Tigana

Chapter 13

TIME BEFORE DAWN, SHE WASN'T SURE WHAT HOUR IT was, Dianora rose from bed and walked to the windows overlooking her balcony. In the end, she had not slept all night. Neither, as it happened, had her brother, a very long way to the south, fighting in the Ember war and then sharing the beginning of spring on a hilltop won from the Darkness.

She herself had shared nothing with anyone that night, lying alone in her bed, visited by ghosts and memories. Now she looked out upon a cold darkness that had little in it of springtime or the promise of growth to come. The late stars still shone though the moon had long since set. A wind blew in from off the sea. She could just make out the banners flapping from the masts of the ships in the harbor beyond the Ring Dive pier.

One of those ships was newly in from Ygrath. It had carried Isolla the singer here. It would not carry her back.

"Khav, my lady?" Scelto said quietly from behind her.

She nodded without turning. "Please. And then come sit with me, we have something to talk about." If she moved quickly enough, she thought, if she set it all in motion without giving herself time for hesitation or fear, she might possibly do this thing. Otherwise she was lost.

She could hear Scelto bustling efficiently in the small kitchen that was a part of her suite of rooms. The fire had been kept going all night. Ygrath might not observe the same spring and autumn rituals as the Palm, but Brandin had seldom interfered with local customs or religion, and Dianora never lit a new flame on any of the Ember Days. Neither did most of the women in the saishan, if it came to that. The eastern wing of the palace would be a dark place after sunset for two more nights.

She thought about stepping out on the balcony, but it looked much too cold. There were no signs of life yet down below. She thought about Camena di Chiara. At sunrise they would probably bring him out, his bones broken, to die on a wheel in the sight of the people. She turned her mind away from that image too.

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

She did turn at that, and her heart ached a little to see the helpless worry in his eyes. She knew how he would have grieved for her last night. The marks of sleeplessness were in his face; she supposed they were in her own as well. She could guess how she must look this morning. She forced a smile and accepted the mug he offered. It was warm to her hand and comforting, even before she drank.

She sat in one of the chairs by the window and motioned him to the other. He hesitated a moment and then sat down. She was silent, weighing her words. She realized, abruptly, that she had no idea how to do this subtly. So much, she thought wryly, for the cynical manipulator of the court.

Taking a deep breath, she said, "Scelto, I need to be out on the mountain this morning alone. I know all of the difficulties, but I have my reasons and they are important. How can we arrange it?"

His smooth brow furrowed. He said nothing though, and she realized that he was thinking about an answer to her question, not trying to judge or understand it. She had feared a different sort of reaction, but realized, belatedly, that she should not have. Never with him.

He said, "It will depend on whether they do the mountain run today."

Her heart swelled with love for him. He hadn't even asked her reasons. "Why would they not run it?" she asked stupidly, and realized the answer even as he replied.

"Camena," he said. "I don't know if the King will allow the spring run on the same day as an execution. If they are doing the race then you will be invited to come watch the ending from the King's pavilion in the meadow as you always are."

"I have to be alone," she repeated. "And up the mountain."

"Alone with me," he modified. It was almost a plea.

She sipped her khav. This was the difficult part. "Some of the way, Scelto," she said. "There is a thing I must do there by myself. I will have to leave you partway up."

She watched him wrestle with that. Before he could speak she added, "I would not say this if it were not necessary. There is no one I would rather have by my side."

She did not say what it was necessary for and she saw him fighting to hold back the question. He did hold it back though, and she knew what it would have cost him.

He rose. "I'll have to find out what is happening then. I'll be back soon. If they are running we will at least have an excuse to be outside. If they aren't, we'll have to think further on this."

She nodded gratefully and watched him go, neat and trim, infinitely reassuring in his competence. She finished her khav, looking out the window. It was still dark outside. She walked into the other room to wash and dress herself, doing so with some care, knowing it might matter today. She chose a simple brown woolen robe, and belted it at the waist. This was an Ember Day, not a time for splendor of apparel. There was a hood to hide her hair; that too might matter.

By the time she was done Scelto had returned. He had a queer expression on his face.

"They are running," he said. "And Camena is not going to be executed on the wheel."

"What happened to him?" she asked, feeling an instinctive dread.

Scelto hesitated. "The word is being put about that he has been granted a merciful death already. Because the actual conspiracy was from Ygrath and Camena was merely a victim, a tool."

She nodded. "And what has really happened."

Scelto's face was troubled. "This may be a thing you were better not to know, my lady."

It probably was, she thought. But she had come too far in the night, and had too far yet to go. This was no morning for sheltering, or trying to seek shelter. "Perhaps," was all she said. "But I would prefer you to tell me, Scelto."

He said, after a moment: "I have been told that he is going to be… altered. Rhun is growing old and the King must have a Fool. It is necessary to have one in readiness, and it can take a long time, depending on the circumstances."

The circumstances, Dianora thought, sickened. Such as whether the Fool-in-waiting had been a healthy, gifted, normal young man with a love of his home.

Even understanding what the Fools of Ygrath were to their Kings, even grasping that Camena had forfeited his life by what he had done yesterday, she still could not stop her stomach from turning at the implications of Scelto's words. She remembered Rhun hacking at Isolla's body yesterday. She remembered Brandin's face. She forced her mind away from that. She couldn't afford to think about Brandin this morning. In fact, she was better off not thinking about anything at all.

"Have I been summoned yet?" she asked tersely.

"Not yet. You will be." She could hear tension in his voice; the news about Camena had evidently disturbed him as well.

"I know I will," she said. "I don't think we can wait though. If I go out with the others it will be impossible to slip away. What do you think would happen if we two tried to walk down together now?"

Her tone was steady and calm; Scelto's face grew thoughtful. "We can try," he said after a moment.

"Then come."

Her fear was very simple: if she waited too long, or considered this too much she would be paralyzed by doubt. The thing was to move, and to keep on moving, until she reached a certain place.

What would happen then, if anything, she would leave to the Triad's grace.

Her heart beating rapidly, she followed Scelto out of her rooms and into the main saishan corridor. The first thin streaks of light were showing now through the windows at the eastern end. The two of them went the other way, passing two young castrates who were moving toward Vencel's rooms. Dianora looked straight at them. She was pleased, for the first time, to see fear spark in the eyes of both of the boys. Today fear was a weapon, a tool, and she would need all the tools she could find.

Scelto led her, not hurrying, down the wide stairway towards the double doors that led to the outside world. She caught up to him just as he rapped. When the guard outside opened she stepped through without waiting for his challenge or Scelto's announcement. She fixed him with a cool glance as she went by, and saw his eyes widen as he recognized her. She began walking down the long hallway. As she went past the other guard she saw that he was the young one she'd smiled at yesterday. Today she did not smile.

Behind her she heard Scelto speak one quick, cryptic sentence, and then another in answer to a question. Then she heard his footsteps coming down the corridor. A moment later the door swung shut behind them. Scelto caught up to her.

"I think it will take a brave man to stop you today," he said quietly. "They all know what happened yesterday. It is a good morning to be trying this."

It was the only morning she would ever be trying this, Dianora thought.

"What did you tell them?" she asked, continuing to walk.

"The only thing I could think of. You are going to a meeting with d'Eymon about what happened yesterday."

She slowed a little, considering that, and as she did, the glimmerings of a proper plan came to her, like the first faint illumination of the sun rising in the east above the mountains.

"Good," she said, nodding her head. "Very good, Scelto. That is exactly what I'm doing." Two other guards walked past them, taking no notice at all. "Scelto," she said, when they were alone again, "I need you to find d'Eymon. Say I want to speak with him alone before we all go out this afternoon for the end of the race. Tell him I'll be waiting in the King's Garden two hours from now."

Two hours might or might not be enough; she didn't know. But somewhere in the vast expanse of the King's Garden on the north side of the palace she knew there was a gate that led out to the meadows, and then the slopes of Sangarios beyond.

Scelto stopped, forcing her to do the same.

"You are going to go without me, aren't you?" he said.

She would not lie to him. "I am," she said. "I expect to be back in time for that meeting. After you give him the message go back to the saishan. He doesn't know we're out already, so he'll have to send for me. Make sure the message goes directly to you, I don't care how."

"They usually do," he said quietly, clearly unhappy.

"I know that. When he does send we'll have our excuse for being out. Two hours from now come back down yourself. I should be in the garden with him. Look for us there."

"And if you aren't?"

She shrugged. "Stall. Hope. I have to do this, Scelto, I told you."

He looked at her a moment longer, and then nodded his head once. They went on. Just before reaching the sweep of the Grand Staircase on their left Scelto turned right and they went down a smaller stairwell to the ground level. It brought them out into another east-west corridor. There was no one there. The palace was only just beginning to stir.

She looked over at Scelto. Their eyes met. For a fleeting moment she was sorely tempted to confide in him, to make an ally of a friend.

What could she say, though? How explain in the middle of a dawn corridor the dark night and the train of years that had led her here?

She put a hand on his shoulder and squeezed. "Go now," she said. "I'll be all right."

Without looking back she walked alone a little way down the hallway, pushed open two glass doors leading to the labyrinth of the King's Garden, and went out into the grey, cold beginning of dawn.

It hadn't always been known as the King's Garden, nor had it always been as wild as it was now. The Grand Dukes of Chiara had shaped this pleasure ground for themselves over successive generations, and it had changed over the years as tastes and styles in the Island court had changed.

When Brandin of Ygrath had first arrived it had been a glittering exercise in topiary: hedges artfully trimmed in the shapes of birds and animals, trees precisely spaced and arranged throughout the enormous walled expanse of the garden, wide walks with sculpted benches at easy intervals, each one under a sejoia planted for fragrance and shade. There had been one tidy box-hedged maze with a lover's seat at the center, and rows and rows of flowers carefully arrayed in complementary colors.

Tame and boring, the King of Ygrath had labeled it the first time he walked through.

Within two years the garden had changed again. A great deal this time. The walkways were less wide now, dappled and overhung with leaves in summer and fall. They twisted seemingly at random through the densely planted groves of trees, brought down with some labor from the mountain slopes and the forests on the north side of the Island. Some of the sculpted benches remained, and the thick and fragrant flower beds, but the bird hedges and the animal bushes had been the first things to go, and the neat, symmetrically pruned shrubs and serrano bushes had been allowed to grow out, higher and darker, like the trees. The maze was gone: the whole of the garden was a maze now.

An underground stream had been tapped and diverted and now the sound of running water was everywhere. There were leafy pools one might stumble upon, with overhanging trees for shade in the summer's heat. The King's Garden was a strange place now, not overgrown and most certainly not neglected, but deliberately shaped to give a sense of stillness and isolation and even, at times, of danger.

Times such as this, with the dawn wind still cold and the scarcely risen sun just beginning to warm the air. Only the earliest buds were on the branches of the trees, and only the first flowers of the season, anemones and wild caiana roses, adding flashes of color to the wan morning. The winter trees stood tall and dark against the grey sky.

Dianora shivered and closed the glass doors behind her. She took a deep breath of the sharp air and looked up at the clouds piled high above the mountain, hiding the peak of Sangarios. Over to the east the clouds were beginning to break up; it would be a mild day later. Not yet though. She stood at the edge of the wildness of an end-of-winter garden and tried to guide herself towards steadiness and calm.

She knew there was a gate in the northern wall, but she wasn't sure she remembered where. Brandin had showed it to her one summer's night years ago when they had walked for miles aimlessly amid fireflies and the drone of crickets and the sound of unseen water splashing in the darkness beyond the torchlit paths. He had brought her to a gate he'd stumbled upon one day, half-hidden by climbing vines and a rose bush. He had shown it to her in the darkness, with torches behind them and blue Ilarion overhead.

He had held her hand that night as they walked, she remembered, and talked to her about herbs and the properties of flowers. He had told her an Ygrathen fairy tale of a forest princess born in some far distant otherworld, on an enchanted bed of snow-white flowers that bloomed only in the dark.

Dianora shook her head, pushing the memory away, and set off briskly down one of the smaller, pebbly paths leading northeast through the trees. After twenty strides she could no longer see the palace when she looked back. Overhead the birds were beginning to sing. It was still cold. She put up her hood, feeling, as she did so, like the brown-robed priestess of some unknown sylvan god.

And thinking so, she prayed to the god she did know and to Morian and Eanna, that the Triad might send her wisdom and the clear heart she had come out this Ember morning to find. She was intensely aware of what day this was.

At almost exactly the same moment, Alessan, Prince of Tigana was riding out from Castle Borso in the Certandan highland towards a meeting in the Braccio Pass that he thought might change the world.

Dianora walked past a bed of anemones, much too small and delicate yet to pick. They were white, which made them Eanna's. The red ones were Morian's, except in Tregea where they were said to be stained by the blood of Adaon on his mountain. She stopped and looked down at the flowers, their fragile petals shaken by the breeze; but her thoughts were back with Brandin's fairy tale of the far away princess born under summer stars, cradled on such flowers.

She closed her eyes then, knowing that this would not do.

And slowly, deliberately, searching out pain as a spur, a goad, she built up a mental image of her father riding away, and then of her mother, and then of Baerd among the soldiers in the square. When she opened her eyes to go on there were no fairy tales in her heart.

The paths twisted hopelessly, but the main cloud mass was to the north over the mountain and she kept that in front of her as best she could. It was strange to be wandering like this, almost lost among the trees, and Dianora realized, with a start, that it had been a great many years since she'd last been so alone.

She had only two hours and a long way to go. She quickened her pace. A little later the sun came up on her right and the next time she looked up part of the sky was blue above her and gulls were wheeling against that blue. She pushed back her hood and shook her long hair free, and just then she saw the thick, high grey stone of the northern wall through a screen of ohve trees.

Vines and clumps of laren moss were growing along the wall, purple and dark green. The path ended at the olives, forking east and west. She stood a moment, irresolute, trying to orient herself within a memory of summer and torches at night. Then she shrugged and went west, because her heart always did that.

Ten minutes later, winding past a pool and a ruffled reflection of white clouds within it, Dianora came to the gate.

She stopped, suddenly cold again, though the morning was warmer now with the sun. She looked at the arched shape and the rusted iron hinges. The gate was very old; there seemed to have been something carved on it once, but whatever image or symbol had been there was almost entirely worn away. The gate was overgrown with ivy and vines. The rose bush she remembered was bare yet on this first day of spring, but the thorns were long and sharp. She saw the heavy bolt, as rusted as the hinges. There was no lock, but she was suddenly uncertain whether she would even be able to move the corroded bolt. She wondered who had last gone through this gate into the meadows beyond. Who and when and why. She thought about climbing, and looked up. The wall was ten feet high, but she thought there might be hand and toeholds there. She was about to move forward when she heard a sound behind her.

Thinking about it afterwards she tried to understand why she hadn't been more frightened than she was. Somewhere in her mind, she decided, she must have thought that this might happen. The grey rock on the mountainside had been only a starting point. There was no reason in the world to expect that she might find that rock, or find what she needed there.

She turned in the King's Garden, alone among the trees and the earliest flowers, and saw the riselka combing her long green hair beside a pool.

They are only found when they want to be, she remembered. And then she had another thought and she looked quickly around to see if anyone else was there.

They were quite alone in the garden though, or in this part of the garden. The riselka smiled, as if reading Dianora's mind. She was naked, small and very slender, but her hair was so long it almost served her as a robe. Her skin was as translucent as Brandin had said it had been and the eyes were enormous, almost frighteningly so, pale as milk in the pale white face.

She looks like you, Brandin had said. Or, no. She reminded me of you, was what he'd said. And in an eerie, chilling fashion Dianora had a sense of what he meant. She had a memory of herself in the year Tigana fell, too thin and pale, her eyes almost as huge as these in the hollows of her face.

Brandin had never seen or known her then.

shivered. The riselka's smile deepened. There was nothing of Warmth in her, or comfort. Dianora didn't know if she had expected either of those. She didn't really know what she had expected to find. She had come for the clear path of the old foretelling verse, and it seemed that if she was to find it, it would be here among the intricately winding ways of the King's Garden.

The riselka was beautiful, heartbreakingly so, in a fashion that had little to do with mortal beauty. Dianora's mouth was dry. She didn't even try to speak. She stood very still in her plain brown robe, her owrx dark hair unbound and falling down her back, and she watched the riselka lay a bone-white comb down on the stone bench by the pool and motion to her.

Slowly, her hands beginning to tremble, Dianora walked off the path and under an arch of trees to stand before that pale, elusive creature of legend. She was so near she could see the green hair shine in the soft morning light. The pale eyes had shadings to them, and depth. The riselka lifted one hand, its fingers longer and more slender than any mortal's could be, and she brought it up to Dianora's face and touched her.

The touch was cool, but not so cold as she might have feared. Gently, the riselka stroked her cheek and throat. And then, the hieratic, alien smile deepening again, she slipped her hand further down, undid a button of Dianora's robe, and reached within to touch her breasts. One, and then the other, not hurrying, smiling that entirely secret smile all the while.

Dianora was trembling; she could not make herself stop. Incredulous and afraid, she felt her body respond involuntarily to the exploration of that touch. She could see the riselka's childlike breasts half-hidden beneath the curtain of hair. Her knees were weak suddenly. The riselka's smile showed small, sharp, very white teeth. Dianora swallowed, feeling a hurt inside her she could not even begin to understand. She shook her head mutely, unable to speak. She felt herself beginning to weep.

The riselka's smile faded. She withdrew her hand and, almost apologetically it seemed, did up the robe again. She reached, as gently as before, and touched one of the tears on Dianora's cheek. Then she brought her finger to her lips and tasted it.

She is a child, Dianora thought suddenly, a thought cast up on the beach of her mind as if by a tide. And even as it came to her, she knew that this was true, however many years this creature might have lived. She wondered if this was the same slender, numinous figure Baerd had met under moonlight by the sea the night he went away.

The riselka touched and then tasted another tear. Her eyes were so large Dianora had a sense that she could fall into them and never come out again. It was a deeply seductive imagining, a pathway to oblivion. She looked for another moment and then slowly, with an effort, shook her head again.

"Please?" she said then, whispered it, needing, and afraid of her need. Afraid that words or need or longing, anything, could drive a riselka away.

The green-haired creature turned, and Dianora's hands clenched at her sides. But the riselka looked back over her shoulder, grave now, unsmiling, and Dianora understood that she was to follow.

They came to the edge of the pool. The riselka was looking down into the water and so Dianora did the same. She saw a reflection of blue sky overhead, of a single white gull slicing across the space above the pool, dark green cypresses like sentinels and the branches of other trees not yet in leaf. And even as she looked, she realized, with a chill like winter come back too soon, what was wrong. The wind was blowing above them and all around, she could hear it among the trees and feel it on her face and in her hair, but the water of the pool was like the glass of her mirror, absolutely calm, unruffled by so much as a tendril of the breeze or any movement in its own depths.

Dianora drew back from the edge and turned to the riselka. The creature was looking at her, the green hair lifted by the breeze and blown back from her small white face. The eyes were darker now, cloudy, and she no longer looked like a child. She looked like a power of the natural world, or an emissary of such a power, and not one with any warmth for mortal man or woman. No kindness or shelter there. But Dianora, fighting a rising fear, reminded herself that she had not come here for shelter, but for a signing of her road, and she saw then that the riselka held a small white stone in her hand, and she saw her throw that stone into the pool.

No ripples. No movement at all. The stone sank without a trace of its passage. But the surface of the water changed soon after, and darkened, and then the reflections were gone. No cypresses. No morning circle of sky overhead. No bare trees framing the slant of gulls. The water had grown too dark, it cast nothing back. But Dianora felt the riselka take her hand and draw her gently but inexorably back to the edge of the pool, and she looked down, having come out from the saishan to find this truth, this signing. And in the dark waters she saw a reflection.

Not herself or the riselka, nor anything at all of the King's Garden on this first of the Ember Days. Instead, an image of another season, late spring or summer, another place, bright with color, a great many people gathered, and, somehow, she could even hear the sound of them in the image, and beneath that sound, constantly, was the surge and sigh of waves.

And in the depths of the pool Dianora saw an image of herself, clad in a robe green as the riselka's hair, moving alone between those gathered people. And then she saw, in the pool, where her steps were leading her.

Fear touched her in that moment with an icy hand for one second and then was gone. She felt her racing heartbeat slow, and then grow slower yet. A deep calm came over her. And a moment later, not without its burden of sorrow, came acceptance. For years her nights had known dreams of such an ending. This morning she had come out of the saishan looking for this certainty. And now, above this pool, her path came clear to her at last and Dianora saw that it led to the sea.

The sounds of gathered people faded away, and then all the images, the bright sun of summer. The pool was dark again giving nothing back at all.

Some time later, it might have been moments or hours, Dianora looked up again. The riselka was still beside her. Dianora looked into the pale eyes, so much lighter than the enchanted waters but seemingly as deep, and she saw herself as a child again, so many years ago. Yet not so many, a blink of an eye or the moment it took an autumn leaf to fall, as this creature would measure time.

"Thank you," she whispered. And: "I understand."

And she stood very still, not flinching at all, as the riselka rose up on tiptoe and kissed her, soft as the wing of a butterfly, upon the lips. There was no hint of desire this time, in the giving or receiving. This was the aftermath, the consummation had come and gone. The riselka's mouth tasted of salt. The salt, Dianora knew, of her own tears. She no longer felt any fear at all; only a quiet sadness like a smooth stone in the heart.

She heard a ripple of sound and turned back to the pool. The cypresses were reflected again, their images ruffled and broken now by the movement of the water in the wind.

When she looked away again, pushing her hair back from her face, she saw that she was alone.

When she came back out to the open space before the palace doors d'Eymon was waiting for her, dressed formally in grey, his Seal of Office about his neck. He was sitting on one of the stone benches, his staff resting beside him. Scelto hovered by the doors, and Dianora saw the flash of relief he could not hide when she came out from among the trees.

She stopped and looked at the Chancellor allowing a slight smile to show on her face. It was artifice of course, but an act she could do unconsciously by now. In d'Eymon's normally inscrutable expression she read edginess and anger, and other signs of what had happened yesterday. He would probably be spoiling for a fight, she guessed. It was difficult, amazingly difficult, to switch back to the manners and affairs of state. It was also something that had to be done.

"You were late," she said mildly, walking towards him. He had risen, with perfect courtesy, as she approached. "I went walking in the garden. There are anemones beginning already."

"I was precisely on time," d'Eymon said.

She might once have been intimidated, but not now. He would be wearing the Seal as an attempt to reinforce his authority, but she knew how badly yesterday would have unsettled him. She was fairly certain he would have offered to kill himself last night; he was a man for whom the old traditions mattered. In any case, she was armored against him: she had seen a riselka this morning.

"Then I must have been early," she said carelessly. "Forgive me. It is good to see you looking so well after yesterday's… confusions. Have you been waiting long?"

"Long enough. You wanted to talk about yesterday, I gather. What is it?" Dianora didn't think she had ever heard an inconsequential remark from d'Eymon, let alone a pleasantry.

Refusing to be rushed she sat down on the bench he had just vacated and brushed her brown robe smooth over her knees. She clasped her fingers in her lap and looked up, letting her expression grow suddenly as cold as his own.

"He almost died yesterday," she said flatly, deciding only in that moment what her tack would be. "He would have died. Do you know why, Chancellor?" She didn't wait for his answer. "The King almost died because your people were too complacent or too slovenly to bother searching a party of Ygrathens. What did you think? That danger could only come from the Palm? I expect yesterday's guards to be dealt with, d'Eymon. And soon."

The use of his name and not his title was deliberate. He opened his mouth and closed it, visibly biting back a swift retort. She was pushing things, Triad knew how hard she was pushing with this, but if ever there was going to be a chance for her to do so, this would be it. D'Eymon's face was white with anger and shock. He took a deep breath to control himself.

"They have been dealt with already," he said. "They are dead."

She hadn't expected that. She managed, with an effort, to keep her discomfiture out of her eyes. "There is more," she went on pressing her advantage. "I want to know why Camena di Chiara was not watched when he went to Ygrath last year."

"He was watched. What would you have had us do? You know who was behind yesterday's attack. You heard."

"We all heard. Why did you not know about Isolla and the Queen?" This time the bite she put into the words was real, not merely tactical.

For the first time she saw a flicker of hesitation in his eyes. He fingered his Seal, then seemed to become aware that he was doing so and dropped his hand to his side. There was a brief silence.

"I did know," he said finally. His eyes met her own, a question in them like an angry challenge.

"I see," said Dianora a moment later, and looked away. The sun was higher now, slanting across most of the clearing. If she moved a little along the bench its warmth would fall upon her. The harsh, unspoken question in d'Eymon's eyes hung in the air: Would you have told the King, knowing these things about his Queen?

Dianora was silent, tracking implications to their endings. With this admission, she realized, d'Eymon was hers, if he hadn't already been so after his failure yesterday and what she had done to save the King. She was also, she thought, in fairly immediate danger as a consequence. The Chancellor was not a man to be treated lightly, ever. Most of the saishan had their suspicions as to how Chloese di Chiara had died ten years ago, and why.

She looked up, and let her rising anger keep the anxiety from showing. "Wonderful," she said acidly. "Such efficient security. And now, of course, because of what I was forced to do your pet courtier Neso simply has to receive the posting in Asoli, doesn't he. With a wound of honor earned saving the life of the King. How marvelously clever of you, d'Eymon!"

She had miscalculated. For the first time he smiled, a narrow, mirthless expression. "Is that what this is about?" he asked softly.

She bit back a swift denial. It was not inconvenient for him to think so, she realized.

"Among other things," she admitted, as if grudgingly. "I want to know why you have been favoring him for the Asoli posting. I had been meaning to talk to you about this."

"I thought as much," he said, a measure of his usual complacency returning. "I have also been keeping track of some, not all, I have no doubt, of the gifts Scelto has been receiving in your name these past weeks. That was a splendid necklace yesterday, by the way. Did Neso's money pay for it? In an attempt to have you win me over to his side?"

He was immensely well-informed, and he was shrewd. She had always known these things. It was never wise to underestimate the Chancellor.

"It helped pay for it," she said briefly. "You haven't answered my question. Why do you favor him? You must know what sort of man he is."

"Of course I know," d'Eymon replied impatiently. "Why do you think I want him out of here? I want him posted to Asoli because I don't trust him at court. I want him away from the King and in a place where he can be killed without undue inconvenience. I trust that answers your question?"

She swallowed. Never, ever underestimate him, she told herself again. "It does," she said. "Killed by whom?"

"That should be obvious. It will be put about that the Asolini did it themselves. I expect it will not take Neso long to give them cause."

"Of course. And then?"

"And then the King will investigate and find that Neso was guilty of gross corruption, which we need not doubt he will be. We execute some man or other for the murder but the King declares his firm renunciation of Neso's methods and greed. He appoints a new Taxing Master and promises fairer measures in the future. I think that should quiet affairs in north Asoli for a time."

"Good," said Dianora, trying to ignore the casual indifference of that some man or other. "And very tidy. I have only one thing to add: the new officer will be Rhamanus." She was taking another risk, she knew. When it came down to bedrock, she was a captive and a concubine, and he was the Chancellor of Ygrath and of the Western Palm. On the other hand, there were other ways to measure the balance here, and she fought to focus on those.

