Tigana

Chapter 7

DIANORA COULD REMEMBER THE DAY SHE CAME TO THE Island.

The air that autumn morning had been much like it was today at the beginning of spring, white clouds scudding in a high blue sky as the wind had swept the Tribute Ship through the whitecaps into the harbor of Chiara. Beyond harbor and town the slopes mounting to the hills had been wild with fall colors. The 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: colors 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 splendor of Chiara's harbor, at the long pier where the Grand Dukes used to stand to throw a ring into the sea, and from where Letizia had leaped in the first of the Ring Dives to reclaim the ring from the waters and marry her Duke: 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 harbor 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 favorite 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 harbor to the serene grandeur of the palace just beyond. Birds had been wheeling, crying loudly about the three high masts of the Tribute Ship. 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-colored gown, she remembered, chosen to set off her dark hair and the dark brown of her eyes.

She had been certain she would be chosen. She'd felt neither triumph nor fear, even though she'd been pointing her life toward that moment for five full 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 afterward. 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 Isolla of Ygrath later that day. At twenty-one she'd been at the peak, she supposed, of whatever beauty she'd been granted. She'd had nothing of 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 asked, reaching for the hand she'd left on the table. "Do you think you have power, my Dianora?"

She'd expected that. "Only through you, and for the little time remaining 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 rumor. 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 leveled 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 color 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 that 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 she, 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 toward her balcony. No one else in the saishan moved like Scelto. The castrates were notoriously prone to lassitude and to eating too much, the 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.

They had never spoken about it, but Dianora knew, as surely as she knew anything, that he would refuse the position if it were offered to him, in order to remain bound to her. She also knew, and this was the thing that touched her, that this would be true even if Brandin stopped sending for her entirely and she became merely another aging ignored item of history in the saishan wing.

And this was the second thing she'd never expected to find when hate had carried her through autumn seas to Chiara on the Tribute Ship: kindness and caring and a friend behind the high walls and ornate screens of the place where women waited among men who had lost their manhood.

Scelto's tread, rapid even after the long climb up the Great Staircase and then another flight up to the saishan, clicked across the mosaics of the balcony floor behind her. She heard him murmur kindly to the boy and dismiss him.

He took another step forward and coughed once, to announce himself.

"Is it terribly hideous?" she asked without turning around.

"It will do," Scelto said, coming to stand beside her. She looked over, smiling to see his close-cropped grey hair, the thin, precise mouth, and the terribly broken hook of his nose. Ages ago, he'd said when she'd asked. A fight over a woman back in Ygrath. He'd killed the other man, who happened to be a noble. Which unfortunate fact had cost Scelto his sex and his liberty and brought him here. Dianora had been more disturbed by the story than he seemed to be. On the other hand, she remembered thinking, it had been new to her, while for him it was only the familiar coinage of his life, from a long time past.

He held up the dark red gown they'd had made in the old town. From his smile which matched her own Dianora knew it had been worth cajoling Vencel for the funds to have this done. The head of the saishan would want a favor later, he always did, but through such exchanges was the saishan run, and Dianora, looking at the gown, had no regrets.

"What is Solores wearing?" she asked.

"Hala wouldn't tell me," Scelto murmured regretfully.

Dianora laughed aloud at the straight face he managed to maintain. "I'm quite sure he wouldn't," she said. "What is she wearing?"

"Green," he said promptly. "High waisted, high neck. Two shades in pleats below the waist. Gold sandals. A great deal of gold everywhere else. Her hair will be up, of course. She has new earrings."

Dianora laughed again. Scelto allowed himself a tiny smile of satisfaction. "I took the liberty," he added, "of purchasing something else while I was in town."

He reached into a fold of his tunic and handed her a small box. She opened it and wordlessly held up the gem inside. In the bright morning light of the balcony it dazzled and shone like a third red moon to join Vidomni and blue Ilarion.

Scelto said, "I thought it would be better with the gown than anything Vencel would offer you from the saishan jewels."

She shook her head wonderingly. "It is beautiful, Scelto. Can we afford this? Will I have to go without chocolate for all of the spring and summer?"

"Not a bad idea," he said, ignoring her first question. "You ate two pieces this morning while I was gone."

"Scelto!" she exclaimed. "Stop that! Go spy on Solores and see what she's spending her chiaros on. I have my habits and my pleasures, and none of them, so far as I can see, are particularly evil. Do I look fat to you?"

Almost reluctantly he shook his head. "I have no idea why not," he murmured ruefully.

"Well you keep thinking about it till you figure it out," she said with a toss of her head. "In the meantime, that reminds me, the boy this morning was fine, except that the khav was very weak. Will you speak to him about how I like it?"

"I did. I told him to make it a little weak."

"You what? Scelto, I absolutely…”

"You always begin drinking more khav at the end of winter, when the weather begins to turn, and every spring you always have trouble sleeping at night. You know this is true, my lady. Either fewer cups or weaker khav. It is my duty to try to keep you rested and tranquil."

Dianora was speechless for a second. "Tranquil!" she finally managed to exclaim. "I might have frightened that poor child to the tips of his fingernails. I would have felt terrible!"

"I had told him what to say," Scelto said placidly. "He would have blamed it on me."

"Oh, really. And what if I'd reported it directly to Vencel, instead?" Dianora retorted. "Scelto, he would have had that boy starved and lashed."

Scelto's dignified little sniff conveyed quite clearly what he thought about the likelihood of her having done any such thing.

His expression was so wryly knowing that, against her will, Dianora found herself laughing again. "Very well," she said, surrendering. "Then let it be fewer cups, because I do like it strong, Scelto. It isn't worth the drinking otherwise. Besides, I don't think that's why I can't sleep at night. This season simply makes me restless."

"You were taken as Tribute in the spring," he murmured. "Everyone in the saishan is restless in the season they were taken." He hesitated. "I can't do anything about that, my lady. But I thought perhaps the khav might be making it worse." There was concern and affection in his brown eyes, almost as dark as her own.

"You worry too much about me," she said after a moment.

He smiled. "Who else should I worry about?" There was a little silence; Dianora could hear the noises from far below in the square.

"Speaking of worrying," said Scelto in a transparent effort to change the mood, "we may be concentrating too much on what Solores is doing. We may want to start keeping an eye on the young one with the green eyes."

"lassica?" Dianora said, surprised. "What ever for? Brandin hasn't even called her to him and she's been here a month already."

"Exactly," said Scelto. He paused, somewhat awkwardly, which piqued her curiosity.

"What are you saying, Scelto?"

"I, um, have been told by Tesios who has been looking after her that he has never seen or heard of a woman in the saishan with such… control of her body or such… capacity for the climax of love."

He was blushing furiously, which made Dianora abruptly self-conscious too. It was a standard practice, with some quite unstandard variations, for the women of the saishan to use their castrates to give them physical release if too much time went by between summonses to the other wing.

Dianora had never asked Scelto for such a service. Something about the very idea disturbed her: it seemed an abuse, in a way she couldn't articulate. He had been a man, she reminded herself frequently, who had killed someone for love of a woman. Their relationship, close as it was, had never entered that dimension. It was strange, she thought, even amusing, how shy they could both become at the very mention of the subject, and Triad knew it came up often enough in the hothouse atmosphere of the saishan.

She turned back to the railing, looking down through the screen, to give him time to regain his composure. Thinking about what he'd said though, she found herself feeling a certain amusement after all. She was already working out how and when to tell Brandin about this.

"My friend," she said, "you may know me well, but in exactly the same way and for many of the same reasons I know Brandin very well."

She glanced back at her castrate. "He is older than you, Scelto, he is almost sixty-five, and for reasons I don't entirely understand he has said he must live here in the Palm another sixty years or so. All the sorcery in the world would surely not avail him to prolong his life that long if lassica is as… exceptional as Tesios suggests. She would wear him out, however pleasantly, in a year or two."

Scelto blushed again, and glanced quickly back over his shoulder. They were quite alone though. Dianora laughed, partly out of genuine amusement, but more specifically to mask the recurring sorrow she felt whenever this one lie had to be told: the thing she still kept from Scelto. The one secret that mattered.

Of course she knew why Brandin needed to stay here in the Palm, why he needed to use his sorcery to prolong his life here in what was surely a place of exile for him in a land of grief.

He had to wait for everyone born in Tigana to die.

Only then could he leave the peninsula where his son had been slain. Only then would the full measure of the vengeance he had decreed be poured out on the bloodied ground. For no one would be left alive in the world who had any true memory of Tigana before the fall, of Avalle of the Towers, the songs and the stories and the legends, all the long, bright history-It would truly be gone then. Wiped out. Seventy or eighty years wreaking as comprehensive an obliteration as millennia had on the ancient civilizations no one could now recall. Whole cultures that were now only an awkwardly pronounced name of a place, or a deciphered, pompous title, Emperor of All the Earth, on a broken pottery shard.

Brandin could go home after sixty years. He could do whatever he chose. By then she would be long dead and so too would be those from Tigana even younger than she, those born up to the very year of the conquest, the last inheritors.

The last children who could hear and read the name of the land that had been their own. Eighty years, Brandin was giving himself. More than enough, given lifespans in the Palm.

Eighty years to oblivion. To the broken, meaningless pottery shard. The books were gone already, and the paintings, tapestries, sculptures, music: torn or smashed or burned in the terrible year after Valentin's fall when Brandin had come down upon them in the agony of a father's loss, bringing them the reciprocal agony of a conqueror's hate.

The worst year of Dianora's life. Seeing so much of beauty and splendor crumble to rubble and dust or burn down to ashes of loss. She'd been fifteen, then sixteen. Still too young to comprehend the full reality of what was being eradicated. For her father's death and the destruction of his art, the works of his hands and days, she could mourn bitterly. And so too for the deaths of friends and the sudden terrors of an occupied impoverished city. The larger losses, the implications for the future, she couldn't really grasp back then.

Many in the city had gone mad that year.

Others had fled, taking their children away to try to shape a life far from the burning or the memory of burning, of hammers smashing into the statues of the Princes in the long covered loggia of the Palace by the Sea. Some had withdrawn so far into themselves, a madness of another kind, that only the merest spark was left within to make them eat and sleep and somehow walk through the waste spaces of their days.

Her mother had been one of those.

On the balcony in Chiara so many years later, Dianora looked up at Scelto and realized, from the blinking concern in his face, that she'd been silent for too long.

She forced a smile. She'd been here for a long time; she was good at dissembling. At smiling when it was needful. Even with Scelto whom she hated to deceive. And especially with Brandin, whom she had to deceive, or die.

"lassica is not a concern," she said mildly, resuming the conversation as if nothing had happened. Indeed, nothing had happened, only old memories come back. Nothing of weight or import in the world, nothing that mattered or could matter. Only loss.

She said, skillfully laughing, "She is far too unintelligent to divert him and too young to relax him as Solores does. I'm glad of your information though, I think we can use it. Tell me, is Tesios growing weary tending her? Should I speak to Vencel about assigning someone younger? Or perhaps more than one?"

She made him smile, even as he flushed again. It always seemed to go this way. If she could make them smile or laugh it would brush away the clouds like a wind, a springtime or an autumn wind, leaving behind the high clear blue of the sky.

Dianora wished, with an aching heart, that she'd known how to do that eighteen years ago. For her mother and her brother. For both of them so long ago. No laughter then. No laughter anywhere, and the blue skies a mockery, looking down upon ruin.

Vencel, more awesomely obese every time she saw him, approved Solores's gown, Nesaia's, Chylmoene's, and then her own. Only the four of them, experienced enough to know how to cope with the exigencies of a formal reception, were going down to the Audience Chamber. The envy in the saishan during the past week had been acute enough to produce a scent, Scelto had said wryly more than once. Dianora hadn't noticed; she was used to it.

Vencel's shrewd eyes widened from deep in the manifold creases of his dark face as he studied her. She had the gem on her brow, set in a band of white gold that held back her hair. Sprawled on his couch of pillows, the head of the saishan played with the billowing folds of his elephantine white robe. The sun shining through the arch of a window behind him glinted distractingly from his bald head.

"I do not recall that stone among our treasures," he murmured in his high, disconcerting voice. It was a voice so utterly inconsequential that it might lead one to underestimate the speaker. Which, as a good many people had discovered over the years, was a serious, sometimes a mortal mistake.

"It isn't," Dianora replied cheerfully. "Though after we return this afternoon may I ask you to guard it in my name among the other treasures?"

Scelto's suggestion, that. Vencel could be corrupt and venal about a great many things, but not when it came to the formal aspects of his office. He was too clever for that. Again, a truth some had paid the ultimate price to discover.

He nodded benignly now. "It seems a very fine stone from this distance." Obediently, Dianora stepped nearer and inclined her head graciously to let him see it more clearly. The scent of tainflowers that he always wore after winter's end enveloped her. It was too sweet, but not unpleasant.

She had feared Vencel once, a fear mixed of physical revulsion at his grossness and rumors of the things he liked to do with the younger castrates and some of the women who were in the saishan for purely political reasons, with no hope of ever seeing the outside world or the west wing of the palace and Brandin's chambers. Long ago though she and the saishan head had reached their understanding. Solores had the same unspoken pact with Vencel, and out of the delicate balance achieved thereby the three of them controlled, as best they could, their enclosed, over-intense, incense-laden world of idle, frustrated women, and half-men.

With a surprisingly delicate finger Vencel touched the gem on her brow. He smiled. "A good stone," he said again, this time in judgment. His breath was fragrant. "I must talk to Scelto about it. I know about such things, you see. Vairstones come from the north, you see. From my own land. They are mined in Khardhun. For years and years I used to play with them as trinkets, a monarch's toys. In the days when I was more than I am now. For as you know, I have been a King in Khardhun."

Dianora nodded gravely. For this too was a part of the unspoken terms of her relationship with Vencel. That however many times he might speak this wild fabrication of a lie, and he said it many times a day, in one variant or another, she was to nod knowingly, reflectively, as if pondering the message hidden in the grandeur of his fall.

Only in her rooms alone with Scelto could she give way to fits of girlish giggling at the very thought of the vasty saishan head being more than he was now, or at the subversive, deadly imitation Scelto could give of Vence’s speech and gestures.

"You do that wonderfully," she might say innocently, as Scelto dressed her hair, or polished her curved slippers till they shone.

"It is a thing I know about, you see," he would reply if certain they were alone, his voice pitched high above its normal range. He would gesticulate slowly, expansively. "For as you are aware, I have been a King in Khardhun."

She would laugh like a little girl who knew just how naughty she was being, the more out of control because of that very fact.

She had asked Brandin about it once. His Khardhun campaign had been only a marginal success, she learned. He was frank with her about such things by then. There was real magic in Khardhun, in that hot northern land across the sea, beyond the coastal villages and the desert wastes. A magic far greater than anything in the Peninsula of the Palm and equal to the sorcery of Ygrath.

Brandin had taken one city and established a tenuous control over some lands that lay on the fringes of the great desert stretching north. There had been losses though, serious losses she gathered. The Khardhu had long been celebrated for their skill in battle, nor was this unknown in the Palm: many of them had served as well-paid mercenaries in the warring provinces before the Tyrants had come and made all such feuding irrelevant.

Vencel had been a herald captured late in the campaign, Brandin told her. He'd already been unmanned: a thing they did to messengers in the north, for no reason Brandin had understood. It had been manifestly evident where the castrate belonged when brought back to Ygrath. He had already, Brandin confirmed, been enormous.

Dianora straightened as Vencel withdrew his finger from the red gleam of the vairstone.

"Will you escort us down?" she asked. A ritual.

"I think not," he said judiciously, as if actually giving thought to the matter. "Perhaps Scelto and Hala can manage that office between them. I have some matters that need my attention here this afternoon, you see."

"I understand." Dianora glanced over at Solores and each of them raised a spread palm in respectful salute. In fact, Vencel hadn't left the saishan wing in at least five years. Even when he toured the rooms on this floor it was on a cleverly contrived rolling platform of cushions. Dianora could not remember the last time she'd actually seen him stand upright. Scelto and Solores's Hala attended to virtually all the formal out-of-saishan duties. Vencel believed in delegating.

They went down the stairway that led out from the saishan to the world. One flight below they accepted the scrutiny, respectful but careful, of the two guards posted outside the heavy bronze doors that barred access to and from the level where the women were. Dianora responded to their cautious glances with a smile. One of them returned it shyly. The guards were changed often; she didn't know either of these two, but a smile was a start at bonding and a friend never hurt.

Scelto and Hala, dressed unobtrusively in brown, led the four women out of the saishan wing along the main corridor of the palace to the Grand Staircase in the center. There the two castrates paused to let the women precede them. With some pride but not with hauteur, they were the captives and concubines of a conqueror, Dianora and Solores led the way down the sweeping stair.

They were noticed of course. The women of the saishan were always noticed when they came out. There were a number of people milling about in the marbled vestibule waiting to enter the Audience Chamber; they made way for the four of them. Some of the newer men smiled in a manner that had taken Dianora some time to accept.

Others knew her better and their expressions were rather different. In the arched doorway to the largest of the formal reception rooms she and Solores paused again side by side, this time entirely for effect, the blood-red gown beside the green, and then walked together into the crowded room of state.

As she did so, every single time she did so, Dianora offered an inward voicing of gratitude for the impulse that had led Brandin to change the rules for his saishan here in the colony he now ruled.

