I want
you there. There seems to be some news, as well. We had better hear it."
He turned and walked towards the bedroom door. Danoleon was standing just befo
re it. Alessan stopped before the High Priest and they looked at each other. T
he Prince whispered something Devin could not hear; he leaned forward and kiss
ed the old man on the cheek.
Then he went past him. At the door he paused for a moment and drew a long stea
dying breath. He lifted a hand as if to run it through his hair but stopped hi
mself. A queer smile crossed his face as if chasing a memory.
"A bad habit, that," he murmured, to no one in particular. Then he opened the
door and went in and they followed him.
The High Priest's bedchamber was almost as large as the sitting room in the fr
ont, but its furnishings were starkly simple. Two armchairs, a pair of rustic,
worn carpets, a wash-stand, a writing desk, a trunk for storage, a small priv
y set apart in the southeastern corner. There was a fireplace in the northern
wall, twin to the one in the front room, sharing the same chimney. This side w
as lit, despite the mildness of the day, and so the room was wanner though bot
h windows were open, curtains drawn back to admit some slanting light from und
er the eaves of the porticoes to the west.
The bed on the back wall under the silver star of Eanna was large, for Danoleo
n was a big man, but it too was simple and unadorned. No canopy, plain pinewoo
d posts in the four corners, and a pine headboard.
It was also empty.
Devin, nervously following Alessan and the High Priest through the door, had e
xpected to see a dying woman there. He looked, more than a little embarrassed,
towards the door of the privy. And almost jumped with shock when a voice spok
e from the shadows by the fire, where the light from the windows did not fall.

"Who are these strangers?"
Alessan himself had turned unerringly toward the fire the moment he entered th
e room—guided by what sense, Devin never knew —and so he appeared controlled
and unsurprised when that cold voice spoke. Or when a woman moved forward fro
m the shadows to stand by one of the armchairs, and then sit down upon it, her
back very straight, her head held high looking at him. At all of them.
Pasithea di Tigana bren Serazi, wife to Valentin the Prince. She must have bee
n a woman of unsurpassed beauty in her youth, for that beauty still showed, ev
en here, even now, at the threshold of the last portal of Morian. She was tall
and very thin, though part of that, clearly, was due to the illness wasting h
er from within. It showed in her face, which was pale almost to translucence,
the cheekbones thrust into too sharp relief. Her robe had a high, stiff collar
which covered her throat; the robe itself was crimson, accentuating her unnat
ural, other-worldly pallor—it was as if, Devin thought, she had already cross
ed to Morian and was looking back at them from a farther shore.
But there were golden rings, very much of this world, on her long fingers, and
one dazzling blue gem gleamed from a necklace that hung down over her robe. H
er hair was gathered and bound up in a black net, a style long out of fashion
in the Palm. Devin knew with absolute certainty that current fashion would mea
n nothing, less than nothing, to this woman. Her eyes looked at him just then
with swift, unsettling appraisal, before moving on to Erlein, and then resting
, finally, upon her son.
The son she had not seen since he was fourteen years old.
Her eyes were grey like Alessan's, but they were harder than his, glittering a
nd cold, hiding their depths, as if some semi-precious stone had been caught a
nd set just below the surface. They glinted, fierce and challenging, in the li
ght of the room, and just before she spoke again—not even waiting for an answ
er to her first question—Devin realized that what they were seeing in those e
yes was rage.
It was in the arrogant face, in the high carriage and the fingers that held ha
rd to the arms of her chair. An inner fire of anger that had passed, long ago,
beyond the realm of words or any other form of expression. She was dying, and
in hiding, while the man who had killed her husband ruled her land. It was th
ere, it was all there, for anyone who knew but half the tale.
Devin swallowed and fought an urge to draw back toward the door, out of range.
A moment later he realized that he needn't bother; as far as the woman in the
chair was concerned he was a cipher, a nothing. He wasn't even there. Her que
stion had not been meant to be answered; she didn't really care who they were.
She had someone else to deal with.
For a long time, a sequence of moments that seemed to hang forever in the sile
nce, she looked Alessan up and down without speaking, her white, imperious fea
tures quite unreadable. At last, slowly shaking her head, she said: "Your fath
er was such a handsome man."
Devin flinched at the words and the tone, but Alessan seemed scarcely to react
at all. He nodded in calm agreement. "I know he was. I remember. And so were
my brothers." He smiled, a small, ironic smile. "The strain must have run out
just before it got to me."
His voice was mild, but when he finished he glanced sharply at Danoleon, and t
he High Priest read a message there. He, in turn, murmured something to Torre
who quickly left the room.
To stand guard in front, Devin realized, feeling a chill despite the fire. Wor
ds had just been spoken here that could kill them all. He looked over at Erlei
n and saw that the wizard had slipped his harp out of its case. His expression
grim, the Senzian took a position near the eastern window and quietly began t
uning his instrument.
Of course, Devin thought: Erlein knew what he was doing. They had come in here
ostensibly to play for a dying woman. It would be odd if no music emerged fro
m this room. On the other hand, he didn't much feel like singing just now.
"Musicians," the woman in the chair said with contempt to her son. "How splend
id. Have you come to play a jingle for me now? To show me how skillful you are
in such an important thing? To ease a mother's soul before I die?" There was
something almost unbearable in her tone.
Alessan did not move, though he too had gone pale now. In no other way did he
betray his tension though, save perhaps in the almost too casual stance, the e
xaggerated simulation of ease.
"If it would please you, my lady mother, I will play for you," he said quietly
. "There was a time I can remember when the prospect of music would indeed hav
e brought you pleasure."
The eyes of the woman in the chair glittered coldly. "There was a time for mus
ic. When we ruled here. When the men of our family were men in more than name.
"
"Oh, I know," said Alessan, a little sharply. "True men and wondrous proud, al
l of them. Men who would have stormed the ramparts of Chiara alone and killed
Brandin long ago, if only through his abject terror at their ferocious determi
nation. Mother, can you not let it rest, even now? We are the last of our fami
ly and we have not spoken in nineteen years." His voice changed, softened, gre
w unexpectedly awkward. "Must we wrangle yet, can our speech be no more than t
he letters were? Did you ask me here simply to say again what you have written
so many times?"
The old woman shook her head. Arrogant and grim, implacable as the death that
had come for her.
"No, not that," she said. "I have not so much breath in me to waste. I summone
d you here to receive a mother's dying curse upon your blood."
"No!" Devin exclaimed before he could stop himself.
In the same second Danoleon took a long stride forward. "My lady, no indeed,"
he said, anguish in his deep voice. "This is not—"
"I am dying," Pasithea bren Serazi interrupted harshly. There were spots of br
ight unnatural color in her cheeks. "I do not have to listen to you anymore, D
anoleon. To anyone. Wait, you told me, all these years. Be patient, you said.
Well, I have no more time for patience. I will be dead in a day. Morian waits
for me. I have no more time to linger while my craven child gambols about the
Palm playing ditties at rustic weddings."
There came a discordant jangling of harpstrings.
"That," said Erlein di Senzio from the eastern window, "is ignorant and unfair
!" He stopped, as if startled by his own outburst. "Triad knows, I have no cau
se to love your son. And it is now more than clear to me whence his arrogance
comes and his lack of care for other lives, for anything but his own goals. Bu
t if you name him a coward simply for not trying to kill Brandin of Ygrath the
n you are dying a vain, foolish woman. Which, to be perfectly frank, does not
surprise me at all in this province!"
He leaned back against the ledge, breathing hard, looking at no one. In the si
lence that followed Alessan finally moved. His stillness had seemed inhuman, u
nnatural, now he sank to his knees beside his mother's chair.
"You have cursed me before," he said gravely. "Remember? I have lived much of
my life in the shadow of that. In many ways it would have been easier to die y
ears ago: Baerd and I slain trying to kill the Tyrant in Chiara . . . perhaps
even killing him, through some miracle of intervention. Do you know, we used t
o speak of it at night, every single night, when we were in Quileia, still boy
s. Shaping half a hundred different plans for an assassination on the Island.
Dreaming of how we would be loved and honored after death in a province with i
ts name restored because of us."
His voice was low, almost hypnotic in its cadences. Devin saw Danoleon, his fa
ce working with emotion, sink back into the other armchair. Pasithea was still
as marble, as expressionless and cold. Devin moved quietly toward the fire, i
n a vain attempt to quell the shivering that had come over him. Erlein was sti
ll by the window. He was playing his harp again, softly, single notes and rand
om chords, not quite a tune.
"But we grew older," Alessan went on, and an urgency, a terrible need to be un
derstood had come into his voice. "And one Midsummer's Eve Marius became Year
King in Quileia, with our aid. After that when we three spoke the talk was dif
ferent. Baerd and I began to learn some true things about power and the world.
And that was when it changed for me. Something new came to me in that time, b
uilding and building, a thought, a dream, larger and deeper than trying to kil
l a Tyrant. We came back to the Palm and began to travel. As musicians, yes. A
nd as artisans, merchants, athletes one time in a Triad Game year, as masons a
nd builders, guards to a Senzian banker, sailors on a dozen different merchant
-ships. But even before those journeys had begun, mother, even before we came
back north over the mountains, it had all changed for me. I was finally clear
about what my task in life was to be. About what had to be done, or tried. You
know it, Danoleon knows; I wrote you years ago what my new understanding was,
and I begged your blessing for it. It was such a simple truth: we had to take both Tyr
ants together, that this whole peninsula might again be free."
His mother's voice overrode his steady passion then, harsh, implacable, unforg
iving: "I remember. I remember the day that letter came. And I will tell you a
gain what I wrote you then to that harlot's castle in Certando: you would buy
Corte's freedom, and Astibar's and Tregea's at the price of Tigana's name. Of
our very existence in the world. At the cost of everything we ever had or were
before Brandin came. At the price of vengeance and our pride."
"Our pride," Alessan echoed, so softly now they could barely hear. "Oh, our pr
ide. I grew up knowing all about our pride, mother. You taught me, even more t
han father did. But I learned something else, later, as a man. In my exile. I
learned about Astibar's pride. About Senzio's and Asoli's and Certando's. I le
arned how pride had ruined the Palm in the year the Tyrants came."
"The Palm?" Pasithea demanded, her voice shrill. "What is the Palm? A spur of
land. Rock and earth and water. What is a peninsula that we should care for it
?"
"What is Tigana?" Erlein di Senzio asked bluntly, his harp silent in his hands
.
Pasithea's glance was withering. "I would have thought a bound wizard should k
now that!" she said corrosively, meaning to wound. Devin blinked at the speed
of her perception; no one had told her about Erlein, she had deduced it in min
utes from a scattering of clues.
She said: "Tigana is the land where Adaon lay with Micaela when the world was
young and gave her his love and a child and a god's gift of power to that chil
d and those who came after. And now the world has spun a long way from that ni
ght and the last descendant of that union is in this room with the entire past
of his people falling through his hands." She leaned forward, her grey eyes b
lazing, her voice rising in indictment. "Falling through his hands. He is a fo
ol and a coward, both. There is so much more than freedom in a peninsula in an
y single generation at stake in this!"
She fell back, coughing, pulling a square of blue silk from a pocket in her ro
be. Devin saw Alessan begin a movement up from his knees, and then check himse
lf. His mother coughed, rackingly, and Devin saw, before he could turn his eye
s away that the silk came away red when she was done. On the carpet beside her
Alessan bowed his head.
Erlein di Senzio, from the far side of the room, perhaps too far to see the bl
ood, said, "And shall I now tell you the legends of Senzio's pre-eminence? Of
Astibar's? Will you hear me sing the story of Eanna on the Island shaping the
stars from the glory of her love-making with the god? Do you know Certando's c
laim to be the heart and soul of the Palm? Do you remember the Carlozzini? The
Night Walkers in their highlands two hundred years ago?"
The woman in the armchair pushed herself straight again glaring at him. Fearin
g her, hating her words and manner and the terrible thing she was doing to her
son, Devin nonetheless felt humbled in the face of so much courage and such a
force of will.
"But that is the point," she said more softly, sparing her strength. "That is
the heart of this. Can you not see it? I do remember those stories. Anyone wit
h an education or a library, any fool who has ever heard a troubadour's sentim
ental wailing can remember them. Can hear twenty different songs of Eanna and
Adaon on Sangarios. Not us, though. Don't you see? Not Tigana anymore. Who wil
l sing of Mi-caela under the stars by the sea when we are gone? Who will be he
re to sing, when one more generation has lived and died away in the world?"
"I will," said Devin, his hands at his sides.
He saw Alessan's head come up as Pasithea turned to fix him with her cold eyes
. "We all will," he said, as firmly as he could. He looked at the Prince and t
hen, forcing himself, back to the dying old woman raging in her pride. "The wh
ole Palm will hear that song again, my lady. Because your son is not a coward.
Nor some vain fool seeking a young death and shallow fame. He is trying for t
he larger thing and he is going to do it. Something has happened this spring a
nd because of it he is going to do what he has said he will do: free this peni
nsula and bring back Tigana's name into the world."
He finished, breathing in hard gasps as if he had been running a race. A momen
t later, he felt himself go crimson with mortification. Pasithea bren Serazi w
as laughing. Mocking him, her frail thin body rocking in the chair. Her high l
aughter turned into another desperate fit of coughing; the blue silk came up,
and when it was withdrawn there was a great deal of blood stain. She clutched
at the arms of her chair to steady herself.
"You are a child," she pronounced finally. "And my son is a child for all the
grey in his hair. And I have no doubt that Baerd bar Saevar is exactly the sam
e, with half the grace and the gifts his father had. 'Something has happened t
his spring,' " she mimicked with cruel precision. Her voice grew hard and cold
as midwinter ice: "Do you infants have any idea what has really just happened
in the Palm?"
Slowly her son rose from his knees to stand before her. "We have been riding f
or a number of days and nights. We have heard no tidings. What is it?"
"I told you there was news," Danoleon said quickly. "But I had no chance to gi
ve you the—"
"I am pleased," Pasithea interrupted. "So very pleased. It seems I still have
something to tell my son before I leave him forever. Something he hasn't learn
ed or thought out all by himself already." She pushed herself erect again in t
he chair, her eyes cold and bright like frost under blue moonlight. There was
something wild and lost in her voice though, trying to break through. Some ter
rible fear, and of more than death. She said:
"A messenger came yesterday at sunset, at the end of the Ember Days. An Ygrath
en, riding from Stevanien with news from Chiara. News so urgent Brandin had se
nt it by his sorcerous link to all his Governors with instructions to spread t
he tidings."
"And the tidings are?" Alessan had braced himself, as if preparing to receive
a blow.
"The tidings? The tidings, my feckless child, are that Brandin has just abdica
ted as King of Ygrath. He is sending his army home. And his Governors. All tho
se who choose to stay with him must become citizens of this peninsula. Of a ne
w dominion: the Kingdom of the Western Palm. Chiara, Corte, Asoli, Lower Corte
. Four provinces under Brandin on the Island. He has announced that we are fre
e of Ygrath, no longer a colony. Taxes are to be shared equally among us now,
and they have been cut in half. Beginning yesterday. Cut by considerably more
than half here in Lower Corte. Our burden will now be equal with the others. T
he messenger said that the people of this province—the people your father rul
ed—were singing Brandin's name in the streets of Stevanien."
Alessan, moving very carefully, as if he were carrying something large and hea
vy, that might shift and fall, turned toward Danoleon. Who was nodding his hea
d.
"It seems that there was an assassination attempt on the Island three days ago
," the High Priest said. "Originating in Ygrath: the Queen and Brandin's son,
the Regent. It apparently failed only because of one of his Tribute women. The
one from Certando who almost started a war. You may remember that, twelve, fo
urteen years ago? It seems that in the wake of this Brandin has changed his mi
nd about what he has been doing. Not about staying in the Palm, or about Tigan
a and his revenge, but about what must be done in Ygrath if he continues here.
"
"And he is going to continue here," Pasithea said. "Tigana will die, still be
lost forever to his vengeance, but our people will be singing the Tyrant's nam
e as it dies. The name of the man who killed your father."
Alessan was nodding his head reflexively. He seemed, in fact, scarcely to be l
istening, as if he had suddenly withdrawn entirely inside himself. Pasithea fe
ll silent in the face of that, looking at her son. It grew deathly still in th
e room. Outside, far away, the uncontrolled shouts and laughter of the childre
n in the field came to their ears again, the louder for the silence within. De
vin listened to that distant mirth and tried to slow the chaos of his heart, t
o attempt to deal with what they had just heard.
He looked at Erlein, who had laid down his harp on the window-ledge and walked
a few steps into the room, his expression troubled and wary. Devin tried desp
erately to think, to gather his scattered thoughts, but the news had caught hi
m hopelessly unprepared. Free of Ygrath. Which was what they wanted, wasn't it
? Except that it wasn't. Brandin was staying, they were not free of him, or th
e weight of his magic. And Tigana? What of Tigana now?
And then, quite unexpectedly, there was something else bothering him. Somethin
g different. A distracting, niggling awareness tugging at the corner of his mi
nd. Telling him there was something he should know, should remember.
Then, equally without warning, the something slid forward and into place. In f
act . . .
In fact, he knew exactly what was wrong.
Devin closed his eyes for a moment, fighting a sudden paralyzing fear. Then, a
s quietly as he could, he began working his way along the western wall away fr
om the fireplace where he had been standing all this time.
Alessan was speaking now, almost to himself. He said: "This changes things of
course. It changes a great deal. I'm going to need time to think it through, b
ut I believe it may actually help us. This may truly be a gift not a curse."
"How? Are you genuinely simple?" his mother snapped. "They are singing the Tyr
ant's name in the streets of Avalle!"
Devin winced at the old name, the desperate pain at the heart of that cry, but
he forced himself to keep moving. A terrifying certainty was rising within hi
m.
"I hear you, I understand. But don't you see?" Alessan dropped to his knees on
the carpet again, close to his mother's chair. "The Ygrathen army is going ho
me. If he has to fight a war it will have to be with an army of our people and
what few Ygrathens stay with him. What ... oh, mother! . . . what do you thin
k the Barbadian in As-tibar will do when he hears this?"
"He will do nothing," Pasithea said flatly. "Alberico is a timorous man spun n
eck-deep in his own webs, all of which lead back to the Emperor's Tiara. At le
ast a quarter of the Ygrathen army will stay with Brandin. And those people si
nging are the most oppressed people in the peninsula. If they are joyous, what
do you think is happening elsewhere? Do you not imagine an army can be raised
in Chiara and Corte and Asoli to fight against Barbadior for a man who has re
nounced his own Kingdom for this peninsula?" She began coughing again, her bod
y rocking even more harshly than before.
Devin didn't know the answer. He couldn't even begin to guess. He knew that th
e balance had completely shifted, the balance Alessan had spoken about and pla
yed with for so long. He also knew something else.
He reached the window. Its ledge was about the height of his chest. He was a s
mall man; not for the first time he regretted it. Then he gave thanks for his
compensations, offered a quick prayer to Eanna and, hands flat on the ledge fo
r leverage, pushed upward hard and swung himself like a gymnast through to the
portico. He heard Pasithea still coughing behind him, a hard, painful sound.
Danoleon cried out.
He stumbled and fell, crashing into a pillar with his shoulder and hip. He pus
hed up and off, scrambling to his feet in time to see a figure in beige robes
leap up from a crouch beside the window, swearing furiously, and sprint away.
Devin grappled for the knife at his belt, a blind, thought-obliterating rage r
ising in him. It had been too uproarious in the games field. The same sound as
before, when the priest had left them alone.
Only this time the priest had left them alone while he spied on this room.
Alessan was at the window, Erlein just behind him.
"Savandi!" Devin gasped. "He was listening!" He spat the words over his should
er because he was already running after the other man. He spared a fleeting mo
ment of thanks, and wonder, for whatever Rinaldo the Healer had done to his le
g in that Certandan barn. Then anger swept over him again, and fear, and the a
bsolute need to catch the other man.
He vaulted the stone balustrade at the back end of the portico without breakin
g stride. Savandi, sprinting for all he was worth, had cut west toward the bac
k of the Sanctuary grounds. In the distance on their left Devin could see the
children playing in the field. He gritted his teeth and ran. These cursed prie
sts! he was thinking, fury almost choking him. Will they undo everything, even
now?
If Alessan's identity became known anywhere in this Sanctuary Devin had little
doubt how swiftly that knowledge would reach Brandin of Ygrath. He had no dou
bts at all about what would happen then.
And then he was assailed by another whirling thought, one that terrified him.
He drove himself to even greater speed, legs pumping, his lungs sucking for ai
r. The mindlink. What if Savandi could link to the King? What if Brandin's spy
could directly contact him in Chiara now?
Devin cursed in the depths of his heart but not aloud, sparing his breath for
speed. Savandi, lithe and quick himself, raced down the path past a small buil
ding on the left and cut sharply right, about twenty strides ahead of Devin, a
round the back part of the temple itself.
Devin sped around the corner. Savandi was nowhere to be seen. He froze for a m
oment, seized by panic. There was no door into the temple here. And only a thi
ck barrier of hedges, just coming into green on the left.
Then he saw where the hedges were quivering and he leaped for that spot. There
was a gap forced low down. He dropped to his knees and scrambled through, scr
atching his arms and face.
He was in a cloistered area, large, beautifully serene, gracefully laid out, w
ith a splashing fountain at the center. He had no time to value such things th
ough. At the northwest corner the cloister gave onto another portico and a lon
g building with a small domed roof at the near end. Savandi was just now sprin
ting up the steps to the portico and then through a doorway into the building.
Devin looked up. At one second-story window an old man could be seen, white h
aired and hollow-cheeked, gazing down without expression on the sunlit cloiste
r.
Running flat out for the doorway, Devin realized where he was. This was the in
firmary, and the small dome would be a temple for the sick who sought the comf
ort of Eanna but could not venture down the path to her larger dome.
He took the three steps to the portico in one flying leap and burst through th
e doorway, knife in hand. He was aware that following so fast he was an easy t
arget for an ambush if Savandi chose to lie in wait. He didn't think that woul
d happen though—which only increased his deeper fear.
The man seemed to be racing away from where his fellow priests might be found,
in the temple itself, the kitchens, the dormitory or the dining room. Which m
eant that he didn't expect help or aid, that he couldn't really be hoping to e
scape.
Which meant, in turn, that there was probably only one thing he was going to t
ry to do, if Devin gave him enough time.
The doorway gave onto a long corridor and a stairway leading upward. Savandi w
as out of sight but Devin, glancing down, gave a quick prayer of thanks to Ean
na: running across the damp ground of the cloister the priest had picked up mu
d on his shoes. The trail was unmistakable on the stone floor and it went down
the corridor and not up the stairs.
Devin sped in pursuit, flying down the hallway, skidding into a left turn arou
nd a corner at the far end. There were rooms at intervals all along and an arc
hed entrance to the infirmary's small temple at the opposite end. Most of the
doors were open; most of the rooms were empty.
But then, in that short corridor he came to one closed door; Savandi's trail l
ed there and stopped. Devin clutched the handle and threw his shoulder hard ag
ainst the heavy wood. Locked. Immovable.
Sobbing for breath he dropped to his knees, grappling in his pocket for the tw
ist of wire he was never without: not since Marra had been alive. Since she ha
d taught him all he knew about locks. He untwisted and tried to shape the wire
, but his hands were trembling. Sweat streamed into his eyes. He wiped it furi
ously away and fought for calm. He had to get this door open before the man in
side sent the message that would destroy them all.
An exterior door opened behind him. Steps thudded quickly down the hallway.
Without looking up, Devin said: "The man who touches or hinders me dies. Savan
di is a spy for the King of Ygrath. Find me a key for this door!"
"It is done!" came a voice he knew. "It is open. Go!"
Devin flung a glance over his shoulder and saw Erlein di Senzio standing there
with a sword in his hand.
Springing to his feet Devin twisted the handle again. The door swung open. He
charged into the room. There were jars and vials lining shelves around the wal
ls, and instruments on tables. Savandi was there, on a bench in the middle of
the room, hands at his temples, visibly straining to concentrate.
"Plague rot your soul!" Devin screamed at the top of his voice. Savandi seemed
to snap awake. He rose with a feral snarl, grabbing for a surgical blade on t
he table beside him.
He never reached it.
Still screaming, Devin was upon him, his left hand gouging at the priest's eye
s. He slashed forward and up with his right in a hard and deadly arc, plunging
his blade in between Savandi's ribs. Once, he stabbed, and then again, raking
savagely upward, feeling the blade twist, grinding against bone with a sicken
ing sensation. The young priest's mouth gaped open, his eyes widened in astoni
shment. He screamed, high and short, his hands flying outward from his sides.
And then he died.
Devin released him and collapsed on the bench, fighting for breath. Blood poun
ded in his head; he could feel a vein pulsing at his temple. His vision blurre
d for a moment and he closed his eyes. When he opened them he saw that his han
ds were still shaking.
Erlein had sheathed his sword. He moved to stand beside Devin.
"Did . . . did he send . . . ?" Devin found that he couldn't even speak proper
ly.
"No." The wizard shook his head. "You came in time. He didn't link. No message
went."
Devin stared down at the blank, staring eyes and the body of the young priest
who had sought to betray them. How long? he wondered. How long was he doing th
is?
"How did you get here?" he asked Erlein, his voice hoarse. His hands were stil
l shaking. He dropped the bloodied knife with a clatter on the tabletop.
"I followed from the bedchamber. Saw which way you went until I lost you aroun
d the back of the temple. Then I needed magic. I traced Savandi's aura here."

"We came through the hedges and across the cloister. He was trying to shake me
."
"I can see that. You're bleeding again."
"Doesn't matter." Devin took a deep breath. There were footsteps in the corrid
or outside. "Why did you come? Why do this for us?"
Erlein looked defensive for an instant, but quickly regained his sardonic expr
ession. "For you? Don't be a fool, Devin. I die if Alessan does. I'm bound, re
member? This was self-preservation. Nothing else."
Devin looked up at him, wanting to say something more, something important, bu
t just then the footsteps reached the doorway and Danoleon entered quickly wit
h Torre close behind. Neither of them said a word, taking in the scene.
"He was trying to mind-link with Brandin," Devin said. "Erlein and I got to hi
m in time."
Erlein made a dismissive sound. "Devin did. But I had to use a spell to follow
them and another on the door. I don't think they were strong enough to draw a
ttention, but in case there is a Tracker anywhere around here we had better ge
t moving before morning."
Danoleon seemed not to have even heard. He was looking down at Savandi's body.
There were tears on his face.
"Don't waste your grief on a carrion bird," Torre said harshly.
"I must," the High Priest said softly, leaning upon his staff. "I must. Don't
you understand? He was born in Avalle. He was one of us."
Devin abruptly turned his head away. He felt sick to his stomach, hit by a res
urgence of the raging white fury that had sped him here, and had driven him to
kill so violently. One of us. He remembered Sandre d'Astibar in the cabin in
the woods, betrayed by his grandchild. He was seriously afraid he was going to
be ill. One of us.
Erlein di Senzio laughed. Devin wheeled furiously around on him, his hands cle
nched into fists. And there must have been something murderous in his eyes, fo
r the wizard quickly sobered, mockery leaving his face as if wiped away with a
cloth.
There was a short silence.
Danoleon drew himself up and straightened his massive shoulders. He said, "Thi
s will have to be dealt with carefully or the story will spread. We can't have
Savandi's death traced to our guests. Torre, when we leave lock this room wit
h the body in it. After dark, when the others are asleep we will deal with him
."
"He'll be missed at dinner," Torre said.
"No he won't. You are the porter. You will see him ride through the gate late
this afternoon. He will be going to see his family. It fits, just after the Em
ber Days, and in the wake of the news from Chiara. He has ridden out often eno
ugh, and not always with my permission. I think I have an idea why now. I wond
er if he ever really rode to his father's house. Unfortunately for Savandi, th
is time he is going to be killed by someone on the road just outside our valle
y."
There was a hardness to the High Priest's voice that Devin had not heard befor
e. One of us. He looked down at the dead man again. His third killing. But thi
s one was different. The guard in the Nievolene barn, the soldier in the hill
pass, they had been doing what they had come to the Palm to do. Loyal to the p
ower they served, hiding nothing of their nature, true to their manifest cause
. He had grieved for their dying, for the lines of life that had brought him t
ogether with them.
Savandi was otherwise. This death was different. Devin searched his soul and f
ound that he could not grieve for what he had done. It was all he could do, he
realized with a sense of real uneasiness, to refrain from plunging his dagger
again in the corpse. It was as if the young priest's corrosive treachery to h
is people, his smiling deceit, had tapped some violence of passion Devin hadn'
t known lay within him. Almost exactly, he thought suddenly, the way that Alie
nor of Castle Borso had done, in a very different sphere of life.
Or, perhaps, at the heart of things, not so very different after all. But that
was too hard, too dangerous a knot to try to untie just now, in the staring p
resence of death. Which reminded him of something, made him suddenly aware of
an absence. He looked quickly up at Danoleon.
"Where's Alessan?" he said sharply. "Why didn't he follow?"
But even before he was answered, he knew. There could only be one reason in th
e world why the Prince hadn't come.
The High Priest looked down at him. "He is still in my chamber. With his mothe
r. Though I am afraid it may be over by now."
"No," Devin said. "Oh, no." And rose, and went to the door, and into the corri
dor, and then out through the eastern doorway of the infirmary into the slanti
ng light of late afternoon, and began, again, to run.
Along the back curve of the temple dome, past the same small building as befor
e and a little garden he hadn't noticed coming here, then back, flying, down t
he path to the High Priest's house, and up onto the portico between the pillar
s, as if rewinding events like a ball of wool, to the window through which he
had leaped such a little while ago. As if he could race back not only past Sav
andi, past their coming here, but all the way back, with a sudden, incoherent
longing, to where the seeds of this grief had been planted when the Tyrants ca
me.
But time was not rewound, neither in the heart nor in the world as they knew i
t. It moved on, and things changed, for better or for worse; seasons changed,
the hours of sunlit day went by, darkness fell and lingered and gave way to li
ght at dawn, years spun after each other one by one, people were born, and liv
ed by the Triad's grace, and they died.
And they died.
Alessan was still in the room, still on his knees on the simple carpet, but be
side the bed now, not by the heavy, dark oak chair as before. He had moved, ti
me had moved, the sun was further west along the curving sky.
Devin had wanted to somehow run his way back through the moments that had pass
ed. That Alessan might not have been left alone, not with this. On his first d
ay in Tigana since he was a boy. He was no longer a boy; there was grey in his
hair. Time had run. Twenty years worth of time had run and he was home again.

And his mother lay on the High Priest's bed. Alessan's two hands were laced ar
ound one of her own, cradling it gently as one might hold a small bird that wo
uld die of fright if clutched too fast but would fly away forever if released.

Devin must have made some kind of sound at the window for the Prince looked up
. Their eyes met. Devin ached inside, wordless with sorrow. His heart felt bru
ised, besieged. He felt hopelessly inadequate to the needs of such a time as t
his now was. He wished that Baerd were here, or Sandre. Even Catriana would kn
ow what to do better than he.
He said, "He is dead. Savandi. We caught him in time." Alessan nodded, acknowl
edging this. Then his gaze went down again to his mother's face, serene now as
it had not been before. As it very likely had not been for the last long year
s of her life. Time, moving inexorably forward for her, taking memory, taking
pride. Taking love.
"I'm sorry," Devin said. "Alessan, I'm so sorry."
The Prince looked up again, the grey eyes clear but terribly far away. Chasing
images backward along a skein of years. He looked as if he would speak but di
d not. Instead, after another moment, he gave his small shrug, the calm, reass
uring motion of acceptance, of shouldering another burden, that they all knew
so well.
Devin suddenly felt as if he could not bear it anymore. Alessan's quiet acquie
scence was as a final blow in his own heart. He felt torn open, wounded by the
hard truths of the world, by the passing of things. He lowered his head to th
e windowsill and wept like a child in the presence of something too large for
his capacity.
In the room Alessan knelt in silence by the bed, holding his mother's hand bet
ween his own. And the westering sun of afternoon sent light in a golden slant
through the window and across the chamber floor, to fall upon him, upon the be
d, upon the woman lying there, upon the golden coins that covered her grey eye
s.

chapter 16

SPRING CAME EARLY IN ASTIBAR TOWN. IT ALMOST ALWAYS did along that sheltered n
orthwestern side of the province, overlooking the bay and the strung-out islan
ds of the Archipelago. East and south the unblocked winds from the sea pushed
the start of the growing season back a few weeks and kept the smaller fishing
boats close to shore this early in the year.
Senzio was already flowering, the traders in Astibar harbor reported, the whit
e blossoms of the sejoia trees making the air fragrant with the promise of sum
mer to come. Chiara was still cold it was said, but that happened sometimes in
early spring on the Island. It wouldn't be long before the breezes from Khard
hun gentled the air and the seas around her.
Senzio and Chiara.
Alberico of Barbadior lay down at night thinking about them, and rose up in th
e morning doing the same, after intense, agitated nights of little rest, shot
through with lurid, disturbing dreams.
If the winter had been unsettling, rife with small incidents and rumors, the e
vents of early spring were something else entirely. And there was nothing smal
l, nothing only marginally provocative about them.
Everything seemed to be happening at once. Coming down from his bedchamber to
his offices of state, Alberico would find his mood darkening with every step i
n the apprehensive anticipation of what might next be reported to him.
The windows of the palace were open now to let the mild breezes sweep through.
It had been some time since it had been warm enough to do that and for much o
f the autumn and winter there had been bodies rotting on death-wheels in the s
quare. Sandreni bodies, Nievolene, Scalvaiane. A dozen poets wheeled at random
. Not conducive to opening windows, that. Necessary though, and lucrative, aft
er his confiscation of the conspirators' lands. He liked when necessity and ga
in came together; it didn't happen often but when it did the marriage seemed t
o Alberico of Barbadior to represent almost the purest pleasure to be found in
power.
This spring however his pleasures had been few and trivial in scope, and the b
urgeoning of new troubles made those of the winter seem like minor, ephemeral
afflictions—brief flurries of snow in a night. What he was dealing with now w
ere rivers in flood, everywhere he looked.
At the very beginning of spring a wizard was detected using his magic in the s
outhern highlands, but the Tracker and the twenty-five men Siferval had immedi
ately sent after him had been slaughtered in a pass by outlaws, to the last ma
n. An act of arrogance and revolt almost impossible to believe.
And he couldn't even properly exact retribution: the villages and farms scatte
red through the highlands hated the outlaws as much or more than the Barbadian
s did. And it had been an Ember Night, with no decent man abroad to see who mi
ght have done this unprecedented deed. Siferval sent a hundred men from Fort O
rtiz to hunt the brigands down. They found no trace. Only long dead campfires
in the hills. It was as if the twenty-five men had been slain by ghosts: which
, predictably, is what the people of the highlands were already saying. It had
been an Ember Night after all, and everyone knew the dead were abroad on such
nights. The dead, hungry for retribution.
"How clever of the dead to use new-fletched arrows," Siferval's written report
had offered sardonically, when he sent two captains to carry the tidings nort
h. His men had retreated quickly in whey-faced terror at the expression on Alb
erico's face. It was, after all, the Third Company which had allowed twenty-fi
ve of its men to be killed, and had then sent out another hundred incompetents
to do no more than elicit laughter, wandering about in the hills.
It was maddening. Alberico had been forced to fight back an urge to torch the
Certandan hamlet nearest to those hills, but he knew how destructive that woul
d be in the longer run. It would undermine all the benefits of the focused res
traint he'd used in the affair of the San-dreni plot. That night his eyelid be
gan to droop again, the way it had in the early autumn.
Then, very shortly after, came the news from Quileia.
He had nourished such hopes there after the shocking fall of the Matriarchy. I
t was such an enormous, ripe new market for trade, an absolute harvest for the
Empire. And one, most importantly, that would be brought into Barbadior's aeg
is by that ever vigilant guardian of the western borders of the Empire, AJberi
co of the Eastern Palm. So much rich hope and promise there, and so little act
ual prospect of difficulty. Even if this Marius, this crippled priestess-kille
r on his precarious throne, chose to trade west with Ygrath as well as east th
at was all right. Quileia was more than large enough to offer bounty both ways
. For a time. Soon enough it should be possible to make the uncouth fellow see
the many-faceted advantages of focusing his dealings towards Barbadior.
In the evolution of the Barbadian Empire there had emerged a number of ways, a
great many time-honored ways, some subtle, some rather less so, of causing me
n to see things in a particular light. Alber-ico had a few thoughts of his own
about even newer means of persuading petty monarchs to view matters usefully.
He fully intended to explore them, once he was home.
Home, as Emperor. For that, after all, was the point, the point of absolutely
everything. Except that the events of the spring utterly refused to cooperate.

Marius of Quileia sent a gratifyingly swift reply to Alberico's latest benevol
ent offer to trade. An emissary delivered it directly into the hands of Siferv
al in Fort Ortiz.
Unfortunately, that brief gratification had been smashed and annihilated when
the letter reached Astibar, carried north this time, in recognition of its imp
ortance, by Siferval himself. Couched in unexpectedly sophisticated language i
t contained a message that, however politely and circuitously phrased, was fla
t and clear: the Quileian regretfully judged that Brandin of Ygrath was the gr
eater, firmer power in the Palm, and as such, and being but green in his own p
ower, he could not risk incurring the anger of the King of Ygrath by trading w
ith Alberico, a minor lord of the Empire, much as he might want to.
It was a letter that could easily drive a man into a killing rage.
Fighting for self-control, Alberico had seen cringing apprehension in his cler
ks and advisors, and even a quickly veiled fear in the eyes of the captain of
the Third Company. Then, when Siferval handed over the second letter, the one,
he explained, that he had so cleverly arranged to extract and copy from the s
addle pouch of the overly garrulous Quileian emissary, Alberico felt all contr
ol deserting him.
He had been forced to turn away, to stride alone to the windows at the back of
the offices of state and draw gasping breaths of air to calm his boiling mind
. He could feel the tell-tale tremor beginning again in his right eyelid; the
fluttering he'd never been able to get rid of since that night he'd almost die
d in the Sandreni Woods. His huge hands grasping the window-ledge with a grip
of iron, he struggled for the equanimity that would let him carefully weigh th
e implications of this intercepted message, but calm was a swiftly receding il
lusion and his thoughts in the morning sunlight were black and foaming like th
e sea in storm.
Senzio! The Quileian fool sought to link himself with those dissolute puppets
in the ninth province! It was almost impossible to credit that a man, however
new to the world stage, could be such an imbecile.
His back to his advisors and his captains, staring blindly out the window down
upon the too bright Grand Square, Alberico abruptly began to consider how thi
s was going to look to the wider world. To the part of the world that mattered
: the Emperor, and those who had his ear, and who saw themselves as rivals to
Alberico. How would the tidings be read, if Brandin of Ygrath was busily tradi
ng south, if Sen-zian merchants were blithely sailing past the Archipelago and
down the coast beyond Tregea and the mountains to Quileian ports and all the
fabled goods of that land, so long kept to themselves under the priestesses?
If the Empire alone was denied access to this new market. Denied access becaus
e Alberico of Barbadior was judged too infirm in his power here as compared to
the Ygrathen in the west . . . Alberico felt himself beginning to sweat; a co
ld trickle of moisture slid down his side. There was a spasm of pain in his ch
est as a muscle clenched near his heart. He forced himself to breathe slowly u
ntil it passed.
From the source of so much promise it suddenly seemed as if a dagger had mater
ialized, more sharp and deadly than any enemy of his back in Barbadior might h
ave fashioned.
Senzio. He had been thinking and dreaming about the ninth province all through
the months of ice and snow, seeking a way in his restless nights to break out
, to regain control of a situation that increasingly seemed to be operating up
on him, instead of he upon it, as master of his destiny.
And that had been in the winter, even before this news from beyond the mountai
ns.
Then, shortly after, even as the first flowers began blooming in the gardens o
f Astibar, there was more. In the very same week word came from the west that
someone had tried to kill Brandin of Ygrath.
Had tried, and failed. For one blissful night Alberico played out glorious sce
narios of triumph in his sleep. Dreaming, over and over again, so keen was the
pleasure, that the assassin—using a crossbow, they had learned—had succeede
d in his purpose. Oh, it would have been so perfect, it would have been timed
so flawlessly for him, dovetailing so neatly with his needs. It would have had
to be seen as a gift, a shining upon his face, from the high gods of the Empi
re. The entire Peninsula of the Palm would have been his in a year, in half a
year. Quileia's crippled monarch, needing the outer world so desperately, woul
d have had to embrace whatever terms of trade Alberico then chose to offer him
.
And the Empire? His, a year after all of that, at the very worst.
With such an unchallenged power base here, he would not have even needed to wa
it for the ailing Emperor to finally die. He could have sailed home with his a
rmies as the champion and the hero of the people. Having first showered them w
ith grain, with gold, with freely flowing wine from the Palm, and all the newl
y rediscovered wealth of Quileia.
It would have been glorious. For that one night Alberico let himself dream, sm
iling in his sleep. Then he woke, and came down the stairs again to the office
s of state and found all three of his captains waiting, grim-faced. A new mess
enger was there with them. From the west again, a single day after the first,
with news that smashed twenty years of balancing into tiny, sharp-edged fragme
nts that would never again be reassembled as they had been.
Brandin had abdicated in Ygrath and named himself King of the Western Palm.
On Chiara, the messenger reported, trembling at his lord's visage, they had be
gun celebrating within hours of the announcement.
"And the Ygrathens?" Karalius of the First asked sharply, though he had no rea
l right to speak.
"Most will go home," the messenger said. "If they stay they must become citize
ns, only equal citizens, of the new kingdom."
"You say they will go home," AJberico said, his gaze flat and heavy, masking t
he feverish churning of his emotions. "Do you know this, have you been told th
is, or do you only guess it to be so?"
The messenger turned grey, stammering some reply about logic and obvious conse
quences and what anyone could predict . . .
"Have this man's tongue cut out then have him killed," Alberico said. "I don't
care how. Feed him to the animals. My messengers bring me the news they learn
. I draw what conclusions are to be drawn."
The messenger fainted dead away, toppling sideways to the floor. It could be s
een that he had soiled himself. Grancial of the Second Company signaled quickl
y for two men to carry him out.
Alberico didn't bother to watch. In a way he was glad the man had spoken as fa
tuously as he had. He had needed an excuse to kill just then.
He gestured with two fingers, and his steward hastily ushered everyone out of
the room but the three captains. Not that any of the lesser officials seemed i
nclined to linger at that particular moment. Which was as it should be. He did
n't trust any of them very much.
He didn't entirely trust his captains either, but he needed them, and they nee
ded him, and he had been careful to keep them at odds and on edge with each ot
her. It was a workable arrangement. Or it had been, until now.
But now was what mattered, and Brandin had just thrown the peninsula into chao
s. Not that the Palm actually mattered, not in itself. It was a gateway, a ste
pping-stone. He had moved out of Barbadior as a young man, in order to rise in
the world and return as a leader in his prime, and there was no point, no poi
nt at all to twenty years of exile if he could not sail home in triumph. In mo
re than triumph. In mastery.
He turned his back on the captains and went to the window, surreptitiously mas
saging his eye. He waited, to see who would speak first, and what he would say
. There was a fear growing within him that he was at pains to hide. Nothing wa
s falling right, none of his caution and discretion seemed to have borne the f
ruit it should.
Karalius said, very softly from behind him, "My lord, there is opportunity her
e. There is great opportunity."
Which is exactly what he was afraid the man would say. Afraid, because he knew
it was true and because it meant moving again, and quickly, committing himsel
f to dangerous, decisive action. But action here and not in the Empire, not ba
ck home, where he had been readying himself to return. War far away in this sa
vage, obdurate peninsula where he could lose all, a lifetime's sowing, in stri
ving for a conquest he hardly cared about.
"We had best go carefully," Grancial said quickly. More to oppose Karalius tha
n anything else, Alberico knew. But he noted that we.
He turned and fixed the Second Company captain with a wintry glance. "I will i
ndeed do nothing without thought," he said, placing clear emphasis on the firs
t word. Grancial flicked his eyes away. Siferval smiled beneath his curling bl
ond moustaches.
Karalius did not. His expression remained sober and thoughtful. He was the bes
t of the three, Alberico knew. Also the most dangerous, for the two things wen
t hand in hand in such a man. Alberico moved around behind his huge oak desk a
nd sat down again. He looked up at the First Company leader and waited.
Karalius said again, "There is opportunity now. There will be turmoil in the w
est, disruption, Ygrathens sailing home. Shall I tell you what I think?" His p
ale skin was flushed with a growing excitement. Alberico understood that: the
man saw chances of his own, land and wealth for himself.
It would be a mistake to let Karalius unfold too much. He would end up thinkin
g the planning was his. Alberico said, "I know exactly what you think, to the
very words you would speak. Be silent. I know everything that will be happenin
g in the west except one thing: we don't yet know how many of the Ygrathen arm
y will stay. My guess is that most will leave, rather than be lowered to the l
evel of people they have had mastery over all these years. They did not come h
ere to become inconsequential figures in the Palm."
"Neither," said Siferval pointedly, "did we."
Alberico suppressed his anger yet again. It seemed he had been forced to do th
at so much of late with these three. But they had their own purposes, their ow
n long drawn-out plans, and wealth and fame were at the heart of them. As they
had to be for all ambitious men in the Empire: toward what else should an amb
itious man aspire?
"I am aware of that," he said, as calmly as he could.
"Then what do we do?" Grancial asked. A real question, not a challenge. Granci
al was the weakest and the most loyal—because of that weakness—of the three.