D'Eymon looked coolly down at her. She kept her gaze on his, her eyes wide and disingenuous.

"It has long amused me," he said at length, "that you so favored the man who captured you. One would think you hadn't minded, that you wanted to come."

Perilously, uncannily near to the mark, but she could see he was baiting her, not serious in his thrust. She forced herself to relax, and smiled. "How could I mind being here? I'd never have had a chance at pleasant meetings such as this. And in any case," she let her tone change, "I do favor him, yes. On behalf of the people of this peninsula I do. And you know that that will always be my concern, Chancellor. He is a decent man. There are not many such Ygrathens, I'm afraid."

He was silent a moment. Then: "There are more than you think." But before she could manage to interpret either his words or the surprising voice in which they were spoken, he added, "I seriously thought of having you poisoned last night. Either that, or suggesting you be freed and made a citizen of Ygrath."

"What extremes, my dear!" She could feel herself growing cold though. "Didn't you teach us all that balance is everything?"

"I did," he said soberly, not rising to her bait. He never did. "Have you any idea what you've done to the equilibrium at this court?"

"What," she said with real asperity, "would you have preferred me to do yesterday?"

"That is not at all the point. Obviously." There was a rare spot of color in his cheeks. When he resumed, though, it was in his usual tones. "I was thinking of Rhamanus for Asoli myself. It shall be as you suggest. In the meantime, I very nearly forgot to mention that the King has sent for you. I intercepted the message before it reached the saishan. He will be waiting in the library."

She shot to her feet, as agitated as he must have known she would be. "How long ago?" she asked quickly.

"Not very. Why? You don't seem to mind being late. There are anemones in the garden, you could tell him that."

"I could tell him some other things as well, d'Eymon." Anger almost choked her. She fought for control.

"And so could I. And so, I suppose, could Solores. We seldom do, do we? The balance, as you have just pointed out, is everything. That is why I should still be very careful, Dianora, despite what happened yesterday. The balance is all. Do not forget it."

She tried to think of a response, a last word, but failed. Her mind was whirling. He had spoken of killing her, of freeing her, had agreed with her choice for Asoli, and then threatened her again. All in a span of minutes! And all the while the King had been waiting for her, and d'Eymon had known.

She turned, abruptly and dismally conscious of her nondescript robe and the fact that she had no time to go back up to the saishan and change. She could feel herself flushing with anger and anxiety.

Scelto had evidently overheard the Chancellor's last remarks. His eyes above the broken nose were vividly concerned and apologetic, though with d'Eymon intercepting the message there was nothing he could have done.

She stopped by the palace doors and looked back. The Chancellor stood alone in the garden leaning upon his stick, a tall, gray, thin figure against the bare trees. The sky above him had turned overcast again. Of course it has, Dianora thought spitefully.

Then she remembered the pool and her mood changed. What did these court maneuvers matter, in the end? D'Eymon was only doing what he had to do, and so now, would she. She had seen her path. She found herself able to smile, letting that inner quiet descend upon her again, though with a stone of sorrow at its center still. She sank low in a very formal curtsey. D'Eymon, taken aback, sketched an awkward bow.

Dianora turned and went through the doors that Scelto was holding for her. She went back down the corridor and up the stairs, along a north-south hallway and past two heavy doors. She stopped in front of the third pair of doors. Out of reflex and habit more than anything else she checked her reflection in the bronze shield that hung on the wall. She adjusted her robe and pushed both hands through her hopelessly wind-blown hair.

Then she knocked on the library doors and entered, holding hard to her calm and the vision of the pool, a round stone of knowledge and sorrow in her heart that she hoped would anchor it in her breast and keep it from flying away.

Brandin was standing with his back to the door looking at a very old map of the then known world that hung above the larger of the fires. He did not turn. She looked up at the map. On it, the Peninsula of the Palm and even the larger land mass of Quileia beyond the mountains running all the way south to the Ice, were dwarfed by the size of Barbadior and its Empire to the east and by Ygrath to the west overseas.

The velvet window curtains of the library were drawn against the morning light and a fire was blazing, which bothered her. She found it difficult to deal with flames on an Ember Day. Brandin held a fire-iron in one hand. He was dressed as carelessly as she, in black riding clothes and boots. His boots were muddy; he must have been out riding very early.

She put the encounter with d'Eymon behind her, but not the riselka in the garden. This man was the center of her life; whatever else had changed that had not, but the riselka's vision had offered her a path, and Brandin had let her lie alone and awake all last night.

She said, "Forgive me, my lord. I was with the Chancellor this morning and he chose to only just now tell me you were waiting here." "Why were you meeting with him?" The nuanced, familiar voice was only mildly interested. He seemed engrossed in the map.

She did not lie to the King. "The Taxing Master question in Asoli. I wanted to know why he favored Neso."

There was a faint hint of amusement in his voice. "I'm sure d'Eymon told you something plausible." He turned finally, and gazed at her for the first time. He looked exactly the same as he always did, and she knew what always happened when their glances first met.

But she had seen a riselka an hour ago and something seemed to have changed. Her calm did not leave her; her heart stayed home. She closed her eyes for an instant, but more to acknowledge the meaning of that change and the passing of a long truth than anything else. She felt that she would weep, for many reasons, if she were not extremely careful now.

Brandin sank into a chair by the fire. He looked tired, as much as anything. It showed only in small ways, but she had known him a long time. "I will have to give it to Neso now," he said. "I think you know that. I'm sorry."

Some things, it seemed, had not changed: always that grave, unexpected courtesy when he spoke to her of such things. What need had the King of Ygrath to apologize to her for choosing one of his courtiers over another? She moved into the room, clinging to her resolution, and at his gesture she took the chair opposite his. Brandin's eyes rested on her with an odd, almost a detached scrutiny. She wondered what he would see.

She heard a sound from the far end of the room and, glancing over, saw Rhun sitting by the second fire, aimlessly leafing through a picture-book. His presence reminded her of something, and she felt her anger suddenly come back.

"Of course you have to offer it to Neso," she said. "Asoli is his prize for gallantry in the service of his King." He scarcely responded. Briefly his mouth quirked, his expression mildly ironic; he still seemed preoccupied though, only half attending to what she said.

"Gallantry, courage. They'll call it something of that sort," he said absently. "Not getting out of the way in time, it really was. D'Eymon was already arranging last night to have word spread that it was Neso who saved my life."

She would not rise to that. She refused. She didn't even understand why he was saying this to her.

She said, instead, looking across the room at Rhun, not at the King: "That makes sense, and you must surely know that I don't care. What I do not understand is why you are putting out lies about Camena's fate." She took a breath, and then plunged ahead. "I know the truth. It is such an ugly, vicious thing to do. If you must prepare a Fool to follow Rhun, why mar a whole man and a healthy one? Why do such a thing?"

He did not answer for a long time and she was afraid to look at him. Rhun, too far away to hear, and nonetheless stopped leafing through his book and was looking over at them.

"As it happens, there are precedents," was what Brandin said at length, his tone still mild. But then, a moment later, he added, "I should probably have taken Scelto away from you a long time ago. You both learn too much, too quickly."

She opened her mouth, but no words came out. What could she say? She had asked for this. For exactly this.

But then, glancing out of the corner of her eye, she saw that Brandin was smiling. An odd smile, and there was something strange about his eyes as he looked at her. He said, "As it also happens, Scelto would have been right this morning, but his tidings are wrong by now."

"What do you mean?" She felt the stirrings of a genuine uneasiness. There was a strangeness to his manner this morning that she could not lay a finger on. It was more than tiredness though, she knew that much.

"I rescinded yesterday's orders after my ride," Brandin said quietly. "Camena is probably dead by now. An easy death. Exactly as word has been put about."

She discovered that her hands were clutching each other in her lap. She said fatuously, without thinking, "Is this true?"

He only raised his eyebrows, but she felt herself flush deep red. "I have no need to deceive you, Dianora. I told them to arrange for witnesses among the Chiarans, so there would be no doubt. What would confirm it for you: shall I have his head sent to your rooms?"

She looked down again, thinking of Isolla's head bursting like a smashed fruit. She swallowed; he had done that with a gesture of his hand. She looked back at the King. Mutely she shook her head. What happened on that ride? What was happening here?

Then, abruptly, she remembered what else had occurred to him yesterday. On the mountainside, at a place where a grey rock stood beside the runners' track. One man sees a riselka: his path forks there. Brandin turned back towards the fire, one leg crossed over the other. He laid the point of the iron down on the hearthstone, leaning it against his chair.

"You haven't asked me why I changed the orders. That's unlike you, Dianora."

"I'm afraid to," she said, truthfully.

He glanced over at that, his dark brows level now, the gray eyes intimidating with their intelligence. "That's unlike you as well."

"You aren't very… like yourself either this morning."

"Fair enough," he said quietly. He looked at her for a moment in silence, then seemed to consider something else. "Tell me, did d'Eymon make things difficult for you just now? Did he… warn you, or threaten?"

It wasn't sorcery, she told herself fiercely. Not mind-reading. It was only Brandin being what he was, aware of all the nuances that affected those in their orbits around him.

"Not directly," she said awkwardly. Once she might have seen this as an opportunity, but the mood this morning was so strange. "He was… upset about yesterday. Afraid, I think, of balances shifting here at the court. Once word is safely out that it was Neso who saved your life I think the Chancellor will be easier. It won't be a difficult story for him to spread; things happened very fast. I doubt anyone saw it clearly."

This time, Brandin's smile as he listened was one she knew and cherished: equal to equal, their minds sharing the track of a complex thought. But when she finished, his expression changed.

"I did," he said. "I saw it clearly."

She looked away and down again, at her hands in her lap. Your path is clear now, she told herself as sternly as she could. Remember that. She had been offered a vision of herself in green beside the sea. And her heart was her own now after last night. There was a stone holding it there, safe within her breast.

Brandin said, "It would be easy to tell the Neso story, I agree. But I did a great deal of thinking last night and then on my ride this morning. I'll be talking to d'Eymon later today, after we watch the runners come home. The tale that goes around will be the true one, Dianora."

She wasn't sure she had heard him rightly, and then she was sure, and something seemed to reach a brim and then spill over a little, like an overflowing wineglass inside her.

"You should go riding more often," she mumbled. He heard. He laughed softly but she didn't look up. She had a very strong sense that she couldn't afford to look up.

"Why?" she asked, intent on her interlocked fingers. "Why to both things, then: Camena's fate, and now this?"

He was silent so long that eventually she did glance up, cautiously. He had turned back to the fire though, and was prodding it with the iron. On the far side of the room Rhun had closed his book and was now standing beside his table looking over at the two of them. He was dressed in black, of course. Exactly like the King.

"Did I ever tell you," said Brandin of Ygrath, very softly, "the legend my nurse used to tell me as a child about Finavir?"

Her mouth was dry again. Something in his tone, the way he was sitting, the discontinuity of his reply.

"No," she said. She tried to think of something witty to add, but failed.

"Finavir, or Finvair," he went on, not really waiting for her response, not looking over at her. "When I grew older and looked in the books of such tales it was written either way, and hi one or two other fashions sometimes. That often happens with the stories that come from before the days when we wrote things down."

He leaned the iron against the chair arm again and sat back, still gazing into the flames. Rhun had walked a little nearer to them, as if drawn by the story. He was leaning against one of the heavy window draperies now, kneading a bunched fold of it in both hands.

Brandin said, "In Ygrath the tale is sometimes told and sometimes believed that this world of ours, both here in the southern lands and north beyond the deserts and the rain forests, whatever lies there, is but one of many worlds the gods sent into Time. The others are said to be far off, scattered among the stars, invisible to us."

"There has been such a belief here as well," Dianora said quietly when he paused. "In Certando. In the highlands they once had a teaching that was much the same, though the priests of the Triad burned people for saying as much." It was true; there had been mass burnings for the Carlozzini heresy in the plague years, long ago.

Brandin said, "We never burned or wheeled people for that thought. They were laughed at sometimes, but that is another thing.

What my nurse used to tell me was what her mother told her, and her mother's mother before, I have no doubt: that some of us are born over and again into various of these worlds until, at the last, if we have earned it by the manner of our lives, we are born a final time into Finavir or Finvair which is the nearest of all the worlds to where the true gods dwell."

"And after that?" she asked. His quiet words seemed to have become a part of the unfolding spell of this day.

"After, no one knew, or would tell me. Nor did any of the parchments and books I read when I grew older." He shifted in his seat, his beautiful hands resting on the carved arms of the chair. "I never liked my nurse's legend of Finavir. There are other kinds of stories, some of them quite different and many of them I loved, but for some reason that one stayed with me. It bothered me. It seemed to make our lives here merely a prelude, inconsequential in themselves, of importance only for where they would lead us next. I have always needed to feel that what I am doing matters, here and now."

"I think I would agree with you," she said. Her own hands were gentle in her lap now; he had shaped a different mood. "But why are you telling me this, if you have never liked the story?"

The simplest of questions.

And Brandin said, "Because during the nights this past year and more I have had recurring dreams of being reborn far away from all of this, in Finavir." He looked straight at her then for the first time since beginning the tale, and his grey eyes were calm and his voice was steady as he said: "And in all of those dreams you have been at my side and nothing has held us apart, and no one has come between."

She had had no warning. None at all, though perhaps the clues had been there all along and she too blind to see. And suddenly she was blind now, helpless tears of shock and wonder overflowing in her eyes and a desperate, urgent hammering that she knew to be her heart.

Brandin said, "Dianora, I needed you so much last night I frightened myself. I did not send for you only because I had to somehow try to come to terms with what happened to me when you blocked Camena's arrow. Solores was a court deception, no more than that: so they might not think me unmanned by danger. I spent the whole night pacing or at my desk, trying to riddle out where my life has now come. What it means that my wife and only living son should try to kill me, and fail only because of you. And thinking about that, consumed by it, I only realized near dawn that I had left you alone all night. My dear, will you ever forgive me for that?"

I want time to stop, she was thinking, wiping vainly at her tears, trying to see him clearly. I want never to leave this room, I want to hear these words spoken over and over, endlessly, until I die.

"I made a decision on my ride," he said. "I was thinking about what Isolla had said and I was finally able to accept that she was right. Since I will not, since I cannot possibly change what I am committed to doing here, I must be prepared to pay all of the price myself, not through others in Ygrath."

She was shaking, quite unable to stop her tears. He had not touched her, or even moved towards her. Behind him Rhun's face was a twisted mask of pain and need, and something else. The thing she sometimes saw there, and could not face. She closed her eyes.

"What will you do?" she whispered. It was hard to speak.

And then he told her. All of it. Named for her the fork in the road he had chosen. She listened, her tears falling more slowly now, welling up from an over-full heart, and at length she came to understand that the wheel was coming full circle.

Listening to Brandin's grave voice over the crackle of flames on an Ember Day, Dianora saw only images of water in her mind. The dark waters of the pool in the garden, and the vision of the sea she'd been given there. And though she had no gift of foreknowing she could see where his words were taking them, taking them all, and now she understood the showing of the pool.

She searched her heart and knew, with an enormous grief, that it was his, it had not come back to her after all. Yet even so, and most terribly of all, she knew what was about to come, what she was going to do.

She had dreamt on other nights alone through her years in the saishan of finding a path like the one that was opening for her now with the words he spoke. At one point, listening to him, thinking thus, she could bear the physical distance between them no longer. She moved from her chair to the carpet at his feet and laid her head in his lap. He touched her hair and began stroking it, down and down, ceaselessly, as he spoke of what had come to him in the night and on his ride; spoke of being willing, finally, to accept the price of what he was doing here in the Palm; and spoke to her about the one thing she could never have made herself ready for. About love.

She wept quietly, she could not stop weeping as his words continued to flow, as the fire slowly died on the hearth. She wept for love of him, and for her family and her home, for the innocence she had lost to the years and for all that he had lost, and she wept most bitterly of all for the betrayals yet to come. All the betrayals that lay waiting outside this room where time, which would not stop, was going to carry them.

Chapter 14

“RIDE!” ALESSAN CRIED, POINTING TOWARDS A GAP IN THE hills. "There's a village beyond!"

Devin swore, lowered his head over his horse's neck, and dug his heels into the animal's flanks, following Erlein di Senzio west towards the gap and the low red disk of the sun.

Behind him, thundering out of the brown twilight hills, were at least eight, possibly a dozen brigands of the highlands. Devin hadn't looked back, after their first startled glimpse of the outlaws and the shouted command to halt.

He didn't think they had a chance, however close this village might be. They had been riding at a bone-jarring pace for hours and the horses Alienor had given them were tired. If this was to be a flat-out race against fresh-mounted outlaws they were probably dead. He gritted his teeth and rode, ignoring the ache in his leg and the sting of reopened cuts from his leap in the mountains earlier that day.

The wind whistled past him as they rode. He saw Alessan turn in his saddle, an arrow notched to his fully drawn bow. The Prince fired backwards once and then again into the twilight, his muscles ridged and corded with the effort. An improbable, desperate attempt at such speed in the wind.

Two men screamed. Devin quickly looked back and saw one of them fall. A handful of erratic arrows dropped well short of the three of them.

"They've slowed!" Erlein rasped, glancing back as well. "How far to this village!"

"Through the gap and twenty minutes beyond! Ride!" Alessan did not shoot again, bending low to urge more speed from his own grey. They fled into the wind along the track of the sun, between the shadowy bulk of two heathery hills and into the gap between.

They didn't get out.

Just where the path bent to follow the curve of the encroaching ridges eight riders were waiting in a line across the gap, bows calmly leveled at the three of them.

They pulled their horses to rearing halts. Devin flung a glance back over his shoulder and saw the pursuing outlaws entering the pass behind them. There was one riderless horse, and another man clutched at his shoulder where an arrow was still embedded.

He looked at Alessan, saw the desperate, defiant look in the Prince's eye.

"Don't be a fool!" Erlein snapped. "You can't run through and you can't kill this many men."

"I can try," Alessan said, his eyes darting across the defile and up the steep hills on either side, wild to find a way out. He had stopped his horse though, and did not raise the bow.

"Straight into a trap. What a splendid ending to two decades of dreaming!" His voice was corrosively bitter, raw with self-laceration.

It was true though, Devin realized, rather too late. This pass between the hills was a natural place for an ambush, and the Triad knew there were enough outlaws hi the wilds of southern Certando, where even the Barbadian mercenaries seldom went, and honest men were never abroad this close to the fall of night. On the other hand, they hadn't had much choice, given how far they had to go, and how fast.

It didn't seem as if they were going to get there. Or anywhere. There was still enough light to make out the outlaws, and their appearance did not reassure. Their clothing might be random and carelessly worn, but the horses were far from the beaten-down creatures most brigands rode. The men in front of them looked disciplined, and the weaponry leveled at the three of them was formidable. This had also been, very clearly, a carefully laid trap.

One man rode a few paces forward from the silent line. "Release your bows," he said with easy authority. "I don't like talking with armed men."

"Neither do I," Alessan replied grimly, staring at the man. But a moment later he let his bow fall to the ground. Beside Devin, Erlein did the same.

"And the boy," the outlaw leader said, still softly. He was a big man of middle years, with a large face and a full beard that showed deep red in the waning light. He wore a dark wide-brimmed hat that hid his eyes.

"I don't carry a bow," Devin said shortly, letting fall his sword. There was mocking laughter at that from the men in front of them.

"Magian, why were your men in arrow range?" The bearded man said, more loudly now. He himself had not laughed. "You knew my instructions. You know how we do this."

"I didn't think we were," came an angry voice behind them, amid a clattering of hooves. Their pursuers had come up. The trap was closed, before and behind. "He fired a long way in half-light and wind. He was lucky, Ducas."

"He wouldn't have had a chance to be lucky if you had done your job properly. Where's Abhar?"

"Took an arrow in the thigh and fell. Torre's gone back to bring him."

"Waste," the red-bearded man scowled. "I don't like waste." He was a dark, bulky presence, silhouetted against the low sun. Behind him the other seven riders kept their bows leveled.

Alessan said, "If waste offends you, you won't like this evening's work at all. We have nothing to give you beyond our weapons. Or our lives, if you are the sort who kill for pleasure."

"Sometimes," the man named Ducas said, not raising his voice. He sounded unsettlingly calm, Devin thought, and very much in control of his band. "Will my two men die? Do you use poisoned arrows?"

Alessan's expression was contemptuous. "Not even against the Barbadians. Why? Do you?"

"Sometimes," the outlaw leader said again. "Especially against the Barbadians. These are the highlands, after all." He smiled for the first time, a cold, wolfish grin. Devin had a sudden sense that he wouldn't want to have this man's memories, or his dreams.

Alessan said nothing. It was growing darker in the pass. Devin saw him glance over at Erlein, a sharp query in his face. The wizard shook his head, a minute, almost invisible gesture. "Too many," he whispered. "And besides…”

"The grey-haired one is a wizard!" came an emphatic voice from the line beyond Ducas.

A chunky, round-faced man moved his horse forward beside the leader's. "Don't even think of it," he continued, looking straight at Erlein. "I could block anything you tried." Startled, Devin glanced at the man's hands, but at this distance it was too dark for him to see if two fingers were missing. They would have to be though.

They had come upon another wizard; much good it would do them.

"And precisely how long do you think it would take a Tracker to find you then?" Erlein was saying, his voice silken. "With the back-spill of magic from the both of us leading to this place?"

"There are a sufficiency of arrows trained on your heart and throat," the leader interjected, "to ensure that such an event would not happen. But I confess this grows more interesting every moment. An archer and a wizard riding abroad on an Ember Day. Aren't you afraid of the dead? What does the boy do?"

"I'm a singer," Devin said grimly. "Devin d'Asoli, lately from the company of Menico di Ferraut, if that means anything to you." The thing, obviously, was to keep the talk going somehow. And he had heard stories, wishful thinking on the road, perhaps, of outlaw bands sparing musicians in exchange for a night of song. Something occurred to him: "You thought we were Barbadians, didn't you? From a distance. That's why you laid the trap."

"A singer. A clever singer," Ducas murmured. "If not clever enough to stay indoors on an Ember Day. Of course we thought you were Barbadians. Who in the eastern peninsula but Barbadians and outlaws would be abroad today? And all of the outlaws for twenty miles around are part of my band."

"There are outlaws and outlaws," Alessan said softly. "But if you were hunting Barbadian mercenaries you are men with the same hearts as ours. I can tell you, and I do not lie, Ducas, that if you hinder us here, or kill us, you will be giving such comfort to Barbadior, and to Ygrath, as they could not have ever dreamt of asking of you." There was, not surprisingly, a silence. The cold wind knifed into the pass, stirring the young grasses in the growing dark.

"You have a rather large opinion of yourself, it appears," Ducas said at length, thoughtfully. "Perhaps I should know why. I think it is time for you to tell me exactly who you are, and where you are riding at dusk on an Ember Day, and I will draw my own conclusions."

"My name is Alessan. I am riding west. My mother is dying and has summoned me to her side."

"How devoted of you," Ducas said. "But one name tells me nothing, and west is a big place, my friend with the bow. Who are you and where are you riding?" The voice was an uncoiled whip this time. Devin jumped. Behind Ducas seven bowstrings were drawn back.

Devin, his heart pounding, saw Alessan hesitate. The sun was almost gone now, a red disk cut in half by the horizon beyond the pass. The wind seemed to be blowing harder, promising a chilly night to come after this first day of spring.

There was a chill in Devin as well. He glanced at Erlein, and discovered that the wizard was staring at him, as if waiting. Alessan had not yet spoken. Ducas shifted meaningfully in his saddle.

Devin swallowed and, knowing that however hard this was for him, it had to be easier than it would be for Alessan, he said: "Tigana. He is from Tigana, and so am I."

He was careful to look straight at the outlaw wizard as he spoke, not at Ducas or the other riders. He saw out of the corner of his eye that Alessan was doing the same thing, so as not to have to see the blank look of incomprehension they both knew would follow. The wizard would be different. Wizards could hear the name.

A murmur rose from the gathered men, before them and behind. And then one man spoke aloud amid the shadows of falling dusk in that lonely place. A voice from the line behind them.

"By the blood of the god!" that voice cried from the heart. Devin wheeled around. A man had dismounted and was striding quickly forward to stand in front of them. Devin saw that the man was small, not much bigger than himself, perhaps thirty years old or a little more, and that he was moving awkwardly and clearly in pain, with Alessan's arrow in his arm.

Ducas was looking at his wizard. "Sertino, what is this?" he said, with an edge in his voice. "I do not…”

"Sorcery," the wizard said bluntly.

"What? His?" Ducas nodded towards Erlein.

"No, not his." It was the wounded man who spoke, his eyes never leaving Alessan's face. "Not this poor wizard's. It is real sorcery, this. It is the power of Brandin of Ygrath that keeps you from hearing the name."

With an angry motion Ducas swept his hat off, revealing a balding dome with a fringe of bright red hair. "And you, Naddo? How do you hear it, then?"

The man on the ground swayed unsteadily on his feet before replying. "Because I was born there too, and so I'm immune to the spell, or another victim of it, whichever you prefer." Devin heard the tautness in his voice, as of someone holding hard to his self-control. He heard the man called Naddo say, looking up at Alessan. "You have been asked for your name, and you only gave him a part. Will you tell us the rest? Will you tell me?" It was hard to see his eyes now, but his voice told an old story.

Alessan was sitting on his horse with an easiness, even after a day in the saddle, that seemed to deny even the possibility of weariness, or the tension of where they were. But then his right hand came up and pushed once, unconsciously, through his already tangled hair, and Devin, seeing the familiar gesture, knew that whatever he himself was feeling now, it was doubled and redoubled in the man he followed.

And then in the stillness of that pass, with the only other sounds the whistle of wind between the hills and the stirring of the horses on the young grass, he heard: "My name is Alessan di Tigana bar Valentin. If you are as old as you appear to be, Naddo di Tigana, you will know who I am."

With a prickling of hairs on his neck and a shiver he could not control, Devin saw Naddo drop to his knees on the cold ground even before the last words were spoken.

"Oh, my Prince!" the wounded man cried in a raw voice. And covering his face with his one good hand, he wept.

"Prince?" said Ducas, very softly. There was a restive movement among the outlaws. "Sertino, you will explain this to me!"

Sertino the wizard looked from Alessan to Erlein, and then down at the weeping man. A curious, almost a frightened, expression crossed his pale, round face.

He said, "They are from Lower Corte. It had a different name before Brandin of Ygrath came. He has used his sorcery to take that name away. Only people born there, and wizards because of our own magic, can hear the true name. That is what is happening here."

"And 'Prince'? Naddo called him that."

Sertino was silent. He looked over at Erlein, and there was still that odd, uneasy look on his face. He said, "Is it true?"

And Erlein di Senzio, with an ironic half-smile, replied, "Just don't let him cut your hair, brother. Unless you like being bound into slavery."

Sertino's mouth fell open. Ducas slapped his knee with his hat. "Now that," he snapped, "I do not understand at all. There is too much of this I do not understand. I want explanations, from all of you!" His voice was harsh, much louder than before. He did not look at Alessan though.

