GUY GAVRIEL KAY

Tigana

For my brothers, Jeffrey and Rex

Contents

Title Page

A Note on Pronunciation

Prologue

Part One

Chapter I

Chapter II

Chapter III

Chapter IV

Chapter V

Chapter VI

Part Two

Chapter VII

Chapter VIII

Part Three

Chapter IX

Chapter X

Chapter XI

Chapter XII

Part Four

Chapter XIII

Chapter XIV

Chapter XV

Chapter XVI

Part Five

Chapter XVII

Chapter XVIII

Chapter XIX

Chapter XX

Epilogue

Afterword

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Also by Guy Gavriel Kay

Copyright

About the Publisher

A Note on Pronunciation

For the assistance of those to whom such things are of importance, I should perhaps note that most of the proper names in this novel should be pronounced according to the rules of the Italian language. Thus, for example, all final vowels are sounded: Corte has two syllables, Sinave and Forese have three. Chiara has the same hard initial sound as chianti but Certando will begin with the same sound as chair or child.

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 lets 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 never 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 only 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 campfires burned on either side of the river, stretching away into the night. Quietly flowing, the Deisa caught the moonlight and the orange of the nearer fires and cast them back in wavery, sinuous ripples. And all the lines of light led to his eyes, to where he was sitting on the riverbank, hands about his knees, thinking about dying and the life he’d lived.

There was a glory to the night, Saevar thought, breathing deeply of the mild summer 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 them. It was curiously hard to impute any absolute sense of evil to those harmonizing voices, or to hate them quite as blindly as being a soldier seemed to require. 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 for 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 leader whose defiant gallantry was almost matched by the two young sons who were 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 times. The Prince called him a friend. It could not be said, Saevar thought, that he had lived a useless or an empty life. He’d had his art, the joy of it and 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 children. 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 to have been allowed to come north to war. Saevar remembered the look on the boy’s face when they had parted. He supposed that much the same expression had been 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 the sea.

He heard a light tread, behind him and to his left, from where the campfires were 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 sank 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 one 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 folly?’

‘The way we see it is,’ Valentin said softly, his quick mind engaged by the question. ‘The beauty we find is shaped, at least in part, by what we know the morning will bring.’

‘What will it bring, my lord?’ Saevar asked, before he could stop himself. Half 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 answer 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 wideness 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 the same, offering comfort and hope and such laughter as we can bring to ease men 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 and white tower in Avalle.’ He paused, and returned to his original thought. ‘They 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 own 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 with 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 seeing there. Saevar, I am so sorry, but the truth is that almost all of the morning’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 besides, 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 could 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 from that surrender,’ he said, with resolution, ‘and walked into the Palace by the 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 Valentin 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 that. Oh, our pride. Our terrible pride. Will they remember that most about us, do you think, after we are gone?’

‘Perhaps,’ Saevar said. ‘But they will remember. The one thing we know with certainty is that they will remember us. Here in the peninsula, and in Ygrath, and 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 daughters 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, and, 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 am 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, ‘there 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. Thank you for saying that.’

‘No thanks, Saevar. Not between us and not this night. The Triad guard and shelter 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 Saevar 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. Valentin rose and was gone, a shadow in moonlight, back towards the fires of his army.

The singing seemed to have stopped, on both sides of the river. It was very late. Saevar knew he should be making his own way back and settling down for a few 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 stars, the fireflies and all the fires.

In the end he decided to stay there by the water. He sat alone in the summer darkness 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 and he thought of his wife and children and the life’s work of his hands that would live after him, and the trialla sang for him all night long.

Part One

A Blade in the Soul

Chapter I

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 of his exile and age and died.

No servants of the Triad were by his side to speak their rituals at his end. Not 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 clergy through the last eighteen years of his life was far from being a secret. And 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 truths 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 justifiable 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 fact at the time of his dying, for all that Alberico of Barbadior had come with an 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 circumspect 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 precise regard for protocol.

By noon of the day the Duke died, a messenger from Alberico was seen to have ridden 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 condolence to Sandre’s children and grandchildren now gathered at their broad estate seven miles beyond the walls.

In The Paelion, the khav room where the wittier sort were gathering that season, it was cynically observed that the Tyrant would have been more likely to send a company of his own Barbadian mercenaries—not just a single message-bearer—were the living Sandreni not such a feckless lot. Before the appreciative, eye-to-who-might-be-listening ripple of amusement at that had quite died away, 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 island of Chiara would arrive condolences in verse before the Festival was over.

‘Too rich an opportunity,’ the rash newcomer explained, cradling a steaming mug of khav laced with one of the dozen or so liqueurs that lined the shelves behind the bar of The Paelion. ‘Brandin will be incapable of letting slip a chance like this to remind Alberico—and the rest of us—that though the two of them have divided our peninsula the share of art and learning is quite tilted west towards Chiara. Mark my words—and wager who will—we’ll have a knottily rhymed verse from stout Doarde or some silly acrostic thing of Camena’s to puzzle 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 Festival, when a long tradition that Alberico of Barbadior had circumspectly indulged allowed more licence than elsewhere in the year. A few men with heads for figures did some rapid calculations of sailing-time and the chances of the autumn seas north of Senzio province and down through the Archipelago, and the musician 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, shouted for attention, and when he had it, reported that the Tyrant’s messenger had 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 procession 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 politics and the anticipated pleasures of the Festival made for a thirsty afternoon. So brisk was his trade that the excitable proprietor of The Paelion began inadvertently serving full measures of liqueur in the laced khavs being ordered in profusion. His wife, of more phlegmatic disposition, continued to short-measure all her patrons with benevolent lack of favouritism.

‘They’ll be turned back!’ young Adreano the poet cried, decisively banging down his mug and sloshing hot khav over the dark oak table of The Paelion’s largest 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 travelling musician who’d made the brash wager on Brandin of Ygrath and his court poets on Chiara. The fellow, looking highly amused, his eyebrows quizzically arched, leaned back comfortably in the chair he had brazenly pulled up to the booth some time ago. Adreano felt seriously offended by the man, and didn’t know whether his umbrage had been more aroused by the musician’s so-casual assertion of Chiara’s pre-eminence in culture, or by his flippant dismissal of the great Camena di Chiara whom Adreano had been assiduously 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 had 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 journeyed 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 in 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 road 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 everything 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 Astibar right now and spirits are running too high—even with the half-measured drinks 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 rest once and for all, and then offer thanks to whatever gods his Emperor overseas 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 swift to abandon the unfashionable pursuit of freedom that Sandre stood for in ungelded Astibar.’

By the end of his speech he was not smiling, nor did the wide-set grey eyes look away from Adreano’s own.

And here, for the first time, were truly dangerous words. Softly spoken, but they 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 else in the room. Adreano’s derisive couplet, so swiftly composed, now seemed trivial and inappropriate in his own ears. He said nothing, his heart beating curiously fast. With some effort he kept his gaze on the musician.

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 enlighten us as to why a farmer from the distrada is so free with his money to come and with his views on matters such as this?’

The other’s smile widened, showing even white teeth. ‘I’m no farmer,’ he protested genially, ‘nor from your distrada either. I’m a shepherd from up in the south Tregea mountains and I’ll tell you a thing.’ The grey eyes swung round, amused, to include the entire booth. ‘A flock of sheep will teach you more about 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 you’re out on a mountain in rain chasing after them with thunder and night coming on together.’

There was genuine laughter around the booth, abetted somewhat by the release of tension. Adreano tried unsuccessfully to keep his own expression sternly repressive.

‘Have we a wager?’ the shepherd asked one more time, his manner friendly and relaxed.

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 that 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 state tomorrow morning at the old Sandreni Palace and have a full-honours 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 upon his own loss of face— young, overly impetuous poets had that happen to them 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 interested, but certainly not triumphant.

‘Ah well,’ the fellow said with a rueful shake of his head, ‘I suppose being right 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 shifted 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 to 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 at a pull. He looked around optimistically, but the others in the booth were guarding their drinks, knowing the painter’s habits very well. With a chuckle the dark-haired shepherd from Tregea proffered his own mug. Self-taught never to query largesse, Nerone quaffed it down. He did murmur a thank-you when the khav was drained.

Adreano noted the exchange, but his mind was racing down unfamiliar channels to 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. Alberico has now succeeded, with one decree, in tightening his bonds with the clergy of the Triad. He’s placed a perfect condition upon the granting of the Duke’s last wish. Sandre’s heirs will have to agree—not that they’d ever not agree to some-thing—and I can’t even begin to guess how many astins it’s going to cost them to assuage the priests and priestesses enough to get them into the Sandreni 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 death.’

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 everything was done with this much subtlety! Wheels within the wheels that guided the fate 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 Adreano 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 the days before he sailed here to conquer, and before Brandin took Chiara and the 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 game after all? Outplayed by a dead man?’

Around them men were rising and settling their accounts in loud haste to be outside, where events of magnitude seemed to be unfolding so swiftly. The eastern 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 been 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 like a rushlight in darkness.

‘You see it, don’t you?’ his new acquaintance said flatly. They were alone at the booth. Nerone had lingered to precipitously drain whatever khav had been left unfinished in the rush for the doors and had then followed the others out into 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 keenness in his grey eyes. ‘I doubt the clergy ever mattered to him at all. They weren’t his enemy. However subtle Alberico may be, the fact is that he won this province and Tregea and Ferraut and Certando because of his army and his sorcery, and he holds the Eastern Palm only through those things. Sandre d’Astibar 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 only 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 induce 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 feeling a zest, an excitement, that 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 that were starting to tumble about inside him.

‘What do you think will happen?’ he asked, with a deference that would have astonished his friends.

‘I’m not sure,’ the other said frankly. ‘But I have a growing suspicion that the Festival of Vines this year may see the beginning of something none of us could 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 travelling 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 reflexively, and watched as the other walked from the almost empty room.

The owner and his wife were moving about collecting mugs and glasses and wiping down the tables and benches. Adreano signalled for a last drink. A moment later, sipping his khav—unlaced this time, to clear his head—he realized that he’d forgotten to ask the musician his name.

Chapter II

Devin was having a bad day.

At nineteen he had almost completely reconciled himself to his lack of size and 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 little more height out of his frame.

The keenness of his memory had always been a source of pride and pleasure to him, but a number of the memories that came with it were not. He would have been quite happy to be able to forget the afternoon when the twins, returning home from hunting with a brace of grele, had caught him suspended from a tree upside down. Six years later it still rankled 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 burly twin brothers were stretching him between them, cackling with great good humour all the while. Enjoying, among other things, the ambit of Devin’s precociously profane vocabulary.

Well, that had been the last time he actually tried to make himself taller. Very late that same night he’d sneaked into the snoring twins’ bedroom and carefully dumped a bucket of pig slop over each of them. Sprinting like Adaon on his mountain he’d been through the yard and over the farm gate almost before their roaring started.

He’d stayed away two nights, then returned to his father’s whipping. He’d expected to have to wash the sheets himself, but Povar had done that and both twins, stolidly good-natured, had already forgotten the incident.

Devin, cursed or blessed with a memory like Eanna of the Names, never did forget. 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 lowlands. It was not long after that incident that Devin had left home, apprenticed as a singer to Menico di Ferraut whose company toured northern Asoli every second or third spring.

Devin hadn’t been back since, taking a week’s leave during the company’s northern swing three years ago, and again this past spring. It wasn’t that he’d been badly treated on the farm, it was just that he didn’t fit in, and all four of 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 hot, hazy, grey monotony of the days.

If his mother had lived it might have been different, but the farm in Asoli where Garin of Lower Corte had taken his three sons had been a dour, womanless place— acceptable perhaps for the twins, who had each other, and for the kind of man Garth had slowly become amid the almost featureless spaces of the flatlands, 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 of 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 predictable greyness and rain. His father and Nico had been turning back to check 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 shoulder.

‘If they don’t treat you right enough,’ he’d said, ‘you can come home, Dev. There’s a place.’

Devin remembered both things: the gentle blow which had been forced to carry more 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 almost 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 truth 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 drink in Astibar? And on the eve of the Festival, no less!

The problem would have been positively laughable were it not so infuriating. It was the doing, he learned quickly enough—in the first inn that refused to serve him his requested flask of Senzio green wine—of the pinch-buttocked, joy-killing priests of Eanna. The goddess, Devin thought fervently, deserved better 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, Eanna’s priests had convinced the Tyrant’s token council that there was too much licentiousness among the young of Astibar and that, more to the point of course, such licence bred unrest. And since it was obvious that the taverns and khav rooms bred licence . . .

It had taken less than two weeks for Alberico to promulgate and begin enforcing a law that no youth of less than seventeen years could buy a drink in Astibar.