In Ygrath, she knew, this would never have been allowed. For a man other than the King or one of the castrates to see, let alone hold converse with a saishan woman was death for both of them. And, Vencel had told her once, for the head of the saishan wing as well.

Things had been different here in Chiara almost from the start. Over the years Dianora had learned enough to know that some of her gratitude should go to Dorotea, Queen of Ygrath, and her decision to remain there with Girald, her elder son, and not accompany her husband into his self-imposed exile abroad. Dorotea's choice, or, depending on to whom one listened, Brandin's decision not to demand the company of his Queen.

Somewhat instinctively Dianora always preferred the latter version of the story, but she was wise enough to know why that was so, and this was one of the things she never spoke about with Brandin. Not that the matter was taboo; he wasn't that kind of man. It was simply that she wasn't sure if or how she could deal with whatever answer he gave her if the question was ever asked.

In any case, with Dorotea remaining in Ygrath there were few high-born court ladies willing to risk the seas and the Queen's displeasure in journeying to the colony in the Palm. Which meant an extreme scarcity of women at Brandin's new court in Chiara, and this, in turn, led to a change in the role of the saishan. The more so since, especially in the early years, Brandin had deliberately ordered the Tribute Ships to search out daughters of distinguished houses in Corte or Asoli. On Chiara he made the choices himself. From Lower Corte, which had once borne a different name, he took no women at all, as a matter of absolute policy. The hatred there ran both ways and too deep, and the saishan was not a place to let it fester.

He'd sent for only a few of the women from his saishan in Ygrath, leaving it largely intact. The politics were straightforward: control of the saishan was a symbol that would confirm the status and authority of Girald, now ruling as Regent of Ygrath in his father's name.

With such changes here in the colony, the new saishan was a very different place from the old; Vencel and Scelto had both told her that. It had another kind of mood to it, a different character entirely.

It also had, among all those women from Corte and Chiara and Asoli and the handful from Ygrath, one woman named Dianora, from Certando. From Barbadian-ruled Certando.

Or so everyone in the palace thought.

It had almost started a war, Dianora remembered.

In the days after her brother left home, sixteen-year-old Dianora di Tigana, daughter of a sculptor who had died in the war, and of a mother who had scarcely spoken since that day, resolved that she would point her own life towards the killing of the Tyrant on Chiara.

Hardening herself, the way she heard that men in battle were forced to do, the way her father must have tried to do by the Deisa, she had begun preparing to leave her mother in the hollow, echoing house that had once been a place crowded with joy. Where the Prince of Tigana had walked in their courtyard, an arm flung about her father's shoulders, discussing and praising the works in progress there.

Dianora could remember.

Entering the Audience Chamber she checked and approved her reflection in the wall of gold-plated mirrors on the far side of the room, then her eyes sought, instinctively, those of d'Eymon of Ygrath, the Chancellor. The second most powerful man in the court.

He was, predictably, already looking towards Solores and herself, his glance precisely as bleak as it always was. It was a look that had bothered Dianora when first she came. She'd thought d'Eymon had taken a dislike to her, or, worse, that he somehow suspected her. It wasn't long before she realized that he disliked and suspected virtually every person who entered this palace. Everyone received the same glacial, appraising scrutiny. It had been exactly so, she gathered, in Ygrath as well. D'Eymon's loyalty to Brandin was fanatical and unwavering, and so was his zeal in protecting his King.

Over the years Dianora had developed a respect, grudging at first, and then less so, for the grim Ygrathen. She counted it as one of her own triumphs that he seemed to trust her now. For years now, in fact, or she would never have been allowed to spend a night in Brandin's bed while he slept.

A triumph of deception, she thought, with an irony whose teeth were all directed inward against herself.

D'Eymon made an economical circling motion with his head and then repeated the gesture for Solores. It was what they had expected: they were to mingle and converse. Neither of them was to take the chair set beside the Island Throne. They did sometimes, and so had the beautiful, unlamented Chloese before her surprising, untimely death, but Brandin was quite punctilious when guests from Ygrath were among them. At such times the seat beside him stood pointedly empty. For Dorotea, his Queen.

Brandin had not yet entered the room of course, but Dianora saw Rhun, the slack-limbed balding Fool shamble towards one of the servers carrying wine. Rhun, clumsy, grievously retarded, was clad sumptuously in gold and white, and so Dianora knew that Brandin would be as well. It was an integral part of the complex relationship of the Sorcerer Kings of Ygrath and their chosen Fools.

For centuries in Ygrath the Fool had served as shadow and projection for the King. He was dressed like his monarch, ate next to him at public functions, was there when honors were conferred or judgment passed. And every King's chosen Fool was someone visibly, sometimes painfully afflicted or malformed. Rhun's walk was sluggish, his features twisted and deformed, his hands dangled at awkward angles in repose, his speech was badly slurred. He recognized people in the court, but not invariably, and not always in the manner one might expect, which sometimes carried a message. A message from the King.

That part, Dianora didn't entirely comprehend, and doubted she ever would. She knew that Rhun's dim, limited mind was mostly under his own control but she also knew that that was not completely so. There was sorcery at work in this: the subtle magic of Ygrath.

This much she understood: that in addition to serving, very graphically, to remind their King of his mortality and his own limitations, the Fools of Ygrath, dressed exactly like their lord, could sometimes also serve as a voice, an external conduit, for the thoughts and emotions of the King.

Which meant that one could not always be sure whether Rhun's words and actions, slurred or awkward as they might be, were his own, or an important revelation of Brandin's mood. And that could be treacherous ground for the unwary.

Right now Rhun seemed smiling and content, bobbing and bowing jerkily at every second person he encountered, his golden cap slipping off every time. He would laugh though, as he bent to pick it up and set it again on his thinning hair. Every so often an overanxious courtier, seeking to curry favor in any way he could, would hastily stoop to pick up the fallen cap and present it to the Fool. Rhun would laugh at that too.

Dianora had to admit that he made her uneasy, though she tried to hide that beneath the real pity she felt for his afflictions and his increasingly evident years. But the core truth for her was that Rhun was intimately tied to Brandin's magic, he was an extension of it, a tool, and Brandin's magic was the source of all her loss and fear. And her guilt.

So over the years she had become adroit at avoiding situations where she might find herself alone with the Fool; his guileless eyes, unnervingly similar to Brandin's, gave her genuine trouble. They seemed, if she looked into them for too long, to have no depth, to be only a surface, reflecting her image back to her in a fashion very different from that of the gold-plated mirrors, and at such times she did not like what she was made to see.

From the doorway, with the polished grace of long experience, Solores drifted to her right as Dianora moved left, smiling at people she knew. Nesaia and Chylmoene, chestnut, and amber-tressed, crossed the floor together, creating a palpable stir where they passed.

Dianora saw the poet Doarde standing with his wife and daughter. The girl, about seventeen, was obviously excited. Her first formal reception, Dianora guessed. Doarde smiled unctuously across the room at her, and bowed elaborately. Even at a distance, though, she could read the discomfiture in his eyes: a reception on this scale for a musician from Ygrath had to be bitter gall for the most senior poet in the colony. All winter he had preened with pride over his verses that Brandin had sent east as a goad for the Barbadian when word had come in the fall of the death of Sandre d'Astibar. Doarde had been insufferable for months. Today though, Dianora could sympathize with him a little, even though he was a monumental fraud in her view.

She'd told Brandin as much once, only to learn that he found the poet's pompousness amusing. For genuine art, he'd murmured, he looked elsewhere.

And you destroyed it, she'd wanted to say.

Wanted so much to say. Remembering with an almost physical pain the broken head and sundered torso of her father's last Adaon on the steps of the Palace by the Sea. The one for which her brother, finally old enough, had served as model for the young god. She remembered looking dry-eyed at the wreckage of that sculpted form, wanting to weep and not knowing where her tears were anymore.

She glanced back at Doarde's daughter, at her young, scarcely contained exhilaration. Seventeen.

Just after her own seventeenth naming day she had stolen half of the silver from her father's hidden strongbox, begging pardon of his spirit and her mother's blessing in her heart, and asking the compassion of Eanna who saw all beneath the shining of her lights.

She'd gone without saying good-bye, though she had looked in a last time by carried candlelight, upon the thin, worn figure of her mother, uneasily asleep in the wideness of her bed. Dianora was hardened, as for battle; she did not weep.

Four days later she'd crossed the border into Certando, having forded the river at a lonely place north of Avalle. She'd had to be careful getting there, Ygrathen soldiers were still ranging the countryside and in Avalle itself they were hammering at the towers, bringing them down. Some yet stood, she could see them from her crossing-place, but most were rubble by then, and what she saw of Avalle was through a screen of smoke.

It wasn't even Avalle by then, either. The spell had been laid down. Brandin's magic. The city where the pall of smoke and summer dust hung so heavily was now called Stevanien. Dianora could remember not being able to understand how a man could name the ugly wreckage of a place once so fair after a child he had loved. Later that would become clearer to her: the name had nothing to do with Brandin's memory of Stevan. It was solely for those living there, and elsewhere in what had been Tigana: a constant, inescapable reminder of whose death had meant their ruin. The Tiganese now lived in a province named Lower Corte, and Corte had been their bitterest foe for centuries. The city of Tigana was the city of Lower Corte now.

And Avalle of the Towers was Stevanien. The vengeance of the King of Ygrath went deeper than occupation and burning and rubble and death. It encompassed names and memory, the fabric of identity; it was a subtle thing, and merciless.

There were a number of refugees in the summer Dianora went east, but none had anything remotely resembling her own fixed purpose and so most of them went much further away: to the far side of the Certandan grainlands, to Ferraut, Tregea, Astibar itself. Willing, anxious even, to live under the spreading tyranny of the Barbadian lord in order to put as much distance as they could between themselves and their images of what Brandin of Ygrath had done to their home.

But Dianora was clinging to those images, she was nursing them within her breast, feeding them with hate, shaping hatred with memory. Twin snakes inside her.

She only went a handful of miles across the border into Certando. The late-summer fields of corn had been yellow and tall, she remembered, but all the men were gone, away to the north and east where Alberico of Barbadior, having carefully consolidated his conquests of Ferraut and Astibar, was now moving south.

He was master of Certando by the end of the fall, and had taken Borifort in Tregea, the last major stronghold to stand against him, by the following spring after a winter siege.

Long before then Dianora had found what she was looking for, in the western highlands of Certando. A hamlet, twenty houses and a tavern, south of Sinave and Forese, the two great forts that watched each other on either side of the border that divided Certando from what she learned to call Lower Corte.

The land so near the southern mountains was not nearly as good as it was farther north. The growing season was shorter. Cold winds swept down from the Braccio and Sfaroni Ranges early in fall bringing snow soon after and a long white winter. Wolves would howl in the wintry nights and sometimes in the morning strange footmarks could be found in the deep snow, marks that came down from the mountains and then returned.

Once, long ago, the village had been near to one of the roads forking northeast from the main highway down from the Sfaroni Pass, in the days when there was still overland trade with Quileia to the south. That was why the ancient tavern was so large in a village now so small, why it had four rooms upstairs for the travelers who had not come for a great many years.

Dianora hid her father's silver south of the village on a thickly wooded slope away from the goatherd runs, and she went to work as a serving girl in the tavern. There was no money to pay her of course. She worked for her room and the scanty board available that first summer and fall, and she labored in the fields with the other women and the young boys to bring home what they could of the harvest.

She told them she was from the north, near Ferraut. That her mother was dead and her father and brother had gone to war. She said her uncle had begun to abuse her and so she had run away. She was good with accents and she had the northern speech right enough for them to believe her. Or at least to ask no questions. There were many transients in the Palm in those days, questions were seldom pushed too far. She ate little and worked as hard as any in the fields. There was actually little enough to do in the inn, with the men away to war. She slept in one of the rooms upstairs, she even had it to herself. They were kind enough to her after their fashion, and given the nature of things in that time.

When the light and the place were right, morning usually, and in certain of the higher fields, she could look away to the west across the border towards the river and see the remaining towers and the smoke above what had been Avalle. One morning, late in the year, she realized that she couldn't see anything anymore. That she hadn't, in fact, seen anything for some time. The last tower was gone.

Around that time the men had begun to come home, beaten and weary. There was work again in the kitchen and waiting on tables or behind the counter of the bar. She was also expected, and had been preparing herself for this as best she could all through the fall, to take a man up to her room if he offered the going rate.

Every village seemed to need one such woman, and she was the obvious candidate here. She tried to make herself not mind, but this was the most difficult thing yet. She had a mission though, a reason for being here, a vengeance to enact, and this, even this, she would tell herself, going up the stairs with someone, was a part of it. She hardened herself, but not always, and not quite enough.

Perhaps that showed through. Several men asked her to marry them. One day she caught herself thinking about one of them as she wiped down the tables after lunch. He was quiet and kind, shy when he took her upstairs, and his eyes would follow her movements in the tavern with a fierce concentration whenever he was there.

That day was when she knew it was time for her to leave.

She was a little surprised to realize that almost three years had gone by. It was spring.

She slipped away one night, again without a farewell, remembering her arrival even as she went. Meadow flowers were blooming beside the path into the hills. The air was clean and mild. By the mingled light of the two moons she found her buried silver and walked away without looking back, taking the road north towards the fort at Sinave. She was nineteen years old.

Nineteen, and sometime in the past two years she had grown beautiful. Her angular boniness had softened, even as her face lost its last traces of girlhood. It was oval, wide at the cheekbones, almost austere. It changed when she laughed though, and for some reason she still knew how to laugh, becoming warm and animated, the unexpected dance in her dark eyes seeming to promise things that went deeper than amusement. Men who had seen her laughing or who had caused her to smile at them would encounter that look again in their dreams, or in the memories that lay on the border of sleep and dream, years after Dianora had gone away.

At Sinave the Barbadians disturbed her, with their oppressive size and careless, casual brutality. She forced herself to be calm and to linger there. Two weeks would be enough she judged. She had to leave an impression and a memory.

A carefully constructed memory of an ambitious, pretty country girl from some hamlet near the mountains. A girl usually silent during the tavern talk at night but who, when she did speak, told vivid, memorable tales of her home village to the south. Told them with the distinctively laconic diction and round vowels that would have marked her anywhere in the Palm as being from the highlands of Certando.

The tales were usually sad, most stories were in those years, but once in a while Dianora would offer a wonderfully droll imitation of some highland rustic voicing his considered opinion on great affairs in the wider world, and those at the table where she was sitting would laugh for a long time.

She appeared to them to have some money, earned very likely in the way that pretty girls usually came to have some money. But she shared a room with another woman at the better of the two hostelries within the walls of the fort, and neither of them was ever seen to invite a man upstairs. Or to accept an invitation to go elsewhere. The Barbadian soldiers might have been a problem, indeed they had been over the winter, but orders had come from Astibar, and the mercenaries were under a tighter rein that spring.

What she wanted to do, Dianora confided one night to the loosely knit group of young men and women she had joined, was to work in a tavern or dining-place that saw a better class of person coming through its doors. She'd had two hands full and more, thank you, of the other sort of inn, she declared.

Someone mentioned The Queen in Stevanien, across the border in Lower Corte.

With a heartfelt, inward sigh of relief Dianora began asking questions about it.

Questions to which she'd known the answers for three days; during which time she'd sat among these selfsame people every night planting subtle hints in the hope that the name might emerge spontaneously. Subtlety, she'd finally decided, was wasted among young Certandans here on the border, and so she'd practically had to drag the conversation over to the subject she wanted.

Now she listened, seemingly enraptured and wide-eyed, as two of her recent acquaintances animatedly described the newest, most elegant Ygrathen innovation in Lower Corte. A dining-place that boasted a master chef brought all the way from Ygrath itself by the current Governor of Stevanien and its distrada. The Governor, it emerged, was notoriously fond of wine and food, and of good music played in comfortable chambers. He had helped establish the new chef in a set of rooms on the ground floor of a former banking-house, and now he basked in the reflected glory of the most elaborate, most luxurious eating-place in the Palm. He dined there himself several times a week, Dianora learned.

For the second time.

She'd picked up all of this in gossip among the merchants during her days checking out the prices and styles of clothing available in Fort Sinave. She needed some things fit for the city, she knew. It might make a difference.

From the very first time she'd heard the name she'd realized that The Queen would be perfect for the next stage of her plan to change her past.

What she learned from the merchants was that no one from Lower Corte was allowed to dine here. Traders from Corte were cordially greeted, as were those from farther afield, in Asoli or Chiara itself. Any Ygrathen, naturally, soldier, merchant or whoever he might be, come to seek his fortune in the newest colony, was graciously ushered in to salute the portrait of Queen Dorotea that hung on the wall opposite the door. Even those merchants crossing the line that divided the Eastern Palm from the West were more than welcome to leave some of whatever currency they carried in The Queen.

It was only the King's true enemies, the denizens of Lower Corte, of Stevanien itself, who were forbidden to stain or sully the ambience with their postulent, heir-murdering presence.

They never did, Dianora learned from a Ferraut trader bound back north and east with leather from Stevanien that he expected to sell at a profit, even with that year's tariff levels. What the inhabitants of Stevanien had done in response to the ban was simply refuse to work for the new establishment. Neither as servers or kitchen help or stable hands, nor even as musicians or artisans to help decorate and maintain the splendid rooms.

