THE SEA WAS AT THEIR BACK, AT THE END OF A LONG goatherds track that wound down the slope to the sands just south of where theyd beached the ships and come ashore. About two miles north of them the walls of Senzio rose up, and from this height Dia-nora could see the gleaming of the temple domes and the ramparts of the castle. The sun, rising over the pine forests to the east, was bronze in a close, deep blue sky. It was warm already this early in the day; it would be very hot by mid-morning.
By which time the fighting would have begun.
Brandin was conferring with dEymon and Rhamanus and his captains, three of them newly appointed from the provinces. From Corte and Asoli and Chiara itself. Not from Lower Corte, of course, though there were a number of men from her province in the army below them in the valley. She had wondered briefly, lying awake one night in the flagship off Farsaro, if Baerd was one of them. She knew he wouldnt be though. Just as Brandin could not change in this, neither could her brother. It went on.
However much might alter, this single thing would go on until the last generation that knew Tigana died.
And she? Since the Dive, since rising from the sea, she had been trying hard not to think at all.
Simply to move with the events she had set in motion. To accept the shining fact of Brandins love for her and the terrible uncertainties of this war. She no longer saw the riselkas path in her minds eye. She had some sense of what that meant, but she made an effort not to dwell upon it during the day. Nights were different; dreams were always different. She was owner and captive, both, of a bitterly divided heart.
With her two guards just behind her she moved forward on the crown of the hill and looked out over the wide east-west running valley. The dense green pine woods were beyond, with olive trees growing on steeper ridges to the south and a plateau north leading to Senzio town.
Down below the two armies were just stirring, men emerging from their tents and sleeping-rolls, horses being saddled and harnessed, swords cleaned, bowstrings fitted and readied. Metal glinted in the young sun all along the valley. The sound of voices carried easily up to her in the clear bright air. There was just enough breeze to take the banners and lift them to be seen. Their own device was new: a golden image of the Palm itself, picked out against a background of deep blue for the sea. The meaning of Brandins chosen image was as clear as he could make it—they were fighting in the name of the Western Palm, but the truer claim was to everything. To a united peninsula with Barbadior driven away. It was a good symbol, Dianora knew. It was also the proper, the necessary step for this peninsula. But it was being taken by the man who had been King of Ygrath.
There were even Senzians in Brandins army, besides the men of the four western provinces. Several hundred had joined them from the city in the two days since theyd landed in the southern part of the bay.
With the Governor dead and a squabble for meaningless power going on in the castle, the official policy of Senzian neutrality was in tatters. Helped, no one doubted, by Albericos decision to torch the lands through which he had come, in retaliation for Barbadian deaths in the city. Had the Barbadians moved faster Rhamanus might have had trouble landing the fleet in the face of opposition, but the winds had been with them, and they reached the city a full day before Alber-ico. Which let Brandin choose the obvious hill from which to overlook the valley, and to align his men where he wanted them. It was an advantage, they all knew it.
It had seemed less of one the next morning when the three armies of Barbadior arrived emerging out of the smoke of burning to the south. They had two banners, not one: the Empires red mountain and golden tiara against their white background, and Albericos own crimson boar on a yellow field. The red in both banners seemed to dot the plain like stains of blood, while horsemen and foot-soldiers arrayed themselves in crisp, precisely drilled ranks along the eastern side of the valley. The soldiers of the Barbadian Empire had conquered most of the known world to the east.
Dianora had stood on the hill watching them come. It seemed to take forever. She went away into their tent and then came back, several times. The sun began to set. It was over behind her in the west
above the sea before Albericos mercenaries had all marched or ridden into the valley.
"Three to one, perhaps a little better than that," Brandin had said, coming up beside her. His short greying hair was uncovered, ruffled by the late afternoon breeze.
"Are they too many?" she had asked, quietly so no one else would hear.
He looked at her quickly, then took her hand. He often did that now, as if unable to bear not having touched her for any length of time. Their love-making since the Dive had taken on an urgency that would leave them both shattered and drained afterwards, scarcely able to form thoughts of any kind. Which was at the center of things for her, Dianora knew: she wanted to numb her mind, to still the voices and the memories. Obliterate the image of that clear, straight path disappearing in the darkness of the sea.
On the hill the day the Barbadians came Brandin laced his fingers through her own and said, "They may be too many. It is hard to judge. I am stronger in my power than Alberico in his. I think that on this hill I am worth the difference in the armies.”
Quietly spoken, a careful statement of relevant facts. No arrogance, only the steady, always enduring pride. And why should she doubt his sorcery? She knew exactly what it had done in war some twenty years ago.
That conversation had been yesterday. Afterwards she had turned to watch the sun go down into the sea. The night had been bright and glorious, with Vidomni waxing and Ilarion at her full, blue and mysterious, a moon of fantasy, of magic. She had wondered if they would have time to be alone that night, but in fact Brandin had been down on the plain among the tents of his army through most of the dark hours, and speaking with his captains after that. DEymon, she knew was going to remain up here with him tomorrow, and Rhamanus—more a sailor than a military commander—would be on the hill as well to lead the men of the Kings Guard in defense, if matters came to that. If matters came to that they were probably dead, she knew.
Both moons had set by the time Brandin came back to their tent on that hill above the sea. Awake in bed, waiting, she could see his weariness. He had maps with him, sketches of terrain to study one last time, but she made him put them down.
He came over to the bed still fully clothed and lay down. After a moment he rested his head in her lap. Neither of them spoke for a long time. Then Brandin shifted a little and looked up at her.
"I hate that man down there," he said quietly. "I hate everything he stands for. There is no passion in him, no love, no pride. Only ambition. Nothing matters but that. Nothing in the world can move him to pity or grief but his own fate. Everything is a tool, an instrument. He wants the Emperors Tiara, everyone knows it, but he doesnt want it for anything. He only wants. I doubt anything in his life has ever moved him to feel anything for anyone else . . . love, loss, anything.”