Eanna’s dust-dry priests celebrated—in whatever ascetic fashion such men celebrated—their petty triumph over the priests of Morian and the elegant priestesses of the god: both of which deities were associated with darker passions and, inevitably, wine.

Tavern-keepers were quietly unhappy (it didn’t do to be loudly unhappy in Astibar), though not so much for the loss of trade as for the insidious manner in which 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. At 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 looked 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 with, it gradually became evident through the course of a morning, one small, boyish-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, fake an ecstasy, and hope they favoured Senzian green here as a means of succouring the overly ecstatic. As another, even less rational, option he contemplated breaking a window in Eanna’s domed shrine and testing if any of the ball-less imbeciles 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 Astibar. 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 towards the harbour and then, following his unfortunately still-functioning sense of smell, towards Tannery Lane. And there, made almost ill by the effluence of the 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 shambling, loose-limbed innkeeper whose eyes were probably inadequate to the dark shadows of his windowless, one-room establishment.

Even this nondescript, evil-smelling hole was completely full. Astibar was crammed to overflowing for tomorrow’s start of the Festival of Vines. The harvest had been a good one everywhere but in Certando, Devin knew, and there were plenty of people with astins or chiaros to spend, and in a mood to spend them too.

There were certainly no free tables to be had in The Bird. Devin wedged himself 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 composed his mind and soul towards a meditation upon the perfidy and unreasonableness 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 sober. He was the experienced trouper anyhow, he thought indignantly. He was a partner. He knew the performance routines like a hand knew a glove. The extra rehearsals 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 out 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 react 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, Menico, 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 leaning a little closer than absolutely necessary to their newest, red-headed female singer, putting perhaps the merest shading of a message into his expression and voice, but still, even so . . .

‘Devin, in the name of the Triad,’ had snapped Catriana d’Astibar, breaking up the rehearsal entirely, ‘do you think you can get your mind away from your groin 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 bright red. Menico, he saw—Menico who should have been sharply reprimanding the girl for her presumption—was laughing helplessly, even more flushed than Devin 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 across the back of her head, Devin had simply spun on his heel 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 drink it in on a brilliant autumn morning in Astibar. Having finally found the wine and the tenuous comfort of shadows he fully expected to figure out, about half a bottle from now, what he should have said to that arrogant red-maned creature back in the rehearsal room.

If only she wasn’t so depressingly tall, he thought. Morosely he filled his glass again. Looking up at the blackened cross-beams of the ceiling he briefly contemplated hanging himself from one of them: by the heels of course. For old time’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 being 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 having 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, ‘you 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 ready for. I’m Rovigo d’Astibar, master of the Sea Maid just in from down the coast 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 his 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 travelling 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 your 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 when I left as when I’d entered.’ Devin rashly sniffed the heavy air; even among the odours of the crowd and despite the lack of windows, the tannery stench from 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 always come straight here when the Sea Maid is home from a voyage? Somehow the smell 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 land, 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 exaggerated 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 ports down the coast or around on the western side of Senzio or Ferraut that the bigger traders never bother with. She’s also quick enough to make it worth my while running south past the mountains to Quileia. It isn’t sanctioned, of course, 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 otherwise see such things. I bring back carpets, or Quileian wood carvings, slippers, jewelled daggers, sometimes casks of buinath to sell to the taverns—whatever’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 Waves 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 the 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 challenges in the Oak Grove. Seven is sacred, he’s proclaimed. By allowing him this latest triumph the Mother Goddess has made known her will. Marius has just declared himself King in Quileia, no longer only the consort of the High Priestess.’

‘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.’

Travelling across the Peninsula of the Palm, from mountain village to remote castle or manor, to the cities that were the centres of affairs, musicians could not help but hear news and gossip of great events. Always, in Devin’s brief experience, the talk had been only that: a way to ease the passing of a cold winter’s night around an inn fire in Certando, or to try to impress a traveller in a tavern in Cone with a murmured confiding that a proBarbadior party was rumoured to be forming in that Ygrathen province.

It was only talk, Devin had long since concluded. The two ruling sorcerers from east and west across the seas had sliced the Palm neatly in half between them, with only hapless, decadent Senzio not formally occupied by either, looking nervously across the water both ways. Its Governor remained paralytically unable 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 stone from the time of his first awareness. Until one of the sorcerers died—and sorcerers were rumoured 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. What might flow from Quileia’s having a more than transitory King, one who did not have to go into the Oak Grove every two years and there, naked, ritually maimed, 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 in 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 you think it will mean?’

One answer he was not to receive.

The tavern-keeper, who had quite efficiently succeeded in ignoring Rovigo’s intermittent signalling 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 father’s ordered you home and—Morian blast you both!—that he’s minded to turn 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 his face, stinging like fire. He scrambled back, wiping at his streaming eyes, swearing 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 was 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 has no father here and I doubt he has a sister.’ He cocked an eyebrow at Devin who 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 not 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 offering him two bottles of corked vintage Certando red, by way of showing your sincere contrition? In return I may be persuaded to let you have a cask of the Quileian buinath that’s sitting on the Sea Maid even now. At an appropriate price of 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 merchant untwisted the collar a little. Goro dragged foetid tavern air into his lungs as if it were scented with Chiaran mountain tainflowers and spluttered a three-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 appeared 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 quits. I suppose,’ he said, turning to Devin, ‘that you should go see who is pretending to be your sister outside.’

‘I know who it is,’ Devin said grimly. ‘Thank you, by the way. I’m used to fighting 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 to 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 return 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 performances, free of charge.’

‘I thank you. And if your path or your curiosity leads you south-east of town, now or later in the year, our land is about five miles along the road on the right-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 grinned, ‘very talented.’

Devin laughed and the two men touched palms formally. Rovigo turned back to reclaim their corner of the bar. Devin, dismally aware that he was soaked with evil-smelling wine from light-brown hair to waist, with stains splotching his hose as well, walked outside clutching his two bottles of Certandan red. He squinted owlishly in the sunshine for a few seconds before spotting Catriana d’Astibar on the other side of the lane, scarlet hair blazing in the light, a handkerchief 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 Devin, vowing inwardly not to be put on the defensive this time, crossed the lane to where Catriana had been expressionlessly observing the altercation.

‘Well,’ he said caustically, ‘I do appreciate your coming all this way to apologize, but you might have chosen a different way of finding me if you were sincere. 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 handkerchief. ‘I hadn’t counted on that much of a reaction inside. But not having a surplus of astins to spend on bribes I couldn’t think of a better way to get tavern-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 transgressions. You must be used to better things.’

She hesitated for the first time. ‘Must we discuss this in the middle of Tannery Lane?’ she said.

Without a word Devin sketched a performance bow and gestured for her to lead the way. She started walking away from the harbour and he fell in stride beside her. They were silent for several minutes, until out of the range of the tannery 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?’ Catriana’s voice dripped with sarcasm. ‘We are going to my room at the inn for a session of love-making like Eanna and Adaon at the dawn of days.’

‘Oh, good,’ Devin snapped, his own anger rekindling. ‘Why don’t we pool our funds 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 answer? Or what you did this morning? I’ve been pleasant to you from the day we signed 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 my closest friend in the company. She died of the plague in Certando. I could have 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 that 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-afternoon lull. Instinctively he looked around; thankfully there were no Barbadians passing just then. There was a familiar tight feeling in his chest, as of the apprehended return of pain, that always came with the thought of Marra. The first 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 beds across the Palm at night. His first lover. First death.

Catriana, released, remained where she was, and there was a look in her own eyes—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 say 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 the 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 others, 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 moment, thinking. He said, ‘Do you know . . . has anyone ever told you . . . that it is possible and even useful to tell things like this to people— especially 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 ever.’

‘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 the corner, hooting with reflexive ribaldry at the sight of the two of them standing together. There was no malice in it though, and they went by without causing any trouble. A few red and golden leaves skipped over the cobbles in the breeze.

‘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 time, that you always were. I was nervous though, with so much at stake. I couldn’t just wait around. You’d left a little, um, upset, after all.’

‘A little,’ Devin agreed gravely, noting that she finally had the grace to look apologetic. He would have felt even more secure if he hadn’t continued to find 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, travelling through that last year on the road before Certando where she died.

‘You had better tell me what’s happened,’ he said, forcing his thoughts back to the present. There was danger in fantasies and in memories, both.

‘The exiled Duke, Sandre, died last night,’ Catriana said. She looked around but 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 tomorrow 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 have a chance to do the most talked-about performance in the whole of the Palm this year!’ She looked very young now. And quite unsettlingly beautiful. Her eyes 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 the first time. It was a pleasant turnabout, especially coupled with the real excitement of her news. He began walking, forcing her to fall in stride with him. For a change.

‘It isn’t like that,’ she protested. ‘It’s just that this is so important. Menico 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 flattered by that, or insulted that you actually thought I’d be so unprofessional as to miss a rehearsal on the eve of the Festival.’

‘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 you had a sense of humour.’

She grew quiet. ‘Sometimes I’m not sure either,’ she said, almost absently. Then, 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 perceptive, 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 had come to know desire.

What he heard was longing, and it reached towards a space inside him that he hadn’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 it was an isolated place and none of them had a frame of reference whereby to properly judge or measure such things.

One of Devin’s first memories of his father—one that he summoned often because 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 memories 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 would 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 few evenings Devin did like to remember, when he and his father and the twins would 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 travelling priest of Morian he sang counterpoint 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 requests without giving offence.

Later yet, he began to be called upon in the taverns. There were no age laws for 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 farm 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 refusing offers to buy the contract of his young tenor, had finally offered Devin journeyman status in the Guild and a regular salary—after first making clear how very much the young man owed him, and how loyalty was the only marginally adequate 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 during the summer wedding season in Corte, Menico had made Devin a ten-per-cent partner in the company. After making the same speech, almost word for word, as the last time.

The honour, 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 journeyman on short-term contract. Especially now, when the aftermath of a plague spring in the south had every troupe in the Palm short of bodies and scrambling to fill with temporary musicians, dancers, or singers.

A haunting thread of sound, barely audible, plucked Devin’s attention away from 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 busyness of his fingers on the pipes. They finished the piece together, pipes and syrenya, and humming tenor voice.

‘I wish I knew the words,’ Devin said regretfully as they ended. ‘My father taught 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 Tregean after two weeks of rehearsal other than that the man was extraordinarily good on the pipes and quite reliable. As Menico’s partner, that was all that should 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, pushing a hand through his hair in a characteristic gesture. ‘It’s been a long time 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 chiaros 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 myself ambitious. Restless, more. And we weren’t originally from Asoli in fact. Came 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 have 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 they’d all known for hours. He wiped his palms on the sides 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 that 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, mildly 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 that 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 used 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 manifest, in his limp posture and the artificially exaggerated shadows that ringed his eyes, why Alberico the Tyrant didn’t appear to be much worried about the descendants 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 Adaon, in crimson, with her hair cropped very short.

It was autumn of course, and the Ember Days were coming on: Devin wasn’t surprised by her hair. He was surprised to see the clergy there for the audition. They made him uncomfortable—another legacy of his father— but this wasn’t a situation 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, after 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 Nieri and Aldine beyond the surface steps of their dance across the recently swept floor and into the laconic, precise articulation of ritual that the ‘Lament’ demanded and was so rarely granted.

When they finished, Devin, travelling slowly back to the Sandreni Palace from the cedar and cypress slopes of Tregea where the god had died—and where he died again each and every autumn—saw that Sandre d’Astibar’s son was weeping. The 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 tears, he knew: ‘Why hire a mongrel and bark yourself?’ she would say when their 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 grief when Burnet di Corte had led his company through her mourning rites in Certando as a gesture of courtesy to Menico.

Devin also knew, by the smouldering look the Sandreni scion gave him from within the smeared dark rings around his eyes, and the scarcely less transparent glance 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 contract he was going to have to be careful in this palace tomorrow. He made a mental note to bring his knife.

They had won the contract. The second number hardly mattered, which is why cunning Menico had begun with the ‘Lament’. Afterwards Menico carefully introduced Devin as his partner when Sandre’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 music 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 experienced tact: presented as a partner he had some slight immunity from overly aggressive wooers, even among the nobility. He was introduced to the clergy next, 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, ringed fingers at his sides. He accepted the blessing and protection of Adaon—the priestess’s index finger tracing the god’s symbol on his brow—in the knowledge 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’Astibar bar Sandre, confirming in Devin’s mind what a sorry creature he was to bear such a magnificent name and lineage.

It would have interested him—and led him a step or two further down the hard road towards maturity—to learn that Duke Sandre himself would have accepted the 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 trestle 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 each of the temples tomorrow. We will earn it back with interest when they choose musicians for the Ember Days.’

Menico, in high good humour, swore even more magnificently than before, and announced a set intention to offer Eghano’s wrinkled body as a tithe to the fleshy priest of Morian instead. Eghano smiled toothlessly and continued his soft drumming.