Alberico looked up. At Karalius, not at Grancial.
"You gather my armies," he said deliberately, though his pulse was racing very
fast. This was dangerous and might be final, every instinct within him told h
im that. But he also knew that time and the gods had thrown a glittering gem d
own toward him from the heavens, and if he did not move it would fall away.
"You gather my armies in all four provinces and take them north. I want them m
assed together as soon as possible."
"Where?" Karalius's eyes were almost shining with anticipation.
"Ferraut, of course. On the northern border with Senzio." Senzio, he was think
ing. The ninth. The jewel. The battleground.
"How long will it take you?" he asked the three of them.
"Five weeks, no more," Grancial said quickly.
"Four," said Siferval, smiling.
"The First Company," said Karalius, "will be on the border three weeks from no
w. Count on it."
"I will," said Alberico. And dismissed them.
He sat alone at his desk for a long time after, toying with a paperweight, thi
nking upon all sides of this, over and around and about. But however he looked
upon it all the pieces seemed to slide into place. There was power to be gras
ped here, and triumph, he could almost see that shimmering jewel falling throu
gh the air, over water, over land, into his reaching hand.
He was acting. Shaping events himself, not being impacted upon. His enemy woul
d be vulnerable, enormously so, until this new chaos settled in the west. Quil
eia's choice could be forced and be no choice at all. The Empire could be made
to see, on the eve of his final journey home, just what his sorcery and his a
rmies could do. The time was offering a jewel, truly, falling from the heavens
, waiting to be clasped. To be set upon his brow.
He was still uneasy though, almost uncannily so, sitting alone as the morning
brightened, trying to convince himself of the truth of all this shining promis
e. He was more than uneasy; his mouth was dry and the spring sunlight seemed s
trange to him, almost painful. He wondered if he was ill. There was something
gnawing away like a rat in darkness at the unlit corners of his thoughts. He f
orced himself to turn towards it, trying to make a torch of his careful ration
ality, to look within himself and root out this anxiety.
And then indeed he did see it, and understood, in that same moment, that it co
uld not be rooted out, not ever be acknowledged to a living soul.
For the truth, the poisonous gall of truth, was that he was afraid. Deathly af
raid, in the deepest inward places of his being, of this other man. Of Brandin
of Ygrath, now Brandin of the Western Palm. The name had been changed, the ba
lance changed utterly.
The truth of fear was exactly as it had been for almost twenty years.
A short while later he left the room and went down the stairs and underground
to see how they killed the messenger.
Alais knew exactly why she was being granted this unprecedented gift of a jour
ney in the Sea Maid with her father: Selvena was getting married at the end of
summer.
Catini bar Edinio, whose father owned a good-sized estate of olive trees and v
ineyards north of Astibar, and a modest but successful banking house in the ci
ty, had asked Rovigo for his second daughter's hand early in the spring. Rovig
o, urgently forewarned by his second daughter, had given his consent, a decisi
on calculated, among other things, to forestall Selvena's oft-proclaimed inten
tion to do away with herself should she still be living at home and unwed by t
he autumn. Catini was earnest and pleasant if a little dull, and Rovigo had do
ne business with Edinio in the past and liked the man.
Selvena was tempestuously ecstatic, about plans for the wedding, about the pro
spect of running her own home—Edinio had offered to set the young couple up i
n a small house on a hill above his vineyards —and, as Rovigo overheard her t
elling the younger girls one evening, about the anticipated pleasures of the m
arriage bed.
He was pleased for her happiness and rather looking forward to the celebration
of the marriage. If he had moments of sadness that he strove to mask, he attr
ibuted it to the natural feelings of a man who saw that his girl-child had bec
ome a woman rather sooner than he had been prepared for. The sight of Selvena
making a red glove for her bridal night affected Rovigo more than he had thoug
ht it would. He would turn from her bright, feverish chatter to Alais, neat an
d quiet and watchful, and something akin to sadness would touch his spirit ami
d the anticipatory bustle of the house.
Alix seemed to understand, perhaps even better than he did himself. His wife h
ad taken to patting his shoulder at sporadic, unexpected moments, as if gentli
ng a restive creature.
He was restive. This spring the news from the wider world was unpredictable an
d of seemingly enormous consequence. Barbadian troops were beginning to clog t
he roads as they moved up to northern Ferraut, on the border of Senzio. From t
he newly declared Kingdom of the Western Palm had come no clear response as ye
t to this provocation. Or none that had reached Astibar. Rovigo hadn't heard a
word from Alessan since well before the Ember Days, but he had been told a lo
ng time ago that this spring might mark the beginning of something new.
And something was in the air, a sense of quickening and of change that fit its
elf to the mood of burgeoning spring and then went beyond it, into danger and
the potential for violence. He seemed to hear it and see it everywhere, in the
tramp of armies on the march, in the lowered voices of men in taverns, lookin
g up too quickly whenever anyone came through the door.
One morning when he woke, Rovigo had an image that lingered in his mind, of th
e great floods of solidly packed river ice he had glimpsed many years ago far
to the south on a long voyage down the coast of Quileia. And in his mind-pictu
re, as he lay in bed, suspended between asleep and fully awake, he had seemed
to see that ice breaking up and the river waters beginning to run again, carry
ing the floes crashing and grinding down to the sea.
Over khav that same morning, standing in the kitchen, he had announced that he
was going into town to see about equipping the Maid for her first run of the
season down to Tregea, with goods, perhaps wine—perhaps Edinio's wine—to tra
de for a ship's hold's worth of early spring wool and Tregean goat's cheese.
It was an impulsive decision, but not an inappropriate one. He usually made a
run south in the spring, if a little later in the season, mostly for trade, pa
rtly to learn what he could for Alessan. He had been doing it for years, for b
oth reasons, ever since he'd met Alessan and Baerd, spending a long night in a
southern tavern with them, and coming away with the knowledge of a shared pas
sion of the soul and a cause that might be a lifetime in the unfolding.
So this spring voyage was a part of his yearly routine. What was not, what was
truly impulsive, was his offer, between one sip of early morning khav and the
next, to take Alais with him.
His eldest, his pride, his clever one. He thought her beautiful beyond words.
No one had asked for her hand. And though he knew she was truly pleased for Se
lvena and not grieving at all for herself, this knowledge didn't stop him from
feeling a difficult sorrow whenever he looked at her amid the already buildin
g excitement of Selvena's wedding preparations.
So he asked her, a little too casually, if she wanted to come with him, and Al
ix glanced up quickly from her labors in the kitchen with a sharp, worried loo
k in her dark eyes, and Alais said, even more quickly, with a fervor rare for
her: "Oh, Triad, yes! I would love to come!"
It happened to be her dream.
One of her oldest dreams, never requested, never even spoken aloud. Alais coul
d feel how high her tell-tale color had suddenly become. She watched her fathe
r and mother exchange a glance. There were times when she envied them that com
munion of their eyes. No words were spoken, they didn't seem to need words muc
h of the time. Then Alais saw her mother nod, and she turned in time to catch
her father's slow smile in response to that, and she knew she was going to sea
in the Maid for the first time in her life.
She had wanted to do so for so long she couldn't even think back to a time whe
n the desire hadn't been there. She remembered being a small girl, light enoug
h to be lifted up by her father while her mother carried Selvena, going down t
o the harbor in Astibar to see the new ship that was the key to their small fo
rtune in the world.
And she had loved it so much. The three masts—they had seemed so tall to her
then—aspiring toward the sky, the dark-haired figurehead of a maiden at the p
row, the bright-blue coat of fresh paint along the railings, the creak of the
ropes and the timber. And the harbor itself: the smell of pitch and pine and f
ish and ale and cheese, wool and spice and leather. The rumble of carts laden
with goods going away to some far part of the known world, or coming in from d
istant places with names that were a kind of magic to her.
A sailor in red and green walked by with a monkey on his shoulder and her fath
er called a familiar greeting to him. Her father seemed to be at home here, he
knew these men, the wild, exotic places from which they came and went. She he
ard shouts and sudden raucous laughter and voices raised in profane dispute ov
er the weight of this or the cost of that. Then someone cried out that there w
ere dolphins in the bay; that was when her father had lifted her up on his sho
ulders so she might see them.
Selvena had begun to cry at all the fierce commotion, Alais remembered, and th
ey had gone back to their cart shortly after and ridden away, past the watchfu
l, looming presence of the Barbadians, big, fair-haired men on their big horse
s, guarding the harbor of Astibar. She had been too young to understand what t
hey were about, but her father's abrupt silence and expressionless face, ridin
g by them, had told her something. Later, she learned a great deal more, growi
ng up into the occupied reality of her world.
Her love of the ships and the harbor had never gone away. Whenever she could s
he would go with Rovigo down to the water. It was easier in winter, when they
all moved to the town house in Astibar, but even in spring and summer and earl
y fall she would find excuses, reasons and ways to accompany him into town and
down to where the Maid was berthed. She gloried in the scene, and at night sh
e dreamt her dreams of oceans opening before her and salt spray off the waves.

Dreams. She was a woman. Women did not go to sea. And dutiful, intelligent dau
ghters never troubled their fathers by even asking to be allowed such a thing.
But it seemed that, sometimes, on some mornings completely unforeseen, Eanna
could look down from among her lights in the sky, and smile, and something mir
aculous might be freely offered that would never have been sought.
It seemed she was a good sailor, adjusting easily to the swing and roll of the
ship on the waves as the coastline of Astibar scrolled by on their right. The
y sailed north along the bay and then threaded their way through the islands o
f the Archipelago and into the wideness of the open sea, Rovigo and his five s
eamen handling the ship with an ease that seemed to her both relaxed and preci
se. Alais was exhilarated, watching everything in this unknown world with an i
ntensity that made them laugh and tease her for it. There was no malice in the
jests though; she had known all five of these men for most of her life.
They swung around the northern tip of the province; a cape of storms, one of t
he men told her. But that spring day it was an easy, mild place, and she stood
at the railing as they turned back south, and watched the green hills of her
province pass by, sloping down to the white sand of the shores and the fishing
villages dotted along the coast.
A few nights later there was a storm, off the cliffs of northern Tregea. Rovig
o had seen it coming at sunset, or smelled it in the air, but the coastline wa
s rocky and forbidding here, with no place to put in for shelter. They braced
for the squall, a respectful distance off shore to keep clear of the rocks. Wh
en it hit, Alais was down below in her cabin, to keep out of the way.
Even this weather, she was grateful to discover, didn't bother her very much.
There was nothing pleasant about it, feeling the Sea Maid groan and shake, buf
feted in darkness by wind and rain, but she told herself that her father had e
ndured infinitely worse in thirty years at sea, and she was not going to let h
erself be frightened or discomfited by a minor spring squall from the east.
She made a point of going back up on deck as soon as she felt the waves and th
e wind die down. It was still raining, and she covered her head with the hood
of her cape. Careful to stay clear of where the men were laboring, she stood a
t one rail and looked up. East of them the swiftly scudding clouds revealed ri
fts of clear sky and briefly Vidomni's light shone through. Later the wind die
d down even more, the rain stopped and the clouds broke up, and she saw Eanna'
s bright, far stars come out above the sea, like a promise, like a gift. She p
ushed back her hood and shook out her dark hair. She took a deep breath of the
fresh clean air, and knew a moment of perfect happiness.
She looked over and saw that her father was watching her. She smiled at him. H
e did not return the smile, but as he walked over she could see that his eyes
were tender and grave. He leaned on the rail beside her, looking west at the c
oastline. Water glistened in his hair and in the short beard he was growing. N
ot far away—a series of dark, massive forms touched by the moonlight—the cli
ffs of Tregea moved slowly by.
"It is in you," her father said quietly, over the slap and sigh of the waves.
"In your heart and in your blood. You have it more than I do, from my father a
nd from his." He was silent a moment, then slowly shook his head, "But Alais,
my darling, a woman cannot live a life at sea. Not in the world as it is."
Her dream. Clear and bright as the glitter of white Vidomni's light upon the w
aves. Laid out and then undone in such simple words.
She swallowed. Said, a speech long rehearsed, never spoken: "You have no sons.
I am eldest. Will you surrender the Maid and all you have worked to achieve w
hen you . . . when you no longer wish to pursue this life?"
"When I die?" He said it gently, but something heavy and hurtful took shape, p
ressing upon her heart. She looped her hand through the crook of his arm, hold
ing tight, and moved nearer to him, to lean her head on his shoulder.
They were silent, watching the cliffs go by and the play of moonlight on the s
ea. The ship was never quiet, but she liked the noises it made. She had fallen
asleep the past few nights hearing the Sea Maid's endless litany of sounds as
a night song.
She said, her head still on his shoulder, "Could I be taught? To help you in y
our business, I mean. Even if not to actually sail on the journeys."
Her father said nothing for a time. Leaning against him, she could feel his st
eady breathing. His hands were loosely clasped together over the rail.
He said, "That can be done, Alais. If you want it, it can be done. Women run b
usinesses all over the Palm. Widows, most often, but not only them." He hesita
ted. "Your mother could keep this going, I think, if she wanted to, if she had
good advisors." He turned his head to look down at her, but she did not lift
hers from his shoulder. "It is a sharp, cold life though, my darling. For a wo
man, for a man, without a hearth at the end of day for warmth. Without love to
carry you outward and home."
She closed her eyes at that. There was something here that went to the heart o
f things. They had never pressed her, never harried or urged, though she was a
lmost twenty years old and it was time, it was well past time. And she had had
that one strange dream many nights through the dark of the winter just past:
herself and a shadowy figure against the moon, a man in a high, unknown place,
among flowers, under the arch of stars, his body lowered to her own, her hand
s reaching to gather him.
She lifted her head, withdrew her arm. Said carefully, looking down at the wav
es: "I like Catini. I'm happy for Selvena. She's ready, she's wanted this for
so long and I think he'll be good to her. But father, I need more than what sh
e will have. I don't know what it is, but I need more."
Her father stirred then. She watched him draw a deep breath and then slowly le
t it out. "I know," she heard him say. "I know you do, my darling. If I knew w
hat, or how, and could give it, it would be yours. The world and the stars of
Eanna would all be yours."
She cried then, which she seldom did. But she loved him and had caused him gri
ef, and he had spoken just now, twice, of dying one day, and the white moon on
the cliffs and sea after the storm was like nothing she had ever known or was
likely to know again.
Catriana couldn't see the road as she climbed the slope from the dell, but fro
m the distant sounds and the way Baerd and Sandre were both standing, rigidly
watchful on the grass at the edge of the trees, she could tell that something
was wrong. Men, she had long since concluded, were significantly worse than wo
men at hiding their feelings in situations such as this.
Her hair still wet after bathing in the pond—a favorite place of hers, one th
ey had passed every time they went back and forth between Ferraut and Certando
—she hurried up the slope to see what was happening.
The two men said nothing as she appeared beside them. The cart had been pulled
into the shade off the north-south road and the two horses let free to graze.
Baerd's bow and quiver were lying in the grass beside the trees, close to han
d if he needed them. She looked at the road and saw the Barbadian troops passi
ng by, marching and riding, raising a heavy cloud of dust all around them.
"More of the Third Company," Sandre said, a cold anger in his voice.
"It looks like they're all going, doesn't it?" Baerd murmured grimly.
Which was good, it was more than good, it was exactly what they wanted. The an
ger, the grimness were almost wholly uncalled for; they seemed to be some inst
inctive male response to the nearness of the enemy. Catriana felt like shaking
them both.
It was clear, really. Baerd himself had explained it to her and Sandre, and to
Alienor of Borso on the day Alessan met Marius of Quileia in the mountains an
d rode west with Devin and Erlein.
And listening that day, forcing herself to be composed in Alien-or's presence,
Catriana had finally understood what Alessan had meant, all this time, when h
e'd said they would have to wait until spring. They had been waiting for Mariu
s to say yes or no. To say if he would risk his own unstable crown and his lif
e for them. And that day in the Braccio Pass he'd said he would. Baerd told th
em a little, a very little, about why.
Ten days later she and Baerd and Sandre had been on watch in the hills outside
Fort Ortiz when the emissaries came riding along the road carrying the Quilei
an flag and were met with ceremonious honor outside the walls and escorted wit
hin by the Barbadians.
Next morning the Quileians had ridden on, not hurrying, down the road to the n
orth. Two hours after their departure the gates of the fort had opened again a
nd six men had ridden out in extreme haste. One of them—it was Sandre who not
ed it—was Siferval himself, captain of the Third Company.
"It is done," Baerd had said, a kind of awe in his voice. "I cannot believe it
, but I think we have done it!"
A little more than a week later the first troops had begun to move, and they k
new he was right. It wasn't until some days after that, in an artisans' villag
e in northern Certando, trading for carvings and finished cloth, that they lea
rned, belatedly, what Brandin of Ygrath had done in Chiara. The Kingdom of the
Western Palm.
"Are you a gambling man?" Sandre had said to Baerd. "The dice are rolling now,
and no one will hold or control them until they stop." Baerd had said nothing
in reply, but something stunned, near to shock in his expression, made Catria
na go over and take his hand in hers. Which was not really like her at all.
But everything had changed, or was changing. Baerd was not the same since the
Ember Days and their stay at Castle Borso. Something had happened to him there
, too, but this part he didn't explain. Ales-san was gone, and Devin—and thou
gh she hated to admit it, she missed him almost as much as the Prince. Even th
eir role here in the east had completely altered now.
They had waited in the highlands for the emissaries, in case something should
go wrong. But now Baerd kept them moving at speed from town to town and he was
stopping to speak to men and to some women Catriana had never even heard abou
t, telling them to be ready, that there might be a summer rising.
And with some of them, not many, only a select few, his message was very speci
fic: Senzio. Head north to Senzio before Midsummer. Have a weapon with you if
you can.
And it was these last words that brought home to Catriana most sharply, most p
otently, the fact that the time for action had truly come. It was upon them. N
o more oblique disruptions or hovering on the edge of events. Events had a cen
ter now, which was or would soon be in Senzio, and they were going there. What
was to happen she didn't yet know. If Baerd did, he wasn't telling.
What he did tell her, and Sandre too, were the names of people.
Scores of them. Names he had held in memory, some for a dozen years. People wh
o were with them in this, who could be trusted. Who needed to be told, here in
the provinces ruled by Barbadior, that the movement of Alberico's troops was
their own signal to be ready at last. To watch the unfolding of events and be
prepared to respond.
They would sit together at night, the three of them, around a campfire under s
tars or in a secluded corner of an inn in some hamlet or village, and Baerd wo
uld recite for them the names they needed to know.
It was only on the third night, falling asleep afterward, that Catriana belate
dly realized that the reason they needed to be told this was if Baerd were to
die, with Alessan away in the west.
"Ricaso bar Dellano," Baerd would say. "A cooper in Marsilian, the first villa
ge south of Fort Ciorone. He was born in Avalle. Could not go to war because o
f a lame foot. Speak to him. He will not be able to come north, but knows the
others near by and will spread the word and lead our people in that district i
f the need for a rising comes."
"Ricaso bar Dellano," she would repeat. "In Marsilian."
"Porrena bren Cullion. In Delonghi, just inside the Tregean border on the main
road from Ferraut. She's a little older than you, Catriana. Her father died a
t the Deisa. She knows who to speak to."
"Porrena," Sandre would murmur, concentrating, his bony, gnarled hands clasped
together. "In Delonghi." And Catriana marveled at how many names there seemed
to be, how many lives Baerd and Alessan had touched in their travels through
a dozen years since returning from Quileia, readying themselves and these unkn
own others for a time, a season, a moment in the future—which was now. Which
they had lived to see. And her heart was filled with hope as she whispered the
names over and over to herself like talismans of power.
They rode through the next weeks, through the flowering of spring, at an almos
t reckless pace, barely simulating their role as merchants. Making bad, hasty
transactions where they stopped, unwilling to linger to bargain for better one
s. Pausing only long enough to find the man or woman who was the key in that v
illage or this cluster of farms, the one who knew the others and would carry t
he word.
They were losing money, but they had astins to spare from Alie-nor. Catriana,
being honest with herself, realized that she was still reluctant to acknowledg
e the role that woman had played in Alessan's doings for so many years. Years
in which she herself had been growing up in ignorance, a child in a fishing vi
llage in Astibar.
Once, Baerd let her make the contact in a town. The woman was a weaver, widely
known for her skill. Catriana had found her house at the edge of the village.
Two dogs had barked at her approach and had been stilled by a mild voice from
within. Inside, Catriana had found a woman only a little younger than her mot
her. She had made certain they were alone, and then, as Baerd had instructed,
had shown her dolphin ring and given Alessan's name and had spoken the message
.
The same message of readiness as everywhere else. Then she carefully named two
men and spoke Baerd's second message: Senzio. Midsummer. Tell them to be arme
d if they can.
The woman had gone pale, standing up abruptly as Catriana began to speak. She
was very tall, even more so than Catriana herself. When the second message was
done she had remained motionless a moment and then stepped forward to kiss Ca
triana on the mouth.
"Triad bless you and keep you and the both of them," she had said. "I did not
think I would live to see this day." She was crying; Catriana tasted salt on h
er lips.
She had walked out into the sunshine and back to Baerd and Sandre. They had ju
st finished a purchase of a dozen barrels of Cer-tandan ale. A wretched transa
ction.
"We're going north, you fools," she had exclaimed, exasperated, her trade inst
incts taking over. "They don't like ale in Ferraut! You know that."
"Then we'll have to drink it ourselves," Sandre said, swinging up on his horse
and laughing. Baerd, who so rarely used to laugh, but who had changed since t
he Ember Days, began to chuckle suddenly. And then, sitting beside him on the
cart as they rode out of town, so did she, listening to the two of them, feeli
ng the clean freshness of the breeze blowing through her hair, and, as it seem
ed, through her heart.
It was that same day, early in the afternoon, that they came to the dell she l
oved and Baerd, remembering, pulled the cart off the road to let her go down t
o the pool and bathe. When she climbed back up neither man was laughing or amu
sed anymore, watching the Barbadians go by.
It was the way the two of them were standing that caused the trouble, she was
sure of it. But by the time she came up beside them it was already too late. I
t would have been mostly Baerd whose look drew their attention. Sandre in his
Khardhu guise was a matter of almost complete indifference to the Barbadians.

But a merchant, a minor trader with a single cart and a second scrawny horse,
who stood gazing at an army passing in the way that this one did, coldly, his
head arrogantly high, not even remotely submissive or chastened let alone show
ing any of the fear proper to such a situation . . .
The language of the body, Catriana thought, could be heard far too clearly som
etimes. She looked at Baerd beside her, his dark eyes fixed in stony appraisal
of the company passing by. It wasn't arrogance, she decided, not just a male
pride. It was something else, something older. A primitive response to this di
splay of the Tyrant's power that he could no more hide than he could the dozen
barrels of ale they carried on the cart.
"Stop it!" she whispered fiercely. But even as she did she heard one of the Ba
rbadians bark a terse command and half a dozen of them detached from the movin
g column of men and horses and galloped over toward them. Catriana's mouth wen
t dry. She saw Baerd glance over to where his bow lay in the grass. He shifted
his stance slightly, to balance himself better. Sandre did the same.
"What are you doing?" she hissed. "Remember where we are!"
She had time for no more. The Barbadians came up to them, huge men on their ho
rses, looking down on a man and a woman of the Palm and this gaunt, grey-haire
d relic from Khardhun.
"I don't like the look of your face," the leader said, staring at Baerd. The m
an's hair was darker than most of the others, but his eyes were pale and hard.

Catriana swallowed. This was the first time in a year they'd had a confrontati
on so direct with the Barbadians. She lowered her eyes, willing Baerd to be ca
lm, to say the right things.
What she did not know, for no one who had not been there could know, was what
Baerd was seeing in that moment.
Not six Barbadians on horses by a road in Certando, but as many Ygrathen soldi
ers in the square before his father's house long ago. So many years, and the m
emory still sharp as a wound from only yesterday. All the normal measures of t
ime seemed to fall apart and blow away in moments such as this.
Baerd forced himself to avert his gaze before the Barbadian's glare. He knew h
e had made a mistake, knew this was a mistake he would always make if he wasn'
t careful. He had been too euphoric though, rushing too fast on a floodtide of
emotion, seeing this marching column as dancing to the tune he and Alessan ha
d called. But it was early yet, far too early, so much lay unknown and uncontr
ollable in the future. And they had to live to see that future or everything w
ould have been wasted. Years and lives, the patient conjuring of dream into re
ality.
He said, eyes cast down, voice low, "I am sorry if I have offended. I was only
marveling at you. We have not seen so many soldiers on the road in years."
"We moved aside to make way," Sandre added in his deep voice.
"You be silent," the Barbadian leader rasped. "If I wish to converse with serv
ants I will inform you." One of the others sidled his horse toward Sandre, for
cing him to step backward. Catriana, behind him, felt her legs grow weak. She
reached out and gripped the railing of the cart; her palms were damp with fear
. She saw two of the Barbadians staring at her with frank, smirking appraisal,
and she was suddenly aware of how her clothing would be clinging to her body
after her swim in the pond.
"Forgive us," Baerd repeated, in a muffled tone. "We meant no harm, no harm at
all."
"Really? Why were you counting our numbers?"
"Counting? Your numbers? Why would I do such a thing?"
"You tell me, merchant."
"It is not so," Baerd protested, inwardly cursing himself as an amateur and a
fool. After twelve years, something so clumsy as this! The situation was caree
ning out of control, and the simple fact was that he had indeed been counting
the Barbadian numbers. "We are only traders," he added. "Only minor traders."

"With a Khardhu warrior for guard? Not so minor, I would say."
Baerd blinked, and clutched his hands together deferentially. He had made a te
rrible mistake. This man was dangerously sharp.
"I was afraid for my wife," he said. "There have been rumors of outlaws in the
south, of great unrest." Which was true. There were, in fact, more than rumor
s. Twenty-five Barbadians had been slaughtered in a pass. He was fairly certai
n Alessan had been there.
"Your wife or your goods?" one of the other Barbadians sneered. "We know which
you people value more." He looked past Baerd to where Catriana stood, and the
re was a loose, heavy-lidded look in his face. The other soldiers laughed. Bae
rd quickly lowered his head again; he didn't want them to see the death that w
as in his eyes. He remembered that kind of laughter, the resonance of it. Wher
e it could lead. Had led, in a square in Tigana eighteen years ago. He was sil
ent, eyes downcast, murder in his heart, bound close with memory.
"What are you carrying?" the first Barbadian rapped out, his voice blunt as a
trowel.
"Ale," Baerd said, squeezing his hands together. "Only barrels of ale for the
north."
"Ale for Ferraut? You are a liar. Or a fool."
"No, no," Baerd said hastily. "Not Ferraut. We got a very good price. Eleven a
stins the barrel. Good enough to be worth taking all the way north. We are bou
nd for Astibar with this. We can sell it for three times that."
Which would have been true, had he not paid twenty-three astins for each of th
ese.
At a gesture from the leader two of the Barbadians dismounted. They cracked op
en one of the barrels, using their swords as levers. The pungent, earthy smell
of Certandan beer surrounded them all.
The leader looked over, saw his men nod, and turned back to Baerd. There was a
malicious smile on his face.
"Eleven astins a barrel? Truly a good price. So good, that even a grasping mer
chant will not hesitate to donate them to the army of Barbadior that defends y
ou and your kind."
Baerd had been half expecting this. Careful to stay in character, he said, "If
. . . if it is your desire, then yes. Would you . . . would you care to buy i
t, at only the price I paid?"
There was a silence. Behind the six Barbadians the army was still marching dow
n the road. It had almost passed them by. He had a decent estimate of how many
there were. Then the man on the horse in front of him drew his sword. Baerd h
eard Catriana make a small sound behind him. The Barbadian leaned forward over
the neck of his horse, weapon extended, and delicately touched Baerd on his b
earded cheek with the flat of his blade.
"We do not bargain," he said softly. "Nor do we steal. We accept gifts. Offer
us a gift, merchant." He moved the blade a little. Baerd could feel it nicking
and fretting against his face.
"Please accept . . . please accept this ale from us as a gift to the men of th
e Third Company," he said. With an effort he kept his eyes averted from the ma
n's face.
"Why thank you, merchant," the man said with lazy sarcasm. Slowly, sliding it
along Baerd's cheek like an evil caress, he drew back his sword. "And since yo
u have given us these barrels, you will surely not begrudge us the horse and c
art that carry them?"
"Take the cart as well," Baerd heard himself saying. He felt suddenly as if he
had left his body. As if he were floating above this scene, looking down.
And it was as from that high, detached vantage point that he seemed to see the
Barbadians move to claim their wagon. They attached the cart-horse to the tra
ces again. One of them, younger than the others, slung their packs and food ou
t onto the ground. He looked shyly back at Catriana, a little abashed, then he
mounted quickly up on the seat and clucked at the horse, and the cart rolled
slowly away to where the tail of the Barbadian column was moving along the roa
d. The five other men, leading his horse, followed after him. They were laughi
ng, the easy, spilling laughter of men among each other, sure of their place a
nd of the shape of their lives. Baerd glanced over at his bow again. He was fa
irly certain he could kill all six of them, starting with the leader, before a
nyone could intervene.
He didn't move. None of them moved until the last of the column was out of sig
ht, their cart rumbling after it. Baerd turned then and looked at Catriana. Sh
e was trembling, but he knew her well enough to know it was as much with anger
as with fear.
"I'm sorry," he said, reaching up a hand to touch her arm.
"I could kill you Baerd for giving me such a fright."
"I know," he said. "And I would deserve to be dead. I underestimated them."
"Could have been worse," Sandre said prosaically.
"Oh, somewhat," Catriana said tartly. "We could all be lying dead here now."
"That would indeed have been worse," Sandre agreed gravely. It took her a mome
nt to realize he was teasing her. She surprised herself by laughing, a little
wildly.
Sandre, his darkened face sober, said something quite unexpected then. "You ha
ve no idea," he murmured, "how dearly I wish you were of my blood. My daughter
, granddaughter. Will you allow me to take pride in what you are?"
She was so surprised she could think of nothing to say. A moment later, deeply
moved, she went forward and kissed him on the cheek. He put his long, bony ar
ms around her and held her to his chest for a moment, carefully, as if she was
fragile, or very precious, or both. She couldn't remember the last time someo
ne had held her that way.
He stepped back, clearing his throat awkwardly. She saw that Baerd's expressio
n was unwontedly soft, looking at the two of them.
"This is all extremely lovely," she said, deliberately dry. "Shall we spend th
e day here telling each other what splendid people we think we are?"
Baerd grinned. "Not a bad idea, but not the very best. I think we'll have to d
ouble back to where we bought the ale. We need another cart and horse."
"Good. I could use a flask of ale," Sandre said. Catriana glanced quickly back
at him, caught the wry look in his eye, and laughed. She knew what he was doi
ng, but she would never have expected to be able to laugh so soon after seeing
a sword against Baerd's face.
Baerd collected his bow and quiver from the grass. They shouldered their packs
and made her ride the horse—nothing else, Sandre said, would look right. She
wanted to argue but couldn't. And she was secretly grateful for the chance to
ride; her knees were still weak.
It was very dusty along the road for a mile or two because of the army, and th
ey kept to the grass beside it. Her horse startled a rabbit and before she cou
ld even register the fact, Baerd had notched an arrow and shot, and the animal
was dead. They traded it a short while later at a farmhouse for a pitcher of
ale and some bread and cheese and then went on.
Late in the day, by the time they had made their slow way back to the village,
Catriana bad convinced herself that the incident had been unfortunate, but no
t really important after all.
Eight days later they were in Tregea town. They had seen no other soldiers in
the intervening week, their path having taken them far off the major roads. Th
ey left the new cart and goods at their usual inn and walked down to the centr
al market. It was late in the afternoon, a warm day for spring. Looking north
between the buildings toward the docks, Catriana could see the masts of the fi
rst ships to come up the river after the winter. Sandre had stopped at a leath
er stall to have repairs done to the belt that held his sword. As she and Baer
d moved through the crowded square, a Barbadian mercenary, older than most, mo
ving with a limp, and probably drunk on spring wine, stumbled out of a tavern,
saw her, and lurched over to grope clumsily at her breasts and between her le
gs.
She shrieked, more startled than anything else.
And a moment later wished with all her heart that she had not done so. Baerd,
just ahead of her, wheeled, saw the man, and with the same deadly, reflexive s
peed that had killed the rabbit, flattened the Barbadian with a colossal blow
to the side of his head.
And Catriana knew—knew in that moment with utter and absolute certainty—that
he was striking out not just against a drunken reserve guard, but against the
officer who had touched him with a sword by that grove in Certando a week bef
ore.
There was a sudden, frightened silence around them. And then an immediate babb
le of sound. They looked at each other for a blurred, flashing second.
"Run!" Baerd ordered harshly. "Meet tonight by the place where you came up fro
m the river last winter. If I am not there go on by yourselves. You know the n
ames. There are only a handful left. Eanna guard you all!"
Then he was gone, sprinting through the square the way they had come, as a clu
ster of mercenaries began fanning out quickly through the crowd toward them. T
he man on the ground had not moved. Catriana didn't wait to see if he would. S
he cut off the other way as fast as she could run. Out of the corner of her ey
e she saw Sandre at the leather stall watching them, his face loose with shock
. She was careful, desperately careful, not to look at him, not to run that wa
y. That one of them, oh, Triad please be willing, one of them might make it fr
om this place alive and free, with the names known and the dream still carried
toward Midsummers's fires.
She darted down a crowded street and then sharply left at the first crossing i
nto the warren of twisting lanes that made up the oldest quarter of Tregea nea
r the river. Over her head the second stories of houses leaned crazily out tow
ards each other, and what filtered through of the sunlight was completely bloc
ked in places by the enclosed bridges that connected that ramshackle buildings
on either side of the street.
She looked back and saw four of the mercenaries following her, pounding loudly
down the lane. One of them shouted a command to halt. If any of them had a bo
w, Catriana thought, she was quite likely to die in the next few seconds. Dodg
ing from side to side she cut to her right down an alleyway and then quickly r
ight again at the first crossing, doubling back the way she had come.
There were three names on Baerd's list here in Tregea, and she knew where two
of them might be found, but there was no way she could go to them for succor,
not with the Barbadians so close behind. She would have to lose the pursuit he
rself, if she could, and leave it to Sandre to make the contact. Or Baerd, if
he survived.
She ducked under the flapping ends of someone's wash hanging above the street,
and knifed over to her left toward the water. There were people milling about
in the lanes, glancing up with mild curiosity as she went by. Their glances w
ould change in a moment, she knew, when the Barbadians rumbled through after h
er.
The streets were a hopelessly jumbled maze. She wasn't certain where she was,
only that the river was north of her; at fleeting intervals she could glimpse
the topmost masts of the ships. The waterfront would be dangerous though, much
too open and exposed. She doubled back south again, her lungs sucking for air
. Behind her, she heard a crashing sound and then a cacophony of irate shouts
and curses.
She stumbled going around another corner to her right. Every moment, every tur
ning, she expected this chaos of lanes to lead her straight back into her purs
uers. If they fanned out she was probably finished. A wheelwright's cart block
ed the lane. She flattened herself against the wall and sidled sideways past.
Came to another crossing of roads. Sprinted straight through this time, past h
alf a dozen children playing a skipping game with ropes. Turned at the second
crossing.
And was grabbed hard just above her right elbow. She started to scream, but a
hand was quickly slapped over her mouth. She bared her teeth to bite, violentl
y twisting to escape. Then suddenly she froze in disbelief.
"Quietly, my heart. And come this way," said Rovigo d'Astibar removing his pal
m from her mouth. "No running. They are two streets over. Look as if you're wa
lking with me." Hand on her arm he guided quickly into a tiny, almost deserted
lane, looked back once over his shoulder, and then propelled her through the
doorway of a fabric shop. "Now down behind the counter, quickly."
"How did you . . . ?" she gasped.
"Saw you in the square. Followed you here. Move, girl!"
She moved. An old woman took her hand and squeezed it, then lifted a hinged co
unter and Catriana ducked through and dropped to the floor behind it. A moment
later the hinge swung up again and her heart stopped as a shadow appeared abo
ve her holding something long and sharp.
"Forgive me," whispered Alais bren Rovigo, kneeling beside her. "My father say
s your hair might give you away when we leave." She held up the scissors she c
arried.
Catriana went rigid for a moment, then, closing her eyes without a word, she s
lowly turned her back on the other woman. A moment later she felt her long red
tresses gathered and pulled. And then the long sharp cloth-cutter's scissors
rasped cleanly through in a line above her shoulders, severing a decade's grow
th in a moment in the shadows.
There was a burst of noise outside, a clatter and hoarse shouting. It approach
ed, reached them, went loudly past. Catriana realized that she was shaking; Al
ais touched her shoulder and then diffidently withdrew her hand. On the other
side of the counter the old woman moved placidly about in the shadows of her s
hop. Rovigo was nowhere to be seen. Catriana's breath came in ragged scourings
of air and her right side ached; she must have crashed into something in her
wild careen. She had no memory of doing so.
There was something lying on the ground beside her feet. She reached down and
gathered the thick red curtain of her severed hair. It had happened so fast sh
e'd hardly had time to realize what was being done.
"Catriana, I'm so sorry," Alais whispered again. There was real grief in her v
oice.
Catriana shook her head. "Nothing . . . this is less than nothing," she said.
It was difficult to speak. "Only vanity. What does it matter?" She seemed to b
e weeping. Her ribs hurt terribly. She put a hand up and touched the shorn rem
ains of her hair. Then she turned sideways a little, on the floor of the shop,
down behind the counter, and leaned her head wearily against the other woman'
s shoulder. Alais's arms came up and around her then, holding her close while
she cried.
On the other side of the counter the old woman hummed tunelessly to herself as
she folded and sorted cloth of many colors and as many diiferent textures, wo
rking by the wan light of afternoon as it filtered down to the street in a qua
rter where the leaning houses mostly blocked the sun.
Baerd lay in the mild darkness by the river, remembering how cold it had been
the last time he was here, waiting with Devin at winter twilight to see if Cat
riana would come floating down to them.
He had lost the pursuit hours ago. He knew Tregea very well. He and Alessan ha
d lived here for more than a year off and on after their return from Quileia,
rightly judging this wild, mountainous province as a good place to seek out an
d nurture any slow flames of revolution.
They had been principally looking for one man they had never found, a captain
from the siege of Borifort, but they had discovered others, and spoken to them
, and bound them to their cause. And they had been back here many times over t
he years, in the city itself and in the mountains of its distrada, finding in
the harsh simple life of this province a strength and a clean directness that
helped carry them both through the terribly slow, twistingly indirect paths of
their lives.
He had known the city's maze of streets infinitely better than the Barbadians
who were barracked here. Known which houses could be quickly climbed, which ro
ofs led to others, and which to avoid as dangerous dead-ends. It had been impo
rtant, in the life they'd led, to know such things.
He'd cut south and then east from the market, and then scrambled up to the roo
f of The Shepherd's Crook, their old tavern here, using the slanting cover of
the adjacent woodpile as a springboard. He remembered doing the same thing yea
rs ago, dodging the night watch after curfew. Running low and quickly he cross
ed two roofs and then spanned a street by crawling along the top of one of the
ramshackle covered bridges that linked houses on either side.
Behind him, far behind him very soon, he heard the sounds of pursuit being bal
ked by seemingly inadvertent things. He could guess what those things might be
: a milk-cart with a loose wheel, a quickly gathered crowd watching two men br
awl in the street, a keg of wine spilled as it was wheeled into a tavern. He k
new Tregea, which meant knowing the spirit of its people too.
In a short time he was a long way from the market square, having covered the d
istance entirely from roof to roof, flitting light-footed and unseen. He could
have almost enjoyed the chase had he not been so worried about Catriana. At t
he higher, southern fringes of Tregea the houses grew taller and the streets w
ider. His memory did not fail him though; he knew which ways to angle in order
to continue working upward till he came to the house he sought and leaped to
land on its roof.
He remained there for several moments, listening carefully for sounds of alarm
in the street below. He heard only the ordinary traffic of late afternoon tho
ugh, and so Baerd slipped the key out from its old  hiding-place under the one
burnt shingle, unlocked the flat trapdoor and slipped down, noiselessly, into
Tremazzo's attic.
He lowered the door behind him and waited for his eyes to adjust to the darkne
ss. Down below, in the apothecary's shop itself he could hear voices quite cle
arly, and he quickly made out the unmistakable rumble of Tremazzo's bass tones
. It had been a long time, but some things seemed never to change. Around him
he could smell soaps and perfumes, and the odors, astringent or sweet, of vari
ous medications. When he could see a little in the gloom he found the tattered
armchair that Tremazzo used to leave up here for them and sank down into it.
The very action brought back memories from years ago. Some things did not chan
ge.
Eventually the voices below fell silent. Listening carefully he could make out
only the one distinctive, heavy tread in the shop. Leaning over, Baerd delibe
rately scratched the floor, the sound a rat might make in an attic room. But o
nly a rat that could scratch three times quickly, and then once again. Three f
or the Triad as a whole, and one more for the god alone. Tregea and Tigana sha
red an ancient link to Adaon, and they had chosen to mark it when they devised
their signal.
He heard the footsteps below stop, and then, a moment later, resume their meas
ured tread, as if nothing had happened. Baerd leaned back in the chair to wait
.
It didn't take long. It was late in the day by now, nearly time to close up sh
op in any case. He heard Tremazzo sweeping the counter and floor and then the
bang of the front door being shut and the click of the bolt driven home. A mom
ent later the ladder was moved into place, footsteps ascended, the lower door
swung back, and Tremazzo came into the attic, carrying a candle. He was puffin
g from exertion, bulkier than ever.
He set the candle on a crate and stood, hands on wide hips, looking down at Ba
erd. His clothes were very fine, and his black beard was neatly trimmed to a p
oint. And scented, Baerd realized a second later.
Grinning, he rose to his feet and gestured at Tremazzo's finery, pretending to
sniff the air. The apothecary grimaced. "Customers," he grunted. "It is the f
ashion of the day. What they expect now in a shop like this. Soon we'll be as
bad as Senzio. Was it you that caused all the hue and cry this afternoon?" No
more than that; no greeting, no effusions. Tremazzo had always been thus, cool
and direct as a wind out of the mountains.
"I'm afraid so," Baerd replied. "Did the soldier die?"
"Hardly," Tremazzo said in his familiar, dismissive tones. "You aren't strong
enough for that."
"Was there word of a woman caught?"
"Not that I heard. Who is she?"
"One of us, Tremazzo. Now listen, there is real news, and I need you to find a
Khardu warrior and give him a message from me."
Tremazzo's eyes widened briefly as Baerd began, then narrowed with concentrati
on as the story unfolded. It didn't take long to explain. Tremazzo was nothing
if not quick. The bulky apothecary was not a man to venture north to Senzio h
imself, but he could contact others who were and let them know. And he should
be able to find Sandre at their inn. He went down the ladder once more and ret
urned, puffing, with a wheel of bread and some cold meat, and a flask of good
wine to go with them.
They touched palms briefly, then he left in search of Sandre. Sitting among th
e sundry items stored above an apothecary's shop, Baerd ate and drank, waiting
for darkness to fall. When he was sure the sun had set he slipped out onto th
e roof again and started back north through the town. After a while he worked
his way down to the ground and, careful of the torches of the watch, threaded
eastward through the winding streets to the place at the edge of the city wher
e Catriana had come ashore from her winter leap. There, he sat down in the gra
ss by the river in the almost windless night and settled himself to wait.
He had never really feared he would be caught. He'd had too many years of livi
ng this way, body honed and hardened, senses sharpened, mind quick to remember
things, to seize and act upon opportunity.
None of which explained or excused what he'd done to get them into this in the
first place. His impulsive blow at the drunken Barbadian had been an act of u
nthinking stupidity, regardless of the fact that it was also something that mo
st of the people in that square had longed to do themselves at one time or ano
ther. In the Palm of the Tyrants today one suppressed such longings or died. O
r watched people one cared for die.
Which lead him back to Catriana. In the starry spring darkness he remembered h
er emerging like a ghost from winter water. He lay silent in the grass thinkin
g of her, and then, after a time, perhaps predictably, of Elena. And then, alw
ays and forever, certain as dawn or dusk or the turning of the seasons, of Dia
nora who was dead or lost to him somewhere in the world.
There was a rustle, too small to be alarming, in the leaves of a tree behind h
im. A moment later a trialla began to sing. He listened to it, and to the rive
r flowing, alone and at home in the dark, a man shaped and defined by his need
for solitude and the silent play of memory.
His father, as it happened, had done the same thing by the Deisa, the night be
fore he died.
A short time later an owl called from along the riverbank just west of him. He
hooted softly in reply, silencing the trialla's song. Sandre came up silently
, scarcely disturbing the grass. He crouched down and then sat, grunting sligh
tly. They looked at each other.
"Catriana?" Baerd murmured.
"I don't know. Not caught though, I think. I would have heard. I lingered in t
he square and around it. Saw the guards come back. The man you hit is all righ
t. They were laughing at him, after. I think this will pass."
Baerd deliberately relaxed his tensed muscles. He said, conversationally, "I a
m a very great fool sometimes, had you noticed?"
"Not really. You'll have to tell me about it some time. Who was the extremely
large man who accosted me?"
"Tremazzo. He's been with us for a long while. We used his upper storage room
for meetings when we lived here, and after."
Sandre grunted. "He came up to me outside the inn and offered to sell me a pot
ion to ensure the lust of any woman or boy I desired."
Baerd found himself grinning. "Rumors of Khardu habits precede you."
"Evidently." Sandre's teeth flashed white in the darkness. "Mind you, it was a
good price. I bought two vials of the stuff."
Laughing quietly, Baerd felt a curious sensation, as if his heart were expandi
ng outward toward the man here with him. He remembered Sandre the night they h
ad met, when all the plans of his old age had been undone, when a final, savag
e end had come for the whole Sandreni family. A night that had not come to an
end until the Duke had used his magic to go into Alberico's dungeons and kill
his own son. Tomasso. Any woman or boy I desired.
Baerd felt humbled by the strength of the old man with him. Not once in half a
year and more of hard traveling, through the bitter cold and rutted tracks of
winter, had Sandre breathed so much as a request for a halt or an easier pace
. Not once had he balked at a task, shown weariness, been slow to rise in the
predawn dampness of the road. Not once given any sign of the rage or the grief
that must have choked him whenever word reached them of more bodies death-whe
eled in As-tibar. He had given them a gift of all he had, his knowledge of the
Palm, the world, and especially of Alberico; a lifetime's worth of subtlety a
nd leadership, offered without arrogance and without reserve, nothing held bac
k.
It was men such as this, Baerd thought, who had been the glory and the grief o
f the Palm in the days before it fell. Glory in the grandeur of their power, a
nd grief in their hatreds and their wars that had let the Tyrants come and tak
e the provinces one by one in their solitary pride.
And sitting there by the river in darkness Baerd felt again, with certainty, i
n the deep core of his heart, that what Alessan was doing— what he and Alessa
n were doing—was right. That theirs was a goal worth the striving for, this r
eaching out for wholeness in the Palm, with the Tyrants driven away and the pr
ovinces bound together in a sharing of the years that would come. A goal worth
all the days and nights of a man's life, whether or not it was ever reached,
could ever be made real. A goal that lay beside and was bound together with th
e other vast and bitter thing, which was Tigana and her name.
Certain things were hard for Baerd bar Saevar, almost impossible in fact, and
had been since his youth had been torn away from him in the year Tigana fell.
But he had lain with a woman on an Ember Night just past, in a place of deepes
t magic, and had felt in that green darkness as if the stern bindings that wra
pped and held his heart were loosening. And this was a dark place too, a quiet
one with the river flowing, and things had begun to take shape in the Palm th
at he had feared would never happen while he lived.
"My lord," he said softly to the old man sitting there with him, "do you know
that I have come to love you in the time we have been together?"
"By the Triad!" Sandre said, a little too quickly. "And I haven't even given y
ou the potion!"
Baerd smiled, said nothing, able to guess at the bindings the old Duke must ha
ve within himself. A moment later though, he heard Sandre murmur, in a very di
fferent voice:
"And I you, my friend. All of you. You have given me a second life and a reaso
n for living it. Even a hope that a future worth knowing might lie ahead of us
. For that you have my love until I die."
Gravely, he held out a palm and the two of them touched fingers in the darknes
s. They were sitting thus, motionless, when they heard the sound of an oar spl
ash gently in the water. Both men rose silently, reaching for their swords. Th
en they heard an owl hoot from the river.
Baerd called softly back, and a moment later a small boat bumped  gently  agai
nst  the sloping bank and  Catriana,  stepping lightly, came ashore.
At the sight of her Baerd drew a breath of pure relief; he had been more afrai
d for her than he could ever have said-. There was a man behind her in the boa
t holding the oars but the moons had not yet risen and Baerd couldn't see who
it was.
Catriana said, "That was quite a blow. Should I be flattered?"
Sandre, behind him, chuckled. Baerd felt as though his heart would overflow wi
th pride in this woman, in the calm, matter-of-factness of her courage. Matchi
ng her tone with an effort he said only, "You shouldn't have shrieked. Half of
Tregea thought you were being ravished."
"Yes, well," she said drily. "Do forgive me. I wasn't sure myself."
"What happened to your hair?" Sandre asked suddenly from behind, and Baerd, mo
ving sideways, saw that it had indeed been cropped away, in a ragged line abov
e her shoulders.
She shrugged, with exaggerated indifference. "It was in the way. We decided to
cut it off."
"Who is we?" Baerd asked. Something within him was grieving for her, for the a
ssumed casualness of her manner. "Who is in the boat? I assume a friend, given
where we are."
"A fair assumption," the man in the boat answered for himself. "Though I must
say I could have picked a better place for our con-traina to have a business m
eeting."
"Rovigo!" Baerd murmured, with astonishment and a swift surge of delight. "Wel
l met! It has been too long."
"Rovigo d'Astibar?" Sandre said suddenly, coming forward. "Is that who this is
?"
"I thought I knew that voice," Rovigo said, shipping his oars and standing up
abruptly. Baerd moved quickly down to the bank to steady the boat. Rovigo took
two precise strides and leaped past him to the shore. "I do know it, but I ca
nnot believe I am hearing it. In the name of Morian of Portals, have you come
back from the dead, my lord?"
Even as he spoke he knelt in the tall grass before Sandre, Duke of Astibar. Ea
st of them, beyond where the river found the sea, Ilarion rose, sending her bl
ue light along the water and over the waving grasses of the bank.
"In a manner of speaking I have," Sandre said. "With my skin somewhat altered
by Baerd's craft." He reached down and pulled Rovigo to his feet. The two men
looked at each other.
"Alessan wouldn't tell me last fall, but he said I would be pleased when I lea
rned who my other partner was," Rovigo whispered, visibly moved. "He spoke mor
e truly than he could have known. How is this possible, my lord?"
"I never died," Sandre said simply. "It was a deception. Part of a poor, fooli
sh old man's scheme. If Alessan and Baerd had not returned to the lodge that n
ight I would have killed myself after the Barbadians came and went." He paused
. "Which means, I suppose, that I have you to thank for my present state, neig
hbor Rovigo. For various nights through the years outside my windows. Listenin
g to the spinning of our feeble plots."
Under the slanting blue moonlight, there was a certain glint in his eye. Rovig
o stepped back a little, but his head was high and he did not avert his gaze.
"It was in a cause that you now know, my lord," he said. "A cause you have joi
ned. I would have cut out my tongue before betraying you to Barbadior. I think
you must know that."
"I do know that," Sandre said after a moment. "Which is a great deal more than
I can say for my own kin."
"Only one of them," Rovigo said quickly, "and he is dead."
"He is dead," Sandre repeated. "They are all dead. I am the last of the Sandre
ni. And what shall we do about it, Rovigo? What shall we do with Alberico of B
arbadior?"
Rovigo said nothing. It was Baerd who answered, from the water's edge.
"Destroy him," he said. "Destroy them both."