He subsided. He was repeating himself in his exhaustion. She pressed her fingers against his temples, looking down at his face as he turned again and his eyes closed and his brow gradually grew smooth under her touch. Eventually his breathing steadied and she knew he was asleep. She stayed awake, her hands moving like a blind womans over him, knowing from the light outside that the moons were down, knowing the morning was war and that she loved this man more than the world.
She must have slept, because the sky was grey with the coming of dawn when she opened her eyes again, and Brandin was gone. There was a red anemone on the pillow beside her. She looked at it without moving for a moment, then picked it up and crushed it to her face inhaling the fragile scent. She wondered if he knew the legend of that flower here. Almost certainly not, she thought.
She rose, and a few moments later Scelto came in with a mug of khav in his hand. He was wearing the stiff leather vest of a messenger; lightweight inadequate armor against arrows. He had volunteered to be one of the score of such men running orders and messages up and down the hill. He had come to her first though, as he had every morning in the saishan for a dozen years. Dianora was afraid that thinking about that would make her cry: a brutal omen on such a day. She managed a smile and told him to go
back to the King, who needed him more this morning.
After he left, she slowly drank her khav, listening to the growing noises outside. Then she washed and dressed herself and went out of the tent into the rising sun.
Two men of the Kings Guard were waiting for her. They went wherever she did, a discreet step or two behind, but not more than that. She would be guarded today, she knew. She looked for Brandin and saw Rhun first. They were both near the front of the flattened ridge, both bare-headed, without armor, though with identical swords belted at their sides. Brandin had chosen to dress today in the simple brown of an ordinary soldier.
She was not fooled. None of them were, or could be.
Not long after that they saw him step alone toward the edge of his hill and raise one hand above his head for all the men in both armies to see. Without a word spoken, any warning at all, a dazzling blood- crimson flare of light sprang from that upthrust hand like a flame into the deep blue of the sky. From below they heard a roar of sound, as, crying their Kings name aloud, Brandins outnumbered army moved forward across the valley to meet the soldiers of AJberico in a battle that had been coming for almost twenty years.
"Not yet," Alessan said steadily, for the fifth time, at least. "We have waited years, we must not be too soon now.”
Devin had a sense that the Prince was cautioning himself more than anyone else. The truth was that until Alessan gave the word there was nothing for them to do but watch as men from Barbadior and Ygrath and the provinces of the Palm killed each other under the blazing Senzian sun.
It was noon or a little past it, by the sun. It was brutally hot. Devin tried to grasp how the men below must feel, hacking and battering each other, slipping on blood, treading the fallen in the broiling caldron of battle. They were too high and far away to recognize anyone, but not so distant that they couldnt see men die or hear their screams.
Their vantage point had been chosen by Alessan a week before with a sure prediction of where the two sorcerers would base themselves. And both had done exactly as he judged they would. From this sloping ridge less than half a mile south of the higher, broader rise of land where Brandin was, Devin gazed down over the valley and saw two armies knotted together in a pitiless sending of souls to Morian.
"The Ygrathen chose his field well," Sandre had said with an almost detached admiration earlier that morning as the cries of horses and men began. "The plain is wide enough to allow him room to maneuver, but not so broad as to let the Barbadians flank around him without serious trouble in the hills. They would have to climb out of the valley, and then along the exposed slopes and back down again." "And if you look, you will see," Ducas di Tregea had added, "that Brandin has most of his archers on his own right flank, toward the south, in case they do try that. They could pick the Barbadians off like deer among the olives on the slopes if they attempt to go around.”
One contingent of Barbadians had, in fact, tried just that an hour ago. They had been slaughtered and driven back by a rain of arrows from the archers of the Western Palm. Devin had felt a quick surge of excitement, but then that congealed within him into turmoil and confusion. The Barbadians were tyranny, yes, and all that it meant, yet how could he possibly exult in any kind of triumph for Brandin of Ygrath?
But should he then desire the death of men of the Palm at the hands of Albericos mercenaries? He didnt know what to think or feel. He felt as though his soul was being stripped raw and exposed here, laid out for burning under the Senzian sky.
Catriana was standing just ahead of him, next to the Prince. Devin didnt think hed seen them apart from each other since Erlein had brought her back from the garden. Hed spent a disoriented, difficult hour the morning after that, struggling to adjust to the shining thing that had so clearly overtaken them. Alessan had looked as he did when he made music, as if hed found a hearthstone in the world. When Devin had glanced over at Alais it was to find her watching him with a curious, very private smile on her face; it left
him even more confused than before. He had a sense that he wasnt even keeping up with himself, let alone with the changes around him. He also knew that there wasnt going to be any time to deal with such things, not with what was coming to Senzio.
In the next two days, the armies had arrived from north and south bringing with them a bone-deep awareness of destiny hanging before them all as if suspended on some balance scale of gods in the summer air.
On their ridge above the battle Devin looked back and saw Alais offering water to Rinaldo in the partial shade of a twisted olive tree that clung to the slope of their ridge. The Healer had insisted on coming with them instead of remaining hidden with Solinghi in town. If lives are at risk then my place is there as well, was all hed said, and hed carried his eagle-headed staff up here with all of them before sunrise.
Devin glanced beyond them to where Rovigo stood with Baerd. He should probably be with those two, he knew. His own responsibility here was the same as theirs: to guard this hill if either sorcerer or both should send troops after them. They had sixty men: Ducass band, Rovigos brave handful of mariners, and those carefully chosen men who had made their solitary way north to Senzio in response to the messages scattered across the provinces. Sixty men. It would have to be enough.
"Sandre! Ducas!" Alessan said sharply, snapping Devin out of reverie. "Look now, and tell me.”
"I was about to," Sandre said with an emerging note of excitement in his voice. "It is as we guessed: with his own presence on the hill Brandin is not outnumbered after all. His power is too much stronger than Albericos. More so than I guessed, even. If you are asking my reading right now, I would say that the Ygrathen is on the edge of breaking through in the center before the hour is out.”
"Sooner than that," Ducas said in his deep voice. "When such things begin they happen very fast.”
