Tigana

Chapter 9

IT WAS COLD IN THE GULLY BY THE SIDE OF THE ROAD. THERE was a thin, sheltering line of birch trees between them and the gates of the Nievolene estate, but even so the wind was a knife whenever it picked up.

There had been snow last night, a rare thing this far north, even in midwinter. It had made for a white, chilled second night of riding from Ferraut town where they had started, but Alessan had refused to slow their pace. He had said increasingly little as the night wore on, and Baerd said little at the best of times. Devin had swallowed his questions and concentrated on keeping up.

They had crossed the Astibar border in darkness and arrived at the Nievolene lands just after dawn. The horses were tethered in a grove about a half mile to the southwest, and the three men had made their way to this gully on foot. Devin dozed off at intervals through the morning. The snow made the landscape strange and crisp and lovely when the sun was out, but around mid-afternoon the grey clouds had gathered heavily overhead and it was only cold now, not beautiful at all. It had snowed again, briefly, about an hour before.

When Devin heard the jingle of horses approaching through the greyness, he realized that the Triad, for once, were holding open palms toward them. Or that, alternatively, the goddesses and the god had decided to give them a chance to do something fatally rash. He pressed himself as flat as he could to the wet ground of the gully. He thought of Catriana and the Duke, warm and sheltered with Taccio in Ferraut.

A company of about a dozen Barbadian mercenaries materialized out of the grey landscape. They were laughing and singing in boisterous exuberance. Their horses' breath and their own made white puffs of smoke in the cold. Flat in the gully Devin watched them go by. He heard Baerd's soft breathing beside him. The Barbadians stopped at the gates of what had once been Nievolene lands. They weren't anymore, of course; not since the confiscations of the fall. The company leader dismounted and strode to the locked gates. With a flourish that drew cheers and laughter from his men he unlocked the iron gates with two keys on an ornate chain.

"First Company," Alessan murmured under his breath. His first words in hours. "He chose Karalius. Sandre said he would."

They watched the gates swing open and saw the horses canter through. The last man locked the iron gates behind him.

Baerd and Alessan waited another few moments then rose to their feet. Devin stood up as well, wincing at how stiff he felt.

"We'll need to find the tavern in the village," Baerd said, his voice so unusually grim that Devin glanced sharply at him in the growing gloom. The other man's features were unreadable.

"Not to go inside, though," Alessan said. "What we do here, we do unknown."

Baerd nodded. He pulled a much-creased paper from an inner pocket of his sheepskin vest. "Shall we start with Rovigo's man?"

Rovigo's man turned out to be a retired mariner who lived in the village a mile to the east. He told them where the tavern was. He also, for a fairly significant sum of money, gave them a name: that of a known informer for Grancial and his Second Company of Barbadians. The old sailor counted his money, spat once, meaningfully, then told them where the man lived, and something of his habits.

Baerd killed the informer, strangling him two hours later as he walked along a country lane from his small farm towards the village tavern. It was full-dark by then. Devin helped him carry the body back towards the Nievolene gates and hide it in the gully.

Baerd didn't speak, and Devin could think of nothing to say. The informer was a paunchy, balding man of middle years. He didn't look especially evil. He looked like a man surprised on the way to his favorite tavern. Devin wondered if he'd had a wife and children. They hadn't asked Rovigo's man about that; he was just as happy they hadn't.

They rejoined Alessan at the edge of the village. He was keeping watch on the tavern from there. Without speaking he pointed to a large dun-colored horse among those tethered outside the inn. A soldier's horse. The three of them doubled back west half a mile and lay down to wait again, prone and watchful by the side of the road.

Devin realized he wasn't cold anymore, or tired; he hadn't had time to think about such things.

Later that night under the cold white gaze of Vidomni in the clearing winter sky Alessan killed the man they'd been waiting for. By the time Devin heard the soft jingle of the soldier's horse, the Prince was no longer by his side and it had been mostly accomplished.

Devin heard a soft sound, more like a cough than a cry. The horse snorted in alarm, and Devin belatedly rose up to try to deal with the animal. By then, though, he realized that Baerd wasn't beside him either. When he finally clambered out of the ditch to the road, the soldier, wearing the insignia of the Second Company, was dead and Baerd had the horse under control. The man, obviously off duty, from the casual look of his uniform, had evidently been on his way back to the border fort. The Barbadian was a big man, they all were, but this one's face seemed very young under the moonlight.

They threw the body across his horse and made their way back to the Nievolene gates. They could hear the men of the First Company singing loudly from the manor-house along the curving drive. The sound carried a long way in the stillness of the wintry air. There were stars out now beside the moon; the clouds were breaking up. Baerd pulled the Barbadian off the horse and leaned him against one of the gate pillars. Alessan and Devin claimed the other dead man from where they had left him in the gully; Baerd tethered the Barbadian's horse some distance off the road.

Some distance, but not too far. This one was meant to be found later.

Alessan touched Devin briefly on the shoulder. Using the skills Marra had taught him, it seemed several lifetimes ago, Devin picked the two elaborate locks. He was glad to be able to make a contribution. The locks were showy but not difficult. The arrogant Nievolene had not had much fear of trespassers.

Alessan and Baerd each shouldered a body and carried them through. Devin swung the gates silently shut and they entered the grounds. Not toward the manor though. They let the pale moonlight lead them over the snow to the barns.

There they found trouble. The largest barn was locked from the inside, and Baerd pointed silently, with a grimace, to a spill of torchlight that showed from under the double doors. He mimed the presence of a guard.

The three of them looked up. There was, clearly illuminated by Vidomni's glow, a single small window open, high up on the eastern side.

Devin looked from Alessan to Baerd and then back to the Prince. He looked at the bodies of the two men already dead.

He pointed to the window and then to himself.

After a long moment Alessan nodded his head.

In silence, listening to the ragged singing from over in the manor-house, Devin climbed the outer wall of the Nievolene barn. By moonlight and by feel he deciphered hand and footholds in the cold. When he reached the window he looked over his shoulder and saw Ilarion, just rising in the east.

He slipped through and into the upper loft. Below, a horse whickered softly and Devin caught his breath. His heart thudding, he froze where he was, listening. There was no other response. In the sudden, seductive warmth of the barn he crawled cautiously forward and looked down.

The guard was comprehensively asleep. His uniform was unbuttoned and the lantern on the floor by his side illuminated an empty flask of wine. He must have lost a dice roll, Devin thought, to have been posted so boringly on guard against nothing here among the horses and the straw.

He went down the ladder without a sound. And in the flickering light of that barn, amid the smell of hay and animals and spilled red wine Devin killed his first man, plunging his dagger into the Barbadian's throat as the man slept. It was not the way his dreams of valiant deeds had ever had him doing this.

It took him a moment to fight back the churning nausea that followed. It's the smell of the wine, he tried to tell himself. There was also more blood than he'd thought there would be. He wiped his blade clean before he opened the door for the other two.

"Well done," Baerd said, taking in the scene. He briefly laid a hand on Devin's shoulder.

Alessan said nothing, but by the wavering light Devin read a disquieting compassion in his eyes.

Baerd had already set about doing what they had to do.

They left the guard where he was to be burned. The informer and the soldier from the Second Company they dragged towards one of the outbuildings. Baerd studied the situation carefully for a few moments, refusing to be rushed, then he placed the two bodies in a particular way, and wedged the door in front of them convincingly shut with what Devin assumed would later appear to be a dislodged beam.

The singing from the manor had gradually been fading away. Now it had come down to a single voice drunkenly caroling a melancholy refrain about love lost long ago. Finally that voice, too, fell silent.

Which was Alessan's cue. At his signal they simultaneously set fire to the dry straw and wood in the guarded barn and two of the adjacent outbuildings, including the one where the dead men were trapped. Then they fled. By the time they were off the property the Nievolene barns were an inferno of flame. Horses were screaming.

There was no pursuit. They hadn't expected any. Alessan and Sandre had worked it out very carefully back in Ferraut. The charred bodies of the informer and the Second Company soldier would be found by Karalius's men. The mercenaries of the First Company would draw the obvious conclusion.

They reclaimed their horses and headed west. They spent the night outside again in the cold taking turns on watch. It had gone very well. It seemed to have gone exactly as planned. Devin wished they'd been able to free the horses, though. Their screaming ran through his fitful dreams in the snow.

In the morning Alessan bought a cart from a farmer near the border of Ferraut and Baerd bargained with a woodcutter for a load of fresh-cut logs. They paid the new transit duty and sold the wood at the first fort across the border. They also bought some winter wool to carry to Ferraut town where they were to rejoin the others.

There was no point, Alessan said, in missing a chance at a profit. They did have responsibilities to their partners.

In fact, a disconcerting number of untoward events had ruffled the Eastern Palm in the autumn and winter that followed the unmasking of the Sandreni conspiracy. In themselves, none of them amounted to very much; collectively they unsettled and irritated Alberico of Barbadior to the point where his aides and messengers began finding their employment physically hazardous, in so far as their duties brought them into proximity with the Tyrant.

For a man noted for his composure and equanimity, even back in Barbadior when he'd been only the leader of a middle-ranking family of nobility, Alberico's temper was shockingly close to the surface all winter long.

It had begun, his aides agreed amongst each other, after the Sandreni traitor, Tomasso, had been found dead in the dungeons when they came to bring him to the professionals. Alberico, waiting in the room of the implements, had been terrifyingly enraged. Each of the guards, from Siferval's Third Company, had been summarily executed. Including the new Captain of the Guard; the previous one had killed himself the night before. Siferval himself was summoned back to Astibar from Certando for a private session with his employer that left him limp and shaking for hours afterwards.

Alberico's fury had seemed to border on the irrational. He had clearly, his aides decided, been radically unsettled by whatever had happened in the forest. Certainly he didn't look well; there was something odd about one of his eyes, and his walk was peculiar. Then, in the days and weeks that followed, it became manifest, as the local informers for each of the three companies began to bring in their reports, that Astibar town simply did not believe, or chose not to believe, that anything had happened in the forest, that there had been any Sandreni conspiracy at all.

Certainly not with the Lords Scalvaia and Nievole, and most certainly not led by Tomasso bar Sandre. People were commenting cynically all over the city, the word came. Too many of them knew of the bone-deep hatreds that divided those three families. Too many knew the stories about Sandre's middle son, the alleged leader of this alleged plot. He might kidnap a boy from a temple of Morian, Astibar was saying, but plot against a Tyrant? With Nievole and Scalvaia?

No, the city was simply too sophisticated to fall for that. Anyone with the slightest sense of geography or economics could see what was really going on. How, by trumping up this «threat» from three of the five largest landowners in the distrada, Alberico was merely creating a sleek cover for an otherwise naked land grab.

It was only sheerest coincidence, of course, that the Sandreni estates were central, the Nievolene farms lay to the southwest along the Ferraut border, and Scalvaia's vineyards were in the richest belt in the north where the best grapes for the blue wine were grown. An immensely convenient conspiracy, all the taverns and khav rooms agreed.

And every single conspirator was dead overnight, as well. Such swift justice! Such an accumulation of evidence against them! There had been an informer among the Sandreni, it was proclaimed. He was dead. Of course. Tomasso bar Sandre had led the conspiracy, they were told. He too, most unfortunately, was dead.

Led by Astibar itself all four provinces of the Eastern Palm reacted with bitter, sardonic disbelief. They may have been conquered, ground under the heavy Barbadian heel, but they had not been deprived of their intelligence or rendered blind. They knew a Tyrant's scheming when they saw it.

Tomasso bar Sandre as a skilled, deadly plotter? Astibar, reeling under the economic impact of the confiscations, and the horror of the executions, still found itself able to mock. And then there arrived the first of the viciously funny verses from the west, from Chiara itself, written by Brandin himself some said, though rather more likely commissioned from one of the poets who hovered about that court. Verses lampooning Alberico as seeing plots hatching in every barnyard and using them as an excuse to seize fowls and vegetable gardens all over the Eastern Palm. There were also a few, not very subtle sexual innuendos thrown in for good measure.

The poems, posted on walls all over the city, and then in Tregea and Certando and Ferraut, were torn down by the Barbadians almost as fast as they went up. Unfortunately they were memorable rhymes, and people didn't need to read or hear them more than once…

Alberico would later acknowledge to himself that he'd lost control a little. He would also admit inwardly that a great deal of his rage stemmed from a fierce indignation and the aftermath of fear.

There had been a conspiracy led by that mincing Sandreni. They had very nearly killed him in that cursed cabin in the woods.

This once, he was telling the absolute truth. There was no pretense or deception. He had every claim of justice on his side. What he didn't have was a confession, or a witness, or any evidence at all. He'd needed his informer alive. Or Tomasso. He'd wanted Tomasso alive. His dreams that first night had been shot through with vivid images of Sandre's son, bound and stripped and curved invitingly backwards on one of the machines.

In the aftermath of the pervert's inexplicable death, and the unanimous word from all four provinces that no one believed a word of what had happened, Alberico had abandoned his original, carefully measured response to the plot.

The lands were seized of course, but in addition all the living members of all three families were searched out and death-wheeled in Astibar. He hadn't expected there to be quite so many, actually, when he gave that order. The stench had been deplorable and some of the children lived an unconscionably long time on the wheels. It made it difficult to concentrate on business in the state offices above the Grand Square.

He raised taxes in Astibar and introduced, for the first time, transit duties for merchants crossing from one of his provinces to another, along the lines of the existing tariff levied for crossing from the Eastern to the Western Palm. Let them pay, literally, if they chose not to believe what had happened to him in that cabin.

He did more. Half the massive Nievolene grain harvest was promptly shipped home to Barbadior. For an action conceived in anger he considered that one to be inspired. It had pushed the price of grain down back home in the Empire, which hurt his family's two most ancient rivals while making him exceptionally popular with the people. In so far as the people mattered in Barbadior.

At the same time, here in the Palm, Astibar was forced to bring in more grain than ever from Certando and Ferraut, and with the new duties Alberico was going to rake a healthy cut of that inflated price as well.

He could almost have slaked his anger, almost have made himself happy, watching the effects of all this ripple through, if it wasn't that small things kept happening.

For one, his soldiers began to grow restless. With an increase in hardship came an increase in tension; more incidents of confrontation occurred. Especially in Tregea where there were always more incidents of confrontation. Under greater stress the mercenaries demanded, predictably, higher pay. Which, if he gave it to them, was going to soak up virtually everything he might gain from the confiscations and the new duties.

He sent a letter home to the Emperor. His first request in over two years. Along with a case of Astibar blue wine, from what were now his own estates in the north, he conveyed an urgent reiteration of his plea to be brought under the Imperial aegis. Which would have meant a subsidy for his mercenaries from the Treasury in Barbadior, or even Imperial troops under his command. As always, he stressed the role he alone played in blocking Ygrathen expansion in this dangerous halfway peninsula. He might have begun his career here as an independent adventurer, he conceded, with what he saw as a nice turn of phrase, but as an older, wiser man he wished to bind himself more tightly and more usefully to his Emperor than ever before.

As for wanting to be Emperor, and wanting the cloak of Imperial sanction thrown over him, however belatedly, well, such things surely did not have to be put into a letter?

He received, by way of reply, an elegant wall-hanging from the Emperor's Palace, commendations on his loyal sentiments, and polite regret that circumstances at home precluded the granting of his request for financing. As usual. He was cordially invited to sail home to all suitable honors and leave the tiresome problems of that far land overseas to a colonial expert appointed by the Emperor.

That, too, was as usual. Turn your new territory over to the Empire. Surrender your army. Come home to a parade or two, then spend your days hunting and your money on bribes and hunting gear. Wait for the Emperor to die without naming a successor. Then knife and be knifed in the brawl to succeed him.

Alberico sent back sincerest thanks, deep regrets, and another case of wine.

Shortly thereafter, at the end of the fall, a number of men in the disgruntled, out-of-favor Third Company withdrew from service and took late-season ship for home. The commanders of the First and Second used that same week to formally present, purely coincidence of course, their new wage demands and to casually remind him of past promises of land for the mercenaries. Starting, it was suggested delicately, with their commanders.

He'd wanted to order the two of them throttled. He'd wanted to fry their greedy, wine-sodden brains with a blast of his own magic. But he couldn't afford to do it; added to which, exercising his powers was still a process of some real strain so soon after the encounter in the woods that had nearly killed him.

The encounter that no one in this peninsula even believed had taken place.

What he had done was smile at the two commanders and confide that he had already marked off in his mind a significant portion of the newly claimed Nievolene lands for one of them. Siferval, he said, more in sorrow than in anger, had been put out of the running by the conduct of his own men, but these two… well, it would be a hard choice. He would be watching them closely over the next while and would announce his decision in due course.

How long a while, exactly, had pursued Karalius of the First.

Truly, he could have killed the man even as he stood there, helmet under his arm, eyes hypocritically lowered in a show of deference. Oh, spring, perhaps, he'd said airily, as if such matters should not be of great moment to men of good will.

Sooner would be better, had said Grancial of the Second, softly.

Alberico had chosen to let his eyes show just a little of what he felt. There were limits.

Sooner would let whichever of us you choose have time to see to the proper handling of the land before spring planting, Grancial explained hastily. A little ruffled, as he should be.

Perhaps it is so, Alberico had said, noncommittally. I will give thought to this.

"By the way," he added, as they reached the door. "Karalius, would you be good enough to send me that very competent young captain of yours? The one with the forked black beard. I have a special, confidential task that needs a man of his evident qualities." Karalius had blinked, and nodded.

It was important, very important, not to let them grow too confident, he reflected after they had gone and he'd managed to calm himself. At the same time, only a genuine fool antagonized his troops. The more so, if he had ultimate plans to lead them home. By invitation of the Emperor, preferably, but not necessarily. Not, to be sure, necessarily.

On further reflection, triggered by that line of thought, he did raise taxes in Tregea, Certando, and Ferraut to match the new levels in Astibar. He also sent a courier to Siferval of the Third in the Certandan highlands, praising his recent work in keeping that province quiet.

You lashed them, then enticed them. You made them fear you, and know that their fortunes could be made if you liked them enough. It was all a matter of balance.

Unfortunately, small things continued to go wrong with the balancing of the Eastern Palm as autumn turned into winter in the unusually cold weeks that followed.

Some cursed poet in Astibar chose that dank and rainy season to begin posting a series of elegies to the dead Duke of Astibar. The Duke had died in exile, the head of a scheming family, most of whom had been executed by then. Verses lauding him were manifestly treasonous.

It was difficult though. Every single writer brought in during the first sweep of the khav rooms denied authorship, and then, with time to prepare, every writer in the second sweep claimed to have written the verses.

Some advisers suggested peremptory wheels for the lot of them, but Alberico had been giving thought to a larger issue. To the marked difference between his court and the Ygrathen's. On Chiara, the poets vied for access to Brandin, quivering like puppies at the slightest word of praise from him. They wrote paeans of exaltation to the Tyrant and obscene, scathing attacks on Alberico at request. Here, every writer in the Eastern Palm seemed to be a potential rabble-rouser. An enemy of the state.

Alberico swallowed his anger, lauded the technical skill of the verses, and let both sets of poets go free. Not before suggesting, however, as benignly as he could manage, that he would enjoy reading verses as well-crafted on one of the many possible themes of rich satiric possibility having to do with Brandin of Ygrath. He had managed a smile. He would be very pleased to read such verses, he'd said, wondering if one of these cursed writers with their lofty airs could take a hint.

None did. Instead, a new poem appeared on walls all over the city two mornings later. It was about Tomasso bar Sandre. A lament about his death, and claiming, unbelievably, that his perverse sexuality had been a deliberately chosen path, a living metaphor for his conquered, subjugated land, for the perverse situation of Astibar under tyranny.

He'd had no choice after that, once he'd understood what the poet was saying. Not bothering with inquiries again, he'd had a dozen writers pulled at random out of the khav rooms that same afternoon, and then broken, wristed, and sky-wheeled among the still-crowded bodies of the families of the conspirators before sundown. He closed all khav rooms for a month. No more verses appeared.

In Astibar. But the same evening his new taxes were proclaimed in the Market Square in Tregea, a black-haired woman elected to leap to her death from one of the seven bridges in protest against the measures. She made a speech before she jumped, and she left behind, the gods alone knew how she'd come into possession of them, a complete sheaf of the "Sandreni Elegies" from Astibar. No one knew who she was. They dragged the icy river for her body but it was never found. Rivers ran swiftly in Tregea, out of the mountains to the eastern sea.

The verses were all over that province within a fortnight, and had crossed to Certando and southern Ferraut before the first heavy snows of the winter began to fall.

Brandin of Ygrath sent an elegantly fur-clad courier to Astibar with an elegantly phrased note lauding the Elegies as the first decent creative work he'd seen emanating from Barbadian territory. He offered Alberico his sincerest congratulations.

Alberico sent a polite acknowledgment of the sentiments and offered to commission one of his newly competent verse-makers to do a work on the glorious life and deeds in battle of Prince Valentin di Tigana.

Because of the Ygrathen's spell, he knew, only Brandin himself would be able to read that last word, but only Brandin mattered.

He thought he'd won that one, but for some reason the woman's suicide in Tregea left him feeling too edgy to be pleased. It was too intense an action, harking back to the violence of the first year after he'd landed here. Things had been quiet for so long, and this level of intensity, of very public intensity, never boded well. Briefly he even considered rolling back the new taxes, but that would look too much like a giving in rather than a gesture of benevolence. Besides, he still needed the money for the army. Back home the word was that the Emperor was sinking more rapidly now, that he was seen in public less and less often. Alberico knew he had to keep his mercenaries happy.

In the dead of winter he made the decision to reward Karalius with fully half of the former Nievolene lands.

The night after the announcement was made public, among the troops first, then cried in the Grand Square of Astibar, the horse barn and several of the outbuildings of the Nievolene family estate were burned to the ground.

He ordered an immediate investigation by Karalius, then wished, a day later, that he hadn't. It seemed that they had found two bodies in the smoldering ruins, trapped by a fallen beam that had barred a door. One was that of an informer linked to Grancial and the Second Company. The other was a Barbadian soldier: from the Second Company.

Karalius promptly challenged Grancial to a duel at any time and place of the latter's choosing. Grancial immediately named a date and place. Alberico quickly made it clear that the survivor of any such combat would be death-wheeled. He succeeded in halting the fight, but the two commanders stopped speaking to each other from that point on. There were a number of small skirmishes among men of the two companies, and one, in Tregea, that was not so small, leaving fifteen soldiers slain and twice as many wounded.

Three local informers were found dead in Ferraut's distrada, stretched on farmer's wagon-wheels in a savage parody of the Tyrant's justice. They couldn't even retaliate, that would involve an admission that the men had been informers.

In Certando, two of Siferva's Third Company went absent from duty, disappearing into the snow-white countryside, the first time that had ever happened. Siferval reported that local women did not appear to be involved. The men had been extremely close friends. The Third Company commander offered the obvious, disagreeable hypothesis.

Late in the winter Brandin of Ygrath sent another suave envoy with another letter. In it he profusely thanked Alberico for his offer of verses, and said he'd be delighted to read them. He also formally requested six Certandan women, as young and comely as the one Alberico had so kindly allowed him to take from the Eastern Palm some years ago, to be added to his saishan. Unforgivably the letter somehow became public information.

Laughter was deadly.

To quell it, Alberico had six old women seized by Siferval in southwestern Certando. He ordered them blinded and hamstrung and set down under a courier's flag on the snow-clad border of Lower Corte between the forts at Sinave and Forese. He had Siferval attach a letter to one of them asking Brandin to acknowledge receipt of his new mistresses.

Let them hate him. So long as they feared.

On the way back east from the border, Siferval said in his report, he had followed an informer's tip and found the two runaway soldiers living together at an abandoned farm. They had been executed on the site, with one of them, the appropriate one, Siferval had reported, castrated first, so that he could die as he'd lived. Alberico sent his commendations.

It was an unsettling winter though. Things seemed to be happening to him instead of moving to a measure he dictated. Late at night, and then at other times as well, more and more as the Palm gradually turned towards a distant rumor of spring, Alberico found himself thinking about the ninth province that no one yet controlled, the one just across the bay. Senzio.

The grey-eyed merchant was making a great deal of sense. Even as he found himself reluctantly agreeing with the man, Ettocio wished the fellow had chosen someone else's roadside tavern for his midday repast. The talk in the room was veering in dangerous directions and, Triad knew, enough Barbadian mercenaries used the main highway between Astibar and Ferraut towns. If one of them stopped in here now, he would be unlikely in the extreme to indulge the current tenor of the conversation as merely an excess of springtime energy. Ettocio's license would probably be gone for a month. He kept glancing nervously towards the door.

"Double taxation now!" the lean man was saying bitterly as he pushed a hand through his hair. "After the kind of winter we've just had? After what he did to the price of grain? So we pay at the border, and now we pay at the gates of a town, and where in the name of Morian is profit?"

There were truculent murmurs of agreement all around the room. In a tavern full of merchants on the road, agreement was predictable. It was also dangerous. Ettocio, pouring drinks, was not the only man keeping an eye on the door. The young fellow leaning on the bar looked up from his crusty roll and wedge of country cheese to give him an unexpectedly sympathetic look.

"Profit?" a wool-merchant from northern Ferraut said sarcastically. "Why should Barbadior care if we make a profit?"

"Exactly!" The grey eyes flashed in vigorous agreement. "The way I hear it, all he wants to do is soak the Palm for everything he can, in preparation for a grab at the Emperor's Tiara back in Barbadior!"

"Shush!" Ettocio muttered under his breath, unable to stop himself. He took a quick, rare pull at a mug of his own beer and moved along the bar to close the window. It was a shame, because the spring day was glorious outside, but this was getting out of hand.

"Next thing you know," the lean trader was saying now, "he'll just go right ahead and seize the rest of our land like he's already started to do in Astibar. Any wagers we're servants or slaves within five years?"

One man's contemptuous laughter rode over the snarling chorus of response triggered by that. The room fell abruptly silent as everyone turned to confront the person who appeared to find this observation diverting. Expressions were grim. Ettocio nervously wiped down the already clean bartop in front of him.

The warrior from Khardhun continued laughing for a long time, seemingly oblivious to the stares he was receiving. His sculpted, black features registered genuine amusement.

"What," said the grey-eyed one coldly, "is so very funny, old man?"

"You are," said the old Khardhu cheerfully. He grinned like a death's head. "All of you. Never seen so many blind men in one room before."

"You care to explain exactly what that means?" the Ferraut wool-merchant rasped.

"You need it explained?" the Khardhu murmured, his eyes wide in mock surprise. "Well, now. Why in the name of your gods or mine or his should Alberico bother trying to enslave you?" He jabbed a bony finger towards the trader who'd started all this. "If he tried that my guess is there's still enough manhood in the Eastern Palm, barely, that you might take offense. Might even… rise up!" He said that last in an exaggerated parody of a secretive whisper.

He leaned back, laughing again at his own wit. No one else did. Ettocio looked nervously at the door.

"On the other side of the coin," the Khardhu went on, still chuckling, "if he just slowly squeezes you dry with taxes and duties and confiscations he can get to exactly the same place without making anyone mad enough to do anything about it. I tell you, gentlemen," he took a long pull at his beer, "Alberico of Barbadior's a smart man."

"And you," said the grey-eyed man leaning across his own table, bristling with anger, "are an arrogant, insolent foreigner!"

The Khardhu's smile faded. His eyes locked on those of the other man and Ettocio was suddenly very glad the warrior's curved sword was checked with all the other weapons behind the bar.

"I've been here some thirty years," the black man said softly. "About as long as you've been alive, I'd wager. I was guarding merchant trains on this road when you were wetting your bed at night. And if lam a foreigner, well… last time I inquired, Khardhun was a free country. We beat back our invader, which is more than anyone here in the Palm can say!"

"You had magic!" the young fellow at the bar suddenly burst out, over the outraged din that ensued. "We didn't! That's the only reason! The only reason!"

The Khardhu turned to face the boy, his lip curling in contempt. "You want to rock yourself to sleep at night thinking that's the only reason, you go right ahead, little man. Maybe it'll make you feel better about paying your taxes this spring, or about going hungry because there's no grain here in the fall. But if you want to know the truth I'll give it to you free of charge."

The noise level had abated as he spoke, but a number of men were on their feet, glaring at the Khardhu.

Looking around the room, as if dismissing the boy at the bar as unworthy of his attention, he said very clearly, "We beat back Brandin of Ygrath when he invaded us because Khardhun fought as a country. As a whole. You people got whipped by Alberico and Brandin both because you were too busy worrying about your border spats with each other, or which Duke or Prince would lead your army, or which priest or priestess would bless it, or who would fight on the center and who on the right, and where the battlefield would be, and who the gods loved best. Your nine provinces ended up going at the sorcerers one by one, finger by finger. And they got snapped to pieces like chicken-bones. I always used to think," he drawled into what had become a quiet room, "that a hand fought best when it made a fist."

He lazily signaled Ettocio for another drink.

"Damn your insolent Khardhu hide," the grey-eyed man said in a strangled voice. Ettocio turned from the bar to look at him. "Damn you forever to Morian's darkness for being right!"