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 their lives. He beamed benevolently as Aldine led Nieri from the room. The girls would share a bed that night, Devin was sure, and for the first time, he suspected. He wished them joy of each other, knowing that they had come together magically as dancers that afternoon and also knowing—for it had happened to him once—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 the 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 one 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 unslaked 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 their womanhood for this one autumn morning of every turning year to the deeper service 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, bride, all through the year and through all the years since Eanna named the stars.

Shared him and loved him except on this one morning in the falling season. This morning that was shaped to become the harbinger, the promise of spring to come, 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 Eanna’s tears and the moist sorrowings of Morian’s endless underground streams 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-clad 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 Morian 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 high 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 garments away, saw them render themselves deliberately naked for greater speed to the chase, seizing blood-red berries of sonrai to intoxicate themselves against what 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 place of his ending. And Devin saw the women come upon him there, with their flying hair and blood flowing along their bodies and he saw Adaon bow his proud, glorious 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 those cries. Instead, piercing through the whole of that wild scene among cedar and cypress on the mountainside, the only thing Devin heard was the sound of Tregean 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 face when he turned to his rending was that of Alessan.

Chapter III

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 rites were never done in the presence of the dead as was the practice in the other eight provinces: such a procedure was regarded as excessive, too fevered an 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 above, leading off the interior rooms on the two upper floors. In one of those rooms, marked by the appropriate hangings—grey-blue and black—lay the body of Sandre d’Astibar, coins over his eyes to pay the nameless doorman at the last portal of Morian, food in his hands and shoes on his feet, for no one living could 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 past 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, servants, lesser merchants—would enter the palace later. They could be heard outside now: gathered to hear the music of the old Duke’s mourning rites. The people drifting into the courtyard in the meantime were the most extraordinary collection of petty and high nobility, and of accumulated mercantile wealth that Devin had ever seen in one place.

Because of the Festival of Vines, all the lords of the Astibar distrada had come into town from their country estates. And being in town they could hardly not be present to see Sandre mourned—for all that many or most of them had bitterly hated him while he ruled, and the fathers or grandfathers of some had paid 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 seats, seeming, in the manner of clergy everywhere, to be privy to a mystery that they collectively shielded from lesser mortals with the gravity of their repose.

Menico’s company waited in a small room off the courtyard that Tomasso had ordered set aside for their use. All the usual amenities were there, and some that were far from usual: Devin couldn’t remember seeing blue wine offered to performers 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 Eghano 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 signalled 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 looked—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 trained his dancers to be. Not inviting or alluring as some other troupes approached this dance of the rites, nor a merely graceful prelude to the real performance, as certain other companies conceived it. Menico’s dancers were guides, cold and compelling, towards the place of the dead and of mourning for the dead. Gradually, inexorably, the slow grave movements, the expressionless, almost inhuman faces imposed the silence that was proper on that restive, preening audience.

And in that silence the three singers and four musicians came forward and began 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 professional skill to shape an apparent artlessness, the company of Menico di Ferraut 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 Astibar, they mourned—as was proper—the dying of all the Triad’s mortal children, brought through Morian’s portals to move on Adaon’s earth under Eanna’s lights 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 Alessan’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 captives in the trap of time—and at the moment that was proper he let his own voice soar with the two syrenyae into the space that had been left for them to fill, in the middle range where mortals lived and died.

So Menico di Ferraut had shaped his approach to the seldom-performed Full Mourning Rites long ago, bringing forty years of art and a full, much-travelled life 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 leader 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’ progression past Sandre’s bier would now take place upstairs. After, the company would finish with the last three rites, ending on Devin’s ‘Lament’, and then the body 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 highest possible accolade. They re-entered the room that had been reserved for their 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 and 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—not now—with Alessan. Drenio and Pieve, the syrenya-players, were bent over their instruments, adjusting the strings. Eghano, pragmatic as ever, was eating while idly drumming the table with his free hand. Menico walked by, restless and distracted. He gave Devin a wordless squeeze on the arm.

Devin looked for Catriana and saw her just then leaving the room through an inner archway. She glanced back. Their glances met for a second, then she went on. Light, strangely filtered, fell from a high unseen window upon the space where 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 moment, he was never able to say exactly why he followed her.

Simple curiosity. Desire. A complex longing born of the look in her eyes before and the strange, floating place of stillness and sorrow where they now seemed 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 judgement in the Tregean’s glance, only an intent expression Devin could not understand. 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 through the archway.

There was a staircase with a high, narrow, stained-glass window on the first-floor landing. In the many-coloured 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 upstairs room would be sheerest, ill-bred presumption.

He hesitated, and he would have turned back then, had it not been for the memory that was his blessing and his curse and always had been. He had seen the hanging banners from the courtyard. The room where Sandre d’Astibar lay was to the 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 colours badly faded. There were two exits, but the dust came to his aid now: he could see the neat print of her sandals going towards the door on the right.

Silently Devin followed that trail through the warren of abandoned rooms on the 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 was gone, much that remained was covered over. The light was dim; most of the windows 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 rooms along the outer side of the palace—none that offered onto the crowded balustrades overlooking the courtyard. It was brighter in these rooms. He could hear 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 three bronze horses on the mantelpiece and three portraits on the walls. The ceiling was gilded in what Devin knew would be gold. Along the outer wall where a line of windows overlooked the street there were two long tables laden with food 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 letting 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, deflecting remark to shatter the heavy spell that seemed to lie upon him, upon the whole 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 followed. 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, controlling 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 would 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 of fact and not a challenge or accusation, ‘This is not a room for privacy, Catriana. 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, sumptuously 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, her voice yearning upwards to where the pipes of Tregea called. He remembered her 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 throat, ‘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 uncertain light. She shook her head though and remained where she was, standing straight 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 the nuances the morning had already carried. He nodded his head—there was nothing 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 in 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 fish-bone. ‘I am cursed in all I turn my hands to!’ She spun back to the fireplace, her hands frantically feeling around the underside of the mantelpiece. ‘For the love of the goddesses 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 widened.

‘Don’t stand there gawking, fool!’ Catriana whispered fiercely. ‘Quickly!’

A new voice had joined the others behind him; there were three now. Devin leaped for the concealed door, slipped inside beside Catriana, and together they pulled 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 response. For one thing, he still couldn’t say why he’d followed her; for another, 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 perfume 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 awake 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 closed his eyes, even though it was pitch-black in the hidden closet. He could feel 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 perspiration on his brow. To distract himself he tried to focus on the sounds from outside. Behind him the shuffling of feet and a steady, diffused murmur made 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 to the outer wall where the laden tables were. ‘Very amusing.’

‘Of course I noticed,’ the first man replied acerbically. Where had Devin heard that tone? And recently. ‘Who do you think spent an evening scrounging up two 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 moment before the family arrives. Listen to me carefully. Only the three of us know what is happening.’

‘It is only us, then?’ the young voice queried. ‘No one else? Not even my father?’

‘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 Catriana 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 and 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 rather 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 within his blue-silver hose. Outside he could hear that voice he almost knew beginning a terse explanation of something involving pall-bearers and a hunting lodge, but the voice and its explanations had abruptly been rendered definitively trivial.

What was not trivial, what was in fact of the vastest importance imaginable was 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 breasts, her own fingers were nimble among the drawstrings at his waist, setting him 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 moonrise 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 slipped 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 becoming 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 his shoulder. For a moment, lost in astonished pleasure and sharp pain, Devin was motionless, holding her close to him, murmuring almost soundlessly, not knowing 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 town—not together!—to join us tonight. Whatever you do be sure you are not followed or we are dead.’

There was a brief silence. Then the door on the farthest side of the room opened 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, remembered, 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 years it wouldn’t have been surprising. I need two glasses of wine very badly. Sitting 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 laughter. Then a newer urgency came over Devin, and it seemed to him it was in her 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 together.

Devin felt her fingernails splay outwards on his back. Feeling his climax gathering he cupped his hands beneath her; she lifted her legs and wrapped them around 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 clothing 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 her 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 body of the Duke so many had hated and some few had loved. To Devin’s left the younger generation of the Sandreni ate and drank, toasting an end to exile. Devin, wrapped close with Catriana, still sheathed within her warmth, could not have hoped to find words to say what he was feeling.

Suddenly she seized one of his tracing fingers and bit it, hard. He winced, because it hurt. She didn’t say anything though.

AFTER THE SANDRENI LEFT, Catriana found the latch and they slipped out into the 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 the other way and Devin, feeling exceptionally alert and alive now, claimed Catriana’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 bother 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 they 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 then 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 what 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 attentiveness, Devin was able to give the ‘Lament for Adaon’ an undivided soul, for he was confused no longer, but quite decided in what he was going to do.

He began softly in the middle range with the two syrenyae, building and shaping 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 mountain glen to crag to chasm brink.

He sang the dying of the god with a voice made pure in the cauldron 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 pall-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 Catriana d’Astibar had just done the very best she could short of murder to prevent him learning about. He strove to turn the acrid taste of that knowledge into grief for Adaon, to let it guide and infuse the path 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 man, and he had already decided, before even he began to sing, here in this crowded courtyard among the great of Astibar, that he was going to be the judge of what was better, not her.

So Devin sang the rending of the god at the hands of the women, and he gave that 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 Casadel as the song came to its end.

And so too, that morning, did a part of Devin’s life. For when a portal of Morian’s has been crossed there is, as everyone knows, never a turning back.

Chapter IV

Escorting his father’s bier out of the eastern gate in the hour before sunset, Tomasso bar Sandre settled his horse to an easy walk and allowed his mind to drift for the first time in forty-eight intensely stressful hours.

The road was quiet. Normally it would have been clogged at this hour with people returning to the distrada before curfew locked the city gates. Normally sundown cleared the streets of Astibar of all save the patrolling Barbadian mercenaries and those reckless enough to defy them in search of women or wine or other 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 harvest a triumphant one, the Festival of Vines would see singing and dancing and things wilder than those in the streets for all three nights. For these three 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 enough to rouse the people unnecessarily by denying them this ancient release from the sober round of the year.

Tomasso glanced back at his city. The setting sun was red among thin clouds behind the temple-domes and the towers, bathing Astibar in an eerily beautiful glow. A breeze had come up and there was a bite to it. Tomasso thought about putting on his gloves and decided against it: he would have had to remove some of his rings and he quite liked the look of his gems in this elusive, transitory 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—if 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 bier 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. Which was not surprising, given the nature of their errand and the complex, many-generationed hatreds that twisted between those two men.

Those three men, Tomasso corrected himself. It was three, if one chose to count 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 province of Astibar should be asked to be his escorts to the hunting lodge for the night-long vigil and from there to the Sandreni Crypt at dawn. Or, to put the 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 forest that night.

At that thought Tomasso felt a nudge of apprehension within his rib-cage. He quelled it, as he had taught himself to do over the years—unbelievable how many years—of discussing such matters with his father.

But now Sandre was dead and he was acting alone, and the night they had laboured 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 easily feel like a child again.

The twelve-year-old child he had been, for example, when Sandre, Duke of Astibar, 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 quiet. Tomasso had been whipped by his father for three days running, the lash meticulously rediscovering the closing wounds each morning. His mother had been 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 manner. 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 train Gianno to succeed him, and spending scarcely less time with young Taeri— making 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 Sandreni 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 had set out through the course of those years to eclipse the memories of all the 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 long 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 dinners or formal state functions. If Tomasso learned something he thought Sandre 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 mattered, 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 themselves 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 mercenaries, 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 thing: the monumental, irredeemable, inescapable stupidity of Gianno d’Astibar bar 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 the 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 the next generation, whatever of his subtlety and perception, his ability to cloak his thoughts and discern the minds of others, whatever of such skills he had 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 one of the truest measures of the Duke’s stature as a ruler of men had emerged on that winter night so long ago. The night he broke a decade’s stony silence and spoke to his middle son and made him his confidant.

His sole confidant in the painfully cautious eighteen-year quest to drive Alberico 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 in to impotent, brooding, Triad-cursing exile, marked by querulous, blustering hunts and too much drinking of his own wine.

Tomasso had never seen his father actually drunk, and he never used his own fluting 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 provincial border with Astibar. For over half a year idle gossip in Astibar had touted that inn as a place of growing distinction. No one remembered, afterwards, where the talk had begun: Tomasso knew very well how useful it was to plant casual rumours of this sort among his friends in the temples. The priests of Morian, 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 Astibar 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 patrons—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. During the course of the following six months every living member of the Canziano family was found, seized, publicly tortured and burned in the Grand Square of Astibar 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 fact, be poisoned.