Devin moved forward to see more clearly. The seething center of the valley was as choked with men and horses as before, many of them dead and fallen. But if he used the banners as his frame of reference, it seemed, even to his untutored eye, that Brandins men were pushing their front lines forward now, though the Barbadians were still more numerous by far.
"How?" he muttered, almost to himself.
"He weakens them with his sorcery," a voice to his right said. He looked over at Erlein. "The same way they conquered us years ago. I can feel Alberico trying to defend them, but I think Sandre has it right: the Barbadian is weakening as we speak.”
Baerd and Rovigo came quickly up from where they too had been looking down.
"Alessan?" Baerd said. Only the name, no more.
The Prince turned and looked at him. "I know," he said. "We were just thinking the same thing. I think it is time. I think it has come." He held Baerds gaze for another moment; neither of them spoke.
Then Alessan looked away, past the friend of his life, to the three wizards.
"Erlein," he said softly. "You know what must be done.”
"I do," said the Senzian. He hesitated. "Pray for the Triads blessing upon the three of us. Upon all of us.”
"Whatever youre going to do, you had better hurry," Ducas said bluntly. "The Barbadian center is starting to give.”
"We are in your hands," Alessan said to Erlein. He seemed about to say something more, but did not.
Erlein turned to Sandre and Sertino who had moved nearer to him. All of the others stepped back a little, to leave the three of them alone.
"Link!" said Erlein di Senzio.
On the plain at the back of his army, but near to them and in their midst—because distance mattered in magic—Alberico of Barbadior had spent the morning wondering if the gods of the Empire had
abandoned him at last. Even the dark-horned god of sorcerers and the night-riding Queen on her Mare.
His thoughts, such thoughts as he could manage to coherently form under the ceaseless, mind-pounding onslaught of the Ygrathen, were black with awareness of ruin; it seemed to him as if there were ashes in his heart choking his throat.
It had seemed so simple once. All that would be needed were planning and patience and discipline, and if he had any qualities, any virtues at all, they were those. Twenty years worth of each of them here in the service of his long ambition.
But now as the merciless bronze sun reached its zenith and slipped past and began its descent toward the sea, Alberico knew with finality that he had been right at the first and wrong at the last. Winning the whole of the Palm had never mattered, but losing it meant losing everything. Including his life. For there was nowhere to run, or hide.
The Ygrathen was brutally, stupefyingly strong. He had known it, he had always known it. Had feared the man not as a coward does, but as one who has taken the measure of something and knows exactly what it is.
At dawn, after that crimson beacon had flamed from Brandins hand on his hill in the west, Alberico had allowed himself to hope, even briefly to exult. He had only to defend his men. His armies were almost three times as strong and they were facing only a small number of the trained soldiers of Ygrath.
The rest of the army of the Western Palm was a flung-together melange of artisans and traders, fishermen and farmers and scarcely bearded boys from the provinces.
He had only to blunt the thrust of Brandins sorcery from the hill and let his soldiers do their work.
He had no need to push his own powers outward against his foe. Only to resist. Only defend.
If only he could. For as the morning wore on and gathered heat to itself like a smothering cloak, Alberico felt his mind-wall begin, by grudging, agonizing degrees, to flatten and bend under the passionate, steady, numbing insistence of Brandins attack. Endlessly the Ygrathens waves of fatigue and weakness flowed down from his hill upon the Barbadian army. Wave after wave after wave, tireless as the surf.
And Alberico had to block them, to absorb and screen those waves, so his soldiers could fight on, unafraid, unsapped in their courage and strength save by the sweltering heat of the sun—which was blazing down upon the enemy too.
Well before noon some of the Ygrathens spell began to leak through. Alberico couldnt hold it all. It just kept coming and coming, monotonous as rain or surf, without alteration in rhythm or degree. Simple power, hugely pouring forth.
Soon—far too soon, too early in the day—the Barbadians began to feel as if they were fighting uphill, even on a level plain, as if the sun actually was fiercer above their heads than on the men they fought, as if their confidence and courage were seeping away with the sweat that poured from them, soaking through their clothing and armor.
Only the sheer weight of numbers kept them level, kept that Senzian plain in balance all morning long. His eyes closed, sitting in the great, canopied chair they had brought for him, Alberico mopped at his face and hair continuously with water-soaked cloths and he fought Brandin of Ygrath through that morning with all his power and all the courage to which he could lay claim.
But shortly after noon, cursing himself, cursing the maggot-eaten soul of Scalvaia dAstibar who had so nearly killed him nine months ago—and who had weakened him enough, after all, to be killing him now—cursing his Emperor for living too long as a useless, senescent, emaciated shell, Alberico of Barbadior confronted the bleak, pitiless reality that all his gods were indeed leaving him here under the burning sun of this far-off land. As the messages began streaming back from the crumbling front ranks of his army, he began preparing himself, in the way of his people, for death.
Then the miracle happened.
At first, his mind too punishingly battered, he couldnt even grasp what was taking place. Only that the colossal weight of magic pouring down from the hill was suddenly, inexplicably, lightening. It was a fraction, a half of what it had been only a moment before. Alberico could sustain it. Easily! That level of magic was less than his own, even weakened as he was now. He could even push forward against that, instead of only defending. He could attack! If that was all that Brandin had left, if the Ygrathen had suddenly reached the end of his reserves . . .
Wildly mind-scanning the valley and the hills around for a clue, Alberico suddenly came upon the third matrix of magic, and abruptly realized—with a glory flowering out of the mornings ashes in his heart—that the horned god was with him yet after all, and the Night Queen in her riding.
There were wizards of the Palm here, and they were helping him! They hated the Ygrathen as much as he! Somehow, for whatever incomprehensible reason, they were on his side against the man who was King of Ygrath, whatever he might pretend to call himself now.
"I am winning!" he shouted to his messengers. "Tell the captains at the front, revive their spirits. Tell them I am beating the Ygrathen back!”
He heard sudden glad cries around him. Opened his eyes to see messengers sprinting forward across the valley. He reached out toward those wizards—four or five, he judged, by their strength, perhaps six of them—seeking to merge with their minds and their power.