The Governor, when he learned what was happening, had vowed in red-faced rage to force the contemptible inhabitants to work wherever they were required by their masters of Ygrath. Force them with dungeon and lash and a death-wheel or three if needed.

The master chef, Arduini, had demurred.

One did not, Arduini had said, in a much-quoted display of artistic temperament, build up and maintain an establishment of quality by using enforced, surly labor. His standards were simply too high for that. Even the stable-boys at his restaurant, said Arduini of Ygrath, were to be trained and willing, and to have a certain style to them.

There had been widespread hilarity when that was reported: stylish stable-hands, indeed. But, Dianora learned, the amusement had turned to respect quite soon, because Arduini, pretentious or not, did know what he was doing. The Queen, the Ferraut trader told her, was like an oasis amid the deserts of Khardhun. In dispirited, broken Stevanien it cast a warm glow of Ygrathen civility and grace. The merchant lamented, though discreetly on this side of the border, the complete absence of any such traits in the Barbadians who had occupied his own province.

But yes, he said, in response to Dianora's apparently casual question, Arduini was still struggling with staff problems. Stevanien was a backwater, and a backwater, moreover, in the most oppressively taxed and militarily subjugated province in the Palm. It was next to impossible to get people to travel there, or stay, and since none of the trickle of adventurers from Ygrath had come so far from home to wash dishes or clear tables or tend to a stable, however stylish a stable it might be, there appeared to be a chronic need for workers from elsewhere in the Palm.

In that moment Dianora had changed every plan she had. She cast the line of her life, with a silent prayer to Adaon, in the direction of this chance information. She had been intending, with some real apprehension, to go northwest to Corte. That had always been the next-to-last destination in her plans. She had seriously wondered, almost every night as she lay awake, whether three years in Certando would be enough to shake off anyone pursuing the true history of her life. She'd had no good ideas about what else she could do, though.

Now she did.

And so it was that a few nights later, in the largest of the taverns in Fort Sinave, a cheerful crowd of young people watched their new friend drink more than was good for her for the first time since she'd arrived. More than one of the men saw cause for cautious optimism in that, with respect to possibilities later in the evening.

"You've settled it then!" Dianora cried in her attractive, south-country voice. She leaned for support against the shoulder of a bemused cartwright. "Hand to the new plow for me tomorrow. I'm over the border as soon as I can to visit The Queen of Ygrath! Triad bless her days!"

Triad shelter and hold my soul, she was thinking as she spoke, absolutely sober, cold to her bones with the sense of the words she was so glibly shouting.

They silenced her, laughing uproariously, in part to cover her words. In Barbadian Certando it was a long way from the path of wisdom to thus salute Ygrath's Queen. Dianora giggled quite endearingly but she subsided. The cartwright and another man tried to see her up to her room afterwards, but found themselves charmingly put off and drinking together amid off-duty mercenaries in the one all-night tavern Fort Sinave possessed.

She was just a little too untutored, too country, to succeed in her ambitious hopes, they agreed sagely. They also agreed, a few drinks later, that she had the most extraordinarily appealing smile. Something about her eyes, what happened to them when she was pleased.

In the morning Dianora was dressed and packed and waiting very early at the main gate of the fort. She struck a bargain for passage to Stevanien with a pleasant-enough middle-aged merchant from Senzio carrying Barbadian spices for the luxury trade. His only reason for going to dreary, flattened Stevanien, she learned as they started west, was because of the new restaurant, The Queen. She took that coincidence as a good omen, closing the fingers of her left hand over the thumb three times to make the wish come true.

The roads were better than she remembered; certainly the merchants traveling them seemed to feel safer. Rolling along in the cart, she asked the Senzian about it. He grinned sardonically.

"The Tyrants have cleaned out most of the highway brigands. Just a matter of protecting their own interests. They want to make sure no one else robs us before they do with their border tariffs and taxes." He spat, discreetly, into the dust of the road. "Personally I preferred the brigands. There were ways of dealing with them."

Not long after that she saw evidence of what he was talking about: they passed two death-wheels beside the roadway, the bodies of would-be thieves spreadeagled upon them, spiraling lazily in the sun, severed hands rotting in their mouths. The smell was very bad.

The Senzian stopped just across the border to do some dealing in the fort of Forese. He also paid his transit duties there scrupulously, waiting patiently in line to have his cart examined and levied. The death-wheels, he pointed out to her after, in the acerbic Senzian manner, were not reserved for highway thieves and captured wizards.

Thus delayed, they spent the night at a coach-house on the well-traveled road, joining a party of Ferraut traders for dinner. Dianora excused herself early and went to bed. She'd paid for a room alone and took the precaution of pushing an oak dresser in front of her door. Nothing disturbed her though, except her dreams. She was back in Tigana and yet she wasn't, because it wasn't there. She whispered the name to herself like a talisman or a prayer before falling into a restless sleep shot through with images of destruction from the burning year.

They spent the second night at another inn beside the river, just outside the walls of Stevanien, having arrived after sundown curfew closed the city gates. They ate alone this time, and she talked to the Senzian until late. He was decent and sober, belying the cliches about his decadent province, and it was clear that he liked her. She enjoyed his company, and she was even attracted to his dry, witty manner. She went to bed alone though. This was not the village in Certando: she had no obligations.

Or not those kinds of obligations. And as for pleasure, or the ordinary needs of human interaction… she would have been honestly uncomprehending if anyone had mentioned them to her.

She was nineteen years old and in Tigana that-had-been.

In the morning, just inside the city walls, she bade farewell to the Senzian, touching palm to palm only briefly. He seemed somewhat affected by the night before but she turned and walked away before he could find whatever words his eyes were reaching for.

She found a hostelry not far away, one where her family had never stayed. She wasn't really worried about being recognized though; she knew how much she had changed and how many girls named Dianora there were scattered across the Palm. She paid in advance for three nights' lodging and left her belongings there.

Then she walked out into the streets of what had been Avalle of the Towers not very long ago. Avalle, on the green banks of the Sperion just before the river turned west to find the sea. There was an ache building in her as she went, and what hurt most of all, she found, was how much the same a place could be after everything had changed.

She went through the leather district and the wool district. She could remember skipping along beside her mother when they had all come inland to Avalle to see one of her father's sculptures ceremoniously placed in some square or loggia. She even recognized the tiny shop where she'd purchased her first grey leather gloves, with coins hoarded from her naming day in the summer for just such a thing.

Grey was a color for grown young women, not for little girls, the red-bearded artisan had teased. I know, six-year-old Dianora had said proudly that autumn long ago. Her mother had laughed. Once upon a time her mother had been a woman who laughed. Dianora could remember.

In the wool quarter she saw women and girls working tirelessly, carding and spinning as they had for centuries in doorways open to the early-summer early-morning light. Over by the river she could see and smell the dyeing sheds and yards.

When Quileia beyond the mountains to the south had folded inward upon its matriarchy, hundreds upon hundreds of years ago, Avalle had lost a great deal. More perhaps than any other city in the Palm. Once poised directly on one of the two main trade routes through the mountains, it had found itself in danger of sudden inconsequentially. With a collective ingenuity bordering on genius the city had decisively shifted its orientation and focus.

Within a generation that city of banking and trade to north and south had become the principal center in all of the Palm for works in leather and for sumptuously dyed wool.

Hardly missing a beat, Avalle pursued its new prosperity and its pride. And the towers kept rising.

With a catch to her heart Dianora finally acknowledged that she had been carefully working her way around the edges of Stevanien, the outlying districts, the artisans' quarters, looking outwards only and into doorways. Not into the center, up towards the hill. Where the towers were gone.

And so, realizing that, she did look, standing stock still in the middle of a wide square at the bottom of the street of the Woolguild. There was a small, very beautiful temple of Morian fronting the square, done in marble of a muted rose color. She gazed at it for a moment, then looked up and beyond.

And in that moment Dianora had a truth brought home to her with finality: how something can seem quite unchanged in all the small surface details of existence where things never really change, men and women being what they are, but how the core, the pulse, the kernel of everything can still have become utterly unlike what it had been before.

The wide beautiful streets seemed even wider than before. But that was because they were almost empty. There was a muted swell of noise over to her left where the riverside market still was, but the sound was not a fraction, her memory told her, not a fraction of what it had been in mornings that were lost.

There were too few people. Too many were gone, or dead, and the Ygrathen soldiers were all the more visible because of how empty the streets were. Dianora let her gaze travel past the temple up the line of the broad boulevard beside it towards the heart of the city.

We can and we will build wide and straight, the people of Avalle had said; even in the very beginning, when towns everywhere else were tortuous warrens of twisty alleys and crooked lanes easy to defend. There will be no city like ours in all the world, and if need comes for defense we will defend ourselves from our towers.

Which were gone. The squat ugly skyline jarred Dianora with a painful discontinuity. It was as if the eye was tricked, looking ceaselessly for something it knew had to be there.

From the earliest days of that broad, elegant city on the banks of the Sperion towers had been associated with Avalle. Assertions of Tiganese pride, sheer arrogance they called it in the provinces of Corte and Chiara and Astibar. They were symbols of internecine rivalry as well, as each noble family or wealthy guild of bankers or traders or artisans thrust its own tower as high as and then higher than they could truly afford. Graceful or warlike, red stone or sandy or grey, the towers of Avalle pushed up towards Eanna's heaven like a forest within the city walls.

The domestic conflicts had actually become dangerous for a time, with murder and sabotage not nearly uncommon enough, and the best masons and architects claiming stupefying fees. It had been the third Prince Alessan in Tigana by the sea who had put an end to the insanity in the simplest possible way more than two hundred years ago.

He commissioned Orsaria, the most celebrated of the architects, to build for him a palace in Avalle. And that palace was to have a tower, said Prince Alessan, that would be, and would remain, by force of law, the highest in the city.

So it had been. The spire of the Prince's Tower, slender and graceful, wrapped in bands of green and white to serve as a memory of the sea this far inland, put an end to the competition for the summit of Avalle. And from then on also, by that Prince Alessan's example which became custom and then tradition, the princes and princesses of Tigana were born in Avalle, in the palace beneath that spire, to mark them as belonging to both of the cities-, to Tigana of the Waves and Avalle of the Towers.

There had been over seventy towers once, Dianora knew, crowned in glory by that green and white preeminence. Once? Four years ago.

What, Dianora thought, her vision hurting for that absence, is a person who moves through her days as she has always moved, who speaks and walks and labors, eats, makes love, sleeps, sometimes even finds access to laughter, but whose heart has been cut out from her living body? Leaving no scar at all to be seen. No wound by which to remember the sliding blade.

The rubble had all been cleared away. There was no smoke, save from over by the dyeworks, to mar the clear blue of the sky. The day was mild and bright, birds sang a welcome to the coming warmth. There was nothing, nothing at all to show that there had ever been towers in this place. In this low, steadily dwindling town of Stevanien here in its remote corner of the Peninsula of the Palm, in the most oppressed province of them all.

What is such a person? Dianora thought again. That person whose heart was gone? She had no answer, how could she have an answer? Loss coiled to life within her, and hate followed it again, as if both of them were new-born, colder and sharper than before.

She walked up that wide boulevard into the center of Stevanien. She passed the soldiers' barracks and the doors of the Governor's Palace. Not far away she found The Queen. She was hired immediately. To start that same night. Help was badly needed. Help was hard to find. Arduini of Ygrath, who did all his own hiring, decided that this pretty creature from Certando had a certain style to her. She would have to do something though, he admonished her, about that wretchedly vulgar highland accent. She promised to try.

Within six months she was speaking almost like a native of the city, he observed. By then he had her out of the kitchen and into the front room waiting on tables, clad in the cream and dark-brown colors around which he had designed his establishment. Colors that happened to suit her very well.

She was quiet, deft, unassuming, and polite. She remembered names and patrons' preferences. She learned quickly. Four months later, in the spring before she turned twenty-one, Arduini offered her the coveted position at the front of The Queen greeting guests and supervising the staff in the three rooms of dining.

She astonished him by refusing. She astonished a great many people. But Dianora knew that this would be far too prominent a position for her own purposes. Which had not changed. If she was to travel north into Corte soon, and clearly marked by now as being from Certando, she needed to have been associated with The Queen, but not so very prominently. Prominent people had questions asked about them, that much she knew.

So she feigned an attack of country-girl anxiety the night Arduini made his offer. She broke two glasses and dropped a platter. Then she spilled Senzian green wine on the Governor himself.

Tearfully she went to Arduini and begged for more time to grow sure of herself. He agreed. It helped that he was in love with her by then. He invited her, gracefully, to become his mistress. In this, too, she demurred, pleading the inevitable tension that such a liaison would elicit within the staff, badly damaging The Queen. It was the right argument; his establishment was Arduini's true mistress.

In fact, Dianora had resolved to let no man touch her now. She was in Ygrathen territory and she had a purpose. The rules had changed. She had tentatively decided to leave in the fall, north towards Corte. She had been weighing possibilities and excuses for doing so when events had overtaken her so spectacularly.

Slowly circling the Audience Chamber, Dianora paused to greet Doarde's wife whom she liked. The poet seized the opportunity to present his daughter. The girl blushed, but dipped her head, hands pressed together, in a creditable manner. Dianora smiled at her and moved on.

A steward caught up to her, bearing khav in a black chalice set with red gemstones. A gift, years ago, from Brandin. It was her trademark on occasions such as this: she never drank anything stronger than khav at public receptions. With a guilty glance towards the doorway where she knew Scelto would be stationed against the wall, she took a grateful sip of the hot drink. Praise the Triad and the growers of Tregea, it was dark and rich and very strong.

"My dear lady Dianora, you are looking more magnificent than ever."

She turned, smoothly suppressing an expression of distaste. She had recognized the voice: Neso of Ygrath, a minor nobleman from overseas who had recently arrived at Brandin's court on the first ship of the season, solely in the hope of becoming a major nobleman in the colony. He was, so far as Dianora had been able to tell, talentless and venal.

She smiled radiantly at him and allowed him to touch her hand. "My dear Neso, how kind of you to lie so skillfully to an aging woman."

She rather liked saying that sort of thing: for, as Scelto had shrewdly observed once, if she was old, what did that make Solores?

Neso hastened to offer all the emphatic, predictable denials. He praised her gown and the vairstone, noting with a courtier's eye and tongue how exquisitely the stones of her chalice echoed her colors that day. Then, lowering his voice towards an unearned intimacy he asked her for the eighth time at least if she happened to have heard anything further about the planned disposition of that very trivial office of Taxing Master in north Asoli.

It was, in fact, a lucrative position. The incumbent had made his fortune, or enough for his own purposes evidently, and was returning to Ygrath in a few weeks. Dianora hated that sort of graft and she had even been bold enough to say so to Brandin once. A little amused, which had irritated her, he had prosaically pointed out how difficult it was to get men to serve in places as devoid of attraction as the north of Asoli without offering them a chance at modest wealth.

His grey eyes beneath the thick dark eyebrows had rested upon her as she'd wrestled and then finally come to terms with the depressing truth inherent in this. She'd finally looked up and nodded a reluctant agreement. Which made him burst into laughter.

"I am so relieved," chuckled Brandin of Ygrath, "that my clumsy reasoning and government meet with your approval." She had gone red to the roots of her hair, but then, catching his mood, had laughed herself at the absurdity of her presumption. That had been several years ago.

Now all she did was try, discreetly, to see that positions such as this one did not go to the most transparently greedy of the motley crew of petty Ygrathen courtiers from whom Brandin had to choose. Neso, she had resolved, was not getting this posting if she could help it. The problem was that d'Eymon seemed, for inscrutable reasons of his own, to be favoring Neso's appointment. She'd already asked Scelto to see if he could find out why.

Now she let her smile fade to an earnestly benevolent look of concern as she gazed at the sleek, plump Ygrathen. Lowering her voice but without leaning towards him she murmured, "I am doing what I can. You should know that there seems to be some opposition."

Neso's eyes narrowed on the far side of the curl of smoke rising from her khav. With practiced subtlety they flicked past her right shoulder to where she knew d'Eymon would still be standing by the King's door. Neso looked back at her, eyebrows raised very slightly.

Dianora gave a small, apologetic shrug.

"Have you a… suggestion?" Neso asked, his brow furrowed with anxiety.

"I'd start by smiling a little," she said with deliberate tartness. There was no point in intriguing in such a way that the whole court knew of it.

Neso forced an immediate laugh and then applauded stagily as if she'd offered an irresistible witticism.

"Forgive me," he said, smiling as ordered. "This matters a great deal to me."

It matters a great deal more to the people of Asoli, you greedy bloodleech, Dianora thought. She laid a hand lightly on Neso's puffed sleeve.

"I know it does," she said kindly. "I will do what I can. If circumstances… allow me to."

Neso, whatever he was, was no stranger to this sort of thing. Once more the false laugh greeted her nonexistent jest. "I hope to be able to assist the circumstances," he murmured.

She smiled again and withdrew her hand. It was enough. Scelto was going to receive some more money that afternoon. She hoped it would come to a decent part of the vairstone's cost. As for d'Eymon, she would probably end up talking directly to him later in the week. Or as directly as discussions ever got with that man.

Sipping at her khav she moved on. People came up to her wherever she went. It was bad politics in Brandin's court not to be on good terms with Dianora di Certando. Conversing absently and inconsequentially she kept an ear pitched for the discreet raps of the Herald's staff that would be Brandin's sole announcement. Rhun, she noted, was making faces at himself in one of the mirrors and laughing at the effect. He was in high humor, which was a good sign. Turning the other way she suddenly noticed a face she liked. One that was undeniably central to her own history.