For the next six years they had done nothing but talk at night in the manor-house among the vineyards and gather what knowledge they could of Alberico himself and events to the east in Barbadior, where the Emperor was said to be growing 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 rumoured that he’d had some of his young friends model for the carvers. Sandre hunted. Gianno, the heir, consolidated a burgeoning reputation as a genial, uncomplicated seducer of women and breeder of children, legitimate and illegitimate. The younger Sandreni were allowed to maintain modest homes in the city as part of Alberico’s overall policy to be as discreet a ruler as possible—except when danger or civil unrest threatened 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 to see ghostly lights flickering there at night, especially on a blue-moon night, or on the spring or autumn Ember Nights when the dead were known to walk abroad.

Then one evening in the country Sandre had told Tomasso, without warning or preamble, that he proposed to die on the eve of the Festival of Vines two autumns 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 necessary for certain things. They also agreed that Gianno had somehow sired one likely son, albeit illegitimate, and that Herado—twenty-one by then and showing 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 was, 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 mind.

It had been an entirely dispassionate conversation, Tomasso remembered, leading his father’s bier southeast between the darkening trees that flanked the path. Their conversations had always been like that; this one had been no different. Afterwards though, he had been unable to fall asleep, the date of the Festival two years away branded into his brain. The date when his father, so precise in his planning, so judicious, had decided he would die so as to give Tomasso a chance to try again, a different way.

The date that had come now and gone, carrying with it the soul of Sandre d’Astibar 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 servants to light torches. It grew colder as the darkness fell. Overhead a thin band of high clouds was tinted a sombre shade of purple by the last upward-angled rays 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 procession could have done without torches in fact, so bright was the twinned moonlight, but torchlight suited the task and his mood, and so Tomasso let them burn as the company cut off the road on to the familiar winding path through the Sandreni 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 centre of the large front room. Candles were lit and the two fires built up at opposite ends of the room. Food, they had set up earlier that day. It was quickly uncovered on the 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 the manor further east and return at daybreak. At vigil’s end.

And so they were left alone, finally. Tomasso and the lords Nievole and Scalvaia, so carefully chosen two years before.

‘Wine, my lords?’ Tomasso asked. ‘We will have three others joining us very shortly.’

He said it, deliberately, in his natural voice, dropping the artificial, fluting 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 did 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 cleverest.’ 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 break the small silence his father had said would follow. Scalvaia would ask, Sandre 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 did 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 glowered above his beard. Both men stared at Tomasso.

‘A little more than that,’ said Taeri as he entered the room, Herado behind him.

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 expression 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, stretching 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 pretences?’

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 last lords of any real power left in Astibar. Two winters past he decided—and informed 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 include 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 suspicion, or interruption, or risk of being detected, to set in motion certain plans 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. The 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 this 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 Sandre 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,’ he said politely to the man he was almost sure had paid for the cup of wine that had killed his mother. ‘He was also quite certain you would agree to come, being 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 say I do prefer your voice as it is now, without all the dips and flutters and wristy things that normally go with it.’

Scalvaia looked amused. Taeri laughed aloud. Herado was carefully watchful. Tomasso 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 been deducing in the last few minutes, being who and what you are, why I have conducted certain aspects of my life in certain well-known ways. There are advantages 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 all 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 dramatic eventuality.’

His gaze was quite unreadable; Tomasso had been warned it would be. He said nothing. Taeri shifted uneasily but blessedly kept quiet, as instructed. He walked 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 ride back towards Astibar carrying word of treachery we would join your father among 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 honour by your presence and 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 point out that although you could readily have us wristed and death-wheeled after torture, it is exceedingly likely, approaching a certainty, that Alberico would then see compelling cause to do the same to both of you, for having been considered likely accomplices of ours. You will remember what happened to the Canziano after that misfortunate 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 from by his fire. ‘Not the Canziano at all!’

‘It was our doing,’ Tomasso agreed calmly. ‘We learned a great deal, I must say.’

‘So,’ Scalvaia murmured drily, ‘did the Canziano. Your father always hated Fabro bar Canzian.’

‘They could not have been said to be on the best of terms,’ Tomasso said blandly. ‘Though I must say that if you focus on that aspect of things I fear you might 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 Nievole’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 have 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 Barbadior 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 honour I will keep faith with the Sandreni in this.’

Tomasso shivered at the invocation of the ancient words. ‘Your oath and honour 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 been 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 honour.’

‘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 around. 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 lineage to succeed in ousting a tyrant. In the Palm or anywhere else.’ With an economical motion he hoisted himself upwards, swung his feet into the room and sat comfortably perched on the ledge. ‘On the other hand,’ he added, ‘agreeing on 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 his 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 never spoke to your father in my life. If he knew of my activities and somehow expected me to find out about this meeting and be here . . . well, I would be somewhat flattered by his confidence but rather more disturbed that he would have known so much about me. On the other hand,’ he said for a second time, ‘it is 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 armchair.

But in that moment Tomasso remembered.

‘I know you!’ he said abruptly. ‘I saw you this morning. You are the Tregean shepherd 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 Sandre ought to appreciate that.’ He grinned.

Tomasso did not return the smile. ‘Perhaps then, under the circumstances, you might favour us by saying who you really are.’ He said it as politely as the situation 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. ‘Though I will say that were I to swear a vow of my own on the honour 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 will not deny us some information surely, even if you choose to shield your name. You said Alberico is a tool for you. A tool for what, Alessan notof-Tregea?’ He was pleased to find that he remembered the name Menico di Ferraut had mentioned 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 immortality beyond the last portal of Morian.’

There was a silence again, broken only by the crackle of the autumn fires on the two hearths. It seemed to Tomasso as if the chill of winter had come into the 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 himself did not smile.

The man on the window-ledge acknowledged the thrust with the briefest nod of his head. He said, ‘This is not, my lord, a subject about which I permit frivolity. 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 sharply. ‘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 said finally. ‘I have not escaped it, I’m afraid. But I am indeed mindful of who you are. And the Sandreni and my lord Nievole. It is why I am here. I have made it my business to be aware of dissidence throughout the Palm for many years. At times I have encouraged it, discreetly. This evening marks the first instance 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 inwardly 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 waiting for a reply he lifted himself down from the ledge and walked over to the wine.

‘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. Herado’s eyes, watching him, were enormous.

‘Two facts,’ the man called Alessan said crisply. ‘Learn them if you are serious 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 Alberico will rule this peninsula within that same period of time.’

He stopped. His eyes—grey, Tomasso noticed now—moved from one to the other of 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 them. They are the core truths of the Palm in our time. The two sorcerers from overseas are their own balance of power and the only balance of power in the peninsula 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 smiled 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 this with infinite respect for the dead man who seems—remarkably enough—to have drawn us here. I’m afraid you are going to have to agree to submit yourselves to my guidance or we can do nothing together at all.’

‘The Scalvaiane have submitted themselves willingly to nothing and no one in living memory or recorded history,’ that vulpine lord said, the texture of velvet 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 meet?’ Alessan retorted, his voice suddenly cutting like a blade. ‘Why are no rear 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—severed 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 everything you have done these past two days. What of the idly curious or the greedy? The petty informer who might decide to follow you just to see what happened here? Just to have a story to tell in the tavern tomorrow? Did you— or your father—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 and 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 arrived? 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 glass of wine. He glanced upwards to the shadows of the half-loft above, where the 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. You 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 performance in his life, had graciously passed their concert at the wine-merchant’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 Menico’s hitherto unfinalized tariff would now have been in the aftermath of the 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 of 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 available as harbingers of what this year’s grapes would offer. Merchants looking to buy in quantity were sampling judiciously, early revellers rather less so.

Fruit-vendors were also in abundance, with figs and melons and the enormous grapes of the season displayed beside vast wheels of white cheeses from Tregea or bricks of red ones from northern Certando. Over by the market the din was deafening 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 strode purposefully towards what he’d just been told was the most fashionable khav room in Astibar.

There were benefits to fame. He was recognized at the doorway, his arrival excitedly announced, and in a matter of moments he found himself at the dark wooden bar of The Paelion nursing a mug of hot khav laced with flambardion—no awkward 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 Sandre 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 rule, 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 Duke had liked to hunt. They told him. They told him where his favourite 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 hour. They let him go eventually: he pleaded an artist’s strained sensitivity after the morning’s endeavours. With the benefit of hindsight he now attached a deal 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 concerning certain verses of condolence that had not yet arrived from Chiara. He and Alessan had saluted each other in an elaborately showy, performers’ fashion that delighted the packed room.

Back at the inn, Devin had fended off the most ardent of the group who had walked 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 woollen overshirt against 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 morning instead of celebrating all night in town spending what they’d just earned.

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. Eventually 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 right. Just past it, as promised, was the delicately rendered image of a ship on the roadside gate of a modest country house. Rovigo’s home— what Devin could see of it, set well back from the road among cypress and olive trees—looked comfortable and cared-for.

A day ago, a different person, he would have stopped. But something had happened 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 alone and then quickly cut to his right, south into the woods, away from the main 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-coloured leaves dappled the sunlight. There was a path winding through the trees and Devin began to follow it, towards the hunting lodge of the Sandreni. From here on he redoubled his caution. On the road he was simply a walker in the autumn countryside; 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 remained 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 offer of her body—well it was for this afternoon and this evening to show how wrong an arrogant girl could be.

What else the evening might reveal, Devin didn’t know; he hadn’t allowed himself 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 picked the lock with the buckle of his belt, went inside, opened a window, and climbed out to relock the chain. Then he slipped back in through the window, closed it, and took a look around.

There was little option, really. The two bedchambers at the back would be dangerous 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 half-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 corner 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 corbin was glitteringly fixed upon him. Under the circumstances it made him nervous. Eventually he got up, turned the chestnut head to one side and settled in 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 overhear 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 carried him.

When the servants came half an hour later to prepare the room they gave him some very bad moments. Bad enough, in fact, to make him briefly wish that he was back home in Asoli guiding a plough behind a pair of stolid water buffaloes. They were fine creatures, water buffaloes, patient, uncomplaining. They ploughed fields 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 Catriana d’Astibar who had got him into this. Nor would any Asolini servant, Devin 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 the vigil-keeping lords should grow weary.

‘Goch, don’t be more of a fool than you absolutely must be!’ the steward snapped officiously in reply. ‘They are here to keep a waking watch all night—a pallet in the room is an insult to them both. Be grateful you aren’t dependent on 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, himself. The ratio seemed about right.

Finally the servants left; heading back for Astibar to bear the Duke’s body here. The steward’s instructions were painstakingly explicit. With idiots like Goch 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 rooms of the palace. To the hidden closet at the end. The sudden silken feel of Catriana when her gown had drifted above her hips. He made himself stop that too.

It grew steadily darker. The first owl called, not far away. Devin had grown up 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 the wind would set the leaves to rustling.

Then, abruptly, there came a shining of white light through one of the drawn window curtains and Devin knew that Vidomni was high enough to look down upon this clearing amid the tall trees of the wood, which meant that blue Ilarion would 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 lock clinked, rattled, and the door swung open. The steward led in eight men carrying a bier. Eye glued to his crack in the floor, breathing shallowly, Devin saw them lay it down. Tomasso came in with the two lords whose names and lineage Devin had learned in The Paelion.

The servants uncovered and laid out the food and then they left, Goch stumbling on the threshold and banging his shoulder pleasingly on the doorpost. The steward, last to go, shrugged a discreet apology, bowed, and closed the door behind 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, and so gradually became aware of the magnitude of what he had stumbled upon, the 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 recruit 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 than 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. ‘Only 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 the 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 Alessan.

For the moment his apprehension was gone, replaced by something entirely different. Alessan had claimed him, given him legitimacy here. He was clearly linked 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 excitement.

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 the exaggerated courtesy and the undeniable sparkle in bar Sandre’s accentuated eyes, that although the fluting voice might be faked, Tomasso, in certain matters and propensities, was still very much what he was said to be. Devin accepted 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 quantity 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 anger in Alessan’s voice. ‘And call Nievole a grain-farmer from the southwestern distrada? 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 and forth across the Palm, which offers advantages I need not belabour.’ A second finger shot up beside the first. ‘Two: music trains the mind, like mathematics, or logic, to precision of detail. The sort of precision, my lords, that would have precluded the carelessness that has marked tonight. If Sandre d’Astibar 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. As matters stand I can only say again that if we are to work together I must ask you to accept my lead.’

He spoke this last directly to Scalvaia who still lounged, elegant and expressionless, in his deep chair. It was Nievole who answered, though, blunt and direct.

‘I am not in the habit of delaying my judgement of men. I think you mean what you say and that you are more versed in these things than we are. I accept. I will 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 nuance, 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 circumstances it is entirely fair. I can only pray you will not hold me to it though. 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 carefully. ‘Names are power, as you know. As the two tyrant-sorcerers from overseas most certainly know. And as I have been made to know in the bitterest ways there are. My lord, you will learn my name in the moment of our triumph if it comes, 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 enough 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 excitement surrender to something else, something he could not yet identify. He stared at Alessan. The man seemed younger than before, somehow—unable to prevent this almost naked showing of his need.