PART FIVE - THE MEMORY OF A FLAME

chapter 17

SCELTO WOKE HER VERY EARLY ON THE MORNING OF THE RITual. She had spent the nig
ht alone, as was proper, and had made offerings the evening before at the temp
les of Adaon and Morian both. Brandin was careful now to be seen observing all
rites and proprieties of the Palm. In the temples the priests and the prieste
sses had been almost fawning in their solicitude. In what she was doing there
was power for them and they knew it.
She'd had a short and restless sleep and when Scelto touched her awake, gently
, and with a mug of khav already to hand, she felt her last dream of the night
slipping away from her. Closing her eyes, only half conscious, she tried to c
hase it, sensing the dream receding as if down corridors of her mind. She purs
ued, trying to reclaim an image that would hold it, and then, just as it seeme
d about to fade and be lost, she remembered.
She sat up slowly in bed and reached for the khav, cradling it in both hands,
seeking warmth. Not that the room was cold, but she had now remembered what da
y it was, and there was a chill in her heart that went beyond foreboding and t
ouched certainty.
When Dianora had been a very small girl—perhaps five years old, a little less
than that—she had had a dream of drowning one night. Sea waters closing over
her head, and a vision of something dark, a shape, final and terrible, approa
ching to draw her down into lightless depths.
She had come awake gasping and screaming, thrashing about in bed, uncertain of
where she even was.
And then her mother had been there, holding Dianora to her heart, murmuring, r
ocking her back and forth until the frantic sobbing ceased. When Dianora had f
inally lifted her head from her mother's breast, she had seen by candlelight t
hat her father was there as well, holding Baerd in his arms in the doorway. He
r little brother had been crying too, she saw, shocked awake in his own room a
cross the hall by her screams.
Her father had smiled and carried Baerd over to her, and the four of them had
sat there in the middle of the night on Dianora's bed while the candles cast l
ight in circles around them, shaping an island in the dark.
"Tell me about it," she remembered her father saying. Afterward he had made sh
adow figures for them with his hands on the wall and Baerd, soothed and drowsy
, had fallen asleep again in his lap. "Tell me the dream, love."
Tell me the dream, love. On Chiara, almost thirty years after, Dianora felt an
ache of loss, as if it had all been but a little while ago. Days, weeks, no t
ime at all. When had those candles in her room lost their power to hold back t
he dark?
She had told her mother and father, softly so as not to wake Baerd, some of th
e fear coming back in the stumbling words. The waters closing over her, a shap
e in the depths drawing her down. She remembered her mother making the sign ag
ainst evil, to unbind the truth of the dream and deflect it away.
The next morning, before opening his studio and beginning his day's work, Saev
ar had taken both his children past the harbor and the palace gates and south
along the beach, and he had begun to teach them to swim in a shallow cove shel
tered from the waves and the west wind. Dianora had expected to be afraid when
she realized where they were going, but she was never really afraid of anythi
ng when her father was with her, and she and Baerd had both discovered, with w
hoops of delight, that they loved the water.
She remembered—so strange, the things one remembered—that Baerd, bending ove
r in the shallows that first morning, had caught a small darting fish between
his hands, and had looked up, eyes and mouth comically round with surprise at
his own achievement, and their father had shouted with laughter and pride.
Every fine morning that summer the three of them had gone to their cove to swi
m and by the time autumn came with its chill and then the rains Dianora felt a
s easy in the water as if it were a second skin to her.
Once, she remembered—and there was no surprise to this memory lingering—the
Prince himself had joined them as they walked past the palace. Dismissing his
retinue, Valentin strolled with the three of them to the cove and disrobed to
plunge into the sea beside their father. Straight out into the waves he had go
ne, long after Saevar stopped, past the sheltering headland of the cove and in
to the choppy whitecaps of the sea. Then he had turned around and come back to
them, his smile bright as a god's, his body hard and lean, droplets of water
sparkling in his golden beard.
He was a better swimmer than her father was, Dianora could see that right away
, even as a child. She also knew, somehow, that it really didn't matter. He wa
s the Prince, he was supposed to be better at everything.
Her father remained the most wonderful man in the world, and nothing she could
imagine learning was ever going to change that.
Nothing ever had, she thought, shaking her head slowly in the saishan, as if t
o draw free of the clinging, spidery webs of memory. Nothing ever had. Though
Brandin, in another, better world, in his imaginary Finavir, perhaps . . .
She rubbed her eyes and then shook her head again, still struggling to come aw
ake. She wondered suddenly if the two of them, her father and the King of Ygra
th, had seen each other, had actually looked each other in the eye that terrib
le day by the Deisa.
Which was such a hurtful thought that she was afraid that she might begin to c
ry. Which would not do. Not today. No one, not even Scelto—especially not Sce
lto, who knew her too well—must be allowed to see anything in her for the nex
t few hours but quiet pride, and a certainty of success.
The next few hours. The last few hours.
The hours that would lead her to the margin of the sea and then down into the
dark green waters which were the vision of the riselka's pool. Lead her to whe
re her path came clear at last and then came, not before time, and not without
a certain relief beneath the fear and all the loss, to an end.
It had unfolded with such direct simplicity, from the moment she had stood by
the pool in the King's Garden and seen an image of herself amid throngs of peo
ple in the harbor, and then alone underwater, drawn toward a shape in darkness
that was no longer a source of childhood terror but, finally, of release.
That same day, in the library, Brandin had told her he was abdicating in Ygrat
h in favor of Girald, but that Dorotea his wife was going to have to die for w
hat she had done. He lived his life in the eyes of the world, he said. Even ha
d he wished to spare her, he would have no real choice.
He didn't wish to spare her, Brandin said.
Then he spoke of what else had come to him on his ride that morning through th
e pre-dawn mists of the Island: a vision of the Kingdom of the Western Palm. H
e was going to make that vision real, he said. For the sake of Ygrath itself,
and for the people here in his provinces. And for his own soul. And for her.
Only those Ygrathens willing to become people of his four joined provinces wou
ld be allowed to stay, he said; all others were free to sail home to Girald.
He would remain. Not just for Stevan and the response shaped in his heart to h
is son's death, though that would hold, that was constant; but to build a unit
ed realm here, a better world than he had known.
That would hold, that was constant.
Dianora had listened to him, had felt her tears beginning to fall, and had mov
ed to lay her head in his lap beside the fire. Brandin held her, moving his ha
nds through her dark hair.
He would need a Queen, he had said.
In a voice she had never heard before; one she had dreamt of for so long. He w
anted to have sons and daughters here in the Palm now, Brandin said. To start
again and build upon the pain of Stevan's loss, that something bright and fair
might emerge from all the years of sorrow.
And then he spoke of love. Drawing his hands gently through her hair he spoke
of loving her. Of how that truth had finally come home into his heart. Once, s
he would have thought it far more likely that she might grasp and hold the moo
ns than ever hear him speak such words to her.
She wept, unable to stop, for in his words it was all gathering now, she could
see how it was coming together, and such clarity and prescience was too much
for a mortal soul. For her mortal soul. This was the Triad's wine, and there w
as too much bitter sorrow at the bottom of the cup. She had seen the riselka,
though, she knew what was coming, where the path would lead them now. For one
moment, a handful of heartbeats, she wondered what would have happened had he
whispered these same words to her the night before instead of leaving her alon
e with the fires of memory. And that thought hurt as much as anything ever had
in all her life.
Let it go! she wanted to say, wanted so much to say that she bit her lip holdi
ng back the words. Oh, my love, let the spell go. Let Tigana come back and all
the world's brightness will return.
She said nothing. Knowing that he could not do so, and knowing, for she was no
longer a child, that grace could not be come by so easily. Not after all thes
e years, not with Tigana and Stevan twined together and embedded so deep down
in Brandin's own pain. Not with what he had already done to her home. Not in t
he world in which they lived.
Besides which, and above everything else, there was the riselka, and her clear
path unfolding with every word whispered by the fire. Dianora felt as if she
knew everything that was going to be said, everything that would follow. And e
ach passing moment was leading them—she could see it as a kind of shimmer in
the room—towards the sea.
Almost a third of the Ygrathens stayed. It was more than he'd expected, Brandi
n told her, standing on the balcony above the harbor two weeks later, watching
most of his flotilla sail away, back to their home, to what had been his home
. He was exiled now, by his own will, more truly than he had ever been before.

He also told her later that same day that Dorotea was dead. She didn't ask how
, or how he knew. His sorcery was still the thing she did not ever want to fac
e.
Shortly after that came bad tidings though. The Barbadians were beginning to m
ove north toward and through Ferraut, all three armies apparently heading for
the border of Senzio. He had not expected that, she saw. Not nearly so soon. I
t was too unlike careful Alberico to move with such decisiveness.
"Something has happened there. Something is pushing him," Brandin said. "And I
wish I knew what it was."
He was weak and vulnerable now, that was the problem. He needed time and they
all knew it. With the Ygrathen army mostly gone Brandin needed a chance to sha
pe a new structure of order in the western provinces. To turn the first giddy
euphoria of his announcement into the bonds and allegiances that would truly f
orge a kingdom. That would let him summon an army to fight in his name, among
a conquered people lately so hard-oppressed.
He needed time, desperately, and Alberico wasn't giving it to him.
"You could send us," d'Eymon the Chancellor said one morning, as the dimension
s of the crisis began to take shape. "Send the Ygrathens we have left and posi
tion the ships off the coast of Senzio. See if that will hold Alberico for a t
ime."
The Chancellor had stayed with them. There was never any real doubt that he wo
uld. For all his trauma—he had looked ill and old for days after Brandin's an
nouncement—Dianora knew that d'Eymon's deepest loyalty, his love, though he w
ould have shied awkwardly away from that word, was given to the man he served
and not to the nation. Moving through those days almost numbed by the division
s in her own heart she envied d'Eymon that simplicity.
But Brandin flatly refused to follow his suggestion. She remembered his face a
s he explained, looking up from a map and strewn sheets of paper covered with
numbers. The three of them together around a table in the sitting-room off the
King's bedchamber; Rhun a nervous, preoccupied fourth on a couch at the far e
nd of the room. The King of the Western Palm still had his Fool, though the Ki
ng of Ygrath was named Girald now.
"I cannot make them fight alone," Brandin said quietly. "Not to carry the full
burden of defending people I have just made them equal to. This cannot be an
Ygrathen war. For one thing, they are not enough, we will lose. But it is more
than that. If we send an army or a fleet it must be made up of all of us here
, or this Kingdom will be finished before I start."
D'Eymon had risen from the table, agitated, visibly disturbed. "Then I must sa
y again what I have said before: this is folly. The thing to do is to go home
and deal with what has happened in Ygrath. They need you there."
"Not really, d'Eymon. I will not flatter myself. Girald has been ruling Ygrath
for twenty years."
"Girald is a traitor and should have been executed as such with his mother!"
Brandin looked up at him, the grey eyes suddenly chilly.
"Must we repeat this discussion? D'Eymon, I am here for a reason and you know
that reason. I cannot go back on that: it would cut against the very core of w
hat I am." His expression changed. "No man need stay with me, but I am bound m
yself to this peninsula by love and grief, and by my own nature, and those thr
ee things will hold me here."
"The Lady Dianora could come with us! With Dorotea dead you would need a Queen
in Ygrath and she would be—"
"D'Eymonl Have done." The tone was final, ending the discussion.
But the Chancellor was a brave man. "My lord," he pushed on, grim-faced, his v
oice low and intense, "if I cannot speak of this and you will not send our fle
et to face Barbadior I know not how to advise you. The provinces will not go t
o war for you yet, we know that. It is too soon. They need time to see and to
believe that you are one of them."
"And I have no time," Brandin replied with what had seemed an unnatural calm a
fter the sharp tension of the exchange. "So I have to do it immediately. Advis
e me on that, Chancellor. How do I show them? Right now. How do I make them be
lieve I am truly bound to the Palm?"
So there it was, and Dianora knew that the moment had come to her at last.
I cannot go back on that; it would cut against the very core of what I am. She
had never really nursed any fantasies of his ever freely releasing and unbind
ing his spell. She knew Brandin too well. He was not a man who went back or re
versed himself. In anything. The core of what he was. In love and hate and in
the defining shape of his pride.
She stood up. There was an odd rushing sound in her ears, and if she closed he
r eyes she was certain she would see a path stretching away, straight and clea
r as a line of moonlight on the sea, very bright before her. Everything was le
ading her there, leading all of them. He was vulnerable, and exposed, and he w
ould never turn back.
There was an image of Tigana flowering in her heart as she rose. Even here, ev
en now, an image of her home. In the depths of the riselka's pool there had be
en a great many people gathered under banners of all the provinces as she walk
ed down to the sea.
She placed her hands carefully on the back of her chair and looked down at him
where he sat. There was grey in his beard, more, it seemed, each time she not
iced it, but his eyes were as they had always been, and there was no fear, no
doubt in them as they looked back at her. She drew a deep breath and spoke wor
ds that seemed to have been given to her long ago, words that seemed to have s
imply waited for this moment to arrive.
"I will do it for you," she said. "I will make them believe in you. I will do
the Ring Dive of the Grand Dukes of Chiara as it used to be done on the eve of
war. You will marry the seas of the peninsula, and I will bind you to the Pal
m and to good fortune in the eyes of all the people when I bring you back the
sea-ring from the sea."
She kept her gaze steady on his own, dark and clear and calm, as she spoke at
last, after so many years, the words that set her on the final path. That set
him, set them all, the living and the dead, the named and the lost, on that pa
th. As, loving him with a sundered heart, she lied.
She finished her khav and rose from bed. Scelto had drawn the curtains back an
d she could see sunrise just beginning to lighten the dark sea. The sky was cl
ear overhead and the banners in the harbor could just be seen, moving lazily i
n the dawn breeze. There was already a huge crowd gathered, hours before the c
eremony was to start. A great many people had spent the night in the harbor sq
uare, to be sure of a place near the pier to see her dive. She thought she saw
someone, a tiny figure at such a distance, lift a hand to point to her window
and she stepped quickly back.
Scelto had already laid out the clothes she would wear, the garments of ritual
. Dark green for the going down: her outer robe and sandals, the net that woul
d hold her hair and the silken undertunic in which she would dive. For afterwa
rds, after she came back from the sea, there was another robe, white, richly e
mbroidered with gold. For when she was to represent, to be the bride come from
the sea with a gold ring in her hand for the King.
After she came back. If she came back.
She was almost astonished at her own calm. It was easier actually because she
hadn't seen Brandin since early the day before, as was proper for the rite. Ea
sier too, because of how brilliantly clear all the images seemed to be, how sm
oothly they had led her here, as if she was choosing or deciding nothing, only
following a course set down somewhere else and long ago.
Easier, finally, because she had come to understand and accept, deeply, and wi
th certitude, that she had been born into a world, a life, that would not let
her be whole.
Not ever. This was not Finavir, or any such dreamplace. This was the only life
, the only world, she was to be allowed. And in that life Brandin of Ygrath ha
d come to this peninsula to shape a realm for his son, and Valentin di Tigana
had killed Stevan, Prince of Ygrath. This had happened, could not be unmade.
And because of that death, Brandin had come down upon Tigana and her people an
d torn them out of the known past and the still unfolding pages of the world.
And was staying here to seal that truth forever—blank and absolute—in vengea
nce for his son. This had happened and was happening, and had to be unmade.
So she had come here to kill him. In her father's name and her mother's, in Ba
erd's name and her own, and for all the lost and ruined people of her home. Bu
t on Chiara she had discovered, in grief and pain and glory, that islands were
truly a world of their own, that things changed there. She had learned, long
ago, that she loved him. And now, in glory and pain and wonder, had been made
to understand that he loved her. This had all happened, and she had tried to u
nmake it, and had failed.
Hers was not a life meant to be made whole. She could see it now so clearly, a
nd in that clarity, that final understanding, Dianora found the wellspring of
her calm.
Some lives were unlucky. Some people had a chance to shape their world. It see
med—who could have foretold?—that both these things were true of her.
Of Dianora di Tigana bren Saevar, a sculptor's daughter; a dark-haired dark-ey
ed child, gawky and unlovely in her youth, serious and grave, though with flas
hes of wit and tenderness, beauty coming to her late, and wisdom coming later,
too much later. Coming only now.
She took no food, though she'd allowed herself the khav—a last concession to
years of habit. She didn't think that doing so would violate any rituals. She
also knew it didn't really matter. Scelto helped her dress, and then, in silen
ce, he carefully gathered and pinned her hair, binding it in the dark green ne
t that would hold it back from her eyes when she dived.
When he was done she rose and submitted herself, as always before going out in
to the world, to his scrutiny. The sun was up now; its light flooding the room
through the drawn-back curtains. In the distance the growing noise from the h
arbor could be heard. The crowd must be very large by now, she thought; she di
dn't go back to the window to look. She would see them soon enough. There was
a quality of anticipation to the steady murmur of sound that gave evidence, mo
re clearly than anything else, of the stakes being played for this morning.
A peninsula. Two different dominions here, if it came to that. Perhaps even th
e very Empire in Barbadior, with the Emperor ill and dying as everyone knew. A
nd one last thing more, though only she knew this, and only she would ever kno
w: Tigana. The final, secret coin lying on the gaming table, hidden under the
card laid down in the name of love.
"Will I do?" she asked Scelto, her voice determinedly casual.
He didn't follow that lead. "You frighten me," he said quietly. "You look as t
hough you are no longer entirely of this world. As if you have already left us
all behind."
It was uncanny how he could read her. It hurt to have to deceive him, not to h
ave him with her on this last thing, but there was nothing he could have done,
no reason to give him grief, and there were risks in the doing so.
"I'm not at all sure that's flattering," she said, still lightly, "but I will
attempt to think of it that way."
He refused to smile. "I think you know how little I like this," he said.
"Scelto, Alberico's entire army will be on the border of Senzio two weeks from
now. Brandin has no choice. If they walk into Senzio they will not stop there
. This is his very best chance, probably his only chance, to link himself to t
he Palm in time. You know all this." She forced herself to sound a little angr
y.
It was true, it was all true. But none of it was the truth. The riselka was th
e truth this morning, that and the dreams she'd dreamt alone here in the saish
an through all the years.
"I know," Scelto said, clearly unhappy. "Of course I know. And nothing I think
matters at all. It is just . . ."
"Please!" she said, to stop him before he made her cry. "I don't think I can d
ebate this with you now, Scelto. Shall we go?" Oh, my dear, she was thinking.
Oh, Scelto, you will undo me yet.
He had stopped, flinching at her rebuke. She saw him swallow hard, his eyes lo
wered. After a moment he looked up again.
"Forgive me, my lady," he whispered. He stepped forward and, unexpectedly, too
k her hands, pressing them to his lips. "It is only for you that I speak. I am
afraid. Please forgive."
"Of course," she said. "Of course. There is really nothing to forgive, Scelto.
" She squeezed his hands tightly.
But in her heart she was bidding him farewell, knowing she must not cry. She l
ooked into his honest, caring face, the truest friend she'd had for so many ye
ars, the only real friend actually, since her childhood, and she hoped against
hope that in the days to come, he would remember the way she had gripped his
hands and not the casual, careless sound of her words.
"Let's go," she said again, and turned her face away from him, to begin the lo
ng walk through the palace and out into the morning and then down to the sea.

The Ring Dive of the Grand Dukes of Chiara had been the most dramatic single r
itual of temporal power in the Peninsula of the Palm. From the very beginning
of their dominion on the Island, the leaders of Chiara had known that theirs w
as a power granted by and subject to the waters that surrounded them. The sea
guarded them and fed them. It gave their ships—always the largest armada in t
he peninsula —access to trade and plunder, and it wrapped them about and encl
osed them in a world within the world. No wonder, as the tale-tellers said, no
wonder it was on the Island that Eanna and Adaon had come together to engende
r Morian and make the Triad complete.
A world within the world, girdled by the sea.
It was said to have been the very first of the Grand Dukes who had begun the c
eremony that became the Ring Dive. It had been different in those early days.
Not actually a dive, for one thing, only a ring thrown as a gift into the sea
in propitiation and token of acknowledgment, in the days when the world turned
its face toward the sun and the sailing season began in earnest.
Then one spring, a long time after that, a woman dived into the sea after the
ring when the Grand Duke of that time cast it in. Some said later she had been
crazed with love or religious possession, others that she was only cunning an
d ambitious.
In either case, she surfaced from the waters of the harbor with the ring brigh
t in her hand.
And as the crowd that had gathered to watch the Grand Duke wed the sea shouted
and babbled in wild confusion and wonder the High Priest of Morian in Chiara
suddenly cried aloud, in words that would run down through all the years, neve
r to be lost: "Look and see! See how the oceans accept the Grand Duke as husba
nd to them! How they offer back the sea-ring as a bride piece to a lover!"
And the High Priest moved to the very end of the pier beside the Duke and knel
t to help the woman rise from the sea and so he set in motion everything that
followed. Saronte the Grand Duke was but new to his power and as yet unwed. Le
tizia, who had come into the city from a farm in the distrada and had done thi
s unprecedented thing, was yellow-haired and comely and very young. And their
palms were joined together then and there over the water by Mellidar, that Hig
h Priest of Morian, and Saronte placed the sea-ring on Letizia's finger.
They were wed at Midsummer. There was war that autumn against Asoli and Astiba
r, and young Saronte di Chiara triumphed magnificently in a naval battle in th
e Gulf of Corte, south of the Island. A victory whose anniversary Chiara still
remembered. And from that time onward, the newly shaped ritual of the Ring Di
ve was enshrined for use in time of Chiara's need.
Thirty years later, near the end of Saronte's long reign, in one of the recurr
ing squabbles for precedence among the Triad's clergy, a newly anointed High P
riest of Eanna revealed that Letizia had been near kin to Mellidar, the priest
of Morian who had drawn her from the water and bound her to the Duke. Eanna's
priest invited the people of the Island to draw their own conclusions about t
he schemes of Morian's clergy and their endless striving for preeminence and p
ower.
A number of events, none of them pleasant, had unfolded among the Triad's serv
ants in the months following that revelation, but none of these disturbances h
ad come near to touching the bright new sanctity of the ritual itself. The cer
emony had taken hold on the imagination of the people. It seemed to speak to s
omething deep within them, whether of sacrifice or homage, of love or danger,
or, in the end, of some dark, true binding to the waters of the sea.
So the Ring Dive of the Grand Dukes remained, long after all those feuding cle
rgy of the Triad had been lowered to their rest, their names only half-remembe
red, and only because of their part in the story of the Dive.
What had finally brought an end to the ceremony, in much more recent times, wa
s the death of Onestra, wife to Grand Duke Cazal, two hundred and fifty years
ago.
It was not, by any means, the first such death: the women who volunteered to d
ive for the Grand Dukes always had it made absolutely clear to them that their
lives were worth infinitely less than the ring they sought to reclaim from th
e sea. To come back without the ring left one an exile from the Island for lif
e, known and mocked throughout the whole peninsula. The ceremony was repeated
with another woman, another ring, until one of the thrown rings was found and
claimed.
By contrast, the woman who carried a sea-ring back to the pier was acclaimed a
s the luck of Chiara and her fortune was made for life. Wealth and honor, an a
rranged marriage into nobility. More than one had borne a child to her Grand D
uke. Two had followed Letizia to the consort's throne. Girls from families of
little prospect were not chary about risking their lives for such a glittering
, hallucinatory future.
Onestra di Chiara had been different, and because of her and after her everyth
ing had changed.
Beautiful as a legend and as proud, Grand Duke Cazal's young bride had insiste
d on doing the Ring Dive herself, scorning to allocate such a glittering cerem
ony to some ill-bred creature from the distrada on the eve of a dangerous war.
She had been, all the chroniclers of the day agreed, the most beautiful visio
n any of them had ever seen as she walked down to the sea in the dark-green of
ritual.
When she floated, lifeless, to the surface of the water some distance from the
shore, in full sight of the watching throng, Duke Cazal had screamed like a g
irl and fainted dead away.
After which there had been rioting and a terrified pandemonium unmatched befor
e or since on the Island. In one isolated temple of Adaon on the north shore,
all the priestesses had killed themselves when one of their number brought bac
k the news. It was the wrath of the god that was coming, so the portents were
read, and Chiara almost strangled on its fear.
Duke Cazal, foolhardy and broken, was slain in battle that summer against the
joined armies of Corte and Ferraut, after which Chiara endured two generations
of eclipse, rising to power again only after the bitter, destructive war foug
ht between the erstwhile allies who had beaten it. Such a process, of course,
was hardly noteworthy. It had been the way of things in the Palm as far back a
s the records went.
But no woman had done the Ring Dive since Onestra died.
All the symbols had changed with her, the stakes had risen too high. If anothe
r woman were to die in the Dive, with that legacy of chaos and defeat . . .
It was far too dangerous, successive Grand Dukes declared, the one after the o
ther, and they found ways to keep the Island safe in its sea-girt power withou
t the sanction of that most potent ceremony.
When the Ygrathen fleet had been sighted nineteen years ago the last Grand Duk
e of Chiara had killed himself on the steps of Eanna's temple, and so there ha
d been no one to cast a ring into the sea that year, even had there been a wom
an willing to dive for it, in search of Morian's intercession and the god's.
It was eerily silent in the saishan when she and Scelto left her rooms. Normal
ly at this hour the corridors would be loud with the stir and bustle of the ca
strates, fragrant and colorful with the scented presence of women moving langu
orously to the baths or to their morning meal. Today was different. The hallwa
ys were empty and still save for their own footsteps. Dianora suppressed a shi
ver, so strange did the deserted, echoing saishan seem.
They passed the doorway to the baths and then the entrance to the dining rooms
. Both were empty and silent. They turned a corner toward the stairway that le
d down and out of the women's wing, and there Dianora saw that one person at l
east had remained, and was waiting for them.
"Let me look at you," Vencel said, the usual words. "I must approve you before
you go down."
The saishan head was sprawled as always among the many-colored pillows of his
rolling platform. Dianora almost smiled to see his vast bulk, and to hear the
familiar words spoken.
"Of course," she said, and slowly turned full circle before his scrutiny.
"Acceptable," he said at length. The customary judgment, though his high disti
nctive voice sounded more subdued than she had ever heard it. "But perhaps . .
. perhaps you would like to wear that vairstone from Khardhun about your thro
at? For luck? I brought it with me for you, from the saishan treasures."
Almost diffidently Vencel extended a large soft hand and she saw that he was h
olding the red jewel she had worn the day Isolla of Ygrath had tried to kill t
he King.
She was about to demur when she remembered that Scelto had brought this back f
or her as something special for that day, just before she had dressed to go do
wn. Remembering that, and moved by VencePs gesture, she said, "Thank you. I wo
uld be pleased to wear it." She hesitated. "Would you put it on for me?"
He smiled, almost shyly. She knelt before him and with his deft and delicate f
ingers the enormous saishan head clasped the jewel on its chain about her neck
. Kneeling so near she was overwhelmed by the scent of tainflowers that he alw
ays wore.
Vencel withdrew his hands and leaned back to look at her. In his dark face his
eyes were unwontedly soft. "In Khardhun we used to say to someone going on a
journey Fortune find you there and guide you home. Such is my wish today." He
hid his hands in the billowing folds of his white robe and looked away, down t
he empty corridor.
"Thank you," she said again, afraid to say more. She rose and glanced over at
Scelto; there were tears in his eyes. He wiped them hastily away and moved to
lead her down the stairs. Halfway down she looked back at Vencel, an almost in
humanly vast figure, draped in billowing white. He was gazing expressionlessly
down after them, from among the brilliantly colored panoply of his pillows, a
n exotic creature from another world entirely, somehow carried ashore and stra
nded here in the saishan of Chiara.
At the bottom of the stairs she saw that the two doors had been left unbarred.
Scelto would not have to knock. Not today. He pushed the doors open and drew
back to let her pass.
In the long hallway outside the priests of Morian and the priestesses of Adaon
were waiting for her. She saw the scarcely veiled triumph in their eyes, a co
llective glittering of expectation.
There was a sound, a drawing of breath, as she came through the doors in the g
reen robes of a rite that had not been performed in two and a half hundred yea
rs, her hair drawn back and bound in a net green as the sea.
Trained to control, being what they were, the clergy quickly fell silent. And
in silence they made way for her, to follow behind in orderly rows of crimson
and smoke-grey.
She knew they would make Scelto trail behind them. He could not be part of thi
s procession of the rites. She knew she had not properly said farewell to him.
Hers was not a life meant to be made whole.
They went west down the corridor to the Grand Staircase. At the top of the wid
e marble stairs Dianora paused and looked down, and she finally understood why
the saishan had been so silent. All the women and the castrates were gathered
below. They had been allowed out, permitted to come this far to see her pass
by. Holding her head very high and looking neither left nor right she set her
foot on the first stair and started down. She was no longer herself, she thoug
ht. No longer Dianora, or not only Dianora. She was merging further into legen
d with every step she took.
And then, at the bottom of the staircase, as she stepped onto the mosaic-inlai
d tiles of the floor, she realized who was waiting by the palace doors to esco
rt her out and her heart almost stopped.
There was a cluster of men there.  D'Eymon, for one, and Rhamanus as well, who
had stayed in the Palm as she'd been sure he would, and had been named as Bra
ndin's First Lord of the Fleet. Beside them was Doarde the poet, representing
the people of Chiara. She had expected him: it had been d'Eymon's clever idea
that the participation of one Island poet could help counterbalance the crime
and death of another. Next to Doarde was a burly, sharp-faced man in brown vel
vet hung about with a ransom's worth of gold. A merchant from Corte, and a suc
cessful one clearly enough; very possibly one of the ghouls who had made their
fortune preying on the ruins of Tigana two decades ago. Behind him was a lean
grey-clad priest of Morian who was obviously from Asoli. She could tell from
his coloring, the native Asolino all had that look about them.
She also knew he was from Asoli because the last of the men waiting for her th
ere was from Lower Corte and she knew him. A figure from her own internal lege
nds, from the myths and hopes that had sustained her life this far. And this w
as the one whose presence here almost froze the blood in her veins.
In white of course, majestic as she remembered him from when she was a girl, g
ripping the massive staff that had always been his signature, and towering ove
r every man there, stood Danoleon the High Priest of Eanna in Tigana.
The man who had taken Prince Alessan away to the south. So Baerd had told her
the night he saw his own riselka and went away to follow them.
She knew him, everyone had known Danoleon, his long-striding, broad-shouldered
preeminence, the deep, glorious instrument that was his voice in temple servi
ces. Approaching the doors Dianora fought back a moment of wild panic before s
ternly controlling herself. There was no way he could recognize her. He had ne
ver known her as a child. Why should he have—the adolescent daughter of an ar
tist loosely attached to the court? And she had changed, she was infinitely ch
anged since then.
She couldn't take her eyes off him though. She had known d'Eymon was arranging
for someone to be there from Lower Corte, but had never expected Danoleon him
self. In the days when she had worked in The Queen in Stevanien it was well-kn
own that Eanna's High Priest had withdrawn from the wider world into the godde
ss's Sanctuary in the southern hills.
Now he had come out, and was here, and looking at him, drinking in his reality
, Dianora felt an absurd, an almost overwhelming swell of pride to see how he
seemed to dominate, merely by his presence, all the people assembled there.
It was for him, and for the men and women like him, the ones who were gone and
the ones who yet lived in a broken land, that she was going to do what she wo
uld do today. His eyes rested on her searchingly; they were all doing that, bu
t it was under Danoleon's clear blue gaze that Dianora drew herself up even ta
ller than before. Behind them all, beyond the doors which had not yet been ope
ned, she seemed to see the riselka's path growing brighter all the time.
She stopped and they bowed to her, all six men putting a straight leg forward
and bending low in a fashion of salute not used for centuries. But this was le
gend, ceremony, an invocation of many kinds of power, and Dianora sensed that
she must now seem to them like some hieratic figure out of the tapestry scroll
s of the distant past.
"My lady," said d'Eymon gravely, "if it pleases you and you are minded to allo
w us, we would attend upon you now and lead you to the King of the Western Pal
m."
Carefully said, and clearly, for all their words were to be remembered and rep
eated. Everything was to be remembered. One reason the priests were here, and
a poet.
"It pleases me," she said simply. "Let us go." She did not say more; her own w
ords would matter less. It was not what she would say today that was to be rem
embered.
She still could not take her eyes from Danoleon. He was the first man from Tig
ana, she realized, that she had seen since coming to the Island. In a very dir
ect way it eased her heart that Eanna, whose children they all were, had allow
ed her to see this man before she went into the sea.
D'Eymon nodded a command. Slowly the massive bronze doors swung open upon the
vast crowd assembled between the palace and the pier. She saw people spilling
across the square to the farthest ends of the harbor, even thronging the decks
of the ships at anchor there. The steady murmur of sound that had been presen
t all morning swelled to a crescendo as the doors swung open, and then it abru
ptly stopped and fell away as the crowd caught sight of her. A rigid, strainin
g silence seemed to claim Chiara under the blue arch of the sky; and out into
that stillness Dianora went.
And it was then, as they moved into the brilliant sunshine along the aisle, th
e shining path that had been made for her passage, that she saw Brandin waitin
g by the sea for her, dressed like a soldier-king, without extravagance, bareh
eaded in the light of spring.
Something twisted within her at the sight of him, like a blade in a wound. It
will end soon, she told herself steadily. Only a little longer now. It will al
l be over soon enough.
She went toward him then, walking like a queen, slender and tall and proud, cl
ad in the colors of the dark-green sea with a crimson gem about her throat. An
d she knew that she loved him, and knew her land was lost if he was not driven
away or slain, and she grieved with all her being for the simple truth that h
er mother and her father had had a daughter born to them all those years ago.