Ettocio hadn't expected that, and neither had the others in the room. The mood grew grimly introspective. And, Ettocio realized, more dangerous as well, entirely at odds with the brightness of the spring outside, the cheerful warmth of the returned sun.

"But what can we do?" the young fellow at the bar said plaintively, to no one in particular.

"Curse and drink and pay our taxes," said the wool-merchant bitterly.

"I must say, I do sympathize with the rest of you," said the lone trader from Senzio smugly. It was an ill-advised remark. Even Ettocio, notoriously slow to rouse, was irritated.

The young man at the bar was positively enraged.

"Why you, you… I don't believe it! What right do you have…” He hammered the bar in incoherent fury. The plump Senzian smiled in the superior manner all of them seemed to have.

"What right indeed!" The grey eyes were icy as they returned to the fray. "Last time I looked, Senzio traders all had their hands jammed so deep in their pockets paying tribute money east and west that they couldn't even get their equipment out to please their wives!"

A raucous, bawdy shout of laughter greeted that. Even the old Khardhu smiled thinly.

"Last / looked," said the Senzian, red-faced, "the Governor of Senzio was one of our own, not someone shipped in from Ygrath or Barbadior!"

"What happened to the Duke?" the Ferraut merchant snapped. "Senzio was so cowardly your Duke demoted himself to Governor so as not to upset the Tyrants. Are you proud of that?"

"Proud?" the lean merchant mocked. "He's got no time to be proud of anything. He's too busy looking both ways to see which emissary from which Tyrant he should offer his wife to!"

Again, coarse, bitter laughter.

"You've a mean tongue for a conquered man," the Senzian said coldly. The laughter stopped. "Where are you from that you're so quick to cut at other men's courage."

"Tregea," said the other quietly.

"Occupied Tregea," the Senzian corrected viciously. "Conquered Tregea. With its Barbadian Governor."

"We were the last to fall," the Tregean said a little too defiantly. "Borifort held out longer than anywhere else."

"But it fell," the Senzian said bluntly, sure of his advantage now. "I wouldn't be so quick to talk about other men's wives. Not after the stories we all heard about what the Barbadians did there. And I also heard that most of your women weren't that unwilling to be…”

"Shut your filthy mouth!" the Tregean snarled, leaping to his feet. "Shut it, or I'll close it for you permanently, you lying Senzian scum!"

A babble of noise erupted, louder than any before. Furiously clanging the bell over the bar, Ettocio fought to restore order.

"Enough!" he roared. "Enough of this, or you're all out of here right now!" A dire threat, and it quelled them.

Enough for the Khardhu warrior's sardonic laughter to be audible again. The man was on his feet. He dropped coins on the table to pay his account, and surveyed the room, still chuckling, from his great height.

"See what I mean?" he murmured. "All these stick-like little fingers jabbing and poking away at each other. You've always done that, haven't you? Guess you always will. Until there's nothing left here but Barbadior and Ygrath."

He swaggered to the bar to claim his sword.

"You," said the grey-eyed Tregean suddenly, as Ettocio handed over the curved, sheathed blade. The Khardhu turned slowly.

"You know how to use that thing as well as you use your mouth?" the Tregean asked.

The Khardhu's lips parted in a mirthless smile. "It's been reddened once or twice."

"Are you working for anyone right now?"

Insolently, appraisingly, the Khardhu looked down on the other man. "Where are you going?"

"I've just changed my plans," the other replied. "There's no money to be made up in Ferraut town. Not with double duties to be paid. I reckon I'll have to go farther afield. I'll give you going rates to guard me south to the Certandan highlands."

"Rough country there," the Khardhu murmured reflectively.

The Tregean's face twitched with amusement. "Why do you think I want you?" he asked.

After a moment the smile was returned. "When do we go?" the warrior said.

"We're gone," the Tregean replied, rising and paying his own account. He claimed his own short sword and the two of them walked out together. When the door opened there was a brief, dazzling flash of sunlight.

Ettocio had hoped the talk would settle down after that. It didn't. The youngster at the bar mumbled something about uniting in a common front, a remark that would have been merely insane if it wasn't so dangerous. Unfortunately, from Ettocio's point of view, at any rate, the comment was overheard by the Ferraut wool-trader, and the mood of the room was so aroused by then that the subject wouldn't die.

It went on all afternoon, even after the boy left as well. And that night, with an entirely different crowd, Ettocio shocked himself by speaking up during an argument about ancestral primacy between an Astibarian wine-dealer and another Senzian. He made the same point the tall Khardhu had made, about nine spindly fingers that had been broken one by one because they never formed a fist. The argument made sense to him; it sounded intelligent in his own mouth. He noticed men nodding slowly even as he spoke. It was an unusual, flattering response, men had seldom paid any attention to Ettocio except when he called time in the tavern.

He rather liked the new sensation. In the days that followed he found himself raising the point whenever the opportunity arose. For the first time in his life Ettocio began to get a reputation as a thoughtful man.

Unfortunately, one evening in summer he was overheard by a Barbadian mercenary standing outside the open window. They didn't take away his license. There was a very high level of tension across the whole of the Palm by then. They arrested Ettocio and executed him on a wheel outside his own tavern, with his severed hands stuffed in his mouth.

A great many men had heard the argument by then, though. A great many had nodded, hearing it.

Devin joined the other four about a mile south of the crossroads inn on the dusty road leading to Certando. They were waiting for him. Catriana was alone in the first cart but Devin climbed up beside Baerd in the second.

"Bubbling like a pot of khav," he said cheerfully in response to a quizzical eyebrow, Alessan rode up on one side. He'd buckled on his sword, Devin saw. Baerd's bow was on the cart, just behind the seat and within very quick reach. Devin had had occasion, several times in six months, to see just how quick Baerd's reach could be. Alessan smiled over at him, riding bareheaded in the bright afternoon.

"I take it you stirred the pot a little after we left?"

Devin grinned. "Didn't need much stirring. The two of you have that routine down like professional players by now."

"So do you," said the Duke, cantering up on the other side of the cart. "I particularly admired your spluttering anger this time. I thought you were about to throw something at me."

Devin smiled up at him. Sandre's teeth flashed white through the improbable black of his skin.

Don't expect to recognize us, Baerd had said when they'd parted in the Sandreni woods half a year ago. So Devin had been prepared. Somewhat, but not enough.

Baerd's own transformation had been disconcerting but relatively mild: he'd grown a short beard and removed the padding from the shoulders of his doublet. He wasn't as big a man as Devin had first thought. He'd also somehow changed his hair from bright yellow to what he said was his natural dark brown. His eyes were brown now as well, not the bright blue of before.

What he had done to Sandre d'Astibar was something else entirely. Even Alessan, who'd evidently had years to get used to this sort of thing, gave a low whistle when he first saw the Duke. Sandre had become, amazingly, an aging black fighting man from Khardhun across the northern sea. One of a type that Devin knew had been common on the roads of the Palm twenty or thirty years ago in the days when merchants went nowhere except in company with each other, and Khardhu warriors with their wickedly curved blades were much in demand as insurance against outlaws.

Somehow, and this was the uncanny thing, with his own beard shaven and his white hair tinted a dark grey, Sandre's gaunt, black face and deep-set, fierce eyes were exactly those of a Khardhu mercenary. Which, Baerd had explained, had been almost the first thing he'd noticed about the Duke when he'd seen him in daylight. It was what had suggested the rather comprehensive disguise.

"But how?" Devin remembered gasping.

"Lotions and potions," Alessan had laughed.

It turned out, as Baerd explained later, that he and the Prince had spent a number of years in Quileia after Tigana's fall. Disguises of this sort, colorings for skin and hair, even tints for eyes, were a perfected, important art south of the mountains. They assumed a central role in the Mysteries of the Mother Goddess, and in the less secret rites of the formal theater, and they had played pivotal, complex parts in the tumultuous religion-torn history of Quileia.

Baerd did not say what he and Alessan had been doing there, or how he had come to learn this secret craft or possess the implements of it.

Catriana didn't know either, which made Devin feel somewhat better. They'd asked Alessan one afternoon, and had received, for the first time, an answer that was to become routine through the fall and winter.

In the spring, Alessan told them. In the spring a great deal would be made clearer, one way or another. They were moving towards something of importance, but they would have to wait until then. He was not going to discuss it now. Before the Ember Days of spring they would leave their current Astibar, Tregea, Ferraut loop and head south across the wide grainlands of Certando. And at that point, Ales-san had said, a great many things might change. One way or another, he'd repeated.

He hadn't smiled, saying any of this, though he was a man with an easy smile.

Devin remembered how Catriana had tossed her hair then, with a knowing, almost an angry look in her blue eyes.

"It's Alienor, isn't it?" she demanded, virtually an accusation. "It's that woman at Castle Borso."

Alessan's mouth had twisted in surprise and then amusement. "Not so, my dear," he'd said. "We'll stop at Borso, but this has nothing to do with her at all. If I didn't know better, if I didn't know your heart belonged only to Devin, I'd say you sounded jealous, my darling."

The gibe had entirely the desired effect. Catriana had stormed off, and Devin, almost as embarrassed himself, had quickly changed the subject. Alessan had a way of doing that to you. Behind the deep, effortless courtesy and the genuine camaraderie, there existed a line they learned not to try to cross. If he was seldom harsh, his jests, always the first measure of control, could sting memorably. Even the Duke had discovered that it was best not to press Alessan on certain subjects. Including this one, it emerged: when asked, Sandre said he knew as little as they did about what would happen come spring.

Thinking about it, as fall gave way to winter and the rains and then the snows came, Devin was deeply aware that Alessan was the Prince of a land that was dying a little more with each passing day. Under the circumstances, he decided, the wonder wasn't that there were places they could not trespass upon but, rather, how far they could actually go before reaching the guarded regions that lay within.

One of the things Devin began to learn during that long winter was patience. He taught himself to hold his questions for the right time, or to restrain them entirely and try to work the answers for himself. If fuller knowledge had to wait for spring, then he would wait. In the meantime he threw himself, with an unleashed, even an unsuspected passion, into what they were doing.

A blade had been planted in his own soul that starry autumn night in the Sandreni Woods.

He'd had no idea what to expect when they'd set out five days later with Rovigo's horse-drawn cart and three other horses, bound for Ferraut town with a bed and a number of wooden carvings of the Triad. Taccio had written Rovigo that he could sell Astibarian religious carvings at a serious profit to merchants from the Western Palm. Especially because, as Devin learned, duty was not levied on Triad-related artifacts: part of a successful attempt by both sorcerers to keep the clergy placated and neutralized.

Devin learned a great deal about trade that fall and winter, and about certain other things as well. With his new, hard-won patience he would listen in silence as Alessan and the Duke tossed ideas back and forth on the long roads, turning the rough coals of a concept into the diamonds of polished plans. And even though his own dreams at night were of raising a surging army to liberate Tigana and storm the fabled harbor walls of Chiara, he quickly came to understand, on the cold paths of day, that theirs would have to be a wholly different approach.

Which was, in fact, why they were still in the east, not the west, and doing all they could, with the small glittering diamonds of Alessan and Sandre's plans, to unsettle things in Alberico's realm. Once Catriana confided to him, on one of the days when, for whatever reason, she deemed him worth speaking to, that Alessan was, in fact, moving much more aggressively than he had the year before when she'd first joined them. Devin suggested it might be Sandre's influence. Catriana had shaken her head. She thought that was a part of it, but that there was something else, a new urgency from a source she didn't understand.

We'll find out in the spring, Devin had shrugged. She'd glared at him, as if personally affronted by his equanimity.

It had been Catriana though who'd suggested the most aggressive thing of all as winter began: the faked suicide in Tregea. Along with the idea of leaving behind her a sheaf of the poems that that young poet had written about the Sandreni. Adreano was his name, Alessan had informed them, unwontedly subdued: the name was on the list of the twelve poets Rovigo had reported as being randomly death-wheeled during Alberico's retaliation for the verses. Alessan had been unexpectedly disturbed by that news.

There was other information in the letter from Rovigo, aside from the usual covering business details. It had been held for them in a tavern in north Tregea that served as a mail drop for many of the merchants in the northeast. They had been heading south, spreading what rumors they could about unrest among the soldiers. Rovigo's latest report suggested, for the second time, that an increase in taxes might be imminent, to cover the mercenaries' newest pay demands. Sandre, who seemed to know the Tyrant's mind astonishingly well, agreed.

After dinner, when they were alone around the fire, Catriana had made her proposal. Devin had been incredulous: he'd seen the height of the bridges of Tregea and the speed of the river waters below. And it was winter by then, growing colder every day.

Alessan, still upset by the news from Astibar, and evidently of the same mind as Devin, vetoed the idea bluntly. Catriana pointed out two things. One was that she had been brought up by the sea: she was a better swimmer than any of them, and better than any of them knew.

The second thing was that, as Alessan knew perfectly well, she said, a leap such as this, a suicide, especially in Tregea, would fit seamlessly into everything they were trying to achieve in the Eastern Palm.

"That," Devin remembered Sandre saying after a silence, "is true, I'm sorry to say."

Alessan had reluctantly agreed to go to Tregea itself for a closer look at the river and the bridges.

Four evenings later Devin and Baerd had found themselves crouched amid twilight shadows along the riverbank in Tregea town, at a point that seemed to Devin terribly far away from the bridge Catriana had chosen. Especially in the windy cold of winter, in the swiftly gathering dark, beside the even more swiftly racing waters that were rushing past them, deep and black and cold.

While they waited, he had tried, unsuccessfully, to sort out his complex mixture of feelings about Catriana. He was too anxious though, and too cold.

He only knew that his heart had leaped, moved by some odd, tripled conjunction of relief and admiration and envy when she swam up to the bank, exactly where they were. She even had the wig in one hand, so it would not be tangled up somewhere, and found. Devin stuffed it into the satchel he carried while Baerd was vigorously chafing Catriana's shivering body and bundling her into the layers of clothing they'd carried. As Devin looked at her, shaking uncontrollably, almost blue with the cold, her teeth chattering, he had felt his envy slipping away. What replaced it was pride.

She was from Tigana, and so was he. The world might not know it yet, but they were working together, however elliptically, to bring it back.

The following morning their two carts had slowly rattled out of town, going north and west to Ferraut again with a full load of mountain khav. A light snow had been falling. Behind them the city was in a state of massive ferment and turmoil because of the unknown dark-haired girl from the distrada who had killed herself. After that incident Devin had found it increasingly hard to be sharp or petty with Catriana. Most of the time. She did continue to indulge herself in the custom of deciding that he was invisible every once in a while.

It had become difficult for him to convince himself that they had actually made love together; that he had really felt her mouth soft on his, or her hands in his hair as she gathered him into her.

They never spoke of it, of course. He didn't avoid her, but he didn't seek her out: her moods swung too unpredictably, he never knew what response he'd get. A newly patient man, he let her come to ride a cart or sit before a tavern fire with him when she wanted to. She did, sometimes.

In Ferraut town that winter for the third time, after the leap in Tregea, they had all been wonderfully fed by Ingonida, still in raptures over the bed they'd brought her. Taccio's wife continued to display a particularly solicitous affection for the Duke in his dark disguise, a detail which Alessan took some pleasure in teasing Sandre about when they were alone. In the meantime, the rotund, red-faced Taccio copiously wined them all.

There had been another mail packet waiting from Rovigo in Astibar. Which, when opened, proved to contain two letters this time, one of which gave off, even after its time in transit, an extraordinary effusion of scent.

Alessan, his eyebrows elaborately arched, presented this pale-blue emanation to Devin with infinite suggestiveness. Ingonida crowed and clasped her hands together in a gesture doubtless meant to signify romantic rapture. Taccio, beaming, poured Devin another drink.

The perfume, unmistakably, was Selvena's. Devin's expression, as he took cautious possession of the envelope, must have been revealing because he heard Catriana giggle suddenly. He was careful not to look at her.

Selvena's missive was a single headlong sentence, much like the girl herself. She did, however, make one vivid suggestion that induced him to decline when the others asked innocently if they might peruse his communication.

In fact, though, Devin was forced to admit that his interest was rather more caught by the five neat lines Alais had attached to her father's letter. In a small, businesslike hand she simply reported that she'd found and copied another variant of the "Lament for Adaon" at one of the god's temples in Astibar and that she looked forward to sharing it with all of them when they next came east. She signed it with her initial only.

In the body of the letter Rovigo reported that Astibar was very quiet since the twelve poets had been executed among the families of the conspirators in the Grand Square. That the price of grain was still going up, that he could usefully receive as much green Senzian wine as they could obtain at current prices, that Alberico was widely expected to announce, very soon, a beneficiary among his commanders for the greater part of the confiscated Nievolene lands, and that his best information was that Senzian linens were still underpriced in Astibar but might be due to rise.

It was the news about the Nievolene lands that triggered the next stage of spark-to-spark discussion between Alessan and the Duke.

And those sparks had led to the blaze.

The five of them did a fast run along the well-maintained highway north to Senzio with more of the religious artifacts. They bought green wine with their profit on the statuettes, bargained successfully for a quantity of linens, Baerd, somewhat surprisingly had emerged as their best negotiator in such matters, and doubled quickly back to Taccio, paying the huge new duties at both the provincial border forts and the city-walls.

There had been another letter waiting. Among the various masking pieces of business news, Rovigo reported that an announcement on the Nievolene lands was expected by the end of the week. His source was reliable, he added. The letter had been written five days before.

That night Alessan, Baerd, and Devin had borrowed a third horse from Taccio, who was deeply happy to be told nothing on their intentions, and had set out on the long ride to the Astibar border and then across to a gully by the road that led to the Nievolene gates.

They were back seven days later with a new cart and a load of unspun country wool for Taccio to sell. Word of the fire had preceded them. Word of the fire was everywhere, Sandre reported. There had already been a number of tavern brawls in Ferraut town between men of the First and Second Companies.

They left the new cart with Taccio and departed, heading slowly back towards Tregea. They didn't need three carts. They were partners in a modest commercial venture. They made what slight profit they could, given the taxes and duties that trammeled them. They talked about those taxes and duties a great deal, often in public. Sometimes more frankly than their listeners were accustomed to hearing.

Alessan quarreled with the sardonic Khardhu warrior in a dozen different inns and taverns on the road, and hired him a dozen different times. Sometimes Devin played a role, sometimes Baerd did. They were careful not to repeat the performance anywhere. Catriana kept a precise log of where they had been and what they had said and done there. Devin had assured her they could rely on his memory, but she kept her notes nonetheless.

In public the Duke now called himself "Tomaz." «Sandre» was an uncommon-enough name in the Palm, and for a mercenary from Khardhun it would be sufficiently odd to be a risk. Devin remembered growing thoughtful when the Duke had told them his new name back in the fall. He'd wondered what it was like to have had to kill his son. Even to outlive his sons. To know that the bodies of everyone even distantly related to himself were being spreadeagled alive on the death-wheels of Barbadior. He tried to imagine how all of that would feel.

Life, the processes of living and what it did to you, seemed to Devin to grow more painfully complex all through that fall and winter. Often he thought of Marra, arbitrarily cut off on the way to her maturity, to whatever she had been about to become. He missed her with a dull ache that could grow into something heavy and difficult at times. She would have been someone to talk to about such things. The others had their own concerns and he didn't want to burden them. He wondered about Alais bren Rovigo, if she would have understood these things he was wrestling with. He didn't think so; she had lived too sheltered, too secluded a life for such thoughts to trouble her. He dreamt of her one night though, an unexpectedly intense series of images. The next morning he rode beside Catriana in the lead cart, unwontedly quiet, stirred and unsettled by the nearness of her, the crimson fall of her hair in the pale winter landscape.

Sometimes he thought about the soldier in the Nievolene barn, who had lost a roll of dice and carried a jug of wine to a lonely place away from the singing, and had had his throat slit there while he slept. Had that soldier been born into the world only to become a rite of passage for Devin di Tigana?

That was a terrible thought. Eventually, mulling it over through the long, cold winter rides, Devin worked his way through to deciding it was untrue. The man had interacted with other people through his days. Had caused pleasure and sorrow, doubtless, and had surely known both things. The moment of his ending was not what denned his journey under Eanna's lights, or however that journey was named in the Empire of Barbadior.

It was difficult to sort out though. Had Stevan of Ygrath lived and died so that his father's grief might work the destruction of a small province and its people and their memories? Had Prince Valentin di Tigana been born only to swing the killing blade that caused this to happen? And what about his youngest son then?

And what about the youngest son of the Asolini farmer who had fled from Avalle when it became Stevanien? Truly, it was hard to puzzle through.

In Senzio one morning, with the first elusive hints of spring softening the northern air, Baerd had come back from the celebrated weapons market with a bright, beautifully balanced sword for Devin. There was a black jewel in the hilt. He offered no explanation, but Devin knew it had to do with what had happened in the Nievolene barn. The gift did nothing to answer any of his new questions, but it helped him nonetheless. Baerd began giving him lessons during their midday breaks on the road.

Devin worried about Baerd, in part because he knew that Alessan did.

His first impression in the cabin had been mostly wrong: a big, blond man, intimidatingly cool and competent. But Baerd was dark-haired and not actually large at all and, though his competence ran to such an astonishing number of things that it could still be intimidating after six months, he wasn't really cool. Only guarded, careful. Closed tightly around the kernel of the hurt he had lived with for a long time.

In some ways, Devin realized, Alessan had it easier than Baerd. The Prince could find a temporary release in talk, in laughter, and most of all, and almost always, in music. Baerd seemed to have no release at all; he walked through a world shaped and reshaped every single moment around the knowledge that Tigana was gone.

It would drive him out at night sometimes, away from sleep, or from a fire they'd built up by a road. He would rise without warning, neatly, quietly, and go out into the darkness alone.

Devin would watch Alessan watching Baerd as he went away.

"I knew a man like him once," Sandre said gravely one night after Baerd had left a warm room in a tavern for a fog-shrouded winter night in the Tregean hills near Borifort. "He used to have to go away by himself to fight off a need to kill."

"That would be a part of it," Alessan had said.

Thoughts of winter, mood of a winter's night.

But it was spring now, and as the sap of the earth rose green-gold to the warming light so did Devin feel his own mood lifting to the stir and quickening of the world through which they rode.

Wait for springtime, Alessan had said amid the browns and reds of autumn trees and the bare, harvested vines. And spring was upon them now, with the Ember Days approaching fast and at last, at long last, they were on the road for Certando and whatever answers lay there. Devin could not quell and did not want to quell the sense rising within him like sap in the green woods that whatever was going to happen was going to begin to happen soon.

In the second cart beside Baerd he felt gloriously, importantly alive. Ahead of them the glint of afternoon sunlight in Catriana's hair was doing something strange and wonderful to his blood. He was aware of Baerd giving him a curious scrutiny, and caught a half-smile playing across the other's face. He didn't care. He was even glad. Baerd was his friend.

Devin began a song. A very old ballad of the road, "The Song of the Wayfarer":

I'm a long way from the house where I was born And this is just another winding trail, But when the sun goes down both of the moons will rise And Eanna's stars will hear me tell my tale…

Alessan, whatever his mood might be, was almost always ready to join in a song and, sure enough, Devin had the Tregean pipes with him by the second verse. He looked over and caught a wink from the Prince riding beside them.

Catriana glanced back at them reprovingly. Devin grinned at her and shrugged, and Alessan's pipes suddenly spun into a wilder dance of invitation. Catriana tried and failed to suppress a smile. She joined them on the third verse and then led them into the next song.

Later, in the summer, Devin would revive that image of the five of them in the first hour of the long ride south and the memory would make him feel very old.

He was young that day. In a way they all were, briefly, even Sandre, joining in on the choruses he knew in a passable baritone voice, reborn into his new identity, with a new hope to his long, unfading dream.

Devin took the third song back from Catriana, and sent his high clear voice along the road before them to lead the way down the sunlit, winding trail to Certando, to the Lady of Castle Borso, whoever she might be, and to whatever it was that Alessan had to find in the highlands.

First though, nearing sundown, they overtook a traveler on the road.

In itself that wasn't unusual. They were still in Ferraut, in the populated country north of Fort Ciorone where busy highways from Tregea and Corte met the north-south road they were on. Solitary travelers, on the other hand, were sufficiently rare for Devin to join Baerd in scanning the sides of the road to see if others were hidden in ambush.

A routine precaution, but they were in country where thieves would not survive long and in any case it was still daylight. Then as they drew nearer Devin saw the small harp slung over the man's back. A troubadour. Devin grinned; they were almost always good company.

The man had turned and was waiting for them to catch up. The deep bow he offered Catriana as she pulled the lead cart to a halt beside him was of such courtly grace it almost looked like a parody on the lonely road.

"I've been enjoying the sound of you for the last mile," he said, straightening. "I must say I'm enjoying the sight of you even more." He was tall, no longer young, with long, greying hair and quick eyes. He gave Catriana the sort of smile for which the troubadours of the Palm were notorious. His teeth were white and even in a leathery face.

"Heading south with the spring?" she asked, smiling politely at his flattery. "The old route?"

"I am indeed," he replied. "The old route at the usual time. And I'd hate to tell someone as young and beautiful as you how many years I've been doing it."

Devin jumped down from beside Baerd and strolled closer to the man to confirm something. "I could probably guess," he said, grinning, "because I think I remember you. We did a wedding season in Certando together. Did you play harp for Burnet di Corte two years ago?"

The sharp eyes looked him up and down. "I did," the troubadour admitted after a moment. "I'm Erlein di Senzio and I was with damned Burnet for a season all right. Then he cheated me of my wages and I decided I was happier on my own again. I thought those were professional voices behind me. You are?"

"Devin d'Asoli." The lie came easily. "I was with Menico di Ferraut for a few years."

"And have clearly moved on to other, better things," Erlein said, glancing at their laden carts. "Is Menico still on the road? Is he any fatter than he was?"

"Yes to both," Devin said, concealing the guilt that still assailed him when he thought of his former troupe-leader. "So is Burnet last I heard."

"Rot him," Erlein said mildly. "He owes me money."

"Well," Alessan said, looking down from his horse, "we can't do anything about that but if you like we can run you up to Ciorone and a bed before curfew. You can ride with Baerd," he added quickly, as Erlein glanced at the empty seat beside Catriana.

"I would be most profoundly grateful…” Erlein began.

"I don't like Fort Ciorone," Sandre broke in suddenly. "They cheat you there and too many people learn what you're carrying and where you're going. Too many of the wrong kind of people. It's a mild night coming, I think we're better off out here."

Devin glanced over at the Duke in surprise. This was the first time he'd offered any such opinion.

"Well, really Tomaz, I don't see why…” Alessan began.

"You hired me, merchant," Sandre growled. "You wanted me to do a job for you and I'm doing it. You don't want to listen, pay me now and I'll find someone who will." His eyes were fierce within the hollows of his blackened face.

And his tone was one that none of them could mistake. Whatever it was, Sandre had a reason for what he was doing.

"A little courtesy if you please," Alessan snapped, turning his horse to face the Duke's. "Or I will indeed turn you away and let you carry your old bones back to find someone else idiot enough to put up with you. I have managed," he said, swinging back to Erlein, "to find the most arrogant Khardhu on the roads of the Palm."

"They are all arrogant," the troubadour replied with a shake of his head. "Comes with the curved swords."

Alessan laughed. So too, following his lead, did Devin. "There's a good hour of daylight left," Baerd said in a complaining voice. "We can make the Fort easy. Why sleep on the ground?"

Alessan sighed. "I know," he said. "But I'm sorry. We're new to this run and Tomaz isn't. I suppose we ought to listen to him or we're wasting his fee, aren't we?" He looked back at Erlein and shrugged. "There goes your ride to Ciorone."

"Can't lose what you never had," the troubadour smiled. "I'll manage."

"You're welcome to share our fire," Devin interjected, trusting that he'd read the Duke's brief glance correctly. He still wasn't sure what Sandre was doing.

Surprisingly, Erlein flushed; he looked somewhat embarrassed. "As to that, I thank you, but I've nothing with me to bring to table or hearth."

"You have been on the road a long time," Sandre said in a quieter voice. "I haven't heard a Palm-born use that phrase in years. It's a lost tradition, that one."

"You have a harp, don't you?" Catriana said, at just the right moment and in her sweetest voice. She glanced directly at Erlein for an instant, then demurely lowered her eyes again.

"I do," said the troubadour after a moment, affirming the obvious. He was devouring Catriana with his gaze.

"Then you are far from empty-handed," Alessan said crisply. "Devin and my sister both sing, as you've heard, and I can manage these pipes a little bit. A harp will go gentle after dinner under the stars."

"Say no more," said Erlein. "You'll be better company by a long go than my mouth talking wisdom with only my own ears to hear."

Alessan laughed again.

"There's trees over west, and a stream beyond them, if I remember rightly," Sandre said. "A good place to camp."

Before anyone else could say a word Erlein di Senzio had jumped up and settled himself at Catriana's side. Devin, his mouth agape, closed it quickly at Sandre's hidden, urgent gesture.

Catriana pulled west off the road to lead them toward the trees the Duke had pointed out. Devin heard her giggle at something the troubadour said.