"I understand it well enough, Ducas," came a voice from behind them. It was Magian, the captain of the group that had driven them into the gap. He moved his horse forward as they turned to look at him. "I understand that we have made our fortunes tonight. If this is the Prince of a province Brandin hates then all we need do is take him west to Fort Forese across the border and turn him over to the Ygrathens there. With a wizard to boot. And who knows, one of them probably likes boys in his bed, too. Singing boys." His smile was a wide loose thing in the shadows.

He said, "There will be rewards. Land. Perhaps even…"

He said nothing more than that. Ever. In rigid disbelief Devin saw Magian's mouth fall open and his eyes grow briefly wide, then the man slid slowly sideways off his horse to fall with a clatter of sword and bow on the ground beside Erlein.

There was a long-handled dagger in his back.

One of the outlaws from the line behind him, not hurrying at all, dismounted and pulled the dagger free. He wiped it carefully clean on the dead man's surcoat before sheathing it again at his belt.

"Not a good idea, Magian's," he said quietly, straightening to look at Ducas. "Not a good idea at all. We aren't informers here, and we don't serve the Tyrants."

Ducas slapped his hat back on his head, visibly fighting for control. He took a deep breath. "As it happens, I agree. But as it also happens, Arkin, we have a rule here about weapons drawn against each other."

Arkin was very tall, almost gaunt, and his long face was white, Devin saw, even among the shadows of dusk. He said, "I know that, Ducas. It is wasteful. I know. You will have to forgive me."

Ducas said nothing for a long time. Neither did anyone else. Devin, looking past the dead man, saw the two wizards gazing fixedly at each other in the shadows.

Arkin was still looking at Ducas.

Who finally broke the silence. "You are fortunate that I agree with you," he said.

Arkin shook his head. "We would not have stayed together this long otherwise."

Alessan neatly dismounted from his horse. He walked over towards Ducas, ignoring the arrows still trained on him. "If you are hunting Barbadians," he said quietly, "I have some idea as to why. I am doing the same thing, in my own way." He hesitated. "You can do as your dead man suggested: turn me in to Ygrath, and yes, I suspect there would be a reward. Or you can kill us here, and have done with us. You can also let us go our own way from this place. But there is one other, quite different thing you can do."

"Which is?" Ducas seemed to have regained his self-control. His voice was calm again, as it had been at the beginning.

"Join me. In what I seek to do."

"Which is?"

"To drive both Tyrants from the Palm before this summer is out."

Naddo looked up suddenly, a brightness in his face. "Really, my lord? We can do this? Even now?"

"There is a chance," Alessan said. "Especially now. For the first time there is a chance." He looked back at Ducas. "Where were you born?"

"In Tregea," the other man said after a pause. "In the mountains."

Devin had a moment to think about how completely things had shifted here, that Alessan should be asking the questions now. He felt a stirring within him, of hope renewed and of pride.

The Prince was nodding his head. "I thought it might be so. I have heard the stories of a red-headed Captain Ducas who was one of the leaders at Borifort in Tregea during the Barbadian siege there. They never found him after the fort fell." He hesitated. "I could not help but notice the color of your hair."

For a moment the two men were motionless as in a tableau, one on the ground the other on his horse. Then, quite suddenly, Ducas di Tregea smiled.

"What is left of my hair," he murmured wryly, sweeping off his hat again with a wide gesture.

Releasing his reins he swung down off his horse and, striding forward, held out an open palm to Alessan. Who met both, the smile and offered hand, with his own.

Devin found himself gasping with the rush of relief that swept over him, and then cheering wildly at the top of his voice with twenty outlaws in that dark Certandan pass.

What he noticed though, even as the cheering reached a crescendo, was that neither wizard was shouting. Erlein and Sertino sat very still, almost rigid on their horses, as if concentrating on something. They gazed at each other, expressions identically grim.

And because he noticed, because he seemed to be becoming the sort of man who saw things like this, Devin was the first to fall silent, and he had even instinctively raised a hand to quiet the others. Ales-san and Ducas lowered their linked palms and gradually, as silence returned to the pass, everyone looked at the wizards.

"What is it?" Ducas said.

Sertino turned to him. "Tracker. Northeast of us, quite close. I just felt the probe. He'll not find me though, I've done no magic for a long time."

"I have," said Erlein di Senzio. "Earlier today, in the Braccio Pass. Only a light spell, a screen for someone. Evidently it was enough. There must have been a Tracker in one of the southern forts."

"There almost always is," Sertino said flatly.

"What," Ducas said, "were you doing in the Braccio Pass?"

"Gathering flowers," Alessan said. "I'll tell you later. Right now we have Barbadians to deal with. How many will be with the Tracker?"

"Not less than twenty. Probably more. We have a camp in the hills south of here. Shall we run for it?"

"They'll follow," Erlein said. "He's got me traced. The spill of my magic will mark me for another day at least."

"I don't much feel like hiding in any case," Alessan said softly.

Devin turned quickly to look at him. So did Ducas. Awkwardly, Naddo rose to his feet.

"How good, exactly, are your men here?" Alessan said, a challenge in his tone and in the grey eyes.

And in the shadows of what was now almost full-dark Devin saw the Tregean outlaw leader's teeth suddenly flash. "They are good enough, and to spare, to deal with a score of Barbadians. This will be more than we've ever tackled, but we've never fought beside a Prince before. I think," he added, in a meditative voice, "that I too am grown tired of hiding, suddenly."

Devin looked over at the wizards. It was hard to make out their features in the dark, but Erlein said, in a hard-edged voice: "Alessan, the Tracker will have to be killed immediately, or he'll send an image of this place back to Alberico."

"He will be," said Alessan quietly. And in his voice, too, there was a new note. The presence of something Devin had never heard. A second later he realized that it was death.

Alessan's cloak flapped in a gust of wind. Very deliberately he drew his hood over his face.

The hard thing for Devin was that Alberico's Tracker turned out to be twelve years old.

They sent Erlein riding west out of the pass, as the lure. He was the one being followed. He had Sertino di Certando, the other wizard, and two other men with them, one of whom was the wounded Naddo, who insisted on being of use even though he could not fight. They had taken the arrow from his arm and bandaged it as best they could. It was clear that he was in difficulty, but even more clear that in the presence of Alessan he was not about to give way to that.

A short while later, under the stars and the low eastward crescent of Vidomni, the Barbadians entered the pass. There were twenty-five of them, and the Tracker. Six carried torches, which made things easier. Though not for them.

Alessan's arrow and Ducas's met in the Tracker's breast, fired from slopes on opposite sides of the defile. Eleven of the mercenaries fell under that first rain of arrows before Devin found himself galloping furiously down with Alessan and half a dozen other men out of their concealment in hollows in the pass. They angled to close the western exit, even as Ducas and nine men sealed off the eastern end the Barbadians had entered from.

And so on that Ember Night, in the company of outlaws in the highlands of Certando far from his lost home, Alessan bar Valentin, Prince of Tigana, fought the first true battle of his long war of return. After the drawn-out years of maneuvering, a subtle gathering of intelligence and the delicate guiding of events, he drew blade against the forces of a Tyrant in that moonlit pass.

No subterfuge, no hidden manipulation anymore from the wings of the stage. This was battle, for the time had come.

Marius of Quileia had made a promise to him that day, against wisdom and experience and beyond hope. And with Marius's promise everything had changed. The waiting was over. He could loosen the rigid bonds that had held his heart so tightly leashed all these years. Tonight in this pass he could kill: in memory of his father and his brothers and all the dead of the River Deisa and after, in that year when he himself had not been permitted to die.

They had spirited him away and hidden him in Quileia south of the mountains, with Marius, then a captain of the High Priestess's guard. A man with his own reasons for fostering and concealing a young Prince from the northlands. That had been almost nineteen years ago, when the hiding had begun.

He was tired of hiding. The time of running was over now; the season of war had begun. True, it was Barbadior, not Ygrath, whose soldiers drew blade against them now, but in the end it was all the same. Both Tyrants were the same. He had been saying that for all the years since he'd come back north to the peninsula with Baerd. It was a truth hammered into shape like metal on the hard forge of his heart. They had to take them both, or be no nearer freedom than before.

And in the Braccio Pass this morning the taking had begun. The keystone had been set in the arch of his design. And so tonight in this dark defile he could unbind his pent-up passion, his own long memories of loss, and set his sword arm free.

Devin, laboring to keep up with the Prince, rode into his first combat with raw panic and exhilaration vying for mastery in his breast. He did not shout as most of the outlaws did; he was concentrating as much as anything else on ignoring the ache in his wounded leg. He gripped the dark sword Baerd had bought for him, holding it with the blade curving upwards as he had been taught in wintry morning lessons that seemed unimaginably remote from this night's happenings.

He saw Alessan drive straight into the circled ranks of the mercenaries, unswerving as one of his arrows, as if to put behind him in this one act of direct response all the years when such a thing was not allowed.

Frantically, gritting his teeth, Devin followed in Alessan's wake. He was alone though, and half a dozen lengths behind, when a yellow-bearded Barbadian loomed up beside him, enormous on his horse. Devin cried out in shock. Only some blind survival instinct and the reflexes he had been born with saved his life. He pulled his horse hard to the left, veering for a space he saw, and then leaning back to his right, as low to the ground as he could manage, he cut upwards with all his strength. He felt a searing pain in his wounded leg and almost fell. The windrush of the Barbadian's blade sliced empty air where Devin's head had been. A heartbeat later Devin felt his own wickedly curved sword cleave through leathery armor and into flesh.

The Barbadian screamed, a liquid, bubbling sound. He swayed wildly on his mount as his sword fell from his grasp. He brought one hand to his mouth in a curiously childlike gesture. Then, like the slow toppling of a mountain tree, he slid sideways in his saddle and crashed to the ground.

Devin had already pulled his sword free. Wheeling his horse in a tight circle, he looked for adversaries. No one was coming though. Alessan and the others were ahead of him, pounding against the mercenaries, driving to meet Ducas and Arkin's group pressing forward from the east.

It was almost over, Devin realized. There was nothing, really, for him to do. With a complex mixture of emotions that he didn't even try to understand just then, he watched the Prince's blade rise and fall three times and he saw three Barbadians die. One by one the six torches dropped to the ground and were extinguished. And then, only moments after they had ridden into the pass, it seemed to Devin, the last of the Barbadians had been cut down and slain.

It was then that he saw what was left of the Tracker and realized how young he had been. The body had been hideously trampled in the melee. It lay twisted and splayed unnaturally. Somehow the face had been spared, though for Devin, looking down, that was actually the worst thing. The two arrows were still embedded in the child's body, though the upper shaft of one of them had been broken off.

Devin turned away. He stroked the horse Alienor had given him, and whispered to it. Then he forced himself to ride back towards the man he'd killed. This was not the same as the sleeping soldier in the Nievolene barn. It was not, he told himself. This had been open warfare and the Barbadian had been armed and armored, and he had swung his massive blade seeking Devin's life. Had the Barbadians and the Tracker come upon him and Alessan and Erlein alone in the wilderness Devin had no illusions, none at all, as to what their fate would have been.

It was not the same as in the barn. He said it within himself once again, as he gradually became aware of the eerie, disorienting calm that seemed to have descended upon the pass. The wind still blew, as cold as before. He glanced up, and realized belatedly that Alessan had quietly ridden to his side and was also looking down at the man Devin had slain. Both horses stamped and snorted, made restless by the frenzy just past and the smell of blood.

"Devin, believe me, I am sorry," Alessan murmured softly, so that no one else would hear. "It is hardest the first time, and I gave you no chance to prepare."

Devin shook his head. He felt drained, almost numb. "You didn't have much choice. Maybe it was better this way." He cleared his throat awkwardly. "Alessan, you have larger things to worry about. I chose freely in the Sandren Woods last fall. You aren't responsible for me."

"In a way I am."

"Not in a way that matters. I made my own choice." "Doesn't friendship matter?"

Devin was silent, rendered suddenly diffident. Alessan had a way of doing that to you. After a moment the Prince added, almost as an afterthought, "I was your age when I came back from Quileia."

For a moment he seemed about to add something, but in the end he did not. Devin had an idea of what he meant though, and something kindled quietly within him like a candle.

For a moment longer they looked down at the dead man. Only a crescent, Vidomni's pale light was still bright enough to show the staring pain in his face.

Devin said, "I chose freely, and I understand the need, but I don't think I'm ever going to get used to this."

"I know I never have," said Alessan. He hesitated. "Either one of my brothers would have been so much better at what I was kept alive to do."

Devin turned then, trying to read the expression on the Prince's face in the shadows. After a moment he said, "I never knew them, but will you allow me to say that I doubt it? Truly I doubt it, Alessan." After a moment the Prince touched his shoulder. "Thank you. There are those who would disagree, I'm afraid. But thank you, nonetheless."

And with those words he seemed to remember something, or be recalled to something. His voice changed. "We had better ride. I must speak with Ducas, and then we'll have to catch up with Erlein and go on. We've a lot of ground to cover yet." He looked at Devin appraisingly. "You must be exhausted. I should have asked before: how is your leg? Can you ride?"

"I'm fine," Devin protested quickly. "Of course I can ride." Someone behind them laughed sardonically. They both turned. To discover that Erlein and the others had, in fact, returned to the pass.

"Tell me," the wizard said to Alessan, sharp mockery in his voice, "what did you expect him to say? Of course he'll tell you he can ride. He'd ride all night, half-dead, for you. So would this one", he gestured towards Naddo behind him, "on barely an hour's acquaintance. I wonder, Prince Alessan, how does it feel to have such a power over the hearts of men?"

Ducas had ridden over while Erlein was speaking. He said nothing though, and it was too dark now with the torches extinguished, to make out anyone's features clearly. One had to judge by the words, and the inflections given them.

Alessan said quietly, "I think you know my answer to that. In any case, I'm unlikely to think too highly of myself with you around to point these things out to me." He paused, then added, "Triad for-fend you would ever volunteer to ride all night in any cause but your own."

"I," said Erlein flatly, "have no choice in the matter anymore. Or have you forgotten?"

"I have not. But I've no mind to repeat that quarrel now, Erlein. Ducas and his men have just put their lives at risk to save your own. If you…”

"To save my own! I would never have been at risk if you hadn't compelled me to…”

"Erlein, enough! We have a great many things to do and I am not of a mind to debate."

In the darkness Devin saw Erlein sketch a mocking bow on horseback. "I most humbly cry your pardon," he said in an exaggerated tone. "You really must let me know when you are of a mind to debate. You'll concede it is an issue of some importance to me."

Alessan was silent for what seemed a long time. Then, mildly, he said, "I think I can guess what is behind this now. I understand. It is meeting another wizard, isn't it? With Sertino here you feel what has happened to you the more."

"Don't pretend you understand me, Alessan!" said Erlein furiously.

Still calmly, Alessan said, "Very well then, I won't. In some ways I may never understand you and how you have lived you life, I told you that the evening we met. But for now this issue is a closed one. I will be prepared to discuss it the day the Tyrants are gone from the Palm. Not before."

"You will be dead before that. We will both be dead."

"Don't touch him!" Alessan said sharply. Belatedly Devin saw the Naddo had raised his good hand to strike the wizard. More quietly the Prince added, "If we are both dead, then our spirits can wrangle in Morian's Halls, Erlein. Until then, no more. We will have a great deal to do together in the weeks to come."

Ducas coughed. "As to that," he said, "we two also had better speak. There is a fair bit I'd like to know before I go further than this night's work, much as it has pleased me."

"I know," said Alessan, turning to him in the dark. He hesitated. "Will you ride with us for a little. Only as far as the village. You and Naddo, because of his arm."

"Why there, and why because of the arm? I don't understand," Ducas said. "You should know that we are not much welcome in the village. For obvious reasons."

"I can guess. It won't matter. Not on an Ember Night. You will understand when we get there. Come. I want my good friend Erlein di Senzio to see something. And I suppose Sertino had better join us too."

"I wouldn't miss this for all the blue wine in Astibar," said the pudgy Certandan wizard. It was interesting, at another time it might even have been amusing, to note what a healthy distance he continued to keep between himself and the Prince. The words he spoke were facetious, but his tone was deadly serious.

"Come on then," said Alessan brusquely. He turned his horse past Erlein's, almost brushing against the other man, and started west out of the pass. The ones he had named began to follow. Ducas spoke a few terse commands to Arkin, too low for Devin to hear. Arkin hesitated for a moment, clearly torn, wanting to come with his leader. But then, without speaking, he turned his horse the other way. When Devin glanced back a moment later, he saw that the outlaws were rifling the Barbadians' bodies for weapons.

He turned to look over his shoulder again a few moments later but they were in open country by then, with the hills in shadow to the south and east and a grassy plain rolling north of them. The entrance to the pass could no longer even be seen. Arkin and the others would be gone from within it soon, Devin knew, leaving only the dead. Only the dead for the scavengers; one of them killed by his own sword, and another one a child.

The old man lay on his bed in the darkness of an Ember Night and the always darkness of his own affliction. Far from sleep, he listened to the wind outside and to the woman in the other room clicking her prayer beads and intoning the same litany over and over.

"Eanna love us, Adaon preserve us, Morian guard our souls. Eanna love us, Adaon preserve us, Morian guard our souls. Eanna love us…"

His hearing was very good. It was a compensation most of the time, but sometimes, as tonight, with the woman praying like a demented thing, it was a curse of a particularly insidious kind. She was using her old beads; he could tell the thin, quick sound even through the wall separating their chambers. He had made her a new ring of beads of rare, polished tanchwood three years ago for her naming day. Most of the time she used that ring, but not on the Ember Days. Then she went back to her old beads and she prayed aloud for most of three days and nights.

In the earliest years here he had slept those three nights in the barn with the two boys who had brought him here, so much did her unceasing litany disturb him. But he was old now, his bones creaked and ached on windy nights such as this, so he kept to his own bed under piled blankets and endured her voice as best he could.

"Eanna love us always, Adaon preserve us from all perils, Morian guard our souls and shelter us. Eanna love us…"

The Ember Days were a time of contrition and atonement, but they were also a time when one was to count and give thanks for one's gifts. He was a cynical man, for sufficient and varied reasons, but he would not have called himself unreligious, and he would not, in fact, have said he'd lived a life unblessed, despite the blindness of almost two decades. He had lived much of his life in wealth and near to power. The length of his days was a blessing, and so too was the lifelong grace of his hands with wood. Only a form of play at first, a diversion, it had become something more than that in the years since they had come here.

There was also his other gift of skill, though few people knew of that. Had it been otherwise he would never have been able to shape a quiet life in this highland village, and a quiet life was essential because he was hiding. Still.

The very fact of his survival on the long, sightless journey all those years ago was a blessing of a special kind. He was under no illusions: he would never have survived without the loyalty of his two young servants. The only ones they had allowed to stay with him. The only ones who had wanted to stay.

They weren't young nor were they servants any longer. They were farmers on land they owned with him. No longer sleeping on the front-room floor in their first small farmhouse nor out in the barn as they had in the earliest years, but in their own homes with wives beside them and children near by. Lying in darkness he offered thanks for that, as gratefully as for anything he had ever been given himself.

Either of them would have let him sleep in their home these three nights, to escape the unending drone of the woman in the other room, but he would not presume to ask so much. Not on the Ember Nights, not on any night. He had his own sense of what was appropriate, and besides, he liked his own bed more and more with the passing years.

"Eanna love us as her children, Adaon preserve us as his children…"

He wasn't, clearly, going to be able to fall asleep. He thought about getting up to polish a staff or a bow, but he knew Menna would hear him, and he knew she would make him pay for profaning an Ember Night with labor. Watery porridge, sour wine, his slippers cruelly moved from where he laid them down.

"They were in my way," she would say when he complained. Then, when fires were allowed again: burnt meat, undrinkable khav, bitter bread. For a week, at least. Menna had her own ways of letting him know what mattered to her. After all the years they had their tacit understandings much as any old couple did, though of course he had never married her.

He knew who he was, and what was appropriate, even in this fallen state, far from home, from the memory of wealth or power. Here on this small farm-holding bought with gold fearfully hidden on his person during that long, blind journey seventeen years ago, sure that a murderous pursuit was riding close behind.

He had survived, though, and the boys. Coming to this village on a day in autumn long ago: strangers arriving in a dark time. A time when so many people had died and so many others were brutally uprooted all across the Palm in the wake of the Tyrants' coming. But the three of them had somehow endured, had even managed to make the land put forth a living for them in good years. In Certando's bad years latterly he had had to deplete his dwindled reserve of gold, but what else was it for, at this point?

Really, what else would it be for? Menna and the two boys, they were no longer boys, of course, were his heirs. They were all he could claim as family now. They were all he had, if one didn't count the dreams that still came in his nights.

He was a cynical man, having seen a great deal in the days before his darkness came, and after, in a different way of seeing, but he was not so burdened by irony as to defeat wisdom. He knew that exiles always dreamt of home and that the sorely wronged never really forgot. He had no illusions about being unique in this.

"Eanna love us, Adaon preserve us from, Triad save us!"

Menna fell silent, very abruptly. And for the same reason the old man sat suddenly upright in bed, wincing at a sharp protest from his spine. They had both heard it: a sound outside in the night. In the Ember Night, when no one should be abroad.

Listening carefully he caught it again: the sound, delicate and faint, of pipes playing in the darkness outside, passing by their walls. Concentrating, the old man could make out footsteps. He counted them. Then, his heart beating dangerously fast, he swung out of bed as quickly as he could and began to dress.

"It is the dead!" Menna wailed in the far room. "Adaon preserve us from vengeful ghosts, from all harm. Eanna love us! The dead have come for us. Morian of Portals guard our souls!"

Despite his agitation the old man paused to note that Menna, even in her fear, still included him in prayers. For a moment he was genuinely moved. In the next moment he ruefully acknowledged the inescapable fact that the succeeding two weeks of his life, at least, were likely to be sheerest domestic torment.

He was going outside, of course. He knew exactly who this was. He finished dressing and reached for his favorite stick by the door. He moved as quietly as he could, but the walls were thin and Menna's hearing almost as good as his own: there was no point in trying to slip out unheard. She would know what he was doing. And would make him pay the price.

Because this had happened before. On Ember Nights and other nights for almost ten years now. Sure of foot inside the house he went to the front door and used his stick to roll back the chink-blocker on the floor. Then he opened the door and went out. Menna was praying again already: "Eanna love me, Adaon preserve me, Morian guard my soul." The old man smiled a wintry smile. Two weeks, at least. Watery porridge in the morning. Burnt, tasteless khav. Bitter mahgoti tea. He stood still for a moment, still smiling faintly, breathing the crisp, cool air. Mercifully, the wind had died down a little, his bones felt fine. Lifting his face to the night breeze he could almost taste the spring to come.

He closed the door carefully behind him and began tapping his way with the stick along the path towards the barn. He had carved this stick when he still had his sight. Many times he had carried it in the palace, an affectation at a dissolute court. He had never expected to need it in this way. Its head was the head of an eagle with the eyes lovingly detailed, wide and fiercely defiant.

Perhaps because he had killed for the second time in his life that night, Devin was remembering that other much larger barn from the winter just past, in Astibar.

This one was far more modest. Only two milk cows and a pair of plow horses stabled. It was well-made though, and warm, with the smell of the animals and clean straw. The walls had no chinks to admit the knife of wind, the straw was freshly piled, the floor swept clean, the tools along the walls neatly laid and stacked.

In fact, if he wasn't careful, the smell and the feel of this barn would take him much further back than last winter: back to their own farm in Asoli, which he tried never to think about. He was tired though, bone tired, after two sleepless nights, and so he supposed he was vulnerable to such memories. His right knee ached fiercely, where he had twisted it on the mountain. It was swollen to twice its normal size and sharply sensitive to touch. He'd had to walk slowly, making a real effort not to limp.

No one spoke. No one had spoken since they had reached the outskirts of this village of some twenty homes. The only sound for the last few moments after they tethered the horses and began to walk had been Alessan's pipes softly playing. Playing, and Devin wondered if he alone knew this, or if Naddo recognized it too, a certain nursery melody from Avalle.

Here in the barn Alessan was still playing, as gently as before. The tune was one more thing that seemed to be trying to carry Devin back to his family. He resisted: if he went that way in the condition he was in right now he would probably end up crying.

Devin tried to imagine how the haunting, elusive melody would sound to anyone huddled inside the walls of their lightless homes on this Ember Night. A company of ghosts passing by, that was what they would seem to be. The dead abroad, following a small, forgotten tune. He remembered Catriana singing in the Sandreni Woods:

But wherever I wander, by night or by day, Where water runs swiftly or high trees sway, My heart will carry me back and away To a dream of the towers of Avalle.

He wondered where she was tonight. And Sandre. Baerd. He wondered if he would ever see any of them again. Earlier this evening, pursued into the pass, he had thought he was about to die. And now, two hours later, they had killed twenty-five Barbadians with those same outlaws who had pursued them, and three of the outlaws were here with them in this unknown barn listening to Alessan play a cradle song.

He didn't think he would understand the strangeness of life if he lived to be a hundred years old.

There was a sound outside and the door swung open. Devin stiffened involuntarily. So did Ducas di Tregea, a hand reaching for his sword. Alessan looked at the door, but his fingers never faltered on the pipes and the music continued.

An old man, slightly stooped, but with a leonine combed-back mane of white hair, stood for a moment, backlit by the sudden moonlight, before he stepped inside and pushed the door closed behind him with a stick he carried. After that it was dark again in the barn and hard to see for a few moments.

No one spoke. Alessan did not even look up again. Tenderly, with feeling, he finished the tune. Devin looked at him as he played and wondered if he was the only man here who understood what music meant to the Prince. He thought about what Alessan had been through in this past day alone, about what it was he was riding towards, and something complicated and awkward stirred in his heart as he listened to the wistful ending of the song. He saw the Prince set his pipes aside with a motion of regret. Laying down his release, taking up the burdens again. All the burdens that seemed to be his legacy, the price of his blood.

"Thank you for coming, old friend," he said now, quietly, to the man in the doorway.

"You owe me, Alessan," the old man said in a clear strong voice. "You have condemned me to sour milk and spoiled meat for a month."

"I was afraid of that," Alessan said in the darkness. Devin could hear affection and an unexpected amusement in his voice. "Menna has not changed, then?"

The other man snorted. "Menna and change do not coexist," he said. "You are with new people, and a friend is missing. What has happened? Is he all right?"

"He is fine. A half-day's ride east. There is much to tell. I came with some reason, Rinaldo."

"So much is clear to me. One man with a leg that is torn inside. Another with an arrow wound. The two wizards are not happy but I can do nothing about their missing fingers and neither is ill. The sixth man is now afraid of me, but he need not be."

Devin gasped with astonishment. Beside him Ducas swore aloud.

"Explain this!" he growled furiously. "Explain everything!"

Alessan was laughing. So, more softly, was the man he had called Rinaldo. "You are a spoiled and petty old man," the Prince said, still chuckling, "and you enjoy shocking people simply for the sake of doing it. You should be ashamed of yourself."

"There are so few pleasures left to me in my age," the other retorted. "Would you deny me this one too? There is much to tell, you say? Tell me."