Nievole cleared his throat loudly, as if to dispel an aura, a resonance of something 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 sweep 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 from that lodge.

He could guess, analyse, play out scenarios in his mind, but he would never know. 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 it 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 private portals to endings near or far, were laid down by the owl that cried a second time, very clearly, just as Nievole began to speak.

Alessan flung up his hand. ‘Trouble!’ he said sharply. Then: ‘Baerd?’

The doorway banged open. Devin saw a large man, his very long, pale-yellow hair held back by a leather band across his brow. There was another leather thong about 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—the 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, what was exchanged in it, became another one of the things that Devin never forgot, or fully understood.

For a long moment—a very long moment, it seemed to Devin, with twenty horsemen 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, but 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. Do 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 our 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 nearest 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 clearing.

With Devin in the middle they ran swiftly around to the side of the cabin farthest from the path that led to the main road. They didn’t go far. His pulse pounding furiously, Devin dropped to the ground when the other two men did so. Peering cautiously out from under a cluster of dark-green serrano bushes they could 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 bows, 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’Astibar.

‘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 jingling 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 own nerves. He looked over at his brother; Taeri seemed all right. Herado was white-faced, however. Tomasso winked at the boy. ‘Have another drink, nephew. You look infinitely prettier with colour in your cheeks. There is nothing to fear. 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 drained it at a gulp. Just as he put the goblet down the door crashed loudly open, 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 brings you here, to interrupt a vigil?’ He was careful to sound petulant, not angry.

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 it to examine the half-loft where the young singer had been hiding. Other soldiers, 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 protest directly to your lord. We have Alberico’s express permission to conduct this vigil and the burial tomorrow. I have it in writing under his seal!’ He addressed 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 expressions blank and dangerous.

‘This is intolerable!’ Tomasso whined, staying in character, his hands writhing about each other. ‘I shall ride immediately to Alberico! I shall demand that 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, Ferraut 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-cloak of numbing fear threatened to descend over Tomasso, trammelling 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 his terror and bewilderment. ‘You are most welcome here,’ he bleated, rising carefully, ‘most welcome, most honoured lord. You do us too much honour with your presence at my father’s rites.’

‘I do,’ said Alberico bluntly. Tomasso received the full weight of a heavy scrutiny from the small eyes, close-set and unblinking deep, in the folds of the sorcerer’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, gesturing with a meaty palm.

‘But of course, of course.’

Tomasso stumbled to obey, intimidated as always by the sheer, bulky physicality of Alberico and his Barbadians. They hated him, he knew, and all his kind, over and above everything else these conquerors felt about the people of the Eastern 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 schooling 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. Nievole 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 sitting.

It was time, Tomasso judged, to sound more confident, less guilty. ‘You will forgive 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 likely to know of those changes before you, bar Sandre.’

‘Of course, my lord. But of course. They—’ ‘I wanted,’ said Alberico of Barbadior, ‘to look upon the coffin of your father. To look, and to laugh.’ He showed no trace of an inclination towards amusement.

Tomasso’s blood felt suddenly icy in his veins. Alberico stepped past him and stood massively over the remains of the Duke. ‘This,’ he said flatly, ‘is the body of a vain, wretched, fatuous old man who decreed the hour of his own death to no purpose. No purpose at all. Is it not amusing?’

He did laugh then—three short, harsh barks of sound that were more truly frightening 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, impotent Lord Scalvaia? Is it not diverting to think how all of you have been brought 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 easily smashed through with a fist today.’ His clenched hand crashed heavily down on the wooden coffin lid, splintering the carved Sandreni arms. With a faint sound of distress Scalvaia sank back into his chair.

‘My lord,’ Tomasso gulped, gesticulating. ‘What can you possibly mean? What are you—’

He got no further than that. Wheeling savagely Alberico slapped him meatily across 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 least 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 desperately to hold back. Oh, my father, he thought, stricken to his soul that it should 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 they would not know! You told me—’

It was all he said. It is difficult to expostulate with a dagger embedded in your throat.

‘The Sandreni deal with the scrapings of dirt under their own fingernails,’ said 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 continuous motion, sheathed it in his own heart.

‘One less Sandreni for your sky-wheels, Barbadian!’ he taunted, gasping. ‘Triad send a plague to eat the flesh from your bones.’ He dropped to his knees. His 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 sort 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 his 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 them full into the face of the soldier nearest to him. The blow smashed bones like splintering wood. Blood spurted as the man screamed and crumpled heavily back 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 eyes 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 one 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 hand, pointed it straight at Alberico’s face, and squeezed the spring catch hidden in the handle.

Sorcerers cannot, indeed, be poisoned—a minor protective art, one that most of them master in their youth. On the other hand, they most certainly can be slain, by arrow or blade, or any of the other instruments of violent death—which is why such things were forbidden within a decreed radius of wherever Alberico might be.

There is also a well-known truth about men and their gods—whether of the Triad in the Palm, or the varying pantheon worshipped in Barbadior, whether of mother goddess or dying and reviving god or lord of wheeling stars or single awesome Power above all of these in some rumoured prime world far off amid the drifts of space.

It is the simple truth that mortal man cannot understand why the gods shape events as they do. Why some men and women are cut off in fullest flower while others 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, sheer 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 and on the taut, bleeding form of Tomasso. No one had spared a glance for the crippled lord in his chair.

It was only the fact—mercilessly random—that that evening’s Captain of the Guard 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 things so achingly small are lives measured and marred.

Alberico, turning in a white rage to snap an order at his captain, saw the cane come up and Scalvaia’s finger jerk upon the handle. Had he been facing straight ahead or turning the other way he would have died of a sharpened projectile bursting into his brain.

It was towards 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 blurred oozing of matter and air where Alberico’s head had been. The bolt smashed 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 living nor dead, left to howl impotently in the waste that lay in ambush for those who dared essay such magic—Alberico summoned the lineaments of his form back 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 foot 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 recognize, clattered loudly to the ground. The air seemed thick and viscous to the sorcerer, 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 in the room, before he trusted himself to even try to speak.

‘You are dung,’ he said, thickly, coarsely, to the ashen captain. ‘You are less than that. You are filth and crawling slime. You will kill yourself. Now!’ He spoke as if there were sliding soil clogging and spilling from his mouth. With 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 jugular with a swift, jagged slash. Alberico felt a froth of rage foaming and boiling through his mind. He fought to will an end to a palsied tremor in his left hand. He could not.

There were a great many dead men in the room and he very nearly had been one of 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 fingers at the drooping eyelid. He felt ill, nauseous. The air was hard to breathe. He needed to be outside, away from this suddenly stifling lodge of his enemies.

Nothing had come to pass as he’d expected. There was only one single element left of his original design for the evening. One thing that might yet offer a kind of pleasure, that might redeem a little of what had gone so desperately awry.

He turned, slowly, to look at Sandre’s son. At the lover of boys. He dragged his 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 are things we can do with this one before we allow him to die. Things appropriate to what he was.’

His vision was still not working properly, but he saw one of his mercenaries smile. Tomasso bar Sandre closed his eyes. There was blood on his face and clothing. There would be more before they were done.

Alberico put up his hood and limped from the room. Behind him the soldiers lifted 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 he began to feel better during the torchlit ride back to Astibar. He was utterly devoid of magic though. Even through the dulled sensations of his altered, reassembled 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 back. What he had done in the flashing of that instant in the lodge had drained more 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 families left in the Eastern Palm. Even more, he had the middle Sandreni son here now as evidence, public proof of the conspiracy for the days to come. The pervert who was said to relish pain. Alberico allowed himself a tiny smile within the recesses of his hood.

It was all going to be done by law, and openly, as had been his practice almost 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 course 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 Sandreni plot.

Or miss the point of how comprehensive that response was about to be.

With the prudent caution that was the truest well-spring of his character, Alberico of Barbadior began thinking through his actions of the next hours and days. 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 see that he knew how to give it what was needful. And it was growing more and more 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. The only commands that caused him an inward flicker of emotion were the ones concerning Tomasso bar Sandre. These, at least, did not have to be made public and 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 underground could be extremely private indeed. He surprised himself a little with the anticipation he felt.

At one point he remembered that he’d wanted the hunting lodge torched when they 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 V

‘Oh, Morian,’ Alessan whispered, wistful regret infusing his voice. ‘I could have sent him to your judgement 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 from where they were hidden among the trees north of the ribbon of road the Barbadians had just ridden along. He looked with even more respect than before at Alessan 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 the 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 any 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. Catriana, Devin saw, had not smiled. Certainly not at him. On the other hand, he reminded himself, he was supposed to be the one who was angry. The present circumstances 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 the 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 intelligent enough to now understand why she did it. You might suspend your own pride 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 stomach. Swallowing awkwardly, he looked from Alessan back to Catriana, but her gaze was fixed on the stars, away from and above them all. Finally, shamed, he looked down at the darkened forest floor. He felt fourteen years old again.

‘I don’t particularly appreciate that, Alessan,’ he heard Catriana saying coldly. ‘I fight my own wars. You know it.’

‘Not to mention,’ Baerd added casually, ‘the dazzling inappropriateness of your chastising anyone alive for having too much pride.’

Alessan chose to ignore that. To Catriana he said, ‘Bright star of Eanna, do you think I don’t know how you can fight? This is different though. What happened this morning cannot be allowed to matter. I can’t have this becoming a battle 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 intense interest in the loamy forest soil beneath his feet. His mind and heart were whirling with confusion.

Alessan’s voice was gentler when he resumed. ‘Catriana, what happened this morning 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 following you as innocently as he did. If you must, curse me for not stopping him as 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 the trees. Only Ilarion was overhead among the stars, making the night strange with her shining. Ghostlight, the country folk called it when the blue moon rode alone.

Alessan had the light behind him so his eyes were hidden. For a moment the only sounds were the night noises of the forest: rustle of leaf in breeze, of grass, the dry crackle of the woodland floor, quick flap of wings to a branch near 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 just 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. None the less he felt himself beginning to grow cold even as Alessan spoke. He had a swooping sense, like the descent of a hunting bird, that he had come to where Morian’s portal had led him, here in the shadows of this wood under the waxing blue moon.

Nor was he made easier when he turned to Baerd and saw the stricken look on the face of the other man. Even by the distorting moonlight he could see how pale Baerd had become.

‘Alessan . . .’ Baerd began, his voice roughened.

‘You are dearer to me than anyone alive,’ Alessan said, calm and grave. ‘You have been more than a brother to me. I would not hurt you for the world, and especially not in this. Never in this. I would not ask unless I was sure. Test him, 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 holding tightly to control of himself, took Devin by the arm and led him a dozen steps 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 leads 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 his hands together to keep them steady; he felt cold, and it had little to do with 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 could see building in Baerd’s eyes. The blond-haired man had appeared so effortlessly competent until this moment and now, absurdly, he seemed to have become terribly fragile. Someone who could be shattered with unsettling ease. Abruptly, 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, defined boundaries of the daylight world.

And in this mood, under the blue light of Ilarion, he heard Baerd begin the tale, so that it came to him that first time like a spell, something woven in words 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 Tregea 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 sailed his fleet into the Great Harbour of Chiara and he took the Island. He took it easily, for the Grand Duke killed himself, seeing how many ships had come from Ygrath. This much I suspect that you know.’

His voice was low. Devin found himself leaning forward, straining to hear. A trialla was singing sweetly, sadly, from a branch behind him. Alessan and Catriana made no sound at all. Baerd went on.

‘In that year the Peninsula of the Palm became a battleground in an enormous balancing game between Ygrath and the Empire of Barbadior. Neither thought it could 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 afterwards, had to do with his younger, most-beloved son, Stevan. Brandin of Ygrath 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 liquescent voice, gentler even than the nightingale’s, an echo to something in his own.

‘The Chiarans, attempting to rally a resistance in the mountains, were massacred on the slopes of Sangarios. Brandin took Asoli province soon after, and word of his power ran before him. He was very strong in his sorcery, even stronger than Alberico, and though he had fewer soldiers than the Barbadians in the east, his were more completely loyal and better trained. For where Alberico was only a wealthy, ambitious minor lord of the Empire using hired mercenaries, Brandin ruled Ygrath and his were the picked soldiers of that realm. They moved south through Corte almost effortlessly, defeating each province’s army one by 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 shape the fate of the Palm.

‘It was a mistake, though he could not really have known it then, eighteen years 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, there was a new timbre to his voice; it seemed to Devin to be carrying many different things, all of them old, and all of them sorrowful.