But in that he was balked. He knew exactly where they were. He could even see where they were—a ridge of land just south of the Ygrathens hill—but they would not let him join with them or know who they were. They must still be afraid of what he did to wizards when he found them.
What he did to wizards? He would glory in them! He would give them land and wealth and power, honor here and in Barbadior. Riches beyond their starved, pinched dreams. They would see!
No matter that they did not open to him! It truly mattered not. So long as they stayed, and lent their powers to his defense there was no need to merge. Together they were a match for Brandin. And all they had to do was be a match: Alberico knew he still had more than twice the army in the field that the other had.
But even as hope was pouring back into his soul with these thoughts, he felt the weight beginning to return. Unbelievably, the Ygrathens power growing again. Frantically he checked: the wizards on their ridge were still with him. Yet Brandin was still pushing forward. He was so strong! So accursedly, unimaginably strong. Even against all of them he was exerting his might, tapping deeper into his wellspring of sorcery. How deep could he go? How much more did he have?
Alberico realized, the knowledge like ice amid the inferno of war, the savage heat of the day, that he had no idea. None at all. Which left him only the one course. The only one hed ever had from the moment the battle had begun.
He closed his eyes again, the better to focus and concentrate, and he set himself, with all the power in him, to resist again. To resist, to hold, to keep the wall intact.
"By the seven sisters of the god!" Rhamanus swore passionately. "They are regaining the ground they lost!”
"Something has happened," Brandin rasped in the same moment. They had erected a canopy above him for shade and had brought a chair for him to sit upon. He was standing though—one hand on the back of the chair for support at times—the better to look down on the course of battle below.
Dianora was standing close to him, in case he needed her, for water or comfort, for anything at all that she could give, but she was trying not to look down. She didnt want to see any more men die. About the screaming in the valley she could do nothing though, and every cry below seemed to fly upward and sheath itself in her like a knife made of sound and human agony.
Had it been like this by the Deisa when her father died? Had he screamed so with his own mortal wound, seeing his lifes blood leave him, not to be held back, staining the river red? Had he died in this
kind of pain under the vengeful blades of Brandins men?
It was her own fault, this sickness rising. She should not be here. She should have known what images war would unleash in her. She felt physically ill: from the heat, the sounds, she could actually smell the carnage below.
"Something has happened," Brandin said again, and with his voice a clarity came back into the maelstrom of the world. She was here and he was the reason why, and if the others could not, Dianora who knew him so well, could hear a new note in his voice, a marginal clue to the strain he was enduring.
She walked quickly away and then back, a beaker of water in her hand and a cloth to wet his brow.
He took the water, seeming almost oblivious to her presence, to the touch of the cloth. He closed his eyes, and then slowly turned his head from side to side, as if blindly seeking something.
Then he opened his eyes again and pointed. "Over there, Rhamanus." Dianora followed his gaze. On a ridge of land south of them, across the uneven, tummocky ground, a number of figures could be discerned.
"There are wizards there," Brandin said flatly. "Rhamanus, youll have to take the Guard after them.
They are working with Alberico against me. I dont know why. One of them looks like a Khardhu, but he isnt; I would recognize Khardhun magic. There is something extremely odd about this.”
His eyes were a dark, clouded grey.
"Can you match them, my lord?" It was dEymon, his tone deliberately neutral, masking any hint of concern.
"I am about to try," Brandin said. "But I am getting near to the limit of the power I can safely tap.
And I cant turn my magic on them alone, they are working with Alberico. Rhamanus, youll have to get those wizards for me yourself. Take everyone here.”
Rhamanuss ruddy face was grim. "I will stop them or die, my lord. I swear it.”
Dianora watched him step out from under the canopy and summon the men of the Kings Guard. In pairs they fell into step behind him and started quickly down the goat-track leading west and south. Rhun took a couple of steps after them, and then stopped, looking confused and uncertain.
She felt a touch and turned from the Fool as Brandin took her hand. "Trust me, love," he murmured.
"And trust Rhamanus." After a second he added, with what was almost a smile: "He brought you to me.”
Then he let her go and turned his attention back to the plain below. And now he did sit down in the chair. Watching, she could literally see him gather himself to renew his assault.
She looked over at dEymon, then followed the Chancellors narrowed, speculative gaze south again, across to the cluster of people on that slope half a mile away. They were near enough that she could see the dark-skinned figure Brandin said wasnt really a Khardhu. She thought she could make out a red- haired woman as well.
She had no idea who they were. But suddenly, for the first time, looking around at their own thinned- out numbers on the hill, she felt afraid.
"Here they come," Baerd said, looking north, a hand up to screen his eyes.
They had been waiting for this, and watching for it from the moment the wizards linked, but anticipation was not reality and, at the sight of the picked men of Brandins Guard moving swiftly down their hill and beginning to cross the ground between, Devins heart began thumping hard. There had been war all morning in the valley below; now it was coming to them.
"How many?" Rovigo asked, and Devin was grateful to hear the tension in the merchants voice: it meant he was not alone in what he was feeling now.
"Forty-nine, if he sent them all, and Alessan thought he would," Baerd replied, not turning around.
"That is always the number of the Kings Guard in Ygrath. It is sacred for them.”
Rovigo said nothing. Devin glanced to his right and saw the three wizards standing closely together.
Erlein and Sertino had their eyes closed, but Sandre was staring fixedly downwards to where Alberico of Barbadior was at the back of his army. Alessan had been with the wizards but now he came quickly over to join the thirty or so men spread out behind Baerd on the ridge.
"Ducas?" he asked quietly.
"I cant see any of them," Baerd said, with a quick glance at the Prince. The last of the Ygrathen Guard had now descended their hill. The vanguard were already moving rapidly over the uneven ground between. "I still dont believe it.”
"Let me take my men to meet them below," Ducas had urged Alessan, the moment the wizards had linked. "We know he will be coming after us.”
"Of course we do," Alessan had said, "but we are poorly armed and trained. We need the advantage of height up here.”