Alessan's voice grew sober. "I had a meeting in the mountains this morning."

"Ah, I was wondering about that! And what follows?"

"Everything, Rinaldo. Everything follows. This summer. He said yes. We will have the letters. One to Alberico, one to Brandin, and one to the Governor of Senzio."

"Ah," said Rinaldo again. "The Governor of Senzio." He said it softly, but could not quite disguise the excitement in his voice. He took a step forward into the room. "I never dreamt I would live to see this day. Alessan, we are going to act?"

"We have already begun. Ducas and his men joined with us tonight in battle. We killed a number of Barbadians and a Tracker pursuing a wizard with us."

"Ducas? That is who this is?" The old man gave a low whistle, a curiously incongruous sound. "Now I know why he is afraid. You have your share of enemies in this village, my friend."

"I am aware of that," said Ducas drily.

"Rinaldo," Alessan said, "do you remember the siege of Borifort when Alberico first came? The stories about a red-bearded captain, one of the leaders of the Tregeans there? The one who was never found?"

"Ducas di Tregea? This is he?" Again the whistle. "Well met then, Captain, though not, as a matter of fact, for the first time. If I remember rightly, you were in the company of the Duke of Tregea when I paid a formal visit there some twenty years ago."

"A visit from where?" Ducas asked, visibly struggling to get his bearings. Devin sympathized: he was doing the same thing, and he knew rather more than the red-bearded man did. "From… from Alessan's province?" Ducas hazarded.

"Tigana? But of course," Erlein di Senzio interjected harshly. "Of course he is. This is just another petty injured lordling from the west. Is that why you brought me here, Alessan? To show how brave an old man can be? You will forgive me if I choose to pass on this lesson."

"I didn't hear the beginning of that." It was Rinaldo, speaking softly to the wizard. "What did you say?"

Erlein fell silent, turning from Alessan to the man by the door. Even in darkness Devin could see his sudden confusion.

"He named my province," Alessan said. "They both think you are from my home."

"An outrageous slander," Rinaldo said calmly. He swung his large, handsome head towards Ducas and Erlein. "I am vain enough to have thought you might know me by now. My name is Rinaldo di Senzio."

"What! Senzio?" Erlein exclaimed, shocked out of his own composure. "You can't be!"

There was a silence.

"Who, exactly, is this presumptuous man?" Rinaldo asked, of no one in particular.

"My wizard, I'm afraid," Alessan replied. "I have bound him to me with Adaon's gift to the line of our Princes. I spoke to you of that once, I think. His name is Erlein. Erlein di Senzio."

"Ah!" said Rinaldo letting his breath out slowly. "I see. A bound wizard and a Senzian. That explains his anger." He moved another few steps forward, sweeping his stick over the ground in front of him.

It was in that moment that Devin realized that Rinaldo was blind. Ducas registered it in the same moment: "You have no eyes," he said.

"No," Rinaldo said equably. "I used to, of course, but they were judged inappropriate for me by my nephew, at the suggestion of both Tyrants seventeen years ago this spring. I had the temerity to oppose Casalia's decision to lay down his Ducal status and become a Governor instead."

Alessan was staring fixedly at Erlein as Rinaldo spoke. Devin followed his glance. The wizard looked more confused than Devin had ever seen him.

"I do know who you are, then," he said, almost stammering.

"Of course you do. Just as I know you, and knew your father, Erlein bar Alein. I was brother to the last real Duke of Senzio and am uncle to the craven disgrace who styles himself Casalia, Governor of Senzio now. And I was as proud to be the one as I am shamed to call myself the other."

Visibly fighting for control, Erlein said, "But then you knew what Alessan was planning. You knew about those letters. He told you. You know what he intends to do with them! You know what it will mean for our province! And you are still with him? You are helping him?" His voice rose erratically at the end.

"You stupid, petty little man," Rinaldo said slowly, spacing the words for weight, his own voice hard as stone. "Of course I am helping him. How else are we to deal with the Tyrants? What other battleground is possible in the Palm today but our poor Senzio where Barbadior and Ygrath circle each other like wolves and my crapulous nephew drowns himself in drink and spills his seed in the backsides of whores! Do you want freedom to be easy, Erlein bar Alein? Do you think it drops like acorns from trees in the fall?"

"He thinks he is free," Alessan said bluntly. "Or would be, if it wasn't for me. He thinks he was free until he met me by a river in Ferraut last week."

"Then I have nothing more to say to him," said Rinaldo di Senzio, with contempt.

"How did you… how did you find this man?" It was Sertino, speaking to Alessan. The Certandan wizard still kept to the far side of the room from the Prince, Devin noted.

"Finding such men has been my labor for twelve years and more now," Alessan said. "Men and women from my home or yours, from Astibar, Tregea… all over the peninsula. People I thought could be trusted and who might have reason to hate the Tyrants as much as I. And a desire to be free that matched my own. Truly free," he said, looking at Erlein again. "Masters of our own peninsula."

With a faint smile he turned to Ducas. "As it happened, you hid yourself well, friend. I thought you might be alive, but had no idea where. We lived in Tregea on and off for more than a year but no one we spoke to knew, or would say anything about your fate. I had to be terribly clever tonight to lure you into finding me instead."

Ducas laughed at that, a deep sound in his chest. Then, sobering, he said, "I wish it had happened earlier."

"So do I. You have no idea how much. I have a friend I think will take to you as much as you will to him."

"Shall I meet him?"

"In Senzio, later this spring, if events fall right. If we can make them fall right."

"If that is so, you had best start by telling us how you need them to fall," Rinaldo said prosaically. "Let me tend to your two wounded while you tell what we should know."

He moved forward, tapping the ground ahead of him as he came up to Devin. "I am a Healer," he explained gravely, the sharpness gone from his voice. "Your leg is bad and needs dealing with. Will you let me try?"

"So that is how you knew us," Ducas said, wonder in his voice again. "I have never known a true Healer before."

"There are not many of us and we tend not to announce ourselves," Rinaldo said, the empty sockets of his eyes fixed on nothingness. "That was so even before the Tyrants came: it is a gift with limits and a price. Now we keep ourselves hidden for the same reason the wizards do, or almost the same: the Tyrants are happy to seize us, and force us serve them until they wear us out."

"Can they do that?" Devin asked. His voice was hoarse. He realized that he hadn't spoken for a long time. He cringed at the thought of what he would sound like if he tried to sing tonight. He couldn't remember the last time he had been so exhausted.

"Of course they can," said Rinaldo simply. "Unless we choose to die on their death-wheels instead. Which has been known to happen."

"I will be happy to learn of any difference between that coercion and what this man has done to me," Erlein said coldly.

"And I will be happy to tell you," Rinaldo shot back, "as soon as I finish my work." To Devin he said, "There should be straw behind you. Will you lie down and let me see what I can do?"

In a few moments Devin found himself prone on a bed of straw. With an old man's gingerly caution Rinaldo knelt beside him. The Healer began rubbing his palms slowly against each other.

Over his shoulder Rinaldo said, "Alessan, I'm serious. Talk while I work. Begin with Baerd. I would like to know why he isn't with you."

"Baerd!" a voice interrupted. "Is that your friend? Baerd bar Saevar?" It was Naddo, the wounded man. He stumbled forward to the edge of the straw.

"Saevar was his father, yes," Alessan said. "You knew him?"

Naddo was so distraught he could scarcely speak. "Knew him? Of course I knew him. I was… I…" He swallowed hard. "I was his father's last apprentice. I loved Baerd as… as an older brother. I… we… parted badly. I went away in the year after the fall."

"So did he," Alessan said gently, laying a hand on Naddo's trembling shoulder. "Not long after you did. I know who you are now, Naddo. He has often spoken to me of that parting. I can tell you that he grieved for the manner of it. That he still does. I expect he will tell you himself when you meet."

"This is the friend you mentioned?" Ducas asked softly.

"It is."

"He has spoken to you of me?" Naddo's voice skirled high with wonder.

"He has."

Alessan was smiling again. Devin, weary as he was, found himself doing the same. The man before them sounded remarkably like a young boy just then.

"Do you… does he know what happened to his sister? To Dianora?" Naddo asked.

Alessan's smile faded. "We do not. We have searched for a dozen years, and asked in a great many places, wherever we find survivors of the fall. There are so many women of that name. She went away herself, some time after he left in search of me. No one knows why, or where she went, and the mother died not long after. They are… their loss is the deepest hurt I know in Baerd."

Naddo was silent; a moment later they realized that he was fighting back tears. "I can understand that," he said finally, his voice husky. "She was the bravest girl I ever knew. The bravest woman.

And if she wasn't really beautiful she was still so very…" He stopped for a moment, struggling for composure, and then said quietly: "I think I loved her. I know I did. I was thirteen years old that year."

"If the goddesses love us, and the god," Alessan said softly, "we will find her yet."

Devin hadn't known any of this. There seemed to be so many things he hadn't known. He had questions to ask, maybe even more than Ducas had. But just then Rinaldo, on his knees beside him, stopped rubbing his palms together and leaned forward.

"You need rest quite badly," he murmured, so softly none of the others could hear. "You need sleep as much as your leg needs care." As he spoke he laid one hand gently on Devin's forehead and Devin, for all his questions and all his perturbation, felt himself suddenly beginning to drift, as on a wide calm sea towards the shores of sleep, far from where men were speaking, from their voices and their grief and their need. And he heard nothing more at all of what was said in the barn that night.

Chapter 15

THREE DAYS LATER AT SUNRISE THEY CROSSED THE BORDER south of the two forts and Devin entered Tigana for the first time since his father had carried him away as a child.

Only the most struggling musicians came into Lower Corte, the companies down on their luck and desperate for engagements of any kind, however slight the pay, however grim the ambience. Even so long after the Tyrants had conquered, the itinerant performers of the Palm knew that Lower Corte meant bad luck and worse wages, and a serious risk of falling afoul of the Ygrathens, either inside the province or at the borders going in or out.

It wasn't as if the story wasn't known: the Lower Corteans had killed Brandin's son, and they were paying a price in blood and money and brutally heavy oppression for that. It did not make for a congenial setting, the artists of the roads agreed, talking it over in taverns or hospices in Ferraut or Corte. Only the hungry or the newly begun ventured to take the ill-paying, risk-laden jobs in that sad province in the southwest. By the time Devin had joined him Menico di Ferraut had been traveling for a very long time and had more than enough of a reputation to be able to eschew that particular one of the nine provinces. There was sorcery involved there too; no one really understood it, but the travelers of the road were a superstitious lot and, given an alternative, few would willingly venture into a place where magic was known to be at work. Everyone knew the problems you could find in Lower Corte. Everyone knew the stories.

So this was the first time for Devin. Through the last hours of riding in darkness he had been waiting for the moment of passage, knowing that since they had glimpsed Fort Sinave north of them some time ago, the border had to be near, knowing what lay on the other side.

And now, with the first pale light of dawn rising behind them, they had come to the line of boundary cairns that stretched north and south between the two forts, and he had looked up at the nearest of the old, worn, smooth monoliths, and had ridden past it, had crossed the border into Tigana.

And he found to his dismay that he had no idea what to think, how to respond. He felt scattered and confused. He had shivered uncontrollably a few hours ago when they saw the distant lights of Sinave in darkness, his imagination restlessly at work. I’ll be home soon, he had told himself. In the land where I was born.

Now, riding west past the cairn, Devin looked around compulsively, searching, as the slow spread of light claimed the sky and then the tops of hills and trees and finally bathed the springtime world as far as he could see.

It was a landscape much like what they had been riding through for the past two days. Hilly, with dense forests ranging in the south on the rising slopes, and the mountains visible beyond. He saw a deer lift its head from drinking at a stream. It froze for a minute, watching them, and then remembered to flee.

They had seen deer in Certando, too.

This is home! Devin told himself again, reaching for the response that should be flowing. In this land his father had met and wooed his mother, he and his brothers had been born, and from here Garin di Tigana had fled northward, a widower with infant sons, escaping the killing anger of Ygrath. Devin tried to picture it: his father on a cart, one of the twins on the seat beside him, the other, they must have taken turns, in the back with what goods they had, cradling Devin in his arms as they rode through a red sunset darkened by smoke and fires on the horizon.

It seemed a false picture in some way Devin could not have explained. Or, if not exactly false, it was unreal somehow. Too easy an image. The thing was, it might even be true, it might be exactly true, but Devin didn't know. He couldn't know. He had no memories: of that ride, of this place. No roots, no history. This was home, but it wasn't. It wasn't really even Tigana through which they rode. He had never even heard that name until half a year ago, let alone any stories, legends, chronicles of its past.

This was the province of Lower Corte; so he had known it all his life.

He shook his head, edgy, profoundly unsettled. Beside him Erlein glanced over, an ironic smile playing about his lips. Which made Devin even more irritable. Ahead of them Alessan was riding alone. He hadn't said a word since the border.

He had memories, Devin knew, and in a way that he was aware was odd or even twisted he envied the Prince those images, however painful they might be. They would be rooted and absolute and shaped of this place which was truly his home.

Whatever Alessan was feeling or remembering now would have nothing of the unreal about it. It would all be raw, brutally actual, the trampled fabric of his own life. Devin tried, riding through the cheerful birdsong of a glorious spring morning, to imagine how the Prince might be feeling. He thought that he could, but only just: a guess more than anything else. Among other things, perhaps first of all things, Alessan was going to a place where his mother was dying. No wonder he had urged his horse ahead; no wonder he wasn't speaking now.

He is entitled, Devin thought, watching the Prince ride, straight-backed and self-contained in front of them. He's entitled to whatever solitude, whatever release he needs. What he carries is the dream of a people, and most of them don't even know it.

And thinking so, he found himself drawn out of his own confusion, his struggling adjustment to where they were. Focusing on Alessan he found his avenue to passion again to the burning inward response to what had happened here, and was still happening. Every hour of every day in the ransacked, broken-down province named Lower Corte.

And somewhere in his mind and heart, fruits of a long winter of thought, and of listening in silence as older and wiser men spoke, Devin knew that he was not the first and would not be the last person to find in a single man the defining shape and lineaments for the so much harder love of an abstraction or a dream.

It was then, looking all around at the sweep of land under the wide arch of a high blue sky, that Devin felt something pluck at the strings of his heart as if it were a harp. As if he were. He felt the drumming of his horse's hooves on the hard earth, following fast behind the Prince, and it seemed to Devin that that drumming was with the harp-strings as they galloped.

Their destiny was waiting for them, brilliant in his mind like the colored pavilions on the plain of the Triad Games that took place every three years. What they were doing now mattered, it could make a difference. They were riding at the very center of events in their time. Devin felt something pull him forward, lifting and bearing him into the riptide, the maelstrom of the future. Into what his life would have been about when it was over.

He saw Erlein glance over again, and this time Devin smiled back at him. A grim, fierce smile. He saw the habitual, reflexive irony leave the wizard's lean face, replaced by a flicker of doubt. Devin almost felt sorry for the man again.

Impulsively he guided his horse nearer to Erlein's brown and leaned over to squeeze the other man's shoulder.

"We're going to do it!" he said brightly, almost gaily.

Erlein's face seemed to pinch itself together. "You are a fool," he said tersely. "A young, ignorant fool." He said it without conviction though, an instinctive response.

Devin laughed aloud.

Later he would remember this moment too. His words, Erlein's, his laughter under the bright, blue cloudless sky. Forests and the mountains on their left and in the distance before them now the first glimpse of the Sperion, a glinting ribbon flowing swiftly north before beginning its curve west to find the sea.

The Sanctuary of Eanna lay in a high valley set within a sheltering and isolating circle of hills south and west of the River Sperion and of what had been Avalle. It was not far from the road that had once borne such a volume of trade back and forth from Tigana and Quileia through the high saddleback of the Sfaroni Pass.

In all nine provinces Eanna's priests and Morian's, and the priestesses of Adaon had such retreats. Founded in out-of-the way parts of the peninsula, sometimes dramatically so, they served as centers of learning and teaching for the newly initiated clergy, repositories of wisdom and of the canons of the Triad, and as places of withdrawal, where priests and priestesses who chose might lay down the pace and burdens of the world outside for a time or for a lifetime.

And not just the clergy. Members of the laity would sometimes do the same, if they could afford «contributions» that were judged as appropriate offerings for the privilege of sheltering for a space of days or years within the ambit of these retreats.

Many were the reasons that led people to the Sanctuaries. It had long been a jest that the priestesses of Adaon were the best birth doctors in the Palm, so numerous were the daughters of distinguished or merely wealthy houses that elected to sojourn at one of the god's retreats at times that might otherwise have been inconvenient for their families. And, of course, it was well known that an indeterminately high percentage of the clergy were culled from the living offerings these same daughters left behind when they returned to their homes. Girl children stayed with Adaon, the boys went to Morian. The white-robed priests of Eanna had always claimed that they would have nothing to do with such goings-on, but there were stories belying that, as well.

Little of this had changed when the Tyrants came. Neither Brandin nor Alberico was so reckless or ill-advised as to stir up the clergy of the Triad against their rule. The priests and the priestesses were allowed to do as they had always done. The people of the Palm were granted their worship, odd and even primitive as it might seem to the new rulers from overseas.

What both Tyrants did do, with greater or lesser success, was play the rival temples against each other, seeing, for it was impossible not to see, the tensions and hostilities that rippled and flared among the three orders of the Triad. There was nothing new in this: every Duke, Grand Duke, or Prince in the peninsula had sought, in each generation, to turn this shifting three-way friction to his own account. Many patterns might have changed with the circling of years, some things might change past all recognition, and some might be lost or forgotten entirely, but not this one. Not this delicate, reciprocal dance of state and clergy.

And so the temples still stood, and the most important ones still flourished their gold and machial, their statuary, and their cloth-of-gold vestments for services. Save in one place only: in Lower Corte, where the statues and the gold were gone and the libraries looted and burned. That was part of something else though, and few spoke of it after the earliest years of the Tyrants. Even in this benighted province, the clergy were otherwise allowed to continue the precisely measured round of their days in city and town, and in their Sanctuaries.

And to these retreats came a great variety of men and women from time to time. It was not only the awkwardly fecund who found reason to ride or be carried away from the turbulence of their lives. In times of strife, whether of the soul or the wider world, the denizens of the Palm always knew that the Sanctuaries were there, perched in snowbound precipitous eyries or half-lost in their misty valleys.

And the people knew as well that, for a price, such a withdrawal into the regimen, the carefully modulated hours of retreats such as this one of Eanna in its valley, could be theirs. For a time. For a lifetime. Whoever they might have been in the cities beyond the hills.

Whoever they might have been.

For a time, for a lifetime, the old woman thought, looking out the window of her room at the valley in sunlight at spring's return. She had never been able to keep her thoughts from going back. There was so much waiting for her in the past and so little here, now, living through the agonizingly slow descent of the years. Season after season falling to the earth like shot birds, arrows in their breasts, through this lifetime that was her own, and her only one.

A lifetime of remembering, by curlew's cry at dawn or call to prayer, by candlelight at dusk, by sight of chimney smoke rising straight and dark into winter's wan gray light, by the driving sound of rain on roof and window at winter's end, by the creak of her bed at night, by call to prayer again, by drone of priests at prayer, by a star falling west in the summer sky, by the stern cold dark of the Ember Days… a memory within each and every motion of the self or of the world, every sound, each share of color, each scent borne by the valley wind. A remembrance of what had been lost to bring one to this place among the white-robed priests with their unending rites and their unending pettiness, and their acceptance of what had happened to them all.

Which last is what had nearly killed her in the early years. Which, indeed, she would say, had said last week to Danoleon, was killing her now, whatever the priest-physician might say about growths in her breast.

They had found a Healer in the fall. He had come, anxious, febrile, a lank, sloppy man with nervous motions and a flushed brow. But he had sat down beside her bed and looked at her, and she had realized that he did have the gift, for his agitation had settled and his brow had cleared. And when he touched her, here, and here, his hand had been steady and there had been no pain, only a not unpleasant weariness.

He had shaken his head though in the end, and she had read an unexpected grief in his pale eyes, though he could not have known who she was. His sorrow would be for simple loss, for defeat, not caring who it was who might be dying.

"It would kill me," he said quietly. "It has come too far. I would die and I would not save you. There is nothing I can do."

"How long?" she had asked. Her only words.

He told her half a year, perhaps less, depending on how strong she was.

How strong? She was very strong. More so than any of them guessed save perhaps Danoleon, who had known her longest by far. She sent the Healer from the room, and asked Danoleon to leave, and then the one slow servant the priests had allowed to the woman they knew only as a widow from an estate north of Stevanien.

As it happened she had actually known the woman whose identity she had assumed; had had her as one of the ladies of her court for a time. A fair-haired girl, green eyes and an easy manner, quick to laugh. Melina bren Tonaro. A widow for a week; less than that. She had killed herself in the Palace by the Sea when word came of Second Deisa.

The deception was a necessary shielding of identity: Danoleon's suggestion. Almost nineteen years ago. They would be looking for her and for the boy, the High Priest had said. The boy he was taking away, he would soon be safely gone, their dreams carried in his person, a hope living so long as he lived. She had been fair-haired herself, in those days. It had all happened such a long time ago. She had become Melina bren Tonaro and had come to the Sanctuary of Eanna in its high valley above Avalle.

Above Stevanien.

Had come, and had waited. Through the changing seasons and the unchanging years. Waited for that boy to grow into a man such as his father had been, or his brothers, and then do what a descendant in direct line of Micaela and the god should know he had to do.

Had waited. Season after season; shot birds falling from the sky.

Until last autumn, when the Healer had told her the cold large thing she had already guessed for herself. Half a year, he had said. If she was strong.

She had sent them from her room and lain in her iron bed and looked out at the leaves on the valley trees. The change of colors had come. She had loved that once; her favorite season for riding. As a girl, as a woman. It had occurred to her that these would be the last fall leaves she would ever see.

She had turned her mind from such thoughts and had begun to calculate. Days and months, and the numbering of the years. She had done the arithmetic twice, and a third time to be sure of it. She said nothing to Danoleon, not then. It was too soon.

Not until the end of winter, with all the leaves gone and ice just beginning to melt from the eaves, did she summon the High Priest and instruct him as to the letter she wanted sent to the place where she knew, as he knew, alone of all the priests, her son would be on the Ember Days that began this spring. She had done the calculations. Many times.

She had also timed it very well, and not by chance. She could see Danoleon wanting to protest, to dissuade, to speak of dangers and circumspection. But the ground was out from under his feet, she could see it in the way his large hands grew restless and the way his blue eyes moved about the room as if seeking an argument on the bare walls. She waited patiently for him to meet her gaze at last, as she knew he would, and then she saw him slowly bow his head in acceptance.

How did one deny a mother, dying, a message to her only living child? An entreaty to that child to come bid her farewell before she crossed over to Morian. Especially when that child, the boy he himself had guided south over the mountains so many years ago, was her last link to what she had been, to her own broken dreams and the lost dreams of her people?

Danoleon promised to write the letter and have it sent. She thanked him and lay back in her bed after he went out. She was genuinely weary, genuinely in pain. Hanging on. It would be half a year just past the Ember Days of spring. She had done the numbers. She would be alive to see him if he came. And he would come; she knew he would come to her.

The window had been open a little though it was still cold that day. Outside, the snow had lain in gentle drifting folds in the valley and up the slopes of the hills. She had looked out upon it but her thoughts, unexpectedly, had been of the sea. Dry-eyed, for she had not wept since everything fell, not once, not ever, she walked her memory-palaces of long ago and saw the waves come in to break and fall on the white sands of the shore, leaving shells and pearls and other gifts along the curving beach.

So Pasithea di Tigana bren Serazi. Once a princess in a palace by the sea; mother of two dead sons, and of one who yet lived. Waiting, as winter near the mountains turned to spring in that year.

"Two things. First, we are musicians," said Alessan. "A newly formed company. Secondly: do not use my name. Not here." His voice had taken on the clipped, hard cadences Devin remembered from the first night in the Sandreni lodge when this had all begun for him.

They were looking down on a valley running west in the clear light of afternoon. The Sperion lay behind them. The uneven, narrow road had wound its way for hours up around the shoulders of an ascending sequence of hills until this highest point. And now the valley unrolled before them, trees and grass touched by the earliest green-gold of spring. A tributary stream, swift-running with the melting snows, slanted northwest out of the foothills, flashing with light. The temple dome in the midst of the Sanctuary gleamed silver in the middle distance.

"What name, then?" Erlein asked quietly. He seemed subdued, whether because of Alessan's tone or the awareness of danger, Devin did not know.

"Adreano," the Prince said, after a moment. "I am Adreano d'Astibar today. I will be a poet for this reunion. For this triumphant, joyous homecoming."

Devin remembered the name: the young poet death-wheeled by Alberico last winter, after the scandal of the "Sandreni Elegies." He looked closely at the Prince for a moment and then away: this was not a day to probe. If he was here for any reason it was to try, somehow, to make things easier for Alessan. He didn't know how he was going to go about doing that though. He felt badly out of his depth again, his earlier rush of excitement fading before the grimness of the Prince's manner.

South of them, towering above the valley, the peaks of the Sfaroni Range loomed, higher even than the mountains above Castle Borso. There was snow on the peaks and even on the middle slopes; winter did not retreat so swiftly this high up, this far south. Below them though, north of the contoured foothills, in the sheltered eastwest running of the valley Devin could see green buds swelling on the trees. A grey hawk hung in an updraft for a moment, almost motionless, before wheeling south and down to be lost against the backdrop of the hills. Down on the valley floor the Sanctuary seemed to lie within its walls like a promise of peace and serenity, wrapped away from all the evils of the world.

Devin knew it was not so.

They rode down, not hurrying now, for that would have been unusual in three musicians come here at midday. Devin was keenly, anxiously aware of danger. The man he was riding behind was the last heir to Tigana. He wondered what Brandin of Ygrath would do to Alessan if the Prince was betrayed and taken after so many years. He remembered Marius of Quileia in the mountain pass: Do you trust this message?

Devin had never trusted the priests of Eanna in his whole life. They were too shrewd, by far the most subtle of the clergy, by far the most apt to steer events to their own ends, which might lie out of sight, generations away. Servants of a goddess, he supposed, might find it easier to take the longer view of things. But everyone knew that all across the peninsula the clergy of the Triad had their own triple understanding with the Tyrants from abroad: their collective silence, their tacit complicity, bought in exchange for being allowed to preserve the rites that mattered more to them, it seemed, than freedom in the Palm.

Even before meeting Alessan, Devin had had his own thoughts about that. On the subject of the clergy his father had never been shy about speaking his mind. And now Devin remembered again Garin's single candle of defiance twice a year on the Ember Nights of his childhood in Asoli. Now that he had begun to think about it, there seemed to be a great many nuances to the flickering lights of those candles in the dark. And more shadings to his own stolid father than he had ever guessed. Devin shook his head; this was not the time to wander down that path.

When the hill track finally wound its way down to the valley floor, a wider, smoother road began, slanting towards the Sanctuary in the middle of the valley. About half a mile away from the stone outer walls, a double row of trees began on either side of the approach. Elms, coming into early leaf. Beyond them on either side Devin saw men working in the fields, some lay servants and some of them priests, clad not in the white of ceremony, but in nondescript robes of beige, beginning the labors that the soil demanded at winter's end. One man was singing, a sweet, clear tenor voice.