He was looking at Sandre though. So were Baerd and Alessan.

The Duke glanced at Erlein whose back was to the four of them, then very briefly he held up his left hand with the third and fourth fingers carefully curled down. He gazed at Alessan deliberately and then back to the man beside Catriana.

Devin didn't understand. An oath? he thought, confused.

Sandre lowered his hand but his eyes remained locked on the Prince's. There was an odd, challenging expression in them. Alessan had suddenly gone pale.

And in that moment Devin understood.

"Oh, Adaon," Baerd whispered on a rising note, as Devin leaped up on the cart beside him. "I do not believe this!"

Neither did Devin.

What Sandre was telling them, quite plainly, was that Erlein di Senzio was a wizard. One who had cut two fingers in his linking to the magic of the Palm.

And Alessan bar Valentin was a Prince of the blood of Tigana. Which meant, if the old tale of Adaon and Micaela was true, that he could bind a wizard to his service. Sandre had not believed it back in the cabin in the fall. Devin remembered that.

But now he was giving Alessan his chance. Which explained the challenge in his gaze.

A chance, or at least the beginnings of a chance. Thinking as fast as he ever had in his life, Devin turned to Baerd. "Follow my lead when we get there," he said softly. "I have an idea." Only later would he have time to reflect what a change six months had made. Only six months, one Ember season to another. For him to speak so to Baerd, speak and be listened to…

There was indeed a stream, as Sandre had known, or guessed. Not far from its banks they halted the carts. The usual twilight routine began. Catriana seeing to the horses, Devin to wood for the fire. Alessan and the Duke laid out the sleeping-rolls and organized the cooking gear and the food they carried.

Baerd took his bow and disappeared into the trees. He was back in twenty minutes, no more than that, with three rabbits and a plump, wingless grele.

"I'm impressed," Erlein said from beside Catriana and the horses. His eyes were wide. "I'm very impressed."

"I'm buying your music for later," Baerd said with a rare smile. The one he usually reserved for bargaining sessions at town fairs.

Devin had been watching Erlein as unobtrusively as he could. When he could manage to focus on the troubadour's left hand, which never seemed to be still for more than an instant, there did seem to be an odd blurring, an occluding of air around it.

He had been waiting for Baerd to come back, now he waited no longer.

"You," he said, grinning at the returning hunter, "look like something that should be hunted yourself. You are going to terrify every civilized merchant we meet. You need a haircut before you are fit for society, my friend."

Baerd was very quick.

"I wouldn't talk, scamp," he shot back, tossing his prey over to Sandre by the wood gathered for the fire. "Not the way you look yourself. Or are you deliberately trying to be scruffy to scare away Alienor at Borso?"

Alessan laughed. So did Erlein.

"Nothing scares away Alienor," the troubadour chuckled. "And that one is exactly the right age for her."

"What 'right age'?" Alessan grinned slyly. "Over twelve and not yet buried suits her fine."

"I don't like that," Catriana said primly as the five men laughed.

"Sorry," Alessan said trying to keep a straight face, as she stepped in front of him, hands firmly on her hips.

"You are not at all sorry, but you should be!" Catriana snapped. "You know very well I don't like that kind of talk. How do you think it makes me look? And you only do it when you're idle. Do something useful. Cut Devin's hair. He does look awful, even worse than usual."

"Me?" Devin squeaked in protest. "My hair? What do you mean? It's Baerd, not me! What about him? He's the one who…”

"You all need a haircut," Catriana pronounced with a blunt finality that admitted of no rebuttal. Her cold scrutiny rested critically on Erlein's shaggy mane for a second. She opened her mouth, hesitated, then closed it, in a brilliant miming of polite restraint. Erlein flushed. His right hand went uneasily to tug at his shoulder-length strands.

His left hand never stopped playing restlessly with some pebbles he'd gathered by the stream.

"I think," Devin said spitefully, "that you've just insulted our guest. That should make him feel properly welcome here."

"I didn't say a word, Devin," she flared.

"You didn't have to," Erlein said ruefully. "Those magnificent eyes were somewhat less than pleased with what they saw."

"My sister's eyes are almost never pleased with what they see," Alessan grunted. He was crouched beside one of the packs and after a moment's rummaging pulled out a scissors and a comb. "I am fairly obviously being ordered to duty here. There's half an hour of light left. Who's first victim?"

"Me," said Baerd quickly. "You aren't touching me in twilight, I'll tell you that much."

Erlein watched with interest as Alessan led Baerd over to a rock by the stream and proceeded, quite competently, in fact, to trim the other man's hair. Catriana went back to the horses, though not before offering Erlein another quick, enigmatic glance. Sandre stacked the wood for the fire and began skinning the rabbits and the grele, humming tunelessly to himself.

"More wood, lad," he said abruptly to Devin, without looking up. Which was perfect, of course.

Oh, Marian, Devin thought, a heady blend of excitement and pride racing through him. They are all so good.

"Later," was all he said, lounging casually on the ground. "We've got enough for now and I'm next with Alessan."

"No you're not," Alessan called from by the river, picking up Sandre's gambit. "Get the wood, Devin. There isn't enough light to do three of you. I'll cut yours tomorrow, and Erlein's now if he wants. Catriana will just have to endure you looking fearsome for one more night."

"As if a haircut's going to change that!" she called from the other side of the clearing. Erlein and Baerd laughed.

Grumbling, Devin stood up and ambled off toward the trees.

Behind him he heard Erlein's voice.

"I'd be grateful to you," the troubadour was saying to Alessan. "I'd hate to have another woman look at me the way your sister just did."

"Ignore her," Devin heard Baerd laugh as he strode back toward the fire.

"She is impossible to ignore," Erlein said in a voice pitched to carry to where the horses were tethered. He stood up and walked over to the riverbank. He sat down on the rock in front of Alessan. The sun was a red disk, westering beyond the stream.

Carrying an armful of wood, Devin looped quietly around in the growing shadows to where Catriana stood among the horses. She heard him come up but continued brushing the brown mare. Her eyes never left the two men by the river.

Neither did Devin's. Squinting into the setting sun it seemed to him as if Alessan and the troubadour had become figures in some timeless landscape. Their voices carried with an unnatural clarity in the quiet of the gathering twilight.

"When was this last done for you?" he heard Alessan ask casually, his scissors busy in the long grey tangles of Erlein's hair.

"I don't even remember," the troubadour confessed.

"Well," Alessan laughed, bending to wet his comb in the stream, "on the road we don't exactly have to keep up with court fashions. Tilt a little this way. Yes, good. Do you brush it across in front or straight back?"

"Back, by preference."

"Fine." Alessan's hands moved up to the crown of Erlein's head, the scissors flashing as they caught the last of the sun. "That's an old-fashioned look, but troubadours are supposed to look old-fashioned, aren't they? Part of the charm. You are bound by Adaon 's name and my own. I am Alessan, Prince of Tigana, and wizard you are mine!"

Devin took an involuntary step forward. He saw Erlein try, reflexively, to jerk away. But the hand of binding held his head, and the scissors, so busy a moment before, were now sharp against his throat. They froze him for an instant and an instant was enough.

"Rot your flesh!" Erlein screamed as Alessan released him and stepped back. The wizard sprang from the stone as if scalded, and wheeled to face the Prince. His face was contorted with rage.

Fearing for Alessan, Devin began moving toward the river, reaching for his blade. Then he saw that Baerd had an arrow already notched to his bow, and trained on Erlein's heart. Devin slowed his rush and then stopped. Sandre was right beside him, the curved sword drawn. He caught a glimpse of the Duke's dark face and in it, though he couldn't be absolutely sure in the uncertain light, he thought he read fear.

He turned back to the two men by the river. Alessan had laid down the scissors and comb neatly on the rock. He stood still, hands at his sides, but his breath was coming quickly.

Erlein was literally shaking with fury. Devin looked at him and it was as if a curtain had been drawn back. In the wizard's eyes hatred and terror vied for domination. His mouth worked spasmodically. He raised his left hand and pointed it at Alessan in a gesture of violent negation.

And Devin saw, quite clearly now, that his third and fourth fingers had indeed been chopped off. The ancient mark of a wizard's binding to his magic and the Palm.

"Alessan?" Baerd said.

"It is all right. He cannot do anything with his power now against my will." Alessan's voice was quiet, almost detached, as if this was all happening to someone else entirely. Only then did Devin realize that the wizard's gesture had been an attempt to cast a spell. Magic. He had never thought to be so near it in his life. The skin prickled at the back of his neck, and not because of the twilight breeze.

Slowly Erlein lowered his hand and slowly his trembling stopped. "Triad curse you," he said, low and cold. "And curse the bones of your ancestors and blight the lives of your children and your children's children for what you have done to me." It was the voice of someone wronged, brutally, grievously.

Alessan did not flinch or turn away. "I was cursed almost nineteen years ago, and my ancestors were, and whatever children I or any of my people might have. It is a curse I have set my life to undo while time yet allows. For no other reason have I bound you to me."

There was something terrible in Erlein's face. "Every true Prince of Tigana," the wizard said with bitter intensity, "has known since the beginning how awful a gift the god gave them. How savage a power over a free, a living soul. Do you even know…” He was forced to stop, white-faced, his hands clenched, to regain control of himself. "Do you even know how seldom this gift has been used."

"Twice," Alessan said calmly. "Twice, to my knowledge. The old books recorded it so, though I fear all the books have been burned now."

"Twice!" Erlein echoed, his voice skirling upwards. "Twice in how many generations stretching back to the dawn of records in this peninsula? And you, a puling princeling without even a land to rule have just casually, viciously, set your hands upon my life!"

"Not casually. And only because I have no home. Because Tigana is dying and will be lost if I do not do something."

"And what part of that little speech gives you rights over my life and death?"

"I have a duty," Alessan replied gravely. "I must use what tools come to hand."

"I am not a tool!" Erlein cried from the heart. "I am a free and living soul with my own destiny!"

Watching Alessan's face Devin saw how that cry shafted into him. For a long moment there was silence by the river. Devin saw the Prince draw air into his lungs carefully, as if steadying himself under yet another burden, a new weight joined to those he already carried. Another part added to the price of his blood.

"I will not lie and say that I am sorry," Alessan said finally, choosing his words with care. "I have dreamt of finding a wizard for too many years. I will say, and this is true, that I understand what you have said and why you will hate me, and I can tell you that I grieve for what necessity demands."

"It demands nothing!" Erlein replied, shrill and unrelenting in his righteousness. "We are free men. There is always a choice."

"Some choices are closed to some of us." It was, surprisingly, Sandre.

He moved forward to stand a little in front of Devin. "And some men must make choices for those who cannot, whether through lack of will or lack of power." He walked nearer to the other two, by the dark, quiet rushing of the stream. "Just as we may choose not to slay the man who is trying to kill our child, so Alessan may have chosen not to bind a wizard who might be needed by his people. His children. Neither refusal, Erlein di Senzio, is a true alternative for anyone with honor."

"Honor!" Erlein spat the word. "And how does honor bind a man of Senzio to Tigana's fate? What Prince compels a free man to a sure death at his side and then speaks of honor?" He shook his head. "Call it naked power and have done."

"I will not," the Duke replied in his deep voice. It was quite dark now; Devin could no longer see his hooded eyes. From behind them all he heard the sounds of Baerd beginning to light the fire. Overhead the first stars were emerging in the blue-black cloak of the sky. Away west, across the stream, there was a last hint of crimson along the line of the horizon.

"I will not," Sandre said again. "The honor of a ruler, and his duty, lies in his care for his land and his people. That is the only true measure. And the price, part of the price of that, comes when he must go against his own soul's needs and do such things that will grieve him to the very bones of his hands. Such things," he added softly, "as the Prince of Tigana has just done to you."

But Erlein's voice shot back, unpersuaded, contemptuous. "And how," he snarled, "does a bought sword from Khardhun presume to use the word honor or to speak about the burdens of a prince?" He wanted the words to hurt, Devin could see, but what came through in the inflections of his voice was the sound of someone lost and afraid.

There was a silence. Behind them the fire caught with a rush, and the orange glow spun outward, illuminating Erlein's taut rage and Sandre's gaunt, dark face, the bones showing in high relief. Beyond them both, Devin saw, Alessan had not moved at all.

Sandre said, "The Khardhu warriors I have known were deeply versed in honor. But I will claim no credit for that. Be not deceived: I am no Khardhu. My name is Sandre d'Astibar, once Duke of that province. I know a little about power."

Erlein's mouth fell open.

"I am also a wizard," Sandre added matter-of-factly. "Which is how you were known: by the thin spell you use to mask your hand."

Erlein closed his mouth. He stared fixedly at the Duke as if seeking to penetrate his disguise or find confirmation in the deep-hooded eyes. Then he glanced downwards, almost against his will.

Sandre already had the fingers of his left hand spread wide. All five fingers.

"I never made the final binding," he said. "I was twelve years old when my magic found me. I was also the son and heir of Tellani, Duke of Astibar. I made my choice: I turned my back on magic and embraced the rule of men. I used my very small power perhaps five times in my life. Or six," he amended. "Once, very recently."

"Then there was a conspiracy against the Barbadian," Erlein murmured, his rage temporarily set aside as he wrestled with this. "And then… yes, of course. What did you do? Kill your son in the dungeon?"

"I did." The voice was level, giving nothing away at all.

"You could have cut two fingers and brought him out."

"Perhaps."

Devin looked over sharply at that, startled.

"I don't know. I made my choice long ago, Erlein di Senzio." And with those quiet words another shape of pain seemed to enter the clearing, almost visible at the edges of the firelight.

Erlein forced a corrosive laugh. "And a fine choice it was!" he mocked. "Now your Dukedom is gone and your family as well, and you've been bound as a slave wizard to an arrogant Tiganese. How happy you must be!"

"Not so," said Alessan quickly from by the river.

"I am here by my own choice," Sandre said softly. "Because Tigana's cause is Astibar's and Senzio's and Chiara's, it is the same for all of us. Do we die as willing victims or while trying to be free? Do we skulk as you have done all these years, hiding from the sorcerers? Or can we not join palm to palm, for once in this folly-ridden peninsula of warring provinces locked into their pride, and drive the two of them away?"

Devin was deeply stirred. The Duke's words rang in the firelit dark like a challenge to the night. But when he ended, the sound they heard was Erlein di Senzio clapping sardonically.

"Wonderful," he said contemptuously. "You really must remember that for when you find an army of simpletons to rally. You will forgive me if I remain unmoved by speeches about freedom tonight. Before the sun went down I was a free man on an open road. I am now a slave."

"You were not free," Devin burst out.

"And I say I was!" Erlein snapped, rounding fiercely on him. "There may have been laws that constrained me, and one government ruling where I might have wished for another. But the roads are safer now than they ever were when this man ruled in Astibar or that one's father in Tigana, and I carried my life where I wanted to go. You will all have to forgive my insensitivity if I say that Brandin of Ygrath's spell on the name of Tigana was not the first and last thought of my days!"

"We will," Alessan said then in an unnaturally flat voice. "We will all forgive you for that. Nor will we seek to persuade you to change your views now. I will tell you this, though: the freedom you speak of will be yours again when Tigana's name is heard in the world once more. It is my hope, vain, perhaps, that you will work with us willingly in time, but until then I can say that the compulsion of Adaon's gift will suffice me. My father died, and my brothers died by the Deisa, and the flower of a generation with them, fighting for freedom. I have not lived so bitterly or striven so long to hear a coward belittle the shattering of a people and their heritage."

"Coward!" Erlein exclaimed. "Rot you, you arrogant princeling! What would you know about it?"

"Only what you have told us yourself," Alessan replied, grimly now. "Safer roads, you said. One government where you might have wished for another." He took a step toward Erlein as if he would strike the man, his composure finally beginning to break. "You have been the worst thing I know, a willing subject of two tyrants. Your idea of freedom is exactly what has let them conquer us, and then hold us. You called yourself free? You were only free to hide… and to soil your breeches if a sorcerer or one of their Trackers came within ten miles of your little screening spell. You were free to walk past death-wheels with your fellow wizards rotting on them, and free to turn your back and continue on your way. Not anymore, Erlein di Senzio. By the Triad, you are in it now! You are in it as deep as any man in the Palm! Hear my first command: you are to use your magic to conceal your fingers exactly as before."

"No," said Erlein flatly.

Alessan said nothing more. He waited. Devin saw the Duke take a half-step towards the two of them and then stop himself. He remembered that Sandre had not believed that this was possible.

Now he saw. They all saw, by the light of the stars and the fire Baerd had made.

Erlein fought. Understanding next to nothing, unnerved by almost all that was happening, Devin gradually became aware that a horrible struggle was taking place within the wizard. It could be read in his rigid, straining stance and his gritted teeth, heard in the rasp and wheeze of his shortening breath, seen in tightly closed eyes and the suddenly clenched fingers at his sides.

"No," Erlein gasped, once and then again and again, with more effort each time. "No, no, no!" He dropped to his knees as if felled like a tree. His head bent slowly downward. His shoulders hunched as if resisting some overmastering assault. They began to shake with erratic spasms. His whole body was trembling.

"No," he said again in a high, cracked whisper. His hands spread open, pressing flat against the ground. In the red firelight his face was a mask of staring agony. Sweat poured down it in the chill of night. His mouth suddenly gaped open.

Devin looked away in pity and terror just before the wizard's scream ripped the night apart. In the same moment Catriana took two quick running steps and buried her head against Devin's shoulder.

That cry of pain, the scream of a tormented animal, hung in the air between fire and stars for what seemed an appallingly long time.

Afterwards Devin became aware of the intensity of the silence, broken only by the occasional crackle of the fire, the river's soft murmur, and Erlein di Senzio's choked, ragged breathing.

Without speaking Catriana straightened and released her grip on Devin's arm. He glanced at her but she didn't meet his eye. He turned back to the wizard.

Erlein was still on his knees before Alessan in the new spring grass by the riverbank. His body still shook, but with weeping now. When he lifted his head Devin could see the tracks of tears and sweat and the staining mud from his hands. Slowly Erlein raised his left hand and stared at it as if it was something alien that didn't even belong to him. They all saw what had happened, or the illusion of what had happened.

Five fingers. He had cast the spell.

An owl suddenly called, short and clear from north along the river, nearer to the trees. Devin became aware of a change in the sky. He looked up. Blue Ilarion, waning back to a crescent, had risen in the east. Ghostlight, Devin thought, and wished he hadn't.

"Honor!" Erlein di Senzio said, scarcely audible.

Alessan had not moved since giving his command. He looked down on the wizard he had bound and said, quietly, "I did not enjoy that, but I suppose we needed to go through it. Once will be enough, I hope. Shall we eat?"

He walked past Devin and the Duke and Catriana to where Baerd was waiting by the fire. The meat was already cooking. Caught in a vortex of emotion, Devin saw the searching look Baerd gave Alessan. He turned back in time to see Sandre reaching out a hand to help Erlein rise.

For a long moment Erlein ignored him, then, with a sigh, he grasped the Duke's forearm and pulled himself erect.

Devin followed Catriana back toward the fire. He heard the two wizards coming after them.

Dinner passed in near silence. Erlein took his plate and glass and went to sit alone on the rock by the stream at the very farthest extent of the fire's glow. Looking over at his dark outline, Sandre murmured that a younger man would very likely have refused to eat. "He's a survivor that one," the Duke added. "Any wizard who's lasted this long has to be."

"Will he be all right then," Catriana asked softly. "With us?"

"I think so," Sandre answered, sipping his wine. He turned to Alessan. "He'll try to run away tonight though."

"I know," the Prince said.

"Do we stop him?" It was Baerd.

Alessan shook his head. "Not you. I will. He cannot leave me unless I let him. If I call he must return. I have him… tethered to my mind. It is a queer feeling."

Queer indeed, Devin thought. He looked from the Prince to the dark figure by the river. He couldn't even imagine what this must feel like. Or rather, he could almost imagine it, and the sensation disturbed him.

He became aware that Catriana was looking at him and he turned to her. This time she didn't look away. Her expression, too, was strange; Devin realized she must be feeling the same edginess and sense of unreality that he was. He suddenly remembered, vividly, the feel of her head against his shoulder an hour ago. At the time he'd hardly registered the fact, so intent had he been on Erlein. He tried to smile reassuringly, but he didn't think he managed it.

"Troubadour, you promised us harp music!" Sandre called out abruptly. The wizard in the darkness didn't respond. Devin had forgotten about that. He didn't feel much like singing and he didn't think Catriana did either.

So, in the event, what happened was that Alessan expressionlessly claimed his Tregean pipes and began to make music alone beside the fire.

He played beautifully, with a pared-down economy of sound, melodies so sweetly offered that Devin, in his current mood, could almost imagine Eanna's stars and the blue crescent of the one moon pausing in their movements overhead so as not to have to wheel inexorably away from the grace of that music.

Then a short while later Devin realized what Alessan was doing and he felt, abruptly, as if he was going to cry. He held himself very still, to keep control, and he looked at the Prince across the red and orange of the flames.

Alessan's eyes were closed as he played, his lean face seemed almost hollowed out, the cheekbones showing clearly. And into the sounds he made he seemed to pour, as from a votive temple bowl, both the yearning that drove him, and the decency and care that Devin knew lay at the root of him. But that wasn't it, that wasn't what was making Devin want to cry: Every song that Alessan was playing, every single tune, achingly high and sweet, heartbreakingly clear, one after another, was a song from Senzio.

A song for Erlein di Senzio, cloaked in bitterness and the shadows of night by the riverbank alone.

I will not say I am sorry, Alessan had told the wizard as the sun had set. But I can tell you that I grieve.

And the night, listening to the music the Prince of Tigana made upon his pipes, Devin learned the diiference between the two. He watched Alessan, and then he watched the others as they looked at the Prince, and it was when he was gazing at Baerd that the need to weep did grow too strong. His own griefs rose to the call of the mountain pipes. Grief for Alessan and overmastered Erlein. For Baerd and his haunted night walking. For Sandre and his ten fingers and his dead son. For Catriana and himself, all their generation, rootless and cut off from what they were in a world without a home. For all the myriad accumulations of loss and what men and women had to do in order to seek redress.

Catriana went to the baggage and she opened and poured another bottle of wine. The third glass. And as always, it was blue. She filled Devin's glass in silence. She'd scarcely spoken a word all night, but he felt closer to her than he had in a long time. He drank slowly, watching the cold smoke rise from his glass and drift away in the cool night. The stars overhead were like icy points of fire and the moon was as blue as the wine and as far away as freedom, or a home.

Devin finished his glass and put it down. He reached for his blanket and lay down himself, wrapping it around him. He found himself thinking about his father and of the twins for the first time in a long time.

A few moments later Catriana lay down not far away. Usually she spread her sleeping-roll and blanket on the far side of the fire from where he was, next to the Duke. Devin was wise enough now to know that there was a certain kind of reaching out in what she did, and that tonight might even mark a chance to begin the healing of what lay badly between them, but he was too drained to know what to do or say among all these complicated sorrows.

He said good-night to her, softly, but she did not reply. He wasn't sure if she'd heard him, but he didn't say it again. He closed his eyes. A moment later he opened them again, to look at Sandre across the fire. The Duke was gazing steadily into the flames. Devin wondered what he saw there. He wondered, but he didn't really want to know, Erlein was a shadow, a darker place in the world against the dark by the riverbank. Devin lifted himself on one elbow to look for Baerd, but Baerd had gone away, to walk alone in the night.

Alessan hadn't moved, or opened his eyes. He was still playing, lonely and high and sorrowful, when Devin fell asleep.

He woke to Baerd's firm hand on his shoulder. It was still dark and quite cold now. The fire had been allowed to die to ember and ash. Catriana and the Duke were still asleep, but Alessan was standing behind Baerd. He looked pale but composed. Devin wondered if he'd gone to bed at all.

"I need your help," Baerd murmured. "Come."

Shivering, Devin rolled out of his blankets and began pulling on his boots. The moon was down. He looked east but there was no sign of dawn along the horizon. It was very still. Sleepily he shrugged into the woolen vest Alais had sent him by way of Taccio in Ferraut. He had no idea how long he'd been asleep or what time it was.

He finished dressing and went to relieve himself in the trees by the river. His breath smoked in the frosty air. Spring was coming, but it wasn't quite here yet, not in the middle of the night. The sky was brilliantly clear and full of stars. It would be a beautiful day later when the sun came. Right now he shivered, and did up the drawstrings of his breeches.

Then he realized that he hadn't seen Erlein anywhere.

"What happened?" he whispered to Alessan as he returned to the camp. "You said you could call him back."

"I did," the Prince said shortly. Standing closer Devin could see now how weary he looked. "He fought it so hard that he passed out just now. Somewhere out there." He gestured south and west.

"Come on," Baerd said again. "Bring your sword."

They had to cross the stream. The icy cold water drove all the sleep out of Devin. He gasped with the shock of it.

"I'm sorry," Baerd said. "I'd have done it alone, but I don't know how far away he is or what else is out here in this country. Alessan wants him back in camp before he revives. It made sense to have two men."

"No, no, that's fine," Devin protested. His teeth were chattering.

"I suppose I could have woken the old Duke from his rest. Or Catriana could have helped me."

"What? No, really, Baerd. I'm fine. I'm…”

He stopped, because Baerd was laughing at him. Belatedly Devin caught on to the teasing. It warmed him in a curious way. This way, in fact, the first time he'd ever been out alone in the night with Baerd. He chose to see it as another level of trust, of welcoming. Little by little he was beginning to feel more of a part of what Alessan and Baerd had been trying to achieve for so many years. He straightened his shoulders and, walking as tall as he could, followed Baerd west into the darkness.

They found Erlein di Senzio at the edge of a cluster of olive trees on a slope, about an hour's walk from the camp. Devin swallowed awkwardly when he saw what had happened. Baerd whistled softly between his teeth; it wasn't a pretty sight.

Erlein was unconscious. He had tied himself to one of the tree-trunks and appeared to have knotted the rope at least a dozen times. Bending down, Baerd held up the wizard's waterflask. It was empty: Erlein had soaked the knots to tighten them. His pack and his knife lay together on the ground, a deliberate distance out of reach.

The rope was frayed and tangled. It looked as if a number of knots had been undone, but five or six still held.

"Look at his fingers," Baerd said grimly. He drew his dagger and began cutting the rope.

Erlein's hands were shredded into raw strips. Dried blood covered both of them. It was brutally clear what had happened. He had tried to make it impossible for himself to yield to Alessan's summons. What had he hoped for, Devin wondered. That the Prince would assume he had somehow escaped and would therefore forget about him?

Devin doubted, in fact, if what Erlein had done carried any such weight of rational thought. It was defiance, pure and simple, and one had to acknowledge, not even grudgingly, the ferocity of it. He helped Baerd cut through the last of the bonds. Erlein was breathing, but showed no signs of consciousness. His pain must have been devastating, Devin realized, with a flashing memory of the wizard beaten to his knees and screaming by the river. He wondered what screams the night had heard, here in this wild and lonely place.

He felt an awkward mixture of respect and pity and anger as he gazed down at the grey-haired troubadour. Why was he making this so hard for them? Why forcing Alessan to shoulder so much more pain of his own?

Unfortunately, he knew some of the answers to that, and they were not comforting.

"Will he try to kill himself?" he asked Baerd abruptly.

"I don't think so. As Sandre said, this one is a survivor. I don't think he'll do this again. He had to run once, to test the limits of what would happen to him. I would have done the same thing." He hesitated. "I didn't expect the rope though."

Devin took Erlein's pack and gear and Baerd's bow and quiver and sword. Baerd slung the unconscious wizard over his shoulder with a grunt and they started back east. It was slower going back. On the horizon in front of them when they reached the stream the first grey of false dawn was showing, dimming the glow of the late-rising stars.

The others were up and waiting for them. Beard laid Erlein down by the fire, Sandre had it burning again. Devin dropped the gear and weapons and went back to the river with a basin for water. When he returned Catriana and the Duke began cleaning and wrapping Erlein's mangled hands. They had opened his shirt and turned up the sleeves, revealing angry weals where he had writhed against the ropes in his struggle to be free.

Or is that backwards, Devin thought grimly. Wasn't the binding of the rope his real struggle to be free? He looked over and saw Ales-san gazing down at Erlein. He could read absolutely nothing in the Prince's expression.

The sun rose, and shortly after that Erlein woke.

They could see him register where he was.

"Khav?" Sandre asked him casually. The five of them were sitting by the fire, eating breakfast, drinking from steaming mugs. The light from the east was a pale, delicate hue, a promise. It glinted and sparkled on the water of the stream and turned the budding leaves green-gold on the trees. The air was filled with birdsong and the leap and splash of trout in the stream.

Erlein sat up slowly and looked at them. Devin saw him become aware of the bandages on his hands. Erlein glanced over at the saddled horses and the two carts, packed and ready for the road.

His gaze swung back and steadied on Alessan's face. The two men, so improbably bound, looked at each other without speaking. Then Alessan smiled. A smile Devin knew. It opened his stern face to warmth and lit the slate-grey of his eyes.

"Had I known," Alessan said, "that you hated Tregean pipes quite that much I honestly wouldn't have played them."