"Speak for yourself," Ducas di Tregea had growled.
"There isnt any cover down there. Where could you hide?”
"You are telling me whether there is cover?" Ducas replied, feigning anger. His mouth widened in his wolfish grin. "Alessan, go teach your fingers to know your fingernails! I was fighting running battles and ambushes in this kind of terrain while you were still numbering oak trees or some such thing in Quileia.
Leave this to me.”
Alessan had not laughed. After a moment though, he nodded his head. Not waiting for more, red- bearded Ducas and his twenty-five men had immediately melted away down the slopes of their ridge. By the time the Ygrathens sent the Guard, the outlaws were down below, hidden among the gorse and heather, the high grass and the scattered olive and fig trees in the ground between the hills.
Squinting, Devin thought he could see one of them, but he wasnt sure.
"In Marians name/" Erlein di Senzio suddenly cried from the east end of the ridge. "He is pushing us back again!”
"Then hold!" Sandre snarled. "Fight him! Go deeper!”
"I havent got any deeper to go!" Sertino gasped.
Baerd leaped from his crouch staring at the three of them. He hesitated, visibly wracked by doubt for a moment, then he strode swiftly over to the wizards.
"Sandre, Erlein? Can you hear me?”
"Yes, of course." Sandres darkened face was streaming with perspiration. He was still staring east, but his gaze was unfocused now, inward.
"Then do it! Do what we talked about. If hes pushing all of you back we have to try or there is no point to any of this!”
"Baerd, they could be ..." Erleins words came out one by one as if forced from his lips.
"No, hes right!" Sertino gasped, cutting in. "Have to try. The mans . . . too strong. Ill follow you two . . . know where to reach. Do it!”
"Stay with me then," Erlein said, in a voice leeched of all strength. "Stay with me, both of you.”
There were sudden shouts and then screaming below them. Not from the battlefield. From the ground to the north. All of them but the wizards wheeled around to see.
Ducas had sprung his trap. Firing from ambush his outlaws unleashed a score of arrows at the Ygrathens, and then swiftly let fly as many more. Half a dozen, eight, ten of their attackers fell, but the Kings Guard of Ygrath were armored against arrows even in the blazing heat, and most of them pushed on, reacting with frightening agility despite the weight they carried, moving toward Ducass spread-out men.
Devin saw three of the downed men get up again. One pulled an arrow from his own arm and stumbled resolutely on, pressing toward their ridge.
"Some of them will have bows. We have to cover the wizards," Alessan snapped. "Any man with any kind of shield, over here!”
Half a dozen of the men remaining on the hill rushed over. Five had makeshift shields of wood or leather, the sixth, a man of some fifty years, limped behind them on a twisted foot, carrying nothing but an ancient, battered sword.
"My lord Prince," he said, "my body is shield enough for them. Your father would not let me go north to the Deisa. Do not deny me now. Not again. I can stand between them and any arrows, in Tiganas name.”
Devin saw the suddenly blank, frightened look on many of the faces near them: a name had been spoken that they could not hear.
"Ricaso," Alessan began, looking around. "Ricaso, you need not . . . You shouldnt have even come here. There were other ways to . . ." The Prince stopped. For a moment it looked as if he would refuse the man as his father had, but he said nothing more, only nodded his head once and strode away. The lame man and the other five immediately placed themselves in a protective circle around the wizards.
"Spread out!" Alessan ordered the others. "Cover the north and the west sides of the ridge. Catriana, Alais—keep your eyes on the south in case some of them make it around behind us. Shout if you see anything move!”
Sword in hand, Devin raced for the northwest edge of their hill. There were men fanning out all around him. He looked over as he ran, and caught his breath in dismay. Ducass men were in pitched battle on the uneven ground with the Ygrathens, and though they were holding their own, taking a man, it seemed, for every one of them that fell, that meant that they were falling. The Ygrathens were quick and superbly trained and ferociously determined. Devin saw their leader, a big man no longer young, hurl himself against one of the outlaws and hammer the man flat to the ground with a blow of his shield.
"Naddo! Look out!”
A scream, not a shout. Baerds voice. Wheeling, Devin saw why.
Halfway to the other hill, Naddo had just beaten back an Ygrathen, and was continuing a fighting withdrawal toward a clump of bushes where Arkin and two others were. What he didnt see was the man who had flanked wide to the east and was now rushing toward him from behind.
What the running Ygrathen didnt see was the arrow that hit him, fired from the summit of the ridge by Baerd di Tigana with all the strength of his arm and the skill of a lifelong discipline. Far away, unbelievably far, the Ygrathen grunted and fell, an arrow in his thigh. Naddo whirled at the sound, saw the man, and dispatched him with a quick sword.
He looked up at the ridge, saw Baerd, and quickly waved his thanks. He was still waving, hand aloft in salute to the friend he had left as a boy, when an Ygrathen arrow took him in the chest.
"No!" Devin cried out, a fist of grief clenching about his throat. He looked toward Baerd, whose eyes had gone wide with shock. Just as Devin took a step towards him he heard a quick scrabbling sound and a grunt, and behind him Alais screamed, "Look out!”
He turned back just in time to see the first of half a dozen Ygrathens surging up the slope. He had no idea how theyd got here so fast. He howled a second warning for the others and rushed forward to engage the first man before he gained the summit of the ridge.
He didnt make it. The Ygrathen was up and balanced, with a shield in his left hand. Charging at him, trying to drive the man backward down the slope, Devin swung his sword as hard as he could. It clanged on the metal shield sending shock waves all along his arm. The Ygrathen thrust straight ahead with his own blade. Devin saw it coming and twisted desperately to one side. He felt a sudden tearing pain as the
sword ripped him above the waist.
He let himself drop, ignoring the wound, and as he fell forward he chopped viciously for the unprotected back of the Ygrathens knee. He felt his sword bite deep into flesh. The man cried out and pitched helplessly forward, trying, even as he tumbled, to bring his own blade down on Devin again.