The eastern gates of the Sanctuary complex were open before them, simple and unadorned save for the star-symbol of Eanna. The gates were high though, Devin noted, and of heavy wrought iron. The walls that enclosed the Sanctuary were high as well, and the stone was thick. There were also towers, eight of them, curving forward at intervals around the wide embrace of the walls. This was clearly a place built, however many hundreds of years ago, to withstand adversity. Set within the complex, rising serenely above everything else, the dome of Eanna's temple shone in the sunlight as they rode up to the open gates and passed within.

Just inside Alessan pulled his horse to a halt. From ahead of them and some distance over to the left they heard the unexpected sound of children's laughter. In an open, grassy field set beyond a stable and a large residence hall a dozen young boys in blue tunics were playing maracco with sticks and a ball, supervised by a young priest in the beige work-robes.

Devin watched them with a sudden sharp sadness and nostalgia. He could remember, vividly, going into the woods near their farm with Povar and Nico when he was five years old, to cut and carry home his first maracco stick. And then the hours, minutes more often, snatched from chores when the three of them would seize their sticks and one of the battered succession of balls Nico had patiently wound together out of layers and layers of cloth, to whoop and slash their way about in the mud at the end of the barnyard, pretending they were the Asolini team at the upcoming Triad Games.

"I scored four times one game in my last year of temple schooling," Erlein di Senzio said in a musing voice. "I've never forgotten it. I doubt I ever will."

Surprised and amused, Devin glanced over at the wizard. Alessan turned in his saddle to look back as well. After a moment the three men exchanged a smile. In the distance the children's shouts and laughter gradually subsided. The three of them had been seen. It was unlikely that the appearance of strangers was a common event here, especially so soon after the melting of the snow.

The young priest had left the playing field and was making his way over, as was an older man with a full black leather apron over his robes of beige, coming from where the sheep and goats and cows were kept in pens on the other side of the central avenue. Some distance in front of them lay the arched entrance to the temple and beside it on the right and a little behind, the smaller dome of the observatory, for in all her Sanctuaries the priests of Eanna tracked and observed the stars she had named.

The complex was enormous, even more so than it had seemed from above on the hill slopes. There were a great many priests and servants moving about the grounds, entering and leaving the temple itself, working among the animals, or in the vegetable gardens Devin could see beyond the observatory. From that direction as well came the unmistakable clanging of a blacksmith's forge. Smoke rose up there, to be caught and carried by the mild breeze. Overhead he saw the hawk again, or a different one, circling lazily against the blue.

Alessan dismounted and Devin and Erlein did the same just as the two priests came up to them, at almost exactly the same moment. The younger one, sandy-haired and small like Devin, laughed and gestured at himself and his colleague.

"Not much of a greeting party, I'm afraid. We weren't expecting visitors this early in the year, I must admit. No one even noticed you riding down. Be welcome though, be most welcome to Eanna's Sanctuary, whatever the reason you have come to us. May the goddess know you and name you hers." He had a cheerful manner and an easy smile.

Alessan returned the smile. "May she know and surely name all who dwell within these walls. To be honest, we wouldn't have been certain how to deal with a more official greeting. We haven't actually worked out our entrance routines yet. And as for early in the year, well, everyone knows new-formed companies have to get moving sooner than the established ones or they are likely to starve."

"You are musical performers?" the older priest asked heavily, wiping his hands on the leather apron he wore. He was balding and brown and grizzled, and there was a gap where two of his front teeth ought to have been.

"We are," said Alessan with some attempt at a grand manner. "My name is Adreano d'Astibar. I play the Tregean pipes, and with me is Erlein di Senzio, the finest harp player in all of the peninsula. And I must tell you truly, you haven't heard singing until you've listened to our young companion Devin d'Asoli."

The younger priest laughed again. "Oh, well done! I should bring you along to the outer school to give a lesson to my charges in rhetoric."

"I'd do better to teach the pipes," Alessan smiled. "If music is part of your program here."

The priest's mouth twitched. "Formal music," he said. "This is Eanna, not Morian, after all."

"Of course," said Alessan hastily. "Very formal music for the young ones boarding here. But for the servants of the goddess themselves…?" He arched one of his dark eyebrows.

"I will admit," said the sandy-haired young priest, smiling again, "to a preference for Rauder's early music myself."

"And no one plays it better than we," Alessan said smoothly. "I can see we have come to the right place. Should we make our obeisance to the High Priest?"

"You should," said the older man, not smiling. He began untying the apron-strings at his back. "I'll take you to him. Savandi, your charges are about to commit assault upon each other or worse. Have you no control at all over them?"

Savandi spun to look, swore feelingly in a quite unpriestly fashion, and began running towards the games field shouting imprecations. From this distance it did indeed seem to Devin that the maracco sticks were being used by Savandi's young charges in a fashion distinctly at variance with the accepted rules of the game.

Devin saw Erlein grinning as he watched the boys. The wizard's lean face changed when he smiled. When the smile was a true one, not the ironic, slipping-sideways expression he so often used to indicate a sour, superior disdain.

The older priest, grim-faced, pulled his leather apron over his head, folded it neatly, and draped it over one of the bars of the adjacent sheepfold. He barked a name Devin could not make out and another young man, a servant this time, hastily emerged from the stables on their left.

"Take their horses," the priest ordered bluntly. "See that their goods are brought to the guest house."

"I'll keep my pipes," Alessan said quickly.

"And I my harp," Erlein added. "No lack of trust, you understand, but a musician and his instrument…"

This priest was somewhat lacking in Savandi's comfortable manner. "As you will," was all he said. "Come. My name is Torre, I am the porter of this Holy Sanctuary. You must be brought to the High Priest." He turned and set off without waiting for them, on a path going around to the left of the temple.

Devin and Erlein looked at each other and exchanged a shrug. They followed Torre and Alessan, passing a number of other priests and lay servants, most whom smiled at them, somewhat making up for their dour, self-appointed guide.

They caught up to the other two as they rounded the southern side of the temple. Torre had stopped, Alessan beside him. The balding porter looked around, quite casually, then said, almost as casually:

"Trust no one. Speak truth to none but Danoleon or myself. These are his words. You have been expected. We thought it would be another night, perhaps two before you came, but she said it would be today."

"Then I have proved her right. How gratifying," said Alessan in an odd voice.

Devin felt suddenly cold. Off to their left, in the games field, Savandi's boys were laughing again, lithe shapes clad in blue, running after a white ball. From within the dome he could hear, faintly, the sound of chanting. The end of the afternoon invocations. Two priests in formal white came along the path from the opposite direction, arm in arm, disputing animatedly.

"This is the kitchen, and this the bakehouse," Torre said clearly, pointing as he spoke. "Over there is the brewhouse. You will have heard of the ale we make here, I have no doubt."

"Of course we have," murmured Erlein politely, as Alessan said nothing.

The two priests slowed, registered the presence of the strangers and their musical instruments, and went on. "Just over there is the High Priest's house," Torre continued, "beyond the kitchen and the outer school."

The other two priests, resuming their argument, swept briskly around the curve of the path that led to the front of the temple.

Torre fell silent. Then, very softly, he said: "Eanna be praised for her most gracious love. May all tongues give her praise. Welcome home my Prince. Oh, in the name of love, be welcome home at last."

Devin swallowed awkwardly, looking from Torre to Alessan. An uncontrollable shiver ran along his spine: there were tears, bright-sparkling in the brilliant sunlight, in the porter's eyes.

Alessan made no reply. He lowered his head, and Devin could not see his eyes. They heard children's laughter, the final notes of a sung prayer.

"She is still alive then?" Alessan asked, looking up at last.

"She is," said Torre emotionally. "She is still alive. She is very…” He could not finish the sentence.

"There is no point in the three of us being careful if you are going to spill tears like a child," Alessan said sharply. "Enough of that, unless you want me dead."

Torre gulped. "Forgive me," he whispered. "Forgive me, my lord."

"No! Not 'my lord'. Not even when we are alone. I am Adreano d'Astibar, musician." Alessan's voice was hard. "Now take me to Danoleon."

The porter wiped quickly at his eyes. He straightened his shoulders. "Where do you think we are going?" he snapped, almost managing his earlier tone again. He spun on his heel and strode up the path.

"Good," Alessan murmured to the priest, from behind. "Very good, my friend." Trailing them both, Devin saw Torre's head lift at the words. He glanced at Erlein but this time the wizard, his expression thoughtful, did not return the look.

They passed the kitchens and then the outer school where Savandi's charges, children of noblemen or wealthy merchants, sent here to be educated, would study and sleep. All across the Palm such teaching was a part of the role of the clergy, and a source of a goodly portion of their wealth. The Sanctuaries vied with each other to draw student boarders, and their fathers' money.

It was silent within the large building now. If the dozen or so boys on the games-field with Savandi were all the students in the complex, then Eanna's Sanctuary in Lower Corte was not doing very well.

On the other hand, Devin thought, who of those left in Lower Corte could afford Sanctuary schooling for their children now? And what shrewd businessman from Corte or Chiara, having bought up cheap land here in the south, would not send his son home to be educated? Lower Corte was a place where a clever man from elsewhere could make money out of the ruin of the inhabitants, but it was not a place to put down roots. Who wanted to be rooted in the soil of Brandin's hate?

Torre led them up the steps of a covered portico and then through the open doorway of the High Priest's house. All doors seemed to be open to the spring sunshine, after the shuttered holiness of the Ember Days just past.

They stood in a large, handsome, high-ceilinged sitting-room. A huge fireplace dominated the southwestern end and a number of comfortable chairs and small tables were arranged on a deep-piled carpet. Crystal decanters on a sideboard held a variety of wines. Devin saw two bookcases on the southern wall but no books. The cases had been left to stand, disconcertingly empty. The books of Tigana had been burned. He had been told about that.

Arched doorways in both the eastern and western walls led out to porches where the sunlight could be caught in the morning and at eve.

On the far side of the room there was a closed door, almost certainly leading to the bedchamber. There were four cleverly designed, square recesses in the walls and another smaller one above the fire where statues would once have stood. These too were gone. Only the ubiquitous silver stars of Eanna served for painted decoration on the walls.

The door to the bedroom opened and two priests came out.

They seemed surprised, but not unduly so, to see the porter waiting with three visitors. One man was of medium height and middle years, with a sharp face and close-cropped salt-and-pepper hair. He carried a physician's tray of herbs and powders in front of him, supported on a thong about his neck.

It was at the other man that Devin stared, though. It was the other man who carried the High Priest's staff of office. He would have commanded attention even without it, Devin thought, gazing at the figure of what had to be Danoleon.

The High Priest was an enormous man, broad-shouldered with a chest like a barrel, straight-backed despite his years. His long hair and the beard that covered half his chest were both white as new snow, even against the whiteness of his robe. Thick straight eyebrows met in the middle of a serene brow and above eyes as clear and blue as a child's. The hand he wrapped about the massive staff of office held it as if it were no more than a cowherd's hazel switch.

If they were like this, Devin thought, awed, looking up at the man who had been High Priest of Eanna in Tigana when the Ygrathens came, if the leaders were all like this then there were truly great men here before the fall.

They couldn't have been so different from today; he knew that rationally. It was only twenty years ago, however much might have changed and fallen away. But even so, it was hard not to feel daunted in the commanding presence of this man. He turned from Danoleon to Alessan: slight, unprepossessing, with his disorderly, prematurely silvered hair and cool, watchful eyes, and the nondescript, dusty, road-stained riding clothes he wore.

But when he turned back to the High Priest he saw that Danoleon was squeezing his own eyes tightly shut as he drew a ragged breath. And in that moment Devin realized, with a thrill that was oddly akin to pain, where, despite all appearances, the truth of power lay between these men. It was Danoleon, he remembered, who had taken the boy Alessan, the last prince of Tigana, south and away in hiding across the mountains all those years ago.

And would not have seen him again since that time. There was grey in the hair of the tired man who stood before the High Priest now. Danoleon would be seeing that, trying to deal with it. Devin found himself hurting for the two of them. He thought about the years, all the lost years that had tumbled and spun and drifted like leaves or snow between these two, then and now.

He wished he were older, a wiser man with a deeper understand-big. There seemed to be so many truths or realizations of late, hovering at the edge of his awareness, waiting to be grasped and claimed, just out of reach.

"We have guests," Torre said in his brusque manner. "Three musicians, a newly formed company."

"Hah!" the priest with the medicine-tray grunted with a sour expression. "Newly formed? They'd have to be to venture here and this early in the year. I can't remember the last time someone of any talent showed up in this Sanctuary. Can you three play anything that won't clear a room of people, eh?"

"It depends on the people," said Alessan mildly.

Danoleon smiled, though he seemed to be trying not to. He turned to the other priest. "Idrisi, it is just barely possible that if we offered a warmer welcome we might be graced with visitors happier to display their art." The other man grunted what might or might not have been an apology under the scrutiny of that placid blue gaze.

Danoleon turned back to the three of them. "You will forgive us," he murmured. His voice was deep and soothing. "We have had some disconcerting news recently, and right now we have a patient in some pain. Idrisi di Corte, here, our physician, tends to be distressed when such is the case."

Privately, Devin doubted if distress had much to do with the Cortean priest's rudeness, but he kept his peace. Alessan accepted Danoleon's apology with a short bow.

"I am sorry to hear that," he said to Idrisi. "Is it possible we might be of aid? Music has long been known as a sovereign ease for pain. We should be happy to play for any of your patients." He was ignoring for the moment, Devin noted, the news Danoleon had mentioned. It was unlikely to be an accident that Danoleon had given them Idrisi's formal name, making clear that he was from Corte.

The physician shrugged. "As you please. She is certainly not sleeping, and it can do no harm. She is almost out of my hands now, in any case. The High Priest has had her brought here against my will.

Not that I can do very much anymore. In truth she belongs to Morian now." He turned to Danoleon. "If they tire her out, fine. If she sleeps it is a blessing. I will be in the infirmary or in my garden. I'll check in here tonight, unless I have word from you before."

"Will you not stay to hear us play, then?" Alessan asked. "We might surprise you."

Idrisi grimaced. "I have no leisure for such things. Tonight in the dining hall, perhaps. Surprise me." He flashed a small, unexpected smile, gone as quickly as it appeared, and went past them with brisk, irritated strides out the door.

There was a short silence.

"He is a good man," Danoleon said softly, almost apologetically.

"He is a Cortean," Torre muttered darkly.

The High Priest shook his handsome head. "He is a good man," he repeated. "It angers him when people die in his care." His gaze went back to Alessan. His hand shifted a little on his staff. He opened his mouth to speak.

"My lord, my name is Adreano d'Astibar," Alessan said firmly. "This is Devin… d'Asoli, whose father Garin you may perhaps remember from Stevanien." He waited. Danoleon's blue eyes widened, looking at Devin. "And this," Alessan finished, "is our friend Erlein di Senzio, who plays harp among other gifts of his hands."

As he spoke those last words, Alessan held up his left palm with two fingers curled down. Danoleon looked quickly at Erlein, and then back to the Prince. He had grown pale, and Devin was suddenly made aware that the High Priest was a very old man.

"Eanna guard us all," Torre whispered from behind them.

Alessan looked pointedly around at the open archways to the porches. "This particular patient is near death then, I take it?"

Danoleon's gaze, Devin thought, seemed to be devouring Alessan. There was an almost palpable hunger in it, the need of a starving man. "I'm afraid she is," he said keeping his tone steady only with an obvious effort. "I have given her my own chamber that she might be able to hear the prayers in the temple. The infirmary and her own rooms are both too far away."

Alessan nodded his head. He seemed to have himself on a tightly held leash, his movements and his words rigidly controlled. He lifted the Tregean pipes in their brown leather sheath and looked down at them.

"Then perhaps we should go in and make music for her. It sounds as if the afternoon prayers are done."

They were. The chanting had stopped. In the fields behind the house the boys of the outer school were still running and laughing in the sunlight. Devin could hear them through the open doorways. He hesitated, unsure of himself, then coughed awkwardly and said: "Perhaps you might like to play alone for her? The pipes are soothing, they may help her fall asleep."

Danoleon was nodding his head in anxious agreement, but Ales-san turned back to look at Devin, and then at Erlein. His expression was veiled, unreadable.

"What?" he said at length. "Would you abandon me so soon after our company is formed?" And then, more softly: "There will be nothing said that you cannot know, and some things, perhaps, that you should hear."

"But she is dying," Devin protested, feeling something wrong here, something out of balance. "She is dying and she is…” He stopped himself.

Alessan's eyes were so strange.

"She is dying and she is my mother," he whispered. "I know. That is why I want you there. There seems to be some news, as well. We had better hear it."

He turned and walked towards the bedroom door. Danoleon was standing just before it. Alessan stopped before the High Priest and they looked at each other. The Prince whispered something Devin could not hear; he leaned forward and kissed the old man on the cheek.

Then he went past him. At the door he paused for a moment and drew a long steadying breath. He lifted a hand as if to run it through his hair but stopped himself. A queer smile crossed his face as if chasing a memory.

"A bad habit, that," he murmured, to no one in particular. Then he opened the door and went in and they followed him.

The High Priest's bedchamber was almost as large as the sitting room in the front, but its furnishings were starkly simple. Two armchairs, a pair of rustic, worn carpets, a wash-stand, a writing desk, a trunk for storage, a small privy set apart in the southeastern corner. There was a fireplace in the northern wall, twin to the one in the front room, sharing the same chimney. This side was lit, despite the mildness of the day, and so the room was wanner though both windows were open, curtains drawn back to admit some slanting light from under the eaves of the porticoes to the west.

The bed on the back wall under the silver star of Eanna was large, for Danoleon was a big man, but it too was simple and unadorned. No canopy, plain pinewood posts in the four corners, and a pine headboard.

It was also empty.

Devin, nervously following Alessan and the High Priest through the door, had expected to see a dying woman there. He looked, more than a little embarrassed, towards the door of the privy. And almost jumped with shock when a voice spoke from the shadows by the fire, where the light from the windows did not fall.

"Who are these strangers?"

Alessan himself had turned unerringly toward the fire the moment he entered the room, guided by what sense, Devin never knew, and so he appeared controlled and unsurprised when that cold voice spoke. Or when a woman moved forward from the shadows to stand by one of the armchairs, and then sit down upon it, her back very straight, her head held high looking at him. At all of them.

Pasithea di Tigana bren Serazi, wife to Valentin the Prince. She must have been a woman of unsurpassed beauty in her youth, for that beauty still showed, even here, even now, at the threshold of the last portal of Morian. She was tall and very thin, though part of that, clearly, was due to the illness wasting her from within. It showed in her face, which was pale almost to translucence, the cheekbones thrust into too sharp relief. Her robe had a high, stiff collar which covered her throat; the robe itself was crimson, accentuating her unnatural, other-worldly pallor, it was as if, Devin thought, she had already crossed to Morian and was looking back at them from a farther shore.

But there were golden rings, very much of this world, on her long fingers, and one dazzling blue gem gleamed from a necklace that hung down over her robe. Her hair was gathered and bound up in a black net, a style long out of fashion in the Palm. Devin knew with absolute certainty that current fashion would mean nothing, less than nothing, to this woman. Her eyes looked at him just then with swift, unsettling appraisal, before moving on to Erlein, and then resting, finally, upon her son.

The son she had not seen since he was fourteen years old.

Her eyes were grey like Alessan's, but they were harder than his, glittering and cold, hiding their depths, as if some semi-precious stone had been caught and set just below the surface. They glinted, fierce and challenging, in the light of the room, and just before she spoke again, not even waiting for an answer to her first question, Devin realized that what they were seeing in those eyes was rage.

It was in the arrogant face, in the high carriage and the fingers that held hard to the arms of her chair. An inner fire of anger that had passed, long ago, beyond the realm of words or any other form of expression. She was dying, and in hiding, while the man who had killed her husband ruled her land. It was there, it was all there, for anyone who knew but half the tale.

Devin swallowed and fought an urge to draw back toward the door, out of range. A moment later he realized that he needn't bother; as far as the woman in the chair was concerned he was a cipher, a nothing. He wasn't even there. Her question had not been meant to be answered; she didn't really care who they were. She had someone else to deal with.

For a long time, a sequence of moments that seemed to hang forever in the silence, she looked Alessan up and down without speaking, her white, imperious features quite unreadable. At last, slowly shaking her head, she said: "Your father was such a handsome man."

Devin flinched at the words and the tone, but Alessan seemed scarcely to react at all. He nodded in calm agreement. "I know he was. I remember. And so were my brothers." He smiled, a small, ironic smile. "The strain must have run out just before it got to me."

His voice was mild, but when he finished he glanced sharply at Danoleon, and the High Priest read a message there. He, in turn, murmured something to Torre who quickly left the room.

To stand guard in front, Devin realized, feeling a chill despite the fire. Words had just been spoken here that could kill them all. He looked over at Erlein and saw that the wizard had slipped his harp out of its case. His expression grim, the Senzian took a position near the eastern window and quietly began tuning his instrument.

Of course, Devin thought: Erlein knew what he was doing. They had come in here ostensibly to play for a dying woman. It would be odd if no music emerged from this room. On the other hand, he didn't much feel like singing just now.

"Musicians," the woman in the chair said with contempt to her son. "How splendid. Have you come to play a jingle for me now? To show me how skillful you are in such an important thing? To ease a mother's soul before I die?" There was something almost unbearable in her tone.

Alessan did not move, though he too had gone pale now. In no other way did he betray his tension though, save perhaps in the almost too casual stance, the exaggerated simulation of ease.

"If it would please you, my lady mother, I will play for you," he said quietly. "There was a time I can remember when the prospect of music would indeed have brought you pleasure."

The eyes of the woman in the chair glittered coldly. "There was a time for music. When we ruled here. When the men of our family were men in more than name."

"Oh, I know," said Alessan, a little sharply. "True men and wondrous proud, all of them. Men who would have stormed the ramparts of Chiara alone and killed Brandin long ago, if only through his abject terror at their ferocious determination. Mother, can you not let it rest, even now? We are the last of our family and we have not spoken in nineteen years." His voice changed, softened, grew unexpectedly awkward. "Must we wrangle yet, can our speech be no more than the letters were? Did you ask me here simply to say again what you have written so many times?"

The old woman shook her head. Arrogant and grim, implacable as the death that had come for her.

"No, not that," she said. "I have not so much breath in me to waste. I summoned you here to receive a mother's dying curse upon your blood."

"No!" Devin exclaimed before he could stop himself.

In the same second Danoleon took a long stride forward. "My lady, no indeed," he said, anguish in his deep voice. "This is not…”

"I am dying," Pasithea bren Serazi interrupted harshly. There were spots of bright unnatural color in her cheeks. "I do not have to listen to you anymore, Danoleon. To anyone. Wait, you told me, all these years. Be patient, you said. Well, I have no more time for patience. I will be dead in a day. Morian waits for me. I have no more time to linger while my craven child gambols about the Palm playing ditties at rustic weddings."

There came a discordant jangling of harpstrings.

"That," said Erlein di Senzio from the eastern window, "is ignorant and unfair!" He stopped, as if startled by his own outburst. "Triad knows, I have no cause to love your son. And it is now more than clear to me whence his arrogance comes and his lack of care for other lives, for anything but his own goals. But if you name him a coward simply for not trying to kill Brandin of Ygrath then you are dying a vain, foolish woman. Which, to be perfectly frank, does not surprise me at all in this province!"

He leaned back against the ledge, breathing hard, looking at no one. In the silence that followed Alessan finally moved. His stillness had seemed inhuman, unnatural, now he sank to his knees beside his mother's chair.

"You have cursed me before," he said gravely. "Remember? I have lived much of my life in the shadow of that. In many ways it would have been easier to die years ago: Baerd and I slain trying to kill the Tyrant in Chiara… perhaps even killing him, through some miracle of intervention. Do you know, we used to speak of it at night, every single night, when we were in Quileia, still boys. Shaping half a hundred different plans for an assassination on the Island. Dreaming of how we would be loved and honored after death in a province with its name restored because of us."

His voice was low, almost hypnotic in its cadences. Devin saw Danoleon, his face working with emotion, sink back into the other armchair. Pasithea was still as marble, as expressionless and cold. Devin moved quietly toward the fire, in a vain attempt to quell the shivering that had come over him. Erlein was still by the window. He was playing his harp again, softly, single notes and random chords, not quite a tune.

"But we grew older," Alessan went on, and an urgency, a terrible need to be understood had come into his voice. "And one Midsummer's Eve Marius became Year King in Quileia, with our aid. After that when we three spoke the talk was different. Baerd and I began to learn some true things about power and the world. And that was when it changed for me. Something new came to me in that time, building and building, a thought, a dream, larger and deeper than trying to kill a Tyrant. We came back to the Palm and began to travel. As musicians, yes. And as artisans, merchants, athletes one time in a Triad Game year, as masons and builders, guards to a Senzian banker, sailors on a dozen different merchant-ships. But even before those journeys had begun, mother, even before we came back north over the mountains, it had all changed for me. I was finally clear about what my task in life was to be. About what had to be done, or tried. You know it, Danoleon knows; I wrote you years ago what my new understanding was, and I begged your blessing for it. It was such a simple truth: we had to take both Tyrants together, that this whole peninsula might again be free."

His mother's voice overrode his steady passion then, harsh, implacable, unforgiving: "I remember. I remember the day that letter came. And I will tell you again what I wrote you then to that harlot's castle in Certando: you would buy Corte's freedom, and Astibar's and Tregea's at the price of Tigana's name. Of our very existence in the world. At the cost of everything we ever had or were before Brandin came. At the price of vengeance and our pride."

"Our pride," Alessan echoed, so softly now they could barely hear. "Oh, our pride. I grew up knowing all about our pride, mother. You taught me, even more than father did. But I learned something else, later, as a man. In my exile. I learned about Astibar's pride. About Senzio's and Asoli's and Certando's. I learned how pride had ruined the Palm in the year the Tyrants came."

"The Palm?" Pasithea demanded, her voice shrill. "What is the Palm? A spur of land. Rock and earth and water. What is a peninsula that we should care for it?"

"What is Tigana?" Erlein di Senzio asked bluntly, his harp silent in his hands.

Pasithea's glance was withering. "I would have thought a bound wizard should know that!" she said corrosively, meaning to wound. Devin blinked at the speed of her perception; no one had told her about Erlein, she had deduced it in minutes from a scattering of clues.

She said: "Tigana is the land where Adaon lay with Micaela when the world was young and gave her his love and a child and a god's gift of power to that child and those who came after. And now the world has spun a long way from that night and the last descendant of that union is in this room with the entire past of his people falling through his hands." She leaned forward, her grey eyes blazing, her voice rising in indictment. "Falling through his hands. He is a fool and a coward, both. There is so much more than freedom in a peninsula in any single generation at stake in this!"