‘At the line of the River Deisa,’ Baerd said, ‘a little more than halfway between 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—for 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 Corte, 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 spoke. Devin never took his own eyes away from Baerd. He concentrated as if his life depended on his doing so, treating each word spoken as if it were a jewelled 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 some recess of his mind. Ringing 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 Alberico 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 slain, and he met the remnant of his last foes where they had waited for him by the Deisa.’

Once more Baerd looked over at Alessan. His face was bleak, ghostly in the moonlight. 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 Deisa and he burned every field and village through which he passed. He took no prisoners. 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 many 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 levelled all the glorious towers of the city in the foothills of the mountains— the one now called Stevanien. On the coast he smashed to rubble and sand the walls and the harbour 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 year 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 single moon. And with it there was still that bell warning of sorrows yet to come, 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 ultimate revenge. He made it as if we had never been. Our deeds, our history, our very 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. Baerd 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 that 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 Astibar. 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 tightly than Baerd could ever have known. Than anyone could have known. For no one since Marra had died really knew what memory meant to Devin d’Asoli: the way 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 love, shelter from loss: for if something could be remembered it was not wholly lost. 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 what Devin was, the old vengeance of Brandin of Ygrath smashed into him that night as if it had been newly wrought, pounding through to the vulnerable centre of how Devin saw and dealt with the world, and it cut him like a fresh and killing 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 than ever now. Especially now, with the echo of Baerd’s last terrible words fading in the night. Devin looked at the blond-haired man with the leather bands across 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 from 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 learned 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 Morian 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 the people who can still hear and remember the name that has been . . . otherwise taken away.’

Alessan said, ‘It is so.’

Devin discovered that his hands were shaking. He looked down at them, concentrating, but he could not make them stop.

He said, ‘Then this is something that has been stolen from me all my life. Will 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 why. In the darkness they heard the trialla one more time, a long, descending note, and then Baerd spoke, and for the first time in his days Devin heard someone say:

‘Tigana.’

Within him the bell he had been hearing, as if in a dream of unknown summer fields, 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 corridors of his blood.

Then he saw how Baerd was staring at him. Saw his face rigid and white, the fear 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 any more. Around a difficult 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 name is Devin di Tigana bar Garin.’

Even as he spoke, something akin to glory blazed in Baerd’s face. The fair-haired 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. Devin heard Alessan draw an unsteady breath, and then, surprised, he felt Catriana 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 run 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 that 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 different from the bells he’d heard before. This time it was a music that took him 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 used, 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 the 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 trees sway,

My heart will carry me back and away To

a dream of the towers of Avalle.

A dream of my home in Avalle.

The sweet sad words to the tune he’d always known drifted down to Devin, and with them came something else. A sense of loss so deep it almost drowned the light grace of Catriana’s song. No breaking waves now, or trumpets along the blood: only the waters of longing. A longing for something taken away from him before he’d even known it was his—taken so completely, so comprehensively he might 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, learned very early in northern Asoli how risky it was to cry where someone might 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 mother 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 bitter-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 brave 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 mother 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 heart with what memory meant to him and the loss of memory: and out of that blazing something took shape in Devin that was to change the running of his life line 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 of the heart. Very carefully he folded his third and fourth fingers down so that 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, calloused one.

Devin said, ‘If you will have me I am with you. In the name of my mother who died 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 rustling as Alessan sank to his knees beside them. ‘Devin, I should be cautioning you,’ he said soberly. ‘This is not a thing in which to move too fast. You can be 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. ‘Tomasso bar Sandre will name you both to the torturers tonight or tomorrow. I’m afraid 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. Devin 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 Micaela. 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 added. ‘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. Ending their lives or blighting their souls. Your mother was dead, Avalle fallen, Tigana gone. He had fought and survived both battles by the Deisa.’ Above them Catriana made a small sound.

‘I never knew,’ Devin protested. ‘He never told us any of that.’ There was a new 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 away as they could, to a fishing village here in Astibar down the coast from Ardin, 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 oppression and the stigma that bore down—that still bear down—upon Tigana. Or Lower 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 imagine 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 something that would reveal you, unmistakably, to anyone from Tigana, but to no one else. I do not think it was chance. No more than Catriana’s mother giving her daughter 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, but his eyes had adjusted to that, and he could make out a strange, twining shape 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 appeared, come from bright Avalle of the towers in the southern highlands of Tigana and who had, in his youth, wooed and won a woman beloved of all who saw her. Who 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 have 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 oath. 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. ‘You seem to have entangled yourself rather thoroughly here.’ She lowered her left 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 forbade him to mention any details of what happened. How do I enforce that if you bring 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 you joined us. Why indeed should this be any different?’

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 sitting 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 rode by.’

‘Oh, very clear thinking, that,’ Baerd retorted. ‘With twenty soldiers surrounding 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. ‘Especially 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 added, ‘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 expected 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, ‘how 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 for 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 darkness—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. The 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 terrible 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 your 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 armchairs. ‘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 hidden 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 sorrow for what has happened?’ He paused. ‘And my respect for you, my lord Sandre.’

Devin’s jaw dropped open as if unhinged. He snapped it shut so hard he hurt his 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 deserve your respect though, nor that of anyone else. Once perhaps; not any more. You are speaking to an old vain fool—exactly as the Barbadian named me. A man who spent too many years alone, tangled in his own spun webs. You were right 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.’

‘Then his soul is cursed,’ Baerd said, quiet and fierce. ‘He is in Morian’s custody now, and she will know how to deal with him. May he be trammelled in darkness until the end of time.’

The old man seemed not to have even heard. ‘Taeri killed him,’ he murmured, wonderingly. ‘I had not thought he was brave enough, or so quick. Then he stabbed himself, to deny them the pleasure or whatever they might have learned of him. 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 guttering 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 gleamed with a cold defiance.

‘I am here,’ Sandre said, ‘and you are here because it goes on. It goes on whatever happens, whoever dies. While there is breath to be drawn and a heart with 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 straight 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 pieces of information were coming at him from too many different directions, contradicting each other ferociously. He felt dizzy, overwhelmed. He was in a room 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 come upon. At the same time, the one man he’d known to be dead—the man whose mourning rites he had sung that very morning—was the only man of Astibar left alive in this lodge.

If he was of Astibar!

For if he was, how could he have just spoken the name of Tigana, given what Devin had just learned in the wood? How could he have known that Alessan was—and this, too, Devin fought to assimilate—a Prince? The son of that Valentin who 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 and look—to absorb as much as he could into the memory that had never failed him 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. Finally I understand. My lord, I thought you always a giant among men. From the first 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 immediately made Devin feel better: he wasn’t the only one desperately treading water here.

‘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 killing 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 corrosive 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 nothing 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 Palm as it was elsewhere. We knew this. All the wizards knew this. You would have thought they would apply their brains to that knowledge, would you not? What good is a finding spell, or a fledgling mental arrow if it leads one straight to a Barbadian death-wheel in the sun?’ There was an acid, mocking bitterness 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 have agreed upon—other than the dividing line running down the Palm—that theirs 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 been 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 friend and shook his head. ‘Not this one, Baerd,’ he said cryptically. ‘Not Sandre d’Astibar.’

He turned back to the Duke and hesitated, choosing his words. Then, with an unmistakable pride, he said, ‘You will have heard the legend. It happens to be true. 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 appeared in Sandre’s hooded eyes. ‘I do know that story. The only wizard who ever 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 name as mortal mother of us all. And the line of the Princes has never been broken.’

Devin felt a complex stir of emotions working within himself. He didn’t even try 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 excuse for Tiganese arrogance. Princes of Tigana! Not Dukes, oh no. Princes! Descended of the god!’ He thrust the poker towards Alessan. ‘You will stand here tonight, 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, Eanna and Morian forbade. But the god granted a binding power over the Palm’s own 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 hand 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. Sandre’s sardonic amusement gradually receded into the deep lines etched in his face. The bitterness 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 replied, 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 sunken 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 any more. 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 little 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 happened,’ 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 used 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 peninsula.’

‘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 within 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 down 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 agreement.’

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. What 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 are 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 the 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 governing wizards here—but it constrains what I am able to do. I can go in there myself, yes, but I am not strong enough to bring someone else out. I can take 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, softly.

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 snapping 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. Here 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 freely, 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 your 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 sufficient 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 Alberico came, and it is the last vow I shall ever swear. I will say though that it shall be my endeavour 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 mattered, that neither man had spoken lightly, or less than the truth of his heart. He glanced over just then at Catriana and discovered that she had been watching 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. Because 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 given him an idea, his first really clear thought since they’d entered the lodge.

‘Are you sure you’ll be able to stop your son from talking?’ he asked diffidently.

‘Quite sure,’ Sandre replied briefly.

Devin’s brow knit. ‘Well then, it seems to me none of us is in immediate danger. 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 isn’t that kind of man. What happened this morning is what a lifelong trouper like 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 have let the old campaigner buy the inn in Ferraut he’d talked about for so many years. The place where he’d always said he’d like to settle when the road grew 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. Where 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 knew.

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’ve 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 Hall. 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 the Festival of Vines is going to blithely proceed after what has occurred tonight? 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 Sandre. ‘Alberico is cautious almost before he is anything else. I think tonight will redouble 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 wheels 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 and found his mind flinching away from the very image. Unobtrusively he made the 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 troupe all the time. Or left to start their own companies. Or retired from the road 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. That should have been a helpful thought, but it wasn’t. Somehow Devin hated to make 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 was connected with them? We’re sort of linked to the Sandreni now in a way. Should 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 acknowledgement.

‘Now that cloth I will buy,’ Baerd said. ‘That does make sense, though I’m sorry to say it.’

‘A good deal of sense,’ Sandre agreed. Devin fidgeted a little as he came under 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 the corner where Sandre’s grandson lay by the second, dying fire, his throat slashed 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 my preference for a soft bed at night. In short,’ he concluded with a grin, ‘your 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 favoured him with a forbidding glare. One that Alessan appeared to weather quite easily. ‘I will refrain,’ Baerd said darkly, ‘from a recitation of your own nocturnal habits. I will wait here alone for Duke Sandre to return. We’ll have to burn this lodge tonight, for obvious reasons. There’s a body that will 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 fit to rise from your pillows. Assuming,’ he added with heavy sarcasm, ‘that soft 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 isn’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 music 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 new 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 already 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 Catriana out the door and into the darkness of the wood again.

Chapter VI

As 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 autumn stars, cicadas loud in the woods on either side. Devin was glad of his woollen 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 travelling Menico was always careful to have his company quartered and settled by the dinner hour. Even with the stern measures both Tyrants had taken against thieves and brigands, the paths of the Palm were not often travelled 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 darkness having abandoned any such prospects or security, and having sworn an oath that marked him for a death-wheel, in Chiara if not here. Both places actually, if Tomasso bar Sandre talked.

It was an odd, lonely feeling. He trusted the men he had joined—he even trusted 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 sworn 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 evocation 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 glamour 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 reasons, how much his father did, or pride, or the sound of Baerd’s voice speaking 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 exactly as he had for the past six years. From having the triumph and the rewards that seemed to lie before him. He shook his head. It was astonishing in a way, 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 wondered how often men did what they did, made the choices of their lives, for reasons that were clean and uncomplicated and easily understood as they were happening.

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 the 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 both. Revellers 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 an 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 striving back towards the ordinary and familiar after what had happened in the night, 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 artisans I know. And, to tell the truth, Rovigo, I remember you saying the same thing to me yesterday afternoon in The Bird.’

‘I know that voice,’ Rovigo replied instantly. ‘I know that voice and I am exceedingly glad to hear it—even though you have just unmasked me before a shrewish 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. Devin heard relieved laughter from the two women in the cart. Behind him, Alessan 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 whom I was sharing a bottle in elegant surroundings when Catriana arranged to have 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 clutch of daughters were half so intelligent. No one,’ he added, ‘should much want to go inside The Bird unless they have a head-cold so virulent that it defeats 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 unseaworthy excuse for 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 personage named Taccio.’

‘My esteemed factor in Ferraut!’ Rovigo exclaimed. ‘Well-met, indeed! By the god, where did you encounter him?’

‘In another tavern, I am sorry to have to say. A tavern where I had been playing music and he was . . . well, escaping retribution was his own phrase. We two 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 talking.’

‘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 ponderous, unmarriageable daughter. He was beginning to take the measure of Rovigo’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 bound this way for the Festival he charged me to seek you out and carry verbal confirmation 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 and 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 before the winter frosts, the Dragon that slumbers uneasily by his side would awaken 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, Devin decided, pursuing his earlier thought, didn’t sound even remotely shrewish.

‘Eanna and Adaon, who bless marriages together, forfend that such a thing should 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 puppet-show.

‘Though why,’ came a mild, still-amused female voice from the cart, ‘all of you 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 only 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 habitual 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. ‘We’d taken a long walk to clear our heads and escape the noise, but were just about ready to brave the city again.’