A moment later, horribly, Erlein di Senzio began to laugh. There was no joy in that sound, nothing infectious, nothing to be shared. His eyes were squeezed shut and tears welled out of them, pouring down his face.

No one else spoke or moved. It lasted for a long time. When Erlein had finally composed himself he wiped his face on his sleeve, careful of his bandaged hands and looked at Alessan again. He opened his mouth, about to speak, and then closed it again.

"I know," Alessan said quietly to him. "I do know."

"Khav?" Sandre said again, after a moment.

This time Erlein accepted a mug, cradling it awkwardly in both muffled hands. Not long after they broke camp and started south again.

Chapter 10

FIVE DAYS LATER, ON THE EVE OF THE EMBER DAYS OF SPRING, they came to Castle Borso.

All that last afternoon as they moved south Devin had been watching the mountains. Any child raised in the watery lowlands of Asoli could not help but be awed by the towering southland ranges: the Braccio here in Certando, the Parravi east towards Tregea and, though he'd never seen them, the rumor of the snow-clad Sfaroni, highest of all, over west where Tigana once had been.

It was late in the day. Far to the north on that same afternoon Isolla of Ygrath lay dead and dismembered under a bloody sheet in the Audience Chamber of the palace on Chiara.

The sun setting behind a thrust spur of the mountains dyed the peaks to burgundy and red and a somber purple hue. On the very highest summits the snow still shone and dazzled in the last of the light. Devin could just make out the line of the Braccio Pass as it came down: one of the three fabled passes that had linked, in some seasons, and never easily, the Peninsula of the Palm with Quileia to the south.

In the old days, before the Matriarchy had taken deep root in Quileia there had been trade across the mountains, and the brooding piety of the springtime Ember Days had also presaged a quickening and stir of commercial life with the promise of the passes opening again. The towns and fortress-castles here in the southern highlands had been vibrant and vital then. Well-defended too, because where a trade caravan could cross, so could an army. But no King of Quileia had ever been secure enough on his throne to lead an army north; not with the High Priestesses standing by at home to see him fail or fall. Here in Certando the private armies had mostly bloodied their blades and arrows against each other, in savage southland feuds that ranged over generations and became the stuff of legend.

And then the Quileian Matriarchy had come to power after all, in the time of Achis and Pasitheia, several hundred years ago. Quileia under the priestesses had folded inward upon itself like a flower at dusk and the caravans ended.

The southland cities dwindled into villages, or, if flexible and energetic enough, they changed their character and turned their faces northward and to other things, as Avalle of the Towers had done in Tigana. Here in the Certandan highlands the mighty lords who had once held glittering court in their huge warlike castles became living anachronisms. Their forays and battles with each other, once integral to the flow of events in the Palm, became more and more inconsequential, though not the less bitter or vicious for that.

To Devin, touring with Menico di Ferraut, it had sometimes seemed that every second ballad they sang was of some lord or younger son pursued by enemies among these crags; or of ill-fated southland lovers divided by the hatred of their fathers; or of the bloody deeds of those fathers, untamed as hawks in their stern high castles among these foothills of the Braccio.

And of those ballads, whether wild with battle and blood and villages set afire, or lamenting parted lovers drowning themselves in silent pools hidden in the misty hills, of all those songs, half again, it seemed to Devin, were of the Borso clan and set in and around the massive, piled, grim splendor of Castle Borso hard under Braccio Pass.

There hadn't been any new ballads for a long time, very few in fact since the Quileian caravans had stopped. But of fresh stories and rumors there had been many in the past two decades. A great many. In her own particular way, and in her own lifetime, Alienor of Castle Borso had already become a legend among the men and women of the road.

And if these newer stories were about love, as so many of the older songs had been, they had little to do with anguished youth bewailing fate on windswept crags, and rather more to tell about certain changes within Castle Borso itself. About deep woven carpets and tapestries, about imported silk and lace and velvet, and profoundly disconcerting works of art in rooms that had once seen hard men plan midnight raids at trestle-tables, while unruly hunting dogs had fought for flung bones among the rushes of the floor.

Riding beside Erlein in the second cart, Devin dragged his gaze away from the last shining of light on the peaks and looked at the castle they were nearing. Tucked into a fold of hills, with a moat around it and a small village just beyond, Borso was already in shadow. Even as he watched, Devin saw lights being lit in the windows. The last lights until the end of the Ember Days.

"Alienor is a friend," was all that Alessan had volunteered. "An old friend."

That much, at least, was evident from the greeting she gave him when her seneschal, tall and stooped, with a magnificent white beard, ushered them gravely into the firelit warmth of the Great Hall.

Alessan's color was unusually high when the lady of the castle unlaced her long fingers from his hair and withdrew her lips from his own. She hadn't hurried the encounter. Neither, even more interestingly, had he. Alienor stepped back, smiling a little, to survey his companions.

She favored Erlein with a nod of recognition. "Welcome back, troubadour. Two years, is it?"

"Even so, my lady. I am honored that you remember." Erlein's bow harkened back to an earlier age, to the manner they'd seen before Alessan had bound him.

"You were alone then, I remember. I am pleased to see you now in such splendid company."

Erlein opened his mouth and then closed it without replying. Alienor glanced at Alessan, a fleeting inquiry in her very dark eyes.

Receiving no response she turned to the Duke and the curiosity in her face sharpened. Thoughtfully she laid a finger against her cheek and tilted her head slightly to one side. The disguised Sandre endured her scrutiny impassively.

"Very well done," said Alienor of Borso, softly so the servants and the seneschal by the doors could not hear. "I imagine that Baerd has the whole Palm taking you for a Khardhu. I wonder who you really are, under all of that." Her smile was quite ravishing.

Devin didn't know whether to be impressed or unsettled. An instant later that particular dilemma was rendered irrelevant.

"You don't know?" said Erlein di Senzio loudly. "A terrible oversight. Allow me the introduction. My lady, may I present to you the…”

He got no further.

Devin was the first to react, which surprised him, thinking about it afterwards. He'd always been quick though, and he was closest to the wizard. What he did, the only thing he could think of to do, was pivot sharply and bury his fist as hard as he could in Erlein's belly.

As it was, he was only a fraction of a second ahead of Catriana on Erlein's other side. She had leaped to clap her hand over the wizard's mouth. The force of Devin's blow doubled Erlein over with a grunt of pain. This in turn had the unintended effect of throwing Catriana off balance and stumbling forward. To be smoothly caught and braced by Alienor.

The whole thing had taken perhaps three seconds.

Erlein sank to his knees on the opulent carpet. Devin knelt beside him. He heard Alienor dismissing her servants from the room.

"You are a fool!" Baerd snarled at the wizard.

"He certainly is," Alienor agreed in a rather different tone, all exaggerated petulance and flounce. "Why would anyone think I'd want the burden of knowing the true identity of a disguised Khardhu warrior?" She was still holding Catriana around the waist, quite unnecessarily. Now she let her go, with an amused expression at the girl's rapid retreat.

"You are an impetuous creature, aren't you?" she murmured silkily.

"Not especially," said Catriana hardily, stopping a few feet away.

Alienor's mouth quirked. She looked Catriana up and down with an expert eye. "I am horribly jealous of you," she pronounced at length. "And I would be, even if you had that hair chopped off and those eyes sewn shut. What magnificent men you are traveling with!"

"Are they?" Catriana's voice was indifferent, but her color was suddenly high.

"Are they?" Alienor echoed sharply. "You mean you haven't established that for yourself? Dear child, what have you been doing with your nights? Of course they are! Don't waste your youth, my dear."

Catriana looked at her levelly. "I don't think I am," she said. "But I doubt we'd have the same thoughts on that subject."

Devin winced, but Alienor's answer was mild. "Perhaps not," she agreed, unruffled. "But, in truth, I think the overlap would actually be greater than you imagine." She paused. "You may also find as you get older that ice is for deaths and endings, not for beginnings. Any kind of beginnings. On the other hand, I will ensure," she added, with a smile that was all kindness, "that you have a sufficiency of blankets to keep you warm tonight."

Erlein groaned, dragging Devin's attention away from the two women. He heard Catriana say, "I thank you for your solicitude," but he missed her expression. From the tone he could hazard a guess at what it would be.

He supported Erlein's head as the wizard labored to get his wind back. Alienor simply ignored them. She was greeting Baerd now with a friendly civility, a tone that was cheerfully matched, Devin noted instinctively, by Baerd's own manner towards her.

"I'm sorry," he whispered to Erlein. "I couldn't think of anything else."

Erlein waved a feeble, still-unhealed hand. He'd insisted on removing the bandages before they'd entered the castle. "I'm sorry," he wheezed, surprising Devin considerably. "I forgot about the servants." He wiped his lips with the back of one hand. "I won't achieve much for myself if I get us all killed. Not my idea of freedom, that. Nor, frankly, is this posture my notion of middle-aged dignity. Since you knocked me down you can kindly help me up." For the first time Devin heard a faint note of amusement in the troubadour's voice. A survivor, Sandre had said.

As tactfully as he could he helped the other man stand.

"The extremely violent one," Alessan was saying drily, "is Devin d'Asoli. He also sings. If you are very good he may sing for you."

Devin turned away from Erlein, but perhaps because he'd been distracted by what had just happened he was quite unprepared to deal with the gaze he now encountered.

There is no possible way, he found himself thinking, that this woman is forty years old. He reflexively sketched the performer's bow Menico had taught him, to cover his confusion. She was almost forty and he knew it: Alienor had been widowed two years after she'd been wed, when Cornaro of Borso had died in the Barbadian invasion of Certando. The stories and descriptions of the beautiful widow in her southland castle had begun very shortly after that.

They didn't come even near to catching what she was, what he saw standing before him in a long gown of a blue so deep it was nearly black. Her hair was black, worn high upon her head and held by a diadem of white gold studded with gems. A few tendrils of hair had been artlessly allowed to fall free, framing the perfect oval of her face. Her eyes were indigo, almost violet under the long lashes, and her mouth was full and red and smiling a private smile as she looked at Devin.

He forced himself to meet that look. Doing so, he felt as though all the sluice-gates in his veins had been hurled open and his blood was a river in flood, racing through a steep wild course at an ever-increasing speed. Her smile grew deeper, more private, as if she could actually see that happening inside him, and the dark eyes grew wider for an instant.

"I suppose," said Alienor di Certando, before turning back to Alessan, "that I shall have to try to be very good then, if that will induce you to sing for me."

Her breasts were full and high, Devin saw, could not help but see. The gown was cut very low and a diamond pendant hung against her skin, drawing the eye like a blue-white fire.

He shook his head, fighting to clear it, a little shocked at his own reaction. This was ridiculous, he told himself sternly. He had been overheated by the stories told, his imagination rendered unruly by the opulent, sensuous furnishings in the room. He looked upwards for distraction and then wished he hadn't.

On the ceiling someone not a stranger to the act of love had painted Adaon's primal coupling with Eanna. The face of the goddess was very clearly that of Alienor and the painting showed, just as clearly, that she was in the very moment of rapture when the stars had streamed into being from her ecstasy.

There were indeed stars streaming all across the background of the ceiling fresco. It was, however, difficult to look at the background of the fresco. Devin forced his eyes down. What helped him reclaim his composure was meeting Catriana's glance just then: a mingled look of caustic irony and a second thing he couldn't quite recognize. For all her own splendor and the wild crimson glory of her hair, Catriana looked exceptionally young just then. Almost a child, Devin thought sagely, not yet fully realized or accomplished in her womanhood.

The lady of Castle Borso was complete in what she was, from her sandaled feet to the band in her lustrous hair. Her nails, Devin noticed belatedly, were painted the same blue-black dangerous color as her gown.

He swallowed, and looked away again.

"I expected you yesterday," Alienor was saying to Alessan. "I was waiting for you and I'd made myself beautiful for you but you didn't come."

"Just as well, then," Alessan murmured, smiling. "Had I seen you any more beautiful than you are now I might never have found the strength to leave."

Her mouth curled mischievously. She turned to the others. "You see how the man torments me? Not a quarter of an hour in my home and he speaks of leaving. Am I well served in such a friend?"

The question was addressed, as it happened, directly to Devin. His throat was dry; her glance did disruptive things to the orderly flow of messages from brain to tongue. He essayed a smile, suspecting rather that the expression produced fell somewhere between the fatuous and the imbecilic.

Wine, Devin thought desperately. He was in serious need of an effective glass of something.

As if summoned by an art of timing more subtle than wizardry three servants in blue livery reappeared, each bearing seven glasses on a tray. Two of the trays, Devin saw, bore a red wine that was almost certainly Certandan.

The wine in the third set of glasses was blue.

Devin turned to Alessan. The Prince was looking at Alienor with an expression that spoke to something private and shared far in the past. For a moment her own expression and demeanor altered: as if she had laid aside for an instant the reflexive spinning of her webs of enticement. And Devin, a far more perceptive man than he had been six months before, thought he saw the hint of a sadness in her eyes.

Then she spoke and he was certain that he'd seen it. In some subtle way it calmed him, and shed a different, milder light on the mood in the room.

"It is not a thing I am likely to forget," she said softly to Alessan, gesturing towards the blue wine.

"Nor I," he replied. "Since it began here."

She was silent a moment, eyelids lowered. Then the moment passed. Alienor's eyes were sparkling again when they lifted. "I have the usual collection of letters for you. But one is very recent," she said. "Brought two days ago by a very young priest of Eanna who was terrified of me the whole time he was here. He wouldn't even stay the night though he only arrived at sunset. I swear he rode out so fast he must have feared I'd have his robe off if he lingered for a meal."

"And would you have?" Alessan grinned.

She made a face. "Unlikely. Eanna's sort are seldom worth the trouble. Though he was pretty. Almost as pretty as Baerd, come to think of it."

Baerd, quite unperturbed, simply smiled. Alienor's glance lingered flirtatiously on him. There too, Devin noted. An exchange that spoke to events and things shared a long way back. He felt young suddenly, and out of his depth.

"Where is the new message from?" Alessan asked.

Alienor hesitated. "West," was all she said. She glanced at the rest of them with a veiled question in her eyes.

Alessan noted it. "You may speak freely. I trust every man and woman here." He was careful not to even look at Erlein. Devin did look, but if he'd expected a reaction from the wizard he was disappointed.

With a gesture Alienor dismissed her servants. The old seneschal had already withdrawn to see to the preparation of their rooms. When they were alone Alienor walked over to a writing-table by one of the four blazing fireplaces and claimed a sealed envelope from a drawer. She came back and gave it to Alessan.

"It is from Danoleon himself," she said. "From your own province whose name I cannot yet hear or say."

And that, Devin had not expected at all.

"Forgive me," Alessan murmured. He strode quickly toward the nearest fire, tearing the letter open as he went. Alienor became very busy offering glasses of the red wine. Devin took a long drink from his. Then he noticed that Baerd had not touched his wine and that his gaze was fixed on Alessan across the room. Devin followed the look. The Prince had finished reading. He was standing rigidly, staring into the fire.

"Alessan?" Baerd said.

Alienor turned swiftly at that. Alessan did not move; seemed not to have even heard.

"Alessan?" Baerd said again, more urgently. "What is it?"

Slowly the Prince of Tigana turned from the flames to look at them. Or not really at them, Devin amended inwardly. At Baerd. There was something bleak and cold in his face. Ice is for endings, Devin thought involuntarily.

"It is from Danoleon, I'm afraid. From the Sanctuary." Alessan's voice was flat. "My mother is dying. I will have to start home tomorrow."

Baerd's face had gone as white as Alessan's. "The meeting?" he said. "The meeting tomorrow?"

"That first," Alessan said. "After the meeting, whatever happens, I must ride home."

Given the shock of that news and the impact Alessan's words and manner had on all of them, the knock on Devin's chamber door late that night came as a disorienting surprise.

He had not been asleep. "Wait," he called softly and struggled quickly into his breeches. He pulled a loose shirt on over his head and padded in his stockings across the floor, wincing at the cold of the stones where the carpeting ended. His hair disordered, feeling rumpled and confused, he opened the door.

In the hallway outside, holding a single candle that cast weird, flickering shadows along the corridor wall was Alienor herself.

"Come," was all she said. She did not smile and he could not see her eyes behind the flame. Her robe was a creamy white, lined with fur. It was fastened at the throat but Devin could discern the swell of her breasts beneath. Her hair had been loosened, tumbling over her shoulders and down her back in a black cascade.

Devin hesitated, his mouth dry again, his mind scattered and lagging. He put up a hand to try to straighten the hopeless tangle of his hair.

She shook her head. "Leave it like that," she said. Her free hand with the long dark nails came up and pushed through his brown curls. "Leave it," she said again, and turned.

He followed her. Her and the single candle and the unleashed chaos of his blood down a long corridor then a shorter one, through an angled sequence of empty public rooms then up a curving flight of stairs. At the top of the stairs an orange spill of light came from beyond a pair of open doors. Devin passed through those doors behind the Lady of Castle Borso. He had time to register the blaze of the fire, the rich, intricate hangings on the walls, the profusion of extravagant carpets on the floor, and the huge canopied bed strewn with pillows of all colors and sizes. A lean hunting dog, grey and graceful, regarded him from by the fire but did not rise.

Alienor laid her candle down. She closed the two doors and turned to him, leaning back against the polished wood. Her eyes were enormous, uncannily black. Devin felt his pulse like a hammer. The rush of his blood seemed loud in his veins.

"I am burning up," Alienor said.

Somewhere a part of him, where proportion lived and irony took shape, wanted to protest, even to be amused at such a pronouncement. But as he looked at her he saw the quickening draw of her breathing and how shallow it was, saw the deep flush of her coloring… one of his hands as if of its own will came up and touched her cheek. It was burning hot.

With a sound deep in her throat Alienor trapped his hand with one of her own and sank her teeth in the flesh of his palm.

And with that pain desire was loosed in Devin as it never had been in his life. He heard an oddly distorted sound and realized it had come from him. He took a half-step toward her and she was in his arms. Her fingers locked and twisted in his hair and her mouth met his with an avidness, a hunger that raked the rising fires of his own need to a point where awareness fled and drifted far away.

Everything was gone, or going. Tigana. Alessan, Alais, Catriana. His memories. Memory itself, that was his most sure anchor and his pride. Even the memory of the hallways to this room, the roads and years and rooms, all the other rooms that led to this one. And her.

He tore at the fastenings of her robe and buried his face between her breasts as they spilled free. She gasped, and her hands clawed at his shirt until it came away. He felt her nails tear the skin along his back. He twisted his head and bit her then and tasted blood. He heard her laugh.

Never, ever, had he done such a thing before.

Somehow they seemed to be on the bed among the colored splay of the pillows. And then Alienor was naked above him, impaled on his sex, her mouth descending to his own as the two of them surged together through the arc of an act that strove to cast the world away. As far away as it could be hurled.

For an instant Devin thought he understood. In some unthinking flash of visceral illumination he thought he grasped why Alienor did this. The nature of her need, which was not what it seemed to be. Given another moment, a still place in the firmament, he could have reached out to put a name to it, a frame for the blurred awareness. He reached…

She cried out with her climax. Her hands slid along his skin, curving down. Desire obliterated thought, any straining towards thought. With a racking twist he virtually threw her to one side and swung himself above her, never leaving the warm shelter between her thighs. Cushions scattered around them, fell on the floor. Her eyes were tightly shut, her mouth forming soundless words.

Devin began to drive himself into her as if to drive away all the demons and the hurts, all the brutal deadening truths that were the world of the Palm in their day. His own climax when it came left him shuddering and limp, lost to where he was, only dimly clinging to what he knew to be his name.

He heard her whispering it softly, over and over. She moved gently out from under him. He rolled over on his back, eyes closed. He felt her fingers glide along his skin. He could not move. She was playing with his hands, caressing and guiding them out from his sides. Her lips and fingers danced down his chest and belly, over his satiated sex and further down, exploring along his thighs and legs, and down.

By the time he was aware of what she'd done he was bound hand and foot to the four posts of her bed, spreadeagled beneath her. His eyes flew open, startled and alarmed. He struggled. Uselessly, he was held in bonds of silk looped and knotted.

"That," said Alienor in a husky voice, "was a wonderful beginning to a night. Shall I teach you something now?" She reached, naked and magnificent, flushed and scored with his marks upon her, and brought something up from the floor beside the bed. His eyes grew wide when he saw what it was she held.

"You are binding me against my will," Devin said, a little desperately. "This is not my idea of how to come together in love." He twisted hard again, at shoulder and hip; the silken bonds held firm.

Alienor's answering smile was luminous. She was more beautiful in that moment than he could ever have imagined a woman being. In the huge dark pools of her eyes something stirred, primal and dangerous and terrifyingly arousing. He felt, improbably soon, a quickening in his sex. She saw it. Her smile deepened. One long fingernail stroked lightly, almost meditatively along his gathering tumescence.

"It will be," murmured his dark lady, the Lady of Castle Borso. Her lips parted showing the sharp white teeth behind. He registered the taut firmness of her nipples as she opened her legs to straddle him again. He saw her caress what she had claimed from the carpet by the bed. Beyond her, by the fire, the wolfhound had its handsome head raised, watching them.

"It will be," Alienor said again. "Trust me. Let me teach you now, and show you, this, and then this, and soon it will be your idea of how to come together. Oh yes, Devin, it will be very soon."

She moved upon his body and the candlelight was deflected and then hidden as she came down over him. He struggled but only for a moment for his heart was pounding again and desire was overwhelmingly upon him, just as Alienor was, just as her own complex needs could be seen rising in her again, in the darkness of her eyes before they closed, in her movements above him, and in the ragged, reaching, upward straining of her breath.

And before the night was over, before the half of it had passed, with the last candles of winter burning down, she had proven herself right, terribly, over and over again. And at the end even, she was the one who lay bound and open between the four pillars of the world that was her bed and Devin was no longer quite sure of who he was that he should be doing to her the things he was. The things that made her whisper and then cry aloud his name as she did, over and again. But he did know that she had changed him and had found a place within him where his need to seek oblivion was equal to her own.

The candle on his side of the bed burned out some time later. There was a small, scented drifting of smoke. The pattern of light and shade in the room changed; neither of them was asleep, they both noticed it. The fire was down to its embers; the dog still lay before it, its magnificent head stretched out on its paws.

"You had better go," Alienor said, stroking his near shoulder absently. "While there's a candle for you to carry. It is easy to lose your way in the dark."

"You observe the Ember Days?" he asked, a little surprised at such piety. "No fires?"

"No fires," she said ruefully. "Half my household staff would leave me, and I don't even want to guess at what the tenant farmers or the villagers would do. Storm the castle. Call down some ancient curse with ears of corn soaked in blood. These are the southern highlands, Devin, they take their rites seriously up here."

"As seriously as you take yours?"

She smiled at that and stretched like a cat. "I suppose so. The fanners will do things tonight and tomorrow that I prefer not to know about." With a sinuous motion she curled downwards towards the foot of the bed and reached for something on the carpet by the bedposts. Her body was a smooth, candlelit curve of white flesh, with the marks he had made on her still showing red.

She straightened and handed him his breeches. It felt abrupt, a dismissal, and Devin gave her a long stare, not moving. She met the look, but her eyes were neither hard nor dismissive.

"Don't be angry," Alienor said softly. "You were too splendid to be leaving in anger. I'm telling you truths: I do observe the Ember rites and it is hard to find your way back without a light." She hesitated a moment, then added, "And I have always slept alone since my husband died."

Devin said nothing. He rose and dressed. His shirt he found halfway between the bed and the doors. It was shredded so badly it should have been amusing. He wasn't amused though. In fact, he was angry, or some feeling beyond anger, or beside it, a more complex thing. Lying naked and uncovered among the scattered pillows of her bed, Alienor watched him clothe himself. He looked at her, marveling still at her feline magnificence and even, despite the change of mood, even aware of how easy it would be for her to stir his desire again.

But as he gazed at her a dormant thought surfaced from wherever thought had been driven in the primitive frenzy of the last few hours. He arranged the shirt as best he could and walked over to claim one of the candles in a brass holder.

She had turned on her side to follow his movements, her head now resting on one hand, the black hair tumbling about her, her body offered to his sight as a gift, a glory in the shifting light. Her eyes were wide and direct, her smile generous, even kind.

"Good-night," she said. "I don't know whether you know it, but you are welcome back should you choose to come one day."

He hadn't expected that. He knew, without having to be told, that she was honoring him with this. But his thought, his disquiet from before was strong now and intermingled with other images, so that, although he smiled in return and nodded, it was neither pride nor honor that he felt.

"Good-night," he said and turned to go.

At the doors he stopped and, as much because he had remembered Alessan saying that the blue wine had begun with her as for any other single reason that he knew, then or later, Devin turned back to her. She had not moved. He looked, drinking in the opulence of the chamber and the proffered beauty of the woman on the bed. Even as he stood there another candle died on the far side of the room.

"Is this what happens to us?" Devin said then, quietly, reaching for words to frame this new, hard thought. "When we are no longer free. Is this what happens to our love?"

He could see her eyes change, even from this distance and in this wavering of light and dark. For a long time she looked back at him.

"You are clever," she said finally. "Alessan has chosen well in you."

He waited.

"Ah!" said Alienor throatily, simulating astonishment. "He actually wants an answer. A true answer from a lady in her castle at the edge of the world." It may have been a trick of the uncertain light, but she seemed to look away then, beyond where Devin stood, even beyond the tapestried walls of her room.

"It is one of the things that happens to us," she said at last. "A kind of insurrection in the dark that somehow stands against the laws of day that bind us and cannot be broken now."

Devin thought about it.

"Possibly that," he agreed softly, working it through. "Or else an admission somewhere in the soul that we deserve no more than this, nothing that goes deeper. Since we are not free and have accepted that."

He saw her flinch then, and close her eyes.

"Did I deserve that?" she asked.

A terrible sadness passed over Devin. He swallowed with some difficulty. "No," he said. "No, you didn't."

Her eyes were still closed when he left the room.

He felt heavy and burdened, beyond merely tired; laden with the weight of his thoughts, slowed by them. He stumbled going down the stairwell and had to fling out his free hand to brace himself against the stone wall. The motion left the candle unguarded and it went out.

It was very dark then. The castle was utterly still. Moving carefully, Devin reached the bottom of the stairs and he put the spent flame down on a ledge there. At intervals, high in the walls, tall thin windows let slanting moonlight fall across the corridor but the angle and the hour did not allow for any real illumination.

Briefly he considered going back for another candle but then, after standing still a moment to let his eyes adjust, Devin set out along what he thought to be the way they had come.

He was lost very soon, though not really alarmed. In his present mood there seemed to be something apposite about padding thus silently down the darkened hallways of this ancient highland castle in the dead of night, the stones cold against his feet.

There are no wrong turnings. Only paths we had not known we were meant to walk,

Who had told him that? The words had come unbidden to his mind from some recess of memory. He turned into an unfamiliar corridor and passed through a long room hung with paintings. Part of the way through, he found a voice for the words: it had been the old priest of Morian at the goddess's temple by his family's farm in Asoli. He had taught the twins and then Devin how to read and do sums, and when it appeared that the youngest boy, the small one, could sing he had given Devin his first lessons in the rudiments of harmony.

No wrong turnings, Devin thought again. And then, with a shiver he could not suppress, he remembered that this was not just the nadir of a night, it was the end of winter, the first of the Ember Days, when the dead were said to walk abroad.

The dead. Who were his dead? Marra. His mother, whom he had never known. Tigana? Could a country, a province, be said to have died? Could it be lost and mourned like a living soul? He thought of the Barbadian he had slain in the Nievolene barn.

He did quicken his pace then, over the dark, sporadically moonlit stones of the vast and silent castle.

It seemed to Devin that he walked for an endless time, or a time outside of time, passing no one, hearing nothing save for his own breathing or the soft tread of his feet, before he finally recognized a statue in an alcove. He had admired it by torchlight earlier in the evening. He knew his room was just ahead and around a corner to the right. Somehow he had come entirely the wrong way along the whole far wing of Castle Borso.

He also knew, from earlier in the evening, that the room directly opposite the small fine statue of the bearded archer drawing a bow, was Catriana's.

He looked up and down the corridor but saw only greater and lesser shadows among the bands of white moonlight falling from above. He listened, and heard no sound. If the dead were abroad they were silent.

No wrong turnings, Ploto the priest had told him long ago.

He thought of Alienor, lying with her eyes closed among her bright cushions and all her candles and he was sorry for what he'd said to her at the end. He was sorry for many things. Alessan's mother was dying. His own was dead.

Ice is for deaths and endings, Alienor had said to Catriana in the hall.

He was cold, and very sad. He moved forward and ended the silence, knocking gently on Catriana's door.

She'd had a restless night, for many reasons. Alienor had disturbed her: both the unbridled sensuousness that emanated from the woman, and the obviously close, unknown past she shared with Alessan and Baerd.

Catriana hated unknown things, information hidden from her. She still didn't know what Alessan was going to do tomorrow, what this mysterious meeting in the highlands was all about, and ignorance made her uneasy and even, on a less acknowledged level, afraid.