In could be said, in many ways, to have been the Governor's own fault. So anxious was he to assuage the evident frustration of Rhamanus, captain of that year's Tribute Ship, that he ordered the Certandan serving-girl, who had apologized so very charmingly after the spilled-wine incident some time ago, to bring rather more of The Queen's best vintages than were entirely good for any of them at the table.

Rhamanus, young enough to still be ambitious, old enough to feel his chances slipping away, had made some pointedly acid remarks earlier in the day on board the river galley about the state of affairs in Stevanien and its environs. So much of a backwater, so desultory in its collection of duties and taxes, he murmured a little too casually, that he wasn't even sure if the galley run upriver in spring was worthwhile… under the present administrative circumstances.

The Governor, long past the point of ambition but needing a few more years here skimming his share of border tariffs and internal levies, along with the criminal justice fines and confiscations, had winced inwardly and cursed the conjunctions of his planets. Why, when he strove so hard to be decent and uncontentious in everything he did, to leave any waters he entered as unruffled as possible, did he have so little luck?

Short of a massive midsummer military assertion there was no way to force more money or goods out of this impoverished region. If Brandin had seriously wanted to extract real wealth out of Stevanien he would have been better advised not to have so successfully smashed the city and its distrada to its knees.

Not that the Governor would have even dreamt of letting such a furtive thought come anywhere near his lips. But the reality was that he was doing the best he could. If he squeezed the leather or the wool guilds any harder than he was they would simply start to fold. Stevanien, already thinly inhabited, and particularly bereft of men in their prime years, would become a town of ghosts and empty squares. And he had explicit instructions from the King to prevent that.

If the King's various orders and demands rammed so violently up against each other, in such patent contradiction, what, in all fairness, was a middle-echelon administrator to do?

Not that such a plaint could be used with this bristly, unhappy Rhamanus. What care would the captain have for the Governor's dilemmas? The Tribute Ship captains were judged by what came home to Chiara in their holds. Their job was to put as much pressure on the local administrators as they could, even to the point, sometimes, of forcing them to surrender a portion of their own levies to bring the contents of the ship nearer to the mark. The Governor had already resigned himself, dismally, to doing just that by the end of the week if the last hurried sweep of the distrada that he'd ordered didn't produce enough to satisfy Rhamanus. It wouldn't, he knew. This was an ambitious captain he was dealing with, and there had been a tenuous harvest in Corte last fall, Rhamanus's next stop.

His retirement estate in eastern Ygrath, on the promontory he'd already chosen in his mind, seemed farther away this evening than ever before. He signaled for another round of wine for all of them, inwardly grieving for the blue-green sea and the splendid hunting woods by the home he'd probably never be able to build.

On the other hand (as they liked to say here), it appeared that his attempt to soothe the ire of this Rhamanus had been unexpectedly successful. The Governor had asked his wonderful Arduini, the true and only joy there was for him in this benighted place, to prepare an evening meal for them of an unforgettable order.

"All of my meals are unforgettable," Arduini had bridled predictably, but had been mollified by a judicious mixture of flattery, gold ygras, and a quiet reminder (almost certainly not the truth, the Governor reflected unrepentantly) that their guest that evening had ready access to the ear of the King on Chiara.

The meal had been an ascending series of revelations, the service prompt, soothing, and unobtrusive, the wines a sequence of complementary grace notes to Arduini's undeniable artistry. Rhamanus, a man who appeared to keep his trim physique with some difficulty, had progressed from edginess through guarded appreciation, to increasing pleasure, ending up in a volubly expansive good humor.

Somewhere in the next-to-last bottle of dessert wine imported from back home in Ygrath he had also become quite drunk.

Which was the only explanation, the only possible explanation, for the fact that, after the dinner was over and The Queen closed for the night, he'd had their evening's dark-haired waitress formally seized as Tribute for Brandin in Chiara and bundled directly onto the galley in the river.

The serving-girl. The serving-girl from Certando.

Certando, on the other side of the border, where Alberico of Barbadior held sway, not, alas, Brandin of Ygrath.

The Governor of Stevanien had been awakened at dawn from a fitful, wine-fogged slumber by a terrified, apologetic Clerk of the Council. Unclothed and without so much as a whiff of his morning khav he had heard, through the ominous pounding of a colossal headache, the nature of the news.

"Stop that galley!" he roared, as the horrifying implications fought their way through to register upon his slowly emerging consciousness. He had tried to roar, anyway. What came forth was a pitiful squeal that had been, nonetheless, sufficiently explicit to send the clerk flying, his gown flapping in his haste to obey.

They blocked the River Sperion, stopping Rhamanus just as he was raising anchor.

Unfortunately the Tribute captain then proceeded to reveal a stubbornness that ran stupefyingly counter to the most rudimentary political good sense. He refused to surrender the girl. For one wild, hallucinatory moment of insanity the Governor actually contemplated storming the galley.

The river galley of Brandin, King of Ygrath, Lord of Burrakh in Khardhun, Tyrant of the western provinces of the Peninsula of the Palm. Said galley then flying, rather pointedly, Brandin's own device as well as the royal banner of Ygrath.

Death-wheels, the Governor reflected, were lovingly made for minor functionaries who essayed such maneuvers.

Desperately, his brain curdling in the unfair brightness of the morning sunlight by the river, the Governor tried to find a way of communicating reason to a Tribute captain seized by the manifest throes of a midsummer madness.

"Do you want to start a war?" he shouted from the dock. He had to shout from the dock; they wouldn't let him on the galley. The wretched girl was nowhere to be seen; stowed, doubtless in the captain's cabin. The Governor wished she were dead. He wished that he himself was dead. He wished, in the most grievous inner sacrilege of all, that Arduini the master chef had never set foot in Stevanien.

"And why," Captain Rhamanus called blandly from the middle of the river, "should my doing my precise duty by my King cause any such a thing?"

"Has the sea salt rotted your miserable excuse for a brain?" the Governor screamed, ill-advisedly. The captain's brow darkened. The Governor pushed on, dripping with sweat in the sun.

"She's a Certandan, in the name of the seven holy sisters of the god! Do you have any idea how easy it will be to goad Alberico into starting a border war over this?" He mopped at his brow with the square of red cloth a servant belatedly produced.

Rhamanus, cursedly composed despite having drunk at least as much as the Governor the night before, seemed unimpressed.

"As far as I'm concerned," he pronounced airily, the words drifting over the water, "she's living in Stevanien, she's working in Stevanien, and she was taken in Stevanien. By my reckoning that makes her perfectly suitable for the saishan, or whatever our King, in his wisdom, decides to do with her." He leveled a finger suddenly at the Governor. "Now clear the river of these boats or I will ram and sink them in the name of each of the seven sisters and the King of Ygrath. Unless," he added, leaning forward, lowering his hand to the railing, "you would care to farspeak Chiara and have the King settle this himself?"

They had a saying here in the colony: naked between a fist and a fist. It was an exact phrase for the place where that insidious, cleverly calculated, viciously unfair proposition put the man to whom it was addressed. A phrase that described in precise and graphic terms where the Governor of Stevanien abruptly felt himself to be. The red cloth swabbed repeatedly, and ineffectually, at his forehead and neck.

One did not farspeak the King without, it had been painstakingly impressed upon all the regional administrators in the Western Palm, very compelling reason. The power demanded of Brandin to sustain such a link with his non-sorcerous underlings was considerable.

One most particularly did not willingly undertake such a course of action in the very early morning hours when the King might be asleep. Most relevant of all, perhaps, one did not hasten to bespeak the mental presence of one's monarch with a mind clogged and befuddled with the miasmic aftermath of wine, and over an issue that, in essence, might be seen to involve no more than the Tribute seizure of a common farm girl.

That was one of the fists.

The other was war on the border. With the brain-battering possibility of more than that. For who, in the name of the sisters and the god, knew how the devious pagan mind of Alberico of Barbadior worked? How he might regard, or decide to regard, an incident such as this? Despite Rhamanus's glib analysis, the fact that the girl worked in The Queen made it obvious that she wasn't really a Lower Cortean. In the name of the sisters, they couldn't even seize a Lower Cortean for tribute! They weren't allowed to, by order of the King. To take the woman, she had to be Certandan. If Rhamanus wanted to argue she was a resident of Stevanien, well that made her a Lower Cortean which meant that they couldn't take her! Which meant that… he didn't know what that meant. The Governor held out his sopping kerchief and it was exchanged for a fresh one. His brain felt as if it was frying in the sun.

All he had wanted out of his declining years in service was the quiet, mildly lucrative postings his family's long, if fairly minor, support of Brandin's original claim to succession in Ygrath had earned them. That was it. All he wanted. With a decent house on that eastern promontory one day where he could watch the sun come up out of the sea and go hunting in the woods with his dogs. So very much to ask?

Instead, a fist and a fist.

He briefly considered washing his hands of the whole affair, and let the cursed inhabitants of this peninsula chew on that for a phrase! letting the imbecilic Tribute captain row his galley down the river just as he pleased. In fact, he realized, lamentably too late, if he had stayed in bed and pretended he'd not received the message in time he would have been entirely blameless in this affair of a drunken captain's blunder. He closed his eyes, tasting the exquisite, vanished sweetness of such a possibility.

Too late. He was standing by the riverside in the blinding light and the heat of the sun, and half of Stevanien had heard what he and Rhamanus had just shouted back and forth across the water.

With a small, diffident prayer to his own patron gods of food and forest, and a poignantly clear image of that seaside estate, the Governor chose his fist.

"Let me on board then," he said as briskly as he could manage. "I'm not about to farspeak the King while standing on this dock. I want a chair and some quiet and an extremely strong mug of whatever passes for khav on a galley."

Rhamanus was visibly nonplussed. The Governor was able to derive a certain sour pleasure from that.

They gave him everything he asked for. The woman was taken below deck and he was left alone in the captain's cabin. He took a deep breath and then several more. He drank the khav, scalding his tongue which, as much as anything else, woke him up. Then, for the first time in three years of office, he narrowed his mind down to a pinpoint image as Brandin had taught him, and he framed, questioningly, the name of the King in his thoughts.

With profoundly unsettling speed Brandin's crisp, cool, always slightly mocking voice was in his head. It was dizzying. The Governor fought to keep his composure. As carefully but as quickly as he could, speed mattered, they had all been taught, he outlined the situation they faced. He apologized twice, en route, but dared not risk the time required for a third, however much his lifetime's instincts bade him to. What good were a career diplomat's lifetime instincts when enmeshed in sorcery? He felt sick to his stomach with the strain and the discontinuity of the farspeaking.

Then, with a surging of his spirit, with glory, with paeans of praise to twenty different deities chorusing within him, the Governor of Stevanien was given to understand that his King was not angered. More: that he had been exactly correct in this farspeaking. That the political timing could not be better for such a testing of Alberico's resolve. That, accordingly, Rhamanus should indeed be allowed to take the girl as Tribute but, and the King stressed this, very clearly identified as a Certandan. A Certandan who happened to be in Lower Corte. That fact was to be their claim of authority: no evasions about her being a resident of Stevanien or some such thing. They would see what sort of spirit this minor Barbadian sorcerer had after all.

The Governor had done well, the King said.

The image of the house by the sea grew almost incandescently vivid in the back of the Governor's mind even as he heard himself babbling, silently over the link Brandin made, his most abject protestations of love and obedience. The King cut him short.

"We must end now," he said, "Do go easier on the wine down there." Then he was gone. The Governor sat alone in the captain's cabin for a long time, trying to reassure himself that Brandin's last tone had been amused, not reproving. He was fairly certain it was. He was almost sure.

A very tense period had ensued. The galley was allowed to leave that same morning. In the fortnight that followed the King had far-spoken him twice. Once to order the border garrison at Forese quietly increased but not by so much as to amount to further provocation in itself. The Governor spent an anguished sleepless night trying to calculate what number of soldiers would suit that command.

Reinforcements from the city of Lower Corte arrived up the river to supplement his own forces in Stevanien. Later he was instructed by the King to watch for a possible Barbadian envoy from Certando, and to greet such a one with utmost cordiality, referring all questions to Chiara for resolution. He was also warned to be on full alert for a retaliatory border raid from Sinave, and to annihilate any and all Barbadian troops that might venture into Lower Corte. The Governor had very little personal experience at annihilation but he swore to obey.

Merchants, he was told, were to be advised to delay their plans to travel east for a little while; no orders, nothing official, merely a piece of advice a prudent businessman might wish to heed. Most did.

In the end nothing happened.

Alberico chose to entirely ignore the affair. Short of a willingness to have things escalate a long way there was nothing else he could do without losing face. For a while there was speculation he might punish some merchant or itinerant musician from the Western Palm who happened to be in his provinces, but there was no sign of this either. The Barbadians simply treated the girl as having been an established resident of Lower Corte, exactly as Rhamanus had so blithely opined the morning he'd seized her.

In the Ygrathen provinces, though, the girl was deliberately described as Certandan from the start, the woman from Barbadian territory that Brandin had seized, mocking Alberico all the while. She was said to be beautiful as well.

Rhamanus made his slow progression home through the rest of that summer and into the early fall. The galley took them downriver and all the collected inland tributes were transferred to the great Tribute Ship itself with its broad, filling sails. Slowly it made its way up the coast, collecting taxes and tariffs at the designated places in Corte and Asoli.

The harvest had indeed been bad in Corte, they had to struggle to meet the quotas there. Twice they rested at anchor for long periods while the captain led a company to an inland post. And all the while Rhamanus searched for women who might be useful as more than hostages or symbols of Ygrath's manifest dominance. Women who might credit the saishan itself and so make the career of a certain Tribute captain who was just about ready for a landside posting after twenty years at sea.

Three possibilities were found. One was of noble birth, her existence revealed by an informer. She was taken only after her father's manor in Corte had been, somewhat regretfully, burned to the ground.

At length, in the autumn turning of the year, beautiful even in flat, unlovely Asoli when the rains chose to relent, the Tribute Ship slipped through the tricky passages of the Strait of Asoli and entered the waters of the Chiaran Sea. A few days later, red and gold sails billowing triumphantly, it had sailed into the Great Harbor of the Island, celebrated in song for more years than could be counted.

The Tribute Ship of Rhamanus had carried gold and gems and silver and coinage of various kinds. It bore leather from Stevanien and wood carvings from Corte and great huge wheels of saull cheese from the west coast of Asoli. They had spices and herbs and knives, stained glass and wool and wine. There were two women from Corte and one from Asoli, and besides these three there was another woman and this one was different. This one was the dark-haired, brown-eyed beauty known throughout the peninsula by the time their voyage ended as the woman who'd come near to starting a war.

Dianora di Certando, her name was.

Dianora, who had intended to come to the Island from the very first, from the earliest glimmerings of her plan when she had sat alone before a dead fire one summer night in her father's silent house. Who had hardened herself, as men in battle were said to have to do, to the thought of being captured and brought here and locked for life inside the saishan of the Tyrant. She had worked it out that far five years ago, a girl with death in her heart, with a father dead and a brother gone and a mother gone even farther away: images of all three of them rising in her dreams from the ashes of the burning in her land.

And death was still there, still with her on that ship. She still had those dreams, but with them now, as fabled Chiara drew nearer under the brightness of the sky was something else: a bemused, an almost numbed incredulity at how the line of her life had run. How things had fallen out so completely wrong, and yet so precisely as she had planned from the first.

She had tried to see that as an omen, closing her left hand three times over her thumb to make her wish come true, as she entered that new world.

Chapter 8

IT WAS STRANGE, DIANORA THOUGHT, STILL MOVING THROUGH the crowded Audience Chamber as spring sunlight filtered down on Brandin's court from the stained-glass windows above, how the so clear portents of youth were alchemized by time into the many-layered ambiguities of adult life.

Sipping from her jeweled cup she considered the alternative. That she had simply allowed things to become nuanced and difficult. That the real truths were exactly the same as they had been on the day she arrived. That all she was doing was hiding: from what she had become, and what she had not yet done.

It was the central question of her life and once more she pushed it away to the edges of her awareness. Not today. Not in any daytime. Those thoughts belonged to nights alone in the saishan when only Scelto by her door might know how sleepless she was, or find the tracks of tears along her cheeks when he came to wake her in the morning.

Night thoughts, and this was bright day, in a very public place.

So she walked over towards the man she'd recognized and let her smile reach her eyes. Balancing her chalice gracefully she sketched a full Ygrathen salute to the portly, soberly dressed personage with three heavy gold chains about his neck.

"Greetings," she murmured, straightening and moving nearer. "This is a surprise. It is rare indeed that the so-busy Warden of the Three Harbors deigns to spare a moment from his so-demanding affairs to visit old friends."

Unfortunately Rhamanus was as hard to ruffle or disconcert as he had ever been. Dianora had been trying to get a rise out of him ever since the night he'd had her bundled like a brown heifer out of the street in front of The Queen and onto the river galley.

Now he simply grinned, heavier with the years gone by and, latterly, his shore-bound duties, but unmistakably the man who'd brought her here.

One of the few men from Ygrath she genuinely liked.