For someone as small as he was it was hopeless to try to see anything from the
harbor square itself and even the deck of the ship that had brought them here
from Corte was thronged with people who had paid the captain for a chance to
view the Drive from this vantage point. Devin had made his way over to the mai
nmast and scrambled up to join another dozen men clinging to the rigging high
above the sea. There were compensations inherent in agility.
Erlein was somewhere below amid the crowd on deck. He was still terrified, aft
er three days here, by this enforced proximity to the sorcerer from Ygrath. It
was one thing, he had said angrily, to elude Trackers in the south, another f
or a wizard to walk up to a sorcerer.
Alessan was somewhere among the crowd in the harbor. Devin had spotted him at
one point working his way towards the pier, but couldn't see him now. Danoleon
was inside the palace itself, representing Lower Corte in the ceremony. The i
rony of that was almost overwhelming, whenever Devin allowed himself to think
about it. He tried not to because it made him afraid, for all of them.
But Alessan had been decisive when the courteously phrased request had come fo
r the High Priest to travel north and join men of the other three provinces as
formal witnesses to the Ring Dive.
"You will go, of course," the Prince had said, as if it were the most natural
thing in the world. "And we shall be there as well. I need to take the measure
of things on Chiara since this change."
"Are you absolutely mad?" Erlein had gasped, not bothering to hide his disbeli
ef.
Alessan had only laughed, though not, Devin thought, with any real amusement.
He had become virtually impossible to read since his mother had died. Devin fe
lt quite inadequate to the task of bridging that space or breaking through. Se
veral times in the days following Pasithea's death he had found himself desper
ately wishing that Baerd were with them.
"What about Savandi?" Erlein had demanded. "Couldn't this be a trap for Danole
on. Or for you, even?"
Alessan shook his head. "Hardly. You said yourself, no message was sent. And i
t is entirely plausible that he was killed by brigands in the countryside as T
orre made it seem. The King of the Western Palm has larger things to worry abo
ut right now than one of his petty spies. I'm not concerned about that, Erlein
, but I do thank you for your solicitude." He smiled, a wintry smile. Erlein h
ad scowled and stalked away.
"What are you concerned about?" Devin had asked the Prince.
But Alessan hadn't answered that.
High in the rigging of the Aema Falcon Devin waited with the others for the pa
lace doors to open, and tried to control the pounding of his heart. It was dif
ficult though; the sense of excitement and anticipation that had been building
on the Island for three days had started to become overwhelming this morning,
and had taken an almost palpable shape when Brandin himself had appeared and
walked calmly down to the pier with a small retinue, including one stooped, ba
lding old man dressed exactly like the King.
"Brandin's Fool," the Cortean in the rigging next to him said, when Devin aske
d, pointing. "Something to do with sorcery, the way they do things in Ygrath."
He grunted. "We're better off not knowing."
Devin had gazed for the first time at the man who had destroyed Tigana and tri
ed to imagine what it would be like to have a bow in his hands right now and B
aerd or Alessan's skill at archery. It was a long, but not an impossible shot,
down, and across a span of water to strike a single soberly clad, bearded man
standing by the sea.
Imagining the flight of that arrow in the morning sun, he remembered another c
onversation with Alessan, at the rail of the Falcon the night they reached Chi
ara.
"What do we want to happen?" Devin had asked.
Word had reached the Gulf of Corte just before they sailed that most of the Se
cond Company of Alberico's Barbadian mercenaries had now been pulled back from
the border forts and cities in Ferraut and were marching with the other armie
s towards Senzio. Hearing that, Alessan's face had gone pale, and there was a
sudden hard glitter in his gray eyes.
Much like his mother's, Devin had thought, but would not dream of saying.
On the ship Alessan had turned to him briefly at the question and then looked
back out to sea. It was very late, nearer dawn than midnight. Neither of them
had been able to sleep. Both moons were overhead and the water gleamed and spa
rkled with their mingled light.
"What do we want to happen?" Alessan repeated. "I'm not completely sure. I thi
nk I know, but I can't be certain yet. That's why we're going to watch this Di
ve."
They listened to the sounds of the ship in the night sea. Devin cleared his th
roat.
"If she fails?" he asked.
Alessan was silent for so long Devin didn't think he was going to answer. Then
, very softly, he said, "If the Certandan woman fails Brandin is lost I think.
I am almost sure."
Devin looked quickly over at him. "Well then, that means . . ."
"That means a number of things, yes. One is our name come back. Another is Alb
erico ruling the Palm. Before the year is out, almost certainly."
Devin tried to absorb that. If we take them then we must take them both, he re
membered the Prince saying in the Sandreni lodge, with Devin hiding in the lof
t above.
"And if she succeeds?" he asked.
Alessan shrugged. In the blue and silver moonlight his profile seemed more mar
ble than flesh. "You tell me. How many people of the provinces will fight agai
nst the Empire of Barbadior for a king who has been wedded to the seas of the
Palm by a sea-bride from this peninsula?"
Devin thought about it.
"A lot," he said at length. "I think a lot of people would fight."
"So do I," said Alessan. "Then the next question becomes, who would win? And t
he one after that is: Is there something we can do about it?"
"Is there?"
Alessan looked over at him then and his mouth crooked wryly. "I have lived my
life believing so. We may find it put to the test very soon."
Devin stopped his questions then. It was very bright with the two moons shinin
g. A short while later Alessan touched his shoulder and pointed with his other
hand. Devin looked and saw a high, dark mass of land rising from the sea in t
he distance.
"Chiara," said Alessan.
And so Devin saw the Island for the first time.
"Have you ever been here before?" he asked softly.
Alessan shook his head, never taking his eyes from that dark, mountainous shap
e on the horizon.
"Only in my dreams," he said.
"She's coming!" someone shouted from the topmost rigging of the Asolini ship a
nchored next to them; the cry was immediately picked up and strung from ship t
o ship and along the harbor, peaking in a roar of anticipation.
And then falling away to an eerie, chilling silence as the massive bronze door
s of Chiara Palace swung fully back to reveal the woman framed within.
Even when she began to walk the silence held. Moving slowly, she passed among
the throngs assembled in the square, seeming almost oblivious of them. Devin w
as too far away to see her face clearly yet, but he was suddenly conscious of
a terrible beauty and grace. It is the ceremony, he told himself; it is only b
ecause of where she is. He saw Danoleon behind her, moving among the other esc
orts, towering above them.
And then, moved by some instinct, he turned from them to Brandin of Ygrath on
the pier. The King was nearer to him and he had the right angle. He could see
how the man watched the woman approach. His face was utterly expressionless. I
cy cold.
He's calculating the situation. Devin thought. The numbers, the chances. He's
using all of this—the woman, the ritual, everyone gathered here with so much
passion in them—for a purely political end. He realized that he despised the
man for that, over and above everything else: hated him for the blank, emotion
less gaze with which he watched a woman approach to risk her life for him. By
the Triad, he was supposed to be in love with her!
Even the bent old man beside him, Devin saw, the King's Fool, dressed exactly
like Brandin, was wringing his hands over and about each other in obvious appr
ehension, anxiety and concern vivid in his face.
By contrast, the face of the King of the Western Palm was a frigid, uncaring m
ask. Devin didn't even want to look at him anymore. He turned back to the woma
n, who had come much nearer now.
And because she had, because she was almost at the water's edge, he could see
that his first sense had been right and his glib explanation wrong: Dianora di
Certando clad in the sea-green robes of the Ring Dive was the most beautiful
woman he had ever seen in all his life.
What do we want to happen? he had asked Alessan three nights ago, sailing to t
his Island.
He still didn't know the answer. But looking down at the woman as she reached
the sea a sudden fear rose in him, and an entirely unexpected pity. He grasped
the rigging tightly and set himself to watch from high, high above.
She knew Brandin better than anyone alive; it had been necessary, in order to
survive, especially in the beginning, in order to say and do the right things
in a mortally dangerous place. Then as the years slipped by necessity had some
how been alchemized into something else. Into love, actually, bitterly hard as
that had been to acknowledge. She had come here to kill, with the twin snakes
of memory and hatred in her heart. Instead, she had ended up understanding hi
m better than anyone in the world because there was no one else who mattered h
alf so much.
And so what came very near to breaking her, as she passed through that multitu
de of people to the pier, was seeing how ferociously he was struggling not to
show what he was feeling. As if his soul were straining to escape through the
doorways of his eyes, and he, being born to power, being what he was, felt it
necessary to hold it in, here among so many people.
But he couldn't hide it from her. She didn't even have to look at Rhun to read
Brandin now. He had cut himself off from his home, from all that had anchored
him in life, he was here among an alien people he had conquered, asking for t
heir aid, needing their belief in him. She was his lifeline now, his only brid
ge to the Palm, his only link, really, to any kind of future here, or anywhere
.
But Tigana's ruin lay between the two of them like a chasm in the world. The l
esson of her days, Dianora thought, was simply this: that love was not enough.
Whatever the songs of the troubadours might say. Whatever hope it might seem
to offer, love was simply not enough to bridge the chasm in her world. Which w
as why she was here, what the riselka's vision in the garden had offered her:
an end to the terrible, bottomless divisions in her heart. At a price, however
, that was not negotiable. One did not bargain with the gods.
She came up to Brandin at the end of the pier and stopped and the others stopp
ed behind her. A sigh, rising and falling away like a dying of wind, moved thr
ough the square. With an odd trick of the mind her vision seemed to detach its
elf from her eyes for a moment, to look down on the pier from above. She could
see how she must appear to the people gathered there: inhuman, otherworldly.

As Onestra must have seemed before the last Dive. Onestra had not come back, a
nd devastation had followed upon that. Which was why this was her chance: the
dark doorway history offered to release, and to the incarnation of her long dr
eam in the saishan.
The sunlight was very bright, gleaming and dancing on the blue-green sea. Ther
e was so much color and richness in the world. Beyond Rhun, she saw a woman in
a brilliant yellow robe, an old man in blue and yellow, a younger, dark-haire
d man in brown with a child upon his shoulders. All come to see her dive. She
closed her eyes for a moment, before she turned to look at Brandin. It would h
ave been easier not to, infinitely easier, but she knew that there were danger
s in not meeting his gaze. And, in the end, here at the end, this was the man
she loved.
Last night, lying awake, watching the slow transit of the moons across her win
dow, she had tried to think of what she could say to him when she reached the
end of the pier. Words beyond those of the ritual, to carry layers of meaning
down through the years.
But there, too, lay danger, a risk of undoing everything this moment was to be
come. And words, the ones she would want to say, were just another reaching ou
t towards making something whole, weren't they? Towards bridging the chasms. A
nd in the end that was the point, wasn't it? There was no bridge across for he
r.
Not in this life.
"My lord," she said formally, carefully, "I know I am surely unworthy, and I f
ear to presume, but if it is pleasing to you and to those assembled here I wil
l try to bring you the sea-ring back from the sea."
Brandin's eyes were the color of skies before rain. His gaze never wavered fro
m her face. He said, "There is no presumption, love, and infinite worthiness.
You ennoble this ceremony with your presence here."
Which confused her, for these were not the words they had prepared. But then h
e looked away from her, slowly, as if turning away from light.
"People of the Western Palm!" he cried, and his voice was clear and strong, a
King's, a leader of men, carrying resonantly across the square and out among t
he tall ships and the fishing boats. "We are asked by the Lady Dianora if we f
ind her worthy to dive for us. If we will place our hopes of fortune in her, t
o seek the Triad's blessing in the war Barbadior brings down upon us. What is
your reply? She waits to hear!"
And amid the thunderous roar of assent that followed, a roar as loud and sure
as they had known it would be after so much pent-up anticipation, Dianora felt
the brutal irony of it, the bitter jest, seize hold of her.
Our hopes of fortune. In her? The Triad's blessing. Through her?
In that moment, for the first time, here at the very margin of the sea, she fe
lt fear come in to lay a finger on her heart. For this truly was a ritual of t
he gods, a ceremony of great age and numinous power and she was using it for h
er own hidden purposes, for something shaped in her mortal heart. Could such a
thing be allowed, however pure the cause?
She looked back then at the palace and the mountains that had defined her life
for so long. The snows were gone from the peak of Sangarios. It was on that s
ummit that Eanna was said to have made the stars. And named them all. Dianora
looked away and down, and she saw Danoleon gazing at her from his great height
. She looked into the calm, mild blue of his eyes and felt herself reach out a
nd back through time to take strength and sureness from his quietude.
Her fear fell away like a discarded garment. It was for Danoleon, and for thos
e like him who had died, for the books and the statues and the songs and the n
ames that were lost that she was here. Surely the Triad would understand that
when she was brought to her final accounting for this heresy? Surely Adaon wou
ld remember Micaela by the sea? Surely Eanna of the Names would be merciful?
Slowly then, Dianora nodded her head as the roar of sound finally receded; see
ing that, the High Priestess of the god came forward in her crimson gown and h
elped her free of the dark-green robe.
Then she was standing by the water, clad only in the thin green undertunic tha
t barely reached her knees, and Brandin was holding a ring in his hand.
"In the name of Adaon and of Morian," he said, words of ritual, rehearsed and
carefully prepared, "and always and forever in the name of Eanna, Queen of Lig
hts, we seek nurture here and shelter. Will the sea welcome us and bear us upo
n her breast as a mother bears a child? Will the oceans of this peninsula acce
pt a ring of offering in my name and in the name of all those gathered here, a
nd send it back to us in token of our fates bound together? I am Brandin di Ch
iara, King of the Western Palm, and I seek your blessing now."
Then he turned to her, as a second murmur of astonishment began at his last wo
rds, at what he'd named himself, and beneath that sound, as if cloaked and she
ltered under it, he whispered something else, words only she could hear.
Then he turned towards the sea and drew back his arm, and he threw the golden
ring in a high and shining arc up towards the brightness of the sky and the da
zzling sun.
She saw it reach its apex and begin to fall. She saw it strike the sea and she
dived.
The water was shockingly cold, so early in the year. Using the momentum of the
dive she drove herself downwards, kicking hard. The green net held her hair s
o she could see. Brandin had thrown the ring with some care but he had known h
e could not simply toss it near to the pier—too many people would be looking
for that. She propelled herself forward and down with half a dozen hard, drivi
ng strokes, her eyes straining ahead in the blue-green filtered light.
She might as well reach it. She might as well see if she could claim the ring
before she died. She could carry it as an offering, down to Morian.
Her fear, amazingly, was entirely gone. Or perhaps it was not so amazing after
all. What was the riselka, what did its vision offer if not this certainty, a
sureness to carry her past the old terror of dark waters, to the last portal
of Morian? It was ending now. It should have ended long ago.
She saw nothing, kicked again, forcing herself deeper and further out, towards
where the ring had fallen.
There was a sureness in her, a brilliant clarity, an awareness of how events h
ad shaped themselves towards this moment. A moment when, simply by her dying,
Tigana might be redeemed at last. She knew the story of Onestra and Cazal; eve
ry person in this harbor did. They all knew what disasters had followed upon O
nestra's death.
Brandin had gambled all on this one ceremony, having no other choice in the fa
ce of battle brought to him too soon. But Alberico would take him now; there c
ould be no other result. She knew exactly what would follow upon her death. Ch
aos and shrill denunciation, the perceived judgment of the Triad upon this arr
ogantly self-styled King of the Western Palm. There would be no army in the we
st to oppose the Barbadian. The Peninsula of the Palm would be Alberico's to h
arvest like a vineyard, or grind like grain beneath the millstones of his ambi
tion.
Which was a pity, she supposed, but redressing that particular sorrow would ha
ve to be someone else's task. The soul's quest of another generation. Her own
dream, the task she'd set herself with an adolescent's pride, sitting by a dea
d fire in her father's house long years ago, had been to bring Tigana's name b
ack into the world.
Her only wish, if she were allowed a wish before the dark closed over her and
became everything, was that Brandin would leave, would find a place to go far
from this peninsula, before the end came. And that he might somehow come to kn
ow that his life, wherever he went, was a last gift of her love.
Her own death didn't matter. They killed women who slept with conquerors. They
named them traitors and they killed them in many different ways. Drowning wou
ld do.
She wondered if she would see the riselka here, sea-green creature of the sea,
agent of destiny, guardian of thresholds. She wondered if she would have some
last vision before the end. If Adaon would come for her, the stern and glorio
us god, appearing as he had to Micaela on the beach so long ago. She was not M
icaela though, not bright and fair and innocent in her youth. She didn't think
that she would see the god.
Instead, she saw the ring.
It was to her right and just above, drifting like a promise or an answered pra
yer down through the slow, cold waters so far below the sunlight. She reached
out, in the dreamlike slowness of all motion in the sea, and she claimed it an
d put it on her finger that she might die as a sea-bride with sea-gold upon he
r hand.
She was very far under now. The filtered light had almost disappeared this far
down. She knew her last gathered air would soon be gone as well, the need for
the surface becoming imperative, reflexive. She looked at the ring, Brandin's
ring, his last and only hope. She brought it to her lips, and kissed it, and
then she turned her eyes, her life, her long quest, away from the surface and
the sunlight, and love.
Downward she went, forcing herself as deep as she could. And it was then, just
then, that the visions began to come.
She saw her father in her mind, clearly, holding his chisel and mallet, his sh
oulders and chest covered with a fine powder of marble, walking with the Princ
e in their courtyard, Valentin's arm familiarly thrown about his shoulders, an
d then she saw him as he had been before he rode away, awkward and grim, to wa
r. Then Baerd was in her mind: as a boy, sweet-natured, seemingly always laugh
ing. Then weeping outside her door the night Naddo left them, then wrapped clo
se in her arms in a ruined moonlit world, and lastly in the doorway of the hou
se the night he went away. Her mother next—and Dianora felt as if she were so
mehow swimming back through all the years to her family. For ah1 these images
of her mother were from before the fall, before the madness had come, from a t
ime when her mother's voice had seemed able to gentle the evening air, her tou
ch still soothe all fevers away, all fear of the dark.
It was dark now, and very cold in the sea. She felt the first agitation of wha
t would soon be a desperate need for air. There came to her then, as on a scro
ll unrolling through her mind, vignettes of her life after she'd left home. Th
e village in Certando. Smoke over Avalle seen from the high and distant fields
. The man—she couldn't even remember his name—who had wanted to marry her. O
thers who had bedded her in that small room upstairs. The Queen in Stevanien.
Arduini. Rhamanus on the river galley taking her away. The opening sea before
them. Chiara. Scelto.
Brandin.
And so, at the very end, it was he who was in her mind after all. And over and
above the hard, quick images of a dozen years and more Dianora suddenly heard
again his last words on the pier. The words she had been fighting to hold bac
k from her awareness, had tried not to even hear or understand, for fear of wh
at they might do to her resolve. What he might do.
My love, he'd whispered, come back to me. Stevan is gone. I cannot lose you bo
th or I will die.
She had not wanted to hear that; anything like that. Words were power, words t
ried to change you, to shape bridges of longing that no one could ever really
cross.
Or I will die, he had said.
And she knew, could not even try to deny within herself that it was true. That
he would die. That her false, beneficent vision of Brandin living somewhere e
lse, remembering her tenderly, was simply another lie in the soul. He would do
no such thing. My love, he had called her. She knew, gods how she and her hom
e had cause to know, what love meant to this man. How deep it went in him.
How deep. There was a roaring sound in her ears now, a pressure of water so fa
r below the surface of the sea. Her lungs felt as if they were going to burst.
She moved her head to one side, with difficulty.
There seemed to be something there, beside her in the darkness. A darting figu
re further out to sea. A glimmer, glimpse of a form, of a man or a god she cou
ld not say. But it could not be a man down here. Not so far below the light an
d the waves, and not glowing as this form was.
Another inward vision, she told herself. A last one, then. The figure seemed t
o be swimming slowly away from her, light shining around it like an aureole. S
he was spent now. There was an aching in her, of longing, a yearning for peace
. She wanted to follow that gentle, impossible light. She was ready to rest, t
o be whole and untormented, without desire.
And then she understood, or thought she did. That figure had to be Adaon. It h
ad to be the god coming for her. But he had turned his back. He was moving awa
y, the calm glow receding away towards blackness here in the depths of the sea
.
She did not belong to him. Not yet.
She looked at her hand. The ring upon it was almost invisible, so faint was th
e light. But she could feel it there, and she knew whose ring it was. She knew
.
Far down in the dark of the sea, terribly far below the world where mortal men
and women lived and breathed the air, Dianora turned. She pushed her hands ab
ove her, touched palms together and parted them, cleaving the water upwards, h
urling her body like a spear up through all the layers of the sea, of dark-gre
en death, towards life again and all the unbridged chasms of air and light and
love.
When he saw her break the surface of the sea, Devin wept. Even before he saw t
he flash of gold sparkling on the hand she lifted in weariness, that they all
might see the ring.
Wiping at his streaming eyes, his voice raw from screaming with all the others
on the ship, on all the ships, all through the harbor of Chiara, he then saw
something else.
Brandin of Ygrath, who had named himself Brandin di Chiara, had dropped to his
knees on the pier and had buried his face in his hands. His shoulders were sh
aking helplessly. And Devin understood then how wrong he had been before: that
this was not, after all, a man who was only pleased and happy that a stratage
m had worked.
With agonizing slowness the woman swam to the pier. An eager priest and priest
ess helped her from the sea and supported her and wrapped her shivering form i
n a robe of white and gold. She could scarcely stand. But Devin, still weeping
, saw her lift her head high as she turned to Brandin and offered him the sea-
ring in a trembling hand.
Then he saw the King, the Tyrant, the sorcerer who had ruined them with his bi
tter, annihilating power, gather the woman into his arms, gently, with tendern
ess, but with the unmistakable urgency of a man deprived and hungry for too lo
ng.
Alessan reached up and removed the child from his shoulders, setting it carefu
lly down beside its mother. She smiled at him. Her hair was yellow as her gown
. He smiled back, reflexively, but found himself turning away. From her, from
the man and woman embracing feverishly next to them. He felt physically ill. T
here was a quite substantial level of jubilant chaos erupting all around in th
e harbor. His stomach was churning. He closed his eyes, fighting nausea and di
zziness, the tumultuous overflow.
When he opened his eyes it was to gaze at the Fool—Rhun, they had said his na
me was. It was deeply unsettling to see how, with the King releasing his own f
eelings, clutching the woman in that grip of transparent need, the Fool, the s
urrogate, seemed suddenly empty and hollow. There was a blank, weighted sadnes
s to him, jarring in its discontinuity amid the exultation all around. Rhun se
emed a still, silent point of numbness amid a world of tumult and weeping and
laughter.
Alessan looked at the bent, balding figure with his weirdly deformed face, and
felt a blurred, disorienting kinship to the man. As if the two of them were l
inked here, if only in their inability to know how to react to all of this.
He had to have been shielding himself, Alessan repeated in his mind for the te
nth time, the twentieth. He had to. He looked at Brandin again, and then away,
hurting with confusion and grief.
For how many years in Quileia had he and Baerd spun adolescent plots of making
their way here? Of coming upon the Tyrant and killing him, their cries of Tig
ana's name ringing in the air, hurtling back into the world.
And this morning, now, he'd been scarcely fifteen feet away, unsuspected, unkn
own, with a dagger at his belt and only one row of people between him and the
man who'd tortured and killed his father.
He had to have been shielding himself against a blade.
But the thing was, the simple fact was, that Alessan couldn't know that. He ha
dn't tested it; hadn't tried. He had stood and watched. Observed. Played out h
is own cool plan of shaping events, steering them towards some larger abstract
ion.
His eyes hurt; there was a dull pulsing behind them, as if the sun were too br
ight for him. The woman in yellow had not moved away; she was still looking up
at him with a slantwise glance hard not to understand. He didn't know where t
he child's father was, but it was clear that the woman didn't greatly care jus
t now. It would be interesting, he thought, with that perverse, detached quirk
of his mind that was always there, to see how many children were born in Chia
ra nine months from now.
He smiled at her again, meaninglessly, and made some form of mumbled excuse. T
hen he started back alone through the celebrating, uproarious crowd towards th
e inn where the three of them had been paying for their room by making music t
hese past three days. Music might help right now, he thought. Very often music
was the only thing that helped. His heart was still racing weirdly, as it had
started to do when the woman broke the surface of the water with the ring on
her hand after so long undersea.
So long a time he had actually begun to calculate if there was anything he cou
ld do to make use of the shock and fear that was going to follow upon her deat
h.
And then she had come up, had been there before them in the water and, in the
second before the roaring of the crowd began, Brandin of Ygrath, who had been
rigidly motionless from the moment she dived, had collapsed to his knees as if
struck from behind by a blow that had robbed him of all his strength.
And Alessan had found himself feeling ill and hopelessly confused even as the
screams of triumph and ecstasy began to sweep across the harbor and the ships.

This is fine, he told himself now, forcing his way past a wildly dancing ring
of people. This will fit, it can be made to fit. It is coming together. As I p
lanned. There will be war. They will face each other. In Senzio. As I planned.

His mother was dead. He had been fifteen feet away from Brandin of Ygrath with
a blade in his belt.
It was too bright in the square, and much too loud. Someone grabbed his arm as
he went by and tried to draw him into a whirling circle. He pulled away. A wo
man careened into his arms and kissed him full upon the lips before she diseng
aged. He didn't know her. He didn't know anyone here. He stumbled through the
crowd, pushed and pulled this way and that, trying numbly to steer himself, a
cork in a flood, towards The Trialla, where his room was, and a drink, and mus
ic.
Devin was already at the crowded bar when he finally made it back. Erlein was
nowhere to be seen yet. Probably still on the ship; staying afloat, as far fro
m Brandin as he could. As if the sorcerer had the faintest scintilla of intere
st in pursuing wizards right now.
Devin, mercifully, said nothing at all. Only pushed over a full glass and a fl
agon of wine. Alessan drained the glass and then another very quickly. He had
poured and tasted a third when Devin quickly touched his arm and he realized,
with a sense of almost physical shock, that he'd forgotten his oath. The blue
wine. Third glass.
He pushed the flagon away and buried his head in his hands.
Someone was speaking beside him. Two men arguing.
"You're actually going to do it? You're a goat-begotten fool!" the first one s
narled.
"I'm joining up," the second replied, in the flat accents of Asoli. "After wha
t that woman did for him I figure Brandin's blessed with luck. And someone who
styles himself Brandin di Chiara is a long sight better than that butcher fro
m Barbadior. What are you, friend, afraid of fighting?"
The other man gave a harsh bark of laughter. "You simple-minded dolt," he said
. He flattened his voice in broad mimicry. "After what that woman did for him.
We all know what she did for him, night after night. That woman is the Tyrant
's whore. She spent a dozen years coupling with the man who conquered us all.
Spreading her legs for him for her own gain. And here you are, here all of you
are, making a whore into a Queen over you."
Alessan pushed his head up from his hands. He shifted his feet, pivoting for l
everage. Then, without a word spoken, he hammered a fist with all the strength
of his body and all the tormented confusion of his heart into the speaker's f
ace. He felt bones crack under his blow; the man flew backwards into the bar a
nd halfway over it, scattering glasses and bottles with a splintering crash.
Alessan looked down at his fist. It was covered with blood across the knuckles
, and already beginning to swell. He wondered if he'd broken his hand. He wond
ered if he was going to be thrown out of the bar, or end up in a free-wheeling
brawl for this stupidity.
It didn't happen. The Asolini who had proclaimed his readiness for war clapped
him on the back with a hard, cheerful blow and the owner of The Trialla—thei
r employer, in fact—grinned broadly, completely ignoring the shards of broken
glass along the bar.
"I was hoping someone would shut him up!" he roared over the raucous tumult in
the room. Someone else came over and wrung Ales-san's hand, which hurt amazin
gly. Three men were shouting insistent demands to buy him a drink. Four others
picked up the unconscious man and began carting him unceremoniously away in s
earch of medical aid. Someone spat on the man's shattered face as he was carri
ed by.
Alessan turned away from that, back to the bar. There was a single glass of As
tibar blue wine in front of him. He looked quickly at Devin who said nothing a
t all.
Tigana, he murmured under his breath, as a Cortean sailor behind him bellowed
his praise and ruffled his hair and someone else pushed over to pound his back
, Oh, Tigana, let my memory of you be like a blade in my soul.
He drained the glass. Someone—not Devin—immediately reached to pick it up an
d smash it on the floor. Which started a predictable sequence of other men doi
ng the same with their own drinks. As soon as he decently could he made his wa
y out of the room and went upstairs. He remembered to touch Devin's arms in th
anks as he went. In their room he found Erlein lying on his bed, hands behind
his head, gazing fixedly at the ceiling. The wizard glanced over as Alessan ca
me in, and his eyes quickly narrowed and grew frankly curious.
Alessan said nothing. He fell onto his pallet and closed his eyes which were s
till hurting. The wine, naturally hadn't helped. He couldn't stop thinking abo
ut the woman, what she had done, how she had looked rising like some supernatu
ral creature from the sea. He couldn't force out of his mind the image of Bran
din the Tyrant falling to his knees and burying his face in his hands.
Hiding his eyes, but not before Alessan, fifteen feet away, only that, had see
n the shattering relief and the blaze of love that had shone through like the
white light of a falling star.
His hand hurt terribly, but he flexed it gingerly and didn't think he'd broken
anything. He honestly couldn't have said why he'd felled that man. Everything
he'd said about the woman from Certando was true. All of it was true, yet non
e of it was the real truth. Everything about today was brutally confusing.
Erlein, unexpectedly tactful, cleared his throat in a way that offered a quest
ion.
"Yes?" Alessan said wearily, not opening his eyes.
"This is what you wanted to happen, isn't it?" the wizard asked, unwontedly he
sitant.
With an effort Alessan opened his eyes and looked over. Erlein was propped on
one elbow gazing at him, his expression thoughtful and subdued. "Yes," he said
at length, "this is what I wanted."
Erlein nodded slowly. "It means war, then. In my province."
His head was still throbbing, but less than before. It was quieter up here, th
ough the noise from below still penetrated, a dull, steady background of celeb
ration.
"In Senzio, yes," he said.
He felt a terrible sadness. So many years of planning, and now that they were
here, where were they? His mother was dead. She had cursed him before she died
, but had let him take her hand as the ending came. What did that mean? Could
it be made to mean what he needed it to?
He was on the Island. Had seen Brandin of Ygrath. What would he tell Baerd? Th
e slender dagger at his side felt heavy as a sword. The woman had been so much
more beautiful than he'd expected her to be. Devin had had to give him the bl
ue wine; he couldn't believe that. He'd hurt a hapless, innocent man so brutal
ly just now, had shattered the bones of his face. I must look truly terrible,
he thought, for even Erlein to be so gentle with me now. They were going to wa
r in Senzio. This is what I wanted, he repeated to himself.
"Erlein, I'm sorry," he said, risking it, trying to struggle upwards from this
sorrow.
He braced for a stinging reply, he almost wanted one, but Erlein said nothing
at all at first. And when he spoke it was mildly. "I think it is time," was wh
at he said. "Shall we go down and play? Would that help?"
Would that help? Since when did his people—Erlein, even—need to minister to
him so much?
They went back down the stairs. Devin was waiting for them on the makeshift st
age at the back of the Trialla. Alessan took up his Tregean pipes. His right h
and was hurting and swollen, but it was not going to keep him from making musi
c. He needed music now, very badly. He closed his eyes and began to play. They
fell silent for him in the densely crowded room. Erlein waited, his hands mot
ionless on the harp, and Devin did, leaving him a space in which to reach upwa
rds alone, yearning towards that high note where confusion and pain and love a
nd death and longing could all be left behind him for a very little while.

chapter 18

NORMALLY  WHEN  SHE  WENT  UP  ON  THE  RAMPARTS  OF  HER castle at sunset it
was to look south, watching the play of light and the changing colors of the s
ky above the mountains. Of late though, as springtime turned towards the summe
r they had all been waiting for, Alienor found herself climbing to the norther
n ramparts instead, to pace the guard's walk behind the crenellations or lean
upon the cool rough stone, gazing into the distance, wrapped in her shawl agai
nst the chill that still came when the sun went down.
As if she could actually see as far as Senzio.
The shawl was a new one, brought by the messengers from Quileia that Baerd had
told them would come. The ones who carried the messages that could, if all we
nt right, turn the whole world upside down. Not just the Palm: Barbadior too,
where the Emperor was said to be dying, and Ygrath, and Quileia itself where,
precisely because of what he was doing for them, Marius might not survive.
The Quileian messengers had stopped on their way to Fort Ortiz, as was appropr
iate, to pay their respects to the Lady of Castle Borso and to bring her a gif
t from the new King of Quileia: an indigo-colored shawl, a color almost imposs
ible to find here in the Palm, and one which was, she knew, a mark of nobility
in Quileia, It was evident that Alessan had told this Marius a fair bit about
her involvement with him over the years. Which was fine. Marius of Quileia, i
t seemed, was one of them; in fact, as Baerd had explained it the afternoon af
ter Alessan had ridden into the Braccio Pass and then away west, Marius was th
e key to everything.
Two days after the Quileians passed through, AJienor began a habit of springti
me rides that took her, casually, far enough afield to necessitate one or two
overnight stays at neighboring castles. At which time she relayed a quite spec
ific message to a hah0 dozen equally specific people.
Senzio. Before Midsummer
Not long afterwards, a silk-merchant and then a singer she rather liked came d
own to Castle Borso with word of tremendous troop movements among the Barbadia
ns. The roads were absolutely clogged with mercenaries marching north, they sa
id. She had raised her eyebrows in quizzical mystification, but had allowed he
rself more wine than was customary each of those two nights, and had rewarded
both men later, after her own fashion.
Up on the ramparts at sunset now, she heard a footstep on the stair behind her
. She had been waiting for it.
Without turning, she said, "You are almost too late. The sun is nearly gone."
Which was true; the color of the sky and the thin, underlit clouds in the west
had darkened from pink through crimson and purple most of the way down to the
indigo she wore about her shoulders.
Elena stepped out on the parapet.
"I'm sorry," she said, inappropriately. She was always apologizing, still unea
sy in the castle. She moved to the guard's walk beside Alienor and looked out
over the gathering darkness of the late-spring fields. Her long yellow hair fa
nned over her shoulders, the ends lifting in the breeze.
Ostensibly she was here to serve as a new lady-in-waiting to Alienor. She had
brought her two young children and her few belongings into Borso two mornings
after the Ember Days had ended. It was considered a good idea that she be esta
blished here well before the time that might matter. It appeared, incredibly e
nough, that there could actually come a time when her being here might matter.