She wished she could be more like Devin sometimes, matching his seemingly tranquil acceptance of what he could or could not know. She has seen him storing away the pieces of what he did learn and patiently waiting to receive another piece, and then putting them together like the tiles of a children's puzzle game.

Sometimes she admired that, sometimes it made her wild and contemptuous to see him so accepting of Alessan's occasional reticence or Baerd's chronic reserve. Catriana needed to know. She had been ignorant for so much of her life, shielded from her own history in that tiny fishing village in Astibar. She felt that there was so much lost time to be regained. Sometimes it made her want to weep.

That was how she'd been feeling this evening before drifting into a shallow, uneasy sleep and a dream of home. She often dreamt of home since she'd left, especially of her mother.

This time she saw herself walking through the village just after sunrise, passing the last house, Tendo's, she even saw his dog, and then rounding the familiar curve of the shore to where her father had bought a derelict cottage and repaired it and raised a family.

In her dream she saw the boat already far out, trawling among the early-morning swell of the sea. It seemed to be springtime. Her mother was in the doorway of the cottage mending nets in the good light of the sunrise. Her eyes had been going bad for years and it was hard for her to work with her needle in the evenings. Catriana had gradually taken over the night-time needlework in her last year at home.

It was a beautiful morning in the dream. The stones of the beach gleamed and the breeze was fresh and light off the water. All the other boats were out as well, taking advantage of the morning, but it was easy to tell which one was their own. Catriana walked up the path and stood by the newly mended porch, waiting for her mother to look up and see her and leap to her feet with a cry, and fold her daughter in her arms.

Her mother did glance up from her work, but only to gaze seaward, squinting toward the light, to check the position of their boat. An old habit, a nervous one, and one that had probably done much to hurt her eyes. She'd a husband and three sons in that small boat though.

She didn't see her daughter at all. Catriana realized with a queer pain that she was invisible here. Because she had gone, because she had left them and wasn't there any longer. There was more grey, she saw, in her mother's hair, and her heart ached as she stood there in mild sunlight to see how worn and hard her mother's hands were, and how tired the kind face was. She had always thought of her mother as a young woman, until Tiena, the baby, had died in the plague six years ago. Things had changed after that.

It isn't fair, she thought, and in the dream she cried aloud and was not heard.

Her mother sat on a wooden chair on the porch in the early light, working on the nets, occasionally looking up to check the position of one small boat among so many bobbing on this alien eastern sea so far from the one she'd loved.

Catriana woke, her body twisting violently away from all the hurts embedded in that image. She opened her eyes, waiting for her heartbeat to slow, lying under several blankets in a room in Castle Borso. Alienor's castle.

Alienor, who was the same age as Catriana's worn, tired mother. It truly was not fair. Why should she be carrying such guilt, seeing such sad, hurtful images in her sleep, for having gone away? Why, when it was her mother who had given her the ring when she was fourteen, in the year the baby died. The ring that marked her as from Tigana and by the sea for anyone who knew the ancient symbols, and for no one else.

The ring that had so marked her for Alessan bar Valentin two years ago when he and Baerd had seen her selling eels and fresh-caught telanquy in Ardin town just up the coast from the village.

She had not been a trusting person at eighteen. She could not have said, then or now, why she'd trusted the two of them and joined them for that walk upriver out of town when the market was done. If pushed to an answer she would have said that there was something about Baerd that had reassured her.

It was on that walk that they had told her about her ring and about Tigana, and the axis of her life had tilted another way. A new running of time had begun from that moment, and with it the need to know.

At home that evening after dinner, after the boys had gone to bed, she told her parents that she now knew where they were from, and what her ring meant. And she asked her father what he was going to do to help her bring Tigana back, and what he had been doing all these years. It was the only time in her life she'd ever seen her mild, innocuous father in a rage, and the only time he'd ever struck her.

Her mother wept Her father stormed about the house in the awkward manner of a man unused to raging, and he swore upon the Triad that he'd not taken his wife and daughter away before the Ygrathen invasion and the fall only to be sucked back into that ancient grief now.

And thus had Catriana learned the second thing that had changed her life.

The youngest of the boys had begun crying. Her father had stomped out then, slamming the door, rattling the windows. Catriana and her mother had looked at each other in silence a long time while a frightened child gradually subsided in the loft above their heads. Catriana held up her hand and showed the ring she'd worn for the past four years. She had looked a question with her eyes, and her mother had nodded once, not weeping now. The embrace they exchanged was one they both expected to be their last.

Catriana had found Alessan and Baerd at the best-known of the inns in Ardin town. It had been a bright night, she remembered, both moons high and nearly full. The night watchman at the inn had leered at her and groped when she sidled by him up the stairs toward the room he'd identified.

She had knocked and Alessan had opened to her name. His grey eyes, even before she spoke, had been curiously dark, as if anticipating a burden or a grief.

"I am coming with you," she had said. "My father was a coward. We fled before the invasion. I intend to make that up. I will not sleep with you though. I've never slept with any man. Can I trust you both?"

Awake in Castle Borso she blushed in the darkness, remembering that. How impossibly young she must have sounded to them. Neither man had laughed though, or even smiled. She would never forget that.

"Can you sing?" was all that Alessan had said.

She fell asleep again, thinking about music, about all the songs

she'd sung with him, crossing the Palm for two years. This time when she dreamt it was about water, about swimming in the sea at home, her greatest, sweetest joy. Diving for shells at summer twilight among the startled flashing fish, feeling the water wrap her like a second skin.

Then without warning or transition the dream changed and she was on the bridge in Tregea again in a gathering of winter dark and wind, more terrified than she had imagined a soul could be. Only herself to blame, her own pride, her gnawing, consuming, unslaked need to make redress for the fact that they had fled. She saw herself mount and balance on the railing again, saw the racing, black tumultuous water far below, heard, even over the loud rush of the river, the pounding of her heart…

And woke a second time just before the nightmare of her leap. Woke because what she had heard as the beat of her heart was a knocking at her door.

"Who is it?" she called.

"Devin. Will you let me come in?"

Abruptly she sat up in bed and pulled the topmost blanket to her chin.

"What is it?" she called.

"I'm not sure, actually. May I come in?"

"The door isn't locked," she said finally. She made sure the blankets were covering her, but the room was so dark it didn't really matter.

She heard him enter, but saw only the outline of his form.

"Thank you," he said. "You should lock your door, you know."

She wondered if he had any idea how much she hated being told things like that. "The only person likely to be roaming tonight was our hostess, and she was unlikely to be coming for me. There's a chair to your left."

She heard him reach for it and sink back with a sigh into the deep armchair. "I suppose that's true enough," he said in a drained voice. "And I'm sorry, you don't really need me to be telling you how to take care of yourself."

She listened for irony but heard none. "I seem to have managed tolerably well without your guidance," she said mildly.

He was silent. Then: "Catriana, I honestly don't know why I'm here. I'm in such a strange mood tonight. I feel ridiculously sad."

There was something extremely odd in his voice. She hesitated a moment, then, carefully adjusting the blankets, reached over to strike a flint.

"You light fires on the Ember Days?" he asked.

"Evidently."

She lit the candle by her bed. Then, somewhat regretting the waspishness of that reply, added, "My mother used to light one, just one, as a reminder to the Triad, she used to say. Though I only understood what she meant after I met Alessan."

"That's strange. So did my father," Devin said wonderingly. "I've never thought about that. I never knew why he did it. My father was not a man who explained things."

She turned to look at him, but he was deep in the chair and the wings hid his face.

"A reminder of Tigana?" she said.

"It would have to have been. As if… as if the Triad didn't deserve full devotion or observance because of what they'd allowed." He paused, then in a meditative tone added, "It's another example of our pride, isn't it? Of that Tiganese arrogance Sandre always talks about. We make bargains with the Triad, we balance scales with them: they take away our name, we take away a part of their rites."

"I suppose so," she said, though it didn't really strike her that way. Devin talked like this sometimes. She didn't see the action as one of pride, or bargaining, just as a reminder to the self of how great a wrong had come to pass. A reminder, like Alessan's blue wine.

"My mother is not a proud woman," she said, surprising herself.

"I don't know what mine was like," he said in that tightened voice. "I don't even know if I could say that my father is proud. I guess I don't know very much about him either." He really did sound peculiar.

"Devin," she said sharply, "lean forward. Let me look at you." She checked her blankets; they covered her to the chin.

Slowly he shifted forward: the candlelight spilled across his wildly disheveled hair, the torn shirt and the visible scratches and marks of teeth. She felt a quick surge of anger, and then a slower, deeper anxiety that had nothing to do with him. Or not directly.

She masked both reactions behind a sardonic laugh. "She was roaming, I see. You look like you've been to war."

With an effort he managed a brief smile, but there was something somber in his eyes: she could read it even by candlelight.

It unsettled her. "What is it then?" she pursued with broad sarcasm, "You tired her out and came here wanting more? I can tell you…”

"No," he said quickly. "No, it isn't that. It is… hardly that, Catriana. It has been a… difficult night."

"You certainly look as if it was," she retorted, her hands gripping the blankets.

He pushed on doggedly. "Not that way. It's so strange. So complicated. I think I learned something there. I think…”

"Devin, I really don't want the details!" She was angry with herself for how edgy this sort of thing made her feel.

"No, no. Not like that, though yes, there was that at the beginning. But…" He drew a breath. "I think what I learned was something about what the Tyrants have done to us. Not just Brandin, and not just in Tigana. Alberico too. Both of them, and to all of us."

"Such insight," she mocked, reflexively. "She must be even more skillful than you imagined."

Which silenced him. He leaned back in the chair again and she couldn't see his face. In the quiet that followed her breathing grew calmer.

"I'm sorry," she said at length. "I didn't mean that. I'm tired. I've had some bad dreams tonight. What do you want from me, Devin?"

"I'm not sure," he said. "I guess, to be a friend."

Again she felt pushed and uneasy. She resisted an instinctive, nervous urge to suggest he go write a letter to one of Rovigo's daughters. She said, "I've never been good at that, even as a child."

"Nor I," he said, shifting forward again. He had pushed his hair into a semblance of order. He said, "It is more than that between you and I though. You hate me sometimes, don't you."

She felt her heart thump. "We do not have to discuss this, Devin. I don't hate you."

"Sometimes you do," he pursued in that strange, dogged tone. "Because of what happened in the Sandreni Palace." He paused, and drew a shaky breath. "Because I was the first man you ever made love with."

She closed her eyes. Tried, unsuccessfully, to will that last sentence not to have been spoken. "You knew?"

"Not then. I figured it out later."

Pieces of another puzzle. Patiently putting it together. Figuring her out. She opened her eyes and gazed bleakly at him. "And is it your idea that discussing this interesting subject will make us friends?"

He winced. "Probably not. I don't know. I thought I'd tell you I want to be." There was a silence. "I honestly don't know, Catriana. I'm sorry."

Surprisingly, her shock and anger had both passed. She saw him slump back again, exhausted, and she did the same, reclining against the wooden headboard of her bed. She thought for a while, marveling at how calm she felt.

"I don't hate you, Devin," she said finally. "Truly, I don't. Nothing like that. It is an awkward memory, I won't deny that, but I don't think it has ever hindered us in what we have to do. Which is what really matters, isn't it?"

"I suppose so," he said. She couldn't see his face. "If that is all that matters."

"I mean, it's true what I said before: I've always been bad at making friends."

"Why?"

Pieces of the puzzle again. But she said, "As a girl, I'm not sure. Maybe I was shy, perhaps proud. I never felt easy in our village, even though it was the only home I'd ever known. But since Baerd named Tigana for me, since I heard the name, that has been all there is in the world for me. All that counts for anything at all."

She could almost hear him thinking about that.

He said, "Ice is for endings."

Which is exactly what Alienor had said to her. He went on, "You are still a living person, Catriana. With a heart, a life to live, access to friendship, even to love. Why are you sealing yourself down to the one thing only?"

And she heard herself reply: "Because my father never fought. He fled Tigana like a coward before the battles at the river."

She could have ripped her tongue bleeding from her mouth, out at the very root, the moment she had spoken.

"Oh," he said.

"Not a word, Devin! Don't say a word!"

He obeyed, sitting very still, almost invisible in the depths of his chair. Abruptly she blew out the candle; she didn't want light now. And then, because it was dark, and because he was so obligingly silent she was gradually able to regain control of herself. To move past the meaning of this moment without weeping. It took a long time in the darkness but eventually she was able to draw a long, steady breath and know she was all right.

"Thank you," she said, not entirely sure what she was thanking him for. Mostly, the silence.

There was no reply. She waited a moment then softly called his name. Again no answer. She listened, and eventually was able to make out the steady rise and fall of his breathing in sleep.

She had enough of a sense of irony to find that amusing. He had evidently had a difficult night though, and not just in the obvious ways.

She thought about waking him and sending him back to his own room. It would most certainly raise eyebrows if they were seen leaving here together in the morning. She discovered, though, that she didn't really care. She also realized that she minded less than she'd expected that he'd figured out the one truth about her and had just learned another. About her father, but really more about herself. She wondered about that, why it didn't bother her more.

She considered putting one of the blankets over him but resisted the impulse. For some reason she didn't really want him waking in the morning and knowing she'd done that. Rovigo's daughters did that sort of thing, not she. Or no: the younger daughter would have had him in this bed and inside her by now, strange moods and exhaustion notwithstanding. The older? Would have woven a new quilt at miraculous speed and tucked it around him with a note attached as to the lineage of the sheep that had given the wool and the history of the pattern she'd chosen.

Catriana smiled to herself in the darkness and settled back to sleep. Her restlessness seemed to have passed and she did not dream again. When she woke, just after dawn, he was gone. She didn't learn until later just how far.

Chapter 11

ELENA STOOD BY THE OPEN DOOR OF MATTIO'S HOUSE LOOKING up the dark road to the moat and the raised drawbridge, watching the candles flicker and go out one by one in the windows of Castle Borso. At intervals people walked past her into the house, offering only a nod or a brief greeting if anything at all. It was a night of battle that lay ahead of them, and everyone arriving was aware of that.

From the village behind her there came no sound at all, and no light. All the candles were long snuffed out, fires banked, windows covered over, even the chinks at the base of doors blocked by cloth or rags. The dead walked on the first of the Ember Nights, everyone knew that.

There was little noise from within the house behind her, though fifteen or twenty people must have arrived by now, crowding into Mattio's home at the edge of the village. Elena didn't know how many more Walkers were yet to join them here, or later, at the meeting-place; she did know that there would be too few. There hadn't been enough last year, or the year before that, and they had lost those battles very badly. The Ember Night wars were killing the Walkers faster than young ones like Elena herself were growing up to replace them. Which is why they were losing each spring, why they would almost certainly lose tonight.

It was a starry night, with only the one moon risen, the white crescent of Vidomni as she waned. It was cold as well, here in the highlands at the very beginning of spring. Elena wrapped her arms about herself, gripping her elbows with her hands. It would be a different sky, a different feel to the night entirely, in only a few hours, when the battle began.

Carenna walked in, giving her quick warm smile, but not stopping to talk. It was not a time for talking. Elena was worried about Carenna tonight; she had just had a child two weeks before. It was too soon for her to be doing this. But she was needed, they were all needed, and the Ember Night wars did not tarry for any man or woman, or for anything that happened in the world of day.

She nodded in response to a couple she didn't know. They followed Carenna past her into the house. There was dust on their clothing; they had probably come from a long way east, timing their arrival here for after the sundown closing of the doors and windows in the town and in all the lonely farmhouses out in the night of the fields. Behind all those doors and windows, Elena knew, the people of the southern highlands would be waiting in darkness and praying.

Praying for rain and then sun, for the earth to be fruitful through spring and summer to the tall harvest of fall. For the seedlings of grain, of corn, to nourish when sown, take root and then rise, yellow and full of ripened promise, from the dark, moist, giving soil. Praying, though they knew nothing within their wrapped dark homes of what would actually happen tonight, for the Night Walkers to save the fields, the season, the grain, save and succor all their lives.

Elena instinctively reached up to finger the small leather ornament she wore about her neck. The ornament that held the shriveled remnant of the caul in which she had been born, as all the Walkers had been, sheathed in the transparent birthing sac as they came crying from the womb.

A symbol of good fortune, birthwomen named the caul elsewhere in the Palm. Children born sheathed in that sac were said to be destined for a life blessed by the Triad.

Here at the remote southern edges of the peninsula, in these wild highlands beneath the mountains, the teachings and the lore were different. Here the ancient rites went deeper, further back, were passed from hand to hand, from mouth to mouth down from their beginnings long ago. In the highlands of Certando a child born with a caul was not said to be guarded from death at sea, or naively named for fortune.

It was marked for war.

For this war, fought each year on the first of the Ember Nights that began the spring and so began the year. Fought in the fields and for the fields, for the not yet risen seedlings that were hope and life and the offered promise of earth renewed. Fought for those in the great cities, cut off from the truths of the land, ignorant of such things, and fought for all the living here in Certando, huddled behind their walls, who knew only enough to pray and to be afraid of sounds in the night that might be the dead abroad.

From behind Elena a hand touched her shoulder. She turned to see Mattio looking quizzically at her. She shook her head, pushing her hair back with one hand.

"Nothing yet," she said.

Mattio did not speak, but the pale moonlight showed his eyes bleak above the full black beard. He squeezed her shoulder, out of a habit of reassurance more than anything else, before turning to go back inside.

Elena watched him go, heavy-striding, solid and capable. Through the open doorway she saw him sit down again at the long trestle-table, across from Donar. She gazed at the two of them for a moment, thinking about Verzar, about love and then desire.

She turned away again to look out into the night toward the huge brooding outline of the castle in whose shadow she had spent her whole life. She felt old suddenly, far older than her years. She had two small children sleeping with her mother and father tonight in one of those shut-up cottages where no lights burned. She also had a husband sleeping in the burying field, a casualty, one of so many, of the terrible battle a year ago when the numbers of the Others seemed to have grown so much larger than ever before and so cruelly, malevolently triumphant.

Verzar had died a few days after that defeat, as all the victims of the night battles did.

Those touched by death in the Ember Night wars did not fall in the fields. They acknowledged that cold, final touch in their souls, like a finger on the heart, Verzar had said to her, and they came home to sleep and wake and walk through a day or a week or a month before yielding to the ending that had claimed them for its own.

In the north, in the cities, they spoke of the last portal of Morian, of longed-for grace in her dark Halls. Of priestly intercessions invoked with candles and tears.

Those born with the caul in the southern highlands, those who fought in the Ember wars and saw the shapes of the Others who came to battle there, did not speak in such a way.

Not that they would ever be so foolish as to deny Morian of Portals or Eanna or Adaon; only that they knew that there were powers older and darker than the Triad, powers that went beyond this peninsula, beyond even, Donar had once told her, this very world with its two moons and its sun. Once a year the Night Walkers of Certando would have, would be forced to have, a glimpse of these truths under a sky that was not their own.

Elena shivered. There would be more claimed for death tonight, she knew, and so fewer to fight the next year, and fewer the next. And where it would end she did not know. She was not educated in such things. She was twenty-two, a mother and a widow and a wheelwright's daughter in the highlands. She was also a child born with the caul of the Night Walkers into a time when all the battles were being lost, year by year.

She was also known to have the best eyesight in the dark of all of them, which is why Mattio had placed her here by the door, watching the road for the one Donar had said might come.

It was a dry season; the moat, as he'd expected, was shallow. Once, long ago, the lords of Castle Borso had been pleased to keep their moat stocked with creatures that could kill a man. Baerd didn't expect to find such things; not now, not for a long time now.

He waded across, hip-deep, under the high stars and the thin light of Vidomni in the sky. It was cold, but it had been many years since the elements bothered him much. Nor did it disturb him to be abroad on an Ember Night. Indeed, it had become a ritual of his own over the years: knowing that all across the Palm the holy days were observed and marked by people waiting in silent darkness behind their walls offered him a deepened sense of the solitude his soul seemed to need. He was profoundly drawn to this sense of moving through a scarcely breathing world that lay as if crouched in primitive darkness under the stars with no mortal fires cast back at the sky, only whatever flames the Triad created for themselves with lightning out of the heavens.

If there were ghosts and spirits awake in the night he wanted to see them. If the dead of his past were walking abroad he wanted to beg their forgiveness.

His own pain was spun of images that would not let him go. Images of vanished serenity, of pale marble under moonlight such as this, of graceful porticos shaped of harmonies a man might spend a lifetime studying to understand, of quiet voices heard and almost understood by a drowsy child in another room, of sure, confident laughter following, then morning sunlight in a known courtyard and a steady, strong, sculptor's hand upon his shoulder. A father's hand.

Then fire and blood and ashes on the wind, turning the noon sun red.

Smoke and death, and marble hammered into fragments, the head of the god flying free, to bounce like a boulder on scorched earth and then be ground remorselessly down into powder like fine sand. Like the sand on the beaches walked in the dark later that year, infinite and meaningless by the cold uncaring sea.

These were the bleak visitants, the companions of his nights, these and more, endlessly, through almost nineteen years. He carried, like baggage, like a cart yoked to his shoulders, like a round stone in his heart, images of his people, their world destroyed, their name obliterated. Truly obliterated: a sound that was drifting, year by year, further away from the shores of the world of men, like some tide withdrawing in the grey hour of a winter dawn. Very like such a tide, but different as well, because tides came back.

He had learned to live with the images because he had no choice, unless it was a choice to surrender. To die. Or retreat into madness as his mother had. He defined himself by his griefs; he knew them as other men knew the shape of their own hands.

But the one thing that could drive him awake, barred utterly from the chambers of sleep or any kind of rest, what could force him abroad now, as he had been driven abroad as a boy in a ruined place, was, in the end, none of these things. Neither a flash of splendor gone, nor an image of death and loss. It was, instead, over and above everything else, the remembrance of love among those ashes of ruin.

Against the memory of a spring and summer with Dianora, with his sister, his barriers could not hold in the dark.

And so Baerd would go out into the nights across the Palm, doubly moonlit, or singly, or dark with only stars. Among the heathered summer hills of Ferraut, or through the laden vineyards of autumn in Astibar or Senzio, along snow-mantled mountain slopes in Tregea, or here, on an Ember Night at the beginning of spring in the highlands.

He would go out to walk in the enveloping dark, to smell the earth, feel the soil, listen to the voice of winter's wind, taste grapes and moonlit water, lie motionless in a forest tree to watch the night predators at their hunt. And once in a great while, when waylaid or challenged by brigand or mercenary, Baerd would kill. A night predator in his own incarnation, restless and soon gone. Another kind of ghost, a part of him dead with the dead of the River Deisa.

In every corner of the mainland Palm except his own, which was gone, he had done these things for years upon years, feeling the slow turning of the seasons, learning the meaning of night in this forest and that field, by this dark river, or on that mountain ridge, reaching out or back or inward all the time toward a release that was ever and again denied.

He had been here in the highlands many times before on this same Ember Night. He and Alessan went back a long way and had shared a great deal with Alienor of Borso, and there was the other, larger reason why they came south to the mountains at the beginning of every second year. He thought of the news from the west. From home. He remembered the look on Alessan's face reading Danoleon's letter and his heart misgave him. But that was for tomorrow, and more Alessan's burden than his own, however much he might want, as he always wanted, to ease or share the weight.

Tonight was his own, and it called to him. Alone in the darkness, but hand in hand with a dream of Dianora, he walked away from the castle. Always before he had gone west and then south from Borso, curving his way into the hills themselves below the Braccio Pass. Tonight, for no reason he knew, his footsteps led him the other way, southeast. They carried him along the road to the edge of the village that lay beneath the castle walls and there, as he passed a house with an unexpectedly open door, Baerd saw a fair-haired woman standing in the moonlight as if she had been waiting for him and he stopped.

Sitting at the table, resisting the temptation to count their numbers one more time, trying to appear as if all were as normal as it could be on this night of war, Mattio heard Elena call his name and then Donar's from outside the house. Her voice was soft, as it always was, but his senses were pitched toward her, as they had been for years. Even before poor Verzar had died.

He glanced across the table at Donar, but the older man was already reaching for his crutches and rising to swing on his one leg toward the door. Mattio followed. A number of the others looked over at them, edgy and apprehensive. Mattio forced himself to smile reassuringly. Carenna caught his eye and began speaking soothingly to a few of the more visibly nervous people.

Not at all easy himself, Mattio stepped outside with Donar and saw that someone had come. A dark-haired man, neatly bearded and of middle height, stood motionless before Elena, glancing from her to the two of them, not speaking. He had a sword slung in a scabbard on his back in the Tregean fashion.

Mattio looked over at Donar whose face was quite impassive. For all his experience of Ember Night wars and of Donar's gift he could not repress a shiver.

"Someone may come," their one-legged leader had said yesterday. And now someone was indeed here in the moonlight in the very hour before battle. Mattio looked over at Elena; her eyes had not left the stranger. She was standing very straight, slender and motionless, hands holding her elbows, hiding fear and wonder as best she could. But Mattio had spent years watching her, and he could see that her breathing was shallow and fast. He loved her for her stillness, and for wanting to hide her fear.

He glanced at Donar again, and then stepped forward, extending two open palms to the stranger. Calmly he said, "Be welcome, though it is not to be abroad."

The other man nodded. His feet were planted wide and solid on the earth. He looked as though he knew how to use his sword. He said, "Nor, as I understand the highlands, is it a night to have doors and windows open."

"Why would you think you understand the highlands?" Mattio said. Too quickly. Elena still had not looked away from this man. There was an odd expression on her face.

Moving a little nearer to stand beside her, Mattio realized that he had seen this man before. This was one who had come several times to the Lady's castle. A musician, he seemed to remember, or a merchant of some sort. One of those landless men who endlessly crossed and recrossed the roads of the Palm. His heart, which had lifted to see the sword, sank a little.

The stranger had not responded to his sharp retort. He appeared, as much as the moonight revealed, to be giving the matter thought. Then he surprised Mattio.

"I'm sorry," he said. "If I am trespassing upon a custom in ignorance, forgive me. I walk for reasons of my own. I will leave you to your peace."

He actually turned away then, clearly intending to leave.

"No!" Elena said urgently.

And in the same moment Donar spoke for the first time.

"There is no peace tonight," he said in the deep voice they all trusted so much. "And you are not trespassing. I thought someone might come along this road. Elena was watching for you."

And at that the stranger turned. His eyes seemed wider in the dark, and something new, cooler, more appraising, gleamed in them now.

"Come for what?" he asked.

There was a silence. Donar shifted his crutches and swung forward. Elena moved to one side to let him stand in front of the stranger. Mattio looked across at her; her hair was falling over one shoulder, white-gold in the moonlight. She never took her eyes from the dark-haired man.

Who was gazing steadily at Donar. "Come for what?" he repeated, mildly enough.

Still Donar hesitated, and in that moment Mattio realized with a shock that the miller, their Elder, was afraid. A sickening lurch of apprehension rose in Mattio, for he suddenly understood what Donar was about to do.

And then Donar did it. He gave them away to one from the north.

"We are the Night Walkers of Certando," he said, his voice steady and deep. "And this is the first of the Ember Nights of spring. This is our night. I must ask you: wherever you were born, was there a mark… did the birthwomen who attended declare a blessing found?" And slowly he reached a hand inside his shirt and drew forth the leather sac he wore there, holding the caul that had marked him at his birth.

Out of the side of his eye Mattio saw Elena biting her lower lip. He looked at the stranger, watched him absorb what Donar had said, and he began gauging his chances of killing the man if it should come to that.

This time the silence stretched. The muted sounds from the house behind them seemed loud. The dark-haired man's eyes had grown wide now, and his head was lifted high. Mattio could see that he was weighing what lay behind what had just been revealed.

Then, still not speaking, the stranger moved one hand to his throat and reaching inside his shirt he brought out, so that the three of them could see, by starlight and moonlight, the small leather sac he too wore.

Mattio heard a small sound, a release of breath, and realized belatedly that he had made it himself.

"Earth be praised!" Elena murmured, unable to stop herself. She had closed her eyes.

"Earth, and all that springs from it and returns," Donar added. His voice, amazingly, trembled.

They left it for Mattio to finish. "Returns, to spring forth again in the cycle that has no end," he said, looking at the stranger, at the sac he bore, almost identical to Mattio's own, to Elena's, to Donar's, to the one they all carried, every one of them.

It was with the words of invocation spoken in sequence by the three of them that Baerd finally understood what he had stumbled upon.

Two hundred years ago, in a time of seemingly unending plagues, a time of harvest failures, of violence and blood, the Carlozzini heresy had taken root here in the south. And from the highlands it had begun to spread throughout the Palm, gaining momentum and adherents with frightening speed. And against Carlozzi's central teaching: that the Triad were younger deities, subject to and agents of an older, darker set of powers, the priesthood of the Palm had grimly and in concert set their hands.

Faced with such rare and absolute unity among the clergy, and caught up in the panic of a decade of plague and starvation, the Dukes and Grand Dukes and even Valcanti, Prince of Tigana, had seen themselves as having no choice. The Carlozzini had been hunted down and tried and executed all across the peninsula, by whatever means executions were conducted in each province in that time.