"Not so much flavor from you, girl," he mock-growled. "It is not for idle women who do nothing all day but put their hair up and down and up again for exercise to criticize those of us who have stern and arduous tasks that shorten our nights and put grey in our hair."

Dianora laughed. Rhamanus's thick black curls, the envy of half the saishan, showed not a trace of grey. She let her gaze linger expressively on his dark locks.

"I'm a liar," Rhamanus conceded with untroubled equanimity, leaning forward so only she could hear. "It's been a dead-quiet winter. Not much to do at all. I could have come to visit but you know how much I hate these goings-on at court. My buttons pop when I bow."

Dianora laughed again and gave his arm a quick squeeze. Rhamanus had been kind to her on the ship, and courteous and friendly ever since, even when she'd been merely another new body, if a slightly notorious one, in the saishan of the King. She knew he liked her and she also knew, from d'Eymon himself, that the former Tribute Ship captain was an efficient and a fair administrator.

She had helped him get the posting four years ago. It was a high honor for a seaman, supervising harbor rules and regulations at the three main ports of Chiara itself. It was also, to judge from Rhamanus's slightly threadbare clothing, a little too near the seat of power for any real gains to be extracted.

Thinking, she clicked her tongue against her upper teeth, a habit Brandin teased her about. He claimed it always signaled a request or a suggestion. He knew her very well, which frightened her at least as much as it did anything else.

"This is the merest thought," she said now to Rhamanus quietly, "but would you have any interest at all in living in north Asoli for a few years? Not that I want to get rid of you. It's a dreadful place, everyone knows that, but there are opportunities and I'd as soon a decent man reaped them as some of the greedy clutch that are hovering about here."

"The taxing office?" he asked, very softly.

She nodded. His eyes widened slightly but, schooled to discretion, he gave no other sign of interest or surprise.

What he did do, an instant later, was glance quickly beyond her shoulder towards the throne. Dianora was already turning by then, an inexplicable sense, almost an antenna, having alerted her.

So she was facing the Island Throne and the doorway behind it by the time the herald's staff rapped the floor twice, not loudly, and Brandin came into the room. He was followed by the two priests, and the priestess of Adaon. Rhun shambled quickly over to stand near by, dressed identically to the King except for his cap.

The truer measure of power, Brandin had once said to her, wouldn't be found in having twenty heralds deafen a room by proclaiming one's arrival. Any fool in funds for a day could rivet attention that way. The more testing course, the truer measure, was to enter unobtrusively and observe what happened.

What happened was what always happened. The Audience Chamber had been collectively poised as if on the edge of a cliff for the past ten minutes, waiting. Now, just as collectively, the court plummeted into obeisance. Not one person in the whole crowded room was still speaking by the time the herald's muted staff of office proclaimed the King. In the silence the two discreet raps on the marbled floor sounded like echoing thunder.

Brandin was in high good humor. Dianora could have told that from halfway across the room, even if she hadn't had a hint from Rhun already. Her heart was beating very fast. It always did whenever Brandin entered a room where she was. Even after twelve years. Even still, and despite everything. So many lines of her life led to or from this man or came together, hopelessly intertwined, in him.

He looked to d'Eymon first, as always, and received the other's expressionless bow, sketched low in the Ygrathen fashion. Then, as always, he turned and smiled at Solores.

Then at Dianora. Braced as she was, as she always tried to be, she still could not quite master what happened to her when the grey eyes found and held her own. His glance was like a touch, a gliding presence, fiery and glacial both, as Brandin was.

And all this from a look across a very crowded room.

Once, in bed, years before, she had dared to ask him a question that had long troubled her.

"Is there sorcery involved when you love me here, or when we first meet in a public place?"

She hadn't known what answer she wanted, or what to expect by way of reaction. She'd thought he might be flattered by the implication, or at least amused. You could never be sure with Brandin though, his mind ran through too many different channels and with too much subtlety. Which is why questions, especially revealing ones, were dangerous. This had been important to her though: if he said yes she was going to try to use that to kindle her killing anger again. The anger she seemed to have lost here in the strange world that was the Island.

Her expression must have been very grave; he turned on his pillow, head propped on one hand to regard her from beneath level brows. He shook his head.

"Not in any way you are thinking. Nothing that I control or shape with my magic, other than the matter of children. I will not have any more heirs, you know that." She did know that; all his women did. He said, after a pause, carefully, "Why do you ask? What happens to you?"

For a second she thought she'd heard uncertainty in his voice, but one could never be sure of such things with Brandin. "Too much," she'd answered. "Too much happens." And she'd been speaking, for that one time, the unshielded truth of a no longer innocent heart. There was an acute understanding in his clear eyes. Which frightened her. She moved herself, moved by all the layers of her need, to slide over against his body again and then above and upon it that it might begin once more, the whole process. All of it: betrayal and memory mixed with yearning, as in the amber-colored wine the Triad were said to drink, too potent for mortals to taste.

"Are you truly serious about that posting in Asoli?" Rhamanus's voice was soft. Brandin had not gone to the throne but was making a relaxed circuit of the room, more evidence of his benign mood. Rhun, with his lopsided smile, shambled in his wake.

"I confess I had never even given it a thought," the former Tribute captain added.

With an effort Dianora forced her thoughts back to him. For a second she had forgotten her own query. Brandin did that to her. It was not a good thing, she thought. For many reasons it was not a good thing.

She turned again to Rhamanus. "I'm quite serious," she said. "But I'm not sure if you would want the position, even if it were possible. You have more status where you are, and this is Chiara, after all. Asoli can offer you some chance at wealth, but I think you have an idea what would be involved. What matters to you, Rhamanus?"

It was more bluntly put than courtesy would have deemed appropriate, especially with a friend.

He blinked, and fingered one of his chains of office.

"Is that what it comes down to?" he asked hesitantly. "Is that how you see it? Can a man not perhaps be moved by the prospect of a new challenge, or even, at the risk of sounding foolish, by the desire to serve his King?"

Her turn to blink.

"You shame me," she said simply, after a moment. "Rhamanus, I swear you do." She stilled his quick protests with a hand on his sleeve. "Sometimes I wonder what is happening to me. All the intriguing that goes on here."

She heard footsteps approaching and what she said next was spoken as much to the man behind as to the one in front of her. "Sometimes I wonder what this court is doing to me."

"Should I be wondering as well?" asked Brandin of Ygrath.

Smiling, he joined them. He did not touch her. He very seldom touched the saishan women in public, and this was an Ygrathen reception. They knew his rules. Their lives were shaped by his rules.

"My lord," she said, turning and sketching her salutation. She kept her voice airily provocative. "Do you find me more cynical than I was when this terrible man brought me here?"

Brandin's amused glance went from her to Rhamanus. It was not as if he'd needed the reminder of which Tribute captain had brought him Dianora. She knew that, and he knew she did. It was all part of their verbal dance. His intelligence stretched her to her limits, and then changed what those limits were. She noticed, perhaps because the subject had come up with Rhamanus, that there was as much grey in his beard now as black.

He nodded judiciously, simulating a deep concern over the question. "I would have to say so, yes. You have grown cynically manipulative in almost exactly the same proportion as the terrible man has grown fat."

"So much?" Dianora protested. "My lord, he is very fat!"

Both men chuckled. Rhamanus patted his belly affectionately.

"This," he said, "is what happens when you feed a man cold salt meat for twenty years at sea and then expose him to the delights of the King's city."

"Well then," said Brandin, "we may have to send you away somewhere until you are sleek as a seal again."

"My lord," said Rhamanus instantly, "I am yours to command in all things." His expression was sober and intense.

Brandin registered that and his tone changed as well. "I know that," he murmured. "I would that I had more of you at court. At both of my courts. Portly or sleek, Rhamanus, I am not unmindful of you, whatever our Dianora may think."

Very high praise, a promise of sorts, and a dismissal for the moment. Bright-eyed, Rhamanus bowed formally and withdrew. Brandin walked a couple of paces away, Rhun shuffling along beside him. Dianora followed, as she was expected to. Once out of earshot of anyone but the Fool, Brandin turned to her. He was, she was sorry to see, suppressing a smile.

"What did you do? Offer him north Asoli?"

Dianora heaved a heartfelt sigh of frustration. This happened all the time. "Now that," she protested, "is unfair. You are using magic."

He let the smile come. She knew that people were watching them. She knew what they would say amongst each other.

"Hardly," Brandin murmured. "I wouldn't waste it or drain myself on something so transparent."

"Transparent!" she bridled.

"Not you, my cynical manipulator. But Rhamanus was too serious too quickly when I jested about posting him away. And the only position of significance currently available is north Asoli and so…"

He let the sentence trail off. Laughter lingered in his eyes.

"Would he be such a bad choice?" Dianora asked defiantly. It was genuinely disconcerting how easily Brandin could sound the depths of things. If she allowed herself to dwell on that she could become frightened again.

"What do you think?" he asked by way of reply.

"I? Think?" She lifted her plucked eyebrows in exaggerated arches. "How should a mere object of the King's occasional pleasure venture to have an opinion on such matters?"

"Now that," said Brandin nodding briskly, "is an intelligent observation. I shall have to consult Solores, instead."

"If you get an intelligent observation out of her," Dianora said tartly, "I shall hurl myself from the saishan balcony into the sea."

"All the way across the harbor square? A long leap," said Brandin mildly.

"So," she replied, "is an intelligent observation for Solores."

And at that he laughed aloud. The court was listening. Everyone heard. Everyone would draw their own conclusions, but they would all be the same conclusion in the end. Scelto, she reflected, was likely to receive discreet contributions from sources other than Neso of Ygrath before the day was out.

"I saw something interesting on the mountain this morning," Brandin said, his amusement subsiding. "Something quite unusual."

This, she realized, was why he'd wanted to speak to her alone. He'd been up on Sangarios that morning; she was one of the few who knew about it. Brandin kept this venture quiet, in case he should fail. She'd been prepared to tease him about it.

At the beginning of spring, just as the winds began to change, before the last snows melted in Certando and Tregea and the southern reaches of what had been Tigana, came the three Ember Days that marked the turning of the year.

No fires not already burning were lit anywhere in the Palm. The devout fasted for at least the first of the three days. The bells of the Triad temples were silent. Men stayed within their doors at night, especially after darkfall on the first day which was the Day of the Dead.

There were Ember Days in autumn as well, halfway through the year, when the time of mourning came for Adaon slain on his mountain in Tregea, when the sun began to fade as Eanna mourned and Morian folded in upon herself in her Halls underground. But the spring days inspired a colder dread, especially in the countryside, because so much depended upon what would follow them. Winter's passing, the season of sowing, and the hope of grain, of life, in the summer's fullness to come.

In Chiara there was an added ritual, different from anything elsewhere in the Palm.

On the Island the tale was told that Adaon and Eanna had first come together in love for three full days and nights on the summit of Sangarios. That in the surging climax of her desire on the third night Eanna of the Lights had created the stars of heaven and strewn them like shining lace through the dark. And the tale was told that nine months later, which is three times three, the Triad was completed when Morian was born in the depths of winter in a cave on that same mountain.

And with Morian had come both life and death into the world, and with life and death came mortal man to walk under the newly named stars, the two moons of the night's warding, and the sun of day.

And for this reason had Chiara always asserted its preeminence among the nine provinces of the Palm, and for this reason as well did the Island name Morian as guardian of its destiny.

Morian of Portals, who had sway over all thresholds. For everyone knew that all islands were worlds unto themselves, that to come to an island was to come to another world. A truth known under the stars and moons, if not always remembered by the light of day.

Every three years then, at the beginning of each Year of Morian, on the first of the springtime Ember Days, the young men of Chiara would vie with each other in a dawn race up to the summit of Sangarios, there to pluck a blood-dark sprig of sonrai, the intoxicating berries of the mountain, under the watchful eye of the priests of Morian who had kept vigil on the peak all night long among the waking spirits of the dead. The first man down the mountain was anointed Lord of Sangarios until the next such run in three years' time.

In the old days, the very old days, the Lord of Sangarios would have been hunted down and slain on his mountain by the women six months later on the first of the Ember Days of fall.

Not anymore. Not for a long time. Now the young champion was likely to find himself in fierce demand as a lover by women seeking the blessing of his seed. A different sort of hunt, Dianora had said to Brandin once.

He hadn't laughed. He didn't find the ritual amusing. In fact, six years ago the King of Ygrath had elected to run the course himself, the morning before the actual race. He had done it again three years past. No small achievement, really, for a man of his years, considering how hard and how long the runners trained for this. Dianora didn't know what to find more whimsical: the fact that Brandin would do this thing, in such secrecy, or the ebullient masculine pride he'd felt both times he'd made it up to the summit of Sangarios and down again.

In the Audience Chamber Dianora asked the question she was clearly expected to ask: "What did you see, then?"

She did not know, for mortals seldom do know when they approach a threshold of the goddess, that the question would mark the turning of her days.

"Something unusual," Brandin repeated. "I had of course outstripped the guards running with me."

"Of course," she murmured, giving him a sidelong glance.

He grinned. "I was alone on the path part of the way up. The trees were still very thick on either side, mountain ash, mostly, some sejoias."

"How interesting," she said.

This time he quelled her with a look. Dianora bit her lip and schooled her expression dutifully.

"I looked over to my right," Brandin said, "and saw a large grey rock, almost like a platform at the edge of the trees. And sitting on the rock there was a creature. A woman, I would swear, and very nearly human."

"Very nearly?"

She wasn't teasing anymore. Within the actual archway of a portal of Morian we sometimes do know that a thing of importance is happening.

"That's what was unusual. She certainly wasn't entirely human. Not with green hair and such pale skin. Skin so white I swear I saw blue veins beneath, Dianora. And her eyes were unlike any I've ever seen. I thought she was a trick of light, the sun filtering through trees. But she didn't move, or change in any way, even when I stopped to look at her."

And now Dianora knew exactly where she was.

The ancient creatures of water and wood and cave went back in time as far as the Triad did almost, and from the description she knew what he had seen. She knew other things as well and was suddenly afraid.

"What did you do?" she asked, as casually as she could.

"I wasn't sure what to do. I spoke; she didn't answer. So I took a step towards her and as soon as I did she leaped down from the rock and backed away. She stopped among the trees. I held out my open palms, but she seemed to be startled by that, or offended, and a moment later she fled."

"Did you follow?"

"I was about to, but by then one of the guards had caught up to me."

"Did he see her?" she asked. Too quickly.

Brandin gave her a curious look. "I asked. He said no, though I think he would have answered that way, regardless. Why do you ask?"

She shrugged. "It would have confirmed she was real," she lied.

Brandin shook his head. "She was real. This was no vision. In fact," he added, as if the thought had just occurred to him, "she reminded me of you."

"With… what was it? Green skin and blue hair?" she replied, letting her court instincts guide her now. Something large was happening here though. She labored to hide the turmoil she felt. "I thank you so much my gracious lord. I suppose if I talked to Scelto and Vencel we could achieve the skin color, and blue hair should be easy enough. If it excites you so dramatically…"

He smiled but did not laugh. "Green hair, not blue," he said, almost absently. "And she did, Dianora," he repeated, looking at her oddly. "She did remind me of you. I wonder why. Do you know anything about such creatures?"

"I do not," she said. "In Certando we have no tales of green-haired women in the mountains." She was lying. She was lying as well as she could, wide-eyed and direct. She could scarcely believe what she had just heard, what he had seen.

Brandin's good humor was still with him.

"What mountain tales do you have in Certando?" he queried, smiling expectantly.

"Stories of hairy things that walk on legs like tree stumps and eat goats and virgins in the night."

His smile broadened. "Are there any?"

"Goats, yes," she said with a straight face. "Fewer virgins. Hairy creatures with such specific appetites are not an incentive to chastity. Are you sending out a party to search for this creature?" A question so important she held her breath awaiting his reply.

"I think not," Brandin said. "I suspect such things are only seen when they want to be."

Which, she knew for a fact, was absolutely true.

"I haven't told anyone but you," he added unexpectedly.

There was no dissembling in the expression she felt come over her face at that. But over and above everything else there was something new inside her with these tidings. She badly needed to be alone to think. A vain hope. She wouldn't get that chance for a long time yet today; best to push his story as far back as she could, with all the other things she was always pushing to the edges of her mind.

"Thank you, my lord," she murmured, aware that they had been talking privately for some time. Aware, as ever, of how that would be construed.

"In the meantime," Brandin suddenly said, in a quite different tone, "you still have not yet asked me how I did on the run. Solores, I have to tell you, made it her first question."

Which carried them back to familiar ground.

"Very well," she said, feigning indifference. "Do tell me. Halfway? Three-quarters?"

A glint of royal indignation nickered in the grey eyes. "You are presumptuous sometimes," he said. "I indulge you too much. I went, if you please, all the way to the summit and came down again this morning with a cluster of sonrai berries. I will be extremely interested to see if any of tomorrow's runners are up and down as quickly."

"Well," she said quickly, unwisely, "they won't have sorcery to help them."

"Dianora, have done!"

And that tone she recognized and knew she'd gone too far. As always at such moments she had a dizzying sense of a pit gaping at her feet.

She knew what Brandin needed from her; she knew the reason he granted her license to be outrageous and impertinent. She had long understood why the wit and edge she brought to their exchanges were important to him. She was his counterbalance to Solores's soft, unquestioning, undemanding shelter. The two of them, in turn, balancing d'Eymon's ascetic exercise of politics and government.