‘I imagine the three of you would have been besieged by admirers all night,’ Rovigo 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 leaving the younger ones alone too late, and my unfortunate oldest, Alais, suffers from 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 his free hand. ‘I am hounded without respite even into my dreams. But, if you are 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 honour us,’ Alix added. ‘We heard you play and sing this morning at the Duke’s rites. Truly, it would be an honour if you joined us.’

‘You were in the palace?’ Devin asked, surprised.

‘Hardly,’ Rovigo murmured in a self-deprecating tone. ‘We were in the street outside among the crowd.’ He hesitated. ‘Sandre d’Astibar was a man I greatly honoured 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 neighbour to the very end. I wanted to hear his mourning sung . . . and when I learned that my newest young friend’s company had been selected to perform the rites, well . . . 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 could 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 laugh. ‘You are all so unfair!’

INSIDE, THERE WAS LIGHT and warmth and continuing laughter. There were also three undeniably attractive young women whose names flew past Devin—amid screams and blushes—much too fast to be caught. The oldest of these three though—about seventeen, he guessed—had a musical lilt to her voice and an exceptionally 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 red hair resembled nothing so much as the mane of a lioness.

They were ushered by insistent female hands and voices into immensely comfortable chairs in a sitting-room furnished in shades of green and gold. A huge country fire blazed on the hearth, repudiating the autumn chill. A large carpet in a design that was unmistakably Quileian, even to Devin’s untutored eye, covered the floor. The seventeen-year-old—Selvena, it emerged— sank gracefully down 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 nearer to the fire. Alais was elsewhere for the moment, helping her mother.

Just then Rovigo reappeared, flushed and triumphant from some back room, carrying three bottles.

‘I hope,’ he said, beaming down upon them, ‘that you all have a taste for Astibar’s blue wine?’

And for Devin that simple question cast an entirely benevolent aura of fate over his impulsive action in the darkness outside. He glanced over at Alessan, and was rewarded with an odd smile that seemed to him to acknowledge many things.

Rovigo quickly began uncorking and pouring the wine. ‘If any of my wretched females are bothering you,’ he said over his shoulder, ‘feel free to swat them away 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 thing. Her mother—neat, trim, competent, a laughably far cry from Rovigo’s description 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, savouring the icy-clean bouquet. He leaned back in his chair and prepared to be extremely content for the next little while. 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 again, 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 mock-ferocious cuff at each of them.

Devin doubted if he’d ever seen a man so obviously happy to be where he was. It 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 merchant’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 guess: I was of elephantine proportions and formidably evil disposition, and the four girls had scarcely enough good features among them to make up one passably acceptable woman. Am I right?’

Laughing aloud, Devin turned to see Rovigo—not at all discomfited—beaming with pride at his wife. ‘Exactly right,’ Devin said to Alix, ‘but I must say in his defence 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 air 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 wine.’

‘Nor do I,’ Alessan said quietly. He lifted his own glass. ‘To memory,’ he said 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 astonishingly 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 over and saluted Rovigo with his glass.

‘To all of you,’ Catriana said suddenly. ‘To kindness on a dark road.’ She smiled—a smile without any edge or mockery to it. Devin was surprised, then decided 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 something he could understand now. For he too was on that road after all, despite what she’d done to keep him from it. He tried to catch her eye but failed. She was talking to Alix, now seated beside her. Briefly reflective, Devin turned his attention to his food.

A moment later Selvena touched his foot lightly. ‘Will you sing for us?’ she asked with a delicious smile. She didn’t move her hand. ‘Alais heard you, and my 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, ‘you have a lesson to learn. Our friends make music for their livelihood. They are 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? She meant it in good faith, I can assure you of that.’

‘I know she did,’ Devin protested, as Selvena sniffled softly at his feet. ‘There 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. ‘Unless of course it was only Devin you had in mind?’

Devin winced, even though the slash had not been directed at him. Selvena flinched 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 them. 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 centre 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 mind 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 indulge a shameless child I blush to acknowledge as my own, it happens that I do have a set of Tregean pipes in the house—the Triad alone know why. I seem to remember once having a doting father’s fancy that one of these creatures might emerge with a talent of some sort.’

Alix, from several feet away, mimed a blow with a spoon at her husband. Unabashed, 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 serious, did not break away. He felt a small, unsettling skip to the rhythm of his 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 favoured him with a particularly dazzling smile. Rovigo needed 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 anything in the world than that look from those blue eyes. Not that Catriana had ever favoured him with anything remotely resembling such a glance. He found himself 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 two 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 committing 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, in 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 hair backlit by the fire, watching him with grave concentration. He sang one whole verse directly to her, then, in fidelity to the song, he sent his vision inward to where his purest music was always found, and he looked at no one at all 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 blue-white star named Micaela aloft in a black night, and he let the keenness of that carry him, high and soaring, up towards Catriana’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 tranquillity. A few moments later AIix 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,’ Rovigo’s daughter said. ‘If you like I can show you your room now. I hope you don’t mind sharing with me. Selvena usually does, but she’s in with the girls tonight.’

Devin expected Catriana to demur, or worse, at this fairly transparent separation 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 said. ‘It will remind me of home.’

Devin, who had been smiling at the irony of the situation, suddenly found the expression less appropriate than he’d thought. Catriana had seen him grinning though; 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 together 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 the 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 from one to the other of his guests.

It was Alessan who broke the silence though. ‘Devin’s a friend,’ he said quietly. ‘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 playing about his lips, glanced briefly over at him, and then returned Alessan’s gaze 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 of the day before. He glared at Rovigo. ‘You didn’t find me in The Bird by accident. Alessan sent you. You had him follow me, didn’t you?’ he accused, turning 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 rites 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 yesterday,’ 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. Once you were forced down to the waterfront you happened to end up in a place I know 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 letting 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 whole reason Catriana and I were in Astibar with Menico’s troupe was because of what I expected to see happen with Sandre’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 has 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 made 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 here or Brandin of Ygrath ruling in Chiara and Corte and Asoli, and in that province 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 Tomasso’s comings and goings. They were wholly focused on Alberico; I was their neighbour here in the distrada, it was easy enough to slip onto their land. I learned 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, then, without speaking, he closed it.

Alessan nodded. ‘Thank you,’ he said. He turned to Rovigo. ‘There are one or two 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 matter of trust, or any such thing.’

‘After nine years I think I do know that,’ Rovigo murmured. ‘What should I know about what happened tonight?’

‘Alberico arrived just after I joined Tomasso and the vigil-keepers in the lodge. 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. Sheepishly he added, ‘I overheard 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 Alessan, he held them in. Devin was grateful.

Alessan said, ‘When we went back to the cabin afterwards we found the vigil-keepers dead. Tomasso was taken. Baerd has remained behind to take care of a number 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 since the Tyrants came, would you not say?’

There was a silence as Rovigo fought to master his shock and rage. Devin coughed nervously and broke it: ‘Your own family,’ he asked. ‘Do they—’

‘They know nothing of this,’ the merchant said, regaining his calm. ‘Neither Alix nor any of the girls had ever seen Alessan or Catriana before tonight. I met Alessan and Baerd in Tregea town nine years ago and we discovered in the course of a long night that we had certain dreams and certain enemies in common. They told me something of what their purposes were, and I told them I was willing 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 hope to live long enough to be able to hear the oath Alessan offers when he drinks 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 before he drank.

Alessan gazed steadily at Rovigo. ‘There is one other thing you should know: Devin is one of us in more than the obvious way. I learned that by accident yesterday 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 of my own.’ Alessan’s voice was careful and very clear. ‘I always do. I said: Tigana, 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 time 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. But 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 merchant reached for his glass and drained it. ‘Will you . . . one more time?’

‘Tigana,’ Devin said before Alessan could speak. To make this legacy, this grief 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 were both lost. Taken away.

‘Let my memory of you be like a blade in my soul,’ he said, his voice faltering 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 said 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 realize 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 tending to the fire again, though the blaze was doing perfectly well. While he did so Devin looked at Alessan. The other man met his gaze. They said nothing though. Alessan’s eyebrows lifted a little, and he gave the small shrug Devin had come to know.

‘What do we do now, then?’ asked Rovigo d’Astibar, returning to stand beside his chair. His colour was high, perhaps from the fire. ‘I am as disturbed by this as I was when we first met. I do not like magic. Especially this kind of magic. It remains a matter of some . . . significance to me to be able to hear one day what I was just debarred from hearing.’

Devin felt a rush of excitement run through him again: the other element to his feelings this evening. His pique at having been deceived in The Bird was entirely gone. These two, and Baerd and the Duke, were men to be reckoned with, in 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 burdened with a new and difficult weight. He leaned slowly back in his chair, his 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 excitement 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 daughters. 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 think 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 Baerd 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 danger.’

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 . . . would not expect that freedom could be found or won without a price paid. You said three days ago that the coming spring might mark a turning-point for all of 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 echo 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 hesitation. ‘Where is our choice, our freedom, if you do that? I would obviously prefer not to do anything that will put them into actual danger, and I cannot afford to suspend my business entirely. But within these confines, is there no aid 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 afraid now though not for himself.

There will be people put at risk by everything we do, the Prince had said in the forest, speaking of Menico. And now Devin was beginning to understand, painfully, 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 ancillary 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 seemed, 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 on Alessan’s momentarily unguarded face and he saw him come hard to his decision. 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, unexpectedly, the smile deepened and it reached his eyes. ‘Had you ever given any thought,’ he said in an elaborately casual voice, ‘to taking on some business partners?’

For just a moment Rovigo seemed nonplussed, then a quick, answering smile of understanding broadened across his face. ‘I see,’ he said. ‘You need access to some 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 years when it was only Baerd and I. I have been giving thought to this since Catriana 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 you and I will have a more legitimate means of exchanging information and I’m going to need information regularly this winter. As partners we have reason to be 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 Taccio, by the way, that wasn’t a coincidence either. I assume you’d figured that out?’ Devin hadn’t even thought 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 travel 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, or told Devin to be a little less impressive.’

‘No you wouldn’t have,’ Devin said quietly. ‘Whatever other things you would have 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 activities that would be awkward for us as performers. Especially well-known performers. 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 matter of five of one hand, five of the other: artists are welcome at Brandin’s court 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 assumed 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 fine imitation of a shrewdly avaricious businessman.

‘Well,’ the merchant said in a greedy, wheedling voice, ‘you appear to have made a most . . . intriguing proposal, gentlemen. I do have to ask one or two preliminary questions. I’ve known Alessan for some time, but this particular issue has never come up before, you understand.’ His eyes narrowed with exaggerated cunning. ‘What, if anything, do you know about business?’

Alessan gave a sudden burst of laughter, then quickly grew serious again. ‘Have 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 sufficiently 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 border.’

‘Not from Nievole,’ Alessan said quickly.

Another silence. Rovigo nodded his head slowly. ‘I see,’ he said, startling Devin again with his quickness. ‘You think we can expect some confiscations 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 person 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 each 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 the travelling and put in the time. Based on what you have just told me I will accept 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 we jointly conduct. Is that acceptable?’

He was looking at Devin. With as much composure as he could manage, Devin replied, ‘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. Which 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 across his face. ‘Ferraut! That is splendid. Absolutely splendid! You can save us some money already. I’ll give you a cart and all of you can take Ingonida her new bed!’

On the way upstairs Alais couldn’t remember when she had last been so happy. Not 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. AIix and Alais were never at ease when he ventured south of the mountains into Quileia, no matter 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 home 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, absorbing 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 stood extremely still, listening to a clear voice soar from the inner courtyard out among the unnatural silence of the people gathered. A voice that lamented Adaon’s death among the cedars of Tregea so bitterly, so sweetly, that Alais had been afraid she would cry. She had closed her eyes.

It had been a source of astonished pride for her when Rovigo had casually mentioned 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 young 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 Rovigo 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 clatter 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 this was, Alais had thought her heart would stop from sheer excitement. She could feel the tell-tale colour rising in her cheeks.

When it became clear that the musicians were coming inside, it had taken a supreme act of self-control for her to regain the mien and composure proper to her 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 course of behaviour so embarrassingly transparent to her older sister that it drove Alais straight back into her own habitual, detached watchfulness. Selvena had 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 in 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 sandy-brown hair that curled halfway over his ears. She’d expected him to be arrogant or pretentious, despite what her father had said, but she saw nothing of that at all.

The other man, Alessan, looked about fifteen years older, perhaps more. His black, 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. He intimidated her a little, even though he was joking easily with her father right 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 her father, in jesting or in anything else. And this man with the sharp, quizzical 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 musician could manage that. On the other hand, she reflected, she didn’t know very much about musicians at all.