A time of violence and blood. Two hundred years ago.

And now he was standing here showing the leather that held the caul of his birth, and speaking to three who had just declared themselves to be Carlozzini.

And more. Night Walkers, the one-legged old man had said. The vanguard, the secret army of the sect. Chosen in some way that no one knew. But now he did know, they had shown him. It occurred to him that he might be in danger now, having been granted this knowledge, and indeed, the bigger, bearded man seemed to be holding himself carefully, as if prepared for violence.

The woman who had stood watch was weeping though. She was very beautiful, though not in the way of Alienor, whose every movement, every spoken word might hint at a feline undercurrent of danger. This woman was too young, too shy, he could not make himself believe in a threat from her. Not weeping as she was. And all three of them had spoken words of thanks, of praise. His instincts were on guard, but not in a way that warned of immediate danger. Deliberately Baerd forced his muscles to relax. He said, "What have you to tell me, then?"

Elena wiped the tears from her face. She looked at the stranger again, absorbing his square, neat, quiet solidity, his reality, the improbable fact that he was here. She swallowed with difficulty, painfully aware of the racing of her heart, trying to move past the moment when she had seen this man emerge from night and shadow to stand before her. And then the long interval when they had faced each other in the moonlight before she had impulsively reached out to touch his hand, to be sure that he was real. And had only then called for Mattio and Donar. Something odd seemed to be happening to her. She made herself concentrate on what Donar was saying.

"What I tell you now gives you power of life and death over a great many people," he said softly. "For the priesthood still want us destroyed and the Tyrant in Astibar will bide by what the clergy say in such things. I think you know this."

"I know this," the dark-haired one echoed, equally quietly. "Will you say why you are confiding in me?"

"Because tonight is a night of battle," Donar said. "Tonight I lead the Night Walkers into war, and yesterday at sunset I fell into a sleep and dreamt of a stranger coming to us. I have learned to trust my dreams, though not to know when they will come."

Elena saw the stranger nod, calm, unruffled, acknowledging this as easily as he had acknowledged her presence in the road. She saw that his arms were ridged with muscle under his shirt, and that he held himself as a man who had known fighting in his days. There seemed to be a sadness in his face, but it was really too dark to tell so much, and she chided herself for letting her imagination run free at such a time.

On the other hand, he was abroad and alone on an Ember Night. Men without griefs of their own would never do such a thing, she was certain. She wondered where he was from. She was afraid to ask.

"You are the leader then, of this company?" he said to Donar.

"He is," Mattio cut in sharply. "And you would do well not to dwell upon his infirmity." From the defiance of his tone it was clear he had misinterpreted the question. Elena knew how protective he was of Donar; it was one of the things she most respected in him. But this was too huge, too important a moment for misunderstandings. She turned to him and shook her head urgently.

"Mattio!" she began, but Donar had already laid a hand on the blacksmith's arm, and in that moment the stranger smiled for the first time.

"You leap at a slight that is not meant," he said. "I have known others, as badly injured or worse, who led armies and governed men. I seek only to find my bearings. It is darker here for me than it is for you."

Mattio opened his mouth and then closed it. He made a small, awkward gesture of apology with his shoulders and hands. It was Donar who replied.

"I am Elder of the Walkers, yes," he said. "And so mine, with Mattio's aid, is leadership in battle. But you must know that the war we are to fight tonight is not like any battle you might know. When we come out again from this house it will be under a different sky entirely than the one above us now. And under that sky, in that challenging world of ghosts and shadows, few of us will appear as we do here."

The dark-haired man shifted uneasily for the first time. He glanced downward, almost reluctantly, to look at Donar's hands.

Donar smiled, and held out his left hand, five fingers spread wide.

"I am not a wizard," he said softly. "There is magic here, yes, but we step into it and are marked for it, we do not shape it. This is not wizardry."

The stranger nodded at length. Then said, with careful courtesy, "I can see that. I do not understand it, but I can only assume you are telling me these things to a purpose. Will it please you now to tell me what that is?"

And so Donar said then, finally, "Because we would ask aid of you in our battle tonight."

In the silence that followed, Mattio spoke, and Elena had an idea how much pride he swallowed in saying: "We have need. Very great need."

"Who do you fight?" the other man said.

"We call them the Others," Elena said herself, as neither Donar nor Mattio spoke. "They come to us year by year. Generation after generation."

"They come to ruin the fields and blight the seedlings and the harvest," Donar said. "For two hundred years the Night Walkers of Certando would battle them on this Ember Night, and for all this time we were able to hold them in check as they come upon us from the west."

Mattio said, "For almost twenty years now, though, it has grown worse and worse for us. And on the last three Ember Nights we have been very badly beaten. Many of us have died. And Certando's droughts have grown worse; you will know about that, and about the plagues here. They have…”

But the stranger had flung up a hand suddenly, a sharp, unexpected gesture.

"Almost twenty years? And from the west?" he said harshly. He came a step nearer and turned to Donar. "The Tyrants came almost twenty years ago. And Brandin of Ygrath landed in the west."

Donar's gaze was steady as he leaned on his crutches looking at the other man. "This is true," he said, "and it is a thought that has occurred to some of us, but I do not think it signifies. Our battles on this night each year go far beyond the daily concerns of who governs in the Palm in a given generation, and how they govern, and from where they come."

"But still…” the stranger began.

"But still," Donar said, nodding his head, "there are mysteries to this that are beyond my power to grasp. If you discern a pattern that I do not… who am I to question or deny that it might be true?"

He reached up to his neck and touched the leather sac. "You carry the mark we all bear, and I dreamt your presence here tonight. Notwithstanding that, we have no claim upon you, none at all, and I must tell you that death will be there to meet us in the fields when the Others come. But I can also tell you that our need goes beyond these fields, beyond Certando, and even, I think, beyond this Peninsula of the Palm. Will you fight with us tonight?"

The stranger was silent a long time. He turned away and looked upwards then, at the thin moon and stars, but Elena had a sense that his truer vision was inwards, that he was not really looking up at the lights.

"Please?" she heard herself say. "Will you please?"

He made no sign that he had even heard her. When he turned back it was to look at Donar once more.

He said, "I understand little of this. I have my own battles to fight, and people to whom I owe a sworn allegiance, but I hear no evil in you, and no untruth, and I would see for myself the shape these Others take. If you dreamt my coming here I will let myself be guided by your dream."

And then, as her eyes began brimming with tears again, Elena saw him turn to her. "Yes, I will," he said levelly, not smiling, his dark eyes grave. "I will fight with you tonight. My name is Baerd."

And so it seemed that he had heard her, after all.

Elena mastered her tears, standing as straight as she could. There was a tumult, a terrible chaos, rising within her though, and in the midst of that chaos it seemed to Elena that she heard a sound, as of a single note plucked on her heart. Beyond Donar, Mattio said something but she didn't hear what it was. She was looking at this stranger, and realizing, as his gaze met her own, that she had been right before, that her instincts had not misled. There was so deep a sadness in him it could not possibly be missed by any man or woman with eyes to see, even in night and shadow.

She looked away, and then closed her eyes tightly for a moment, trying to hold back something of her heart for herself, before it all went seeking in the magic and the strangeness of this night. Oh, Verzar, she thought. Oh, my dead love.

She opened her eyes again and took a careful breath. "I am Elena," she said. "Will you come in and meet the others?"

"Yes," said Mattio gruffly, "come in with us, Baerd. Be welcome in my home." This time she heard the hurt that came through in his voice, though he tried to mask it. She winced inwardly at that sound, caring for him, for his strength and his generosity, hating so much to give sorrow. But this was an Ember Night and the tides of the heart could scarcely be ruled even by the light of day.

Besides, she had a very grave doubt, already, as the four of them turned to go into the house, whether there would be any joy for her to find in what had just happened to her. Any joy in this stranger who had come to her out of darkness, in answer to or called by Donar's dream.

Baerd looked at the cup that the woman named Carenna had just placed in his hands. It was of earthenware, rough to the touch, chipped at one edge, the unpainted color of red soil.

He looked from Carenna to Donar, the older, maimed man, the Elder, they called him, to the bearded one, to the other girl, Elena. There was a kind of light in her face as she looked back at him, even in the shadows of this house, and he turned away from that as something, perhaps the one thing, he could not deal with. Not now, perhaps not ever in his life. He cast his gaze out over the company assembled there. Seventeen of them. Nine men, eight women, all holding their own cups, waiting for him. There would be more at the meeting-place, Mattio had said. How many more they could not tell.

He was being reckless, he knew. Swept away by the power of an Ember Night, by the undeniable truth of Donar's dream, the fact that they had been waiting for him. By, if he were honest with himself, the look in Elena's eyes when he had first come up to her. A complex tempting of fate, that aspect of it, something he seldom did.

But he was doing it now, or about to do it. He thought of Ales-san, and of all the times he'd chided or derided the Prince, his brother of the soul, for letting his passion for music take him down one dangerous path or another. What would Alessan say now, or quick-tongued Catriana? Or Devin? No, Devin would say nothing: he would watch, with that careful, focused attention, and come to his own conclusions in his own time. Sandre would call him a fool.

And perhaps he was. But something had responded deep within him to the words Donar had spoken. He had borne the caul of his birth in leather all his life, a minor, a trivial superstition. A charm against drowning, he had been told as a child. But it was more here, and the cup he held in his hands would mark his acceptance of that.

Almost twenty years, Mattio had said.

The Others from the west, Donar had said.

There might be little in it, or a great deal, or nothing at all, or everything.

He looked at the woman, Elena, and he drained the cup to the lees.

It was bitter, deathly bitter. For one panicked, irrational moment he feared he was undone, poisoned, a blood sacrifice in some unknown Carlozzini rite of spring.

Then he saw the sour face Carenna made as she drank from her own cup, and saw Mattio wince ruefully at the taste of his, and the panic passed.

The long table had been put away, lifted from its trestles. Pallets had been spread about the room for them to lie upon. Elena moved towards him and gestured, and it would have been ungracious to hold back. He walked with her toward one wall and took the pallet she offered him. She sat down, unspeaking, on the one beside it.

Baerd thought of his sister, of that clear image of walking hand in hand with Dianora down a dark and silent road, only the two of them abroad in the wide world.

Donar the miller swung himself towards the pallet on Baerd's other side. He leaned his crutches against the wall and subsided on the mat.

"Leave your sword here," he said. Baerd raised his eyebrows. Donar smiled, a hieratic expression, devoid of mirth. "It will be useless where we are going. We will find our weapons in the fields."

Baerd hesitated a moment longer; then, aware of even greater recklessness, of a mystic folly he could not have explained, he slipped the back-scabbard over his head and laid it against the wall beside Donar's crutches.

"Close your eyes," he heard Elena saying from beside him. "It is easier that way." Her voice sounded oddly distant. Whatever he had drunk was beginning to act upon him. "It will feel like sleep," she said, "but it will not be. Earth grant us grace, and the sky her light." It was the last thing he heard.

It was not sleep. Whatever it was, it was not sleep, for no dream could be this vivid, no dream-wind this keen in his face.

He was in an open field, wide and fallow and dark, with the smell of spring soil, and he had no memory at all of coming here. There were a great many people, two hundred perhaps, or more, in the field with him, and he had no memory of any of them either. They must have come from other villages in the highlands, from gatherings in other homes like Mattio's.

The light was strange. He looked up.

And Baerd saw that the moon in the sky was round and large and full, and it was green like the first green-gold of spring. It shone with that green and golden light among stars in constellations he had never seen. He wheeled around, dizzied, disoriented, his heart pounding, searching for a pattern that he knew in the heavens. He looked south, to where the mountains should be, but as far as his eyes could track in the green light he saw level fields stretching away, some fallow, some fully ripe with summer grain in a season that should only be spring. No mountains at all. No snow-clad peaks, no Braccio Pass with Quileia beyond. He spun again. No Castle Borso to north or east. Or west?

West. With a sudden premonition he turned to look there. Low hills rose and fell in seemingly endless progression. And Baerd saw that the hills were bare of trees, of grass, bare of flower and shrub and bush, bleak and waste and barren.

"Yes, look there," Donar's deep voice said from behind him, "and understand why we are here. If we lose tonight the field in which we stand will be desolate as those hills next year when we come back. The Others are down into these grainlands now. We have lost the battles of those hills over the past years. We are fighting in the plain now, and if this goes on, one Ember Night not far from now our children or their children will stand with their backs to the sea and lose the last battle of our war."

"And?" Baerd's eyes were still on the west, on the grey, stony ruin of the hills.

"And all the crops will fail. Not just here in Certando. And people will die. Of hunger or of plague."

"All over the Palm?" He could not look away from the desolation that he saw. He had a vision of a lifeless world looking like that. He shivered. It was sickening.

"The Palm and beyond, Baerd. Make no mistake, this is no local skirmish, no battle for a small peninsula. All over this world, and perhaps beyond, for it is said that ours is not the only world scattered by the Powers among time and the stars."

"Carlozzi taught this?"

"Carlozzi taught this. If I understand his teaching rightly, our own troubles here are bound up with even graver dangers elsewhere; in worlds we have never seen or will see, except perhaps in dream."

Baerd shook his head, still looking out at the hills in the west. "That is too remote for me. Too difficult. I am a worker in stone and a sometime merchant and I have learned how to fight, against my will and inclination, over many years. I live in a peninsula overrun by enemies from overseas. That is the level of evil I can grasp."

He turned away from the western hills then and looked at Donar. And despite the warning they'd given him, his eyes widened with amazement. The miller stood on two sound legs; his grey, thinning hair had become a thick dark brown like Baerd's own, and he stood with his broad shoulders straight and his head held high, a man in his prime.

A woman came up to them, and Baerd knew Elena, for she was not greatly changed. She seemed older here though, less frail; her hair was shorter, though still white-gold despite the strangeness of the light. Her eyes, he saw, were a very deep blue.

"Were your eyes that same color an hour ago?" he asked.

She smiled, pleased and shy. "It was more than an hour. And I don't know what I look like this year. It changes a little for me every time. What color are they now?"

"Blue. Extremely blue."

"Well then, yes, they have always been blue. Perhaps not extremely blue, but blue." Her smile deepened. "Shall I tell you what you look like?" There was an incongruity, a lightness in her voice. Even Donar had an amused expression playing about his lips.

"Tell me."

"You look like a boy," she said with a little laugh. "A fourteen-or fifteen-year-old boy, beardless now and much too thin and with a shock of brown hair I would love to cut if we had but half a chance."

Baerd felt his heart thud like a mallet in his breast. It actually seemed to stop for an instant before beginning again, laboriously, to beat. He turned sharply away from the others, looking down at his hands. They did seem different. Smoother, less lined. And a knife scar he'd got in Tregea five years ago was not there. He closed his eyes, feeling suddenly weak.

"Baerd?" Elena said behind him, concerned. "I'm sorry. I did not mean to…”

He shook his head. He tried to speak but found that he could not. He wanted to reassure her, her and Donar, that it was all right, but he seemed, unbelievably, to be weeping, for the first time in almost twenty years.

For the first time since the year he had been a fourteen-year-old boy forbidden to go to war by his Prince's orders and his father's. Forbidden to fight and die with them by the red banks of the River Deisa when all the shining had come to an end.

"Be easy, Baerd," he heard Donar saying, deep and gentle. "Be easy. There is always a strangeness here."

Then a woman's hands were briefly upon his shoulders and then reaching around him from behind to meet and clasp at his chest. Her cheek rested against his back and she held him so, strong and sharing and generous, while he brought his hands up to cover his face as he cried.

Above them on the Ember Night the full moon was green-gold and around them the strange fields were fallow, or newly sown, or full with ripened grain before the planting-time, or utterly bare and desolate and lost, in the west.

"They are coming," someone said, walking up to them. "Look. We had best claim our weapons."

He recognized Mattio's voice. Elena released him and stepped back. Baerd wiped his eyes and looked to the west again.

And he saw then that the Ember war was giving him another chance. A chance to make right what had gone so bitterly wrong in the world the summer he was fourteen.

Over the hills from the west, far off yet but unnaturally clear in the unnatural light, the Others were coming: and they were clad, all of them, in the livery of Ygrath.

"Oh, Morian!" he whispered on a sharply taken breath.

"What do you see?" Mattio said.

Baerd turned. The man was leaner, and his black beard was differently trimmed, but he was recognizably the same. "Ygrathens," he said on a rising note of excitement. "Soldiers of the King of Ygrath. You may never have seen them here, this far east, but that is exactly what they are, your Others."

Mattio looked suddenly thoughtful. He shook his head, but it was Donar who spoke.

"Be not deceived, Baerd. Remember where we are, what I have told you. You are not in our peninsula, this is no battle of the day against your invaders from overseas."

"I see them, Donar. I know what I see."

"And shall I tell you that what I see out there are hideous shapes in grey and dun, naked and hairless, dancing and coupling with each other as they mock us with their numbers?"

"And the Others for me are different again," Mattio said bluntly, almost angrily. "They are large, larger than men, with fur on their spines running down into a tail like the mountain cats. They walk upon two legs but they have claws on their hands, and razored teeth in their mouths."

Baerd wheeled again, his heart hammering, looking west in the eerily lucid green light of wherever they were. But still, in the middle distance, pouring down out of the hills, he saw soldiers with weapons: swords and pikes and the undulating knives of Ygrath.

He turned to Elena, a little desperate.

"I do not like to name what I see," she murmured, lowering her eyes. "They frighten me too much. They are creatures of my childhood fears. But it is not what you are seeing, Baerd. Believe me. Believe us. You may see the Others in the shape of your heart's hate, but this is not the battle of your daytime world."

He shook his head in fierce denial. There was a deep surging in his spirit, a rushing of blood in his veins. The Others were nearer now, hundreds of them, streaming out of the hills.

"I am always fighting the same battle," he said to her. To her and the two men. "All my life. Wherever I am. And I know what I see out there. I can tell you that I am fifteen years old now, not fourteen or I could not be here. They would not have allowed me." A thought struck him. "Tell me: is there a stream west of us, a river below where they are descending now?"

"There is," Donar said. "Do you want to join battle there?"

A red, fierce joy was running through Baerd, wild and uncontrollable.

"I do," he said. "Oh, I do. Mattio, where do we claim our weapons?"

"There." Mattio pointed southeast to a small nearby field where tall stalks of corn were growing, in defiance of what should have been the season. "Come. They will be at your stream very soon."

Baerd did not speak. He followed Mattio's lead. Elena and Donar went with them. Other men and women were in that field of corn already and Baerd saw that they were reaching down to pluck a stalk to be their weapon in the night. It was uncanny, incredible, but he was beginning to take a part of the measure of this place, to understand the magic that was at work here, and a corner of his mind, which worked outside and around the stern logic of day, grasped that the tall yellow grain that was so endangered was the only weapon possible tonight. They would fight for the fields with grain in their hands.

He stepped in among the others in that cornfield, careful of where he walked, and he bent down and grasped a stalk for himself. It came free easily, even willingly to his hand in that green night. He walked out on to fallow ground again and hefted it in his hand and swung it cautiously, and he saw that already the stalk had stiffened like metal forged. It sliced through the air with a keen whistling sound. He tested it with a finger and drew blood. The stalk had grown as sharp as any blade he'd ever held, and as true to his hand, and it was many-edged like the fabled blades of Quileia, centuries ago.

He looked away to the west. The Ygrathens were descending the nearest of the hills. He could see the glint of their weapons under the moon. This is not a dream, he told himself. Not a dream.

Donar was beside him, grim and unwavering. Mattio stood beyond, a passionate defiance in his face. Men and women were gathering behind them and all around, and all of them held corn swords in their hands, and all of them looked the same: stern and resolute and unafraid.

"Shall we go?" Donar said then, turning to look out upon them all. "Shall we go and fight them for the fields and for our people? Will you come with me now to the Ember war?"

"For the fields!" the Night Walkers cried, and raised their living swords aloft to the sky.

What Baerd di Tigana bar Saevar cried he cried only in his heart and not aloud, but he went forward with all of them, a stalk of corn like a long blade in his hand, to do battle under the pale green moon of that enchanted place.

When the Others fell, scaly and grey, blind and crawling with maggots, there was never any blood. Elena understood why that was so, Donar had told her years ago: blood meant life, and their foes tonight were the enemies, the opposite, of any kind of life. When they fell to the corn swords nothing flowed from them, nothing seeped away into the earth.

There were so many of them. There always were, swirling in a grey mass like slugs, pouring down out of the hills and swarming into the stream where Donar and Mattio and Baerd had come to make their stand.

Elena prepared herself to fight, amid the loud, whirling, green-tinted chaos of the night. She was frightened, but she knew she could deal with that. She remembered how deathly afraid she'd been in her first Ember war, wondering how she, she who could scarcely have even lifted a sword in the daytime world, could possibly battle such hideous creatures as the nightmare ones she saw.

But Donar and Verzar had assuaged her fears: here in this green night of magic it was the soul and the spirit that mattered, here it was courage and desire that shaped and drove the bodies in which they found themselves. Elena felt so much stronger on the Ember Nights, so much more lithe and quick. That had frightened her, too, the first time and even afterward: under this green moon she was someone who could kill. It was a realization she had to deal with, an adjustment to be made. They all did, to one degree or another. None of them were exactly what they were under the sun or the two moons of home. Donar's body on this night of war reached backwards, further every year, toward a lost image of what he once had been.

Just as Baerd's very clearly, reached back as well, more than one might have guessed or expected. Fifteen, he had said. Not fourteen, or he would not have been allowed. She didn't understand that, but she had no time to puzzle such things out. Not now. The Others were in the stream, and now they were trying to clamber out, clad in the hideous shapes her mind gave them.

She dodged a scything axe-blow from a creature dripping with water as it scrambled up the bank towards her, and as she did she gritted her teeth and slashed downward with an instinctive deadliness she would have never known was hers. She felt her blade, her living sword, crunch hard through scaly armor and bury itself in the maggot-infested body of her foe.

She pulled the weapon free with an effort, hating what she had done, but hating the Others more, infinitely more. She turned, barely in time to block another ascending blow and withdraw a step before two new, gapejawed assailants on her right. She lifted her blade in a desperate attempt to ward.

Then suddenly only one of the Others was standing there. Then neither of them.

She lowered her sword and looked at Baerd. At her stranger on the road, her promise given by the night. He smiled grimly at her, tight-lipped, standing over the bodies of the Others he had just killed. He smiled, and he had saved her life, but he said nothing to her at all. He turned and went forward to the edge of the river. She watched him go, saw his boy's body stride into the thickness of battle, and she wasn't sure whether to give way to a rush of hope because of his deadly skill or to grieve for the look in his too young eyes.

Again, no time for such thoughts. The river seethed and boiled now with the churning of the Others as they waded into it. Screams of pain, cries of rage and fury cut the green night like blades of sound. She saw Donar along the bank to the south swinging his sword two-handed in wheeling circles of denial. Saw Mattio beside him, slashing and stabbing, neat-footed among the fallen bodies, absolute in his courage. All about her the Night Walkers of Certando plunged into the caldron of their war.

She saw a woman fall, then another, swarmed over and hacked down by the creatures from the west. She cried out herself then, in fury and revulsion, and she moved back up to the edge of the river, running to where Carenna was, her sword swinging forward, her blood, her blood which was life, and the promise of life, raging with the need to drive them back. Back now, tonight, and then again a year from now, and after that, and again and again on each of these Ember Nights, that the spring sowing might be fruitful, that the earth be allowed to bear its bounty in the fall. This year and the next year, and the next.

In the midst of that chaos of noise and motion, Elena glanced up. She checked the height of the still-climbing moon, and then, she could not stop herself, she looked to the nearest of the devastated hills beyond the stream, apprehension clutching at her heart. There was no one there. Not yet.

There would be, though. She was almost certain there would be. And then? She pulled herself back from that. What would happen would happen. Around her there was war, here and now, and more than enough terror in the Others massed before her, surging up out of the river on either side.

She tore her thoughts from the hill and struck downwards, hard, feeling her blade bite into a scabrous shoulder. She heard the Other make a wet, bubbly sound. She jerked her sword free and spun left barely in time to block a sideways blow, scrambling to keep her footing. Carenna's free hand braced her from behind; she didn't even have time to look but she knew who it was.

It was wild under the unknown stars, under the green light of that moon, it was frenzy and chaos; there was screaming and shouting everywhere now, and the riverbank was muddy, slippery and treacherous. Elena's Others were wet and grey, dark with their parasites and open sores. She clenched her teeth and fought, letting this Ember Night body's grace be guided by her soul, the stalk that was her sword dancing with a life that seemed to come from within itself as much as it did from her. She was splashed with mud and water, and she was sure there must be blood, but there was no time to check, no time now to do anything at all but parry and hammer and slash, and fight to keep one's footing on the slope of the riverbank, for to fall would be to die.

She was aware, in scattered, hallucinatory flashes, of Donar beside her and Carenna for a time. Then she saw him stride away with a handful of others to quell a movement to the south. Baerd came up on her left at one point, guarding her open side, but when she glanced over again, and now the moon was very high, she saw he was gone. Then she saw where. He was in the river, not waiting for the Others to come to him. He was attacking them in the water, screaming incoherent words she could not understand. He was slim and young and very beautiful, and deadly. She saw bodies of the Others piling before his feet like grey sludge blocking the stream. He would be seeing them differently, she knew. He had told them what he saw: he would be seeing soldiers of Ygrath, of Brandin, the Tyrant in the west.

His blade seemed almost to vanish in a blur, it moved so fast. Knee-deep in the stream he stood rooted like a tree and they could not force him back, or survive in front of him. The Others were falling back from him there, scrambling to withdraw, trying to work their way around their own dead to get further down the stream. He was driving them away, battling alone in the water, the moonlight strange on his face and strange on the living stalk that was his sword, and he was a fifteen-year-old boy. Only that. Elena's heart ached for him, even as she fought an overwhelming weariness.

She willed herself to hold her own ground, north of where he was, up on the muddy bank. Carenna was further south along the river now, fighting beside Donar. Two men and a woman from another village came up beside Elena, and together the four of them fought for their stretch of slippery ground, trying to move in concert, to be of one mind.

They were not fighters, not trained for battle. They were farmers and farmers' wives, millers and blacksmiths and weavers, masons and serving-girls, goatherds in the hills of the Braccio Range. But each and every one of them had been born with a caul in the highlands and named in childhood for Carlozzi's teachings and for the Ember war. And under the green moon, which had passed its apex and would be setting now, the passion of their souls taught their hands to speak for life with the blades the tall grain had become.

So the Night Walkers of Certando did battle by that river, fighting for the deepest, oldest dream of the widespreading country fields beyond all the high city walls. A dream of Earth, of the life-giving soil, rich and moist and flourishing in its cycle of seasons and years; a dream of the Others driven back, and farther back, and finally away, one bright year none of them would live to see.

And there came a time, amid the tumult and the frenzy, the loud, blurred, spinning violence by the river, when Elena and her three companions forged a respite for themselves. She had a moment to look up and she saw that the stream was thinning of foes. That the Others were milling about, disorganized and confused west of the river. She saw Baerd splash further into the water, hip-deep now, crying for the enemy to come to him, cursing them in a voice so tormented it was scarcely knowable as his own.

Elena could barely stand. She leaned on her sword, sucking in air with heaving sobs, utterly spent. She looked over and saw that one of the men who had fought beside her was down on one knee, clutching his right shoulder. He bled from an ugly, ragged wound. She knelt beside him, tearing weakly at her clothing for a strip to bind it with. He stopped her though.

He stopped her and touched her shoulder and, mutely, he pointed across the stream. She looked where he pointed, away to the west, fear rising in her again. And hi that moment of seeming victory Elena saw that the crown of the nearest hill was not empty anymore. That there was something standing there.

"Look!" a man cried just then, from further down the river. "He is with them again! We are undone!"

Other voices took up that cry along the riverbank, in grief and horror and cold fear, for they saw, they all saw now, that the shadow figure had come. Within the darkest spaces of her heart Elena had known that he would.

Just as he almost always had these last years. Fifteen years, twenty; though never before that, Donar had said. When the moon began to set, green and full, just when, so much of the time, it seemed as if they might have a chance to force the Others back, that dark figure would appear, to stand wrapped in fog and mist as hi a shroud at the back of the enemy ranks.

And it was this figure the Walkers would see come forward in the years of their defeats, when they were retreating, having been driven back. It was he who would step onto the bitterly contested places of battle, the lost fields, and claim them for his own. And blight and disease and desolation spread where he passed, wherever he walked upon the earth.

He stood now on the nearest of the wasted hills west of the river, clouds of obscuring mist rising and flowing all around him. Elena could not discern his face, none of them ever had, but from within that smoke and darkness she saw him raise his hands and stretch them out toward them, reaching, reaching for the Walkers on the riverbank. And as he did Elena felt a sudden shaft of coldness come into her heart, a terrible, numbing chill. Her legs began to tremble. She saw that her hands were shaking and it seemed that there was nothing she could do, nothing at all, to hold her courage to her.