And all three of them in orbit around the star that Brandin was. The voluntarily exiled sun, removed from the heavens it knew, from the lands and seas and people, bound to this alien peninsula by loss and grief and revenge decreed.

She knew all this. She knew the King very well. Her life depended on that. She did not often stray across the line that was always there, invisible but inviolate. When she did it was likely to be over something as apparently trivial as this. It was such a paradox for her how he could shrug off or laugh at or even invite her caustic commentary on court and colony, and yet bridle like a boy with affronted pride if she teased about his ability to run up and down a mountain in a morning.

At such times he had only to say her name in a certain way and endless chasms opened before her in the delicately inlaid floor of the Audience Chamber.

She was a captive here, more slave than courtesan, at the court of a Tyrant. She was also an impostor, living an ongoing lie while her country slowly died away from the memories of men. And she had sworn to kill this man, whose glance across a room was as wildfire on her skin or amber wine in her mortal blood.

Chasms, everywhere she turned.

And now this morning he had seen a riselka. He, and very possibly a second man as well. Fighting back her fear she forced herself to shrug casually, to arch her eyebrows above a face schooled to bland unconcern.

"This amuses me," she said, reaching for self-possession, knowing precisely what his need in her was, even now. Especially now. "You profess to be pleased, even touched, by Solores's doubtlessly agitated query about your mountain run. The first thing she asked, you say. How she must have wondered whether or not you succeeded! And yet when I, knowing as surely as I know my own name that you were up on the summit this morning, treat it lightly, as something small, never in doubt… why then the King grows angry. He bids me sternly to have done! But tell me, my lord, in all fairness, which of us, truly, has honored you more?"

For a long time he was silent and she knew that the court would be avidly marking the expression on his face. For the moment she cared nothing for them. Or even for her past, or his encounter on the mountainside. There was one specific chasm here that began and ended in the depths of the grey eyes that were now searching her own.

When he spoke it was in a different voice again, but this tone she happened to know exceedingly well and, in spite of everything that had just been said, and in spite of where they were and who was watching them, she felt herself go weak suddenly. Her legs trembled, but not with fear now.

"I could take you," said Brandin, King of Ygrath, thickly, his face flushed, "on the floor of this room right now before all of my gathered court."

Her throat was dry. She felt a nerve flutter beneath the skin of her wrist. Her own color was high, she knew. She swallowed with some difficulty.

"Perhaps tonight would be wiser," she murmured, trying to keep her tone light but not really managing it, unable to hide the swift response in her eyes, spark to spark like the onset of a blaze. The jeweled khav chalice trembled in her hand. He saw that, and she saw that he did and that her response, as always, served as kindling for his own desire. She sipped at her drink, holding it with both hands, clinging to self-control.

"Better tonight, surely," she said again, overwhelmed as always by what was happening to her. She knew what he needed her to say though, now, at this moment, in this room of state thronged with his court and emissaries from home.

She said it, looking him in the eyes, articulating carefully: "After all my lord, at your age you should marshal your strength. You did run partway up a hill this morning."

An instant later, for the second time, the Chiaran court of Brandin of Ygrath saw their King throw back his handsome, bearded head and they heard him laugh aloud in delight. Not far away, Rhun the Fool cackled in simultaneous glee.

"Isolla of Ygrath!"

This time there were trumpets and a drum, as well as the herald's staff resounding as it struck the floor by the double doors at the southern end of the Audience Chamber.

Standing most of the way towards the throne, Dianora had time to observe the stately progress of the woman Brandin had called the finest musician in Ygrath. The assembled court of Chiara was lined several rows deep, flanking the approach to the King.

"A handsome woman still," murmured Neso of Ygrath, "and she's fifty years old if she's a day." Somehow he had managed to end up next to her in the front row.

His unctuous tone irritated her, as always, but she tried not to let it show. Isolla was clad in the simplest possible robe of dark blue, belted at the waist with a slender gold chain. Her hair, brown with hints of grey, was cut unfashionably short, although the spring and summer fashion might change after today, Dianora thought. The colony always took its cue in these matters from Ygrath.

Isolla walked confidently, not hurrying, down the aisle formed by the courtiers. Brandin was already smiling a welcome. He was always immensely pleased when one or another of Ygrath's artists made the long, often dangerous, sea voyage to his second court.

Several steps behind Isolla, and carrying her lute in its case as if it were an artifact of immeasurable worth, Dianora saw, with genuine surprise, the poet Camena di Chiara, clad in his ubiquitous triple-layered cloak. There were murmurs from the assembly: she wasn't the only one caught off guard by this.

Instinctively she threw a glance across the aisle to where Doarde stood with his wife and daughter. She was in time to see the spasm of hate and fear that flickered across his face as his younger rival approached. An instant later the revealing expression was gone, replaced by a polished mask of sneering disdain at Camena's vulgar lowering of himself to serve as porter for an Ygrathen.

Still, Dianora considered, this was an Ygrathen court. Camena, she guessed in a flash of intuition, had probably had one of his verses set to music. If Isolla was about to sing a song of his it would be a dazzling coup for the Chiaran poet. More than sufficient to explain why he would offer to further exalt Isolla, and Ygrathen artists, by serving as a bearer for her.

The politics of art, Dianora decided, was at least as complex as that of provinces and nations.

Isolla had stopped, as was proper, about fifteen steps from the dais of the Island Throne, very close to where Dianora and Neso stood.

Neatly she proceeded to perform the triple obeisance. Very graciously, a mark of high honor, Brandin rose to his feet to bid her welcome. He was smiling. So was Rhun, behind him and to his left.

For no reason she would ever afterwards be able to name or explain Dianora turned from monarch and musician back to the poet bearing the lute. Camena had stopped a further half a dozen paces behind Isolla and had knelt on the marble floor.

What detracted from the grace of the tableau was the dilation of his eyes. Nilth leaves, Dianora concluded instantly. He's drugged himself. She saw beads of perspiration on the poet's brow. It was not warm in the Audience Chamber.

"You are most welcome, Isolla," Brandin was saying with genuine pleasure. "It has been far too long since we have seen you, or heard you play."

Dianora saw Camena make a small adjustment in the way he held the lute. She thought he was preparing to open the case. It did not look like an ordinary lute though. In fact,

Afterwards she was able to know one thing only with certainty: it had been the story of the riselka that made her so sharp to see. The story, and the fact that Brandin wasn't certain if the second man, his guard, had seen her or not.

One man meant a fork in the path. Two men meant a death.

Either way, something was to happen. And now it did.

All eyes but hers were on Brandin and Isolla. Only Dianora saw Camena slip the velvet cover off the lute. Only Dianora saw that it was not, in fact, a lute. And only she had heard Brandin's tale of the riselka.

"Die, Isolla of Ygathl" Camena screamed hoarsely; his eyes bulged as he hurled the velvet away and leveled the crossbow he carried.

With the lightning reaction of a man half his years Brandin reflexively threw out his hand to cast a sorcerer's shield around the threatened singer.

Exactly as he was expected to, Dianora realized.

"Brandin, no!" she screamed. "It's you!"

And seizing the gape-mouthed Neso of Ygrath by the near shoulder she propelled herself and him both into the aisle.

The crossbow bolt, aimed meticulously to the left of Isolla on a line for Brandin's heart, buried itself instead in the shoulder of a stupefied Neso. He shrieked in pain and shock.

Her momentum drove Dianora stumbling to her knees beside Isolla. She looked up. And for the rest of her days never forgot the look she met in the singer's eyes.

She turned away from it. The emotion, the hatred was too raw. She felt physically ill, trembling with aftershock. She forced herself to stand; she looked at Brandin. He hadn't even lowered his hand. There was still the shimmer of a protective barrier around Isolla.

Who had never been in danger at all.

The guards had Camena by now. He'd been dragged to his feet. Dianora had never seen anyone look so white. Even his eyes were white, from the drug. For a moment she thought he was going to faint, but then Camena threw his head back as far as he could in the iron grip of the Ygrathen soldiers. He opened his mouth, as if in agony.

"Chiara!" he cried once, and then, "Freedom for Chiara!" before they silenced him, brutally.

The echoes rang for a long time. The room was large and the stillness was almost absolute. No one dared to move. Dianora had a sense that the court wasn't even breathing. No one wanted the slightest attention drawn to them.

On the mosaic-inlaid floor Neso moaned again in fear and pain, breaking the tableau. Two soldiers knelt to tend to him. Dianora was still afraid she was going to be sick; she couldn't make her hands stop trembling. Isolla of Ygrath had not moved.

She could not move, Dianora realized: Brandin was holding her in a mindlock like a flower pressed flat on a sheet. The soldiers lifted Neso and helped him from the room. Dianora stepped back herself, leaving Isolla alone before the King. Fifteen very proper paces away.

"Camena was a tool," Brandin said softly. "Chiara has virtually nothing to do with this. Do not think that I am unaware of that, I can offer you nothing now but an easier death. You must tell me why you did this." His voice was rigidly measured, careful and uninflected. Dianora had never heard such a tone from him. She looked at Rhun: the Fool was weeping, tears streaking his distorted features.

Brandin lowered his hand, freeing Isolla to move and speak.

The blazing flash of hatred left her features. In its place was a defiant pride. Dianora wondered if she had actually thought the deception would work. If after the King had been slain she had really expected to walk freely from this room. And if not, if she had not expected to do so, what did that mean?

Holding herself very straight, Isolla gave part of an answer. "I am dying," she said to Brandin. "The physicians have given me less than a season before the growth inside reaches my brain. Already there are songs I can no longer remember. Songs that have been mine for forty years."

"I am sorry to hear it," said Brandin formally, his courtesy so perfect it seemed a violation of human nature. He said, "All of us die, Isolla. Some very young. Not all of us plot the death of our King. You have more to tell me before I may grant you release from pain."

For the first time Isolla seemed to waver. She lowered her gaze from his eerily serene grey eyes. Only after a long moment did she say, "You had to have known that there would be a price for what you did."

"Exactly what is it that I did?"

Her head came up. "You exalted a dead child above the living one, and revenge above your wife. And more highly than your own land. Have you spared a thought, a fraction of a thought, for any of them while you pursued your unnatural vengeance for Stevan?"

Dianora's heart thudded painfully. It was a name not spoken in Chiara. She saw Brandin's lips tighten in a way she had seen only a handful of times. But when he spoke his voice was as rigidly controlled as before.

"I judged that I had considered them fairly. Girald has governance in Ygrath as he was always going to have. He even has my saishan, as a symbol of that. Dorotea I invited here several times a year for the first several years."

"Invited here that she might wither and grow old while you kept yourself young. A thing no Sorcerer-King of Ygrath has ever done before, lest the gods punish the land for that impiety. But for Ygrath you never spared a thought, did you? And Girald? He is no King, his father is. That is your title, not his. What does the key to a saishan mean against that reality? He is even going to die before you, Brandin, unless you are slain. And what will happen then? It is unnatural! It is all unnatural, and there is a price to be paid."

"There is always a price," he said softly. "A price for everything. Even for living. I had not expected to pay it in my own family." There was a silence. "Isolla, I must extend my years to do what I am here to do."

"Then you pay for it," Isolla repeated, "and Girald pays and Dorotea. And Ygrath."

And Tigana, Dianora thought, no longer trembling, her own ache come back like a wound in her. Tigana pays too; in broken statues and fallen towers, in children slain and a name gone.

She watched Brandin's face. And Rhun's.

"I hear you," the King said at length to the singer. "I have heard more than you have chosen to say. I need only one thing further. You must tell me which of them did this." It was said with visible regret. Rhun's ugly face was screwed up tightly, his hands gestured with a random helplessness.

"And why," said Isolla, drawing herself up and speaking with the frigid hauteur of one who had nothing left to lose, "should you imagine their purposes to be at odds in this? Why the one or the other, King of Ygrath?" Her voice rang out, harsh as the message it bore.

Slowly he nodded. The hurt was clear in him now; Dianora could see it in the way he stood and spoke, however much he controlled himself. She didn't even need to look at Rhun.

"Very well," Brandin said. "And you, Isolla? What could they have offered to make you do this thing. Can you really hate me so much?"

The woman hesitated only for an instant. Then, as proudly, as defiantly as before, she said, "I can love the Queen so much."

Brandin closed his eyes. "How so?"

"In all the ways that you forsook when you chose exile here and love of the dead over the heart and the bed of your wife."

In any normal, any halfway normal time there would have been a reaction to this from the court. There would have had to be. Dianora heard nothing though, only the sound of a great many people breathing carefully as Brandin opened his eyes again to look down upon the singer. There was an unveiled triumph in the Ygrathen woman's face.

"She was invited here," he repeated almost wistfully. "I could have compelled her but I chose not to do so. She had made her feelings clear and I left the choice to her. I thought it was the kinder, fairer action. It would appear that my sin lies in not having ordered her to take ship for this peninsula."

So many different griefs and shapes of pain seemed to be warring for preeminence within Dianora. Behind the King she could see d'Eymon; his face was a sickly grey. He met her eyes for only an instant then quickly looked away. Later she might think of ways to use this sudden ascendancy over him but right now she felt only pity for the man. He would offer to resign tonight, she knew. Offer, probably, to kill himself after the old fashion. Brandin would refuse, but after this nothing would be quite the same.

For a great many reasons.

Brandin said, "I think you have told me what I had need to know."

"The Chiaran acted alone," Isolla volunteered unexpectedly. She gestured at Camena, in the bone-cracking grip of the soldiers behind her. "He joined us when he visited Ygrath two years ago. Our purposes appeared to march together this far."

Brandin nodded. "This far," he echoed quietly. "I thought that might be the case. Thank you for confirming it," he added gravely.

There was a silence. "You promised me an easy death," Isolla said, holding herself very straight.

"I did," Brandin said. "I did promise you that." Dianora stopped breathing. The King looked at Isolla without expression for what seemed an unbearably long time.

"You can have no idea," he said at last, in a voice little above a whisper, "how happy I was that you had come to make music for me again."

Then he moved his right hand, in exactly the same casual gesture he would use to dismiss a servant or a petitioner.

Isolla's head exploded like an overripe fruit smashed with a hammer. Dark blood burst from her neck as her body collapsed like a sack. Dianora was standing too near; the blood of the slain woman spattered thickly on her gown and face. She stumbled backwards. A hideous illusion of reptilian creatures was coiling and twisting in the place where Isolla's head had been mashed to a formless, oozing pulp.

There was screaming everywhere and a frenzied pandemonium as the court backed away. One figure suddenly ran forward. Stumbling, almost falling in its haste, the figure jerked out a sword. Then awkwardly, with great clumsy two-handed slashes, Rhun the Fool began hacking at the dead body of the singer.

His face was weirdly distorted with rage and revulsion. Foam and mucus ran from his mouth and nose. With one savage butcher's blow he severed an arm from the woman's torso. Something dark and green and blind appeared to undulate from the stump of Isolla's shoulder, leaving a trail of glistening black slime. Behind Dianora someone gagged with horror.

"Stevan!" she heard Rhun cry brokenly. And amid nausea and chaos and terror, an overwhelming pity suddenly laid hard siege to her heart. She looked at the frantically laboring Fool, clad exactly like the King, bearing a King's sword. Spittle flew from his mouth.

"Music! Stevan! Music! Stevan!" Rhun shouted obsessively, and with each slurred, ferocious articulation of the words his slender, jeweled court sword went up and down, glinting brilliantly in the streaming light, hewing the dead body like meat. He lost his footing on the slippery floor and fell to his knees with the force of his own fury. A grey thing with eyes on waving stalks appeared to attach itself like a bloodleech to his knee.

"Music," Rhun said one last time, softly, with unexpected clarity. Then the sword slipped through his fingers and he sat in a puddle of blood beside the mutilated corpse of the singer, his balding head slewed awkwardly down and to one side, his white-and-gold court garments hopelessly soiled, weeping as though his heart was broken.

Dianora turned to Brandin. The King was motionless, standing exactly as he had been throughout, his hands relaxed at his sides. He gazed at the appalling scene in front of him with a frightening detachment.

"There is always a price," he said quietly, almost to himself, through the incessant screaming and tumult that filled the Audience Chamber. Dianora took one hesitant step towards him then, but he had already turned and, with d'Eymon quickly following, Brandin left the room through the door behind the dais.

With his departure the slithering, oleaginous creatures immediately disappeared, but not the mangled body of the singer or the pitiful, crumpled figure of the Fool. Dianora seemed to be alone near them, everyone else had surged back towards the doors. Isolla's blood felt hot where it had landed on her skin.

People were tripping and pushing each other in their frantic haste to quit the room now that the King was gone. She saw the soldiers hustling Camena di Chiara away through a side door. Other soldiers came forward with a sheet to cover Isolla's body. They had to move Rhun away to do it; he didn't seem to understand what was happening. He was still weeping, his face grotesquely screwed up like a hurt child's. Dianora moved a hand to wipe at her cheek and her fingers came away streaked with blood. The soldiers placed the sheet over the singer's body. One of them gingerly picked up the arm Rhun had severed and pushed it under the sheet as well. Dianora saw him do that. There seemed to be blood all over her face. On the very edge of losing all control she looked around for help, any kind of help.

"Come, my lady," said a desperately needed voice that was somehow by her side. "Come. Let me take you back to the saishan."

"Oh, Scelto," she whispered. "Please. Please do that, Scelto."