Devin rolled frantically away, dizzy with pain. He clawed to his feet, clutching his ripped side.
In time to see the prone Ygrathen killed by Alais bren Rovigo with a clean swordthrust in the back of his neck.
It seemed to Devin that he knew a moment of almost hallucinatory stillness then in the midst of carnage. He looked at Alais, at her clear, mild, blue eyes. He tried to speak. His throat was dry. Their gazes locked for a second. It was hard for Devin to absorb, to understand this image of her with a reddened sword in her hand.
He looked past her, and instantly the stillness was gone, shattered. Fifteen, perhaps twenty of the Ygrathens were up on the summit. More were coming. And some of them did have bows. He saw an arrow fly, to be embedded in one of the shields around the wizards. There was a sound of quick footsteps ascending the slope to his left. No time to speak, even if he could have. They were here to die if they had to, it had always been possible. There was a reason why they had come. There was a dream, a prayer, a tune his father had taught him as a child. He held his left hand tightly to his wound and turned from Alais, stumbling forward, gripping his sword, to meet the next man scrambling up the ridge.
A mild day, the sun in and out of the clouds pushed swiftly along by the breeze. In the morning they had walked in the meadows north of the castle gathering flowers, armfuls of them. Irises, anemones, bluebells. The sejoia trees were just coming into flower now this far south; they left the white blossoms for later in the season.
They were back in Castle Borso drinking mahgoti tea just past midday when Elena abruptly made a small, frightened sound. She stood up rigidly straight, her hands clutching at her head. Her tea spilled unregarded, staining the Quileian carpet.
Alienor quickly laid her own cup down. "It has come?" she said. "The summons? Elena, what can I do?”
Elena shook her head. She could scarcely hear the other womans words. There was a clearer, harder, more compelling voice in her head. Something that had never happened before, not even on the Ember Nights. But Baerd had been right, her stranger who had come to them out of darkness and changed the shape of the Ember wars.
He had returned to the village late in the day that followed, after his friends had come down from the pass and ridden west. He had spoken to Donar and Mattio and to Carenna and Elena and said that what the Night Walkers shared had to be a kind of magic, if not the same as wizardry. Their bodies changed in the Ember Nights, they walked under a green moon through lands that were not there by the light of day, they wielded swords of growing corn that altered under their hands. They were wedded in their own fashion, he had said, to the magic of the Palm.
And Donar had agreed that this was so. So Baerd had told them, carefully, what his purpose was, and that of his friends, and hed asked Elena to come to Castle Borso until summers end. In case, hed said, in case it was possible for their power to be tapped in this cause.
Would they do this? There would be danger. He had asked it diffidently, but there had been no hesitation in Elena as she looked into his eyes and answered that she would. Nor in the others when they agreed. He had come to them in their own need. They owed him at least this much, and more. And they too were living through tyranny in their own land. His cause in the daylight was their own.
Elena di Certando? Are you there? Are you in the castle?
She didnt know this mind-voice, but within its clarity she could sense a desperation; there seemed to be chaos all around him.
Yes. Yes, I am, Im here. What . . . what must I do?
I dont believe it! A second voice joined them, deeper, as imperative. Erlein, you have reached her!
Is Baerd there? she asked, a little desperately herself. The sudden link was dizzying, and the sense of tumult all around; she swayed, almost fell. She reached out and put both her hands on the high back of a chair. The room in Castle Borso was beginning to fade for her. Had Alienor spoken now she would not have even heard.
He is, the first man said quickly. He is here with us and we have terrible need of help. We are at wart Can you link to your friends? To the others? We will help you. Please! Reach for them!
She had never tried such a thing, not by daylight nor even under the green moon of the Ember Nights.
She had never known anything like this wizards link, but she felt their power resting in her, and she knew where Mattio would be, and Donar; and Carenna would be at home with her newest child. She closed her eyes and reached out for the three of them, straining to focus her mind on the forge, the mill, Carennas house in the village. To focus, and then to call. To summon.
Elena, what . . . ? Mattio. She had him.
Join me! she sent quickly. The wizards are here. There is war.
He asked no more questions. She could feel his steadying presence in her mind as the wizards helped her open to him. She registered his own sudden, disoriented shock at the link to the other men. Two of them, no three, there was a third one there as well.
Elena, has it come? Have they sent? Donar in her mind, seizing at truth like a weapon to his hand.
I am here, love! Carennas mind-voice, quick and bright, exactly the same as her speech. Elena, what must we do?
Hold to each other and open to us! the deep presence of the second wizard was there to answer. We may now have a chance. There is danger, I will not lie, but if we hold together—for once in this peninsula —we may yet break through! Come, join us, we must forge our minds into a shield. I am Sandre dAstibar and I never died. Come to us now!
Elena opened her mind to him, and reached out. And in that moment she felt as though her own body was entirely gone, as if she were no more than a conduit, like and yet very unlike what happened on the Ember Nights. A clammy fear of this unknown thing rose in her. Defiantly she fought it back. Her friends were with her, and— unbelievably—the Duke of Astibar was there, and alive, and Baerd was with him in far-off Senzio, battling against the Tyrants.
He had come to them, to her, in their own war. She had heard him weep and had lain with him in love on a hill in the Ember dark after the green moon had set. She would not fail him now. She would lead the Carlozzini to him along the pathway of her mind and her soul.
Without warning they broke through. The link was forged. She was in a high place under a fiercely blazing sun, seeing with the eyes of the Duke of Astibar on a hill in Senzio. The vision rocked with stomach-churning dislocation. Then it steadied and Elena saw men killing each other in a valley below, armies grappling together in the heat like beasts in a convulsive embrace. She heard screaming so loud she felt the sound as pain. Then she became aware of something else.
Sorcery. North of them, that hill. Brandin of Ygrath. And in that moment Elena and the three other Night Walkers understood why they had been summoned, feeling in their own minds the punishing weight of the assault they had to resist.
Back in Castle Borso, Alienor stood by, helpless and blind in her uncertainty, understanding nothing of this at all, only knowing that it was happening, that it was upon them at last. She wanted to pray, to reach back toward words not thought or spoken in almost twenty years. She saw Elena bring her hands up to cover her face.