Tomaz, the gaunt, aged Khardhu warrior had said that it would be necessary for
one of them to stay here. Tomaz, who was very clearly not from Khardhun, and
just as clearly unwilling to say who he really was. Alienor didn't care about
that. What mattered was that Baerd and Alessan trusted him, and in this matter
Baerd was deferring to the dark, hollow-cheeked man absolutely,
"One of whom, exactly?" Alienor had asked. The four of them had been alone: he
rself, Baerd and Tomaz, and the red-headed young girl who didn't like her, Cat
riana.
Baerd hesitated a long time. "One of the Night Walkers," he said finally.
She had raised her eyebrows at that, the small outward gesture serving to show
all she was prepared to reveal of her inward astonishment.
"Really? Here? They are still about?"
Baerd nodded.
"And that is where you were last night when you went out?"
After a second Baerd nodded again.
The girl Catriana blinked in manifest surprise. She was clever and quite beaut
iful, Alienor thought, but she still had rather a great deal to learn.
"Doing what?" Alienor asked Baerd.
But this time he shook his head. She had expected that. There were limits with
Baerd; she enjoyed trying to push towards them. One night, ten years ago, she
had found exactly where his boundaries of privacy lay, in one dimension at le
ast. Surprisingly perhaps, their friendship had deepened from that time on.
Now, unexpectedly, he grinned. "You could have them all stay here, of course,
not just one."
She had grimaced with a distaste only partly feigned. "One will be sufficient,
thank you. Assuming it is enough for your purposes, whatever those are?" She
said that last to the old man disguised as a Khardhu warrior. His skin colorin
g was really very good but she knew all about Baerd's techniques of disguise.
Over the years he and Ales-san had shown up here in an effective diversity of
appearances.
"I'm not absolutely sure what our purposes are," Tomaz had replied frankly. "B
ut insofar as we need an anchor for what Baerd wants us to at least be able to
try, one of them in this castle should be enough."
"Enough for what?" she'd probed again, not really expecting anything.
"Enough for my magic to reach out and find this place," Tomaz had said bluntly
.
This time it was she who blinked and Catriana who looked unruffled and superio
r. Which was unfair, Alienor decided afterwards; the girl must have known the
old man was a wizard. That was why she hadn't reacted. Alienor had enough of a
sense of humor to find their by-play amusing, and even to feel a little regre
tful when Catriana had gone.
Two days afterwards Elena had come. Baerd had said it would be a woman. He had
asked Alienor to take care of her. She had raised her eyebrows at that as wel
l.
On the northern ramparts she glanced over in the twilight. Elena had come up w
ithout a cloak; her hands were cupping her elbows tightly against her body. Fe
eling unreasonably irritated, Alienor abruptly removed her shawl and draped it
over the other's shoulders.
"You should know better by now," she said sharply. "It gets cold up here when
the sun goes down."
"I'm sorry," Elena said again, quickly motioning to remove the shawl. "But you
'll be chilled now. I'll go down and get something for myself."
"Stay where you are!" Alienor snapped. Elena froze, apprehension in her eyes.
Alienor looked out past her, past the darkening fields and the emerging flicke
rs of light where night candles and fires were being lit in houses and farms b
elow. She looked beyond all these under the first stars of the evening, her ey
es straining north, her imagination winging far beyond her sight to where the
others would all be gathering now, or soon.
"Stay here," she said, more gently. "Stay with me."
Elena's blue eyes widened in the darkness as she looked over. Her expression w
as grave, thoughtful. Unexpectedly, she smiled. And then, even more astonishin
gly, she moved nearer and drew her arm through Alienor's, pulling her close. A
lienor stiffened for a second, then allowed herself to relax against the other
woman. She had asked for companionship. For the first time in more years than
she could remember, she had asked for this. A completely different kind of in
timacy. It felt, of late, as if something rigid and hard was falling away insi
de her. She had waited for this summer, for what it might mean, for so many ye
ars.
What had the young one said, Devin? About being allowed more than the transien
ce of desire, if only one believed it was deserved. No one had ever said such
a thing to her in all the years since Cornaro of Borso had died fighting Barba
dior. In which dark time his young widow, his bride, alone in a highland castl
e with her grief and rage, had been set upon the road towards what she had bec
ome.
He had gone with Alessan, Devin. By now, they would probably be in the north a
s well. Alienor looked out, letting her thoughts stream like birds arrowing aw
ay through darkness, across the miles between, to where all of their fates wou
ld be decided when Midsummer came.
Dark hair and light blown back and mingled by the wind, the two women stood to
gether in that high place for a long time, sharing warmth, sharing the night a
nd the waiting time.
It had long been said, sometimes in mockery, sometimes with a bemusement that
bordered on awe, that as the days heated up in summer, so did the night-time p
assions of Senzio. The hedonistic self-indulgence of that northern province, b
lessed with fertile soil and gentle weather, was a byword in the Palm and even
over the seas. You could get whatever you wanted in Senzio, it was said, prov
ided you were willing to pay for it. And fight someone to keep it, the initiat
ed often added.
Towards the end of spring that year it might have been thought that burgeoning
tensions and the palpable threat of war would have dampened the nocturnal ard
or of the Senzians—and their endless flow of visitors—for wine, for lovemaki
ng in diverse combinations, and for brawling in the taverns and streets.
Someone might indeed have thought such a thing, but not anyone who knew Senzio
. In fact, it actually seemed as if the looming portents of disaster—the Barb
adians massed ominously on the Ferraut border, the ever-increasing numbers of
ships of the Ygrathen flotilla anchored at Farsaro Island off the northwestern
tip of the province—were simply spurs to the wildness of night in Senzio tow
n. There were no curfews here; there hadn't been for hundreds of years. And th
ough emissaries of both invading powers were prominently housed in opposite wi
ngs of what was now called the Governor's Castle, Senzians still boasted that
they were the only free province in the Palm.
A boast that began to ring more hollow with each passing day and sybaritic nig
ht as the entire peninsula braced itself for a conflagration.
In the face of which onrushing intrusion of reality Senzio town merely intensi
fied the already manic pace of its dark hours. Legendary watering-holes like T
he Red Glove or Thetaph were packed with sweating, shouting patrons every nigh
t, to whom they dispensed their harsh, overpriced liquors and a seemingly endl
ess stream of available flesh, male or female, in the warrens of airless rooms
upstairs.
Those innkeepers who had elected, for whatever reasons, not to trade in purcha
sed love had to offer substantially different inducements to their patrons. Fo
r the eponymous owner of Solinghi's, a tavern not far from the castle, good fo
od, decent vintages and ales, and clean rooms in which to sleep were assurance
s of a respectable if not an extravagant living, derived primarily from mercha
nts and traders disinclined to traffic in the carnality of night, or at least
to sleep and eat amid that overripe corruption. Solinghi's also prided itself
on offering, by day or night, the best music to be found in the city at any gi
ven time.
At this particular moment, shortly before the dinner-hour one day late in the
spring, the bar and table patrons of the almost full tavern were enjoying the
music of an unlikely trio: a Senzian harper, a piper from Astibar, and a young
Asolini tenor who—according to a rumor started a couple of days before—was
the singer who had disappeared after performing Sandre d'Astibar's funeral rit
es last fall.
Rumors of every kind were rife in Senzio that spring, but few believed this on
e: such a prodigy was unlikely in the extreme to be singing in a put-together
group like this. But in fact the young tenor had an exceptional voice and he w
as matched by the playing of the other two. Solinghi di Senzio was immensely p
leased with their effect on business over the past week.
The truth was, he would have given them employment and a room upstairs if they
made music like boarhounds in lust. Solinghi had been a friend of the dark-ha
ired man who was now calling himself Adreano d'Astibar for almost ten years. A
friend, and more than that; as it happened, almost half the patrons of the in
n this spring were men who had come to Senzio expressly to meet the three musi
cians here. Solinghi kept his mouth shut, poured wine and beer, supervised his
cooks and serving-girls, and prayed to Eanna of the Lights every night before
he went to sleep that Alessan knew what he was doing.
This particular afternoon the patrons enjoying the young tenor's rousing rendi
tion of a Certandan ballad were rudely snapped out of their bar-pounding rhyth
m when the doors to the street were pushed open, revealing a largish cluster o
f new customers. Nothing of note in that, of course. Or not until the singer c
ut himself off in the middle of a chorus with a shouted greeting, the piper qu
ickly laid down his pipes and leaped off the stage, and the harper lowered his
own instrument and followed, if more slowly.
The enthusiasms of the reunion that ensued would have led to predictably cynic
al conclusions about the nature of the men involved, given the way of such thi
ngs in Senzio, had the new party not included a pair of exceptionally attracti
ve young women, one with short red hair, one with raven-dark. Even the harper,
a dour, unsmiling fellow if ever there was one, was drawn almost against his
will into the circle, to be crushed against the bony breast of a cadaverous lo
oking Khardhu mercenary who towered over the rest of the party.
A moment later another kind of reunion occurred. One with a different resonanc
e that even stilled the excitement of the newly mingled group. Another man ros
e and walked diffidently over to the five people who had just arrived. Those w
ho looked closely could see that his hands were trembling.
"Baerd?" they heard him say.
There followed a moment of silence. Then the man whom he'd addressed said "Nad
do?" in a tone even the most innocent Senzian could interpret. Any lingering d
oubts about that were laid to rest a second later by the way the two men embra
ced each other.
They even wept.
More than one man, eyeing the two women with frank admiration, decided that hi
s chances of a conversation, and who knew what else, might be better than they
'd first appeared if the men were all like that.
Alais had been moving through the days since Tregea in a state of excitement t
hat brought an almost continuous flush to her pale skin and made her more deli
cately beautiful than she knew. What she did know is why she had been allowed
to come.
From the moment the Sea Maid 's landing-boat had silently returned to the ship
in the moonlit harbor of Tregea, bearing her father and Catriana and the two
men they'd gone to meet, Alais had been aware that something more than friends
hip was involved here.
Then the dark-skinned man from Khardhu had looked at her appraisingly, and at
Rovigo with an amused expression on his lined face, and her father, hesitating
for only a moment, had told her who this really was. And then, quietly, but w
ith an exhilarating confidence in her, he'd explained what these people, his n
ew partners, were really doing here, and what he appeared to have been doing i
n secret with them for a great many years.
It appeared that it had not been entirely a coincidence after all that they'd
met three musicians on the road outside their home during the Festival of Vine
s last fall.
Listening intently, trying not to miss a syllable or an implication, Alais mea
sured her own inward response to all of this and was pleased beyond words to d
iscover that she was not afraid. Her father's voice and manner had much to do
with that. And the simple fact that he was trusting her with this.
It was the other man—Baerd, they named him—who said to Rovigo, "If you are t
ruly set on coming with us to Senzio, then we will have to find a place on the
coast to put your daughter ashore."
"Why, exactly?" Alais had said quickly before Rovigo could answer. She could f
eel her color rising as all eyes turned to her. They were down below deck, cro
wded in her father's cabin.
Baerd's eyes were very dark by candlelight. He was a hard-looking, even a dang
erous-seeming man, but his voice when he answered her was not unkind.
"Because I don't believe in subjecting people to unnecessary risks. There is d
anger in what we are about to do. There are also reasons for us to face those
dangers, and your father's assistance and that of his men if he trusts them, i
s important to us. For you to come would be a danger without necessity. Does t
hat make sense?"
She forced herself to be calm. "Only if you judge me a child, incapable of any
contribution." She swallowed. "I am the same age as Catriana and I think I no
w understand what is happening here. What you have been trying to do. I have .
.. I can say that I have the same desire as any of you to be free."
"There are truths in that. I think she should come." It was, remarkably, Catri
ana. "Baerd," she went on, "if this is truly the time that will decide, we hav
e no business refusing people who feel the way we do. No right to decide that
they must huddle in their homes waiting to see if they are still slaves or not
when the summer ends."
Baerd looked at Catriana for a long time but said nothing. He turned to Rovigo
, deferring to him with a gesture. In her father's face Alais could see worry
and love warring with his pride in her. And then, by the light of the candles,
she saw that inner battle end.
"If we get through this alive," Rovigo d'Astibar said to his daughter, his lif
e, his joy in life, "your mother will kill me. You know that, don't you?"
"I'll try to protect you," Alais said gravely, though her heart was racing lik
e a wild thing.
It had been their talk at the railing of the ship, she knew. She knew it absol
utely. The two of them looking at the cliffs under moonlight after the storm.

I don't know what it is, she had said, but I need more.
I know, her father had replied. I know you do. If I could give it, it would be
yours. The world and the stars of Eanna would all be yours.
It was because of that, because he loved her and meant what he had said, that
he was allowing her to come with them to where the world they knew would be pu
t into the balance.
Of that journey to Senzio she remembered two things particularly. Standing at
the rail early one morning with Catriana as they moved north up the coast of A
stibar. One tiny village, and then another and another, the roofs of houses br
ight in the sun, small fishing boats bobbing between the Sea Maid and the shor
e.
"That one is my home," Catriana said suddenly, breaking a silence, speaking so
softly only Alais could hear. "And that boat with the blue sail is actually m
y father's." Her voice was odd, eerily detached from the meaning of the words.

"We have to stop, then!" Alais had murmured urgently. "I'll tell my father! He
'll—"
Catriana laid a hand on her arm.
"Not yet," she'd said. "I can't see him yet. After. After Senzio. Perhaps."
That was one memory. The other, very different, was of rounding the northern t
ip of Farsaro Island early in the morning and seeing the ships of Ygrath and t
he Western Palm anchored in the harbor there. Waiting for war. She had been af
raid then, as the reality of what they were sailing towards was brought home t
o her in that vision, at once brightly colorful and forbidding as grey death.
But she had looked over at Catriana, and her father, and then at the old Duke,
Sandre, who named himself Tomaz now, and she had seen shadings of doubt and a
nxiety in each of them as well. Only Baerd, carefully counting the flotilla, h
ad a different kind of expression on his face.
If she'd been forced to put a name to that look she would have said, hesitantl
y, that it was desire.
The next afternoon they had come to Senzio, and had moored the Maid in the cro
wded harbor and gone ashore, and so had come, at the end of the day, to an inn
all the others seemed to know about. And the five of them had walked through
the doors of that tavern into a flashing of joy bright and sudden as the sun c
ome up from the rim of the sea.
Devin embraced her tightly and then kissed her on the lips, and then Alessan,
after a moment's visible anxiety at her presence and a searching glance at her
father, did exactly the same. There was a lean-faced grey-haired man named Er
lein with them, and then a number of other men in the tavern came up—Naddo wa
s one name, Ducas another, and there was an older blind man with those two who
se name she never caught. He walked with the aid of a magnificent stick. It ha
d the most extraordinary carved eagle's head, with eyes so piercing they seeme
d almost to be a compensation for the loss of his own.
There were others as well, from all over, it seemed. She missed most of their
names. There was a great deal of noise. The innkeeper brought them wine: two b
ottles of Senzio green and a third one of Astibar's blue wine. She had a small
, careful glass of each, watching everyone, trying to sort through the chaotic
babble of all that was said. Alessan and Baerd drew briefly apart for a momen
t, she noticed; when they returned to the table both men looked thoughtful and
somewhat grim.
Then Devin and Alessan and Erlein had to go back and make their music for an h
our while the others ate, and Alais, flushed and terribly excited, inwardly re
lived the feel of the two men's lips upon hers. She found herself smiling shyl
y at everyone, afraid that her face was giving away exactly what she was feeli
ng.
Afterwards they made their way upstairs behind the broad back of the innkeeper
's wife to their rooms. And later, when it was quiet on that upper level Catri
ana led her from the room they were put in, down the hall to the bedroom Devin
and Alessan and Erlein shared.
They were there, and a number of other men—some of the ones she'd just met, a
nd a few who were strangers. Her father entered a moment later with Sandre and
Baerd. She and Catriana were the only women there. She had a moment to feel a
little strange about that, and to think about how far she was from home, befo
re everyone fell silent as Alessan pushed a hand through his hair and began to
speak.
And as he did, Alais, concentrating, gradually came to understand with the oth
ers the dimensions, the truly frightening shape, of what he proposed to do.
At a certain point he stopped and looked at three men one by one. At Duke Sand
re first, then at a round-faced Certandan named Sertino sitting with Ducas, an
d finally, almost challengingly, at Erlein di Senzio.
The three of them were wizards, she understood. It was a hard thing to come to
terms with. Especially Sandre. The exiled Duke of Astibar. Their neighbor in
the distrada all her life.
The man called Erlein was sitting on his bed, his back against the wall, hands
crossed over his breast. He was breathing hard.
"It is clear to me now that you have lost your mind," he said. His voice shook
. "You have lived in your dreams so long you've lost sight of the world. And n
ow you are going to kill people in your madness."
Alais saw Devin open his mouth and then snap it shut without speaking.
"All of this is possible," Alessan said, with an unexpected mildness. "It is p
ossible I am pursuing a path of madness, though I think not. But yes, there ar
e likely to be a great many people killed. We always knew that; the real madne
ss would have been in pretending otherwise. For the moment though, compose you
r spirit and ease your soul. You know as well as I do, nothing is happening."

"Nothing? What do you mean?" It was her father.
Alessan's expression was wry, almost bitter. "Haven't you noticed? You were in
the harbor, you walked through the town. Have you seen any Barbadian troops?
Any Ygrathens, soldiers from the west? Nothing is happening. Alberico of Barba
dior has his entire army massed on the border, and the man refuses to order th
em north!"
"He is afraid," said Sandre flatly in the silence that followed. "He's afraid
of Brandin."
"Perhaps," her father said thoughtfully. "Or else he is just cautious. Too cau
tious."
"What do we do then?" asked the red-bearded Tregean named Ducas.
Alessan shook his head. "I don't know. I honestly don't know. This is one thin
g I never expected. You tell me," he said. "How do we make him cross the borde
r? How do we bring him to war?" He looked at Ducas and then at each of the oth
ers in the room.
No one answered him.
They would think he was a coward. They were fools. They were all fools. Only a
fool went lightly into war. Especially a war such as this, that risked everyt
hing for a gain he hardly cared about. Senzio? The Palm? What did they matter?
Should he throw twenty years away for them?
Every time a messenger arrived from back in Astibar something in him leaped wi
th hope. If the Emperor had died . . .
If the Emperor had died he and his men were gone. Away from this blighted peni
nsula, home to claim an Emperor's Tiara in Barbadior. That was his war, the on
e he wanted to fight. The one that mattered, the only thing that had really ma
ttered all these years. He would sail home with three armies and wrest the Tia
ra from the court favorites hovering there like so many ineffectual fluttering
moths.
And after that he could make war back here, with all the gathered might of Bar
badior. Then let Brandin of Ygrath, of the Western Palm, whatever he chose to
name himself, then let him try to stand before Alberico, Emperor of Barbadior.

Gods, the sweetness of it ...
But no such message came from the east, no such glittering reprieve. And so th
e bald reality was that he found himself camped with his mercenaries here on t
he border between Ferraut and Senzio, preparing to face the armies of Ygrath a
nd the Western Palm, knowing that the eyes of the entire world would be upon t
hem now. If he lost, he lost everything. If he won . . . well that depended on
the cost. If too many of his men died here, what kind of an army would he hav
e to lead home?
And too many men dying was a vivid prospect now. Ever since what had happened
in the harbor of Chiara. Most of the Ygrathen army had indeed sailed home, exa
ctly as anticipated, leaving Brandin crippled and exposed. Which is why Alberi
co had moved, why the three companies were here and he with them. The flow and
shape of events had seemed to be on their side, in the clearest possible way.

Then the Certandan woman had fished a ring from the water for Brandin.
She haunted his dreams, that never-seen woman. Three times now she'd surfaced
like a nightmare in his life. Back when Brandin had first claimed her for his
saishan she had nearly drawn him into an insane war. Siferval had wanted to fi
ght, Alberico remembered. The Third Company captain had proposed storming acro
ss the border into Lower Corte and sacking Stevanien itself.
Gods. Alberico shuddered even now, long years after, at the thought of such a
war far to the west against the Ygrathens in all their power. He had swallowed
his bile and absorbed all the mocking gibes Brandin sent east. Even then, lon
g ago, he had preserved his discipline, kept his eyes on the real prize back h
ome.
But he might have had the Peninsula of the Palm without effort this spring, a
pure gift fallen from the sky, if that same Dianora di Certando had not saved
the Ygrathen's life two months ago. It had been there for him, gently floating
down: with Brandin assassinated the Ygrathens would have all sailed home and
the western provinces would have lain open before him like so much ripe fruit.

Quileia's crippled King would have hobbled across the mountains to abase himse
lf before Alberico, begging for the trade he needed. No elaborate letters then
about fearing the mighty power of Ygrath. It would have all been so easy, so
... elegant.
But it was not so, because of the woman. The woman from one of his own provinc
es. The irony was coruscating, it was like acid in his soul. Certando was his
and Dianora di Certando was the only reason Brandin was alive.
And now—her third time in his life—she was the only reason there was an army
from the west, a flotilla anchored in the Bay of Farsaro, waiting for Alberic
o to make the slightest move.
"They are fewer than us," his spies reported daily. "And not as well armed."
Fewer, the three captains echoed each other in mindless litany. Not as well ar
med, they gibbered. We must move, they chorused, their imbecilic faces looming
in his dreams, set close together, hanging like lurid moons too near the eart
h.
Anghiar, his emissary in the Governor's Castle at Senzio, sent word that Casal
ia still favored them; that the Governor realized that Brandin was not as stro
ng as they. That he had been persuaded to see the virtue of tilting even furth
er towards the Barbadior. The emissary from the Western Palm, one of the few Y
grathens who had decided to stay with Brandin, was having a more difficult tim
e each passing day gaining audience with the Governor, but Anghiar dined with
plump, sybaritic Casalia almost every night.
So now even Anghiar, who had grown lazy and self-indulgent, morally corrupt as
any Senzian during his years there, was saying the same thing as all the othe
rs: Senzio is a vineyard ripe for harvesting. Come!
Ripe for harvesting? Didn't they understand? Didn't any of them realize that t
here was sorcery to reckon with?
He knew how strong Brandin was; he had probed and backed quickly away from the
Ygrathen's power in the year they had both come here, and that had been when
he himself was in his prime. Not hollow and weakened, with a bad foot and a dr
ooping eye after almost being killed in that cursed Sandreni lodge last year.
He was not the same anymore; he knew it, if none of the others did. If he went
to war it had to be a decision made in the light of that. His military edge h
ad to be enough to offset the Ygrathen's sorcery. He needed to be certain. Sur
ely any man not a fool could see that that had nothing to do with cowardice! O
nly with a careful measuring of gains and losses, risks and opportunities.
In his dreams in his tent on the border he thrust the vacuous moon faces of hi
s captains back up into the sky, and under five moons, not two, he slowly dism
embered and defiled the staked-out body of the woman from Certando.
Then the mornings would come. Digesting messages like rancid food, he would be
gin to wrestle again, endlessly, with the other thing that was nagging him thi
s season like an infected wound.
Something felt wrong. Entirely wrong. There was an aspect about this whole cha
in of events—from the autumn onwards—that jarred within him like a jangling,
dissonant chord.
Here on the border with his army all around him he was supposed to feel as if
he were calling the measure of the dance. Forcing Brandin and the entire Palm
to respond to his tune. Seizing control again after a winter of being impacted
upon in all those trivial, disconcerting, cumulative ways. Shaping events so
that Quileia would have no choice but to seek him out, so that back home in th
e Empire they could not mistake his power, the vigor of his will, the glory of
his conquests.
That was how he was supposed to feel. How he had indeed briefly felt the morni
ng he'd heard that Brandin had abdicated in Ygrath. When he'd ordered his thre
e armies north to the border of Senzio.
But something had changed since that day and it was more than just the presenc
e of opposition now waiting in the Bay of Farsaro. There was something else, s
omething so vague and undefined he couldn't even talk about it—even if he'd h
ad anyone to talk to— couldn't even pin it down, but it was there, nagging at
him like an old wound in rain.
Alberico of Barbadior had not got to where he was, achieved this power base fr
om which a thrust for the Tiara was imminent, without subtlety and thoughtfuln
ess, without learning to trust his instincts.
And his instincts told him, here on the border, with his captains and his spie
s and his emissary in Senzio literally begging him to march, that something wa
s wrong.
That he was not calling the tune. Someone else was. Somehow, someone else was
guiding the dangerous steps of this dance. He had truly no idea who it could b
e, but the feeling was there each morning when he woke and it would not be sha
ken off. Neither would it come clear for him under the spring sun, in that bor
der meadow bright with the banners of Barbadior, with irises and asphodels, an
d fragrant with the scent of the surrounding pines.
So he waited, praying to his gods for word of a death back home, agonizingly a
ware that the world might soon be laughing at him if he drew back, knowing, as
spies kept hastening south in relays, that Brandin was getting stronger in Fa
rsaro every day, but held there on the border by his craftiness, his instinct
for survival, by that ache of doubt. Waiting for something to come clear.
Refusing, as the days slipped past, to dance to what might be someone else's t
une, however seductively the hidden pipes might play.
She was numbingly afraid. This was worse, infinitely worse than the bridge in
Tregea. There she had embraced and accepted danger because there was more than
a hope of surviving the leap. It had been only water down below, however frig
id it might be, and there had been friends waiting in the darkness around the
bend to claim her from the river and chafe her back to life.
Tonight was different. Catriana realized with dismay that her hands were shaki
ng. She stopped in the shadows of a lane to try to steady herself.
She reached up nervously to adjust her hair under the dark hood, fingering the
jeweled black comb she'd set in it. On the ship coming here Alais, who had sa
id she was used to doing so for her sisters, had evened and shaped her origina
l swift cropping on the floor of the shop in Tregea. Catriana knew her appeara
nce was perfectly acceptable now—more than that, actually, if the reactions o
f men in Senzio these past days meant anything.
And they had to mean something. For that was what had brought her out here in
the darkness alone, pressed against a rough stone wall in a lane, waiting now
for a noisy swarm of revelers to pass by in the street before her. This was a
better part of town, so near the castle, but there was no truly safe quarter o
f Senzio for a woman alone in the streets at night.
She wasn't out here for safety though, which is why none of the others knew wh
ere she was. They would never have let her come. Nor would she, being honest w
ith herself, have knowingly let any of them undertake anything like this.
This was death. She was under no illusions.
All afternoon, walking through the market with Devin and Rovigo and Alais, she
had been shaping this plan and remembering her mother. That single candle alw
ays lit at sunset on the first of the Ember Days. Devin's father had done the
same thing, she remembered him saying. Pride, he'd thought it was: withholding
something from the Triad because of what they had allowed to happen. Her moth
er wasn't a proud woman, but neither had she permitted herself to forget.
Tonight Catriana saw herself as being like one of her mother's forbidden candl
es on those Ember Nights while all the rest of the world lay shrouded in darkn
ess. She was a small flame, exactly like those candles; one that would not las
t the night, but one that, if the Triad had any love at all for her, might sha
pe a conflagration before she went out.
The drunken revelers finally staggered by, heading in the direction of the har
bor taverns. She waited another moment and then, muffled in her hood, went qui
ckly into the street, keeping to the side of it and started the other way. Tow
ard the castle.
It would be much better, she thought, if she could somehow make her hands be s
till and slow her racing heart. She should have had a glass of wine back at So
linghi's before slipping away, using the outside back stairs so that none of t
he others would see her. She'd sent Alais down to dinner alone, pleading a wom
an's illness, promising to follow soon if she could.
She had lied so easily, had even managed a reassuring smile. Then Alais was go
ne and she was alone, realizing in that precise instant, as the room door gent
ly closed, that she would never see any of the others again.
In the street she shut her eyes, feeling suddenly unsteady; she put her hand o
n a shop-front for support, drawing deep breaths of the night air. There were
tainflowers not far away, and the unmistakable fragrance of sejoia trees. She
was near to the castle gardens then. She bit her lips, to force color into the
m. Overhead the stars were bright and close. Vidomni was already risen in the
east, with blue Ilarion to follow soon. She heard a sudden peal of laughter fr
om the next street over. A woman's laughter followed by shouting. The voice of
a man. More laughter.
They were going the other way. As she looked up a star fell in the sky. Follow
ing its track to her left she saw the garden wall of the castle. The entrance
would be further around that way. Entrances and endings, faced alone. But she
had been a solitary child, and then solitary as a woman, drawn into an orbit o
f her own that took her away from others, even those who would be her friends.
Devin and Alais only the latest of those who had tried. There had been others
back home in the village before she left. She knew her mother had grieved for
her proud solitude.
Pride. Again.
Her father had fled Tigana before the battles at the river.
There it was. There it was.
Carefully she drew back her hood. With real gratitude she discovered that her
hands were steady now. She checked her earrings, the silver band about her thr
oat, the jeweled ornament in her hair. Then she drew onto her hand the red glo
ve she'd bought in the market that afternoon and she walked across the street
and around the corner of the garden wall into the blaze of light at the entran
ce to the Governor's Castle of Senzio.
There were four guards, two outside the locked gates, two just within. She all
owed her hooded cloak fall open, to let them see the black gown she wore benea
th.
The two guards outside the gates glanced at each other and visibly relaxed, re
moving their hands from their swords. The other two moved nearer, the better t
o see by torchlight.
She stopped in front of the first pair. She smiled. "Would you be kind enough,
" she said, "to let Anghiar of Barbadior know that his red vixen has come?" An
d she held up her left hand, sheathed in the bright red glove.
She had actually been amused at first by Devin's reaction and Rovigo's in the
marketplace. Casalia, the plump, unhealthy looking Governor had ridden through
, side by side with the emissary from Barbadior. They had been laughing togeth
er. Brandin's emissary from the Western Palm had been several paces behind, am
ong a cluster of lesser Senzians. The image and the message were as clear as t
hey could be made.
Alais and Catriana had been standing at a silk-merchant's stall. They had turn
ed to see the Governor go by.
He had not gone by. Instead, Anghiar of Barbadior laid a quick restraining han
d on Casalia's braceleted wrist and they stopped their prancing horses directl
y in front of the two women. Thinking back on it, Catriana realized that she a
nd Alais must have made a striking pair. Anghiar, blond and beefy, with an upt
urned moustache and hair as long as her own was now, evidently thought so.
"A mink and a red vixen!" he said, in a voice pitched for Casalia's ear. The p
lump Governor laughed, too quickly, a little too loudly. Anghiar's blue eyes s
tripped the women to their flesh under the bright sun. Alais looked away, but
not down. Catriana met the Barbadian's gaze as steadily as she could. She woul
d not turn away from these men. His smile only deepened. "A red vixen, truly,"
he repeated, but this time to her, and not to Casalia.
The Governor laughed anyhow. They moved on, their party following, including B
randin's emissary, looking grimly unhappy for all the beauty of the morning.
Catriana had become aware of Devin at her shoulder and Rovigo beside his daugh
ter. She looked at them and registered the clenched fury in their eyes. It was
then that she'd felt amusement, however briefly.
"That," she said lightly, "is exactly how Baerd looked before he almost had us
both killed in Tregea. I don't think I'm prepared to repeat the experience. I
have no hair left to cut."
It was Alais, cleverer by far than Catriana had realized at first, who laughed
, carrying them past the moment. The four of them walked on.
"I would have killed him," Devin said quietly to her as they paused by a leath
er goods booth.
"Of course you would have," she said easily. Then realizing how that probably
sounded, and that he was quite serious in what he'd said, she squeezed his arm
. Not something she would have done six months before. She was changing, they
all were.
But just about then, amusement and anger both fading, Catriana began to think
about something. It seemed to her that the brightness of the day slid abruptly
into shadow for a moment though there were no clouds in the sky at all.
She realized afterwards that she had decided to do it almost as soon as the id
ea took shape in her mind.
Before the morning market had closed she had managed to be alone long enough t
o purchase what she needed. Earrings, gown, black comb. Red glove.
And it was while doing these things that she'd begun to think about her mother
and to remember the bridge in Tregea. Not surprisingly: the mind worked in pa
tterns like that. Such patterns were why she was doing this, why she'd even be
en able to think of it. When night fell she would have to come away by herself
, telling none of them. A lie of some sort for Alais. No farewells; they would
stop her, just as she would have stopped any of them.
But something had to be done, they all knew it. A move had to be made, and tha
t morning in the market Catriana had thought she'd discovered what that move m
ight be.
She'd spent the first part of this solitary walk through darkness wishing she
were braver though, that her hands would not tremble as they were. But they'd
stopped shaking after all when she reached the garden wall and saw a star fall
in the blue-black velvet sky.
"We'll have to search you, you understand," said one of the two guards outside
the gates, a crooked smile on his face.
"Of course," she murmured, stepping nearer. "There are so few benefits to stan
ding watch here, aren't there?" The other one laughed, and drew her forward, n
ot ungently, into the light of the torches and then a little past them, to the
more private shadows at the side of the square. She heard a brief, low-pitche
d altercation between the two men on the other side of the gate, ending in a c
oncise six-word order. One of them, manifestly outranked, reluctantly began he
ading inward through the courtyard to find Anghiar of Barbadior and tell him h
is dreams had just come true, or some such thing. The other hastily unlocked t
he gates with a key on a ring at his belt and came out to join the others.
They took some with her, but were not unkind, nor did they presume too much in
the end. If she was going to the Barbadian and found favor there, they could
be at risk in offending her. She had counted on something like that. She manag
ed to laugh softly once or twice, but not so much as to encourage them. She wa
s thinking of patterns still, remembering the very first evening she'd come to
Alessan and Baerd. The night porter at the inn groping for her as she went by
, leering, sure of why she was there.
I will not sleep with you, she'd said when they opened to her knock. I have ne
ver slept with any man. So much irony in her life, looking back from these tan
gled shadows, the guards' hands moving over her. What mortal knew the way thei
r fate line would run? Inevitably perhaps, she thought about Devin in the hidd
en closet of the Sandreni Palace. Which had worked our rather differently in a
lmost every way than she had expected it to. Not that she'd been thinking of f
utures or fates that day. Not then.
And now? What should she be thinking now, as the patterns began to unfold agai
n? The images, she told herself, cloaked in shadow with three guards: hold har
d to the images. Entrances and endings, a candle starting a blaze.
By the time they were done with her the fourth guard was back with two Barbadi
ans. They were smiling too. But they treated her with some courtesy as they le
d her through the open gates and across the central courtyard. Light spilled e
rratically downward from interior windows above. Before they passed inside she
looked up at the stars. Eanna's lights. Every one of them with a name.
They went into the castle through a pair of massive doors guarded by four more
men, then up two long flights of marble stairs and along a bright corridor on
the highest level. At the end of this last hallway a door was partly open. Be
yond it, as they approached, Catriana caught a glimpse of a room elaborately f
urnished in dark, rich colors.
In the doorway itself stood Anghiar of Barbadior, in a blue robe to match his
eyes, holding a glass of green wine and devouring her with his gaze for the se
cond time that day.
She smiled, and let him take her red-gloved fingers in his own manicured hand.
He led her into the room. He closed and locked the door. They were alone. The
re were candles burning everywhere.
"Red vixen," he said, "how do you like to play?"
Devin had been edgy all week, uneasy in his own skin; he knew they all felt th
e same way. The combination of building tension and enforced idleness, coupled
with the awareness—one had only to look at Alessan's face sometimes—of how
close they were to a culmination, created a pervasive, dangerous irritability
among them all.
In the face of such a mood Alais had been extraordinary, a blessing of grace t
hese past few days. Rovigo's daughter had seemed to grow wiser and gentler and
yet more at ease among them with each passing day, as if sensing a need, a re
ason for her to be here, and so moving to fill that need. Observant, unceasing
ly cheerful, effortlessly conversational, with questions and bright responses
and a declared passion for long anecdotes from all of them, she had, almost si
ngle-handedly, prevented three or four mealtimes from degenerating into sullen
grimness or fractious rancor. Blind Rinaldo the Healer seemed almost in love
with her, so much did he seem to flourish when she was by his side. He wasn't
the only one of them, either, Devin thought, almost grateful that the tensions
of the time were preventing him from addressing his own inward feelings.
In the hothouse atmosphere of Senzio Alais's delicate, pale beauty and diffide
nt grace singled her out like some flower transplanted here from a garden in a
cooler, milder world. Which was, of course, exactly true. An observer himself
, Devin would catch Rovigo gazing at his daughter as she drew one or another o
f their new companions into conversation, and the look in the man's eyes spoke
volumes.
Now, at the end of dinner, having spent the last half-hour turning their marke
t expedition of the morning and afternoon into a veritable sea-voyage of disco
very, Alais excused herself briefly and went back upstairs. Her departure was
followed by an abrupt return of grimness to the table, an inexorable reversion
to the single dominating preoccupation of their lives. Even Rovigo was not im
mune: he leaned towards Alessan and asked a sharp, low-voiced question about t
he latest foray outside the city walls.
Alessan and Baerd, with Ducas and Arkin and Naddo, had been scouting the distr
ada, searching out likely battlefields, and so the best place for them to posi
tion themselves when the time came for their own last roll of dice. Devin didn
't much like thinking about that. It had to do with magic, and magic always bo
thered him. Besides which, there had to be a battle for anything to happen, an
d AJberico of Barbadior was hunkered down in his meadow on the border and show
ing no signs of moving at all. It was enough to drive men mad.
They had begun spending more time apart from each other in the days and evenin
gs, partly for reasons of caution, but undeniably because too much proximity i
n this mood was good for none of them. Baerd and Ducas were in one of the harb
or taverns tonight, braving the blandishments of the flesh-merchants to keep i
n touch with the Tregean's men and Rovigo's sailors, and a number of the other
s who had made their way north in response to a long-awaited summons.
They also had a rumor to spread: about Rinaldo di Senzio, the Governor's exile
d uncle, said to be somewhere in the city stirring up revolution against Casal
ia and the Tyrants. Devin had briefly wondered about the wisdom of that, but A
lessan had explained, even before Devin could ask: Rinaldo was greatly changed
in eighteen years; few people even knew he had been blinded. He had been a mu
ch-loved man: for Casalia to have released such a word would have been dangero
us back then. They had gouged Rinaldo's eyes to neutralize him, and then kept
it very quiet
The old man, huddled quietly now in a corner of Solinghi's, was unlikely in th
e extreme to be recognized, and the only thing they could really do these days
was contribute as much as they could to raising tensions in the city. If the
Governor could be made more anxious, the emissaries a little more uneasy . . .

Rinaldo himself said little, though it was he himself who had first suggested
starting the rumor. He seemed to be coiling or gathering himself; with a war t
o come the demands on a Healer would be severe, and Rinaldo was not young anym
ore. When he did speak it was mostly with Sandre. The two old men, enemies fro
m rival provinces in the time before the Tyrants, now eased and distracted eac
h other with whispered recollections from bygone years, stories of men and wom
en who had almost all crossed to Morian long ago.
Erlein di Senzio was seldom with them the past few days. He played his music w
ith Devin and Alessan but tended to eat and drink alone, sometimes in Solinghi
's, more often elsewhere. A few of his fellow Senzians had recognized the trou
badour over the course of their time here, though Erlein seemed no more effusi
ve with them than he was with any of their own party. Devin had seen him walki
ng one morning with a woman who looked so much like him he was sure she was hi
s sister. He had thought of walking over to be introduced, but hadn't felt up
to enduring Erlein's abrasiveness. One might have naively thought that as even
ts hung fire here, poised on the edge of a climax, the wizard would lay down h
is own grudges finally. It was not so.
He wasn't worried about Erlein's absences because Alessan wasn't. For the man
to betray them in any way was certain death for himself. Erlein might be enrag
ed and bitter and sullen, but he wasn't, by any stretch, a fool.
He had gone elsewhere to dine this evening as well, though he would have to be
back in Solinghi's soon; they were due to play in a few minutes and for their
music Erlein was never late. The music was their only sanctuary of harmony th
ese last few days, but Devin knew that only really applied to the three of the
m. What some of the others scattered about the city were doing for release he
couldn't imagine. Or, yes he could. This was Senzio.
"Something's wrong!" Blind Rinaldo said abruptly beside him, tilting his head
as if sniffing the air. Alessan stopped sketching the distrada terrain on the
tablecloth and looked up quickly. So did Rovigo. Sandre had already half-risen
from his chair.
Alais hurried up to the table. Even before she spoke Devin felt a finger of dr
ead touch him.
"Catriana's gone!" she said, fighting to keep her voice low. Her eyes flicked
from her father to Devin, then rested on Alessan.
"What? How?" Rovigo said sharply. "We would have had to see her when she came
down, surely?"
"The back stairs outside," Alessan said. His hands, Devin, noticed, had sudden
ly flattened on the tabletop. The Prince stared at Alais. "What else?"
The girl's face was white. "She changed her clothes. I don't understand why. S
he bought a black silk gown and some jewelry in the market this afternoon. I w
as going to ask her about it but I ... I didn't want to presume. She's so hard
to ask questions of. But they're gone. All the things she bought."
"A silk gown?" Alessan said incredulously, his voice rising. "What in Morian's
name . . . ?"
But Devin already knew. He knew absolutely.
Alessan hadn't been with them that morning, neither had Sandre. They had no wa
y of understanding. A bone-deep fear dried his mouth and began hammering at hi
s heart. He stood up, tipping over his chair, spilling his wine.
"Oh, Catriana," he said. "Catriana, no!" Stupidly, fatuously, as if she were i
n the room, and could still be stopped, still be kept among them, dissuaded fr
om going out into the dark alone with her silk and jewels, with her unfathomab
le courage and her pride.
"What? Devin, tell me, what is it?" Sandre, voice like a knife. Alessan said n
othing. Only turned, the grey eyes bracing for pain.
"She's gone to the castle," Devin said flatly. "She's gone to kill Anghiar of
Barbadior. She thinks that will start the war."
Even as he spoke he was moving, rational thought quite gone, something deeper
than that, infinitely deeper, driving him, though if she had reached the castl
e already there was no hope, no hope at all.
He was flying when he reached the door. Even so, Alessan was right beside him,
with Rovigo only a step behind. Devin knocked someone down as they burst into
the darkness. He didn't look back.
Eanna, show grace, he prayed silently, over and over as they raced toward the
risen moons. Goddess of Light, let it not be like this. Not like this.
He said nothing though. He sped toward the castle in the dark, fear in his hea
rt like a living thing, bringing the terrible knowledge of death.
Devin knew how fast he could run, had prided himself on his speed all his life
. But moving as if possessed, scarcely touching the ground, Alessan was with h
im when they reached the Governor's Castle. They careened around a corner side
by side and came to the garden wall and there they stopped, looking upward pa
st the branches of a huge, spreading sejoia tree. They could hear Rovigo come
up behind them, and someone else further back. They did not turn to see. They
were both looking at the same thing.
There was a figure silhouetted against torchlight in one of the highest window
s. A figure they knew. Wearing a long dark gown.
Devin dropped to his knees in the moonlit lane. He thought about climbing the
wall, about screaming her name aloud. The sweet scent of tainflowers surrounde
d him. He looked at Alessan's face, and then quickly away from what he saw the
re.
How did she like to play?
Mostly, she didn't, and especially not like this. She had not been the playing
kind. She had liked swimming, and walks along the beach in the mornings, most
ly alone. Other walks inland into the woods, picking mushrooms or mahgoti leav
es for tea. She had liked music always, and the more since meeting Alessan. An
d yes, some six or seven years ago she had begun to have her own intermittent
dreams of finding love and passion somewhere in the world. Not often though, a
nd the man seldom had a face in those dreams.
There was a man's face with her now though, and this was not a dream. Nor was
it play. It was death. Entrances and endings. A candle shaping fire before it
went out.
She was lying on his bed, naked to his sight and touch save for the jewelry sh
ining at wrist and throat and ears and in her hair. Light blazed from all corn
ers of the room. It seemed that Anghiar liked to watch his women respond to wh
at he did. Come on top of me, he'd murmured in her ear. Later, she had replied
. He had laughed, a husky sound deep in his throat, and had moved to be above
her, naked as well, save for his ruffled white shirt which hung open showing t
he delicate blond hairs on his chest.
He was a skillful lover, a deeply experienced one. It was what let her kill hi
m, in the end.
He lowered his head to her breasts before entering her. He took one nipple in
his mouth, surprisingly gently, and began to run his tongue in circles over it
.
Catriana closed her eyes for a moment. She made a sound, one she thought was r
ight. She stretched her hands catlike above her head, moving her body sinuousl
y under the pressure of his mouth and hands. She touched the black comb in her
hair. Red vixen. She moaned again. His hands were on her thighs, moving upwar
d and between, his mouth was still at her breast. She slid the comb free, pres
sed the catch so the blade sprang open. And then, moving without haste, as if
she had all the time in the world, as if this single moment were the gathered
sum of all the moments of her life, she brought her weapon down and plunged it
into his throat.
Which meant that his life was over.
You could buy anything you wanted in Senzio's weapon market. Anything at all.
Including a woman's ornament with a hidden blade. And poison on the blade. An
ornament for the hair, in black, with shining jewels, one of which released th
e spring that freed the blade. An exquisite, deadly thing.
Grafted in Ygrath, of course. For that was central to her plan tonight.
Anghiar's head snapped back in shock. His mouth twisted in an involuntary snar
l as his eyes bulged wide in staring agony. There was blood pumping from his t
hroat, soaking into the sheets and the pillows, covering her.
He screamed, a terrible sound. He rolled off her, off the bed, onto the carpet
ed floor, clutching desperately at his throat. He screamed again. There was so
much blood pulsing from him. He tried to stop it, pressing his hands to the w
ound. It didn't matter. It wasn't the wound that would kill him. She watched h
im, heard the screaming stop, followed by a wet, bubbling sound. Anghiar of Ba
rbadior toppled slowly over on one side, mouth still open, blood leaking from
his throat onto the carpet. And then his blue eyes clouded and closed.
Catriana looked down at her hands. They were steady as stone. And so was the b
eat of her heart. In a moment that was all the moments in her life. Entrances
and endings.
There was a furious pounding on the locked door. Frantic shouting, a panic-str
icken volley of curses.
She was not yet done. They could not be allowed to take her. She knew what sor
cery could do to the mind. If they had her alive they had all of her friends.
They would know everything. She was under no illusions, had known there was a
final step from the time she formed this plan.
They were battering against the door now. It was large and heavy, would hold a
moment or two. She rose up and put on the gown again. She did not want to be
naked now, she couldn't have really said why. Bending over the bed she took th
e Ygrathen weapon, that glittering agency of death, and, careful of the treate
d blade, laid it beside Anghiar to be quickly found. It was necessary that it
be found.
There was a sharp splintering sound from the door, more shouting, a tumult of
noise in the corridor. She thought about setting fire to the room—candle to b
laze, it appealed to her—but no, they had to find Anghiar's body and exactly
what had killed him. She opened the casement window and stepped up on the ledg
e. The window was elegantly designed, easily tall enough for her to stand upri
ght before it. She looked outward and down for a moment. The room was over the
garden, far above it. More than high enough. The scent of the sejoia trees ca
me drifting up, and the heavy sweetness of tainflowers, and there were other n
ight flowers whose names she did not know. Both moons had risen now, Vidomni a
nd Ilarion watching her. She looked at them for a moment but it was to Morian
she prayed, for it was toward Morian she was crossing, through the last portal
of all.
She thought of her mother. Of Alessan. Of his dream that had become hers, and
for which she was now to die in a land not her own. Briefly she thought of her
father, knowing how much this all had to do with making redress, with the way
each generation seemed to put its mark upon the next, one way or another. Let
it be enough, she prayed then, aiming the thought like an arrow of the mind t
oward Morian in her Halls.
The door burst inward with a grinding crash. Half a dozen men stumbled into th
e room. It was time. Catriana turned back from the stars and the two moons and
the garden. She looked down at the men from the window-ledge. There was a sin
ging in her heart, a crescendo of hope and pride.
"Death to Barbadior's servants!" she screamed at the top of her voice. "Freedo
m for Senziol" she cried, and then: "Long live King Brandin of the Palm!"
One man, quicker than the others, reacted, springing across the room. He was n
ot quite quick enough, not as fast as she. She had already turned, the acid of
those last, necessary words eating in her brain. She saw the moons again, Ean
na's stars, the wide, waiting darkness between them and beyond.
She leaped. Felt the night wind in her face and in her hair, saw the dark grou
nd of the garden begin to hurtle up toward her, heard voices for an instant, a
nd then none at all, only the loud, rushing wind. She was alone, falling. She
had always been alone it seemed. Endings. A candle. Memories. A dream, a praye
r of flames, that they might come. Then a last doorway, an unexpectedly gentle
darkness seemed to open wide before her in the air. She closed her eyes just
before she went through.