She fell back, coughing, pulling a square of blue silk from a pocket in her robe. Devin saw Alessan begin a movement up from his knees, and then check himself. His mother coughed, rackingly, and Devin saw, before he could turn his eyes away that the silk came away red when she was done. On the carpet beside her Alessan bowed his head.

Erlein di Senzio, from the far side of the room, perhaps too far to see the blood, said, "And shall I now tell you the legends of Senzio's pre-eminence? Of Astibar's? Will you hear me sing the story of Eanna on the Island shaping the stars from the glory of her love-making with the god? Do you know Certando's claim to be the heart and soul of the Palm? Do you remember the Carlozzini? The Night Walkers in their highlands two hundred years ago?"

The woman in the armchair pushed herself straight again glaring at him. Fearing her, hating her words and manner and the terrible thing she was doing to her son, Devin nonetheless felt humbled in the face of so much courage and such a force of will.

"But that is the point," she said more softly, sparing her strength. "That is the heart of this. Can you not see it? I do remember those stories. Anyone with an education or a library, any fool who has ever heard a troubadour's sentimental wailing can remember them. Can hear twenty different songs of Eanna and Adaon on Sangarios. Not us, though. Don't you see? Not Tigana anymore. Who will sing of Micaela under the stars by the sea when we are gone? Who will be here to sing, when one more generation has lived and died away in the world?"

"I will," said Devin, his hands at his sides.

He saw Alessan's head come up as Pasithea turned to fix him with her cold eyes. "We all will," he said, as firmly as he could. He looked at the Prince and then, forcing himself, back to the dying old woman raging in her pride. "The whole Palm will hear that song again, my lady. Because your son is not a coward. Nor some vain fool seeking a young death and shallow fame. He is trying for the larger thing and he is going to do it. Something has happened this spring and because of it he is going to do what he has said he will do: free this peninsula and bring back Tigana's name into the world."

He finished, breathing in hard gasps as if he had been running a race. A moment later, he felt himself go crimson with mortification. Pasithea bren Serazi was laughing. Mocking him, her frail thin body rocking in the chair. Her high laughter turned into another desperate fit of coughing; the blue silk came up, and when it was withdrawn there was a great deal of blood stain. She clutched at the arms of her chair to steady herself.

"You are a child," she pronounced finally. "And my son is a child for all the grey in his hair. And I have no doubt that Baerd bar Saevar is exactly the same, with half the grace and the gifts his father had. 'Something has happened this spring, " she mimicked with cruel precision. Her voice grew hard and cold as midwinter ice: "Do you infants have any idea what has really just happened in the Palm?"

Slowly her son rose from his knees to stand before her. "We have been riding for a number of days and nights. We have heard no tidings. What is it?"

"I told you there was news," Danoleon said quickly. "But I had no chance to give you the…”

"I am pleased," Pasithea interrupted. "So very pleased. It seems I still have something to tell my son before I leave him forever. Something he hasn't learned or thought out all by himself already." She pushed herself erect again in the chair, her eyes cold and bright like frost under blue moonlight. There was something wild and lost in her voice though, trying to break through. Some terrible fear, and of more than death. She said:

"A messenger came yesterday at sunset, at the end of the Ember Days. An Ygrathen, riding from Stevanien with news from Chiara. News so urgent Brandin had sent it by his sorcerous link to all his Governors with instructions to spread the tidings."

"And the tidings are?" Alessan had braced himself, as if preparing to receive a blow.

"The tidings? The tidings, my feckless child, are that Brandin has just abdicated as King of Ygrath. He is sending his army home. And his Governors. All those who choose to stay with him must become citizens of this peninsula. Of a new dominion: the Kingdom of the Western Palm. Chiara, Corte, Asoli, Lower Corte. Four provinces under Brandin on the Island. He has announced that we are free of Ygrath, no longer a colony. Taxes are to be shared equally among us now, and they have been cut in half. Beginning yesterday. Cut by considerably more than half here in Lower Corte. Our burden will now be equal with the others. The messenger said that the people of this province, the people your father ruled, were singing Brandin's name in the streets of Stevanien."

Alessan, moving very carefully, as if he were carrying something large and heavy, that might shift and fall, turned toward Danoleon. Who was nodding his head.

"It seems that there was an assassination attempt on the Island three days ago," the High Priest said. "Originating in Ygrath: the Queen and Brandin's son, the Regent. It apparently failed only because of one of his Tribute women. The one from Certando who almost started a war. You may remember that, twelve, fourteen years ago? It seems that in the wake of this Brandin has changed his mind about what he has been doing. Not about staying in the Palm, or about Tigana and his revenge, but about what must be done in Ygrath if he continues here."

"And he is going to continue here," Pasithea said. "Tigana will die, still be lost forever to his vengeance, but our people will be singing the Tyrant's name as it dies. The name of the man who killed your father."

Alessan was nodding his head reflexively. He seemed, in fact, scarcely to be listening, as if he had suddenly withdrawn entirely inside himself. Pasithea fell silent in the face of that, looking at her son. It grew deathly still in the room. Outside, far away, the uncontrolled shouts and laughter of the children in the field came to their ears again, the louder for the silence within. Devin listened to that distant mirth and tried to slow the chaos of his heart, to attempt to deal with what they had just heard.

He looked at Erlein, who had laid down his harp on the window-ledge and walked a few steps into the room, his expression troubled and wary. Devin tried desperately to think, to gather his scattered thoughts, but the news had caught him hopelessly unprepared. Free of Ygrath. Which was what they wanted, wasn't it? Except that it wasn't. Brandin was staying, they were not free of him, or the weight of his magic. And Tigana? What of Tigana now?

And then, quite unexpectedly, there was something else bothering him. Something different. A distracting, niggling awareness tugging at the corner of his mind. Telling him there was something he should know, should remember.

Then, equally without warning, the something slid forward and into place. In fact…

In fact, he knew exactly what was wrong.

Devin closed his eyes for a moment, fighting a sudden paralyzing fear. Then, as quietly as he could, he began working his way along the western wall away from the fireplace where he had been standing all this time.

Alessan was speaking now, almost to himself. He said: "This changes things of course. It changes a great deal. I'm going to need time to think it through, but I believe it may actually help us. This may truly be a gift not a curse."

"How? Are you genuinely simple?" his mother snapped. "They are singing the Tyrant's name in the streets of Avalle!"

Devin winced at the old name, the desperate pain at the heart of that cry, but he forced himself to keep moving. A terrifying certainty was rising within him.

"I hear you, I understand. But don't you see?" Alessan dropped to his knees on the carpet again, close to his mother's chair. "The Ygrathen army is going home. If he has to fight a war it will have to be with an army of our people and what few Ygrathens stay with him. What… oh, mother!… what do you think the Barbadian in Astibar will do when he hears this?"

"He will do nothing," Pasithea said flatly. "Alberico is a timorous man spun neck-deep in his own webs, all of which lead back to the Emperor's Tiara. At least a quarter of the Ygrathen army will stay with Brandin. And those people singing are the most oppressed people in the peninsula. If they are joyous, what do you think is happening elsewhere? Do you not imagine an army can be raised in Chiara and Corte and Asoli to fight against Barbadior for a man who has renounced his own Kingdom for this peninsula?" She began coughing again, her body rocking even more harshly than before.

Devin didn't know the answer. He couldn't even begin to guess. He knew that the balance had completely shifted, the balance Alessan had spoken about and played with for so long. He also knew something else.

He reached the window. Its ledge was about the height of his chest. He was a small man; not for the first time he regretted it. Then he gave thanks for his compensations, offered a quick prayer to Eanna and, hands flat on the ledge for leverage, pushed upward hard and swung himself like a gymnast through to the portico. He heard Pasithea still coughing behind him, a hard, painful sound. Danoleon cried out.

He stumbled and fell, crashing into a pillar with his shoulder and hip. He pushed up and off, scrambling to his feet in time to see a figure in beige robes leap up from a crouch beside the window, swearing furiously, and sprint away. Devin grappled for the knife at his belt, a blind, thought-obliterating rage rising in him. It had been too uproarious in the games field. The same sound as before, when the priest had left them alone.

Only this time the priest had left them alone while he spied on this room.

Alessan was at the window, Erlein just behind him.

"Savandi!" Devin gasped. "He was listening!" He spat the words over his shoulder because he was already running after the other man. He spared a fleeting moment of thanks, and wonder, for whatever Rinaldo the Healer had done to his leg in that Certandan barn. Then anger swept over him again, and fear, and the absolute need to catch the other man.

He vaulted the stone balustrade at the back end of the portico without breaking stride. Savandi, sprinting for all he was worth, had cut west toward the back of the Sanctuary grounds. In the distance on their left Devin could see the children playing in the field. He gritted his teeth and ran. These cursed priests! he was thinking, fury almost choking him. Will they undo everything, even now?

If Alessan's identity became known anywhere in this Sanctuary Devin had little doubt how swiftly that knowledge would reach Brandin of Ygrath. He had no doubts at all about what would happen then.

And then he was assailed by another whirling thought, one that terrified him. He drove himself to even greater speed, legs pumping, his lungs sucking for air. The mindlink. What if Savandi could link to the King? What if Brandin's spy could directly contact him in Chiara now?

Devin cursed in the depths of his heart but not aloud, sparing his breath for speed. Savandi, lithe and quick himself, raced down the path past a small building on the left and cut sharply right, about twenty strides ahead of Devin, around the back part of the temple itself.

Devin sped around the corner. Savandi was nowhere to be seen. He froze for a moment, seized by panic. There was no door into the temple here. And only a thick barrier of hedges, just coming into green on the left.

Then he saw where the hedges were quivering and he leaped for that spot. There was a gap forced low down. He dropped to his knees and scrambled through, scratching his arms and face.

He was in a cloistered area, large, beautifully serene, gracefully laid out, with a splashing fountain at the center. He had no time to value such things though. At the northwest corner the cloister gave onto another portico and a long building with a small domed roof at the near end. Savandi was just now sprinting up the steps to the portico and then through a doorway into the building. Devin looked up. At one second-story window an old man could be seen, white haired and hollow-cheeked, gazing down without expression on the sunlit cloister.

Running flat out for the doorway, Devin realized where he was. This was the infirmary, and the small dome would be a temple for the sick who sought the comfort of Eanna but could not venture down the path to her larger dome.

He took the three steps to the portico in one flying leap and burst through the doorway, knife in hand. He was aware that following so fast he was an easy target for an ambush if Savandi chose to lie in wait. He didn't think that would happen though, which only increased his deeper fear.

The man seemed to be racing away from where his fellow priests might be found, in the temple itself, the kitchens, the dormitory or the dining room. Which meant that he didn't expect help or aid, that he couldn't really be hoping to escape.

Which meant, in turn, that there was probably only one thing he was going to try to do, if Devin gave him enough time.

The doorway gave onto a long corridor and a stairway leading upward. Savandi was out of sight but Devin, glancing down, gave a quick prayer of thanks to Eanna: running across the damp ground of the cloister the priest had picked up mud on his shoes. The trail was unmistakable on the stone floor and it went down the corridor and not up the stairs.

Devin sped in pursuit, flying down the hallway, skidding into a left turn around a corner at the far end. There were rooms at intervals all along and an arched entrance to the infirmary's small temple at the opposite end. Most of the doors were open; most of the rooms were empty.

But then, in that short corridor he came to one closed door; Savandi's trail led there and stopped. Devin clutched the handle and threw his shoulder hard against the heavy wood. Locked. Immovable.

Sobbing for breath he dropped to his knees, grappling in his pocket for the twist of wire he was never without: not since Marra had been alive. Since she had taught him all he knew about locks. He untwisted and tried to shape the wire, but his hands were trembling. Sweat streamed into his eyes. He wiped it furiously away and fought for calm. He had to get this door open before the man inside sent the message that would destroy them all.

An exterior door opened behind him. Steps thudded quickly down the hallway.

Without looking up, Devin said: "The man who touches or hinders me dies. Savandi is a spy for the King of Ygrath. Find me a key for this door!"

"It is done!" came a voice he knew. "It is open. Go!"

Devin flung a glance over his shoulder and saw Erlein di Senzio standing there with a sword in his hand.

Springing to his feet Devin twisted the handle again. The door swung open. He charged into the room. There were jars and vials lining shelves around the walls, and instruments on tables. Savandi was there, on a bench in the middle of the room, hands at his temples, visibly straining to concentrate.

"Plague rot your soul!" Devin screamed at the top of his voice. Savandi seemed to snap awake. He rose with a feral snarl, grabbing for a surgical blade on the table beside him.

He never reached it.

Still screaming, Devin was upon him, his left hand gouging at the priest's eyes. He slashed forward and up with his right in a hard and deadly arc, plunging his blade in between Savandi's ribs. Once, he stabbed, and then again, raking savagely upward, feeling the blade twist, grinding against bone with a sickening sensation. The young priest's mouth gaped open, his eyes widened in astonishment. He screamed, high and short, his hands flying outward from his sides. And then he died.

Devin released him and collapsed on the bench, fighting for breath. Blood pounded in his head; he could feel a vein pulsing at his temple. His vision blurred for a moment and he closed his eyes. When he opened them he saw that his hands were still shaking.

Erlein had sheathed his sword. He moved to stand beside Devin.

"Did… did he send…?" Devin found that he couldn't even speak properly.

"No." The wizard shook his head. "You came in time. He didn't link. No message went."

Devin stared down at the blank, staring eyes and the body of the young priest who had sought to betray them. How long? he wondered. How long was he doing this?

"How did you get here?" he asked Erlein, his voice hoarse. His hands were still shaking. He dropped the bloodied knife with a clatter on the tabletop.

"I followed from the bedchamber. Saw which way you went until I lost you around the back of the temple. Then I needed magic. I traced Savandi's aura here."

"We came through the hedges and across the cloister. He was trying to shake me."

"I can see that. You're bleeding again."

"Doesn't matter." Devin took a deep breath. There were footsteps in the corridor outside. "Why did you come? Why do this for us?"

Erlein looked defensive for an instant, but quickly regained his sardonic expression. "For you? Don't be a fool, Devin. I die if Alessan does. I'm bound, remember? This was self-preservation. Nothing else."

Devin looked up at him, wanting to say something more, something important, but just then the footsteps reached the doorway and Danoleon entered quickly with Torre close behind. Neither of them said a word, taking in the scene.

"He was trying to mind-link with Brandin," Devin said. "Erlein and I got to him in time."

Erlein made a dismissive sound. "Devin did. But I had to use a spell to follow them and another on the door. I don't think they were strong enough to draw attention, but in case there is a Tracker anywhere around here we had better get moving before morning."

Danoleon seemed not to have even heard. He was looking down at Savandi's body. There were tears on his face.

"Don't waste your grief on a carrion bird," Torre said harshly.

"I must," the High Priest said softly, leaning upon his staff. "I must. Don't you understand? He was born in Avalle. He was one of us."

Devin abruptly turned his head away. He felt sick to his stomach, hit by a resurgence of the raging white fury that had sped him here, and had driven him to kill so violently. One of us. He remembered Sandre d'Astibar in the cabin in the woods, betrayed by his grandchild. He was seriously afraid he was going to be ill. One of us.

Erlein di Senzio laughed. Devin wheeled furiously around on him, his hands clenched into fists. And there must have been something murderous in his eyes, for the wizard quickly sobered, mockery leaving his face as if wiped away with a cloth.

There was a short silence.

Danoleon drew himself up and straightened his massive shoulders. He said, "This will have to be dealt with carefully or the story will spread. We can't have Savandi's death traced to our guests. Torre, when we leave lock this room with the body in it. After dark, when the others are asleep we will deal with him."

"He'll be missed at dinner," Torre said.

"No he won't. You are the porter. You will see him ride through the gate late this afternoon. He will be going to see his family. It fits, just after the Ember Days, and in the wake of the news from Chiara. He has ridden out often enough, and not always with my permission. I think I have an idea why now. I wonder if he ever really rode to his father's house. Unfortunately for Savandi, this time he is going to be killed by someone on the road just outside our valley."

There was a hardness to the High Priest's voice that Devin had not heard before. One of us. He looked down at the dead man again. His third killing. But this one was different. The guard in the Nievolene barn, the soldier in the hill pass, they had been doing what they had come to the Palm to do. Loyal to the power they served, hiding nothing of their nature, true to their manifest cause. He had grieved for their dying, for the lines of life that had brought him together with them.

Savandi was otherwise. This death was different. Devin searched his soul and found that he could not grieve for what he had done. It was all he could do, he realized with a sense of real uneasiness, to refrain from plunging his dagger again in the corpse. It was as if the young priest's corrosive treachery to his people, his smiling deceit, had tapped some violence of passion Devin hadn't known lay within him. Almost exactly, he thought suddenly, the way that Alienor of Castle Borso had done, in a very different sphere of life.

Or, perhaps, at the heart of things, not so very different after all. But that was too hard, too dangerous a knot to try to untie just now, in the staring presence of death. Which reminded him of something, made him suddenly aware of an absence. He looked quickly up at Danoleon.

"Where's Alessan?" he said sharply. "Why didn't he follow?"

But even before he was answered, he knew. There could only be one reason in the world why the Prince hadn't come.

The High Priest looked down at him. "He is still in my chamber. With his mother. Though I am afraid it may be over by now."

"No," Devin said. "Oh, no." And rose, and went to the door, and into the corridor, and then out through the eastern doorway of the infirmary into the slanting light of late afternoon, and began, again, to run.

Along the back curve of the temple dome, past the same small building as before and a little garden he hadn't noticed coming here, then back, flying, down the path to the High Priest's house, and up onto the portico between the pillars, as if rewinding events like a ball of wool, to the window through which he had leaped such a little while ago. As if he could race back not only past Savandi, past their coming here, but all the way back, with a sudden, incoherent longing, to where the seeds of this grief had been planted when the Tyrants came.

But time was not rewound, neither in the heart nor in the world as they knew it. It moved on, and things changed, for better or for worse; seasons changed, the hours of sunlit day went by, darkness fell and lingered and gave way to light at dawn, years spun after each other one by one, people were born, and lived by the Triad's grace, and they died.

And they died.

Alessan was still in the room, still on his knees on the simple carpet, but beside the bed now, not by the heavy, dark oak chair as before. He had moved, time had moved, the sun was further west along the curving sky.

Devin had wanted to somehow run his way back through the moments that had passed. That Alessan might not have been left alone, not with this. On his first day in Tigana since he was a boy. He was no longer a boy; there was grey in his hair. Time had run. Twenty years worth of time had run and he was home again.

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

Devin must have made some kind of sound at the window for the Prince looked up. Their eyes met. Devin ached inside, wordless with sorrow. His heart felt bruised, besieged. He felt hopelessly inadequate to the needs of such a time as this now was. He wished that Baerd were here, or Sandre. Even Catriana would know what to do better than he.

He said, "He is dead. Savandi. We caught him in time." Alessan nodded, acknowledging this. Then his gaze went down again to his mother's face, serene now as it had not been before. As it very likely had not been for the last long years of her life. Time, moving inexorably forward for her, taking memory, taking pride. Taking love.

"I'm sorry," Devin said. "Alessan, I'm so sorry."

The Prince looked up again, the grey eyes clear but terribly far away. Chasing images backward along a skein of years. He looked as if he would speak but did not. Instead, after another moment, he gave his small shrug, the calm, reassuring motion of acceptance, of shouldering another burden, that they all knew so well.

Devin suddenly felt as if he could not bear it anymore. Alessan's quiet acquiescence was as a final blow in his own heart. He felt torn open, wounded by the hard truths of the world, by the passing of things. He lowered his head to the windowsill and wept like a child in the presence of something too large for his capacity.

In the room Alessan knelt in silence by the bed, holding his mother's hand between his own. And the westering sun of afternoon sent light in a golden slant through the window and across the chamber floor, to fall upon him, upon the bed, upon the woman lying there, upon the golden coins that covered her grey eyes.

Chapter 16

SPRING CAME EARLY IN ASTIBAR TOWN. IT ALMOST ALWAYS did along that sheltered northwestern side of the province, overlooking the bay and the strung-out islands of the Archipelago. East and south the unblocked winds from the sea pushed the start of the growing season back a few weeks and kept the smaller fishing boats close to shore this early in the year.

Senzio was already flowering, the traders in Astibar harbor reported, the white blossoms of the sejoia trees making the air fragrant with the promise of summer to come. Chiara was still cold it was said, but that happened sometimes in early spring on the Island. It wouldn't be long before the breezes from Khardhun gentled the air and the seas around her.

Senzio and Chiara.

Alberico of Barbadior lay down at night thinking about them, and rose up in the morning doing the same, after intense, agitated nights of little rest, shot through with lurid, disturbing dreams.

If the winter had been unsettling, rife with small incidents and rumors, the events of early spring were something else entirely. And there was nothing small, nothing only marginally provocative about them.

Everything seemed to be happening at once. Coming down from his bedchamber to his offices of state, Alberico would find his mood darkening with every step in the apprehensive anticipation of what might next be reported to him.

The windows of the palace were open now to let the mild breezes sweep through. It had been some time since it had been warm enough to do that and for much of the autumn and winter there had been bodies rotting on death-wheels in the square. Sandreni bodies, Nievolene, Scalvaiane. A dozen poets wheeled at random. Not conducive to opening windows, that. Necessary though, and lucrative, after his confiscation of the conspirators' lands. He liked when necessity and gain came together; it didn't happen often but when it did the marriage seemed to Alberico of Barbadior to represent almost the purest pleasure to be found in power.

This spring however his pleasures had been few and trivial in scope, and the burgeoning of new troubles made those of the winter seem like minor, ephemeral afflictions, brief flurries of snow in a night. What he was dealing with now were rivers in flood, everywhere he looked.

At the very beginning of spring a wizard was detected using his magic in the southern highlands, but the Tracker and the twenty-five men Siferval had immediately sent after him had been slaughtered in a pass by outlaws, to the last man. An act of arrogance and revolt almost impossible to believe.

And he couldn't even properly exact retribution: the villages and farms scattered through the highlands hated the outlaws as much or more than the Barbadians did. And it had been an Ember Night, with no decent man abroad to see who might have done this unprecedented deed. Siferval sent a hundred men from Fort Ortiz to hunt the brigands down. They found no trace. Only long dead campfires in the hills. It was as if the twenty-five men had been slain by ghosts: which, predictably, is what the people of the highlands were already saying. It had been an Ember Night after all, and everyone knew the dead were abroad on such nights. The dead, hungry for retribution.

"How clever of the dead to use new-fletched arrows," Siferval's written report had offered sardonically, when he sent two captains to carry the tidings north. His men had retreated quickly in whey-faced terror at the expression on Alberico's face. It was, after all, the Third Company which had allowed twenty-five of its men to be killed, and had then sent out another hundred incompetents to do no more than elicit laughter, wandering about in the hills.

It was maddening. Alberico had been forced to fight back an urge to torch the Certandan hamlet nearest to those hills, but he knew how destructive that would be in the longer run. It would undermine all the benefits of the focused restraint he'd used in the affair of the Sandreni plot. That night his eyelid began to droop again, the way it had in the early autumn.

Then, very shortly after, came the news from Quileia.

He had nourished such hopes there after the shocking fall of the Matriarchy. It was such an enormous, ripe new market for trade, an absolute harvest for the Empire. And one, most importantly, that would be brought into Barbadior's aegis by that ever vigilant guardian of the western borders of the Empire, Alberico of the Eastern Palm. So much rich hope and promise there, and so little actual prospect of difficulty. Even if this Marius, this crippled priestess-killer on his precarious throne, chose to trade west with Ygrath as well as east that was all right. Quileia was more than large enough to offer bounty both ways. For a time. Soon enough it should be possible to make the uncouth fellow see the many-faceted advantages of focusing his dealings towards Barbadior.

In the evolution of the Barbadian Empire there had emerged a number of ways, a great many time-honored ways, some subtle, some rather less so, of causing men to see things in a particular light. Alberico had a few thoughts of his own about even newer means of persuading petty monarchs to view matters usefully. He fully intended to explore them, once he was home.

Home, as Emperor. For that, after all, was the point, the point of absolutely everything. Except that the events of the spring utterly refused to cooperate.

Marius of Quileia sent a gratifyingly swift reply to Alberico's latest benevolent offer to trade. An emissary delivered it directly into the hands of Siferval in Fort Ortiz.

Unfortunately, that brief gratification had been smashed and annihilated when the letter reached Astibar, carried north this time, in recognition of its importance, by Siferval himself. Couched in unexpectedly sophisticated language it contained a message that, however politely and circuitously phrased, was flat and clear: the Quileian regretfully judged that Brandin of Ygrath was the greater, firmer power in the Palm, and as such, and being but green in his own power, he could not risk incurring the anger of the King of Ygrath by trading with Alberico, a minor lord of the Empire, much as he might want to.

It was a letter that could easily drive a man into a killing rage.

Fighting for self-control, Alberico had seen cringing apprehension in his clerks and advisors, and even a quickly veiled fear in the eyes of the captain of the Third Company. Then, when Siferval handed over the second letter, the one, he explained, that he had so cleverly arranged to extract and copy from the saddle pouch of the overly garrulous Quileian emissary, Alberico felt all control deserting him.

He had been forced to turn away, to stride alone to the windows at the back of the offices of state and draw gasping breaths of air to calm his boiling mind. He could feel the tell-tale tremor beginning again in his right eyelid; the fluttering he'd never been able to get rid of since that night he'd almost died in the Sandreni Woods. His huge hands grasping the window-ledge with a grip of iron, he struggled for the equanimity that would let him carefully weigh the implications of this intercepted message, but calm was a swiftly receding illusion and his thoughts in the morning sunlight were black and foaming like the sea in storm.

Senzio! The Quileian fool sought to link himself with those dissolute puppets in the ninth province! It was almost impossible to credit that a man, however new to the world stage, could be such an imbecile.

His back to his advisors and his captains, staring blindly out the window down upon the too bright Grand Square, Alberico abruptly began to consider how this was going to look to the wider world. To the part of the world that mattered: the Emperor, and those who had his ear, and who saw themselves as rivals to Alberico. How would the tidings be read, if Brandin of Ygrath was busily trading south, if Senzian merchants were blithely sailing past the Archipelago and down the coast beyond Tregea and the mountains to Quileian ports and all the fabled goods of that land, so long kept to themselves under the priestesses?

If the Empire alone was denied access to this new market. Denied access because Alberico of Barbadior was judged too infirm in his power here as compared to the Ygrathen in the west… Alberico felt himself beginning to sweat; a cold trickle of moisture slid down his side. There was a spasm of pain in his chest as a muscle clenched near his heart. He forced himself to breathe slowly until it passed.

From the source of so much promise it suddenly seemed as if a dagger had materialized, more sharp and deadly than any enemy of his back in Barbadior might have fashioned.

Senzio. He had been thinking and dreaming about the ninth province all through the months of ice and snow, seeking a way in his restless nights to break out, to regain control of a situation that increasingly seemed to be operating upon him, instead of he upon it, as master of his destiny.

And that had been in the winter, even before this news from beyond the mountains.

Then, shortly after, even as the first flowers began blooming in the gardens of Astibar, there was more. In the very same week word came from the west that someone had tried to kill Brandin of Ygrath.