The news blazed through the dry tinder of the saishan setting it afire with rumor and fear. An assassination attempt from Ygrath. With Chiaran participation.

And it had very nearly succeeded.

Scelto hustled Dianora down the corridor to her rooms and with a bristling protectiveness slammed the door on the nervous, fluttering crowd that clung and hovered in the hallway like so many silk-clad moths. Murmuring continuously he undressed and washed her, and then wrapped her carefully into her warmest robe. She was shivering uncontrollably, unable to speak. He lit the fire and made her sit before it. In docile submission she drank the mahgoti tea he prepared as a sedative. Two cups of it, one after the other. Eventually the trembling stopped. She still found it difficult to speak. He made her stay in the chair before the fire. She didn't want to leave it anyway.

Her brain felt battered, numb. She seemed to be utterly incapable of marshaling any understanding, of shaping an adequate response to what had just happened.

One thought only kept driving the others away, pounding in her head like the hammer of a herald's staff on the floor. A thought so impossible, so disabling, that she tried, with all she could, through the

blinding pulse of an onrushing headache, to block it out. She couldn't. The hammering crashed through, again and again: she had saved his life.

Tigana had been a single pulsebeat away from coming back into the world. The pulsebeat of Brandin that the crossbow would have ended.

Home was a dream she'd had yesterday. A place where children used to play. Among towers near the mountains, by a river, on curving sweeps of white or golden sand beside a palace at the edge of the sea. Home was a longing, a desperate dream, a name in her dreams. And this afternoon she had done the one thing she could possibly have done to bar that name from the world, to lock it into a dream. Until all the dreams, too, died.

How was she to deal with that? How possibly cope with what it meant? She had come here to kill Brandin of Ygrath, to end his life that lost Tigana might live again. And instead…

The shivering started once more. Fussing and murmuring, Scelto built up the fire and brought yet another blanket for her knees and feet. When he saw the tears on her face he made a queer helpless sound of distress. Someone knocked loudly on her door sometime later and she heard Scelto driving them away with language she had never known him to use before.

Gradually, very slowly, she began to pull herself together. From the color of the light that gently drifted down through the high windows she knew that the afternoon would be waning towards dusk. She rubbed her cheeks and eyes with the backs of her hands. She sat up. She had to be ready when twilight came; twilight was when Brandin sent to the saishan.

She rose from her chair, pleased to find that her legs were steadier. Scelto rushed up, protesting, but when he saw her face he quickly checked himself. Without another word he led her through the inner doors and down that hallway to the baths. His ferocious glare silenced the attendants there. She had a sense that he would have struck them if they had spoken; she had never heard of him doing a single violent act. Not since he had killed a man and lost his own manhood.

She let them bathe her, let the scented oils soften her skin. There had been blood on it that afternoon. The waters swirled around her and then away. The attendants washed her hair. After, Scelto painted the nails of her fingers and toes. A soft shade, dusty rose. Far from the color of blood, far from anger or grief. Later she would paint her lips the same shade. She doubted they would make love, though. She would hold him and be held. She went back to her room to wait for the summons.

From the light she knew when evening had fallen. Everyone in the saishan always knew when evening fell. The day revolved towards and then away from the hour of darkness. She sent Scelto outside, to receive the word when it came.

A short time after he came back and told her that Brandin had sent for Solores.

Anger flamed wildly within her. It exploded like… like the head of Isolla of Ygrath in the Audience Chamber. Dianora could scarcely draw breath, so fierce was her sudden rage. Never in her life had she felt anything like this, this white hot caldron in her heart. After Tigana fell, after her brother was driven away, her hatred had been a shaped thing, controlled, channeled, driven by purpose, a guarded flame that she'd known would have to burn a long time.

This was an inferno. A caldron boiling over inside her, prodigious, overmastering, sweeping all before it like a lava flow. Had Brandin been in her room at that moment she could have ripped his heart out with her nails and teeth, as the women tore Adaon on the mountainside. She saw Scelto take an involuntary backwards step away from her; she had never known him to fear her or anyone else before. It was not an observation that mattered now.

What mattered, all that mattered, the only thing, was that she had saved the life of Brandin of Ygrath today, trampling into muck and spattered blood the clear, unsullied memory of her home and the oath she'd sworn in coming here so long ago. She had violated the essence of everything she once had been; violated herself more cruelly than had any man who'd ever lain with her for a coin in that upstairs room in Certando.

And in return? In return, Brandin had just sent for Solores di Corte, leaving her to spend tonight alone.

Not, not a thing he should have done.

It did not matter that even within the fiery heat of her own blazing Dianora could understand why he might have done this thing. Understand how little need he would have tonight for wit or intelligence, for sparkle, for questions or suggestions. Or desire. His need would be for the soft, unthinking, reflexive gentleness that Solores gave. That she herself apparently did not. The cradling worship, tenderness, the soothing voice. He would need shelter tonight. She could understand: it was what she needed too, needed desperately, after what had happened.

But she needed it from him.

And so it came to be that, alone in her bed that night, sheltered by no one and by nothing, Dianora found herself naked and unable to hide from what came when the fires of rage finally died.

She lay unsleeping through the first and then through the second chiming of the bells that marked off the triads of the dark hours, but before the third chiming that heralded the coming of grey dawn two things had happened within her.

The first was the inexorable return of the single strand of memory she'd always been careful to block out from among all the myriad griefs of the year Tigana was occupied. But she truly was unsheltered and exposed in the dark of that Ember Night, drifting terribly far from whatever moorings her soul had found.

While Brandin, on the far wing of the palace sought what comfort he could in Solores di Corte, Dianora lay as in an open space and alone, unable to deflect any of the images that now came sweeping back from years ago. Images of love and pain and the loss of love in pain that were far too keen, too icy keen a wind in the heart, to be allowed at any normal time.

But the finger of death had rested on Brandin of Ygrath that day, and she alone had guided it away, steering the King past the darkest portal of Morian, and tonight was an Ember Night, a night of ghosts and shadows. It could not be anything like a normal time, and it was not. What came to Dianora, terribly, one after another in unceasing progression like waves of the dark sea, were her last memories of her brother before he went away.

He had been too young to fight by the Deisa. No one under fifteen, Prince Valentin had proclaimed before riding sternly north to war. Alessan, the Prince's youngest child, had been taken away south in hiding by Danoleon, the High Priest of Eanna, when word came that Brandin was coming down upon them.

That was after Stevan had been slain. After the one victory. They had all known; the weary men who had fought and survived, and the women and the aged and the children left behind, that Brandin's coming would mark the end of the world they had lived in and loved.

They hadn't known then how literally true that was: what the Sorcerer-King of Ygrath could do and what he did. This they were to learn in the days and months that followed as a hard and brutal thing that grew like a tumor and then festered in the souls of those who survived.

The dead of Deisa are the lucky ones. So it was said, more and more often, in whispers and in pain in the year Tigana died, by those who endured the dying.

Dianora and her brother were left with a mother whose mind had snapped like a bowstring with the tidings of Second Deisa. Even as the vanguard of the Ygrathens entered the city itself, occupying the streets and squares of Tigana, the noble houses and the delicately colored Palace by the Sea, she seemed to let slip her last awareness of the world to wander, mute and gentle, through a space neither of her children could travel to with her.

Sometimes she would smile and nod at invisible things as she sat amid the rubble of their courtyard that summer, with smashed marble all around her, and her daughter's heart would ache like an old wound in the rains of winter.

Dianora set herself to run the household as best she could, though three of the servants and apprentices had died with her father. Two others ran away not long after the Ygrathens came and the destruction began. She couldn't even blame them. Only one of the women and the youngest of the apprentices stayed with them.

Her brother and the apprentice waited until the long wave of burnings and demolition had passed, then they sought work clearing away rubble or repairing walls as a limited rebuilding started under Ygrathen orders. Life began to return towards a normality. Or what passed for normality in a city now called Lower Corte in a province of that name.

In a world where the very word Tigana could not be heard by anyone other than themselves. Soon they stopped using it in public places. The pain was too great: the twisting feeling inside that came with the blank look of incomprehension on the faces of the Ygrathens or the traders and bankers from Corte who had swarmed quickly down to seek what profit they could among the rubble and the slow rebuilding of a city. It was a hurt for which, truly, there was no name.

Dianora could remember, with jagged, sharp-edged clarity, the first time she'd called her home Lower Corte. They all could, all the survivors: it was, for each of them, a moment embedded like a fish hook in the soul. The dead of Deisa, First or Second, were the lucky ones, so the phrase went that year.

She watched her brother come into a bitter maturity that first summer and fall, grieving for his vanished smile, laughter lost, the childhood too soon gone, not knowing how deeply the same hard lessons and absences were etched in her own hollow, unlovely face. She was sixteen in the late summer, he turned fifteen in the fall. She made a cake on his naming day, for the apprentice, the one old woman, her mother, her brother and herself. They had no guests; assembly of any kind was forbidden throughout that year. Her mother had smiled when Dianora gave her a slice of the dark cake, but Dianora had known the smile had nothing to do with any of them.

Her brother had known it too. Preternaturally grave he had kissed his mother on the forehead and then his sister, and had gone out into the night. It was, of course, illegal to be abroad after nightfall, but something kept driving him out to walk the streets, past the random fires that still smoldered on almost every corner. It was as if he was daring the Ygrathen patrols to catch him. To punish him for having been fourteen in the season of war.

Two soldiers were knifed in the dark that fall. Twenty death-wheels were hoisted in swift response. Six women and five children were among those bound aloft to die. Dianora knew most of them; there weren't so very many people left in the city, they all knew each other. The screaming of the children, then their diminishing cries were things she needed shelter from in her nights forever after.

No more soldiers were killed.

Her brother continued to go out at night. She would lie awake until she heard him come in. He always made a sound, deliberately, so she would hear him and be able to fall asleep. Somehow, he knew she would be awake, though she had never said a word.

He would have been handsome, with his dark hair and deep brown eyes if he hadn't been so thin and if the eyes were not shadowed and ringed by sleeplessness and grief. There was not a great deal of food that first winter, most of the harvest had been burned, and the rest confiscated, but Dianora did the best she could to feed the five of them. About the look in his eyes there was nothing she could do. Everyone had that look that year. She could see it in her mirror.

The following spring the Ygrathen soldiers discovered a new form of sport. It had probably been inevitable that they would, one of the evil growths that sprang from the deep-sown seeds of Brandin's vengeance.

Dianora remembered being at an upstairs window the day it began. She was watching her brother and the apprentice, no longer an apprentice, of course, walking through a sun-brightened early morning across the square on their way to the site where they were laboring. White clouds had been drifting by overhead, scudding with the wind. A small cluster of soldiers came from the opposite side and accosted the two boys. Her window was open to air the room and catch the freshness of the breeze; she heard it all.

"Help us!" one of the soldiers bleated with a smirk she could see from her window. "We're lost," he moaned, as the others quickly surrounded the boys. He drew sly chuckles from his fellows. One of them elbowed another in the ribs.

"Where are we?" the soldier begged.

Eyes carefully lowered, her brother named the square and the streets leading from it.

"That's no good!" the soldier complained. "What good are street names to me? I don't even know what cursed town I'm in!" There was laughter; Dianora winced at what she heard in it.

"Lower Corte," the apprentice muttered quickly, as her brother kept silent. They noticed the silence though.

"What town? You tell me," the spokesman said more sharply, prodding her brother in the shoulder.

"I just told you. Lower Corte," the apprentice intervened loudly. One of the soldiers cuffed him on the side of the head. The boy staggered and almost fell; he refused to lift a hand to touch his head.

Her pulse pounding with fright, Dianora saw her brother look up then. His dark hair gleamed in the morning sunlight. She thought he was going to strike the soldier who had dealt that blow. She thought he was going to die. She stood up at her window, her hands clenched on the ledge. There was a terrible silence in the square below. The sun was very bright.

"Lower Corte," her brother said, as though he were choking on the words.

Laughing raucously the soldiers let them go.

For that morning.

The two boys became the favorite victims of that company, which patrolled their district between the Palace by the Sea and the center of town where the three temples stood. None of the temples of the Triad had been smashed, only the statuary that stood outside and within them. Two had been her father's work. A young, seductively graceful Morian, and a huge, primal figure of Eanna stretching forth her hands to make the stars.

The boys began leaving the house earlier and earlier as spring wore on, taking roundabout routes in an attempt to avoid the soldiers. Most mornings, though, they were still found. The Ygrathens were bored by then; the boys' very efforts to elude them offered sport.

Dianora used to go to that same upstairs window at the front of the house when they left by way of the square, as if by watching whatever happened, sharing it, she could somehow spread the pain among three, not two, and so ease it for them. The soldiers almost always accosted them just as they reached the square. She was watching on the day the game changed to something worse.

It was afternoon that time. A half-day of work only, because of a Triad holiday, part of the aftermath to the springtime Ember Days. The Ygrathens, like the Barbadians to the east, had been scrupulous not to tamper with the Triad and their clergy. After their lunch the two boys went out to do an afternoon's work.

The soldiers surrounded them in the middle of the square. They never seemed to tire of their sport. But that afternoon, just as the leader began his familiar litany of being lost a group of four merchants came trudging up the hill from the harbor and one of the soldiers had an inspiration born of sheerest malice.

"Stop!" he rasped. The merchants did, very abruptly. One obeyed Ygrathen commands in Lower Corte, wherever one might be from.

"Come here," the soldier added. His fellows made way for the merchants to stand in front of the boys. A premonition of something evil touched Dianora in that moment like a cold finger on her spine.

The four traders reported that they were from Asoli. It was obvious from their clothing.

"Good," the soldier said. "I know how grasping you lot are. Now listen to me. These brats are going to name their city and their province to you. If you can tell me what they say, on my honor and in the name of Brandin, King of Ygrath, I'll give the first man who says the name back to me twenty gold ygras."

It was a fortune. Even from where she sat, high up and screened behind her window, Dianora could see the Asoli traders react. That was before she closed her eyes. She knew what was coming and how it was going to hurt. She wanted her father alive in that moment with a longing so acute she almost wept. Her brother was down there though, among soldiers who hated them. She forced back her tears and opened her eyes. She watched.

"You," said the soldier to the apprentice, they always started with him, "your province had another name once. Tell them what it was."

She saw the boy, Naddo was his name, go white with fear or anger, or both. The four merchants, oblivious to that irrelevance, leaned forward, straining with anticipation. Dianora saw Naddo look at her brother for guidance, or perhaps for dispensation.

The soldier saw the glance. "None of that!" he snapped. Then he drew his sword. "For your life, say the name." Naddo, very clearly, said, "Tigana."

And of course not one of the merchants could say back the word he spoke. Not for twenty golden ygras or twenty times so many. Dianora could read the bafflement, the balked greed in their eyes, and the fear that confronting sorcery always brought.

The soldiers laughed and jostled each other. One of them had a shrill cackle like a rooster. They turned to her brother.

"No," he said flatly before they could even command him. "You have had your sport. They cannot hear the name. We all know it, what is left to prove?"

He was fifteen, and much too thin, and his dark-brown hair was too long over his eyes. It had been over a month since she'd cut it for him; she'd been meaning to do so all week. One of her hands was squeezing the window-ledge so tightly that all the blood had rushed away; it was white as ice. She would have cut it off to change what was happening. She noticed other faces at other windows along the street and across the square. Some people had stopped down below as well, seeing the large clustering of men, sensing the sudden tension that had taken shape.

Which was bad, because with an audience the soldiers would now have to clearly establish their authority. What had been a game when done in private was something else now. Dianora wanted to turn away. She wanted her father back from the Deisa, she wanted Prince Valentin back and alive, her mother back from whatever country she wandered through.

She watched. To share it. To bear witness and remember, knowing even then that such things were going to matter, if anything mattered in the days and years to come.

The soldier with the drawn blade placed the tip of it very carefully against her brother's breast. The afternoon sunlight glinted from it. It was a working blade, a soldier's sword. There came a small sound from the people gathered around the edges of the square.

Her brother said, a little desperately, "They cannot hold the name. You know they cannot. You have destroyed us. Is it necessary to go on causing pain? Is it necessary?"

He is only fifteen, Dianora prayed, gripping the ledge like death, her hand a claw. He was too young to fight. He was not allowed. Forgive him this. Please.

The four Asolini traders, as one man, stepped quickly out of range. One of the soldiers, the one with the high laugh, shifted uncomfortably, as if regretting what this had come to. But there was a crowd gathered. The boy had had his fair chance. There was really no choice now.

The sword pushed delicately forward a short way and then withdrew. Through a torn blue tunic a welling of blood appeared and hung a moment, bright in the springtime light, as if yearning towards the blade, before it broke and slid downwards, staining the blue.

"The name," said the soldier quietly. There was no levity in his voice now. He was a professional, and he was preparing himself to kill, Dianora realized.

A witness, a memory, she saw her younger brother spread his feet then, as if to anchor himself in the ground of the square. She saw his hands clench into fists at his sides. She saw his head go back, lifting towards the sky.

And then she heard his cry.

He gave them what they demanded of him, he obeyed the command, but not sullenly or diffidently, and not in shame. Rooted in the land of his fathers, standing before the home of his family he looked towards the sun and let a name burst forth from his soul.