Across the stream the Others, his army or his allies or the amorphous projections of his spirit, saw him stretch his arms toward the battlefield. Elena heard a sudden savage exultation in their cries; she saw them massing west of the river to come at them again. And she remembered, weary and spent, with a grim despair reaching into her heart, that this was exactly how it had been last year, and the spring before that, and the spring before as well. Her spirit ached with the knowledge of loss to come, even as she fought to find a way to ready her exhausted body to face another charge.

Mattio was beside her. "No!" she heard him gasp, with a dull, hopeless insistence, blindly fighting the power of that figure on the hill. "Not this time! Not! Let them kill me! Not retreat again!"

He could scarcely speak, and he was bleeding, she saw. There was a gash in his right side, another along his leg. When he straightened to move to the river she saw that he was limping. He was doing it though, he was moving forward, even into the face of what was being leveled at them. Elena felt a sob escape her dry throat.

And now the Others were coming again. The wounded man beside her struggled gamely up from his knees, holding his sword in his left hand, his useless right arm dangling at his side. Further along the bank she saw men and women as badly wounded or worse. They were all standing though, and lifting their blades. With love, with a shafting of pride that was akin to pain, Elena saw that the Night Walkers were not retreating. None of them. They were ready to hold this ground, or to try. And some of them were going to die now she knew, many of them would die.

Then Donar was beside her, and Elena flinched at what she saw in his white face. "No," he said. "This is folly. We must fall back. We have no choice. If we lose too many tonight it will be even worse next spring. I have to play for time, to hope for something that will make a change." The words sounded as if they were scraped from his throat.

Elena felt herself beginning to cry, from exhaustion as much as anything else. And even as she was nodding from within the abyss of her weariness, trying to let Donar see her understanding, her support, wanting to ease the rawness of his pain, even as the Others drew near again, triumphant, hideous, unwearied, she abruptly realized that Baerd wasn't with them on the bank. She wheeled toward the river, looking for him, and so she saw the miracle begin.

He was never in any doubt, none at all. From the moment the mist-wrapped figure appeared on the black hill Baerd knew what it was. In an odd way he had known this even before the shadow-figure came. It was why he was here, Baerd realized. Donar might not know it, but this was why the Elder had had a dream of someone coming, why Baerd's steps that night had taken him to the place where Elena was watching in the dark. It seemed to have been a long time ago.

He couldn't see the figure clearly but that didn't matter, it really didn't. He knew what this was about. It was as if all the sorrows and the lessons and the labors of his life, his and Alessan's together, had brought him to this river under this green moon that someone here might know exactly what the figure on the black hill was, the nature of its power. The power the Night Walkers had not been able to withstand because they could not understand.

He heard a splash behind him and knew instinctively that it would be Mattio. Without turning he handed him his strange sword. The Others, the Ygrathens of his dreams and hate, were massing again on the western bank.

He ignored them. They were tools. Right now they did not matter at all. They had been beaten by the courage of Donar and the Walkers; only the shadow-figure signified now, and Baerd knew what was needed to deal with that. Not a prowess of blades, not even with these swords of grain. They were past that now.

He drew a deep breath, and he raised his hands from his sides and pointed up at that shrouded figure on the hill, exactly as the figure was pointing down at them. And with his heart full to overflowing with old grief and a young certainty, conscious that Alessan would say it better, but knowing that this had become his task, and knowing also what had to be done, Baerd cried aloud in the strangeness of that night:

"Be gone! We do not fear you! I know what you are and where your power lies! Be gone or I shall name you now and cut your strength apart, we both know the power of names tonight!"

Gradually the raucous cries subsided on the other side of the river, and the murmurs of the Walkers faded. It grew very still, deathly still. Baerd could hear Mattio's labored, painful breathing just behind him. He didn't look back. He waited, straining to penetrate the mist that wrapped the figure on the hill. And as he stared it seemed to him, with a surge in his heart, that the upraised arms were lowered slightly. That the concealing mist dissipated a very little.

He waited no longer.

"Be gone!" he cried again, more loudly yet, a ringing sureness in his voice now. "I have said I know you and I do. You are the spirit of the violators here. The presence of Ygrath in this peninsula, and of Barbadior. Both of them! You are tyranny in a land that has been free. You are the blight and the ruin in these fields. You have used your magic in the west to shape a desecration, to obliterate a name. Yours is a power of darkness and shadow under this moon, but I know you and can name you, and so all your shadows are gone/"

He looked, and even as he was speaking the words that came to him he saw that they were true! It was happening. He could see the mist drifting apart, as if taken by a wind. But even in the midst of joy something checked him: a knowledge that the victory was only here, only in this unreal place. His heart was full and empty at one and the same time. He thought of his father dying by the Deisa, of his mother, of Dianora, and Baerd's hands went flat and rigid at his sides, even as he heard the murmurs of disbelieving hope rising at his back.

Mattio whispered something in a choked voice. Baerd knew it would be a prayer.

The Others were milling about in disarray west of the stream. Even as Baerd watched, motionless, his hands held outwards, his heart in turmoil, more of the shadows cloaking their leader lifted and spread, beginning to blow away over the brow of the hill. For one moment Baerd thought he saw the figure clearly. He thought he saw it bearded and slim, and of medium height, and he knew which of the Tyrants that one would be, which one had come from the west. And something rose within him at that sight, crashing through to the surface like a wave breaking against his soul.

"My sword!" he rasped. "Quickly!"

He reached back. Mattio placed it in his hand. In front of them the Others were starting to fall back, slowly at first, then faster, and suddenly they were running. But that didn't even matter; that didn't matter at all.

Baerd looked up at the figure on the hill. He saw the last of the shadows blowing away and he lifted his voice once more, crying aloud the passion of his soul: "Stay for me! If you are Ygrath, if you are truly the sorcerer of Ygrath I want you now! Stay for me, I am coming! In the name of my home and of my father I am coming for you now! I am Baerd di Tigana bar Saevar!"

Wildly, still screaming his challenge, he splashed forward and clambered out of the stream, scrambling up the other bank. The ruined earth felt cold as ice through his wet boots. He realized that he had entered a terrain that had no real place for life, but tonight, now, with that figure before him on the hill, that didn't matter either. It didn't matter if he died.

The army of the Others was in flight, they were throwing down their weapons as they ran. There was no one to gainsay him. He glanced up again. The moon seemed to be setting unnaturally fast. It looked as if it was resting now, round and huge, on the very crown of the black hill. Baerd saw the figure standing there silhouetted against that green moon; the shadows were gone, almost he saw it clearly again across the dead lands between.

Then he heard a long laugh of mockery, as if in response to his crying of his name. It was the laughter of his dreams, the laughter of the soldiers in the year of the fall. Still laughing, not hurrying at all, the shadow-figure turned and stepped down from the crown of the hill and away to the west.

Baerd began to run.

"Baerd, wait!" he heard the woman, Carenna, cry from behind him. "You must not be on the wastelands when the moon goes down! Come back! We have won!"

They had won. But he had not, whatever the Walkers of the highlands might think, or say. His battle, his and Alessan's, was no nearer resolution than it had been before tonight. Whatever he had done for the Night Walkers of Certando, this night's victory was not his, it could not be. He knew that in his heart. And his enemy, the image of his soul's hate, knew that as well as he and was laughing at him even now just out of sight beyond the brow of that low hill.

"Stay for me!" Baerd screamed again, his young, lost voice ripping through the night.

He ran, flashing over the dead earth, his heart bursting with the need for speed. He overtook stragglers among the army and he killed them as he ran, not even breaking stride. It hardly mattered, it was only for the Walkers in their war, for next year. The Others scattered north and south, away from him, from the line that led to the hill.

Baerd reached the slope and went straight up, scrabbling for a foothold on the cold waste ground. Then he breasted the hill with a surge and a gasp.

And he stood upon the summit, exactly where the shadow-figure had stood, and he looked away to the west, toward all the empty valleys and ruined hills beyond, and saw nothing. There was no one there at all.

He turned quickly north and then south, his chest heaving, and saw that the army of the Others, too, seemed to have entirely melted away. He spun back to the west and then he understood.

The green moon had set.

He was alone in this wasteland under a clear, high dome of brilliant, alien stars and Tigana was no nearer to coming back than it had ever been. And his father was still dead and would never come back to him, and his mother and sister were dead, or lost somewhere in the world.

Baerd sank to his knees on the ruined hill. The ground was cold as winter. It was colder. His sword slipped from his suddenly nerveless fingers. He looked at his hands by starlight, at the slim hands of the boy he had been, and then he covered his face with those hands for the second time in that Ember Night, and he wept as though his heart were breaking now and not broken long ago.

Elena reached the hill and began to climb. She was breathless from running but the slope was not steep. Mattio had grabbed her arm when she started to enter the river. He had said it might mean death to be among the ruined lands after moonset, but Donar had told her it would be all right now. Donar had been unable to stop smiling since Baerd had made the shadow-figure withdraw. There was a stunned, incredulous glory in his face.

Most of the Walkers had gone back, wounded and weary, intoxicated with triumph, to the field where they had claimed their weapons. From there they would be drawn home before sunrise. So it had always happened.

Carefully avoiding Mattio's eyes, Elena had crossed the river and come after Baerd. Behind her as she went she could hear the singing begin. She knew what would follow in the sheltering hollows and the darkness of that field after an Ember victory. Elena felt her pulse accelerate with the very thought. She could guess what Mattio's face would have revealed as she walked away from him into the river and then across. In her heart she offered him an apology, but her stride as she went did not falter, and then, halfway to the hill, she began to run, suddenly afraid for the man she sought, and for herself, alone in all this wide dark emptiness.

Baerd was sitting on the crown of the hill, where the shadow-figure had stood in front of the setting moon just before he fled. He glanced up as she approached, and a queer, frightened expression flickered for an instant across his face in the starlit dark.

Elena stopped, uncertain.

"It is only me," she said, trying to catch her breath.

He was silent a moment. "I'm sorry," he said. "I wasn't expecting anyone. For a moment… for a moment you looked almost exactly like a… like something I saw once as a boy. Something that changed my life."

Elena didn't know what to say to that. She had thought no further than getting here. Now that she had found him she was suddenly unsure of herself again. She sat down on the dead earth facing him. He watched her, but said nothing else.

She took a deep breath and said, bravely, "You should have expected someone. You should have known that I would come." She swallowed hard, her heart pounding.

For a long moment Baerd was very still, his head tilted a little to one side, as if listening to the echo of her words. Then he smiled. It lit up his young, too thin face and the hollow, wounded eyes.

"Thank you," he said. "Thank you for that, Elena." It was the first time he'd used her name. In the distance they could hear the singing from the cornfield. Overhead the stars were almost impossibly bright in the black arch of the sky.

Elena felt herself flushing. She glanced down and away from his direct gaze. She said, awkwardly, "After all, it is dangerous here in the dead lands, and you wouldn't have known. Not having been here before. With us, I mean. You wouldn't even know how to get back home."

"I have an idea," he said gravely. "I imagine we have until sunrise. And in any case, these aren't the dead lands anymore. We won them back tonight. Elena, look at the ground where you walked."

She turned to look back. And caught her breath in wonder and delight to see that along the path she'd taken to this hill white flowers were blooming in what had been barren earth.

Even as she watched she saw that the flowers were spreading in all directions from where she had passed. Tears sprang to her eyes and spilled over, gliding unheeded down her cheeks, making her vision blur. She had seen enough though, she understood. This was the Earth's response to what they had done tonight. Those delicate white flowers coming to life under the stars were the most beautiful things she had seen in all her days.

Quietly, Baerd said, "You have caused this, Elena. Your being here. You must teach Donar and Carenna and the others this. When you win the Ember war it is not only a matter of holding the line of battle. You must follow the Others and drive them back, Elena. It is possible to regain lands lost in battle years before."

She was nodding. Hearing in his words an echo of something known and forgotten long ago. She spoke the memory: "The land is never truly dead. It can always come back. Or what is the meaning of the cycle of seasons and years?" She wiped her tears away and looked at him.

His expression in the darkness was much too sad for a moment such as this. She wished she knew a way to dispel that sorrow, and not only for tonight. He said, "That is mostly true, I suppose. Or true for the largest things. Smaller things can die. People, dreams, a home."

Impulsively Elena reached forward and took his hand. It was fine and slender and it lay in hers quietly but without response. In the distance, east of the river, the Night Walkers were singing songs to celebrate and welcome the spring, to cry the blessing of the season on the crops that summer would see. Elena wished with all her heart that she were wiser, that she might have an answer to what lay so deeply and hurtfully inside this man.

She said, "If we die that is part of the cycle. We come back in another form." But that was Donar's thought, his way of speaking, not her own.

Baerd was silent. She looked at him, but she could find nothing within her to say that wouldn't sound wrong, or be someone else's words. So instead, thinking it might somehow help him to speak, she asked, "You said you knew the shadow-figure. How, Baerd? Can you tell me?" It was a strange, almost an illicit pleasure to speak his name.

He smiled at her then, gently. He had a gentle face, especially young as it was now. "Donar had all the clues himself, and Mattio, all of you. You had been losing for twenty years or so they told me. Donar said I was too much tied to the transitory battles of day, do you remember?"

Elena nodded.

"He wasn't wholly wrong," Baerd went on. "I saw Ygrathen soldiers here, and they were not truly so of course. I understand that now. Dearly as I might have wished them to be. But I wasn't wholly wrong either." For the first time his hand put an answering pressure on her own. "Elena, evil feeds on itself. And the evils of day, however transitory, must add to the power of what you face here on the Ember Nights. They must, Elena, it cannot but be so. Everything connects. We cannot afford to look only at our own goals. That is the lesson the dearest friend of my life has taught me. The Tyrants in our peninsula have shaped a wrong that goes deeper than who governs in a given year. And that evil has spilled over into this battlefield where you fight Darkness in the name of Light."

"Darkness adding to Darkness," she said. She wasn't certain what had led her to say that.

"Exactly," Baerd said. "Exactly so. I understand your battles here now, how far they go beyond my own war in the daylight world. But going far beyond doesn't mean there is no connection. That was Donar's mistake. It was before him all along, if only he could have seen."

"And the naming," Elena asked. "What did the naming have to do with it?"

"Naming has everything to do with it," Baerd said quietly. He withdrew his hand from hers and rubbed it across his eyes. "Names matter even more here in this place of magic than they do at home where we mortals live and die." He hesitated. And after a silence made deeper by the singing far away, he whispered, "Did you hear me name myself?"

It seemed almost a silly question. He had cried it at the top of his voice. All of them had heard. But his expression was too intense for her to do anything but answer.

"I did," she said. "You named yourself Baerd di Tigana bar Saevar."

And moving very slowly then, very deliberately, Baerd reached for and claimed her hand, and brought it to his lips, as though she were the lady of one of the highland castles, and not only the wheelwright's widowed daughter from the village below Borso.

"Thank you," he said, in a queer voice. "Thank you so much. I thought… I thought it might possibly be different tonight. Here."

The back of her hand was tingling where his lips had touched her and her pulse was suddenly erratically fast. Fighting for composure, Elena asked, "I don't understand. What did I do?"

His sorrow was still there, but somehow it seemed gentler now, less naked in his face. He said, quite calmly, "Tigana is the name of a land that was taken away. Its loss is part of the evil that brought the shadow-figure to this hill, and to all your other battlefields for twenty years now. Elena, you won't understand this completely, you can't, but believe me when I tell you that you could not have heard the name of that land back in your village, whether by the light of day or under the two moons. Not even if I spoke it to you from as near as we are now, or cried it louder than I did within the stream."

And now, finally, she did understand. Not the difficult sum of what he was trying to convey, but the thing that mattered more for her: the source of his grief, of that look in the dark of his eyes.

"And Tigana is your home," she said. Not a question. She knew.

He nodded. Very calm. He was still holding her hand, she realized. "Tigana is my home," he echoed. "Men call it Lower Corte now."

She was silent a long moment, thinking hard. Then, "You must speak of this to Donar," she said. "Before morning takes us back. There may be something he knows about such matters, something he can do to help. And he will want to help."

Something flickered in his face. "I'll do that," he said. "I'll speak to him before I go."

They were both silent then. Before I go. Elena pushed that away as best she could. She became aware that her mouth was dry and her heart was still pounding, almost as it had in battle. Baerd did not move. He looked so young. Fifteen, he had said. She glanced away, uncertain again, and saw that all around them now the hill itself was covered with a carpet of white flowers.

"Look!" she said, delighted and awed.

He looked around, and smiled then, from the heart.

"You brought them with you," he said.

Below them and east, in the field of corn across the river only a few voices were still singing. Elena knew what that would mean. This was the first of the Ember Nights of spring. The beginning of the year, of the cycle of sowing and harvest. And tonight they had won the Ember war. She knew what would be happening among the men and women in that field. Overhead, the stars seemed to have come nearer, to be almost as close to them as the flowers.

She swallowed, and summoned her courage again. She said: "There are other things that are different about tonight. Here."

"I know," Baerd said softly.

And then he moved, finally, and was on his knees before her among all the young white flowers. He released her palm then, but only to take her face between his two hands, so carefully it seemed as if he feared she might break or bruise to his touch. Over the rapidly growing thunder of her pulse, Elena heard him whisper her name once, as if it were a kind of prayer, and she had time to answer with his, with all of his name, as a gift, before he lowered his mouth to hers.

She could not have spoken after that, for desire and need crashed over her and bore her away as something, a chip of wood, a fragment of bark, carried by a huge and rushing wave. Baerd was with her, though. They were together here in this place, and then they were naked among the newly sprung white flowers of that hill.

And as she drew him down and into her, feeling the keenness of longing and an aching tenderness, Elena looked up for a moment past his shoulder at all the circling, luminous stars of the Ember Night. And it came to her as a wonderful and joyous thought that every single diamond of those stars would have a name.

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

Chapter 12

THE COLD AND A CRAMPED STIFFNESS WOKE DEVIN ABOUT AN hour before sunrise. It took him a moment to remember where he was. It was still dark in the room. He massaged his neck and listened to Catriana's quiet breathing from under her blankets in the bed. A rueful expression crossed his face.

It was strange, he reflected, twisting his head from side to side to try to ease the soreness, how only a few hours in a soft armchair could leave one feeling more knotted and uncomfortable than a whole night out on cold ground

He felt surprisingly awake though, given the night he'd just had and the fact that he couldn't have been asleep for more than three hours or so. He considered going back to his own bed but realized that he wasn't going to be able to sleep any more that night. He decided to go down to the kitchens and see if any of the household staff could be induced to make him a pot of khav.

He left the room, concentrating on closing the door silently behind him. So much so that when he saw Alessan standing in the hallway watching him from in front of his own door he jumped involuntarily.

The Prince walked over, eyebrows arched.

Devin shook his head firmly. "We just talked. I slept in the chair. Got a kink in my neck to show for it."

"I'm sure," Alessan murmured.

"No, really," Devin insisted.

"I'm sure," Alessan repeated. He smiled. "I believe you. If you had essayed more I would have heard screaming, yours with an unpleasant injury, most likely."

"Very likely," Devin agreed. They walked away from Catriana's door.

"How was Alienor though?"

Devin felt himself going red. "How…?" he began, then gradually became aware of the condition of his clothing and the amused scrutiny Alessan was giving him,

"Interesting," he offered.

Alessan smiled again. "Come downstairs with me and help solve a problem. I need some khav for the road anyhow."

"I was on the way to the kitchens myself. Give me two minutes to change my clothes."

"Not a bad idea," Alessan murmured, eyeing the torn shirt. "I'll meet you down there."

Devin ducked into his own chamber and quickly changed. For good measure he pulled on the vest Alais had sent him. Thinking of her, of her sheltered, quiet innocence, took him back, by polarity, to what had happened last night. He stood stock-still in the middle of his room for a moment and tried to properly grasp what he had done, and had done to him.

Interesting, he had just called it. Language. The process of sharing with words seemed such a futile exercise sometimes. A remnant of the sadness he'd felt, leaving Alienor, washed back over him and it picked up Catriana's sorrows too. He felt as if he'd been washed up by the sea on some grey beach at a bleak hour.

"Khav," Devin said aloud. "Or I'll never get out of this mood."

On the way downstairs he realized, belatedly, what Alessan had meant by "for the road." His meeting, wherever it was, was today, the encounter they'd been pointing toward for half a year.

And after that he would be riding west. To Tigana. Where his mother lay dying in a Sanctuary of Eanna.

Wide awake, his mind snapping from night reflections into the sharper agitations of the day, Devin followed a glow of light to the huge kitchens of Castle Borso and he paused in the arched doorway, looking within.

Sitting by the roaring fire, Alessan was carefully sipping steaming khav from an oversized mug. In a chair beside him Erlein di Senzio was doing the same. The two men were both gazing into the flames while all around them there was already a purposeful stir and bustle in the kitchen.

Devin stood in the doorway a moment, unnoticed, and found himself looking closely at the two men. In their silent gravity they seemed to him to be a part of a frieze, a tableau, emblematic in some complex way of all such pre-dawn hours for those on the long roads.

Neither man was a stranger to this hour, Devin knew, to sitting thus before a castle kitchen fire among the servants in the last dark hour before dawn, easing into wakefulness and a fugitive warmth, preparing for the road again and whatever turnings it might offer in the day that had not yet begun.

It seemed to Devin that Alessan and Erlein, sitting together as they were, were bonded in some way that went beyond the harsh thing that had happened by that twilit stream in Ferraut. It was a linkage that had nothing to do with Prince and wizard, it was shaped of the things they each had done. The same things done. Memories they would each have and could share, if these two men could truly share anything after what had happened between them.

For years they had each been traveling. There had to be so many images that overlapped and could evoke the same mood, emotions, the same sounds and smells. Like this one: darkness outside, the edge of grey dawn and the castle stir the sun would bring, chill of the corridors and knowledge of wind outside the walls, cut by the crackle and roar of the kitchen fire; the reassuring steam and smell rising from their cradled mugs; sleep and dream receding, the mind slowly turning forward to the day that lay ahead swathed in ground mist. Looking at their stillness amid the bustle of the kitchen Devin felt another return of the sadness that seemed to be his legacy from this long strange night in the highlands.

Sadness, and a distinct stir of longing. Devin realized that he wanted that shared history for himself, wanted to be a part of that self-contained, accomplished fraternity of men who knew this scene so well. He was young enough to savor the romance of it, but old enough, especially after this past winter and his time with Menico, to guess at the price demanded for those memories and the contained, solitary, competent look of the two men in front of him.

He stepped through the doorway. A pretty servant noticed him and smiled shyly. Without a word she brought him a scalding mug of khav. Alessan glanced over at him and hooked a third chair with his long leg, pulling it into a position near him by the fire. Devin walked over and sank gratefully down near the warmth. His stiffened neck was still bothering him.

"I didn't even have to be charming," Alessan reported cheerfully. "Erlein was already here and had started in on a fresh pot of khav. There were people in the kitchen all night to keep the fires going. Couldn't have lit new ones on an Ember Day."

Devin nodded, sipping carefully and with intense gratitude from his steaming mug. "And the other question you mentioned?" he asked guardedly, with a glance at Erlein.

"Solved," the Prince said promptly. He seemed unnaturally bright, brittle as kindling. "Erlein's going to have to come with me. We've established that I can't let him get too far away or my summons won't work. And if that's the case, well he simply has to go where I go. All the way west. We really do seem to be tied together, don't we?" He flashed his teeth in a smile at the wizard. Erlein didn't bother to respond; he continued to sip his drink, gazing expressionlessly into the fire.

"Why were you up so early?" Devin asked him, after a moment.

Erlein made a sour face. "Slavery doesn't agree with my rest," he mumbled into his khav.

Devin elected to ignore that. There were times when he really did feel sorry for the wizard, but not when Erlein trotted out his reflexive self-pity.

A thought struck Devin. He turned to Alessan. "Is he going to your meeting this morning, too?"

"I suppose," Alessan said with apparent carelessness. "A small reward for his loyalty and the long ride he'll have afterward. I expect to travel without stopping very much." His tone was genuinely odd; too deliberately casual, as if denying the very possibility of strain.

"I see," Devin said, as neutrally as he could manage. He turned his gaze to the fire and kept it there.

There was a silence. When it stretched, Devin looked back and saw Alessan looking at him.

"Do you want to come?" the Prince asked.

Did he want to come? For half a year, from the moment Devin and Sandre had joined the other three, Alessan had been telling them that everything they wanted to achieve would point toward and wait upon a meeting in these southern highlands on the first of the Ember Days.

Did he want to come?

Devin coughed, spilling some khav on the stone floor. "Well," he said, "not if I'm in the way, naturally. Only if you think I could be useful and if maybe I could…"

He trailed off because Alessan was laughing at him.

Even Erlein had been roused from his sulk to a faint, reluctant snort of amusement. The two older men exchanged a glance.

"You are a terrible liar," the wizard said to Devin.

"He's right," Alessan said, still chuckling. "But never mind. I don't actually think you can be useful, it isn't in the nature of what I have to do. But I'm certain you won't do any harm and you and Erlein can keep each other entertained. It'll be a very long ride."

"What? To the meeting?" Devin asked, startled.

Alessan shook his head. "Only two or three hours there, depending on the state of the pass this morning. No, Devin, I'm inviting you west with me." His voice altered. "Home."

"Pigeon!" the balding, burly-chested man cried, though they were still some distance away. He sat in a massive oak chair set squarely down in the middle of the Braccio Pass. There had been early spring flowers blooming on the lower slopes but not very many this far up. On either side of the path piled rock and stone yielded to forest. Further up, to the south, there was only rock and snow.

Carrying-poles were attached to the oak chair and six men stood behind it in burgundy livery. Devin thought they were servants, but when he came nearer he saw from their weapons that he was wrong: these were soldiers, and guards.

"Pigeon," the man in the chair repeated loudly. "You have risen in the world! You bring companions this time!"

It was with a genuine sense of disorientation that Devin realized that the childish name and the raucous, carrying words were addressed to Alessan.

Who had the oddest look to his face all of a sudden. He said nothing by way of reply though as they rode up to the seven men in the pass. Alessan dismounted; behind him Devin and Erlein did the same. The man in the chair did not rise to greet them, but his bright, small eyes followed every move that Alessan made. His enormous hands were motionless on the carved arms of the chair. He wore at least six rings; they sparkled in the light of the morning sun. He had a hooked much-broken nose in a leathery, weather-beaten face that showed two livid scars. One was an old wound, slanting down his right cheek in a white line. The other, much more recent, raked redly across his forehead to the greying, receding hairline above his left ear.

"Company for the ride," Alessan said mildly. "I wasn't sure if you'd come. They both sing. Could have consoled me on the way back. The young one is Devin, the other is Erlein. You've grown monstrous fat in a year."

"And why should I not grow fat?" the other roared in delight. "And how dare you doubt that I would come! Have I ever not kept faith with you?" The tone was boisterous in the extreme, but Devin saw that the small eyes were alert and very watchful.

"Not ever," Alessan agreed calmly. His own febrile manner had gone, to be replaced by an almost preternatural calm. "But things have changed since two years ago. You don't need me anymore. Not since last summer."

"Not need you!" the big man cried. "Pigeon, of course I need you. You are my youth, my memory of what I was. And my talisman of fortune in battle."

"No more battles though," said Alessan quietly. "Will you allow me to offer my humblest congratulations?"

"No!" the other growled. "No, I will not allow you. No such mewling courtly claptrap from you. What I want is for you to come here and hug me and stop this imbecilic maundering! Who are we to be cluttering like this? The two of us!"

And with the last words he propelled himself upright with a ferocious push of his two muscled arms. The huge oak chair rocked backwards. Three of the liveried guards sprang to balance it.

The big man took two awkward, crippled, hopping steps forward as Alessan strode to meet him. And in that moment Devin abruptly realized, a bucket of ice down the length of his spine, who this scarred, maimed man had to be.

"Bear!" said Alessan, laughter catching in his throat. He threw his arms fiercely about the other man. "Oh, Marius, I truly didn't know if you would come."

Marius.

Stupefied by more than altitude and a sleepless night, Devin saw the self-crowned King of Quileia, the crippled man who'd killed seven armed challengers bare-handed hi the sacred grove, lift the Prince of Tigana clean off his feet and kiss him loudly on both cheeks. He lowered a red-faced Alessan to the path and held him at arms' length for a close scrutiny.

"It is true," he said at length as Alessan's grin faded. "I can see it. You really did doubt me. I should be outraged, Pigeon. I should be wounded and hurt. What did Pigeon Two say?"

"Baerd was sure you would be here," Alessan admitted ruefully. "I'm afraid I owe him money."

"At least one of you has grown up enough to have some sense,"

Marius growled. Then something seemed to register with him. "What? You two young scamps were wagering on me? How dare you!" He was laughing, but the blow he suddenly clapped on Alessan's shoulder made the other man stagger.

Marius hobbled back to his chair and sat down. Again Devin was struck by the all-embracing nature of the glance he turned on them. Only for an instant did it flit over Devin himself, but he had the uncanny sense that Marius had, in that one second, sized him up quite comprehensively, that he would be recognized and remembered should they meet by chance even a decade hence.

He experienced a weird, fleeting moment of pity for the seven warriors who had had to battle this man, bringing merely swords or spears, and armor and two good legs to meet him in a night grove.