Had tried, and failed. For one blissful night Alberico played out glorious scenarios of triumph in his sleep. Dreaming, over and over again, so keen was the pleasure, that the assassin, using a crossbow, they had learned, had succeeded in his purpose. Oh, it would have been so perfect, it would have been timed so flawlessly for him, dovetailing so neatly with his needs. It would have had to be seen as a gift, a shining upon his face, from the high gods of the Empire. The entire Peninsula of the Palm would have been his in a year, in half a year. Quileia's crippled monarch, needing the outer world so desperately, would have had to embrace whatever terms of trade Alberico then chose to offer him.

And the Empire? His, a year after all of that, at the very worst.

With such an unchallenged power base here, he would not have even needed to wait for the ailing Emperor to finally die. He could have sailed home with his armies as the champion and the hero of the people. Having first showered them with grain, with gold, with freely flowing wine from the Palm, and all the newly rediscovered wealth of Quileia.

It would have been glorious. For that one night Alberico let himself dream, smiling in his sleep. Then he woke, and came down the stairs again to the offices of state and found all three of his captains waiting, grim-faced. A new messenger was there with them. From the west again, a single day after the first, with news that smashed twenty years of balancing into tiny, sharp-edged fragments that would never again be reassembled as they had been.

Brandin had abdicated in Ygrath and named himself King of the Western Palm.

On Chiara, the messenger reported, trembling at his lord's visage, they had begun celebrating within hours of the announcement.

"And the Ygrathens?" Karalius of the First asked sharply, though he had no real right to speak.

"Most will go home," the messenger said. "If they stay they must become citizens, only equal citizens, of the new kingdom."

"You say they will go home," Alberico said, his gaze flat and heavy, masking the feverish churning of his emotions. "Do you know this, have you been told this, or do you only guess it to be so?"

The messenger turned grey, stammering some reply about logic and obvious consequences and what anyone could predict…

"Have this man's tongue cut out then have him killed," Alberico said. "I don't care how. Feed him to the animals. My messengers bring me the news they learn. I draw what conclusions are to be drawn."

The messenger fainted dead away, toppling sideways to the floor. It could be seen that he had soiled himself. Grancial of the Second Company signaled quickly for two men to carry him out.

Alberico didn't bother to watch. In a way he was glad the man had spoken as fatuously as he had. He had needed an excuse to kill just then.

He gestured with two fingers, and his steward hastily ushered everyone out of the room but the three captains. Not that any of the lesser officials seemed inclined to linger at that particular moment. Which was as it should be. He didn't trust any of them very much.

He didn't entirely trust his captains either, but he needed them, and they needed him, and he had been careful to keep them at odds and on edge with each other. It was a workable arrangement. Or it had been, until now.

But now was what mattered, and Brandin had just thrown the peninsula into chaos. Not that the Palm actually mattered, not in itself. It was a gateway, a stepping-stone. He had moved out of Barbadior as a young man, in order to rise in the world and return as a leader in his prime, and there was no point, no point at all to twenty years of exile if he could not sail home in triumph. In more than triumph. In mastery.

He turned his back on the captains and went to the window, surreptitiously massaging his eye. He waited, to see who would speak first, and what he would say. There was a fear growing within him that he was at pains to hide. Nothing was falling right, none of his caution and discretion seemed to have borne the fruit it should.

Karalius said, very softly from behind him, "My lord, there is opportunity here. There is great opportunity."

Which is exactly what he was afraid the man would say. Afraid, because he knew it was true and because it meant moving again, and quickly, committing himself to dangerous, decisive action. But action here and not in the Empire, not back home, where he had been readying himself to return. War far away in this savage, obdurate peninsula where he could lose all, a lifetime's sowing, in striving for a conquest he hardly cared about.

"We had best go carefully," Grancial said quickly. More to oppose Karalius than anything else, Alberico knew. But he noted that we.

He turned and fixed the Second Company captain with a wintry glance. "I will indeed do nothing without thought," he said, placing clear emphasis on the first word. Grancial flicked his eyes away. Siferval smiled beneath his curling blond moustaches.

Karalius did not. His expression remained sober and thoughtful. He was the best of the three, Alberico knew. Also the most dangerous, for the two things went hand in hand in such a man. Alberico moved around behind his huge oak desk and sat down again. He looked up at the First Company leader and waited.

Karalius said again, "There is opportunity now. There will be turmoil in the west, disruption, Ygrathens sailing home. Shall I tell you what I think?" His pale skin was flushed with a growing excitement. Alberico understood that: the man saw chances of his own, land and wealth for himself.

It would be a mistake to let Karalius unfold too much. He would end up thinking the planning was his. Alberico said, "I know exactly what you think, to the very words you would speak. Be silent. I know everything that will be happening in the west except one thing: we don't yet know how many of the Ygrathen army will stay. My guess is that most will leave, rather than be lowered to the level of people they have had mastery over all these years. They did not come here to become inconsequential figures in the Palm."

"Neither," said Siferval pointedly, "did we."

Alberico suppressed his anger yet again. It seemed he had been forced to do that so much of late with these three. But they had their own purposes, their own long drawn-out plans, and wealth and fame were at the heart of them. As they had to be for all ambitious men in the Empire: toward what else should an ambitious man aspire?

"I am aware of that," he said, as calmly as he could.

"Then what do we do?" Grancial asked. A real question, not a challenge. Grancial was the weakest and the most loyal, because of that weakness, of the three.

Alberico looked up. At Karalius, not at Grancial.

"You gather my armies," he said deliberately, though his pulse was racing very fast. This was dangerous and might be final, every instinct within him told him that. But he also knew that time and the gods had thrown a glittering gem down toward him from the heavens, and if he did not move it would fall away.

"You gather my armies in all four provinces and take them north. I want them massed together as soon as possible."

"Where?" Karalius's eyes were almost shining with anticipation.

"Ferraut, of course. On the northern border with Senzio." Senzio, he was thinking. The ninth. The jewel. The battleground.

"How long will it take you?" he asked the three of them.

"Five weeks, no more," Grancial said quickly.

"Four," said Siferval, smiling.

"The First Company," said Karalius, "will be on the border three weeks from now. Count on it."

"I will," said Alberico. And dismissed them.

He sat alone at his desk for a long time after, toying with a paperweight, thinking upon all sides of this, over and around and about. But however he looked upon it all the pieces seemed to slide into place. There was power to be grasped here, and triumph, he could almost see that shimmering jewel falling through the air, over water, over land, into his reaching hand.

He was acting. Shaping events himself, not being impacted upon. His enemy would be vulnerable, enormously so, until this new chaos settled in the west. Quileia's choice could be forced and be no choice at all. The Empire could be made to see, on the eve of his final journey home, just what his sorcery and his armies could do. The time was offering a jewel, truly, falling from the heavens, waiting to be clasped. To be set upon his brow.

He was still uneasy though, almost uncannily so, sitting alone as the morning brightened, trying to convince himself of the truth of all this shining promise. He was more than uneasy; his mouth was dry and the spring sunlight seemed strange to him, almost painful. He wondered if he was ill. There was something gnawing away like a rat in darkness at the unlit corners of his thoughts. He forced himself to turn towards it, trying to make a torch of his careful rationality, to look within himself and root out this anxiety.

And then indeed he did see it, and understood, in that same moment, that it could not be rooted out, not ever be acknowledged to a living soul.

For the truth, the poisonous gall of truth, was that he was afraid. Deathly afraid, in the deepest inward places of his being, of this other man. Of Brandin of Ygrath, now Brandin of the Western Palm. The name had been changed, the balance changed utterly.

The truth of fear was exactly as it had been for almost twenty years.

A short while later he left the room and went down the stairs and underground to see how they killed the messenger.

Alais knew exactly why she was being granted this unprecedented gift of a journey in the Sea Maid with her father: Selvena was getting married at the end of summer.

Catini bar Edinio, whose father owned a good-sized estate of olive trees and vineyards north of Astibar, and a modest but successful banking house in the city, had asked Rovigo for his second daughter's hand early in the spring. Rovigo, urgently forewarned by his second daughter, had given his consent, a decision calculated, among other things, to forestall Selvena's oft-proclaimed intention to do away with herself should she still be living at home and unwed by the autumn. Catini was earnest and pleasant if a little dull, and Rovigo had done business with Edinio in the past and liked the man.

Selvena was tempestuously ecstatic, about plans for the wedding, about the prospect of running her own home, Edinio had offered to set the young couple up in a small house on a hill above his vineyards, and, as Rovigo overheard her telling the younger girls one evening, about the anticipated pleasures of the marriage bed.

He was pleased for her happiness and rather looking forward to the celebration of the marriage. If he had moments of sadness that he strove to mask, he attributed it to the natural feelings of a man who saw that his girl-child had become a woman rather sooner than he had been prepared for. The sight of Selvena making a red glove for her bridal night affected Rovigo more than he had thought it would. He would turn from her bright, feverish chatter to Alais, neat and quiet and watchful, and something akin to sadness would touch his spirit amid the anticipatory bustle of the house.

Alix seemed to understand, perhaps even better than he did himself. His wife had taken to patting his shoulder at sporadic, unexpected moments, as if gentling a restive creature.

He was restive. This spring the news from the wider world was unpredictable and of seemingly enormous consequence. Barbadian troops were beginning to clog the roads as they moved up to northern Ferraut, on the border of Senzio. From the newly declared Kingdom of the Western Palm had come no clear response as yet to this provocation. Or none that had reached Astibar. Rovigo hadn't heard a word from Alessan since well before the Ember Days, but he had been told a long time ago that this spring might mark the beginning of something new.

And something was in the air, a sense of quickening and of change that fit itself to the mood of burgeoning spring and then went beyond it, into danger and the potential for violence. He seemed to hear it and see it everywhere, in the tramp of armies on the march, in the lowered voices of men in taverns, looking up too quickly whenever anyone came through the door.

One morning when he woke, Rovigo had an image that lingered in his mind, of the great floods of solidly packed river ice he had glimpsed many years ago far to the south on a long voyage down the coast of Quileia. And in his mind-picture, as he lay in bed, suspended between asleep and fully awake, he had seemed to see that ice breaking up and the river waters beginning to run again, carrying the floes crashing and grinding down to the sea.

Over khav that same morning, standing in the kitchen, he had announced that he was going into town to see about equipping the Maid for her first run of the season down to Tregea, with goods, perhaps wine, perhaps Edinio's wine, to trade for a ship's hold's worth of early spring wool and Tregean goat's cheese.

It was an impulsive decision, but not an inappropriate one. He usually made a run south in the spring, if a little later in the season, mostly for trade, partly to learn what he could for Alessan. He had been doing it for years, for both reasons, ever since he'd met Alessan and Baerd, spending a long night in a southern tavern with them, and coming away with the knowledge of a shared passion of the soul and a cause that might be a lifetime in the unfolding.

So this spring voyage was a part of his yearly routine. What was not, what was truly impulsive, was his offer, between one sip of early morning khav and the next, to take Alais with him.

His eldest, his pride, his clever one. He thought her beautiful beyond words. No one had asked for her hand. And though he knew she was truly pleased for Selvena and not grieving at all for herself, this knowledge didn't stop him from feeling a difficult sorrow whenever he looked at her amid the already building excitement of Selvena's wedding preparations.

So he asked her, a little too casually, if she wanted to come with him, and Alix glanced up quickly from her labors in the kitchen with a sharp, worried look in her dark eyes, and Alais said, even more quickly, with a fervor rare for her: "Oh, Triad, yes! I would love to come!"

It happened to be her dream.

One of her oldest dreams, never requested, never even spoken aloud. Alais could feel how high her tell-tale color had suddenly become. She watched her father and mother exchange a glance. There were times when she envied them that communion of their eyes. No words were spoken, they didn't seem to need words much of the time. Then Alais saw her mother nod, and she turned in time to catch her father's slow smile in response to that, and she knew she was going to sea in the Maid for the first time in her life.

She had wanted to do so for so long she couldn't even think back to a time when the desire hadn't been there. She remembered being a small girl, light enough to be lifted up by her father while her mother carried Selvena, going down to the harbor in Astibar to see the new ship that was the key to their small fortune in the world.

And she had loved it so much. The three masts, they had seemed so tall to her then, aspiring toward the sky, the dark-haired figurehead of a maiden at the prow, the bright-blue coat of fresh paint along the railings, the creak of the ropes and the timber. And the harbor itself: the smell of pitch and pine and fish and ale and cheese, wool and spice and leather. The rumble of carts laden with goods going away to some far part of the known world, or coming in from distant places with names that were a kind of magic to her.

A sailor in red and green walked by with a monkey on his shoulder and her father called a familiar greeting to him. Her father seemed to be at home here, he knew these men, the wild, exotic places from which they came and went. She heard shouts and sudden raucous laughter and voices raised in profane dispute over the weight of this or the cost of that. Then someone cried out that there were dolphins in the bay; that was when her father had lifted her up on his shoulders so she might see them.

Selvena had begun to cry at all the fierce commotion, Alais remembered, and they had gone back to their cart shortly after and ridden away, past the watchful, looming presence of the Barbadians, big, fair-haired men on their big horses, guarding the harbor of Astibar. She had been too young to understand what they were about, but her father's abrupt silence and expressionless face, riding by them, had told her something. Later, she learned a great deal more, growing up into the occupied reality of her world.

Her love of the ships and the harbor had never gone away. Whenever she could she would go with Rovigo down to the water. It was easier in winter, when they all moved to the town house in Astibar, but even in spring and summer and early fall she would find excuses, reasons and ways to accompany him into town and down to where the Maid was berthed. She gloried in the scene, and at night she dreamt her dreams of oceans opening before her and salt spray off the waves.

Dreams. She was a woman. Women did not go to sea. And dutiful, intelligent daughters never troubled their fathers by even asking to be allowed such a thing. But it seemed that, sometimes, on some mornings completely unforeseen, Eanna could look down from among her lights in the sky, and smile, and something miraculous might be freely offered that would never have been sought.

It seemed she was a good sailor, adjusting easily to the swing and roll of the ship on the waves as the coastline of Astibar scrolled by on their right. They sailed north along the bay and then threaded their way through the islands of the Archipelago and into the wideness of the open sea, Rovigo and his five seamen handling the ship with an ease that seemed to her both relaxed and precise. Alais was exhilarated, watching everything in this unknown world with an intensity that made them laugh and tease her for it. There was no malice in the jests though; she had known all five of these men for most of her life.

They swung around the northern tip of the province; a cape of storms, one of the men told her. But that spring day it was an easy, mild place, and she stood at the railing as they turned back south, and watched the green hills of her province pass by, sloping down to the white sand of the shores and the fishing villages dotted along the coast.

A few nights later there was a storm, off the cliffs of northern Tregea. Rovigo had seen it coming at sunset, or smelled it in the air, but the coastline was rocky and forbidding here, with no place to put in for shelter. They braced for the squall, a respectful distance off shore to keep clear of the rocks. When it hit, Alais was down below in her cabin, to keep out of the way.

Even this weather, she was grateful to discover, didn't bother her very much. There was nothing pleasant about it, feeling the Sea Maid groan and shake, buffeted in darkness by wind and rain, but she told herself that her father had endured infinitely worse in thirty years at sea, and she was not going to let herself be frightened or discomfited by a minor spring squall from the east.

She made a point of going back up on deck as soon as she felt the waves and the wind die down. It was still raining, and she covered her head with the hood of her cape. Careful to stay clear of where the men were laboring, she stood at one rail and looked up. East of them the swiftly scudding clouds revealed rifts of clear sky and briefly Vidomni's light shone through. Later the wind died down even more, the rain stopped and the clouds broke up, and she saw Eanna's bright, far stars come out above the sea, like a promise, like a gift. She pushed back her hood and shook out her dark hair. She took a deep breath of the fresh clean air, and knew a moment of perfect happiness.

She looked over and saw that her father was watching her. She smiled at him. He did not return the smile, but as he walked over she could see that his eyes were tender and grave. He leaned on the rail beside her, looking west at the coastline. Water glistened in his hair and in the short beard he was growing. Not far away, a series of dark, massive forms touched by the moonlight, the cliffs of Tregea moved slowly by.

"It is in you," her father said quietly, over the slap and sigh of the waves. "In your heart and in your blood. You have it more than I do, from my father and from his." He was silent a moment, then slowly shook his head, "But Alais, my darling, a woman cannot live a life at sea. Not in the world as it is."

Her dream. Clear and bright as the glitter of white Vidomni's light upon the waves. Laid out and then undone in such simple words.

She swallowed. Said, a speech long rehearsed, never spoken: "You have no sons. I am eldest. Will you surrender the Maid and all you have worked to achieve when you… when you no longer wish to pursue this life?"

"When I die?" He said it gently, but something heavy and hurtful took shape, pressing upon her heart. She looped her hand through the crook of his arm, holding tight, and moved nearer to him, to lean her head on his shoulder.

They were silent, watching the cliffs go by and the play of moonlight on the sea. The ship was never quiet, but she liked the noises it made. She had fallen asleep the past few nights hearing the Sea Maid's endless litany of sounds as a night song.

She said, her head still on his shoulder, "Could I be taught? To help you in your business, I mean. Even if not to actually sail on the journeys."

Her father said nothing for a time. Leaning against him, she could feel his steady breathing. His hands were loosely clasped together over the rail.

He said, "That can be done, Alais. If you want it, it can be done. Women run businesses all over the Palm. Widows, most often, but not only them." He hesitated. "Your mother could keep this going, I think, if she wanted to, if she had good advisors." He turned his head to look down at her, but she did not lift hers from his shoulder. "It is a sharp, cold life though, my darling. For a woman, for a man, without a hearth at the end of day for warmth. Without love to carry you outward and home."

She closed her eyes at that. There was something here that went to the heart of things. They had never pressed her, never harried or urged, though she was almost twenty years old and it was time, it was well past time. And she had had that one strange dream many nights through the dark of the winter just past: herself and a shadowy figure against the moon, a man in a high, unknown place, among flowers, under the arch of stars, his body lowered to her own, her hands reaching to gather him.

She lifted her head, withdrew her arm. Said carefully, looking down at the waves: "I like Catini. I'm happy for Selvena. She's ready, she's wanted this for so long and I think he'll be good to her. But father, I need more than what she will have. I don't know what it is, but I need more."

Her father stirred then. She watched him draw a deep breath and then slowly let it out. "I know," she heard him say. "I know you do, my darling. If I knew what, or how, and could give it, it would be yours. The world and the stars of Eanna would all be yours."

She cried then, which she seldom did. But she loved him and had caused him grief, and he had spoken just now, twice, of dying one day, and the white moon on the cliffs and sea after the storm was like nothing she had ever known or was likely to know again.

Catriana couldn't see the road as she climbed the slope from the dell, but from the distant sounds and the way Baerd and Sandre were both standing, rigidly watchful on the grass at the edge of the trees, she could tell that something was wrong. Men, she had long since concluded, were significantly worse than women at hiding their feelings in situations such as this.

Her hair still wet after bathing in the pond, a favorite place of hers, one they had passed every time they went back and forth between Ferraut and Certando, she hurried up the slope to see what was happening.

The two men said nothing as she appeared beside them. The cart had been pulled into the shade off the north-south road and the two horses let free to graze. Baerd's bow and quiver were lying in the grass beside the trees, close to hand if he needed them. She looked at the road and saw the Barbadian troops passing by, marching and riding, raising a heavy cloud of dust all around them.

"More of the Third Company," Sandre said, a cold anger in his voice.

"It looks like they're all going, doesn't it?" Baerd murmured grimly.

Which was good, it was more than good, it was exactly what they wanted. The anger, the grimness were almost wholly uncalled for; they seemed to be some instinctive male response to the nearness of the enemy. Catriana felt like shaking them both.

It was clear, really. Baerd himself had explained it to her and Sandre, and to Alienor of Borso on the day Alessan met Marius of Quileia in the mountains and rode west with Devin and Erlein.

And listening that day, forcing herself to be composed in Alienor's presence, Catriana had finally understood what Alessan had meant, all this time, when he'd said they would have to wait until spring. They had been waiting for Marius to say yes or no. To say if he would risk his own unstable crown and his life for them. And that day in the Braccio Pass he'd said he would. Baerd told them a little, a very little, about why.

Ten days later she and Baerd and Sandre had been on watch in the hills outside Fort Ortiz when the emissaries came riding along the road carrying the Quileian flag and were met with ceremonious honor outside the walls and escorted within by the Barbadians.

Next morning the Quileians had ridden on, not hurrying, down the road to the north. Two hours after their departure the gates of the fort had opened again and six men had ridden out in extreme haste. One of them, it was Sandre who noted it, was Siferval himself, captain of the Third Company.

"It is done," Baerd had said, a kind of awe in his voice. "I cannot believe it, but I think we have done it!"

A little more than a week later the first troops had begun to move, and they knew he was right. It wasn't until some days after that, in an artisans' village in northern Certando, trading for carvings and finished cloth, that they learned, belatedly, what Brandin of Ygrath had done in Chiara. The Kingdom of the Western Palm.

"Are you a gambling man?" Sandre had said to Baerd. "The dice are rolling now, and no one will hold or control them until they stop." Baerd had said nothing in reply, but something stunned, near to shock in his expression, made Catriana go over and take his hand in hers. Which was not really like her at all.

But everything had changed, or was changing. Baerd was not the same since the Ember Days and their stay at Castle Borso. Something had happened to him there, too, but this part he didn't explain. Ales-san was gone, and Devin, and though she hated to admit it, she missed him almost as much as the Prince. Even their role here in the east had completely altered now.

They had waited in the highlands for the emissaries, in case something should go wrong. But now Baerd kept them moving at speed from town to town and he was stopping to speak to men and to some women Catriana had never even heard about, telling them to be ready, that there might be a summer rising.

And with some of them, not many, only a select few, his message was very specific: Senzio. Head north to Senzio before Midsummer. Have a weapon with you if you can.

And it was these last words that brought home to Catriana most sharply, most potently, the fact that the time for action had truly come. It was upon them. No more oblique disruptions or hovering on the edge of events. Events had a center now, which was or would soon be in Senzio, and they were going there. What was to happen she didn't yet know. If Baerd did, he wasn't telling.

What he did tell her, and Sandre too, were the names of people.

Scores of them. Names he had held in memory, some for a dozen years. People who were with them in this, who could be trusted. Who needed to be told, here in the provinces ruled by Barbadior, that the movement of Alberico's troops was their own signal to be ready at last. To watch the unfolding of events and be prepared to respond.

They would sit together at night, the three of them, around a campfire under stars or in a secluded corner of an inn in some hamlet or village, and Baerd would recite for them the names they needed to know.

It was only on the third night, falling asleep afterward, that Catriana belatedly realized that the reason they needed to be told this was if Baerd were to die, with Alessan away in the west.

"Ricaso bar Dellano," Baerd would say. "A cooper in Marsilian, the first village south of Fort Ciorone. He was born in Avalle. Could not go to war because of a lame foot. Speak to him. He will not be able to come north, but knows the others near by and will spread the word and lead our people in that district if the need for a rising comes."

"Ricaso bar Dellano," she would repeat. "In Marsilian."

"Porrena bren Cullion. In Delonghi, just inside the Tregean border on the main road from Ferraut. She's a little older than you, Catriana. Her father died at the Deisa. She knows who to speak to."

"Porrena," Sandre would murmur, concentrating, his bony, gnarled hands clasped together. "In Delonghi." And Catriana marveled at how many names there seemed to be, how many lives Baerd and Alessan had touched in their travels through a dozen years since returning from Quileia, readying themselves and these unknown others for a time, a season, a moment in the future, which was now. Which they had lived to see. And her heart was filled with hope as she whispered the names over and over to herself like talismans of power.

They rode through the next weeks, through the flowering of spring, at an almost reckless pace, barely simulating their role as merchants. Making bad, hasty transactions where they stopped, unwilling to linger to bargain for better ones. Pausing only long enough to find the man or woman who was the key in that village or this cluster of farms, the one who knew the others and would carry the word.

They were losing money, but they had astins to spare from Alienor. Catriana, being honest with herself, realized that she was still reluctant to acknowledge the role that woman had played in Alessan's doings for so many years. Years in which she herself had been growing up in ignorance, a child in a fishing village in Astibar.

Once, Baerd let her make the contact in a town. The woman was a weaver, widely known for her skill. Catriana had found her house at the edge of the village. Two dogs had barked at her approach and had been stilled by a mild voice from within. Inside, Catriana had found a woman only a little younger than her mother. She had made certain they were alone, and then, as Baerd had instructed, had shown her dolphin ring and given Alessan's name and had spoken the message.

The same message of readiness as everywhere else. Then she carefully named two men and spoke Baerd's second message: Senzio. Midsummer. Tell them to be armed if they can.

The woman had gone pale, standing up abruptly as Catriana began to speak. She was very tall, even more so than Catriana herself. When the second message was done she had remained motionless a moment and then stepped forward to kiss Catriana on the mouth.

"Triad bless you and keep you and the both of them," she had said. "I did not think I would live to see this day." She was crying; Catriana tasted salt on her lips.

She had walked out into the sunshine and back to Baerd and Sandre. They had just finished a purchase of a dozen barrels of Certandan ale. A wretched transaction.

"We're going north, you fools," she had exclaimed, exasperated, her trade instincts taking over. "They don't like ale in Ferraut! You know that."

"Then we'll have to drink it ourselves," Sandre said, swinging up on his horse and laughing. Baerd, who so rarely used to laugh, but who had changed since the Ember Days, began to chuckle suddenly. And then, sitting beside him on the cart as they rode out of town, so did she, listening to the two of them, feeling the clean freshness of the breeze blowing through her hair, and, as it seemed, through her heart.

It was that same day, early in the afternoon, that they came to the dell she loved and Baerd, remembering, pulled the cart off the road to let her go down to the pool and bathe. When she climbed back up neither man was laughing or amused anymore, watching the Barbadians go by.

It was the way the two of them were standing that caused the trouble, she was sure of it. But by the time she came up beside them it was already too late. It would have been mostly Baerd whose look drew their attention. Sandre in his Khardhu guise was a matter of almost complete indifference to the Barbadians.

But a merchant, a minor trader with a single cart and a second scrawny horse, who stood gazing at an army passing in the way that this one did, coldly, his head arrogantly high, not even remotely submissive or chastened let alone showing any of the fear proper to such a situation…

The language of the body, Catriana thought, could be heard far too clearly sometimes. She looked at Baerd beside her, his dark eyes fixed in stony appraisal of the company passing by. It wasn't arrogance, she decided, not just a male pride. It was something else, something older. A primitive response to this display of the Tyrant's power that he could no more hide than he could the dozen barrels of ale they carried on the cart.

"Stop it!" she whispered fiercely. But even as she did she heard one of the Barbadians bark a terse command and half a dozen of them detached from the moving column of men and horses and galloped over toward them. Catriana's mouth went dry. She saw Baerd glance over to where his bow lay in the grass. He shifted his stance slightly, to balance himself better. Sandre did the same.

"What are you doing?" she hissed. "Remember where we are!"

She had time for no more. The Barbadians came up to them, huge men on their horses, looking down on a man and a woman of the Palm and this gaunt, grey-haired relic from Khardhun.