Which made her even more curious about the woman. Alais thought Catriana was terribly beautiful. With her commanding height and the startlingly blue eyes under 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 outrageous flirtation to relax rather than unsettle her: this sort of activity, competition, exercise, was simply not something with which she was going to get involved. 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. Alix 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 sideboard and then listened and watched from her favourite chair next to the fire. Later she had genuine cause to bless Selvena’s shamelessness. None of the rest 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 directly to her once near the end and Alais, her colour furiously rising, forced herself 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 thing Selvena speculated about at night all the time, in detail. Alais hoped they would all attribute her colour to the warmth of the fire.

She did wonder about one thing though, having been an observer of people for most of her life. There was something between Devin and Catriana, but it certainly 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 unaware, and the glances would be more challenging than anything else. She reminded 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 suspicious lack of protest, and touching, shockingly, fingertip to palm with both men in farewell. Alais caught a glance from her father, and a moment later she rose 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 the other woman—someone so independent and obviously at ease in the company of men. Alais flinched inwardly at her own provincial clumsiness, and braced herself for a rebuff. Catriana’s smile, though, 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 their 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 lead 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 couldn’t grasp it. Despite that, or perhaps because of it, something generous in her spirit opened out towards 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 little, 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 contraband brought back by Rovigo from Quileia where winters were so much harsher than here.

Catriana laughed a little under her breath, her eyebrows arching as she surveyed the chamber. ‘Sharing a room does. This is rather more than I knew in a fisherman’s cottage.’ Alais flushed, fearful of having offended, but before she could speak Catriana turned to her, eyes still very wide, and said casually, ‘Tell 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 second. Then she saw the quick smile on the other woman’s face and she laughed aloud 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 on 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 over to one of the woven pieces on the wall. ‘This is nice enough,’ she said, fingering it. ‘Where did your father find it?’

‘I made it,’ Alais said shortly. She felt patronized suddenly, and it irritated her.

It must have shown in her voice, for Catriana looked quickly back over her shoulder. The two women exchanged a look in silence. Catriana sighed. ‘I’m hard to 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 help 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 father’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 even 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 whether 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 colour a little high.

Still wary of another rejection Alais said cautiously, ‘I have no idea about that, actually. Are there rules? Do any of them . . . do you have problems when you travel?’

Catriana shrugged. ‘The kind of problems your sister’s longing to find? Not from 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 music 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 that, 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 where 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, goaded 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. Then: ‘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 sure 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 the other woman spoke. This was, she reminded herself sternly, a guest in her house.

She had no immediate chance to reply though, or to try to mend the rift, because just then Menka bustled importantly into the room with a basin of water heated over the kitchen fire, followed by the youngest of Rovigo’s apprentices with a second basin and towels draped over both his shoulders. The boy’s eyes were 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 mood entirely—both the good and the bad parts of it, Alais thought. After the two servants left, the women washed up in silence. Alais, stealing a glance at the 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 invitation to further conversation in her tone, but she wasn’t sure. If Catriana wanted to talk, she decided, she had only to say something.

They blew out their bedside candles and lay silently in the semi-darkness. Alais watched the red glow of the fire, curled her toes around the hot brick Menka had put at the foot of her bed, and thought ruefully that the distance to Selvena’s side of the room had never seemed so great.

Some time later, still unsleeping though the fire was down to its embers, she heard a burst of hilarity from the three men downstairs. The warm, carrying sound of her father’s laughter somehow worked its way into her and eased her distress. 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 separate rooms.

She remained awake for a while, with an ear perked to catch the sound of her sister in the hallway—though she didn’t really believe even Selvena would do that. 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 lay with him upon that windy height amid a scattering of dew-drenched summer flowers, and in the high, unknown place of that dreaming Alais was filled with complex yearnings she could never have named aloud.

It was bitterly cold in the dungeon where they had thrown him at last. The stones were damp and icy, they smelled of urine and faeces. He’d only been allowed to put back on his linen underclothing and his hose. There were rats in the cell. He couldn’t see them in the blackness but he had been able to hear them from 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 prisoner before locking him up for the night. They all knew Tomasso’s reputation. Everyone knew his reputation. He had made sure of that; it had been part of the plan.

So the guards had stripped him in the harsh brightness of the guardroom and they 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 close his eyes and wish it all away.

For some reason it was the memory of Taeri that wouldn’t let him do that. He still 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 before.

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, brutal 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 worse.

They hurt him a little with their blades and drew blood a few times, but nothing very much—Tomasso knew they were under orders to save him for the professionals 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 took 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 stone when they pushed him in. More blood, he realized, as his hand came away sticky. It didn’t actually seem to matter very much.

He hated the rats though. He’d always been afraid of rats. He rolled the useless 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 fought 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 nephew had done. Nothing seemed large enough to encompass it.

He heard another rat and lashed out blindly with his rolled weapon. He hit something and heard a squeal. Again and again he pounded at the place of that sound. 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 more. He leaned back against the damp slime of the stone wall, wincing because of his open cuts. He closed his eyes, though he couldn’t see in any case, and he 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 cabin. He found it painful to swallow. He felt his forehead and decided he was feverish.

Which is why, when he saw the wan light of a candle, he was sure he was hallucinating. He was able to look around though by its glow. The cell was tiny. There 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 Tomasso 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 burial, looking down with an expression different from any Tomasso could ever remember seeing on his face.

The fever must be extreme, he decided; his mind was conjuring forth in this abyss an image of something his shattered heart so desperately desired. A look of kindness—and even, if one wanted to reach for the word, even of love—in the eyes of the man who’d whipped him as a child and then designated him as useful 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 this dream though, this fever-induced fantasy. There was light in it. It kept the rats away. It even seemed to ease the bone-numbing cold of the wet stones beneath him and against his back.

He lifted an unsteady hand towards the flame. Through a dry throat and torn, puffy 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 understand.

‘You have nothing to be sorry for,’ Tomasso heard his dream-father say. So gently. ‘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 child. 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 they 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 fashion?’

Tomasso let himself weep. The words were balm for the deepest ache he knew. Crying made the light blur and swim though, and so he raised his shaking hands, and kept trying to wipe the tears away. He wanted to speak but his shattered mouth could not form words. He nodded his head though, over and over. Then he had a thought and he raised his left hand—the heart hand, of oaths and fidelity—towards this dream of his father’s ghost.

And slowly Sandre’s hand came down, as if from a long, long way off, from years 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 his 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 vial of some liquid. Tomasso did not understand.

‘This is the last thing I can do for you,’ the ghost said in a strange, unexpectedly wistful voice. ‘If I were stronger I could do more, but at least they will 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 you. 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 removed 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 fantasy 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 wanted 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 asleep, even though he already was asleep, and dreaming in his fever. He really didn’t understand. He especially didn’t understand why his 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 completely strange on him though.

He knew this was so, because the image of his father, looking down upon him, seemed 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 thought 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 spoken and the unspoken ceased to matter any more.

Part Two

Dianora

Chapter VII

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 of spring—white clouds scudding in a high blue sky as the wind had swept the Tribute Ship through the whitecaps into the harbour of Chiara. Beyond harbour and town the slopes mounting to the hills had been wild with fall colours. The leaves were turning: red and gold and some that clung yet to green, she remembered.

The sails of the Tribute Ship so long ago had been red and gold as well: colours of celebration in Ygrath. She knew that now, she hadn’t known it then. She had stood on the forward deck of the ship to gaze for the first time at the splendour of Chiara’s harbour, 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: turning the Dives into the luck and symbol of Chiara’s pride until beautiful Onestra had changed the ending of the story hundreds and hundreds of years ago, and the Ring Dives had ceased. Even so, every child in the Palm knew that legend of the Island. Young girls in each province would play at diving into water for 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 harbour and palace to gaze at the majesty of snow-crowned Sangarios rising behind them. The Ygrathen sailors had not disturbed her silence. They had allowed her to come forward to watch the Island approach. Once she’d been safely aboard ship and the ship away to sea they’d been kind to her. Women thought to have a real chance at being chosen for the saishan were always treated well on the Tribute Ships. It could make a captain’s fortune in Brandin’s court if he brought home a hostage who became a favourite of the Tyrant.

Sitting now on the southern balcony of the saishan wing, looking out from behind the ornately crafted screen that hid the women from gawkers in the square below, 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 face 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 life in the harbour to the serene grandeur of the palace just beyond. Birds had been wheeling, crying loudly about the three high masts of the Tribute Ship. The 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 alive.

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 heart.

She had been chosen for the saishan.

The circumstances of her taking had made it very likely, and Brandin’s celebrated grey eyes had widened appraisingly when she was led before him two days later. She’d been wearing a silken, pale-coloured 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 towards that moment for five full years, 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 anything else.

Or so she’d thought at twenty-one.

For all she’d seen and lived through, even by then, Dianora reflected twelve years 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 hill 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, Brandin was fond of saying in private, had to be handled selectively or life could be too acutely marred. Khav was one of the selected things. Only in the palace 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 divine the hidden meaning in the Ygrathen Tyrant’s words. Senzians spent much of their time doing that, Dianora had observed drily to Brandin afterwards. He’d laughed. 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. Scelto was in town collecting her gown for the reception that afternoon; her attendant was one of the newest castrates, sent out from Ygrath to serve the growing 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 inconvenient. 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 was 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 arrival of lsolla 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 such grace at fifteen and sixteen, she remembered—they hadn’t even bothered to hide 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 Certando. Or not normally, she amended, reminding herself—though this was not, by any means, a thing that really needed a reminder—that she was Dianora di Certando 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 away 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. The 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 hyperbolic raptures about her beauty and her wisdom. The Ygrathens would liken her to the sisters of their god, the Chiarans to the fabled beauty of Onestra before 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 followed.

After one such adjective-bestrewn effort of Doarde’s she’d suggested to Brandin over a late, private supper that one of the measures of difference between men and women was that power made men attractive, but when a woman had power that merely made it attractive to praise her beauty.

He’d thought about it, leaning back and stroking his neat beard. She’d been aware 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 said, 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 before I grow old and you cease to grant me access to you.’ A small slash at Solores there, but discreet enough, she judged. ‘But so long as you command me to come 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 crowns 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 without the power that I wield?’

And that, she remembered, had almost caught her out. It was too unexpected a question, and far too near to the place where her twin snakes yet lived, however 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 outside would hear it, she knew. And they would talk. Everyone in Chiara talked; the Island fed itself on gossip and rumour. There would be another tale after tonight. 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 laugh herself at his mood. He’d taken his pleasure, slowly and in the myriad of ways he’d taught her through the years, for in Ygrath they were versed in such things 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 snakes around the wreckage of her heart, for having done what he had done to Tigana which was her home.

Or had been her home until he had battered and levelled and burned it and killed 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 occupation that followed, and her brother, whose eyes and hair were exactly like her own, whom she had loved more than her life, had been driven into exile in the wideness 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 the memory of men.

Because of Brandin. In whose arms she had lain so many nights through the years 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 it forth from him, was like the healing sun slicing out of clouds. Whose grey eyes were the troubling, unreadable colour of the sea under the first cold slanting light of morning in spring or fall.

In the oldest of all the stories told in Tigana it was from the grey sea at dawn that Adaon the god had risen and come to Micaela and lain with her on the long, dark, destined curving of the sand. Dianora knew that story as well as she knew her name. Her true name.

She also knew two other things at least as well: that her brother or her father would kill her with their hands if either were alive to see what she had become. 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 brother 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 ever reach him of a Dianora with dark eyes like his own in the saishan of the Tyrant.

Unless, said the quiet voice of her heart, unless the morning might yet come when she could find a way to do a thing here on the Island that would still, despite all that had happened—despite the intertwining of limbs at night and the sound of her own voice crying aloud in need assuaged—bring back another sound 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 beyond 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 forgotten 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 sleep outside her door—perhaps it would come to pass if she could indeed find a way to do this thing, that her brother, far from home, would miraculously hear the name of Tigana spoken by a stranger in a world of strangers, in some distant royal court or bazaar, and somehow he would know, in a rush of wonder and joy, in the deep core of the heart she knew so well, that it was through 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 this one thing—in the matter of his vengeance for Stevan—was fixed and unalterable. 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 restored, and her brother would be alive and would know it had been her, and Brandin . . . Brandin would understand that she had found a way to do this thing while sparing his life on all the nights, the numberless nights, when she could have 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 cheeks, 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 the floor towards her balcony. No one else in the saishan moved like Scelto. The castrates were notoriously prone to lassitude and to eating too much—the obvious substitutions for pleasure. Not Scelto, though. Slim as he’d been when she met him, he still sought out those errands the other castrates strove to avoid: trips up into the steep streets of the old town, or even farther north into the hills or partway up Sangarios itself in search of healing herbs or leaves or simply meadow flowers for her room.

He seemed ageless, but he hadn’t been young when Vencel assigned him to Dianora 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.

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