chapter 19

AWARM NIGHT, THE FRAGRANCE OF FLOWERS. MOONLIGHT on the trees, on the pale sto
nes of the garden wall, on the woman standing in the high window.
Devin hears a sound to his left and quickly turns. Rovigo running up, to stop,
rigid with shock as his gaze follows Alessan's upward. Behind him now comes S
andre with Alais.
"Help me!" the Duke orders harshly, dropping to the cobblestones beside Devin.
His expression is wild, distraught, he has a knife in his hand.
"What?" Devin gasps, uncomprehending. "What do you . . . ?"
"My fingers! Now! Cut them! I need the power!" And Sandre d'Astibar slaps the
hilt of the knife hard into Devin's palm and curls his own left hand around a
loose slab of stone in the street. Only his third and fourth fingers are exten
ded. The wizard's fingers, of binding to the Palm.
"Sandre . . ." Devin begins, stammering.
"No words! Cut me, Devin!"
Devin does as he is told. Wincing, gritting his teeth against pain against gri
ef, he poises the sharp slim blade and brings it down on Sandre's exposed fing
ers, cleaving through. He hears someone cry out. Alais, not the Duke.
But in the moment the knife cuts clean through flesh to grind against stone th
ere is a swift and dazzling flash. Sandre's darkened face is illuminated by a
corona of white light that flares like a star about his head and dies away, le
aving them blinded for a moment in the after-image of its glow.
Alais is on the Duke's other side, kneeling to quickly wrap a square of cloth
about his bleeding hand. Sandre lifts that hand, with an effort, silent in the
face of pain. Without a word spoken, Alais helps him, her fingers supporting
his arm.
From high above they hear a sharp, distant crash, the sound of men shouting. S
ilhouetted in the tall window, Catriana becomes suddenly taut. She screams som
ething. They are too far away to make out the words. Too terribly far. They se
e her turn though, to the darkness, to the night.
"Oh, my dear, no. Not this!" Alessan's voice is a ragged whisper scoured up fr
om his heart.
Too late. Far, far too late.
On his knees in the dusty road, Devin sees her fall.
Not wheeling or tumbling to death, but graceful as she has always been, a dive
r cleaving the night downward. Sandre thrusts forward his maimed wizard's hand
, straining upward. He speaks rapid words Devin cannot understand. There is a
sudden weirdly distorting blur in the night, a shimmer as of unnatural heat in
the air. Sandre's hand is aimed straight at the falling woman. Devin's heart
stops for a moment, seizing at this wild, impossible hope.
Then it starts beating again, heavy as age, as death. Whatever Sandre has trie
d, it is not enough. He is too far, it is too hard a spell, he is too new to t
his power. Any of these, all, none. Catriana falls. Unstayed, unchecked, beaut
iful as a moonlit fantasy of a woman who can fly. Down to a broken, crumpled e
nding behind the garden wall.
Alais bursts into desperate sobs. Sandre covers his eyes with his good hand, h
is body rocking back and forth. Devin can hardly see for the tears in his eyes
. High above them, in the window where she had stood, the blurred forms of men
appear, looking downward into the darkness of the garden.
"We have to move away!" Rovigo croaks, the words scarcely intelligible. "They
will be searching."
It is true. Devin knows it is. And if there is any gift, anything at all they
can offer back to Catriana now, to where she might be watching with Morian, it
is that her dying should not have been meaningless or in vain.
Devin forces himself up from his knees, he helps Sandre to rise. Then he turns
to Alessan. Who has not moved, nor taken his eyes from the high window where
there are still men standing and gesturing. Devin remembers the Prince the aft
ernoon his mother died. This is the same. This is worse. He wipes at his eyes
with the backs of his hands. Turns to Rovigo: "We are too many to stay togethe
r. You and Sandre take Alais. Be very careful. They may recognize her—she was
with Catriana when the Governor saw them. We'll go another way and meet you i
n our rooms."
Then he takes Alessan by the arm, and turns him—the Prince does not resist, f
ollows his lead. The two of them start south, stumbling down a lane that will
take them away from the castle, from the garden where she lies. He realizes he
is still holding Sandre's bloodied dagger. He jams it into his belt.
He thinks about the Duke, about what Sandre has just done to himself. He remem
bers—his mind playing its familiar tricks with time and memory—a night in th
e Sandreni lodge last fall. His own first night that has led him here. When Sa
ndre told them he could not take Tomasso out of the dungeon alive because he l
acked the power. Because he'd never sacrificed his fingers in the wizard's bin
ding.
And now he has. For Catriana, not his son, and to no good at all. There is som
ething that hurts so much in all of this. Tomasso is nine months dead, and now
she lies in a garden in Senzio, dead as any of the men of Tigana who fell in
war by the Deisa years ago.
Which was the whole point for her, Devin knows. She had told him as much in Al
ienor's castle. He begins to cry again, unable to stop himself. A moment later
he feels Alessan's hand upon his shoulder.
"Hold hard, for a little longer yet," the Prince says. His first words since h
er fall. "You lead me and I'll lead you, and afterwards we will mourn together
, you and I." He leaves the hand on Devin's shoulder. They make their way thro
ugh the dark lanes and the torchlit ones.
There is already an uproar in the streets of Senzio as they go, a careening, b
reathless thread of rumor about some happening at the castle. The Governor is
dead, someone shouts feverishly, sprinting wildly past them. The Barbadians ha
ve crossed the border, a woman screams, leaning out from a window above a tave
rn. She has red hair, Devin sees, and he looks away. There are no guards in th
e streets yet; they walk quickly and are not stopped by anyone.
Thinking back upon that walk, later, Devin realizes that never, not for a sing
le moment, did he doubt that Catriana had killed the Barbadian before she jump
ed.
Back at Solinghi's Devin wanted nothing more than to go upstairs to his room a
nd close his eyes and be away from people, from all the invading tumult of the
world. But as they came through the door, he and the Prince, a loud, impatien
t cheer suddenly rose in the packed front room, running swiftly toward the bac
k as well. They were well overdue for the first of the evening's performances,
and Solinghi's was jammed with people who'd come to hear them play, regardles
s of the increasing noises from outside.
Devin and Alessan exchanged a glance. Music.
There was no sign of Erlein, but the two of them slowly made their way through
the crowd to the raised platform in the middle space between the two rooms. A
lessan took up his pipes and Devin stood beside him, waiting. The Prince blew
a handful of testing, tuning notes and then, without a word spoken, began the
song Devin had known he would begin.
As the first high, mournful notes of the "Lament For Adaon" spun out into the
densely crowded rooms there was a brief, disconcerted murmur, and then silence
fell. Into which stillness Devin followed Alessan's pipes, lifting his voice
in lament. But not for the god this time, though the words were not changed. N
ot for Adaon falling from his high place, but for Catriana di Tigana fallen fr
om hers.
Men said after that there had never been such a stillness, such rapt attention
among the tables in Solinghi's. Even the servants waiting on patrons and the
cooks in the kitchens behind the bar stopped what they had been doing and stoo
d listening. No one moved, no one made a sound. There were pipes playing, and
a solitary voice singing the oldest song of mourning in the Palm.
In a room upstairs Alais lifted her head from her tear-soaked pillow and slowl
y sat up. Rinaldo, tending to Sandre's maimed hand, turned his blind face towa
rd the door and both men were still. And Baerd, who had come back here with Du
cas to tidings that smashed his heart in a way he had not thought could ever h
appen to him again, listened to Alessan and Devin below and he felt as if his
soul were leaving him, as it had on the Ember Night, to fly through darkness s
earching for peace and a home, for a dreamt-of world in which young women did
not die in this way.
Out in the street where the sound of the pipes and that pure lamenting voice c
arried, people stopped in their loud pursuit of rumor or the restless chasing
of night's pleasures and they stood outside the doors of Solinghi's, listening
to the notes of grief, the sound of love— held fast in the spell of a music
shaped by loss.
For a long time after it was remembered in Senzio, that haunting, heartbreakin
g, utterly unexpected offering of the "Lament" on the mild, moonlit night that
marked the beginning of war.
They played only the one song and then ended. There was nothing left in either
of them. Devin claimed two open bottles of wine from Solinghi behind the bar
and followed Alessan upstairs. One bedroom door was partly open: Alais's, that
had been Catriana's too. Baerd was waiting in the doorway; he made a small ch
oking sound and stepped forward into the hallway and Alessan embraced him.
For a long time they stood locked together, swaying a little. When they drew b
ack both of their faces looked blurred, unfocused. Devin followed them into th
e room. Alais was there and Rovigo. San-dre. Rinaldo, Ducas and Naddo. Sertino
the wizard. All of them crowded into this one room; as if being in the room f
rom which she'd gone would somehow hold her spirit nearer to them.
"Did anyone think to bring wine?" Rinaldo asked in a faint voice.
"I did," Devin said, going over to the Healer. Rinaldo looked pale and exhaust
ed. Devin glanced at Sandre's left hand and saw that the bleeding had been sto
pped. He guided Rinaldo's hand to one of the wine bottles and the Healer drank
, not bothering to ask for a glass. Devin gave the other bottle to Ducas, who
did the same.
Sertino was gazing at Sandre's hand. "You're going to have to get in the habit
of masking those fingers," he said. He held up his own left hand, and Devin s
aw the now-familiar illusion of completeness.
"I know," Sandre said. "I feel very weak right now though."
"Doesn't matter," Sertino replied. "Two missing fingers seen will mean death f
or you. However weary we are, the masking must be constant. Do it. Now."
Sandre looked up at him angrily, but the Certandan wizard's round pink face sh
owed nothing but concern. The Duke closed his eyes briefly, grimaced, and then
slowly held up his own left hand. Devin saw five fingers there, or the illusi
on of such. He couldn't seem to stop thinking about Tomasso, dead in a dungeon
in Astibar.
Ducas was offering him the bottle. He took it and drank. Passed it over to Nad
do, and went to sit beside Alais on the bed. She took his hand, which had neve
r happened before. Her eyes were red with weeping, her skin looked bruised. Al
essan had slumped on the floor by the door, leaning against the wall. His eyes
were closed. In the light of the candles his face looked hollowed out, the ch
eekbones showing in angular relief.
Ducas cleared his throat. "We had best do some planning," he said awkwardly. "
If she killed this Barbadian there will be a search through the city tonight,
and Triad knows what tomorrow."
"Sandre used magic, as well," Alessan said, not opening his eyes. "If there's
a Tracker in Senzio he's in danger."
"That we can deal with," Naddo said fiercely, looking from Ducas to Sertino. "
We did it once already, remember. And there were more than twenty men with tha
t Tracker."
"You aren't in the highlands of Certando now," Rovigo said mildly.
"Doesn't matter," Ducas said. "Naddo's right. If enough of us are down in the
street and Sertino's with us to point out the Tracker then I'd be ashamed of m
y men if we couldn't contrive a brawl that killed him."
"There's a risk," Baerd said.
Ducas suddenly smiled like a wolf, cold and hard, without a trace of mirth. "I
'd be grateful for a risk to take tonight," he said. Devin understood exactly
what he meant.
Alessan opened his eyes and looked up from his place against the wall. "Do it,
then," he said. "Devin can run any messages back here to us. We'll move Sandr
e out, back to the ship if we have to. If you send word that—"
He stopped, and then uncoiled in one lithe movement to his feet. Baerd had alr
eady seized his sword from where it was leaning against the wall. Devin stood
up, releasing Alais's hand.
There came another rattle of sound from the stairway outside the window. Then
the window opened as a hand pulled the glass outward and Erlein di Senzio step
ped carefully over the ledge and into the room with Catriana in his arms.
In the stony silence he looked at them all for a moment, taking in the scene.
Then he turned to Alessan. "If you are worried about magic," he said in a pape
r-thin voice, "then you had best be very worried. I used a great deal of power
just now. If there's a Tracker in Senzio then anyone near me is extremely lik
ely to be captured and killed." He stopped, then smiled very faintly. "But I c
aught her in time. She is alive."
The world spun and rocked for Devin. He heard himself cry out with an inarticu
late joy. Sandre literally leaped to his feet and rushed to claim Catriana's u
nconscious body from Erlein's arms. He hastened to the bed and laid her down.
He was crying again, Devin saw. So, unexpectedly, was Rovigo.
Devin wheeled back to where Erlein stood. In time to see Alessan cross the roo
m in two swift strides and wrap the exhausted wizard in a bear hug that lifted
Erlein, feebly protesting, clean off the ground. Alessan released him and ste
pped back, the grey eyes shining, his face lit by a grin he couldn't seem to c
ontrol. Erlein tried, without success, to preserve his own customary cynical e
xpression. Then Baerd came up and, without warning, seized the wizard by the s
houlders and kissed him on both cheeks.
Again the troubadour struggled to look fierce and displeased. Again he failed.
With an entirely unconvincing attempt at his usual scowl, he said, "Careful,
you. Devin flattened me to the ground when you all ran out the door. I'm still
bruised." He threw a glare at Devin, who smiled happily back at him.
Sertino handed Erlein a bottle. He drank, a long, thirsty pull. He wiped at hi
s mouth. "It wasn't hard to guess from the way you were running that something
was seriously wrong. I started to follow, but I don't run very fast anymore s
o I decided to use magic. I got to the far end of the garden wall just as Ales
san and Devin reached the near side."
"Why?" Alessan asked sharply, wonder in his voice. "You never use your magic.
Why now?"
Erlein shrugged elaborately. "I'd never seen all of you run anywhere like that
before." He grimaced. "I suppose I was carried away."
Alessan was smiling again; he couldn't seem to hold it in for very long. Every
few seconds he glanced quickly over at the bed, as if to reassure himself of
who was lying there. "Then what?" he asked.
"Then I saw her in the window, and figured out what was happening. So I ... I
used my magic to get over the wall and I was waiting in the garden beneath the
window." He turned to Sandre. "You sent an astonishing spell from so far, but
you didn't have a chance. You couldn't know, never having tried, but you can'
t stop someone falling that way. You have to be beneath them. And they usually
have to be unconscious. That kind of magic works on our own bodies almost exc
lusively; if we want to apply it to someone else their will has to be suspende
d or everything gets muddled when they see what is happening and their mind be
gins to fight it."
Sandre was shaking his head. "I thought it was my weakness. That I just wasn't
strong enough, even with the binding."
Erlein's expression was odd. For a second he seemed about to respond to that,
but instead he resumed his tale. "I used a spell to make her lose consciousnes
s partway down, and a stronger one to catch her before she hit. Then a last to
get us over the wall again. By then I was completely spent, and terrified the
y would trace us immediately if there was a Tracker anywhere in the castle. Bu
t they didn't, there was too much chaos. I think something else is happening b
ack there. We hid behind the main temple of Eanna for a time, and then I carri
ed her here."
"Carried her through the streets?" Alais asked. "No one noticed that?"
Erlein grinned at her, not unkindly. "It isn't that unusual in Senzio, my dear
." Alais flushed crimson, but Devin could see that she didn't really mind. It
was all right. Everything was suddenly all right.
"We had better get down into the street then," Baerd said to Ducas. "We'll hav
e to get Arkin and some of the others. Regardless of whether there are Tracker
s, this changes things. When they don't find her body in the garden there's go
ing to be an unbelievable search of the town tonight. I think there will have
to be some fighting."
Ducas smiled again, more like a wolf than ever. "I hope so," was all he said.

"One moment," said Alessan quietly. "I want you all to witness something." He
turned back to Erlein and hesitated, choosing his words. "We both know that yo
u did this tonight without any coercion from me, and against your own best int
erests, in every way."
Erlein glanced over at the bed, two sudden spots of red forming on each of his
sallow cheeks. "Don't make too much of it," he warned gruffly. "Every man has
his moments of folly. I like red-headed women, that's all. That's how you tra
pped me in the first place, remember?"
Alessan shook his head. "That may be true, but it is not all, Erlein di Senzio
. I bound you to this cause against your will, but I think you have just joine
d it freely."
Erlein swore feelingly. "Don't be a fool, Alessan! I just told you, I ..."
"I know what you just told me. I make my own judgments though, I always have.
And the truth is, I have been made to realize tonight—by you and Catriana, bo
th—that there are limits to what I wish to do or see done for any cause. Even
my own."
As AJessan finished speaking, he stepped forward quickly and laid a hand on Er
lein's brow. The wizard flinched, but Alessan steadied him. "I am Alessan, Pri
nce of Tigana," he said clearly, "direct in descent from Micaela. In the name
of Adaon and his gift to her children, I release you to your freedom, wizard!"

Both men suddenly staggered apart, as if a taut cord had been cut. Erlein's fa
ce was bone-white. "I tell you again," he rasped, "you are a fool!"
Alessan shook his head. "You have called me worse than that, with some cause.
But now I will name you something you will probably hate: I will unmask you as
a decent man, with the same longing to be free as any of us here. Erlein, you
cannot hide anymore behind your moods and rancor. You cannot channel into me
your own hatred of the Tyrants. If you choose to leave us, you can. I do not e
xpect you will. Be welcome, freely, to our company."
Erlein looked cornered, assailed. His expression was so confused Devin laughed
aloud; the whole situation was clear to him now, and comical, in a bizarre, t
wisted way. He stepped forward and gripped the wizard.
"I'm glad," he said. "I'm glad you're with us."
"I'm not! I haven't said that!" Erlein snapped. "I haven't said or done any su
ch thing!"
"Of course you have." It was Sandre, the evidence of exhaustion and pain still
vivid in his lined, dark face. "You did it tonight. Alessan is right. He know
s you better than any of us. Better, in some ways, than you know yourself, tro
ubadour. How long have you tried to make yourself believe that nothing mattere
d to you but your own skin? How many people have you convinced that that was t
rue? I'm one. Baerd and Devin. Perhaps Catriana. Not Alessan, Erlein. He just
set you free to prove us all wrong."
There was a silence. They could hear shouting from the streets below now, and
the sound of running footsteps. Erlein turned to Alessan and the two men gazed
at each other. Devin was suddenly claimed by an image, another of his intrusi
ons of memory: that campfire in Ferraut, Alessan playing songs of Senzio for E
rlein, an enraged shadow by the river. There were so many layers here, so many
charges of meaning.
He saw Erlein di Senzio raise his hand, his left hand, with a simulation of fi
ve fingers there, and offer it to Alessan. Who met it with his right so their
palms touched.
"I suppose I am with you," Erlein said. "After all."
"I know," said Alessan.
"Come!" said Baerd, a second later. "We have work to do." Devin followed him,
with Ducas and Sertino and Naddo, toward the back stairs beyond the window.
Just before stepping through Devin turned to look back at the bed. Erlein noti
ced, and followed his gaze.
"She's fine," the wizard said softly. "She'll be just fine. Do what you have t
o do, and come back to us."
Devin glanced up at him. They exchanged an almost shy smile. "Thank you," Devi
n said, meaning a number of things. Then he followed Baerd down into the tumul
t of the streets.
She was actually awake for a few moments before she opened her eyes. She was l
ying somewhere soft and unexpectedly familiar, and there were voices drifting
towards and away from her, as if on a swelling of the sea, or like slow-moving
fireflies in the summer nights at home. At first she couldn't quite make the
voices out. She was afraid to open her eyes.
"I think she is awake now," someone was saying. "Will you all do me a great co
urtesy and leave me alone with her for a few moments?"
She knew that voice though. She heard the sound of a number of people rising a
nd leaving the room. A door closed. That voice was Alessan's.
Which meant she could not be dead. These were not Morian's Halls, after all, w
ith the voices of the dead surrounding her. She opened her eyes.
He was sitting on a chair drawn close to where she lay. She was in her own roo
m in Solinghi's inn, lying under a blanket in bed. Someone had removed the bla
ck silk gown and washed the blood from her skin. Anghiar's blood, that had fou
ntained from his throat.
The rush of memory was dizzying.
Quietly, Alessan said, "You are alive. Erlein was waiting in the garden below
you. He rendered you unconscious and then caught you with his magic as you fel
l and brought you back."
She let her eyes fall shut again as she struggled to deal with all of this. Wi
th the fact of life, the rise and fall of her chest as she breathed, the beat
of her heart, this curiously light-headed sensation, as if she might drift awa
y on the slightest of breezes.
But she wouldn't. She was in Solinghi's and Alessan was beside her. He had ask
ed all the others to leave. She turned her head and looked at him again. He wa
s extremely pale.
"We thought you had died," he said. "We saw you fall from outside the garden w
all. What Erlein did, he did on his own. None of us knew. We thought you had d
ied," he repeated after a moment.
She thought about that. Then she said: "Did I achieve anything? Is anything ha
ppening?"
He pushed a hand through his hair. "It is too soon to tell for certain. I thin
k you did, though. There is a great deal of commotion in the streets. If you l
isten you can hear it."
Concentrating, she could indeed make out the sounds of shouting and running fe
et passing beneath the window.
Alessan seemed unnaturally subdued, struggling with something. It was very pea
ceful in the room though. The bed was softer than she had remembered it being.
She waited, looking at him, noting the perennial unruliness of his hair where
his hands were always pushing through it.
He said, carefully, "Catriana, I cannot tell you how frightened I was tonight.
You must listen to me now, and try to think this through because it is someth
ing that matters very much." His expression was odd, and there was something i
n his voice she couldn't quite pin down.
He reached out and laid his hand over hers where it lay upon the blanket. "Cat
riana, I do not measure your worth by your father's. None of us ever has. You
must stop doing this to yourself. There was never anything for you to redeem.
You are what you are, in and of yourself."
This was difficult ground for her, the most difficult of all, and she found th
at her heartbeat had quickened. She watched him, blue eyes on his grey ones. H
is long, slender fingers were covering her own. She said:
"We arrive with a past, a history. Families matter. He was a coward and he fle
d."
Alessan shook his head; there was still something strained in his expression.
"We have to be so careful," he murmured. "So very careful when we judge them,
and what they did in those days. There are reasons why a man with a wife and a
n infant daughter might choose— other than fear for himself—to stay with the
two of them and try to keep them alive. Oh, my dear, in all these years I hav
e seen so many men and women who went away for their children."
She could feel her tears starting now and she fought to blink them back. She h
ated talking about this. It was the hard kernel of pain at the core of all she
did.
"But it was before the Deisa," she whispered. "He left before the battles. Eve
n the one we won."
Again he shook his head, wincing at the sight of her distress. He lifted her h
and suddenly and carried it to his lips. She could not remember his ever havin
g done that before. There was something completely strange about all of this.

"Parents and children," he said, so softly she almost missed the words. "It is
so hard; we are so quick to judge." He hesitated. "I don't know if Devin told
you, but my mother cursed me in the hour before she died. She called me a tra
itor and a coward."
She blinked, moved to sit up. Too suddenly. She was dizzy and terribly weak. D
evin hadn't told her any such thing; he had said next to nothing about that da
y.
"How could she?" she said, anger rising in her, against this woman she had nev
er seen. "You? A coward? Doesn't . . . didn't she know anything about . . ."
"She knew almost all of it," he said quietly. "She simply disagreed as to wher
e my duty lay. That is what I am trying to say, Catriana: it is possible to di
ffer on such matters, and to reach a place as terrible as that one was for bot
h of us. I am learning so many things so late. In this world, where we find ou
rselves, we need compassion more than anything, I think, or we are all alone."

She managed this time to push herself up higher in the bed. She looked at him,
imagining that day, those words of his mother. She remembered what she hersel
f had said to her father on her own last night at home, words that had driven
him violently out of the house into the dark. He had still been out there some
where, alone, when she had gone away.
She swallowed. "Did it ... did it end like that with your mother? Was that how
she died?"
"She never unsaid the words, but she let me take her hand before the end. I do
n't think I'll ever know if that meant . . ."
"Of course it did!" she said quickly. "Of course it did, Alessan. We all do th
at. We do with our hands, our eyes, what we are afraid to say." She surprised
herself; she hadn't known she knew any such thing.
He smiled then, and looked down to where his fingers still covered hers. She f
elt herself coloring. He said, "There is a truth there. I am doing that now, C
atriana. Perhaps I am a coward, after all."
He had sent the others from the room. Her heart was still beating very fast. S
he looked at his eyes and then quickly away, afraid that after what she had ju
st said it would look like she was probing. She felt like a child again, confu
sed, certain that she was missing something here. She had always, always hated
not understanding what was happening. But at the same time there seemed to be
this very odd, extraordinary warmth growing inside her, and a queer sensation
of light, brighter than the candles in the room should have allowed.
Fighting to control her breathing, needing an answer, but absurdly afraid of w
hat it might be, she stammered, "I ... would you . . . explain that to me? Ple
ase?"
She watched him closely this time, watched him smile, saw what kindled in his
eyes, she even read his lips as they moved.
"When I saw you fall," he murmured, his hand still holding hers, "I realized t
hat I was falling with you, my dear. I finally understood, too late, what I ha
d denied to myself for so long, how absolutely I had debarred myself from some
thing important, even the acknowledging of its possibility, while Tigana was s
till gone. The heart . . . has its own laws though, Catriana, and the truth is
... the truth is that you are the law of mine. I knew it when I saw you in th
at window. In the moment before you leaped I knew that I loved you. Bright sta
r of Eanna, forgive me the manner of this, but you are the harbor of my soul's
journeying."
Bright star of Eanna. He had always called her that, from the very beginning.
Lightly, easily, a name among others, a teasing for when she bridled, a term o
f praise when she did something well. The harbor of his soul.
She seemed to be crying, silently, tears welling up to slide slowly down her c
heeks.
"Oh, my dear, no," he said, with an awkward catch to his voice. "I am so sorry
. I am a fool. This is far too sudden, tonight, after what you have done. Not
tonight. I should never have spoken. I don't even know if you—"
He stopped just there. But only because she had covered his mouth with her fin
gers to make him stop. She was still crying, but there seemed to be the most a
mazing brightness growing inside the room, far more than candles now, more tha
n the moons: a light like the sun beginning to rise beyond the rim of darkness
.
She slipped her fingers down from his mouth and claimed the hand he had held h
er with. We do with our hands what we cannot say. She still said nothing; she
couldn't speak. She was trembling. She remembered how her hands had been shaki
ng when she walked out earlier tonight. So little time ago she had stood in a
castle window and known she was about to die. Her tears fell on his hand. She
lowered her head but others kept falling. She felt as though her heart were a
bird, a trialla, only newly born, spreading wings, preparing to give voice to
the song of its days.
He was on his knees beside the bed. She moved her free hand across and ran it
through his hair, in a hopeless attempt at smoothing it. It seemed to be somet
hing she had wanted to do for a long time. How long? How long could such needs
be present and yet never known, never acknowledged or allowed?
"When I was young," she said finally, her voice breaking, but needing to speak
, "I used to dream of this. Alessan, have I died and come back? Am I dreaming
now?"
He smiled slowly, the deeply reassuring smile that she knew, that they all kne
w, as if her words had granted him release from his own fear, freed him to be
himself again. To offer the look that had always meant that he was with them a
nd so everything would be made all right.
But then, unexpectedly, he moved forward and lowered his head to rest it again
st the thin blanket covering her, as if seeking his own shelter, one that was
hers to give to him. She understood; it seemed— oh, what goddess could have f
oretold this?—that she did have something to offer him. Something more than h
er death after all. She lifted her hands and closed them around his head, hold
ing him to her, and it seemed to Catriana in that moment as if that new-born t
rialla in her soul began to sing. Of trials endured and trials to come, of dou
bt and dark and all the deep uncertainties that defined the outer boundaries o
f mortal life, but with love now present at the base of it all, like light, li
ke the first stone of a rising tower.
There had been a Barbadian Tracker in Senzio, Devin learned later that night,
and he was killed, but not by them. Nor did they have to deal with the kind of
search party they'd feared. It was nearly dawn by the time they pieced the st
ory together.
It seemed that the Barbadians had gone wild.
Finding the poisoned Ygrathen knife on the floor by Anghiar's body, hearing wh
at the woman cried before she leaped, they had leaped themselves—to all the m
urderously obvious conclusions.
There were twenty of them in Senzio, an honor guard for Anghiar. They armed th
emselves, assembled, and made their way across to the western wing of the Gove
rnor's Castle. They killed the six Ygrathens on guard there, broke down a door
, and burst in upon Cullion of Ygrath, Brandin's representative, as he struggl
ed into his clothing. Then they took their time about killing him. The sound o
f his screams echoed through the castle.
Then they went back downstairs and through the courtyard to the front gates an
d hacked to death the four Senzian guards who had let the woman in without a p
roper search. It was during this that the captain of the Castle Guard came int
o the courtyard with a company of Senzians. He ordered them to lay down their
arms.
The Barbadians were, according to most reports later, about to do so, having a
chieved their immediate purposes, when two of the Senzians, enraged at the but
chery of their friends, fired arrows at them. Two men fell, one instantly dead
, one mortally wounded. The dead one was Alberico's Tracker. There ensued a bl
oody, to-the-death melee in the torchlit courtyard of the castle, soon slipper
y with blood. The Barbadians were slaughtered to the last man, taking some thi
rty or forty Senzians with them.
No one knew which man fired the arrow that killed Casalia the Governor as he c
ame hastily down the stairs screaming hoarsely at them all to stop.
In the chaos that followed that death no one gave a thought to going down to t
he garden for the body of the woman who had started it all. There was an incre
asingly wild panic in the city as the news spread through the night. A huge, t
errified crowd gathered outside the castle. Shortly after midnight two horses
were seen racing away from the city walls, heading south for the Ferraut borde
r. Not long after that the five remaining members of Brandin's party in Senzio
rode away as well, in a tight cluster under the risen moons. They went north
of course, toward Farsaro where the fleet was anchored.
Catriana was asleep in the other bed, her face smooth and untroubled, almost c
hildlike in its peace. Alais could not find rest though. There was too much no
ise and tumult in the streets and she knew her father was down there, among wh
atever was happening.
Even after Rovigo came back in and stopped at their door to look in on the two
of them and report that there seemed to be no immediate danger, Alais was sti
ll unable to sleep. Too much had happened tonight, but none of it to her, and
so she was not weary as Catriana was, only excited and unsettled in oddly disc
ontinuous ways. She couldn't even have said all the things that were working u
pon her. Eventually she put on the robe she'd bought two days before in the ma
rket and went to sit on the ledge of the open window.
It was very late by then, both moons were west, down over the sea. She couldn'
t see the harbor—Solinghi's was too far inland—but she knew it was there, wi
th the Sea Maid bobbing at anchor in the night breeze. There were people in th
e streets even now, she could see shadowy forms pass in the lane below, and sh
e heard occasional shouts from the direction of the tavern quarter, but nothin
g more now than the ordinary noises of a city without a curfew, prone to be aw
ake and loud at night.
She wondered how near to dawn it was, how long she would have to stay awake if
she wanted to see the sunrise. She thought she might wait for it. This was no
t a night for sleep; or not for her, Alais amended, glancing back at Catriana.
She remembered the other time the two of them had shared a room. Her own room
at home.
She was a long way from home. She wondered what her mother had thought, receiv
ing Rovigo's letter of carefully phrased almost-explanation sent by courier ac
ross Astibar from the port of Ardin town as they sailed north to Senzio. She w
ondered, but in another way she knew: the trust shared between her parents was
one of the sustaining, defining elements of her own world.
She looked up at the sky. The night was still dark, the stars overhead even mo
re bright now that the moons were setting; it probably lacked several hours ye
t till dawn. She heard a woman's laughter below and realized with an odd sensa
tion that that was the one sound she'd not heard earlier that night amid the t
umult in the streets. In a curious, quite unexpected way, the woman's breathle
ss sound, and then a man's murmur following close upon it served to reassure h
er: in the midst of all else, whatever might come, certain things would still
continue as they always had.
There was a footstep on the wood of the stairway outside. Alais leaned backwar
d on the window-ledge, belatedly realizing she could probably be seen from bel
ow.
"Who is it?" she called, though softly, so as not to disturb Catri-ana.
"Only me," Devin said, coming up to stand on the landing outside the room. She
looked at him. His clothing was muddy, as if he'd tumbled or rolled somewhere
, but his voice was calm. It was too dark to properly see his eyes. "Why are y
ou awake?" he asked.
She gestured, not sure what to say. "Too many things at once, I suppose. I'm n
ot used to this."
She saw his teeth as he smiled. "None of us are," he said. "Believe me. But I
don't think anything else will happen tonight. We are all going to bed."
"My father came in a while ago. He said it seemed to have quieted down."
Devin nodded. "For now. The Governor was slain in the castle. Catriana did kil
l the Barbadian. There was chaos up there, and somebody seems to have shot the
Tracker. I think that was what saved us."
Alais swallowed. "My father didn't tell me about that."
"He probably didn't want to disturb your night. I'll be sorry now if I have."
He glanced past her toward the other bed. "How is she?"
"She's all right, really. Asleep." She registered the quick concern in his voi
ce. But Catriana had earned that concern, that caring, tonight and before toni
ght, in ways Alais could scarcely even encompass within her mind.
"And how are you?" Devin asked, in a different tone, turning back to her. And
there was something in that altered, deeper voice that made it difficult for h
er to breathe.
"I'm fine too, honestly."
"I know you are," he said. "Actually, you are a great deal more than that, Ala
is." He hesitated for a moment, seeming suddenly awkward. She didn't understan
d that, until he leaned slowly forward to kiss her full upon the lips. For the
second time, if you counted the one in the crowded room downstairs, but this
was really quite amazingly unlike the first. For one thing, he didn't hurry, a
nd for another, they were alone and it was very dark. She felt one of his hand
s come up, brushing along the front of her robe before coming to rest in her h
air.
He drew back unsteadily. Alais opened her eyes. He looked blurred and softened
, where he stood on the landing. Footsteps went past in the lane below, slowly
now, not running as before. The two of them were silent, looking at each othe
r. Devin cleared his throat. He said, "It is ... there are still two or three
hours to morning. You should try to sleep, Alais. There will be a ... a great
deal happening in the days to come."
She smiled. He hesitated another moment, then turned to walk along the outer l
anding toward the room he shared with Alessan and Erlein.
She remained sitting where she was for some time longer, looking up at the bri
ghtness of the stars, letting her racing heart gradually slow. She replayed in
her mind the ragged, very young uncertainty and wonder in his voice in those
last words. Alais smiled again to herself in the darkness. To someone schooled
by a life of observation, that voice had revealed a great deal. And it had be
en simply touching her that had done this to him. Which was, if one lingered t
o think about it and relive the moment of that kiss, a most astonishing thing.

She was still smiling when she left the window-ledge and returned to her bed a
nd she did fall asleep then, after all, for the last few greatly altered hours
of that long night.
All through the next day everyone waited. A pall of doom like smoke hung over
Senzio. The city treasurer attempted to assert control in the castle, but the
leader of the Guard was disinclined to take orders from him. Their shouted con
frontations went on all day. By the time someone thought to go down for the gi
rl her body had already been taken away; no one knew where or by whose orders.