"I don't like the look of your face," the leader said, staring at Baerd. The man's hair was darker than most of the others, but his eyes were pale and hard.

Catriana swallowed. This was the first time in a year they'd had a confrontation so direct with the Barbadians. She lowered her eyes, willing Baerd to be calm, to say the right things.

What she did not know, for no one who had not been there could know, was what Baerd was seeing in that moment.

Not six Barbadians on horses by a road in Certando, but as many Ygrathen soldiers in the square before his father's house long ago. So many years, and the memory still sharp as a wound from only yesterday. All the normal measures of time seemed to fall apart and blow away in moments such as this.

Baerd forced himself to avert his gaze before the Barbadian's glare. He knew he had made a mistake, knew this was a mistake he would always make if he wasn't careful. He had been too euphoric though, rushing too fast on a floodtide of emotion, seeing this marching column as dancing to the tune he and Alessan had called. But it was early yet, far too early, so much lay unknown and uncontrollable in the future. And they had to live to see that future or everything would have been wasted. Years and lives, the patient conjuring of dream into reality.

He said, eyes cast down, voice low, "I am sorry if I have offended. I was only marveling at you. We have not seen so many soldiers on the road in years."

"We moved aside to make way," Sandre added in his deep voice.

"You be silent," the Barbadian leader rasped. "If I wish to converse with servants I will inform you." One of the others sidled his horse toward Sandre, forcing him to step backward. Catriana, behind him, felt her legs grow weak. She reached out and gripped the railing of the cart; her palms were damp with fear. She saw two of the Barbadians staring at her with frank, smirking appraisal, and she was suddenly aware of how her clothing would be clinging to her body after her swim in the pond.

"Forgive us," Baerd repeated, in a muffled tone. "We meant no harm, no harm at all."

"Really? Why were you counting our numbers?"

"Counting? Your numbers? Why would I do such a thing?"

"You tell me, merchant."

"It is not so," Baerd protested, inwardly cursing himself as an amateur and a fool. After twelve years, something so clumsy as this! The situation was careening out of control, and the simple fact was that he had indeed been counting the Barbadian numbers. "We are only traders," he added. "Only minor traders."

"With a Khardhu warrior for guard? Not so minor, I would say."

Baerd blinked, and clutched his hands together deferentially. He had made a terrible mistake. This man was dangerously sharp.

"I was afraid for my wife," he said. "There have been rumors of outlaws in the south, of great unrest." Which was true. There were, in fact, more than rumors. Twenty-five Barbadians had been slaughtered in a pass. He was fairly certain Alessan had been there.

"Your wife or your goods?" one of the other Barbadians sneered. "We know which you people value more." He looked past Baerd to where Catriana stood, and there was a loose, heavy-lidded look in his face. The other soldiers laughed. Baerd quickly lowered his head again; he didn't want them to see the death that was in his eyes. He remembered that kind of laughter, the resonance of it. Where it could lead. Had led, in a square in Tigana eighteen years ago. He was silent, eyes downcast, murder in his heart, bound close with memory.

"What are you carrying?" the first Barbadian rapped out, his voice blunt as a trowel.

"Ale," Baerd said, squeezing his hands together. "Only barrels of ale for the north."

"Ale for Ferraut? You are a liar. Or a fool."

"No, no," Baerd said hastily. "Not Ferraut. We got a very good price. Eleven astins the barrel. Good enough to be worth taking all the way north. We are bound for Astibar with this. We can sell it for three times that."

Which would have been true, had he not paid twenty-three astins for each of these.

At a gesture from the leader two of the Barbadians dismounted. They cracked open one of the barrels, using their swords as levers. The pungent, earthy smell of Certandan beer surrounded them all.

The leader looked over, saw his men nod, and turned back to Baerd. There was a malicious smile on his face.

"Eleven astins a barrel? Truly a good price. So good, that even a grasping merchant will not hesitate to donate them to the army of Barbadior that defends you and your kind."

Baerd had been half expecting this. Careful to stay in character, he said, "If… if it is your desire, then yes. Would you… would you care to buy it, at only the price I paid?"

There was a silence. Behind the six Barbadians the army was still marching down the road. It had almost passed them by. He had a decent estimate of how many there were. Then the man on the horse in front of him drew his sword. Baerd heard Catriana make a small sound behind him. The Barbadian leaned forward over the neck of his horse, weapon extended, and delicately touched Baerd on his bearded cheek with the flat of his blade.

"We do not bargain," he said softly. "Nor do we steal. We accept gifts. Offer us a gift, merchant." He moved the blade a little. Baerd could feel it nicking and fretting against his face.

"Please accept… please accept this ale from us as a gift to the men of the Third Company," he said. With an effort he kept his eyes averted from the man's face.

"Why thank you, merchant," the man said with lazy sarcasm. Slowly, sliding it along Baerd's cheek like an evil caress, he drew back his sword. "And since you have given us these barrels, you will surely not begrudge us the horse and cart that carry them?"

"Take the cart as well," Baerd heard himself saying. He felt suddenly as if he had left his body. As if he were floating above this scene, looking down.

And it was as from that high, detached vantage point that he seemed to see the Barbadians move to claim their wagon. They attached the cart-horse to the traces again. One of them, younger than the others, slung their packs and food out onto the ground. He looked shyly back at Catriana, a little abashed, then he mounted quickly up on the seat and clucked at the horse, and the cart rolled slowly away to where the tail of the Barbadian column was moving along the road. The five other men, leading his horse, followed after him. They were laughing, the easy, spilling laughter of men among each other, sure of their place and of the shape of their lives. Baerd glanced over at his bow again. He was fairly certain he could kill all six of them, starting with the leader, before anyone could intervene.

He didn't move. None of them moved until the last of the column was out of sight, their cart rumbling after it. Baerd turned then and looked at Catriana. She was trembling, but he knew her well enough to know it was as much with anger as with fear.

"I'm sorry," he said, reaching up a hand to touch her arm.

"I could kill you Baerd for giving me such a fright."

"I know," he said. "And I would deserve to be dead. I underestimated them."

"Could have been worse," Sandre said prosaically.

"Oh, somewhat," Catriana said tartly. "We could all be lying dead here now."

"That would indeed have been worse," Sandre agreed gravely. It took her a moment to realize he was teasing her. She surprised herself by laughing, a little wildly.

Sandre, his darkened face sober, said something quite unexpected then. "You have no idea," he murmured, "how dearly I wish you were of my blood. My daughter, granddaughter. Will you allow me to take pride in what you are?"

She was so surprised she could think of nothing to say. A moment later, deeply moved, she went forward and kissed him on the cheek. He put his long, bony arms around her and held her to his chest for a moment, carefully, as if she was fragile, or very precious, or both. She couldn't remember the last time someone had held her that way.

He stepped back, clearing his throat awkwardly. She saw that Baerd's expression was unwontedly soft, looking at the two of them.

"This is all extremely lovely," she said, deliberately dry. "Shall we spend the day here telling each other what splendid people we think we are?"

Baerd grinned. "Not a bad idea, but not the very best. I think we'll have to double back to where we bought the ale. We need another cart and horse."

"Good. I could use a flask of ale," Sandre said. Catriana glanced quickly back at him, caught the wry look in his eye, and laughed. She knew what he was doing, but she would never have expected to be able to laugh so soon after seeing a sword against Baerd's face.

Baerd collected his bow and quiver from the grass. They shouldered their packs and made her ride the horse, nothing else, Sandre said, would look right. She wanted to argue but couldn't. And she was secretly grateful for the chance to ride; her knees were still weak.

It was very dusty along the road for a mile or two because of the army, and they kept to the grass beside it. Her horse startled a rabbit and before she could even register the fact, Baerd had notched an arrow and shot, and the animal was dead. They traded it a short while later at a farmhouse for a pitcher of ale and some bread and cheese and then went on.

Late in the day, by the time they had made their slow way back to the village, Catriana bad convinced herself that the incident had been unfortunate, but not really important after all.

Eight days later they were in Tregea town. They had seen no other soldiers in the intervening week, their path having taken them far off the major roads. They left the new cart and goods at their usual inn and walked down to the central market. It was late in the afternoon, a warm day for spring. Looking north between the buildings toward the docks, Catriana could see the masts of the first ships to come up the river after the winter. Sandre had stopped at a leather stall to have repairs done to the belt that held his sword. As she and Baerd moved through the crowded square, a Barbadian mercenary, older than most, moving with a limp, and probably drunk on spring wine, stumbled out of a tavern, saw her, and lurched over to grope clumsily at her breasts and between her legs.

She shrieked, more startled than anything else.

And a moment later wished with all her heart that she had not done so. Baerd, just ahead of her, wheeled, saw the man, and with the same deadly, reflexive speed that had killed the rabbit, flattened the Barbadian with a colossal blow to the side of his head.

And Catriana knew, knew in that moment with utter and absolute certainty, that he was striking out not just against a drunken reserve guard, but against the officer who had touched him with a sword by that grove in Certando a week before.

There was a sudden, frightened silence around them. And then an immediate babble of sound. They looked at each other for a blurred, flashing second.

"Run!" Baerd ordered harshly. "Meet tonight by the place where you came up from the river last winter. If I am not there go on by yourselves. You know the names. There are only a handful left. Eanna guard you all!"

Then he was gone, sprinting through the square the way they had come, as a cluster of mercenaries began fanning out quickly through the crowd toward them. The man on the ground had not moved. Catriana didn't wait to see if he would. She cut off the other way as fast as she could run. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Sandre at the leather stall watching them, his face loose with shock. She was careful, desperately careful, not to look at him, not to run that way. That one of them, oh, Triad please be willing, one of them might make it from this place alive and free, with the names known and the dream still carried toward Midsummers's fires.

She darted down a crowded street and then sharply left at the first crossing into the warren of twisting lanes that made up the oldest quarter of Tregea near the river. Over her head the second stories of houses leaned crazily out towards each other, and what filtered through of the sunlight was completely blocked in places by the enclosed bridges that connected that ramshackle buildings on either side of the street.

She looked back and saw four of the mercenaries following her, pounding loudly down the lane. One of them shouted a command to halt. If any of them had a bow, Catriana thought, she was quite likely to die in the next few seconds. Dodging from side to side she cut to her right down an alleyway and then quickly right again at the first crossing, doubling back the way she had come.

There were three names on Baerd's list here in Tregea, and she knew where two of them might be found, but there was no way she could go to them for succor, not with the Barbadians so close behind. She would have to lose the pursuit herself, if she could, and leave it to Sandre to make the contact. Or Baerd, if he survived.

She ducked under the flapping ends of someone's wash hanging above the street, and knifed over to her left toward the water. There were people milling about in the lanes, glancing up with mild curiosity as she went by. Their glances would change in a moment, she knew, when the Barbadians rumbled through after her.

The streets were a hopelessly jumbled maze. She wasn't certain where she was, only that the river was north of her; at fleeting intervals she could glimpse the topmost masts of the ships. The waterfront would be dangerous though, much too open and exposed. She doubled back south again, her lungs sucking for air. Behind her, she heard a crashing sound and then a cacophony of irate shouts and curses.

She stumbled going around another corner to her right. Every moment, every turning, she expected this chaos of lanes to lead her straight back into her pursuers. If they fanned out she was probably finished. A wheelwright's cart blocked the lane. She flattened herself against the wall and sidled sideways past. Came to another crossing of roads. Sprinted straight through this time, past half a dozen children playing a skipping game with ropes. Turned at the second crossing.

And was grabbed hard just above her right elbow. She started to scream, but a hand was quickly slapped over her mouth. She bared her teeth to bite, violently twisting to escape. Then suddenly she froze in disbelief.

"Quietly, my heart. And come this way," said Rovigo d'Astibar removing his palm from her mouth. "No running. They are two streets over. Look as if you're walking with me." Hand on her arm he guided quickly into a tiny, almost deserted lane, looked back once over his shoulder, and then propelled her through the doorway of a fabric shop. "Now down behind the counter, quickly."

"How did you…?" she gasped.

"Saw you in the square. Followed you here. Move, girl!"

She moved. An old woman took her hand and squeezed it, then lifted a hinged counter and Catriana ducked through and dropped to the floor behind it. A moment later the hinge swung up again and her heart stopped as a shadow appeared above her holding something long and sharp.

"Forgive me," whispered Alais bren Rovigo, kneeling beside her. "My father says your hair might give you away when we leave." She held up the scissors she carried.

Catriana went rigid for a moment, then, closing her eyes without a word, she slowly turned her back on the other woman. A moment later she felt her long red tresses gathered and pulled. And then the long sharp cloth-cutter's scissors rasped cleanly through in a line above her shoulders, severing a decade's growth in a moment in the shadows.

There was a burst of noise outside, a clatter and hoarse shouting. It approached, reached them, went loudly past. Catriana realized that she was shaking; Alais touched her shoulder and then diffidently withdrew her hand. On the other side of the counter the old woman moved placidly about in the shadows of her shop. Rovigo was nowhere to be seen. Catriana's breath came in ragged scourings of air and her right side ached; she must have crashed into something in her wild careen. She had no memory of doing so.

There was something lying on the ground beside her feet. She reached down and gathered the thick red curtain of her severed hair. It had happened so fast she'd hardly had time to realize what was being done.

"Catriana, I'm so sorry," Alais whispered again. There was real grief in her voice.

Catriana shook her head. "Nothing… this is less than nothing," she said. It was difficult to speak. "Only vanity. What does it matter?" She seemed to be weeping. Her ribs hurt terribly. She put a hand up and touched the shorn remains of her hair. Then she turned sideways a little, on the floor of the shop, down behind the counter, and leaned her head wearily against the other woman's shoulder. Alais's arms came up and around her then, holding her close while she cried.

On the other side of the counter the old woman hummed tunelessly to herself as she folded and sorted cloth of many colors and as many different textures, working by the wan light of afternoon as it filtered down to the street in a quarter where the leaning houses mostly blocked the sun.

Baerd lay in the mild darkness by the river, remembering how cold it had been the last time he was here, waiting with Devin at winter twilight to see if Catriana would come floating down to them.

He had lost the pursuit hours ago. He knew Tregea very well. He and Alessan had lived here for more than a year off and on after their return from Quileia, rightly judging this wild, mountainous province as a good place to seek out and nurture any slow flames of revolution.

They had been principally looking for one man they had never found, a captain from the siege of Borifort, but they had discovered others, and spoken to them, and bound them to their cause. And they had been back here many times over the years, in the city itself and in the mountains of its distrada, finding in the harsh simple life of this province a strength and a clean directness that helped carry them both through the terribly slow, twistingly indirect paths of their lives.

He had known the city's maze of streets infinitely better than the Barbadians who were barracked here. Known which houses could be quickly climbed, which roofs led to others, and which to avoid as dangerous dead-ends. It had been important, in the life they'd led, to know such things.

He'd cut south and then east from the market, and then scrambled up to the roof of The Shepherd's Crook, their old tavern here, using the slanting cover of the adjacent woodpile as a springboard. He remembered doing the same thing years ago, dodging the night watch after curfew. Running low and quickly he crossed two roofs and then spanned a street by crawling along the top of one of the ramshackle covered bridges that linked houses on either side.

Behind him, far behind him very soon, he heard the sounds of pursuit being balked by seemingly inadvertent things. He could guess what those things might be: a milk-cart with a loose wheel, a quickly gathered crowd watching two men brawl in the street, a keg of wine spilled as it was wheeled into a tavern. He knew Tregea, which meant knowing the spirit of its people too.

In a short time he was a long way from the market square, having covered the distance entirely from roof to roof, flitting light-footed and unseen. He could have almost enjoyed the chase had he not been so worried about Catriana. At the higher, southern fringes of Tregea the houses grew taller and the streets wider. His memory did not fail him though; he knew which ways to angle in order to continue working upward till he came to the house he sought and leaped to land on its roof.

He remained there for several moments, listening carefully for sounds of alarm in the street below. He heard only the ordinary traffic of late afternoon though, and so Baerd slipped the key out from its old hiding-place under the one burnt shingle, unlocked the flat trapdoor and slipped down, noiselessly, into Tremazzo's attic.

He lowered the door behind him and waited for his eyes to adjust to the darkness. Down below, in the apothecary's shop itself he could hear voices quite clearly, and he quickly made out the unmistakable rumble of Tremazzo's bass tones. It had been a long time, but some things seemed never to change. Around him he could smell soaps and perfumes, and the odors, astringent or sweet, of various medications. When he could see a little in the gloom he found the tattered armchair that Tremazzo used to leave up here for them and sank down into it. The very action brought back memories from years ago. Some things did not change.

Eventually the voices below fell silent. Listening carefully he could make out only the one distinctive, heavy tread in the shop. Leaning over, Baerd deliberately scratched the floor, the sound a rat might make in an attic room. But only a rat that could scratch three times quickly, and then once again. Three for the Triad as a whole, and one more for the god alone. Tregea and Tigana shared an ancient link to Adaon, and they had chosen to mark it when they devised their signal.

He heard the footsteps below stop, and then, a moment later, resume their measured tread, as if nothing had happened. Baerd leaned back in the chair to wait.

It didn't take long. It was late in the day by now, nearly time to close up shop in any case. He heard Tremazzo sweeping the counter and floor and then the bang of the front door being shut and the click of the bolt driven home. A moment later the ladder was moved into place, footsteps ascended, the lower door swung back, and Tremazzo came into the attic, carrying a candle. He was puffing from exertion, bulkier than ever.

He set the candle on a crate and stood, hands on wide hips, looking down at Baerd. His clothes were very fine, and his black beard was neatly trimmed to a point. And scented, Baerd realized a second later.

Grinning, he rose to his feet and gestured at Tremazzo's finery, pretending to sniff the air. The apothecary grimaced. "Customers," he grunted. "It is the fashion of the day. What they expect now in a shop like this. Soon we'll be as bad as Senzio. Was it you that caused all the hue and cry this afternoon?" No more than that; no greeting, no effusions. Tremazzo had always been thus, cool and direct as a wind out of the mountains.

"I'm afraid so," Baerd replied. "Did the soldier die?"

"Hardly," Tremazzo said in his familiar, dismissive tones. "You aren't strong enough for that."

"Was there word of a woman caught?"

"Not that I heard. Who is she?"

"One of us, Tremazzo. Now listen, there is real news, and I need you to find a Khardu warrior and give him a message from me."

Tremazzo's eyes widened briefly as Baerd began, then narrowed with concentration as the story unfolded. It didn't take long to explain. Tremazzo was nothing if not quick. The bulky apothecary was not a man to venture north to Senzio himself, but he could contact others who were and let them know. And he should be able to find Sandre at their inn. He went down the ladder once more and returned, puffing, with a wheel of bread and some cold meat, and a flask of good wine to go with them.

They touched palms briefly, then he left in search of Sandre. Sitting among the sundry items stored above an apothecary's shop, Baerd ate and drank, waiting for darkness to fall. When he was sure the sun had set he slipped out onto the roof again and started back north through the town. After a while he worked his way down to the ground and, careful of the torches of the watch, threaded eastward through the winding streets to the place at the edge of the city where Catriana had come ashore from her winter leap. There, he sat down in the grass by the river in the almost windless night and settled himself to wait.

He had never really feared he would be caught. He'd had too many years of living this way, body honed and hardened, senses sharpened, mind quick to remember things, to seize and act upon opportunity.

None of which explained or excused what he'd done to get them into this in the first place. His impulsive blow at the drunken Barbadian had been an act of unthinking stupidity, regardless of the fact that it was also something that most of the people in that square had longed to do themselves at one time or another. In the Palm of the Tyrants today one suppressed such longings or died. Or watched people one cared for die.

Which lead him back to Catriana. In the starry spring darkness he remembered her emerging like a ghost from winter water. He lay silent in the grass thinking of her, and then, after a time, perhaps predictably, of Elena. And then, always and forever, certain as dawn or dusk or the turning of the seasons, of Dianora who was dead or lost to him somewhere in the world.

There was a rustle, too small to be alarming, in the leaves of a tree behind him. A moment later a trialla began to sing. He listened to it, and to the river flowing, alone and at home in the dark, a man shaped and defined by his need for solitude and the silent play of memory.

His father, as it happened, had done the same thing by the Deisa, the night before he died.

A short time later an owl called from along the riverbank just west of him. He hooted softly in reply, silencing the trialla's song. Sandre came up silently, scarcely disturbing the grass. He crouched down and then sat, grunting slightly. They looked at each other.

"Catriana?" Baerd murmured.

"I don't know. Not caught though, I think. I would have heard. I lingered in the square and around it. Saw the guards come back. The man you hit is all right. They were laughing at him, after. I think this will pass."

Baerd deliberately relaxed his tensed muscles. He said, conversationally, "I am a very great fool sometimes, had you noticed?"

"Not really. You'll have to tell me about it some time. Who was the extremely large man who accosted me?"

"Tremazzo. He's been with us for a long while. We used his upper storage room for meetings when we lived here, and after."

Sandre grunted. "He came up to me outside the inn and offered to sell me a potion to ensure the lust of any woman or boy I desired."

Baerd found himself grinning. "Rumors of Khardu habits precede you."

"Evidently." Sandre's teeth flashed white in the darkness. "Mind you, it was a good price. I bought two vials of the stuff."

Laughing quietly, Baerd felt a curious sensation, as if his heart were expanding outward toward the man here with him. He remembered Sandre the night they had met, when all the plans of his old age had been undone, when a final, savage end had come for the whole Sandreni family. A night that had not come to an end until the Duke had used his magic to go into Alberico's dungeons and kill his own son. Tomasso. Any woman or boy I desired.

Baerd felt humbled by the strength of the old man with him. Not once in half a year and more of hard traveling, through the bitter cold and rutted tracks of winter, had Sandre breathed so much as a request for a halt or an easier pace. Not once had he balked at a task, shown weariness, been slow to rise in the predawn dampness of the road. Not once given any sign of the rage or the grief that must have choked him whenever word reached them of more bodies death-wheeled in Astibar. He had given them a gift of all he had, his knowledge of the Palm, the world, and especially of Alberico; a lifetime's worth of subtlety and leadership, offered without arrogance and without reserve, nothing held back.

It was men such as this, Baerd thought, who had been the glory and the grief of the Palm in the days before it fell. Glory in the grandeur of their power, and grief in their hatreds and their wars that had let the Tyrants come and take the provinces one by one in their solitary pride.

And sitting there by the river in darkness Baerd felt again, with certainty, in the deep core of his heart, that what Alessan was doing, what he and Alessan were doing, was right. That theirs was a goal worth the striving for, this reaching out for wholeness in the Palm, with the Tyrants driven away and the provinces bound together in a sharing of the years that would come. A goal worth all the days and nights of a man's life, whether or not it was ever reached, could ever be made real. A goal that lay beside and was bound together with the other vast and bitter thing, which was Tigana and her name.

Certain things were hard for Baerd bar Saevar, almost impossible in fact, and had been since his youth had been torn away from him in the year Tigana fell. But he had lain with a woman on an Ember Night just past, in a place of deepest magic, and had felt in that green darkness as if the stern bindings that wrapped and held his heart were loosening. And this was a dark place too, a quiet one with the river flowing, and things had begun to take shape in the Palm that he had feared would never happen while he lived.

"My lord," he said softly to the old man sitting there with him, "do you know that I have come to love you in the time we have been together?"

"By the Triad!" Sandre said, a little too quickly. "And I haven't even given you the potion!"

Baerd smiled, said nothing, able to guess at the bindings the old Duke must have within himself. A moment later though, he heard Sandre murmur, in a very different voice:

"And I you, my friend. All of you. You have given me a second life and a reason for living it. Even a hope that a future worth knowing might lie ahead of us. For that you have my love until I die."

Gravely, he held out a palm and the two of them touched fingers in the darkness. They were sitting thus, motionless, when they heard the sound of an oar splash gently in the water. Both men rose silently, reaching for their swords. Then they heard an owl hoot from the river.

Baerd called softly back, and a moment later a small boat bumped gently against the sloping bank and Catriana, stepping lightly, came ashore.

At the sight of her Baerd drew a breath of pure relief; he had been more afraid for her than he could ever have said-. There was a man behind her in the boat holding the oars but the moons had not yet risen and Baerd couldn't see who it was.

Catriana said, "That was quite a blow. Should I be flattered?"

Sandre, behind him, chuckled. Baerd felt as though his heart would overflow with pride in this woman, in the calm, matter-of-factness of her courage. Matching her tone with an effort he said only, "You shouldn't have shrieked. Half of Tregea thought you were being ravished."

"Yes, well," she said drily. "Do forgive me. I wasn't sure myself."

"What happened to your hair?" Sandre asked suddenly from behind, and Baerd, moving sideways, saw that it had indeed been cropped away, in a ragged line above her shoulders.

She shrugged, with exaggerated indifference. "It was in the way. We decided to cut it off."

"Who is we?" Baerd asked. Something within him was grieving for her, for the assumed casualness of her manner. "Who is in the boat? I assume a friend, given where we are."

"A fair assumption," the man in the boat answered for himself. "Though I must say I could have picked a better place for our contraina to have a business meeting."

"Rovigo!" Baerd murmured, with astonishment and a swift surge of delight. "Well met! It has been too long."

"Rovigo d'Astibar?" Sandre said suddenly, coming forward. "Is that who this is?"

"I thought I knew that voice," Rovigo said, shipping his oars and standing up abruptly. Baerd moved quickly down to the bank to steady the boat. Rovigo took two precise strides and leaped past him to the shore. "I do know it, but I cannot believe I am hearing it. In the name of Morian of Portals, have you come back from the dead, my lord?"

Even as he spoke he knelt in the tall grass before Sandre, Duke of Astibar. East of them, beyond where the river found the sea, Ilarion rose, sending her blue light along the water and over the waving grasses of the bank.

"In a manner of speaking I have," Sandre said. "With my skin somewhat altered by Baerd's craft." He reached down and pulled Rovigo to his feet. The two men looked at each other.

"Alessan wouldn't tell me last fall, but he said I would be pleased when I learned who my other partner was," Rovigo whispered, visibly moved. "He spoke more truly than he could have known. How is this possible, my lord?"

"I never died," Sandre said simply. "It was a deception. Part of a poor, foolish old man's scheme. If Alessan and Baerd had not returned to the lodge that night I would have killed myself after the Barbadians came and went." He paused. "Which means, I suppose, that I have you to thank for my present state, neighbor Rovigo. For various nights through the years outside my windows. Listening to the spinning of our feeble plots."

Under the slanting blue moonlight, there was a certain glint in his eye. Rovigo stepped back a little, but his head was high and he did not avert his gaze. "It was in a cause that you now know, my lord," he said. "A cause you have joined. I would have cut out my tongue before betraying you to Barbadior. I think you must know that."

"I do know that," Sandre said after a moment. "Which is a great deal more than I can say for my own kin."

"Only one of them," Rovigo said quickly, "and he is dead."

"He is dead," Sandre repeated. "They are all dead. I am the last of the Sandreni. And what shall we do about it, Rovigo? What shall we do with Alberico of Barbadior?"

Rovigo said nothing. It was Baerd who answered, from the water's edge.

"Destroy him," he said. "Destroy them both."