Those arms like tree-trunks and the message in those eyes told Devin all he needed to know about which way the balance would have tilted in those battles despite the ritual maiming, the severed ankle tendons, of the consort who was supposed to die in the grove, to the greater glory of the Mother Goddess and her High Priestess.

Marius had not died. For anyone's greater glory. Seven times he had not died. And now, since that seventh time, there was a true King in Quileia again and the last High Priestess was dead. It had been Rovigo, Devin remembered suddenly, who had first given him that news. In a rancid tavern called The Bird, either half a year or half a lifetime ago.

"You must have been slipping or lazy or already fat last summer in the Grove," Alessan was saying. He gestured toward the scar on Marius's forehead. "Tonalius should never have been able to get that close to you with a blade."

The smile on the face of the King of Quileia was not, in truth, a pleasant thing to see. "He didn't," Marius said grimly. "I used our kick-drop from the twenty-seven tree and he was dead before we both hit the ground. The scar is a farewell token from my late wife in our last encounter. May the sacred Mother of us all guard her ever-blessed spirit. Will you take wine and a midday meal?"

Alessan's grey eyes blinked. "We would be pleased to," he said.

"Good," said Marius. He gestured to his guards. "In that case, while my men attend to laying things out for us you can tell me, Pigeon, and I hope you will tell me, why you hesitated just now before accepting that invitation."

It was Devin's turn to blink; he hadn't even registered the pause.

Alessan was smiling though. "I wish," he said, with a wry twist of his mouth, "that you would miss something once in a while." Marius smiled thinly, but did not speak. "I have a long ride ahead of me. At least three days, flat out. Someone I must get to, as soon as I can."

"More important than me, Pigeon? I am desolated."

Alessan shook his head. "Not more important, or I wouldn't be here now. More compelling perhaps. There was a message from Danoleon waiting for me at Borso last night. My mother is dying."

Marius's expression changed swiftly. "I am deeply sorry," he said. "Alessan, truly I am." He paused. "It could not have been easy for you to come here first, knowing that."

Alessan gave his small characteristic shrug. His eyes moved away from Marius, gazing past him up the pass toward the high peaks beyond. The soldiers had finished spreading a quite extravagant golden cloth over the level ground in front of the chair. Now they began laying out multi-colored cushions upon it and putting down baskets and dishes of food.

"We will break bread together," Marius said crisply, "and discuss what we are here to discuss, then you must go. You trust this message? Is there danger for you in returning?"

Devin hadn't even thought about that.

"I suppose there is," Alessan said indifferently. "But yes, I trust Danoleon. Of course I do. He took me to you in the first place."

"I am aware of that," Marius said mildly. "I remember him. I also know that unless things have greatly changed he is not the only priest in that Sanctuary of Eanna, and your clergy in the Palm have not been noted for their reliability."

Alessan gave his shrug again. "What can I do? My mother is dying. I've not seen her in almost two decades, Bear." His mouth crooked. "I don't think I am likely to be recognized by many people, even without Baerd's disguises. Would you not say I have changed somewhat since I was fourteen?" There was a slight challenge in the words.

"Somewhat," Marius said quietly. "Not so much as one might think. You were a grown man even then, in many ways. So was Baerd when he came to join you."

Again Alessan's eyes seemed to drift away up the line of the pass, as if chasing a memory or a far-off image to the south. Devin had an acute sense that there was much more being said here than he was hearing.

"Come," Marius said, levering his hands on the chair arms. "Will you join me on our carpet in the meadow?"

"Stay in the chair!" Alessan rapped sharply. His expression remained incongruously benign and untroubled. "How many men came here with you, Bear?"

Marius had not moved. "A company to the foothills. These six through the pass. Why?"

Moving easily, smiling carelessly, Alessan sat down on the cloth at the King's feet. "Hardly wise, to bring so few up here."

"There is little enough danger. My enemies are too superstitious to venture into the mountains. You know that, Pigeon. The passes were named as taboo long ago when they shut down trade with the Palm."

"In that case," Alessan said, still smiling, "I am at a loss to explain the bowman I just saw behind a rock up the trail."

"You are certain?" Marius's voice was as casual as Alessan's, but there was suddenly ice in his eyes.

"Twice now."

"I am deeply distressed," said the King of Quileia. "Such a person is unlikely to be here for any reason other than to kill me. And if they are breaking the mountain taboo I am going to be forced to rethink a number of assumptions. Will you take some wine?" He gestured, and one of the men in burgundy poured with a hand that trembled slightly.

"Thank you," Alessan murmured. "Erlein, can you do anything here without it being known?"

The wizard's face went pale, but he too kept his voice level. "Not any sort of attack. It would take too much power, and there is nothing here to screen it from any Tracker in the highlands."

"A shield for the King?"

Erlein hesitated.

"My friend," Alessan said gravely, "I need you and I am going to continue to need you. I know there is danger in using your magic, for all of us. I must have honest answers though, to make intelligent decisions. Pour him some wine," he said to the Quileian soldier.

Erlein accepted a glass and drank. "I can do a low-level screen behind him against arrows." He stopped. "Do you want it? There is some risk."

"I think I do," Alessan said. "Put up the shield as unobtrusively as you can."

Erlein's mouth tightened but he said nothing. His left hand moved very slightly from side to side. Devin could see the two missing fingers now, but nothing else happened, so far as he could tell.

"It is done," Erlein said grimly. "The risk will increase the longer I hold it up." He drank again from his wine.

Alessan nodded, accepting a wedge of bread and a plateful of meat and cheese from one of the Quileians. "Devin?"

Devin had been waiting. "I see the rock," he said quietly. "Up the path. On the right side. Arrow range. Send me home."

"Take my horse. There's a bow in the saddle."

Devin shook his head. "He may notice, and I'm not good enough with the bow anyhow. I'll do what I can. Can you arrange to be noisy in about twenty minutes?"

"We can be very noisy," said Marius of Quileia. "The climb back up and around will be easier to your left as you go down, just past the point where this path bends. I'd very much like this person alive, by the way."

Devin smiled. Marius suddenly roared with laughter and Alessan followed suit. Erlein was silent as Alessan swept an imperious hand out toward Devin.

"If you forgot it then you can fetch it, thimble-brain! We'll be here, enjoying our meal. We may leave something for you."

"It wasn't my fault!" Devin protested loudly, letting his smile fade to petulance. He turned back to where the horses were tethered. Shaking his head, visibly disconsolate, he mounted his grey and rode down the path along which they had come.

As far as the bend in the trail.

He dismounted and tethered the horse. After a moment's thought he left his sword where it was, hanging from the saddle. He was aware that it was a decision that might cost him his life. He'd seen the wooded slopes beside the pass though; a sword would be awkward and noisy when he began to climb.

Cutting to the west he soon found himself among the trees. He doubled back south and up, as far off the line of the pass as the terrain allowed. It was hard, sweaty going, and he had to hurry, but Devin was fit and he'd always been quick and agile, compensations for a lack of size. He scrambled up the steep slopes, weaving among mountain trees and dark serrano bushes, grasping roots wedged deep into the slanting soil.

Part of the way up, the trees briefly gave out before a short, steep cliff to the south and west. He could go up or he could go around, angling back toward the pass. Devin tried to guess his bearings but it was difficult, no sounds reached him this far off the trail. He couldn't be sure if he was already above the place where the Quileian cloth was spread for lunch. Twenty minutes, he'd told them. He gritted his teeth, offered a quick prayer to Adaon, and began to climb the rock. It occurred to him that there was something profoundly incongruous about an Asolini farmer's son from the northern marshes struggling up a cliff-face in the Braccio Range.

He wasn't an Asolini farmer's son though. He was from Tigana and his father was, and his Prince had asked him to do this thing.

Devin skittered sideways along the rock-face trying not to dislodge any pebbles. He reached an outcrop of stone, changed grip, hung free for a second, and then boosted himself straight up and onto it. He scrambled quickly across some level ground, dropped flat on his stomach and, breathing hard, looked up to the south.

And then straight down. He caught his breath, realizing how lucky he'd been. There was a single figure hiding behind a boulder almost directly below him. Devin had quite certainly been visible on the last part of his climb where the cliff-face broke clear of the trees. His silence had served him well though, for the figure below was oblivious to him, avidly intent on the group feasting on the path. Devin couldn't see them, but their voices carried to him now. The sun moved behind a cloud and Devin instinctively flattened himself, just as the assassin glanced up to gauge the change in the light.

For an archer it would matter, Devin knew. It was a long shot, downhill and partly screened by the guards. There would also be time, most likely, for only one arrow. He wondered if the tips were poisoned. Probably, he decided.

Very carefully he started crawling uphill, trying to work his way further around behind the assassin. His brain was racing as he slipped into a higher stand of trees. How was he going to get close enough to deal with an archer?

Just then he heard the sound of Alessan's pipes followed, a measure later, by Erlein's harp. A moment after that a number of voices started in on one of the oldest, most rollicking highland ballads of all. About a legendary band of mountain outlaws who had ruled these hills and crags with arrogant impunity until they were surprised and defeated by Quileia and Certando together.

Thirty brave men rode apace from the north And forty Quileians met them side by side. There in the mountains each pledged to the other. And Gan Burdash high in his roost defied!

The booming voice of Marius led the others into the refrain. By then Devin had remembered something and he knew what he was going to try to do. He was aware that there was more than an element of lunacy in his planning, but he also knew he didn't have much time, or many options.

His heart was pounding. He wiped his hands dry on his breeches and began moving more quickly through the trees along the line of the ridge he'd climbed. Behind him was the singing; beneath him now, perhaps fifteen feet east of this higher ridge and twenty feet below was an assassin with a bow. The sun came out from behind the clouds.

Devin was above and behind the Quileian now. Had he been carrying a bow and been at all accomplished with one he would have had the other at his mercy.

Instead, what he had was a knife, and a certain pride and trust in his own coordination, and a tall giant of a mountain pine tree rising all the way up to his ridge from just behind the boulder that sheltered the archer. He could see the other clearly now, clad in a masking green for the mountain trail, with a strung bow and half a dozen arrows to hand.

Devin knew what he had to do. He also knew, because there had been woods at home, if not mountain passes, that he could not climb down that tree with any hope of silence. Not even with the loud, seriously off-key voices screening his sounds from below.

Which left, so far as he could judge, only the one option. Others might have planned it better, but others weren't on this ridge. Devin wiped his damp palms very carefully dry again and began concentrating on a large branch that stretched out and away from the others. The only one that might do him any good. He tried to calculate angle and distance as best he could, given an almost total lack of experience at this particular maneuver. What he was about to try was not a thing one did for practice, anywhere.

He checked the hang of the dagger in his belt, wiped his hands one last time, and stood up. Absurdly, the flash of memory that came to him then was of the day his brothers had surprised him hanging upside down from a tree, trying to stretch his height.

Devin smiled tightly and stepped to the edge of the cliff. The branch looked absurdly far away, and it was only half of the way down to the level of the pass. He swore an inward oath that if he survived this Baerd was going to teach him how to use a bow properly.

From the path below he heard the ragged voices swirling erratically towards the climax of the ballad:

Gan Burdash ruled in the mountain heights

And with his band he ranged from crag to glen,

But seventy brave men tracked him to his lair

And when the moons had set the peaks were free again!

Devin jumped. Air whistled past his face. The branch flew up to meet him, blurred, very fast. He stretched his hands, clutched it, swung. Only a little. Only enough to change his angle of descent, cut his momentum. Bring him directly down upon the killer behind the rock.

The branch held, but the leaves crackled loudly as he pivoted. He'd known they would. The Quileian flung a startled glance skyward and grappled for the bow.

Not nearly fast enough. Screaming at the top of his lungs, Devin plummeted like some hunting bird of these high places. By the time his target began to move Devin was already there.

Our kick-drop from the twenty-seven tree, he thought.

Falling, he tilted his torso so that it angled sideways across the upper body of the Quileian and he kicked out hard with both feet as he did. The impact was sickening. He felt his legs make jarring contact, even as he crashed into the other, driving all the air from his own lungs.

They smashed into the ground together, tumbling and rolling away from the base of the boulder. Devin gasped agonizingly for breath, he felt the world sway and rock wildly in his sight. He gritted his teeth and groped for his dagger.

Then he realized it was not necessary.

Dead before we both hit the ground, Marius had said. With a shuddering heave Devin forced air into his tortured lungs. There was an odd, knifing pain running up his right leg. He forced himself to ignore it. He rolled free of the unconscious Quileian and struggled, gasping and wheezing, for another breath of precious air. And then he looked.

The assassin was a woman. Under all the circumstances, not a great surprise. She was not dead. Her forehead appeared to have glanced off the rock under the impact of his sprawling descent. She was lying on her side, bleeding heavily from a scalp wound. He had probably broken a number of her ribs with his kick. She had a profusion of cuts and scrapes from their tumble down the slope.

So, Devin noted, did he. His shirt was torn and he was badly scratched again, for the second time in half a day. There was a joke, something that ought to be amusing in that, but he couldn't reach to it. Not yet.

He seemed to have survived though. And to have done what he'd been asked to do. He managed to draw one full, steadying breath just as Alessan and one of the Quileian soldiers came sprinting up the path. Erlein was just behind them, Devin saw with surprise.

He started to stand, but the world spun erratically and he had to be braced by Alessan. The Quileian guard flipped the assassin over on her back. He stood staring down upon her and then spat, very deliberately, into her bleeding face.

Devin looked away.

His eyes met Alessan's. "We saw you jump from down there. You're really supposed to have wings before trying that sort of thing," the Prince said. "Didn't anyone ever tell you?"

The expression in the grey eyes belied the lightness of his tone. "I feared for you," he added softly.

"I couldn't think of anything else to do," Devin said apologetically. He was aware of a deep pride beginning to well up within him. He shrugged. "The singing was driving me mad. I had to do something to stop it."

Alessan's smile widened. He reached an arm around and squeezed Devin's shoulder. Baerd had done that too, in the Nievolene barn.

It was Erlein who laughed at the joke. "Come back down," the wizard said. "I'll have to clean out those cuts for you."

They helped him descend the slope. The Quileian carried the woman and her bow. Devin saw that it was made of a very dark wood, almost black, and was carved into a semblance of a crescent moon.

From one end of it there hung a gathered and twisted lock of greying hair. He shivered. He had a fair idea of whose it would be.

Marius was on his feet, one hand on the back of his chair, as he watched them come down. His eyes barely flicked over the four men and the carried assassin. They locked, cold and grim, on the black curve of the moon bow. He looked frightening.

And the more so, Devin thought, because not at all afraid.

"I think we are past the need to dance in words around each other," Alessan said. "I would like to tell you what I need and you will tell me if you can do it and that will be all we need say."

Marius held up a hand to stop him.

He had now joined the three of them among the cushions on the golden cloth. The dishes and baskets had been cleared away. Two of the Quileians had taken the woman back up over the pass to where the rest of their company waited. The other four were posted some distance away. The sun was high, as high as it would get at noon this far south, this early in the spring. It had turned into a mild, generous day.

"This Bear is a very bad word-dancer, Pigeon," the King of Quileia said soberly. "You know that. You probably know something else: how much it will grieve me to deny you any request at all. I would like to do this differently. I would like to tell you what I cannot do, so you will not ask it and force me to refuse."

Alessan nodded. He remained silent, watching the King.

"I cannot give you an army," Marius said flatly. "Not yet, and perhaps never. I am too green in power, too far from the stability I need at home to lead or even order troops over these mountains. There are several hundreds of years of tradition I have to set about changing in very little time. I am not a young man anymore, Pigeon."

Devin felt a leap of excitement within himself and struggled to master it. This was too serious an occasion for childlike feelings. He could hardly believe he was here, though, so close to, at the very heart of, something of this magnitude. He stole a sidelong glance at Erlein and then looked more closely: the same quick spark of interest was in the other's face. For all his years and his long travels, Devin seriously doubted if the troubadour-wizard had ever been so near to great events.

Alessan was shaking his head. "Bear," he said, "I would never ask you for that. For our sake as much as for your own. I will not have my name remembered as the man who first invited the newly awakened might of Quileia north into the Palm. If an army ever ventures from Quileia through these passes, and I hope we are both long dead before such a day, the wish of my heart will be for it to be slaughtered and driven back with losses so bloody that no King in the south ever tries again."

"If there is a King in the south and not another four hundred years of the Mother and her priestesses. Very well," Marius said, "then tell me what it is you do need."

Alessan's legs were neatly crossed, his long fingers laced in his lap. He looked for all the world as if he was discussing nothing of greater moment than, perhaps, the sequence of songs for an evening's performance.

Except that his fingers, Devin saw, were so tightly squeezed together they were white.

"A question first," Alessan said, controlling his voice. "Have you received letters offering to open trade?"

Marius nodded. "From both of your Tyrants. Gifts, messages of felicitation, and generous offers to reopen the old trade routes by sea and land."

"And each urged you to scorn the other as being untrustworthy and unstable in his power."

Marius was smiling faintly now. "Are you intercepting my mail, Pigeon? Each did exactly that."

"And what," Alessan asked, direct as an arrow, "have you replied?" For the first time, unmistakably, there was a taut cord of tension in his voice.

Marius heard it too. "Nothing yet," he said, his smile fading. "I want a few more messages from each of them before I move."

Alessan looked down and seemed to notice his clenched fingers for the first time. He unlaced them and ran a hand, predictably, through his hair.

"You will have to move, though," he said with some difficulty. "You will obviously need trade. In your position you have to begin showing Quileia some of the benefits you can offer. Traffic north will be the quickest way, won't it?" There was an awkward kind of challenge in his tone.

"Of course," Marius said simply. "I have to do it. Why else am I King? It is only a question of timing, and with what happened this morning I think my timing has just been moved up."

Alessan nodded, as if he'd known all this already.

"What will you do, then?" he asked.

"Open the passes for both of them. No preferences, no tariffs for either. I will let Alberico and Brandin send me all the gifts and goods and envoys they want. I'll let their trade make me truly a King, a King who brings new prosperity to his people. And I need to start doing it soon. Immediately, I now suspect. I have to put Quileia so firmly on a new path that the old one recedes as fast as I can make it. Otherwise I'll die having done nothing but live somewhat longer than most Year Kings, and the priestesses will be in power again before my bones are picked clean underground."

Alessan closed his eyes. Devin became aware of the rustling of leaves all around them and the sporadic calling of birds. Then Alessan looked up at Marius again, the grey eyes wide and calm, and he said, bluntly:

"My request: that you give me six months before deciding on trade. And something else, in that interval."

"The time alone is a great deal," Marius said very softly. "But tell me the rest, Pigeon. The something else."

"Three letters, Bear. I need three letters sent north. First letter: you say yes to Brandin, conditionally. You ask for time to consolidate your own position before exposing Quileia to outside influences. You make it clear that your inclination toward him is based on his appearing stronger than Alberico, more likely to endure. Second letter: you reject, sorrowfully, all overtures from Astibar. You write Alberico that you are intimidated by Brandin's threats. That you would dearly love to trade with the Empire of Barbadior, need to trade with them, but the Ygrathen seems too strong in the Palm for you to risk offending him. You wish Alberico all good fortune. You ask him to keep in contact with you, discreetly. You say you will be watching events in the north with close interest. You have not yet given Brandin a final decision, and will delay as long as you can. You send your warmest regards to the Emperor."

Devin was lost. He reverted to his trick of the winter: listen, remember, think about it later. Marius's eyes were bright though, and the cold, unsettling smile was back.

"And my third letter?" he asked.

"Is to the Governor of the Province of Senzio. Offering immediate trade, no tariffs, first choice of prime goods, secure anchorage in your harbors for their ships. Expressing deep admiration for Senzio's brave independence and enterprise in the face of adversity." Alessan paused. "And this third letter, naturally…”

"Will be intercepted by Alberico of Barbadior. Pigeon, do you know what you would be setting in motion? How incredibly dangerous a game this is?"

"Wait a minute!" Erlein di Senzio suddenly interjected, starting to rise.

"You be silent!" Alessan literally snarled the command in a voice Devin had never heard him use.

Erlein's mouth snapped shut. He subsided, breathing harshly, his eyes coals of anger and burgeoning understanding. Alessan didn't even look at him. Neither did Marius. The two of them sat on a golden carpet high in the mountains, seemingly oblivious to the existence of anything in the world but each other.

"You do know, don't you?" Marius said finally. "You know exactly." There was a certain wonder in his voice.

Alessan nodded. "I've had enough time to think about it, Triad knows. Once the trade routes open I think my province and its name are lost. With what you can offer him, Brandin will be a hero in the west, not a Tyrant. He will be so secure that there will be nothing I can do, Bear. Your Kingship may be my undoing. And my home's."

"Are you sorry you helped me to it?"

Devin watched Alessan wrestle with that. There were currents of emotion running here, far beneath the surface of what he could see and understand. He listened, and remembered.

"I should be sorry," Alessan murmured at length. "In a way it is a kind of treachery that I am not. But no, how can I possibly regret what we worked so hard to achieve?" His smile was wistful.

Marius said, "You know I love you, Pigeon. Both of you."

"I know. We both know."

"You know what I am facing back home."

"I do. I have reason to remember."

In the silence that followed Devin felt a sadness come over him, an echo of his mood at the end of the night. A sense of the terrible spaces that always seemed to lie between people. The gulfs that had to be crossed for even a simple touching.

And how much wider those gulfs must be for men such as these two, with their long dreams and the burdens of being who they were, and what. How hard it seemed, how brutally hard, for hands to reach out across so much history and such a weight of responsibility and loss.

"Oh, Pigeon," said Marius of Quileia, his voice little more than a whisper, "you may have been an arrow shot from the white moon into my heart eighteen years ago. I love you as my son, Alessan bar Valentin. I will give you six months and your three letters. Build a bonfire to my memory if you hear that I have died."

Even with what little he understood, on the uttermost edges of this, Devin felt a lump gather in his throat, making it difficult to swallow. He looked at the two of them and he couldn't have said which man he admired more in that moment. The one who had asked, knowing what he asked, or the one who had given, knowing what he gave. He had an awareness though, humbling, inescapable, of how far yet he had to travel, a distance he might never traverse, before he could name himself a man after the fashion of these two.

"Does either of you have any idea," Erlein di Senzio broke into the stillness, his voice grim as death, "how many innocent men and women may be butchered because of what you are about to do?"

Marius said nothing. Alessan wheeled on the wizard though.

"Have you any idea," he said, his eyes like chips of grey ice, "how close I am to killing you for saying that?" Erlein paled but did not draw back. Nor did his own eyes flinch away.

"I did not ask to be born into this time, charged by my birth with trying to set it right," Alessan said, his voice held tightly again as if under a leash. "I was the youngest child. This should have been my brothers' burden, either or both of them. They died by the Deisa. Among the lucky ones." Bitterness cracked through for a moment.

And was beaten back. "I am trying to act for the whole of the Palm. Not just for Tigana and her lost name. I have been reviled as a traitor and a fool for doing so. My mother has cursed me because of this. I will accept that from her. To her I will hold myself accountable for blood and death and the destruction of what Tigana was if I fail. I will not hold myself subject to your judgment, Erlein di Senzio! I do not need you to tell me who or what is at risk in this. I need you to do what I tell you, nothing more! If you are going to die a slave you might as well be mine as anyone else's. You are going to fight with me, Senzian. Whether through your will or against it you are going to fight with me for freedom!"

He fell silent. Devin felt himself trembling, as if a titanic thunderstorm had shaken the sky above the mountains and gone.

"Why do you let him live?" Marius of Quileia asked.

Alessan fought to collect himself. He seemed to consider the matter. "Because he is a brave man in his own way," he answered at length. "Because it is true that his people will be placed in great danger by this. Because I have wronged him by his lights, and by my own. And because I have need of him."

Marius shook his large head. "It is bad to have need of a man."

"I know, Bear."

"He may come back to you, even years later, and ask you for something very large. Something your heart will not let you refuse."

"I know, Bear," said Alessan. The two men looked at each other, sitting motionless on the golden carpet.

Devin turned away, feeling like an intruder on that exchange of glances. In the stillness of that pass below the heights of the Braccio Range birdsong rang out with piercing sweetness and, looking up to the south, Devin saw that the last of the high white clouds had drifted apart, revealing the dazzle of sunlit snow on the peaks. The world seemed to be a place of more beauty and more pain than he could ever have imagined it to be.

When they rode back down from the pass Baerd was waiting for them a few miles south of the castle, alone on his horse among the green of the foothills.

His eyes widened when he saw Devin and Erlein, and a rare amusement was visible even behind his beard, as Alessan pulled to a halt in front of him.

"You," said Baerd, "are even worse at these things than I am, despite everything you say."

"Not worse. As bad, perhaps," Alessan said, ruefully ducking his head. "After all, your only reason for refusing to come was so that he wouldn't feel any extra pressure to…”

"And after lashing me verbally for that, you go and take two complete strangers to reduce the pressure even more. I stand my ground: you are worse than I am."

"Lash me verbally," Alessan said.

Baerd shook his head. "How is he?"

"Well enough. Under strain. Devin stopped an assassination attempt up there."

"What?" Baerd glanced quickly at Devin, noting the torn shirt and hose and the scrapes and cuts.

"You are going to have to teach me how to use a bow," Devin said. "There's less wear and tear."

Baerd smiled. "I will. First chance we have." Then something seemed to occur to him. "An assassination?" he said to Alessan. "In the mountains? Surely not!"

Alessan's expression was grim. "I'm afraid so. She carried a moon bow with a lock of his hair. The mountain taboo has obviously been lifted, at least for the purposes of murder."

Baerd's features creased with concern. He sat on his horse quietly a moment, then: "So he had no option really. He needs to act immediately. He said no?"

"He said yes. We have six months and he will send the letters." Alessan hesitated. "He asked us to build a bonfire to his memory if he dies."

Baerd suddenly turned his horse away. He sat staring fixedly off to the west. The late-afternoon sun was shedding an amber glow over the heather and bracken of the hills.

"I love that man," Baerd said, still gazing into the distance.

"I know," said Alessan. Slowly, Baerd turned back to him. They exchanged a look in silence.

"Senzio?" said Baerd.

Alessan nodded. "You will have to explain to Alienor how to set up in the interception. These two will come west with me. You and Catriana and the Duke go north and then into Tregea. We start reaping what we've sown, Baerd. You know the timing as well as I do, and you'll know what to do until we meet again, who we'll want from the east. I'm not sure about Rovigo, I'll leave that to you."

"I'm not happy about separate roads," Baerd murmured.

"Neither am I, if you must know. If you have an alternative I'd be grateful to hear it."

Baerd shook his head. "What will you do?"

"Speak to some people on the way. See my mother. After that it depends on what I find. My own reaping in the west before summer comes."

Baerd glanced briefly at Devin and Erlein. "Try not to let yourself be hurt," he said.

Alessan gave his shrug. "She's dying, Baerd. And I've hurt her enough in eighteen years."

"You have not!" the other replied with sudden anger. "You only wound yourself if you think that way."

Alessan sighed. "She is dying unknown and alone in a Sanctuary of Eanna in a province called Lower Corte. She is not in the Palace by the Sea in Tigana. Do not say she has not been hurt."

"But not by you!" Baerd protested. "Why do you do this to yourself?"

Again the shrug. "I have made certain choices in a dozen years since we came back from Quileia. I am willing to accept that others may disagree with those choices." His eyes flicked to Erlein. "Leave it, Baerd. I promise not to let this unbalance me, even without you there. Devin will help if I need help."

Baerd grimaced behind his beard and looked as if he would pursue the matter further, but when he spoke again it was in a different voice. "You think this is it, then? You think it truly might happen now?"

"I think it has to happen this summer or it never will. Unless, I suppose, someone does kill Marius in Quileia and we go back to stasis here, with nothing at all to work with. Which would mean that my mother and a great many other people were right. In which case you and I will simply have to sail into Chiara harbor and storm the palace walls alone and kill Brandin of Ygrath and watch the Palm become an outpost of Barbadior's Empire. And what price Tigana then?"

He checked himself. Then continued in a lower voice: "Marius is the one wild card we have ever had, the one thing I've been waiting for and working for all these years. And he's just agreed to let us play him as we need. We have a chance. It may not hurt to do some praying, all of us, in the days to come. This has been long enough in arriving."

Baerd was very still. "Long enough," he echoed finally, and something in his voice sent a chill into Devin. "Eanna light your path through the Ember Days and beyond." He paused, glanced at Erlein. "All three of you."

Alessan's expression spoke a world of things. "And yours, the three of you," was all he said though, before he turned his horse and started away to the west.

Following him, Devin glanced back once and saw that Baerd had not moved. He sat astride his horse watching them, and the sunlight fell on his hair and beard burnishing them back toward the golden color Devin remembered from their first meeting. He was too far away for his expression to be discerned.

Devin raised a hand in farewell, palm spread wide and then, surprised and gladdened, saw Erlein abruptly do the same.

Baerd lifted one arm high in salute to them, then twitched his horse's reins and turned north to ride away.

Alessan, setting a steady pace into the setting sun, did not look back at all.