The work of the city ground to a halt. Men and women roamed the streets, feedi
ng on rumor, choking on fear. On almost every corner a different story was hea
rd. It was said that Rinaldo, the last Duke's brother, had come back to the ci
ty to take command in the castle; by the middle of the day everyone had heard
some version of the tale, but no one had seen the man.
A restless, nervous darkness fell. The streets remained crowded all night long
. It seemed that no one in Senzio could sleep. The night was bright and very b
eautiful, both moons riding through a clear sky. Outside Solinghi's inn a crow
d gathered—there was no room at all inside—to hear the three musicians play
and sing of freedom, and of the glory of Senzio's past. Songs not sung since C
asalia had relinquished his claim to his father's Ducal Throne and allowed him
self to be called Governor instead with emissaries from the Tyrants to advise
him. Casalia was dead. Both emissaries were dead. Music drifted out from Solin
ghi's into the scented summer night, spilling along the lanes, rising toward t
he stars.
Just after dawn, word came. Alberico of Barbadior had crossed the border the a
fternoon before and was advancing north with his three armies, burning village
s and fields as he went. Before noon they heard from the north as well: Brandi
n's fleet had lifted anchor in Farsaro Bay and was sailing south with a favora
ble wind.
War had come.
All through Senzio town people left their homes, left the taverns and the stre
ets and began thronging, belatedly, to the temples of the Triad.
In the almost deserted front room of Solinghi's that afternoon one man continu
ed to play the Tregean pipes, faster and faster and higher and higher, in a wi
ld, almost forgotten tune.

chapter 20
THE SEA WAS AT THEIR BACK, AT THE END OF A LONG goatherds' track that wound do
wn the slope to the sands just south of where they'd beached the ships and com
e ashore. About two miles north of them the walls of Senzio rose up, and from
this height Dia-nora could see the gleaming of the temple domes and the rampar
ts of the castle. The sun, rising over the pine forests to the east, was bronz
e in a close, deep blue sky. It was warm already this early in the day; it wou
ld be very hot by mid-morning.
By which time the fighting would have begun.
Brandin was conferring with d'Eymon and Rhamanus and his captains, three of th
em newly appointed from the provinces. From Corte and Asoli and Chiara itself.
Not from Lower Corte, of course, though there were a number of men from her p
rovince in the army below them in the valley. She had wondered briefly, lying
awake one night in the flagship off Farsaro, if Baerd was one of them. She kne
w he wouldn't be though. Just as Brandin could not change in this, neither cou
ld her brother. It went on. However much might alter, this single thing would
go on until the last generation that knew Tigana died.
And she? Since the Dive, since rising from the sea, she had been trying hard n
ot to think at all. Simply to move with the events she had set in motion. To a
ccept the shining fact of Brandin's love for her and the terrible uncertaintie
s of this war. She no longer saw the riselka's path in her mind's eye. She had
some sense of what that meant, but she made an effort not to dwell upon it du
ring the day. Nights were different; dreams were always different. She was own
er and captive, both, of a bitterly divided heart.
With her two guards just behind her she moved forward on the crown of the hill
and looked out over the wide east-west running valley. The dense green pine w
oods were beyond, with olive trees growing on steeper ridges to the south and
a plateau north leading to Senzio town.
Down below the two armies were just stirring, men emerging from their tents an
d sleeping-rolls, horses being saddled and harnessed, swords cleaned, bowstrin
gs fitted and readied. Metal glinted in the young sun all along the valley. Th
e sound of voices carried easily up to her in the clear bright air. There was
just enough breeze to take the banners and lift them to be seen. Their own dev
ice was new: a golden image of the Palm itself, picked out against a backgroun
d of deep blue for the sea. The meaning of Brandin's chosen image was as clear
as he could make it—they were fighting in the name of the Western Palm, but
the truer claim was to everything. To a united peninsula with Barbadior driven
away. It was a good symbol, Dianora knew. It was also the proper, the necessa
ry step for this peninsula. But it was being taken by the man who had been Kin
g of Ygrath.
There were even Senzians in Brandin's army, besides the men of the four wester
n provinces. Several hundred had joined them from the city in the two days sin
ce they'd landed in the southern part of the bay. With the Governor dead and a
squabble for meaningless power going on in the castle, the official policy of
Senzian neutrality was in tatters. Helped, no one doubted, by Alberico's deci
sion to torch the lands through which he had come, in retaliation for Barbadia
n deaths in the city. Had the Barbadians moved faster Rhamanus might have had
trouble landing the fleet in the face of opposition, but the winds had been wi
th them, and they reached the city a full day before Alber-ico. Which let Bran
din choose the obvious hill from which to overlook the valley, and to align hi
s men where he wanted them. It was an advantage, they all knew it.
It had seemed less of one the next morning when the three armies of Barbadior
arrived emerging out of the smoke of burning to the south. They had two banner
s, not one: the Empire's red mountain and golden tiara against their white bac
kground, and Alberico's own crimson boar on a yellow field. The red in both ba
nners seemed to dot the plain like stains of blood, while horsemen and foot-so
ldiers arrayed themselves in crisp, precisely drilled ranks along the eastern
side of the valley. The soldiers of the Barbadian Empire had conquered most of
the known world to the east.
Dianora had stood on the hill watching them come. It seemed to take forever. S
he went away into their tent and then came back, several times. The sun began
to set. It was over behind her in the west above the sea before Alberico's mer
cenaries had all marched or ridden into the valley.
"Three to one, perhaps a little better than that," Brandin had said, coming up
beside her. His short greying hair was uncovered, ruffled by the late afterno
on breeze.
"Are they too many?" she had asked, quietly so no one else would hear.
He looked at her quickly, then took her hand. He often did that now, as if una
ble to bear not having touched her for any length of time. Their love-making s
ince the Dive had taken on an urgency that would leave them both shattered and
drained afterwards, scarcely able to form thoughts of any kind. Which was at
the center of things for her, Dianora knew: she wanted to numb her mind, to st
ill the voices and the memories. Obliterate the image of that clear, straight
path disappearing in the darkness of the sea.
On the hill the day the Barbadians came Brandin laced his fingers through her
own and said, "They may be too many. It is hard to judge. I am stronger in my
power than Alberico in his. I think that on this hill I am worth the differenc
e in the armies."
Quietly spoken, a careful statement of relevant facts. No arrogance, only the
steady, always enduring pride. And why should she doubt his sorcery? She knew
exactly what it had done in war some twenty years ago.
That conversation had been yesterday. Afterwards she had turned to watch the s
un go down into the sea. The night had been bright and glorious, with Vidomni
waxing and Ilarion at her full, blue and mysterious, a moon of fantasy, of mag
ic. She had wondered if they would have time to be alone that night, but in fa
ct Brandin had been down on the plain among the tents of his army through most
of the dark hours, and speaking with his captains after that. D'Eymon, she kn
ew was going to remain up here with him tomorrow, and Rhamanus—more a sailor
than a military commander—would be on the hill as well to lead the men of the
King's Guard in defense, if matters came to that. If matters came to that the
y were probably dead, she knew.
Both moons had set by the time Brandin came back to their tent on that hill ab
ove the sea. Awake in bed, waiting, she could see his weariness. He had maps w
ith him, sketches of terrain to study one last time, but she made him put them
down.
He came over to the bed still fully clothed and lay down. After a moment he re
sted his head in her lap. Neither of them spoke for a long time. Then Brandin
shifted a little and looked up at her.
"I hate that man down there," he said quietly. "I hate everything he stands fo
r. There is no passion in him, no love, no pride. Only ambition. Nothing matte
rs but that. Nothing in the world can move him to pity or grief but his own fa
te. Everything is a tool, an instrument. He wants the Emperor's Tiara, everyon
e knows it, but he doesn't want it for anything. He only wants. I doubt anythi
ng in his life has ever moved him to feel anything for anyone else . . . love,
loss, anything."
He subsided. He was repeating himself in his exhaustion. She pressed her finge
rs against his temples, looking down at his face as he turned again and his ey
es closed and his brow gradually grew smooth under her touch. Eventually his b
reathing steadied and she knew he was asleep. She stayed awake, her hands movi
ng like a blind woman's over him, knowing from the light outside that the moon
s were down, knowing the morning was war and that she loved this man more than
the world.
She must have slept, because the sky was grey with the coming of dawn when she
opened her eyes again, and Brandin was gone. There was a red anemone on the p
illow beside her. She looked at it without moving for a moment, then picked it
up and crushed it to her face inhaling the fragile scent. She wondered if he
knew the legend of that flower here. Almost certainly not, she thought.
She rose, and a few moments later Scelto came in with a mug of khav in his han
d. He was wearing the stiff leather vest of a messenger; lightweight inadequat
e armor against arrows. He had volunteered to be one of the score of such men
running orders and messages up and down the hill. He had come to her first tho
ugh, as he had every morning in the saishan for a dozen years. Dianora was afr
aid that thinking about that would make her cry: a brutal omen on such a day.
She managed a smile and told him to go back to the King, who needed him more t
his morning.
After he left, she slowly drank her khav, listening to the growing noises outs
ide. Then she washed and dressed herself and went out of the tent into the ris
ing sun.
Two men of the King's Guard were waiting for her. They went wherever she did,
a discreet step or two behind, but not more than that. She would be guarded to
day, she knew. She looked for Brandin and saw Rhun first. They were both near
the front of the flattened ridge, both bare-headed, without armor, though with
identical swords belted at their sides. Brandin had chosen to dress today in
the simple brown of an ordinary soldier.
She was not fooled. None of them were, or could be.
Not long after that they saw him step alone toward the edge of his hill and ra
ise one hand above his head for all the men in both armies to see. Without a w
ord spoken, any warning at all, a dazzling blood-crimson flare of light sprang
from that upthrust hand like a flame into the deep blue of the sky. From belo
w they heard a roar of sound, as, crying their King's name aloud, Brandin's ou
tnumbered army moved forward across the valley to meet the soldiers of AJberic
o in a battle that had been coming for almost twenty years.
"Not yet," Alessan said steadily, for the fifth time, at least. "We have waite
d years, we must not be too soon now."
Devin had a sense that the Prince was cautioning himself more than anyone else
. The truth was that until Alessan gave the word there was nothing for them to
do but watch as men from Barbadior and Ygrath and the provinces of the Palm k
illed each other under the blazing Senzian sun.
It was noon or a little past it, by the sun. It was brutally hot. Devin tried
to grasp how the men below must feel, hacking and battering each other, slippi
ng on blood, treading the fallen in the broiling caldron of battle. They were
too high and far away to recognize anyone, but not so distant that they couldn
't see men die or hear their screams.
Their vantage point had been chosen by Alessan a week before with a sure predi
ction of where the two sorcerers would base themselves. And both had done exac
tly as he judged they would. From this sloping ridge less than half a mile sou
th of the higher, broader rise of land where Brandin was, Devin gazed down ove
r the valley and saw two armies knotted together in a pitiless sending of soul
s to Morian.
"The Ygrathen chose his field well," Sandre had said with an almost detached a
dmiration earlier that morning as the cries of horses and men began. "The plai
n is wide enough to allow him room to maneuver, but not so broad as to let the
Barbadians flank around him without serious trouble in the hills. They would
have to climb out of the valley, and then along the exposed slopes and back do
wn again." "And if you look, you will see," Ducas di Tregea had added, "that B
randin has most of his archers on his own right flank, toward the south, in ca
se they do try that. They could pick the Barbadians off like deer among the ol
ives on the slopes if they attempt to go around."
One contingent of Barbadians had, in fact, tried just that an hour ago. They h
ad been slaughtered and driven back by a rain of arrows from the archers of th
e Western Palm. Devin had felt a quick surge of excitement, but then that cong
ealed within him into turmoil and confusion. The Barbadians were tyranny, yes,
and all that it meant, yet how could he possibly exult in any kind of triumph
for Brandin of Ygrath?
But should he then desire the death of men of the Palm at the hands of Alberic
o's mercenaries? He didn't know what to think or feel. He felt as though his s
oul was being stripped raw and exposed here, laid out for burning under the Se
nzian sky.
Catriana was standing just ahead of him, next to the Prince. Devin didn't thin
k he'd seen them apart from each other since Erlein had brought her back from
the garden. He'd spent a disoriented, difficult hour the morning after that, s
truggling to adjust to the shining thing that had so clearly overtaken them. A
lessan had looked as he did when he made music, as if he'd found a hearthstone
in the world. When Devin had glanced over at Alais it was to find her watchin
g him with a curious, very private smile on her face; it left him even more co
nfused than before. He had a sense that he wasn't even keeping up with himself
, let alone with the changes around him. He also knew that there wasn't going
to be any time to deal with such things, not with what was coming to Senzio.
In the next two days, the armies had arrived from north and south bringing wit
h them a bone-deep awareness of destiny hanging before them all as if suspende
d on some balance scale of gods in the summer air.
On their ridge above the battle Devin looked back and saw Alais offering water
to Rinaldo in the partial shade of a twisted olive tree that clung to the slo
pe of their ridge. The Healer had insisted on coming with them instead of rema
ining hidden with Solinghi in town. If lives are at risk then my place is ther
e as well, was all he'd said, and he'd carried his eagle-headed staff up here
with all of them before sunrise.
Devin glanced beyond them to where Rovigo stood with Baerd. He should probably
be with those two, he knew. His own responsibility here was the same as their
s: to guard this hill if either sorcerer or both should send troops after them
. They had sixty men: Ducas's band, Rovigo's brave handful of mariners, and th
ose carefully chosen men who had made their solitary way north to Senzio in re
sponse to the messages scattered across the provinces. Sixty men. It would hav
e to be enough.
"Sandre! Ducas!" Alessan said sharply, snapping Devin out of reverie. "Look no
w, and tell me."
"I was about to," Sandre said with an emerging note of excitement in his voice
. "It is as we guessed: with his own presence on the hill Brandin is not outnu
mbered after all. His power is too much stronger than Alberico's. More so than
I guessed, even. If you are asking my reading right now, I would say that the
Ygrathen is on the edge of breaking through in the center before the hour is
out."
"Sooner than that," Ducas said in his deep voice. "When such things begin they
happen very fast."
Devin moved forward to see more clearly. The seething center of the valley was
as choked with men and horses as before, many of them dead and fallen. But if
he used the banners as his frame of reference, it seemed, even to his untutor
ed eye, that Brandin's men were pushing their front lines forward now, though
the Barbadians were still more numerous by far.
"How?" he muttered, almost to himself.
"He weakens them with his sorcery," a voice to his right said. He looked over
at Erlein. "The same way they conquered us years ago. I can feel Alberico tryi
ng to defend them, but I think Sandre has it right: the Barbadian is weakening
as we speak."
Baerd and Rovigo came quickly up from where they too had been looking down.
"Alessan?" Baerd said. Only the name, no more.
The Prince turned and looked at him. "I know," he said. "We were just thinking
the same thing. I think it is time. I think it has come." He held Baerd's gaz
e for another moment; neither of them spoke. Then Alessan looked away, past th
e friend of his life, to the three wizards.
"Erlein," he said softly. "You know what must be done."
"I do," said the Senzian. He hesitated. "Pray for the Triad's blessing upon th
e three of us. Upon all of us."
"Whatever you're going to do, you had better hurry," Ducas said bluntly. "The
Barbadian center is starting to give."
"We are in your hands," Alessan said to Erlein. He seemed about to say somethi
ng more, but did not. Erlein turned to Sandre and Sertino who had moved nearer
to him. All of the others stepped back a little, to leave the three of them a
lone.
"Link!" said Erlein di Senzio.
On the plain at the back of his army, but near to them and in their midst—bec
ause distance mattered in magic—Alberico of Barbadior had spent the morning w
ondering if the gods of the Empire had abandoned him at last. Even the dark-ho
rned god of sorcerers and the night-riding Queen on her Mare. His thoughts, su
ch thoughts as he could manage to coherently form under the ceaseless, mind-po
unding onslaught of the Ygrathen, were black with awareness of ruin; it seemed
to him as if there were ashes in his heart choking his throat.
It had seemed so simple once. All that would be needed were planning and patie
nce and discipline, and if he had any qualities, any virtues at all, they were
those. Twenty years worth of each of them here in the service of his long amb
ition.
But now as the merciless bronze sun reached its zenith and slipped past and be
gan its descent toward the sea, Alberico knew with finality that he had been r
ight at the first and wrong at the last. Winning the whole of the Palm had nev
er mattered, but losing it meant losing everything. Including his life. For th
ere was nowhere to run, or hide.
The Ygrathen was brutally, stupefyingly strong. He had known it, he had always
known it. Had feared the man not as a coward does, but as one who has taken t
he measure of something and knows exactly what it is.
At dawn, after that crimson beacon had flamed from Brandin's hand on his hill
in the west, Alberico had allowed himself to hope, even briefly to exult. He h
ad only to defend his men. His armies were almost three times as strong and th
ey were facing only a small number of the trained soldiers of Ygrath. The rest
of the army of the Western Palm was a flung-together melange of artisans and
traders, fishermen and farmers and scarcely bearded boys from the provinces.
He had only to blunt the thrust of Brandin's sorcery from the hill and let his
soldiers do their work. He had no need to push his own powers outward against
his foe. Only to resist. Only defend.
If only he could. For as the morning wore on and gathered heat to itself like
a smothering cloak, Alberico felt his mind-wall begin, by grudging, agonizing
degrees, to flatten and bend under the passionate, steady, numbing insistence
of Brandin's attack. Endlessly the Ygrathen's waves of fatigue and weakness fl
owed down from his hill upon the Barbadian army. Wave after wave after wave, t
ireless as the surf.
And Alberico had to block them, to absorb and screen those waves, so his soldi
ers could fight on, unafraid, unsapped in their courage and strength save by t
he sweltering heat of the sun—which was blazing down upon the enemy too.
Well before noon some of the Ygrathen's spell began to leak through. Alberico
couldn't hold it all. It just kept coming and coming, monotonous as rain or su
rf, without alteration in rhythm or degree. Simple power, hugely pouring forth
.
Soon—far too soon, too early in the day—the Barbadians began to feel as if t
hey were fighting uphill, even on a level plain, as if the sun actually was fi
ercer above their heads than on the men they fought, as if their confidence an
d courage were seeping away with the sweat that poured from them, soaking thro
ugh their clothing and armor.
Only the sheer weight of numbers kept them level, kept that Senzian plain in b
alance all morning long. His eyes closed, sitting in the great, canopied chair
they had brought for him, Alberico mopped at his face and hair continuously w
ith water-soaked cloths and he fought Brandin of Ygrath through that morning w
ith all his power and all the courage to which he could lay claim.
But shortly after noon, cursing himself, cursing the maggot-eaten soul of Scal
vaia d'Astibar who had so nearly killed him nine months ago—and who had weake
ned him enough, after all, to be killing him now—cursing his Emperor for livi
ng too long as a useless, senescent, emaciated shell, Alberico of Barbadior co
nfronted the bleak, pitiless reality that all his gods were indeed leaving him
here under the burning sun of this far-off land. As the messages began stream
ing back from the crumbling front ranks of his army, he began preparing himsel
f, in the way of his people, for death.
Then the miracle happened.
At first, his mind too punishingly battered, he couldn't even grasp what was t
aking place. Only that the colossal weight of magic pouring down from the hill
was suddenly, inexplicably, lightening. It was a fraction, a half of what it
had been only a moment before. Alberico could sustain it. Easily! That level o
f magic was less than his own, even weakened as he was now. He could even push
forward against that, instead of only defending. He could attack! If that was
all that Brandin had left, if the Ygrathen had suddenly reached the end of hi
s reserves . . .
Wildly mind-scanning the valley and the hills around for a clue, Alberico sudd
enly came upon the third matrix of magic, and abruptly realized—with a glory
flowering out of the morning's ashes in his heart—that the horned god was wit
h him yet after all, and the Night Queen in her riding.
There were wizards of the Palm here, and they were helping him! They hated the
Ygrathen as much as he! Somehow, for whatever incomprehensible reason, they w
ere on his side against the man who was King of Ygrath, whatever he might pret
end to call himself now.
"I am winning!" he shouted to his messengers. "Tell the captains at the front,
revive their spirits. Tell them I am beating the Ygrathen back!"
He heard sudden glad cries around him. Opened his eyes to see messengers sprin
ting forward across the valley. He reached out toward those wizards—four or f
ive, he judged, by their strength, perhaps six of them—seeking to merge with
their minds and their power.
But in that he was balked. He knew exactly where they were. He could even see
where they were—a ridge of land just south of the Ygrathen's hill—but they w
ould not let him join with them or know who they were. They must still be afra
id of what he did to wizards when he found them.
What he did to wizards? He would glory in them! He would give them land and we
alth and power, honor here and in Barbadior. Riches beyond their starved, pinc
hed dreams. They would see!
No matter that they did not open to him! It truly mattered not. So long as the
y stayed, and lent their powers to his defense there was no need to merge. Tog
ether they were a match for Brandin. And all they had to do was be a match: Al
berico knew he still had more than twice the army in the field that the other
had.
But even as hope was pouring back into his soul with these thoughts, he felt t
he weight beginning to return. Unbelievably, the Ygrathen's power growing agai
n. Frantically he checked: the wizards on their ridge were still with him. Yet
Brandin was still pushing forward. He was so strong! So accursedly, unimagina
bly strong. Even against all of them he was exerting his might, tapping deeper
into his wellspring of sorcery. How deep could he go? How much more did he ha
ve?
Alberico realized, the knowledge like ice amid the inferno of war, the savage
heat of the day, that he had no idea. None at all. Which left him only the one
course. The only one he'd ever had from the moment the battle had begun.
He closed his eyes again, the better to focus and concentrate, and he set hims
elf, with all the power in him, to resist again. To resist, to hold, to keep t
he wall intact.
"By the seven sisters of the god!" Rhamanus swore passionately. "They are rega
ining the ground they lost!"
"Something has happened," Brandin rasped in the same moment. They had erected
a canopy above him for shade and had brought a chair for him to sit upon. He w
as standing though—one hand on the back of the chair for support at times—th
e better to look down on the course of battle below.
Dianora was standing close to him, in case he needed her, for water or comfort
, for anything at all that she could give, but she was trying not to look down
. She didn't want to see any more men die. About the screaming in the valley s
he could do nothing though, and every cry below seemed to fly upward and sheat
h itself in her like a knife made of sound and human agony.
Had it been like this by the Deisa when her father died? Had he screamed so wi
th his own mortal wound, seeing his life's blood leave him, not to be held bac
k, staining the river red? Had he died in this kind of pain under the vengeful
blades of Brandin's men?
It was her own fault, this sickness rising. She should not be here. She should
have known what images war would unleash in her. She felt physically ill: fro
m the heat, the sounds, she could actually smell the carnage below.
"Something has happened," Brandin said again, and with his voice a clarity cam
e back into the maelstrom of the world. She was here and he was the reason why
, and if the others could not, Dianora who knew him so well, could hear a new
note in his voice, a marginal clue to the strain he was enduring. She walked q
uickly away and then back, a beaker of water in her hand and a cloth to wet hi
s brow.
He took the water, seeming almost oblivious to her presence, to the touch of t
he cloth. He closed his eyes, and then slowly turned his head from side to sid
e, as if blindly seeking something.
Then he opened his eyes again and pointed. "Over there, Rhamanus." Dianora fol
lowed his gaze. On a ridge of land south of them, across the uneven, tummocky
ground, a number of figures could be discerned.
"There are wizards there," Brandin said flatly. "Rhamanus, you'll have to take
the Guard after them. They are working with Alberico against me. I don't know
why. One of them looks like a Khardhu, but he isn't; I would recognize Khardh
un magic. There is something extremely odd about this."
His eyes were a dark, clouded grey.
"Can you match them, my lord?" It was d'Eymon, his tone deliberately neutral,
masking any hint of concern.
"I am about to try," Brandin said. "But I am getting near to the limit of the
power I can safely tap. And I can't turn my magic on them alone, they are work
ing with Alberico. Rhamanus, you'll have to get those wizards for me yourself.
Take everyone here."
Rhamanus's ruddy face was grim. "I will stop them or die, my lord. I swear it.
"
Dianora watched him step out from under the canopy and summon the men of the K
ing's Guard. In pairs they fell into step behind him and started quickly down
the goat-track leading west and south. Rhun took a couple of steps after them,
and then stopped, looking confused and uncertain.
She felt a touch and turned from the Fool as Brandin took her hand. "Trust me,
love," he murmured. "And trust Rhamanus." After a second he added, with what
was almost a smile: "He brought you to me."
Then he let her go and turned his attention back to the plain below. And now h
e did sit down in the chair. Watching, she could literally see him gather hims
elf to renew his assault.
She looked over at d'Eymon, then followed the Chancellor's narrowed, speculati
ve gaze south again, across to the cluster of people on that slope half a mile
away. They were near enough that she could see the dark-skinned figure Brandi
n said wasn't really a Khardhu. She thought she could make out a red-haired wo
man as well.
She had no idea who they were. But suddenly, for the first time, looking aroun
d at their own thinned-out numbers on the hill, she felt afraid.
"Here they come," Baerd said, looking north, a hand up to screen his eyes.
They had been waiting for this, and watching for it from the moment the wizard
s linked, but anticipation was not reality and, at the sight of the picked men
of Brandin's Guard moving swiftly down their hill and beginning to cross the
ground between, Devin's heart began thumping hard. There had been war all morn
ing in the valley below; now it was coming to them.
"How many?" Rovigo asked, and Devin was grateful to hear the tension in the me
rchant's voice: it meant he was not alone in what he was feeling now.
"Forty-nine, if he sent them all, and Alessan thought he would," Baerd replied
, not turning around. "That is always the number of the King's Guard in Ygrath
. It is sacred for them."
Rovigo said nothing. Devin glanced to his right and saw the three wizards stan
ding closely together. Erlein and Sertino had their eyes closed, but Sandre wa
s staring fixedly downwards to where Alberico of Barbadior was at the back of
his army. Alessan had been with the wizards but now he came quickly over to jo
in the thirty or so men spread out behind Baerd on the ridge.
"Ducas?" he asked quietly.
"I can't see any of them," Baerd said, with a quick glance at the Prince. The
last of the Ygrathen Guard had now descended their hill. The vanguard were alr
eady moving rapidly over the uneven ground between. "I still don't believe it.
"
"Let me take my men to meet them below," Ducas had urged Alessan, the moment t
he wizards had linked. "We know he will be coming after us."
"Of course we do," Alessan had said, "but we are poorly armed and trained. We
need the advantage of height up here."
"Speak for yourself," Ducas di Tregea had growled.
"There isn't any cover down there. Where could you hide?"
"You are telling me whether there is cover?" Ducas replied, feigning anger. Hi
s mouth widened in his wolfish grin. "Alessan, go teach your fingers to know y
our fingernails! I was fighting running battles and ambushes in this kind of t
errain while you were still numbering oak trees or some such thing in Quileia.
Leave this to me."
Alessan had not laughed. After a moment though, he nodded his head. Not waitin
g for more, red-bearded Ducas and his twenty-five men had immediately melted a
way down the slopes of their ridge. By the time the Ygrathens sent the Guard,
the outlaws were down below, hidden among the gorse and heather, the high gras
s and the scattered olive and fig trees in the ground between the hills.
Squinting, Devin thought he could see one of them, but he wasn't sure.
"In Marian's name/" Erlein di Senzio suddenly cried from the east end of the r
idge. "He is pushing us back again!"
"Then hold!" Sandre snarled. "Fight him! Go deeper!"
"I haven't got any deeper to go!" Sertino gasped.
Baerd leaped from his crouch staring at the three of them. He hesitated, visib
ly wracked by doubt for a moment, then he strode swiftly over to the wizards.

"Sandre, Erlein? Can you hear me?"
"Yes, of course." Sandre's darkened face was streaming with perspiration. He w
as still staring east, but his gaze was unfocused now, inward.
"Then do it! Do what we talked about. If he's pushing all of you back we have
to try or there is no point to any of this!"
"Baerd, they could be ..." Erlein's words came out one by one as if forced fro
m his lips.
"No, he's right!" Sertino gasped, cutting in. "Have to try. The man's . . . to
o strong. I'll follow you two . . . know where to reach. Do it!"
"Stay with me then," Erlein said, in a voice leeched of all strength. "Stay wi
th me, both of you."
There were sudden shouts and then screaming below them. Not from the battlefie
ld. From the ground to the north. All of them but the wizards wheeled around t
o see.
Ducas had sprung his trap. Firing from ambush his outlaws unleashed a score of
arrows at the Ygrathens, and then swiftly let fly as many more. Half a dozen,
eight, ten of their attackers fell, but the King's Guard of Ygrath were armor
ed against arrows even in the blazing heat, and most of them pushed on, reacti
ng with frightening agility despite the weight they carried, moving toward Duc
as's spread-out men.
Devin saw three of the downed men get up again. One pulled an arrow from his o
wn arm and stumbled resolutely on, pressing toward their ridge.
"Some of them will have bows. We have to cover the wizards," Alessan snapped.
"Any man with any kind of shield, over here!"
Half a dozen of the men remaining on the hill rushed over. Five had makeshift
shields of wood or leather, the sixth, a man of some fifty years, limped behin
d them on a twisted foot, carrying nothing but an ancient, battered sword.
"My lord Prince," he said, "my body is shield enough for them. Your father wou
ld not let me go north to the Deisa. Do not deny me now. Not again. I can stan
d between them and any arrows, in Tigana's name."
Devin saw the suddenly blank, frightened look on many of the faces near them:
a name had been spoken that they could not hear.
"Ricaso," Alessan began, looking around. "Ricaso, you need not . . . You shoul
dn't have even come here. There were other ways to . . ." The Prince stopped.
For a moment it looked as if he would refuse the man as his father had, but he
said nothing more, only nodded his head once and strode away. The lame man an
d the other five immediately placed themselves in a protective circle around t
he wizards.
"Spread out!" Alessan ordered the others. "Cover the north and the west sides
of the ridge. Catriana, Alais—keep your eyes on the south in case some of the
m make it around behind us. Shout if you see anything move!"
Sword in hand, Devin raced for the northwest edge of their hill. There were me
n fanning out all around him. He looked over as he ran, and caught his breath
in dismay. Ducas's men were in pitched battle on the uneven ground with the Yg
rathens, and though they were holding their own, taking a man, it seemed, for
every one of them that fell, that meant that they were falling. The Ygrathens
were quick and superbly trained and ferociously determined. Devin saw their le
ader, a big man no longer young, hurl himself against one of the outlaws and h
ammer the man flat to the ground with a blow of his shield.
"Naddo! Look out!"
A scream, not a shout. Baerd's voice. Wheeling, Devin saw why.
Halfway to the other hill, Naddo had just beaten back an Ygrathen, and was con
tinuing a fighting withdrawal toward a clump of bushes where Arkin and two oth
ers were. What he didn't see was the man who had flanked wide to the east and
was now rushing toward him from behind.
What the running Ygrathen didn't see was the arrow that hit him, fired from th
e summit of the ridge by Baerd di Tigana with all the strength of his arm and
the skill of a lifelong discipline. Far away, unbelievably far, the Ygrathen g
runted and fell, an arrow in his thigh. Naddo whirled at the sound, saw the ma
n, and dispatched him with a quick sword.
He looked up at the ridge, saw Baerd, and quickly waved his thanks. He was sti
ll waving, hand aloft in salute to the friend he had left as a boy, when an Yg
rathen arrow took him in the chest.
"No!" Devin cried out, a fist of grief clenching about his throat. He looked t
oward Baerd, whose eyes had gone wide with shock. Just as Devin took a step to
wards him he heard a quick scrabbling sound and a grunt, and behind him Alais
screamed, "Look out!"
He turned back just in time to see the first of half a dozen Ygrathens surging
up the slope. He had no idea how they'd got here so fast. He howled a second
warning for the others and rushed forward to engage the first man before he ga
ined the summit of the ridge.
He didn't make it. The Ygrathen was up and balanced, with a shield in his left
hand. Charging at him, trying to drive the man backward down the slope, Devin
swung his sword as hard as he could. It clanged on the metal shield sending s
hock waves all along his arm. The Ygrathen thrust straight ahead with his own
blade. Devin saw it coming and twisted desperately to one side. He felt a sudd
en tearing pain as the sword ripped him above the waist.
He let himself drop, ignoring the wound, and as he fell forward he chopped vic
iously for the unprotected back of the Ygrathen's knee. He felt his sword bite
deep into flesh. The man cried out and pitched helplessly forward, trying, ev
en as he tumbled, to bring his own blade down on Devin again. Devin rolled fra
ntically away, dizzy with pain. He clawed to his feet, clutching his ripped si
de.
In time to see the prone Ygrathen killed by Alais bren Rovigo with a clean swo
rdthrust in the back of his neck.
It seemed to Devin that he knew a moment of almost hallucinatory stillness the
n in the midst of carnage. He looked at Alais, at her clear, mild, blue eyes.
He tried to speak. His throat was dry. Their gazes locked for a second. It was
hard for Devin to absorb, to understand this image of her with a reddened swo
rd in her hand.
He looked past her, and instantly the stillness was gone, shattered. Fifteen,
perhaps twenty of the Ygrathens were up on the summit. More were coming. And s
ome of them did have bows. He saw an arrow fly, to be embedded in one of the s
hields around the wizards. There was a sound of quick footsteps ascending the
slope to his left. No time to speak, even if he could have. They were here to
die if they had to, it had always been possible. There was a reason why they h
ad come. There was a dream, a prayer, a tune his father had taught him as a ch
ild. He held his left hand tightly to his wound and turned from Alais, stumbli
ng forward, gripping his sword, to meet the next man scrambling up the ridge.

A mild day, the sun in and out of the clouds pushed swiftly along by the breez
e. In the morning they had walked in the meadows north of the castle gathering
flowers, armfuls of them. Irises, anemones, bluebells. The sejoia trees were
just coming into flower now this far south; they left the white blossoms for l
ater in the season.
They were back in Castle Borso drinking mahgoti tea just past midday when Elen
a abruptly made a small, frightened sound. She stood up rigidly straight, her
hands clutching at her head. Her tea spilled unregarded, staining the Quileian
carpet.
Alienor quickly laid her own cup down. "It has come?" she said. "The summons?
Elena, what can I do?"
Elena shook her head. She could scarcely hear the other woman's words. There w
as a clearer, harder, more compelling voice in her head. Something that had ne
ver happened before, not even on the Ember Nights. But Baerd had been right, h
er stranger who had come to them out of darkness and changed the shape of the
Ember wars.
He had returned to the village late in the day that followed, after his friend
s had come down from the pass and ridden west. He had spoken to Donar and Matt
io and to Carenna and Elena and said that what the Night Walkers shared had to
be a kind of magic, if not the same as wizardry. Their bodies changed in the
Ember Nights, they walked under a green moon through lands that were not there
by the light of day, they wielded swords of growing corn that altered under t
heir hands. They were wedded in their own fashion, he had said, to the magic o
f the Palm.
And Donar had agreed that this was so. So Baerd had told them, carefully, what
his purpose was, and that of his friends, and he'd asked Elena to come to Cas
tle Borso until summer's end. In case, he'd said, in case it was possible for
their power to be tapped in this cause.
Would they do this? There would be danger. He had asked it diffidently, but th
ere had been no hesitation in Elena as she looked into his eyes and answered t
hat she would. Nor in the others when they agreed. He had come to them in thei
r own need. They owed him at least this much, and more. And they too were livi
ng through tyranny in their own land. His cause in the daylight was their own.

Elena di Certando? Are you there? Are you in the castle?
She didn't know this mind-voice, but within its clarity she could sense a desp
eration; there seemed to be chaos all around him.
Yes. Yes, I am, I'm here. What . . . what must I do?
I don't believe it! A second voice joined them, deeper, as imperative. Erlein,
you have reached her!
Is Baerd there? she asked, a little desperately herself. The sudden link was d
izzying, and the sense of tumult all around; she swayed, almost fell. She reac
hed out and put both her hands on the high back of a chair. The room in Castle
Borso was beginning to fade for her. Had Alienor spoken now she would not hav
e even heard.
He is, the first man said quickly. He is here with us and we have terrible nee
d of help. We are at wart Can you link to your friends? To the others? We will
help you. Please! Reach for them!
She had never tried such a thing, not by daylight nor even under the green moo
n of the Ember Nights. She had never known anything like this wizards' link, b
ut she felt their power resting in her, and she knew where Mattio would be, an
d Donar; and Carenna would be at home with her newest child. She closed her ey
es and reached out for the three of them, straining to focus her mind on the f
orge, the mill, Carenna's house in the village. To focus, and then to call. To
summon.
Elena, what . . . ? Mattio. She had him.
Join me! she sent quickly. The wizards are here. There is war.
He asked no more questions. She could feel his steadying presence in her mind
as the wizards helped her open to him. She registered his own sudden, disorien
ted shock at the link to the other men. Two of them, no three, there was a thi
rd one there as well.
Elena, has it come? Have they sent? Donar in her mind, seizing at truth like a
weapon to his hand.
I am here, love! Carenna's mind-voice, quick and bright, exactly the same as h
er speech. Elena, what must we do?
Hold to each other and open to us! the deep presence of the second wizard was
there to answer. We may now have a chance. There is danger, I will not lie, bu
t if we hold together—for once in this peninsula —we may yet break through!
Come, join us, we must forge our minds into a shield. I am Sandre d'Astibar an
d I never died. Come to us now!
Elena opened her mind to him, and reached out. And in that moment she felt as
though her own body was entirely gone, as if she were no more than a conduit,
like and yet very unlike what happened on the Ember Nights. A clammy fear of t
his unknown thing rose in her. Defiantly she fought it back. Her friends were
with her, and— unbelievably—the Duke of Astibar was there, and alive, and Ba
erd was with him in far-off Senzio, battling against the Tyrants.
He had come to them, to her, in their own war. She had heard him weep and had
lain with him in love on a hill in the Ember dark after the green moon had set
. She would not fail him now. She would lead the Carlozzini to him along the p
athway of her mind and her soul.
Without warning they broke through. The link was forged. She was in a high pla
ce under a fiercely blazing sun, seeing with the eyes of the Duke of Astibar o
n a hill in Senzio. The vision rocked with stomach-churning dislocation. Then
it steadied and Elena saw men killing each other in a valley below, armies gra
ppling together in the heat like beasts in a convulsive embrace. She heard scr
eaming so loud she felt the sound as pain. Then she became aware of something
else.
Sorcery. North of them, that hill. Brandin of Ygrath. And in that moment Elena
and the three other Night Walkers understood why they had been summoned, feel
ing in their own minds the punishing weight of the assault they had to resist.

Back in Castle Borso, Alienor stood by, helpless and blind in her uncertainty,
understanding nothing of this at all, only knowing that it was happening, tha
t it was upon them at last. She wanted to pray, to reach back toward words not
thought or spoken in almost twenty years. She saw Elena bring her hands up to
cover her face.
"Oh no," she heard the girl whisper in a voice thin as old parchment. "So stro
ng! How can one man be so strong?"
Alienor's hands gripped each other so tightly the knuckles were white. She wai
ted, desperately seeking a clue to what was happening to all of them, so far t
o the north where she could not go.
She did not, could not hear Sandre d'Astibar's reply to Elena: He is strong ye
s, but with you we will be stronger! Oh, children, we can do it now! In the na
me of the Palm, together we can be strong
enough!
What Alienor did see was how Elena's hands came down, how her white face grew
calm, the wild, primitive terror leaving her staring eyes.
"Yes," she heard the other woman whisper. "Yes."
Then there was silence in that room in Castle Borso under the Braccio Pass. Ou
tside, the cool wind of the highlands blew the high white clouds across the su
n and away, and across it and away, and a
single hunting hawk hovered on motionless wings in that passing of light and s
hadow over the face of the mountains.
In fact, the next man scrabbling up the slope of the cliff was Ducas di Tregea
. Devin had actually begun to swing his sword before he recognized who it was.

Ducas reached the summit in two hard, churning strides and stood beside him. H
e was a fearful sight. His face was covered in blood, dripping down into his b
eard. There was blood all over him, and wet on his sword. He was smiling thoug
h, a terrible red look of battle-lust and rage.
"You are hurt!" he said sharply to Devin.
"I wouldn't talk," Devin grunted, pressing his left hand to his torn side. "Co
me on!"
Quickly they turned back east. More than fifteen of the Ygrathens were still o
n their summit, pressing forward against the untrained band of men Alessan had
kept back to defend the wizards. The numbers were almost even, but the Ygrath
ens were the picked and deadly warriors of that realm.
Even so, even with this, they were not getting through. And they would not, De
vin realized with a surge of exultation in his heart, rising high over pain an
d grief.
They would not, because facing them, side by side, swinging blades together in
their longed-for battle after all the long waiting years that had run by, wer
e Alessan, Prince of Tigana, and Baerd bar Saevar, the only brother of his sou
l, and the two of them were absolute and deadly, and even beautiful, if killin
g could be so.
Devin and Ducas rushed over. But by the time they got there five Ygrathens onl
y were left, then three. Then only two. One of them made as if to lay down his
sword. Before he could do so, a figure moved forward with an awkward, decepti
ve swiftness from the ring guarding the wizards. Dragging his lame foot, Ricas
o came up to the Ygrathen. Before anyone could stay him he swung his old, half
-rusted blade in a passionate, scything arc, cleaving through the links in arm
or to bury itself in the man's breast.
Then he fell to his knees on the ground beside the soldier he'd killed, weepin
g as though his soul was pouring out of him.
Which left one of them only. And the last was the leader, the large, broad-che
sted man Devin had seen down below. The man's hair was plastered flat to his h
ead, he was red-faced with heat and exhaustion, sucking hard for breath, but h
is eyes glared at Alessan.
"Are you fools?" he gasped. "Fighting for the Barbadian? Instead of with a man
who has joined the Palm? Do you want to be slaves?"
Slowly Alessan shook his head. "It is twenty years too late for Brandin of Ygr
ath to join the Palm. It was too late the day he landed here with an invading
force. You are a brave man. I would prefer not to kill you. Will you give us a
n oath in your own name and lay down your sword in surrender?"
Beside Devin, Ducas snarled angrily. But before the Tregean could speak, the Y
grathen said: "My name is Rhamanus. I offer it to you in pride, for no dishono
r has ever attached to that name. You will have no oath from me though. I swor
e one to the King I love before I led his Guard here. I told him I would stop
you or die. It is an oath I will keep."
He raised his sword toward Alessan, and gestured—though not seriously, Devin
realized afterwards—to strike at the Prince. Alessan did not even move to war
d the blow. It was Baerd whose blade came up and then swept downward to bite w
ith finality into the neck of the Ygrathen, driving him to the ground.
"Oh, my King," they heard the man say then, thickly, through the blood rising
in his mouth. "Oh, Brandin, I am so sorry."
Then he rolled over on his back and lay still, his sightless eyes staring stra
ight at the burning sun.
The sun had been burning hot as well, the morning he had defied the Governor a
nd taken a young serving-girl for tribute down the river from Stevanien, so ma
ny years ago.
Dianora saw a man raise his sword on that hill. She turned her head away so sh
e would not see Rhamanus die. There was an ache in her, a growing void; she fe
lt as if all the chasms of her life were opening in the ground before her feet
. He had been an enemy, the man who had seized her to be a slave. Sent to clai
m tribute for Brandin, he had burned villages and homes in Corte and Asoli. He
had been an Ygrathen. Had sailed to the Palm in the invading fleet, had fough
t in the last battle by the Deisa.
He had been her friend.
One of her only friends. Brave and decent and loyal all his life to his King.
Kind and direct, ill-at-ease in a subtle court . . . Dianora realized that she
was weeping for him, for the good life cloven like a tree by that stranger's
descending sword.
"They have failed, my lord." It was d'Eymon, his voice actually showing—or wa
s she imagining it?—the faintest hint of emotion. Of sorrow. "All of the Guar
ds are down, and Rhamanus. The wizards are still there."
From his chair under the canopy Brandin opened his eyes. His gaze was fixed on
the valley below and he did not turn. Dianora saw that his face was chalk-whi
te now with strain, even in the red heat of the day. She wiped quickly at her
tears: he must not see her thus if he should chance to look. He might need her
, whatever strength or love she had to give. He must not be distracted with co
ncern for her. He was one man alone, fighting so many.
And more, in fact, than she even knew. For the wizards had reached the Night W
alkers in Certando by now. They were linked, and they were all bending the pow
er of their minds to Alberico's defense.
From the plain below there came a roar, even above the steady noise of battle.
Cheering and wild shouts from the Barbadians. Dianora could see their white-c
lad messengers sprinting forward from the rear where Alberico was. She saw tha
t the men of the Western Palm had been stopped in their advance. They were sti
ll outnumbered; terribly so. If Brandin could not help them now then all was d
one, all over. She looked south toward that hill where the wizards were, where
Rhamanus had been cut down. She wanted to curse them all, but she could not.