"Oh no," she heard the girl whisper in a voice thin as old parchment. "So strong! How can one man
be so strong?”
Alienors hands gripped each other so tightly the knuckles were white. She waited, desperately seeking a clue to what was happening to all of them, so far to the north where she could not go.
She did not, could not hear Sandre dAstibars reply to Elena: He is strong yes, but with you we will be stronger! Oh, children, we can do it now! In the name of the Palm, together we can be strong enough!
What Alienor did see was how Elenas hands came down, how her white face grew calm, the wild, primitive terror leaving her staring eyes.
"Yes," she heard the other woman whisper. "Yes.”
Then there was silence in that room in Castle Borso under the Braccio Pass. Outside, the cool wind of the highlands blew the high white clouds across the sun and away, and across it and away, and a single hunting hawk hovered on motionless wings in that passing of light and shadow over the face of the mountains.
In fact, the next man scrabbling up the slope of the cliff was Ducas di Tregea. Devin had actually begun to swing his sword before he recognized who it was.
Ducas reached the summit in two hard, churning strides and stood beside him. He was a fearful sight.
His face was covered in blood, dripping down into his beard. There was blood all over him, and wet on his sword. He was smiling though, a terrible red look of battle-lust and rage.
"You are hurt!" he said sharply to Devin.
"I wouldnt talk," Devin grunted, pressing his left hand to his torn side. "Come on!”
Quickly they turned back east. More than fifteen of the Ygrathens were still on their summit, pressing forward against the untrained band of men Alessan had kept back to defend the wizards. The numbers were almost even, but the Ygrathens were the picked and deadly warriors of that realm.
Even so, even with this, they were not getting through. And they would not, Devin realized with a surge of exultation in his heart, rising high over pain and grief.
They would not, because facing them, side by side, swinging blades together in their longed-for battle after all the long waiting years that had run by, were Alessan, Prince of Tigana, and Baerd bar Saevar, the only brother of his soul, and the two of them were absolute and deadly, and even beautiful, if killing could be so.
Devin and Ducas rushed over. But by the time they got there five Ygrathens only were left, then three. Then only two. One of them made as if to lay down his sword. Before he could do so, a figure moved forward with an awkward, deceptive swiftness from the ring guarding the wizards. Dragging his lame foot, Ricaso came up to the Ygrathen. Before anyone could stay him he swung his old, half-rusted blade in a passionate, scything arc, cleaving through the links in armor to bury itself in the mans breast.
Then he fell to his knees on the ground beside the soldier hed killed, weeping as though his soul was pouring out of him.
Which left one of them only. And the last was the leader, the large, broad-chested man Devin had seen down below. The mans hair was plastered flat to his head, he was red-faced with heat and exhaustion, sucking hard for breath, but his eyes glared at Alessan.
"Are you fools?" he gasped. "Fighting for the Barbadian? Instead of with a man who has joined the Palm? Do you want to be slaves?”
Slowly Alessan shook his head. "It is twenty years too late for Brandin of Ygrath to join the Palm. It was too late the day he landed here with an invading force. You are a brave man. I would prefer not to kill you. Will you give us an oath in your own name and lay down your sword in surrender?”
Beside Devin, Ducas snarled angrily. But before the Tregean could speak, the Ygrathen said: "My
name is Rhamanus. I offer it to you in pride, for no dishonor has ever attached to that name. You will have no oath from me though. I swore one to the King I love before I led his Guard here. I told him I would stop you or die. It is an oath I will keep.”
He raised his sword toward Alessan, and gestured—though not seriously, Devin realized afterwards—to strike at the Prince. Alessan did not even move to ward the blow. It was Baerd whose blade came up and then swept downward to bite with finality into the neck of the Ygrathen, driving him to the ground.
"Oh, my King," they heard the man say then, thickly, through the blood rising in his mouth. "Oh, Brandin, I am so sorry.”
Then he rolled over on his back and lay still, his sightless eyes staring straight at the burning sun.
The sun had been burning hot as well, the morning he had defied the Governor and taken a young serving-girl for tribute down the river from Stevanien, so many years ago.
Dianora saw a man raise his sword on that hill. She turned her head away so she would not see Rhamanus die. There was an ache in her, a growing void; she felt as if all the chasms of her life were opening in the ground before her feet. He had been an enemy, the man who had seized her to be a slave.
Sent to claim tribute for Brandin, he had burned villages and homes in Corte and Asoli. He had been an Ygrathen. Had sailed to the Palm in the invading fleet, had fought in the last battle by the Deisa.
He had been her friend.
One of her only friends. Brave and decent and loyal all his life to his King. Kind and direct, ill-at- ease in a subtle court . . . Dianora realized that she was weeping for him, for the good life cloven like a tree by that strangers descending sword.
"They have failed, my lord." It was dEymon, his voice actually showing—or was she imagining it?—the faintest hint of emotion. Of sorrow. "All of the Guards are down, and Rhamanus. The wizards are still there.”
From his chair under the canopy Brandin opened his eyes. His gaze was fixed on the valley below and he did not turn. Dianora saw that his face was chalk-white now with strain, even in the red heat of the day. She wiped quickly at her tears: he must not see her thus if he should chance to look. He might need her, whatever strength or love she had to give. He must not be distracted with concern for her. He was one man alone, fighting so many.
And more, in fact, than she even knew. For the wizards had reached the Night Walkers in Certando by now. They were linked, and they were all bending the power of their minds to Albericos defense.
From the plain below there came a roar, even above the steady noise of battle. Cheering and wild shouts from the Barbadians. Dianora could see their white-clad messengers sprinting forward from the rear where Alberico was. She saw that the men of the Western Palm had been stopped in their advance.
They were still outnumbered; terribly so. If Brandin could not help them now then all was done, all over.
She looked south toward that hill where the wizards were, where Rhamanus had been cut down. She wanted to curse them all, but she could not.