"Tigana!" he cried that all should hear. All of them, everyone in the square. And again, louder yet: "Tigana!" And then a third, a last time, at the very summit of his voice, with pride, with love, with a lasting, unredeemed defiance of the heart.

"TIGANA!"

Through the square that cry rang, along the streets, up to the windows where people watched, over the roofs of houses running westward to the sea or eastward to the temples, and far beyond all of these, a sound, a name, a hurled sorrow in the brightness of the air.

And though the four merchants could not cling to the name, though the soldiers could not hold it, the women at the windows and the children with them and the men riveted stone-still in street and square could hear it clearly, and clutch it to themselves, and they could gather and remember the pride at the base of that spiraling cry.

And that much, looking around, the soldiers could see plainly and understand. It was written in the faces gathered around them. He had done only what they themselves had ordered him to do, but the game had been turned inside out, it had turned out wrong in some way they could but dimly comprehend.

They beat him of course.

With their fists and feet and with the flats of their cared-for blades. Naddo too, for being there and so a part of it. The crowd did not disperse though, which would have been the usual thing when a beating took place. They watched in a silence unnatural for so many people. The only sound was that of the blows falling, for neither boy cried out and the soldiers did not speak.

When it was over they scattered the crowd with oaths and imprecations. Crowds were illegal, even though they themselves had caused this one to form. In a few moments everyone was gone. There were only faces behind half-drawn curtains at upstairs windows looking down on a square empty save for two boys lying in the settling dust, blood bright on their clothing in the clear light. There had been birds singing all around and all through what had happened. Dianora could remember.

She forced herself to remain where she was. Not to run down to them. To let them do this alone, as was their right. And at length she saw her brother rise with the slow, meditated movements of a very old man. She saw him speak to Naddo and then carefully help him to his feet. And then, as she had known would happen, she saw him, begrimed and bleeding and hobbling very badly, lead Naddo east without a backwards looks, towards the site where they were assigned to work that day.

She watched them go. Her eyes were dry. Only when the two of them turned the corner at the far end of the square and so were gone from sight did she leave her window. Only then did she loosen her white-clawed hold on the wood of the window-ledge. And only then, invisible to everyone with her curtains drawn, did she allow her tears to fall: in love, and for his hurts, and terrible pride.

When they came home that night she and the servant-woman heated water and drew baths for them and afterwards they dealt with the wounds and the black and purpling bruises as best they could.

Later, over dinner, Naddo told them he was leaving. That same night, he said. It was too much, he said, awkwardly twisting in his seat, speaking to Dianora, for her brother had turned his face away at Naddo's first announcement.

There was no life to be made here, Naddo said with passionate urgency through a torn and swollen mouth. Not with the viciousness of the soldiers and the even more vicious taxes. If a young man, a young man such as himself, was to have any hope of doing something with his life, Naddo said, he had to get away. Desperately his eyes besought her understanding. He kept glancing nervously over to where her brother had now fully turned his back on both of them.

Where will you go, Dianora had asked him.

Asoli, he'd told her. It was a hard, wet land, unbearably hot and humid in summer, everyone knew that. But there was room there for new blood. The Asolini made people welcome, he'd heard, more so than in the Barbadian lands to the east. He would never ever go to Corte or Chiara. People from Tigana did not go there, he said. Her brother made a small sound at that but did not turn; Naddo glanced over at him again and swallowed, his Adam's apple bobbing in his throat.

Three other young men had made plans, he said to Dianora. Plans to slip out from the city tonight and make their way north. He'd known about it for some time, he said. He hadn't been sure. He hadn't known what to do. What had happened this morning had made up his mind for him.

Eanna light your path, Dianora had said, meaning it. He had been a good apprentice and then a brave and loyal friend. People were leaving all the time. The province of Lower Corte was a bad place in a very bad time. Naddo's left eye was completely swollen shut. He might easily have been killed that afternoon.

Later, when he'd packed his few belongings and was ready to leave, she gave him some silver from her father's hidden store. She kissed him in farewell. He'd begun weeping then. He commended himself to her mother and opened the front door. On the threshold he'd turned back again, still crying.

"Goodbye," he'd said, in anguish, to the figure staring stonily into the fire on the front-room hearth. Seeing the look on Naddo's face Dianora silently willed her brother to turn around. He did not. Deliberately he knelt and laid another log on the fire.

Naddo stared at him a moment longer, then he turned to look at Dianora, failed to achieve a tremulous, tearful smile, and slipped out into the dark and away.

Much later, when the fire had been allowed to die, her brother went out as well. Dianora sat and watched the embers slowly fade, then she looked in on her mother and went to bed. When she lay down it seemed to her that a weight was pressing upon her body, far heavier than the quilted comforter.

She was awake when he came in. She always was. She heard him step loudly on the landing as was his habit, to let her know he was safely home, but she didn't hear the next sound, which should have been the opening and closing of his bedroom door.

It was very late. She lay still for another moment, surrounded and mastered by all the griefs of the day. Then, moving heavily, as if drugged or in a waking dream, she rose and lit a candle. She went to her door and opened it.

He was standing in the hallway outside. And by the flickering of the light she bore she saw the river of tears that was pouring without surcease down his bruised, distorted face. Her hands began to shake. She could not speak.

"Why didn't I say goodbye to him?" she heard him say in a strangled voice. "Why didn't you make me say goodbye to him?" She had never heard so much hurt in him. Not even when word had come that their father had died by the river.

Her heart aching, Dianora put the candle down on a ledge that once had held a portrait bust of her mother by her father. She crossed the narrow distance and took her brother in her arms, absorbing the hard racking of his sobs. He had never cried before. Or never so that she could see. She guided him into her room and lay down beside him on her bed, holding him close. They wept together, thus, for a very long time. She could not have said how long.

Her window was open. She could hear the breeze sigh through the young leaves outside. A bird sang, and another answered it from across the lane. The world was a place of dreaming or of sorrow, one or both of those. One or both. In the sanctuary of night she slowly pulled his tunic over his head, careful of his wounds, and then she slipped free of her own robe. Her heart was beating like the heart of a captured forest creature. She could feel the race of his pulse when her fingers touched his throat. Both of the moons had set. The wind was in all the leaves outside. And so.

And so in all that darkness, dark over and about and close-gathered around them, the full dark of moonless night and the darkness of their days, the two of them sought a pitiful illicit shelter in each other from the ruin of their world.

"What are we doing?" her brother whispered once.

And then, a space of time later when pulsebeats had slowed again, leaving them clinging to each other in the aftermath of a headlong, terrifying need, he had said, one hand gentle in her hair, "What have we done?"

And all these long years later, alone in the saishan on the Island as this most hidden memory came back, Dianora could remember her reply.

"Oh, Baerd," she'd said. "What has been done to us?"

It lasted from that first night through the whole of spring and into the summer. The sin of the gods, it was named, what they did. For Adaon and Eanna were said to have been brother and sister at the beginning of time, and Morian was their child.

Dianora didn't feel like a goddess, and her mirror offered no illusions: only a too thin face with enormous, staring eyes. She knew only that her happiness terrified her, and consumed her with guilt, and that her love for Baerd was the whole of her world. And what frightened her almost as much was seeing the same depth of love, the same astonished passion in him. Her heart misgave her constantly, even as they reached for their fugitive joy: too bright this forbidden flame in a land where any kind of brightness was lost or not allowed.

He came to her every night. The woman slept downstairs; their mother slept, and woke, in her own world. In the dark of Dianora's room they escaped into each other, reaching through loss and the knowledge of wrong in search of innocence.

He was still driven to go out some nights to walk the empty streets. Not as often as before, for which she gave thanks and sought a kind of justification for herself. A number of young men had been caught after curfew and killed on the wheels that spring. If what she was doing kept him alive she would face whatever judgment lay in wait for her in Morian's Halls.

She couldn't keep him every night though. Sometimes a need she could not share or truly understand would drive him forth. He tried to explain. How the city was different under the two moons or one of them or the stars. How softer light and shadow let him see it as Tigana again. How he could walk silently down towards the sea and come upon the darkened palace, and how the rubble and ruin of it could somehow be rebuilt in his mind in darkness towards what it had been before.

He had a need for that, he said. He never baited the soldiers and promised her he never would. He didn't even want to see them, he said. They crashed into the illusions he wanted. He just needed to be abroad inside his memory of the city that had gone. Sometimes, Baerd told her, he would slip through gaps he knew in the harbor walls and walk along the beach listening to the sea.

By day he labored, a thin boy at a strong man's job, helping to rebuild what they were permitted to rebuild. Rich merchants from Corte, their ancient enemies, had been allowed to settle in the city, to buy up the smashed buildings and residential palaces very inexpensively, and to set about restoring them for their own purposes.

Baerd would come home at the end of a day sometimes with gashes and fresh bruises, and once the mark of a whip across his shoulders. She knew that if one company of soldiers had ended their sport with him there were others to pick it up. It was only happening here, she'd heard. Everywhere else the soldiers restrained themselves and the King of Ygrath was governing with care, to consolidate his provinces against Barbadior.

In Lower Corte they were special, though. They had killed his son.

She would see those marks on Baerd and she had not the heart to ask him to deny himself his lost city at night when the need rose in him. Even though she lived a hundred terrors and died half a hundred deaths every time the front door closed behind him after dark, until she heard it open again and heard his loved, familiar footstep on the stairs, and then the landing, and then he came into her room to take and hold her in his arms.

It went on into summer and then it ended. It all ended, as her knowing heart had forewarned her from that first time in darkness, listening to the birds singing and the wind in the trees outside.

He came home no later than he usually did from walking abroad one night when blue Ilarion had been riding alone through a high lacework of clouds. It had been a beautiful night. She had sat up late by her window watching the moonlight falling on the rooftops. She'd been in bed when he came home though, and her heart had quickened with the familiar intermingling of relief and guilt and need. He had come into her room.

He didn't come to bed. Instead, he sank into the chair she'd sat in by the window. With a queer, numb feeling of dread she had struck tinder and lit her candle. She sat up and looked at him. His face was very white, she could see that even by candlelight. She said nothing. She waited.

"I was on the beach," Baerd said quietly. "I saw a riselka there."

She had always known it would end. That it had to end.

She asked the instinctive question. "Did anyone else see her?"

He shook his head.

They looked at each other in silence. She was amazed at how calm she was, how steady her hands were upon the comforter. And in that silence a truth came home to her, one she had probably known for a long time. "You have only been staying for me, in any case," she said. A statement. No reproach in it. He had seen a riselka.

He closed his eyes. "You knew?"

"Yes," she lied.

"I'm sorry," he said, looking at her. But she knew that this would be easier for him if she were able to hide how new and deathly cold this actually was for her. A gift; perhaps the last gift she would give him.

"Don't be sorry," she murmured, her hands lying still, where he could see them. "Truly, I understand." Truly, she did, though her heart was a wounded thing, a bird with one wing only, fluttering in small circles to the ground.

"The riselka…” he began. And halted. It was an enormous, frightening thing, she knew.

"She makes it clear," he went on earnestly. "The fork of the prophecy. That I have to go away." She saw the love for her in his eyes. She willed herself to be strong enough. Strong enough to help him go away from her. Oh, my brother, she was thinking. And will you leave me now?

She said, "I know she makes it clear, Baerd. I know you have to leave. It will be marked on the lines of your palm." She swallowed. This was harder than she could ever have imagined. She said, "Where will you go?" My love, she added, but not aloud, only inside, in her heart.

"I've thought about that," he said. He sat up straighter now. She could see him taking strength from her calm. She clung to that with everything she had.

"I'm going to look for the Prince." he said.

"What, Alessan? We don't even know if he's alive," she said in spite of herself.

"There's word he is," Baerd said. "That his mother is in hiding with the priests of Eanna, and that the Prince has been sent away. If there is any hope, any dream for us, for Tigana, it will lie with Alessan."

"He's fifteen years old," she said. Could not stop herself from saying. And so are you, she thought. Baerd, where did our childhood go?

By candlelight his dark eyes were not those of a boy. "I don't think age matters," he said. "This is not going to be a quick or an easy thing, if it can ever be done at all. He will be older than fifteen when the time comes."

"So will you," she said.

"And so will you," Baerd echoed. "Oh, Dia, what will you do?" No one else but her father ever called her that. Stupidly it was the name that nearly broke her control.

She shook her head. "I don't know," she said honestly. "Look after mother. Marry. There is money for a while yet if I'm careful." She saw his stricken look and moved to quell it. "You are not to worry about it, Baerd. Listen to me: you have just seen a riselka! Will you fight your fate to clear rubble in this city for the rest of your days? No one has easy choices anymore, and mine will not be as hard as most. I may," she had added, tilting her head defiantly, "try to think of some way to chase the same dream as you."

It astonished her, looking back, that she had actually said this on that very night. As if she herself had seen the riselka and her own path had been made clear, even as Baerd's forked away from her.

Lonely and cold in the saishan she was not half so cold or alone as she had been that night. He had not lingered once she'd given her dispensation. She had risen and dressed and helped him pack a very few things. He had flatly refused any of the silver. She assembled a small satchel of food for his first sunrise on the long road alone. At the doorway, in the darkness of the summer night, they had held each other close, clinging without words. Neither wept, as if both knew the time for tears had passed.

"If the goddesses love us, and the god," Baerd said, "we will surely meet again. I will think of you each and every day of my life. I love you, Dianora."

"And I you," she'd said to him. "I think you know how much. Eanna light your path and bring you home." That was all she'd said. All she could think to say.

After he'd gone she had sat in the front room wrapped in an old shawl of her mother's, gazing sightlessly at the ashes of last night's fire until the sun came up:

By then the hard kernel of her own plan had been formed.

The plan that had brought her here, all these years after, to this other lonely bed on an Ember Night of ghosts when she should not have had to be alone. Alone with all her memories, with the reawakening they carried, and the awareness of what she had allowed to happen to her here on the Island. Here in Brandin's court. Here with Brandin.

And so it was that two things came to Dianora that Ember Night in the saishan.

The memories of her brother had been the first, sweeping over her in waves, image after image until they ended with the ashes of that dead fire.

The second, following inexorably, born of that same long-ago year, born of memory, of guilt, of the whirlwind hurts that came with lying here alone and so terribly exposed on this night of all nights… the second thing, spun forth from all these interwoven things, was, finally, the shaping of a resolution. A decision, after so many years. A course of action she now knew she was going to take. Had to take, whatever might follow.

She lay there, chilled, hopelessly awake, and she was aware that the cold she felt came far more from within than without. Somewhere in the palace, she knew, the torturers would be attending to Camena di Chiara who had tried to kill a Tyrant and free his home. Who had done so knowing he would die and how he would die.

Even now they would be with him, administering their precise measures of pain. With a professional pride in their skill they would be breaking his fingers one by one, his wrists and his arms. His toes and ankles and legs. They would be doing it carefully, even tenderly, solicitously guarding the beat of his heart, so that after they had broken his back, which was always the last, they could strap him alive on a wheel and take him out to the harbor square to die in the sight of his people.

She would never have dreamt Camena had such courage or so much passion in his heart. She had derided him as a poseur, a wearer of three-layered cloaks, a minor, trivial artist angling for ascension at court.

Not anymore. Yesterday afternoon had compelled a new shape to her image of him. Now that he had done what he had done, now that his body had been given to the torturers and then the wheel there was a question that could no more be buried than could her memories of Baerd. Not tonight. Not unsheltered as she was and so awake.

What, the thought came knifing home like a winter wind in the soul, did Camena's act make her?

What did it make of that long-ago quest a sixteen-year-old girl had so proudly set herself the night her brother went away? The night he'd seen a riselka under moonlight by the sea and gone in search of his Prince.

She knew the answers. Of course she did. She knew the names that belonged to her. The names she had earned here on the Island. They burned like sour wine in a wound. And burning inside, even as she shivered, Dianora strove one more time to school her heart to begin the deathly hard, never yet successful, journey back to her own dominion from that room on the far wing of the palace where lay the King of Ygrath.

That night was different though. Something had changed that night, because of what had happened, because of the finality, the absoluteness of what she herself had done in the Audience Chamber. Acknowledging that, trying to deal with it, Dianora began to sense, as if from a very great distance, her heart's slow, painful retreat from the fires of love. A returning, and then a turning back, to the memory of other fires at home. Fields burning, a city burning, a palace set aflame.

No comfort there of course. No comfort anywhere at all. Only an absolute reminder of who she was and why she was here.

And lying very still in darkness on an Ember Night when country doors and windows were all closed against the dead and the magic in the fields, Dianora told over softly to herself the whole of the old foretelling verse:

One man sees a riselka

his life forks there.

Two men see a riselka

one of them shall die.

Three men see a riselka

one is blessed, one forks, one shall die.

One woman sees a riselka

her path comes clear to her.

Two women see a riselka

one of them shall bear a child.

Three women see a riselka

one is blessed, one is clear, one shall bear a child.

In the morning, she said to herself amid cold and fire and all the myriad confusions of the heart. In the morning it will begin as it should have begun and ended long ago.

The Triad knew how bitter, how impossible all choices had seemed to her. How faint and elusive had been her dream within these walls of making it all come right for all of them. But of one truth she was now, finally, certain: she had needed something to be made clear along the twisting paths to betrayal that seemed to have become her life, and from Brandin's own lips she had learned how that clear path might be offered her.

In the morning she would begin.

Until then she could lie here, achingly awake and alone, as on another night at home so many years ago, and she could remember.