They were men of the Palm. They were her own people. But her own people were d
ying in the valley as well, under the heavy blades of the Empire. The sun was
a brand overhead. The sky a blank, pitiless dome.
She looked at d'Eymon. Neither of them spoke. They heard quick footsteps on th
e slope. Scelto stumbled up, fighting for breath.
"My lord," he gasped, dropping to his knees beside Brandin's chair, "we are ha
rd-pressed ... in the center and on the right. The left is holding . . . but b
arely. I am ordered ... to ask if you want us to fall back."
And so it had come.
I hate that man, he had said to her last night, before falling asleep in utter
weariness. / hate everything he stands for.
There was a silence on the hill. It seemed to Dianora as if she could hear her
own heartbeat with some curious faculty of the ear, discerning it even above
the sounds from below. The noises in the valley seemed, oddly, to have receded
now. To be growing fainter every second.
Brandin stood up.
"No," he said quietly. "We do not fall back. There is nowhere to retreat, and
not before the Barbadian. Not ever." He was gazing bleakly out over Scelto's k
neeling form, as if he would penetrate the distance with his eyes to strike at
Alberico's heart.
But there was something else in him now: something new, beyond rage, beyond th
e grimness of resolution and the everlasting pride. Dianora sensed it, but she
could not understand. Then he turned to her and she saw in the depths of that
grey gaze a bottomless well of pain opening up such as she had never seen in
him. Never seen in anyone, in all her days. Pity and grief and love, he had sa
id last night. Something was happening; her heart was racing wildly. She felt
her hands beginning to shake.
"My love," Brandin said. Mumbled, slurred it. She saw death in his eyes, an ab
scess of loss that seemed to be leaving him almost blind, stripping his soul.
"Oh, my love," he said again. "What have they done? See what they will make me
do. Oh, see what they make me do!"
"Brandin!" she cried, terrified, not understanding at all. Beginning again to
weep, frantically. Grasping only the open sore of hurt he had become. She reac
hed out toward him, but he was blind, and already turning away, east, toward t
he rim of the hill and the valley below.
"All right," said Rinaldo the Healer, and lifted his hands away. Devin opened
his eyes and looked down. His wound had closed; the bleeding had stopped. The
sight of it made him feel queasy; the unnatural speed of the healing, as if hi
s senses still expected to find a fresh wound there. "You are going to have an
easy scar for women to know you by in the dark," Rinaldo added drily. Ducas g
ave a bark of laughter.
Devin winced and carefully avoided meeting Alais's eye. She was right beside h
im, wrapping a roll of linen around his torso to bind the wound. He looked at
Ducas instead, whose own cut above his eye had been closed by Rinaldo in the s
ame way. Arkin, who had also survived the skirmish down below, was bandaging i
t. Ducas, his red beard matted and sticky with blood, looked like some fearful
creature out of childhood night terrors.
"Is that too tight?" Alais asked softly.
Devin drew a testing breath and shook his head. The wound hurt, but he seemed
to be all right.
"You saved my life," he murmured to her. She was behind him now, tying up the
ends of his bandage. Her hands stopped for a moment and then resumed.
"No I didn't," she said in a muffled voice. "He was down. He couldn't have hur
t you. All I did was kill a man." Catriana, standing near them, glanced over.
"I ... I wish I hadn't," Alais said- And began to cry.
Devin swallowed and tried to turn, to offer comfort, but Catriana was quicker
than he, and had already gathered Alais in her arms. He looked at them, wonder
ing bitterly what real comfort there could be to offer on this bare ridge in t
he midst of war.
"Erleinl Now! Brandin is standing!" Alessan's cry knifed through all other sou
nds. His heart suddenly thumping again, Devin went quickly toward the Prince a
nd the wizards.
"It is upon us then," said Erlein, in a hard, flat voice to the other two. "I
will have to pull out now, to track him. Wait for my signal, but move when I g
ive it!"
"We will," Sertino gasped. "Triad save us all." Sweat was pouring down the pud
gy wizard's face. His hands were shaking with strain.
"Erlein," Alessan began urgently, "He must use it all. You know what you—"
"Hush! I know exactly what I must do. Alessan, you have set this in motion, yo
u brought us all here to Senzio, every single person, the living and the dead.
Now it is up to us. Be still, unless you want to pray."
Devin looked north to Brandin's hill. He saw the King step forward from under
his canopy.
"Oh, Triad," he heard Alessan whisper then in a queerly high voice. "Adaon, re
member us. Remember your children now!" The Prince sank to his knees. "Please,
" he whispered again. "Please, let me have been right!"
On his hill to the north of them Brandin of Ygrath stretched forth one hand an
d then the other under the burning sun.
Dianora saw him move forward to the very edge of the hill, out from the canopy
into the white blaze of the light. Scelto scrambled away. Beneath them the ar
mies of the Western Palm were being hammered back now, center and left and rig
ht. The cries of the Barbadians had taken on a quality of triumphant malice th
at fell like blows upon the heart.
Brandin lifted his right hand and leveled it ahead. Then he brought up his lef
t beside it so that the palms were touching each other, the ten fingers pointi
ng together. Pointing straight to where Alberico of Barbadior was, at the rear
of his army.
And Brandin of the Western Palm, who had been the King of Ygrath when he first
came to this peninsula, cried aloud then, in a voice that seemed to flay and
shred the very air:
"Oh, my son! Stevan, forgive me what I do!"
Dianora stopped breathing. She thought she was going to fall. She reached out
a hand for support and didn't even realize it was d'Eymon who braced her.
Then Brandin spoke again, in a voice colder than she had ever heard him use, w
ords none of them could understand. Only the sorcerer down in the valley would
know, only he could grasp the enormity of what was happening.
She saw Brandin spread his legs, as if to brace himself. Then she saw what fol
lowed.
"Now!" Erlein di Senzio screamed. "Both of you! Get the others out! Cut free n
ow!"
"They're loose!" Sertino cried. "I'm out!" He collapsed in a heap to the groun
d as if he might never rise again.
Something was happening on the other hill. In the middle of day, under the bri
lliant sun, the sky seemed to be changing, to be darkening where Brandin stood
. Something—not smoke, not light, some kind of change in the very nature of t
he air—seemed to be pouring from his hands, boiling east and down, disorienti
ng to the eye, blurred, unnatural, like a rushing doom.
Erlein suddenly turned his head, his eyes widening with horror.
"Sandre, what are you doing?" he shrieked, grabbing wildly at the Duke. "Get o
ut, you fool! In Eanna's name, get out!"
"Not . . . yet," said Sandre d'Astibar, in a voice that carried its own full m
easure of doom.
There had been more of them. Four more coming to his aid. Not wizards now, a d
ifferent kind of magic of the Palm, one he hadn't even known about, didn't und
erstand. But it didn't matter. They were here and on his side, if screened fro
m his mind, and with them, with all of them bending their power to his defense
, he had even been able to reach out, and forward, to assert his own strength
against the enemy.
Who were falling back! There was glory after all under the sun, and hope, more
than hope, a glittering vista of triumph spreading in the valley before him,
a pathway made smooth with the blood of his foes, leading straight from here b
ack across the sea and home to the Tiara.
He would bless these wizards, honor them! Make them lords of unimagined power,
here in this colony or in Barbadior. Wherever they wanted, whatever they chos
e. And thinking so, Alberico had felt his own magic flow like intoxicating win
e in his veins and had sent it pouring forth against the Ygrathens and the men
of the Western Palm, and his armies had laughed aloud in triumph and felt the
ir swords to be suddenly as light as summer grass.
He heard them beginning to sing, the old battle-song of the Empire's legions,
conquering in far lands centuries ago. And they were! It was happening again.
They weren't just mercenaries; they were the Empire's legions, for he was, or
would be, the Empire. He could see it. It was here, it was shining before him
in the blazing day.
Then Brandin of Ygrath rose and stepped to the rim of his hill. A distant figu
re alone under the sun in that high place. And a moment later, Alberico, who w
as a sorcerer himself, felt, for he could not have actually heard, the dark, a
bsolute words of invocation that Brandin spoke, and his blood froze in his vei
ns like ice in the dead of a winter night.
"He cannot," he gasped aloud. "Not after so long! He cannot do this!"
But the Ygrathen was. He was reaching for all, summoning everything, every las
t scintilla of his magic, holding nothing back. Nothing, not even the power th
at had sustained the vengeance that had kept him here all these years. He was
emptying himself to shape a sorcery such as had never been wielded before.
Desperately, still half disbelieving, Alberico reached out for the wizards. To
tell them to brace, to be ready. Crying that there were eight of them, nine,
that they could hold against this. That all they had to do was survive this mo
ment and Brandin would be nothing, a shell. Waste, for weeks, months, years! A
hollow man with no magic in him anymore.
Their minds were closed, barred against him. They were still there though, and
defending, braced. Oh, if the horned god and the Night Queen were with him! I
f they were with him yet, he might still . . .
They were not. They were not with him.
For in that instant Alberico felt the wizards of the Palm cut loose, melting a
way without warning, with terrifying suddenness, to leave him naked and alone.
On the hill Brandin had now leveled his hands and from them came blue-grey de
ath, an occluding, obliterating presence in the air, foaming and boiling down
across the valley toward him.
And the wizards were gone! He was alone.
Or almost gone, almost alone. One man was still linked, one of them had held w
ith him! And then that one mind opened up to Alberico like the locked door of
a dungeon springing back, letting light flood in.
The light of truth. And in that moment Alberico of Barbadior screamed aloud in
terror and helpless rage, for illumination came at last and he understood, to
o late, how he had been undone, and by whom destroyed.
In the name of my sons I curse you forever, said Sandre, Duke of Astibar, his
remorseless image rising in Alberico's mind like an apparition of horror from
the afterworld. But he was alive. Impossibly alive, and here in Senzio on that
ridge, with eyes implacable and utterly merciless. He bared his teeth in a sm
ile that summoned the night. In the name of my children and of Astibar, die no
w, forever cursed.
Then he cut free, he too was gone, as that blue-grey death came boiling down t
he valley from Brandin's hill, from his outstretched hands, with blurred, anni
hilating speed, and Alberico, still reeling with shock, clawing frantically up
ward from his chair, was struck and enveloped and consumed by that death, as a
tidal wave of the raging, engorged sea will take a sapling in low-lying field
s.
It swept him away with it and sundered his body, still screaming, from his sou
l, and he died. Died in that far Peninsula of the Palm two days before his Emp
eror passed to the gods in Barbadior, failing at last one morning to wake from
a dreamless sleep.
Alberico's army heard his last scream, and their own cries of exultation turne
d to panic-stricken horror; in the face of that magic from the hill the Barbad
ians felt a fear such as men should never have had to endure sweep over them.
They could scarcely grip their swords, or flee, or even stand upright before t
heir foes who advanced untouched, unharmed, exalted, under that dread, sun-bli
ghting sorcery, and began to carve and hew them with hard and deadly wrath.
Everything, thought Brandin of Ygrath, of the Western Palm, weeping helplessly
on his hill as he looked down over the valley. He had been driven to this and
had answered, had summoned all he had ever had to this final purpose, and it
was enough. It was sufficient and nothing less would have been. There had been
too much magic opposed to him, and death had been waiting for his people here
.
He knew what he had been made to do, knew the price of holding nothing back. H
e had paid that price and was paying it now, would go on doing so with every b
reath he drew until he died. He had screamed Stevan's name, aloud and in the e
choing chambers of his soul, before the summoning of that power. Had known tha
t twenty years of vengeance for that too-soon shattered life were now undone u
nder this bronze sun. Nothing held back. It was over.
There had been men dying below him though, fighting under his banner, in his n
ame, and there had been no retreat for them from that plain. Nor for him. He c
ould not retreat. He had been driven to this moment, like a bear to a rocky cl
iff by a pack of wolves, and the price was being paid now. Everywhere the pric
e was being paid. There was butchery in the valley; a slaughter of Barbadians.
His heart was crying. He was a grieving, torn thing, all the memories of love
, of a father's loss flooding over him, another kind of tidal wave. Stevan.
He wept, adrift in an ocean of loss, far from any shore. He was aware, dimly,
of Dianora beside him, clutching his hands between her own, but he was lost in
side his pain, power gone now, the core of his being shattered into fragments,
shards, a man no longer young, trying without any hope at all, to conceive of
how to shape a life that could possibly go forward from this hill.
Then the next thing happened. For he had, in fact, forgotten something. Someth
ing he alone could possibly have known.
And so time, which truly would not stop, for grief or pity or love, carried th
em all forward to the moment no sorcerer or wizard or piper on his ridge had f
oreseen.
The weight had been the weight of mountains crushing his mind. Carefully, exqu
isitely judged to leave him that faintest spark of self-awareness, which was w
here the purest torture lay. That he might always know exactly who he was and
had been, and what he was being made to do, utterly unable to control himself.
Pressed flat under the burden of mountains.
Which now were gone. He straightened his back, of his own will. He turned east
. Of his own will. He tried to lift his head higher but could not. He understo
od: too many years in the same skewed, sunken position. They had broken the bo
nes of his shoulder several times, carefully. He knew what he looked like, wha
t they had turned him into in that darkness long ago. He had seen himself in m
irrors through the years, and in the mirrors of others' eyes. He knew exactly
what had been done to his body before they started on his mind.
That didn't matter now. The mountains were gone. He looked out with his own si
ght, reached back with his own memories, could speak, if he wished to speak, w
ith his own thoughts, his own voice, however much it had changed.
What Rhun did was draw his sword.
Of course he had a sword. He carried whatever weapon Brandin did, was given ea
ch day the clothing the King had chosen; he was the vent, the conduit, the dou
ble, the Fool.
He was more than that. He knew exactly how much more. Brandin had left him tha
t delicately measured scrap of awareness at the very bottom of his mind, under
the burying, piled-up mountains. That had been the whole point, the essence o
f everything; that and the secrecy, the fact that only they two knew and only
they would ever know.
The men who had maimed and disfigured him had been blind, working on him in th
eir darkness, knowing him only by the insistent probing of their hands upon hi
s flesh, reaching through to bone. They had never learned who he was. Only Bra
ndin knew, only Brandin and he himself, with that dim flickering of his identi
ty so carefully left behind after everything else was gone. It had been so ele
gantly contrived, this answer to what he had done, this response to grief and
rage. This vengeance.
No one living other than Brandin of Ygrath knew his true name and under the we
ight of mountains he had had no tongue to speak it himself, only a heart to cr
y for what was being done to him. The exquisite perfection of it, of that reve
nge.
But the mountains that had buried him were gone.
And on that thought, Valentin, Prince of Tigana, lifted his sword on a hill in
Senzio.
His mind was his own, his memories: of a room without light, black as pitch, t
he voice of the Ygrathen King, weeping, telling what was being done to Tigana
even as they spoke, and what would be done to him in the months and the years
to come.
A mutilated body, his own features sorcerously imposed upon it, was death-whee
led in Chiara later that week then burned to ash and scattered to the winds.
In the black room the blind men began their work. He remembered trying not to
scream at first. He remembered screaming. Much later Brandin came and began an
d ended his own part of that careful patient work. A torture of a different ki
nd; much worse. The weight of mountains in his mind.
Late in that same year the King's Fool from Ygrath died of a misadventure in t
he newly occupied Palace of Chiara. And shortly afterwards, Rhun, with his wea
k, blinking eyes, his deformed shoulder and slack mouth, his nearly crippled w
alk, was brought shambling up from his darkness into twenty years of night.
It was very bright here now, almost blindingly so in the sunlight. Brandin was
just ahead of him. The girl was holding his hand.
The girl. The girl was Saevar's daughter.
He had known her the moment she was first brought to be presented to the King.
She had changed in five years, greatly changed, and she would change much mor
e as the years spun past, but her eyes were her father's, exactly, and Valenti
n had watched Dianora grow up. When he had heard her named, that first day, as
a woman from Cer-tando, the dim, allowed spark of his mind had flickered and
burned, for he knew, he knew what she had come to do.
Then, as the months passed and the years, he watched helplessly with his rheum
y eyes from under the crush of his mountains, as the terrible interwovenness o
f things added love to everything else. He was bound to Brandin unimaginably a
nd he saw what happened. More, he was made to be a part of it, by the very nat
ure of the relationship between the Kings and the Fools of Ygrath.
It was he who first gave expression—beyond his control, he had no control—to
what was growing in the heart of the King. Back in a time when Brandin still
refused to admit even the idea of love into a soul and a life shaped by vengea
nce and loss it was Rhun—Valentin— who would find himself staring at Dianora
, at Saevar's dark-haired daughter, with another man's soul in his eyes.
No more, not ever again. The long night had been rolled back. The sorcery that
had bound him was gone. It was over; he stood in sunlight and could speak his
true name if he chose. He took an awkward step forward and then, more careful
ly, another. No one noticed him though. They never noticed him. He was the Foo
l. Rhun. Even that name, chosen by the King. Only the two of them ever to know
. Not for the world, this. The privacy of pride. He had even understood. Perha
ps the most terrible thing of all: he had understood.
He stepped under the canopy. Brandin was ahead of him near the edge of the hil
l. He had never struck a man from behind in all his days. He moved to one side
, stumbling a little, and came up on the King's right hand. No one looked at h
im. He was Rhun.
He was not.
"You should have killed me by the river," he said, very clearly. Slowly, Brand
in turned his head, as if just now remembering something. Valentin waited unti
l their eyes met and held before he drove his sword into the Ygrathen's heart,
the way a Prince killed his enemies, however many years it might take, howeve
r much might have to be endured before such an ending was allowed.
Dianora could not even scream she was so stunned, so unprepared. She saw Brand
in stagger backward, a blade in his chest. Then Rhun— Rhun!—jerked it clumsi
ly free and so much blood followed. Brandin's eyes were wide with astonishment
and pain, but they were clear, so luminously clear. And so was his voice as s
he heard him say:
"Both of us?" He swayed, still on his feet. "Father and son, both? What a harv
est. Prince of Tigana."
Dianora heard the name as a white burst of sound in her brain. Time seemed to
change, to slow unbearably. She saw Brandin sinking to his knees; it seemed to
take forever for him to fall. She tried to move toward him; her body would no
t respond. She heard an elongated, weirdly distorted sound of anguish, and saw
stark agony in d'Eymon's face as the Chancellor's blade ripped into and throu
gh Rhun's side.
Not Rhun. Not Rhun. Valentin the Prince.
Brandin's Fool. All those years. The thing that had been done to him! And she
beside him, beside that suffering. All those years. She wanted to scream. She
could not make a sound, could scarcely breathe.
She saw him falling too, the maimed, broken form crumpling to the ground besid
e Brandin. Who was still on his knees, a red wound in his chest. And who was l
ooking at her now, only at her. A sound finally escaped her lips as she sank d
own beside him. He reached out, so slowly, with such a colossal effort of will
, with all the control he had, and he took her hand.
"Oh, love," she heard him say. "It is as I told you. We should have met in Fin
avir."
She tried again to speak, to answer him, but tears were streaming down her fac
e and closing her throat. She gripped his hand as tightly as she could, trying
to will life from herself over into him. He slumped sideways against her shou
lder, and so she lowered him to her lap and wrapped her arms around him, the w
ay she had last night, only last night when he slept. She saw the brilliantly
clear grey eyes slowly grow cloudy, and then dark. She was holding him like th
at when he died.
She lifted her head. The Prince of Tigana, on the ground beside them, was look
ing at her with so much compassion in his newly clear eyes. Which was a thing
she could not possibly endure. Not from him: not with what he had suffered and
what she was, what she herself had done. If he only knew, what words would he
have for her, what look would there be in those eyes? She could not bear it.
She saw him open his mouth as if to speak, then his eyes flicked quickly to on
e side.
A shadow crossed the sun. She looked up and saw d'Eymon's sword lifted high. V
alentin raised a hand, pleading, to ward it.
"Wait!" she gasped, forcing the one word out.
And d'Eymon, almost mad with his own grief yet stayed for her voice. Held back
his sword. Valentin lowered his hand. She saw him draw breath against the mas
sive final reality of his own wound, and then, closing his eyes to the pain an
d the fierce light, she heard him speak. Not a cry, only the one word spoken i
n a clear voice. The one word which was—oh, what else could it have ever been
?—the name of his home, offered as a shining thing for the world again to kno
w.
And Dianora saw then that d'Eymon of Ygrath did know it. That he did hear the
name. Which meant that all men now could, that the spell was broken. Valentin
opened his eyes and looked up at the Chancellor, reading the truth of that kno
wledge in d'Eymon's face, and Dianora saw that the Prince of Tigana was smilin
g as the Chancellor's sword came down from its great height and drove into his
heart.
Even in death the smile remained on the terribly afflicted face. And the echo
of his last word, the single name, seemed to Dianora to be hanging yet and spr
eading outward in ripples through the air around the hill, above the valley wh
ere the Barbadians were all dying now.
She looked down at the dead man in her arms, cradling his head and the greying
hair, and she could not stop her tears. In Finavir, he had said. Last words.
Another named place, farther away than dream. And had been right, as so many m
any times he had been right. They ought to have met, if the gods had any kindn
ess, any pity at all for them, in another world than this. Not here. For love
was what it was, but it was not enough. Not here.
She heard a sound from under the canopy and turned in time to see d'Eymon slum
p forward against Brandin's chair. The hilt of his sword was against the seat-
back of the chair. The blade was buried in his breast. She saw it and she piti
ed him his pain but she could not properly grieve. There was nothing left with
in her for such a sorrow. D'Eymon of Ygrath could not matter now. Not with the
two men lying here with her, beside each other. She could pity, oh, she could
pity any man or woman born, but she could not grieve for any but these two. N
ot now.
Not ever, she realized.
She looked over then and saw Scelto, still on his knees, the only other living
person on this hill. He too was weeping. But for her, she realized, even more
than for the dead. His first tears had always been for her. He seemed to be f
ar away though. Everything seemed oddly remote. Except Brandin. Except Valenti
n.
For the last time she looked down at the man for whose love she had betrayed h
er home and all her dead and her own vengeance sworn before a fire in her fath
er's house so long ago. She looked down upon what remained of Brandin of Ygrat
h with his soul gone, and slowly, tenderly, Dianora lowered her head and kisse
d him upon the lips in farewell. "In Finavir," she said. "My love." Then she l
aid him on the ground beside Valentin and she stood.
Looking south she saw that three men and the woman with red hair had descended
the slope of the wizards' ridge and were beginning to swiftly cross the uneve
n ground between. She turned to Scelto whose eyes had now a terrible foreknowl
edge in them. He knew her, she remembered, he loved her and he knew her much t
oo well. He knew all save the one thing, and that one secret she would take aw
ay with her. That was her own.
"In a way," she said to him, gesturing at the Prince, "it would almost be bett
er if no one ever knew who he was. But I don't think we can do that. Tell them
, Scelto. Stay, and tell them when they get here. Whoever they are, they ought
to know."
"Oh, my lady," he whispered, weeping. "Must it end like this?"
She knew what he meant. Of course she knew. She would not dissemble with him n
ow. She looked at the people—whoever they were—coming quickly across the gro
und from the south. The woman.
A brown-haired man with a sword, another darker one, a third man, smaller than
the other two.
"Yes," she said to Scelto, watching them approach. "Yes, I think it must."
And so she turned and left him with the dead on that hill, to wait for those w
ho were coming even now. She left the valley behind, the hill, left all the no
ises of battle and pain, walking down the northernmost of the goatherd's track
s as it wound west along the slope of the hill out of sight of everyone. There
were flowers growing along the path: sonrai berries, wild lilies, irises, ane
mones, yellow and white, and then there was a scarlet one. In Tregea they said
that flower had been made red by the blood of Adaon where he fell.
There were no men or women on that slope to see her or to stay her as she went
, nor was the distance very far to level ground and then to the beginnings of
the sand and finally to the margin of the sea where there were gulls wheeling
and crying overhead.
There was blood on her garments. She discarded them in a small pile on the wid
e sweep of that white sand. She stepped into the water —it was cool, but not
nearly so cold as the sea of Chiara had been on the morning of the Dive. She w
alked out slowly until it came to her hips and then she began to swim. Straigh
t out, heading west, toward where the sun would set when it finally went down
to end this day. She was a good swimmer; her father had taught her and her bro
ther long ago after a dream she had had. Valentin the Prince had even come wit
h them once to their cove. Long ago.
When she began, at length, to tire she was very far from the shore, out where
the blue-green of the ocean near land changes to the darker blue of the deep.
And there she dived, pushing herself downward, away from the blue of the sky a
nd the bronze sun and it seemed to her as she went down that there was an odd
illumination appearing in the water, a kind of path here in the depths of the
sea.
She had not expected that. She had not thought any such thing would be here fo
r her. Not after all that had happened, all that she had done. But there was i
ndeed a path, a glow of light defining it. She was tired now, and deep, and he
r vision was beginning to grow dim. She thought she saw a shape flicker at the
edge of the shimmering light. She could not see very clearly though, there se
emed to be a kind of mist coming down over her. She thought for a moment the s
hape might be the riselka, though she had not earned that, or even Adaon, thou
gh she had no claim at all upon the god. But then it seemed to Dianora that th
ere was a last gathering of brightness in her mind at the very end, and the mi
st fell back a little, and she saw that for her it was neither of these, after
all, not the riselka, nor the god.
It was Morian, come in kindness, come in grace, to bring her home.
Alone of the living on a hill with the dead, Scelto stood and composed himself
as best he could, waiting for those he could see beginning to climb the slope
.
When the three men and the tall woman reached the summit he knelt in submissio
n as they surveyed in silence what had happened here. What death had claimed u
pon this hill. He was aware that they might kill him, even as he knelt. He was
n't sure that he cared.
The King was lying only an arm's length away from Rhun who had slain him. Rhun
, who had been a Prince here in the Palm. Prince of Tigana. Lower Corte. If he
had a space of time later, Scelto sensed that the pieces of this story might
begin to come together for him. Even numbed as he was now, he could feel a lan
cing hurt in his mind if he dwelt upon that history. So much done in the name
of the dead.
She would be near the water by now. She would not be coming back this time. He
had not expected her to return on the morning of the Dive; she had tried to h
ide it, but he had seen something in her when she woke that day. He hadn't und
erstood why, but he had known that she was readying herself to die.
She had been ready, he was certain of it; something had changed for her by the
water's edge that day. It would not change again.
"You are?"
He looked up. A lean, black-haired man, silvering at the temples, was looking
down at him with a clear grey gaze. Eyes curiously like Brandin's had been.
"I am Scelto. I was a servant in the saishan, a messenger today."
"You were here when they died?"
Scelto nodded. The man's voice was calm, though there was a discernible sense
of effort in that, as if he were trying with his tone to superimpose some patt
ern of order upon the chaos of the day.
"Will you tell me who killed the King of Ygrath?"
"His Fool," Scelto said quietly, trying to match the manner of the other man.
In the distance below them the noises of battle were subsiding at last.
"How? At Brandin's request?" It was one of the other men, a hard-looking, bear
ded figure with dark eyes and a sword in his hand.
Scelto shook his head. He felt overwhelmingly weary all of a sudden. She would
be swimming. She would be a long way out by now. "No. It was an attack. I thi
nk . . ." He lowered his head, fearful of presuming.
"Go on," said the first man gently. "You are in no danger from us. I have had
enough of blood today. More than enough."
Scelto looked up at that, wondering. Then he said, "I think that when the King
used his last magic he was too intent on the valley and he forgot about Rhun.
He used so much in that spell that he released the Fool from his binding."
"He released more than that," the grey-eyed man said softly. The tall woman ha
d come to stand beside him. She had red hair and deep blue eyes; she was young
and very beautiful.
She would be far out among the waves. It would all be over soon. He had not sa
id farewell. After so many years. Despite himself, Scelto choked back a sob. "
May I know," he asked them, not even sure why he needed this, "may I know who
you are?"
And quietly, without arrogance or even any real assertion, the dark-haired man
said, "My name is Alessan bar Valentin, the last of my line. My father and br
others were killed by Brandin almost twenty years ago. I am the Prince of Tiga
na."
Scelto closed his eyes.
In his mind he was hearing Brandin's voice again, clear and cold, laden with i
rony, even with his mortal wound: What a harvest. Prince of Tigana. And Rhun,
just before he died, speaking that same name under the dome of the sky.
His own revenge was here then.
"Where is the woman?" the third man asked suddenly, the younger, smaller one.
"Where is Dianora di Certando who did the Ring Dive? Was she not here?"
It would be over by now. It would be calm and deep and dark for her. Green ten
drils of the sea would grace her hair and twine about her limbs. She would fin
ally be at rest, at peace.
Scelto looked up. He was weeping, he didn't even try to stop, or hide his tear
s now. "She was here," he said. "She has gone to the sea again, to an ending i
n the sea."
He didn't think they would care. That they could possibly care about that, any
of them, but he saw then that he was wrong. All four of them, even the grim,
warlike one with the brown hair, grew abruptly still and then turned, almost a
s one, to look west past the slopes and the sand to where the sun was setting
over the water.
"I am deeply sorry to hear that," said the man named Alessan. "I saw her do th
e Ring Dive in Chiara. She was beautiful and astonishingly brave."
The brown-haired man stepped forward, an unexpected hesitation in his eyes. He
wasn't as stern as he had first seemed, Scelto realized, and he was younger a
s well.
"Tell me," the man. "Was she ... did she ever . . ." He stopped, in confusion.
The other man, the Prince, looked at him with compassion in his eyes.
"She was from Certando, Baerd. Everyone knows the story."
Slowly, the other man nodded his head. But when he turned away it was to look
out toward the sea again. They don't seem like conquerors, Scelto thought. The
y didn't seem like men in the midst of a triumph. They just looked tired, as a
t the end of a very long journey.
"So it wasn't me, after all," the grey-eyed man was saying, almost to himself.
"After all my years of dreaming. It was his own Fool who killed him. It had n
othing to do with us." He looked at the two dead men lying together, then back
at Scelto. "Who was the Fool? Do we know?"
She was gone, claimed by the dark sea far down. She was at rest. And Scelto wa
s so tired. Tired of grief and blood and pain, of these bitter cycles of reven
ge. He knew what was going to happen to this man the moment he spoke.
They ought to know, she had said, before she walked away to the sea, and it wa
s true, of course it was true. Scelto looked up at the grey-eyed man.
"Rhun?" he said. "An Ygrathen bound to the King many years ago. No one very im
portant, my lord."
The Prince of Tigana nodded his head, his expressive mouth quirking with an in
ward-directed irony. "Of course," he said. "Of course. No one very important.
Why should I have thought it would be otherwise?"
"Alessan," said the younger man from the front of the hill, "I think it is ove
r. Down below, I mean. I think ... I think the Barbadians are all dead."
The Prince lifted his head and so did Scelto. Men of the Palm and of Ygrath wo
uld be standing beside each other down in that valley.
"Are you going to kill us all now?" Scelto asked him.
The Prince of Tigana shook his head. "I told you, I have had enough of blood.
There is a great deal to be done, but I am going to try to do it without any m
ore killing now."
He went to the southern rim of the hill and lifted his hand in some signal to
the men on his own ridge. The woman went over and stood beside him, and he put
an arm around her shoulders. A moment later they heard the notes of a horn ri
ng out over the valley and the hills, clear and high and beautiful, sounding a
n end to battle.
Scelto, still on his knees, wiped at his eyes with a grimy hand. He looked ove
r and saw that the third man, the one who had tried to ask him something, was
still gazing out to sea. There was a pain there he could not understand. There
had been pain everywhere today though. He had had it in his grasp, even now,
to speak truth and unleash so much more.
His eyes swung slowly down again, away from the hard blue sky and the blue-gre
en sea, past the man at the western edge of the hill, past d'Eymon of Ygrath s
lumped across the King's chair with his own blade in his breast, and his gaze
came to rest on the two dead men beside each other on the ground, so near that
they could have touched had they been alive.
He could keep their secret. He could live with it.

EPILOGUE
THREE MEN ON HORSES IN THE SOUTHERN HIGHLANDS LOOKING over a valley to the eas
t. There are pine and cedar woods beyond, hills on either side. The Sperion Ri
ver sparkles in the distance, flowing down out of the mountains, not far from
where it will begin its long curve west to find the sea. The air is bright and
cool, with a feel of autumn in the breeze. The colors of the leaves will be c
hanging soon and the year-round snow on the highest peaks of the mountains wil
l begin moving down, closing the pass.
In the tranquil green of the valley below them, Devin sees the dome of Eanna's
temple flash in the morning sunlight. Beyond the Sanctuary he can just make o
ut the winding trail they had ridden down in the spring, coming here from the
east across the border. It seems a lifetime ago. He turns in the saddle and lo
oks north over the rolling, gradually subsiding hills.
"Will we be able to see it from here, later?"
Baerd glances over and then follows his gaze. "What, Avalle and the Towers? Ea
sily, on any clear day. Meet me here in a year's time and you'll see my green-
and-white Prince's Tower, I promise you."
"Where are you getting the marble?" Sandre asks.
"Same place as Orsaria did for the original tower. The quarry is still availab
le, believe it or not, about two days' ride west of us near the coast."
"And you'll have it carried here?"
"By sea to Tigana, then on river barges up the Sperion. The same way they did
it back then." Baerd has shaved his beard again. He looks years younger, Devin
finds himself thinking.
"How do you know so much about it?" Sandre asks with lazy mockery. "I thought
all you knew was archery and how not to fall on your face when you were out al
one in the dark."
Baerd smiles. "I was always going to be a builder. I have my father's love of
stone if not his gift. I'm a craftsman though, and I knew how to look at thing
s, even back then. I think I know as much as any man alive about how Orsaria b
uilt his towers and his palaces. Including one in Astibar, Sandre. Would you l
ike me to tell you where your secret passages are?"
Sandre laughs aloud. "Don't boast, you presumptuous mason. On the other hand,
it has been almost twenty years since I was in that palace, you may have to re
mind me of where they are."
Grinning, Devin looks over at the Duke. It has taken him a long time to adjust
to seeing Sandre without his dark Khardhu guise. "You will be going back afte
r the wedding, then?" he asks, feeling a sadness at the thought of another par
ting ahead.
"I think I must, though I will say that I'm torn. I feel too old for governing
anyone now. And it isn't as if I have any heirs to groom."
After a moment's stillness, Sandre takes them smoothly past the darkness of th
ose memories: "To be honest, the thing that interests me most right now is wha
t I've been doing here in Tigana. The mind-linking with Erlein and Sertino and
the wizards we've managed to find."
"And the Night Walkers?" Devin asks.
"Indeed, Baerd's Carlozzini as well. I must say I'm pleased that the four of t
hem are coming with Alienor to the wedding."
"Not as pleased as Baerd is, I'm sure," Devin adds slyly. Baerd gives him a lo
ok, and pretends to be absorbed in scanning the distant line of the road south
of them.
"Well, hardly as pleased," Sandre agrees. "Though I do hope he'll spare his El
ena for a small part of the time she's here. If we are going to change the att
itude of this peninsula to magic there's no better time to start than now, wou
ldn't you say?"
"Oh, certainly," Devin says, grinning broadly.
"She's not my Elena," Baerd murmurs, keeping his eyes firmly fixed on the road
.
"She isn't?" Sandre asks in mock surprise. "Then who's this Baerd person she k
eeps using me to relay messages to? Would you know the fellow?"
"Never heard of him," Baerd says laconically. He keeps a straight face for a m
oment longer, then gives way to laughter. "I'm beginning to remember why I pre
ferred keeping to myself. And what about Devin, if you're on that subject? You
don't think Alais would be sending him messages if she could?"
"Devin," says the Duke airily, "is a mere child, far too young and innocent to
be getting involved with women, especially the likes of that guileful, experi
enced creature from Astibar." He attempts to look stern and fails; both of the
others know his real opinion of Rovigo's daughter.
"There are no inexperienced women in Astibar," Baerd retorts. "And besides, he
's old enough. He even has a battle scar on his ribs to show her."
"She's seen it already," Devin says, enjoying this enormously. "She taped it u
p after Rinaldo healed me," he adds hastily as both of the others raise their
eyebrows. "No thrill there." He tries and fails to conceive of Alais as guilef
ul and deceptive. The memory of her on the window-ledge in Senzio keeps coming
back to him of late though; the particular smile on her face as he stumbled a
long the outside landing to his own room.
"They are coming, aren't they?" the Duke asks. "It occurs to me that I could s
ail home with Rovigo."
"They'll be here," Devin confirms. "They had a wedding of their own last week,
or they'd have arrived by now."
"I see you are intimately versed in their timing," Baerd says with a straight
face. "Just what do you plan to do after the wedding?"
"Actually," Devin says, "I wish I knew. There must be ten different things I'v
e thought about." He evidently sounds more serious than he'd meant to, for bot
h of his friends turn their attention fully to him.
"Such as?" Sandre asks,
Devin takes a breath and lets it out. He holds up both hands and starts counti
ng on his fingers. "Find my father and help him settle here again. Find Menico
di Ferraut and put together the company we should have had before you people
side-tracked me. Stay with Alessan and Catriana in Tigana and help them with w
hatever they have to do. Learn how to handle a ship at sea; don't ask me why.
Stay in Avalle and build a tower with Baerd." He hesitates; the others are smi
ling. He plunges onward: "Spend another night with Alienor at Borso. Spend my
life with Alais bren Rovigo. Start chasing down the words and music of all the
songs we've lost. Go over the mountains to Quileia and find the twenty-seven
tree in the sacred grove. Start training for the sprint race in next summer's
Triad Games. Learn how to shoot a bow—which reminds me, you did promise me th
at, Baerd!"
He stops, because they are laughing now, and so is he, a little breathlessly.
"You must have gone past ten somewhere in that list," Baerd chuckles.
"There are more," Devin says. "Do you want them?"
"I don't think I could stand it," Sandre says. "You remind me too painfully of
how old I am and how young you are."
Devin sobers at those words. He shakes his head. "Never think that. I don't th
ink there was a moment last year when I didn't have to work to keep up with yo
u wherever we went." He smiles at a thought "You aren't old, Sandre, you're th
e youngest wizard in the Palm."
Sandre's expression is wry. He holds up his left hand; they can clearly see th
e two missing fingers. "There's truth to that. And I may be the first to break
the habit of screening what we are, because I never got into the habit."
"You're serious about dropping the screening?" Baerd asks.
"Utterly serious. If we are to survive in this peninsula as a whole nation in
the world we are going to need magic to match Barbadior and Ygrath. And Khardh
un, come to think of it. And I don't even know what powers they have in Quilei
a now; it has been too many years since we dealt with them. We can no longer h
ide our wizards, or the Carlozzini, we can't afford to be as ignorant as we've
always been about how magic is shaped here. Even the Healers, we don't unders
tand anything about them. We have to learn our magic, value it, search wizards
out and train them, find ways to control them too. The Palm has to discover m
agic, or magic will undo us again one day the way it did twenty years ago."
"You think we can do that first thing though?" Devin asks. "Make a nation here
, out of the nine we are?"
"I know we can. And I think we will. I will wager you both right now that Ales
san di Tigana is named King of the Palm at the Triad Games next year."
Devin turns quickly to Baerd, whose color has suddenly risen. "Would he take i
t?" he asks. "Would he do that, Baerd?"
Baerd looks at Sandre and then slowly back to Devin. "Who else could?" he answ
ers finally. "I don't even think he has a choice. The knitting together of thi
s peninsula has been his life's cause since he was fifteen years old. He was a
lready on that path when I found him in Quileia. I think ... I think what he'd
really like to do is find Menico with you, Devin, and spend a few years makin
g music with you two, and Erlein, and Catriana, and some dancers, and someone
who can play the syrenya."
"But?" Sandre asks.
"But he's the man who saved us all, everyone knows it, everyone knows who he i
s now. After a dozen years of being on the roads he knows more people who matt
er in each province than anyone else. He's the one who gave the rest of us the
vision. And he's the Prince of Tigana, too, and in his prime. I'm afraid"—he
grimaces at the word— "I don't see how he can avoid this, even if he wanted
to. I think for Alessan it is just beginning now."
They are silent a moment.
"What about you?" Devin asks. "Will you go with him? What do you want?"
Baerd smiles. "What do I want? Nothing nearly so high. I'd badly like to find
my sister, but I'm beginning to accept that she's . . . gone, and I think that
I may never know where, or how. I'll be there for Alessan whenever he needs m
e, but what I most want to do is build things. Houses, temples, bridges, a pal
ace, half a dozen towers here in Avalle. I need to see things rising, and I ..
. I suppose it's part of the same thing, but I want to start a family. We need
children here again. Too many people died." He looks away for a moment toward
the mountains and then back again. "You and I may be the lucky ones, Devin. W
e aren't Princes or Dukes or wizards. We're only ordinary men, with a life to
start."
"I told you he was waiting for Elena," Sandre says gently. Not a gibe, the voi
ce of a friend, speaking with deep aflFection. Baerd smiles, looking into the
distance again. And in that moment his expression changes, it grows charged wi
th a fierce, bright pleasure:
"Look!" he cries, pointing. "Here he comes!"
From the south, winding out of the mountains and the hills of the highlands al
ong a road that has not been used in hundreds of years there comes a caravan,
many-colored, stretching back a long way. There is music playing beside it and
ahead, with men and women riding and on foot, donkeys and horses laden with g
oods, at least fifty banners flapping in the wind. And now the tunes drift up
to the three of them, bright and gay, and all the colors are flashing in the m
orning light as Marius, King of Quileia comes riding down from the mountain pa
ss to the wedding of his friend.
He is to spend the night in the Sanctuary where he will be formally welcomed b
y the High Priest of Eanna—whom he will remember as the man who brought a fou
rteen-year-old boy to him over the mountains long ago. There are barges waitin
g in Avalle to take them down the river to Tigana in the morning.
But the right of first greeting is Baerd's, in Alessan's name, and he has aske
d the two of them to ride here with him.
"Come on!" he cries now, joy in his face. He urges his horse forward down the
sloping path. Devin and Sandre glance at each other and hasten to follow.
"I will never understand," Devin shouts, as they catch up to Baerd, "how you c
an possibly be so pleased to see a man who calls you Pigeon Two!"
Sandre gives a cackle of glee. Baerd laughs aloud, and mimes a blow at Devin.
The three of them are still laughing as they slow their horses to swing around
a cluster of sonrai bushes at a wide curve in the downward trail.
And it is there that they see the riselka, three men see a riselka, sitting on
a rock beside the sunlit path, her long sea-green hair blowing back in the fr
eshening breeze.

────────────────────────────────────────
  MoMoJesse (★情僧★)             于  (Tue Nov  2 08:51:12 2004)  说道:

英……英……英文版，偶看不懂啊！

────────────────────────────────────────
  speedneeder (雷)                 于  (Tue Nov  2 08:54:19 2004)  说道:

靠，我就能看懂啊？

────────────────────────────────────────
  yup (何处染尘埃)                 于  (Tue Nov  2 09:35:31 2004)  说道:

我倒！！

────────────────────────────────────────
  speedneeder (雷)                 于  (Tue Nov  2 09:37:39 2004)  说道:

我的意思是我也看不懂

────────────────────────────────────────
  yup (何处染尘埃)                 于  (Tue Nov  2 09:40:59 2004)  说道:

所以我才倒！！呵呵。

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  yup (何处染尘埃)                 于  (Tue Nov  2 09:41:56 2004)  说道:

本着谁主张谁举证的原则，本文谁转载谁翻译！
哈哈！

────────────────────────────────────────
  hithaitao (兰海)                 于  (Tue Nov  2 10:26:14 2004)  说道:

什么呀

────────────────────────────────────────
  speedneeder (雷)                 于  (Tue Nov  2 11:18:59 2004)  说道:

你不如说杀了我更直接.....等二十年吧......

────────────────────────────────────────
  speedneeder (雷)                 于  (Tue Nov  2 11:21:01 2004)  说道:

我服了，这帖子也上十大...........

────────────────────────────────────────
  MoMoJesse (★情僧★)             于  (Tue Nov  2 11:21:48 2004)  说道:

────────────────────────────────────────
  speedneeder (雷)                 于  (Tue Nov  2 11:24:16 2004)  说道:

吐血...............怎么又置底了！！！！！

还有MOMO不要落井下石啊！！

────────────────────────────────────────
  MoMoJesse (★情僧★)             于  (Tue Nov  2 11:26:33 2004)  说道:

────────────────────────────────────────
  speedneeder (雷)                 于  (Tue Nov  2 11:28:08 2004)  说道:

发上来看看......期待中！！！

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  yup (何处染尘埃)                 于  (Tue Nov  2 11:34:51 2004)  说道:

害怕了？嘿嘿！呆着没事你也写一个原创去！

────────────────────────────────────────
  yup (何处染尘埃)                 于  (Tue Nov  2 11:47:54 2004)  说道:

我特意上web看了一下，没上啊！？

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  speedneeder (雷)                 于  (Tue Nov  2 11:50:27 2004)  说道:

现在不是了，刚才是，没见那个叫海兰的签名档吗？不是十大的不回！哈哈!!!

────────────────────────────────────────
  pertumn (pertumn)                于  (Tue Nov  2 12:18:49 2004)  说道:

我看了，确实是英文，而且很奇幻，beyond my comprehension

────────────────────────────────────────
  MoMoJesse (★情僧★)             于  (Tue Nov  2 12:20:42 2004)  说道:

────────────────────────────────────────
  yup (何处染尘埃)                 于  (Tue Nov  2 12:21:28 2004)  说道:

────────────────────────────────────────
  speedneeder (雷)                 于  (Tue Nov  2 12:22:55 2004)  说道:

我冤枉阿，我什么时候主动要求了，楼上的大哥，帮忙翻译吧！

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  pertumn (pertumn)                于  (Tue Nov  2 12:26:03 2004)  说道:

翻译个头阿，我开玩笑呢

Fantasy 版 (精华区)