They were men of the Palm. They were her own people. But her own people were dying in the valley as well, under the heavy blades of the Empire. The sun was a brand overhead. The sky a blank, pitiless dome.
She looked at dEymon. Neither of them spoke. They heard quick footsteps on the slope. Scelto stumbled up, fighting for breath.
"My lord," he gasped, dropping to his knees beside Brandins chair, "we are hard-pressed ... in the center and on the right. The left is holding . . . but barely. I am ordered ... to ask if you want us to fall back.”
And so it had come.
I hate that man, he had said to her last night, before falling asleep in utter weariness. / hate everything he stands for.
There was a silence on the hill. It seemed to Dianora as if she could hear her own heartbeat with some curious faculty of the ear, discerning it even above the sounds from below. The noises in the valley seemed, oddly, to have receded now. To be growing fainter every second.
Brandin stood up.
"No," he said quietly. "We do not fall back. There is nowhere to retreat, and not before the Barbadian.
Not ever." He was gazing bleakly out over Sceltos kneeling form, as if he would penetrate the distance with his eyes to strike at Albericos heart.
But there was something else in him now: something new, beyond rage, beyond the grimness of resolution and the everlasting pride. Dianora sensed it, but she could not understand. Then he turned to her and she saw in the depths of that grey gaze a bottomless well of pain opening up such as she had never seen in him. Never seen in anyone, in all her days. Pity and grief and love, he had said last night.
Something was happening; her heart was racing wildly. She felt her hands beginning to shake.
"My love," Brandin said. Mumbled, slurred it. She saw death in his eyes, an abscess of loss that seemed to be leaving him almost blind, stripping his soul. "Oh, my love," he said again. "What have they done? See what they will make me do. Oh, see what they make me do!”
"Brandin!" she cried, terrified, not understanding at all. Beginning again to weep, frantically.
Grasping only the open sore of hurt he had become. She reached out toward him, but he was blind, and already turning away, east, toward the rim of the hill and the valley below.
"All right," said Rinaldo the Healer, and lifted his hands away. Devin opened his eyes and looked down. His wound had closed; the bleeding had stopped. The sight of it made him feel queasy; the unnatural speed of the healing, as if his senses still expected to find a fresh wound there. "You are going to have an easy scar for women to know you by in the dark," Rinaldo added drily. Ducas gave a bark of laughter.
Devin winced and carefully avoided meeting Alaiss eye. She was right beside him, wrapping a roll of linen around his torso to bind the wound. He looked at Ducas instead, whose own cut above his eye had been closed by Rinaldo in the same way. Arkin, who had also survived the skirmish down below, was bandaging it. Ducas, his red beard matted and sticky with blood, looked like some fearful creature out of childhood night terrors.
"Is that too tight?" Alais asked softly.
Devin drew a testing breath and shook his head. The wound hurt, but he seemed to be all right.
"You saved my life," he murmured to her. She was behind him now, tying up the ends of his bandage. Her hands stopped for a moment and then resumed.
"No I didnt," she said in a muffled voice. "He was down. He couldnt have hurt you. All I did was kill a man." Catriana, standing near them, glanced over. "I ... I wish I hadnt," Alais said- And began to cry.
Devin swallowed and tried to turn, to offer comfort, but Catriana was quicker than he, and had already gathered Alais in her arms. He looked at them, wondering bitterly what real comfort there could be to offer on this bare ridge in the midst of war.
"Erleinl Now! Brandin is standing!" Alessans cry knifed through all other sounds. His heart suddenly thumping again, Devin went quickly toward the Prince and the wizards.
"It is upon us then," said Erlein, in a hard, flat voice to the other two. "I will have to pull out now, to track him. Wait for my signal, but move when I give it!”
"We will," Sertino gasped. "Triad save us all." Sweat was pouring down the pudgy wizards face. His hands were shaking with strain.
"Erlein," Alessan began urgently, "He must use it all. You know what you—”
"Hush! I know exactly what I must do. Alessan, you have set this in motion, you brought us all here to Senzio, every single person, the living and the dead. Now it is up to us. Be still, unless you want to pray.”
Devin looked north to Brandins hill. He saw the King step forward from under his canopy.
"Oh, Triad," he heard Alessan whisper then in a queerly high voice. "Adaon, remember us.
Remember your children now!" The Prince sank to his knees. "Please," he whispered again. "Please, let me have been right!”
On his hill to the north of them Brandin of Ygrath stretched forth one hand and then the other under the burning sun.
Dianora saw him move forward to the very edge of the hill, out from the canopy into the white blaze of the light. Scelto scrambled away. Beneath them the armies of the Western Palm were being hammered back now, center and left and right. The cries of the Barbadians had taken on a quality of triumphant malice that fell like blows upon the heart.
Brandin lifted his right hand and leveled it ahead. Then he brought up his left beside it so that the palms were touching each other, the ten fingers pointing together. Pointing straight to where Alberico of Barbadior was, at the rear of his army.
And Brandin of the Western Palm, who had been the King of Ygrath when he first came to this peninsula, cried aloud then, in a voice that seemed to flay and shred the very air: "Oh, my son! Stevan, forgive me what I do!”
Dianora stopped breathing. She thought she was going to fall. She reached out a hand for support and didnt even realize it was dEymon who braced her.
Then Brandin spoke again, in a voice colder than she had ever heard him use, words none of them could understand. Only the sorcerer down in the valley would know, only he could grasp the enormity of what was happening.
She saw Brandin spread his legs, as if to brace himself. Then she saw what followed.
"Now!" Erlein di Senzio screamed. "Both of you! Get the others out! Cut free now!”
"Theyre loose!" Sertino cried. "Im out!" He collapsed in a heap to the ground as if he might never rise again.
Something was happening on the other hill. In the middle of day, under the brilliant sun, the sky seemed to be changing, to be darkening where Brandin stood. Something—not smoke, not light, some kind of change in the very nature of the air—seemed to be pouring from his hands, boiling east and down, disorienting to the eye, blurred, unnatural, like a rushing doom.
Erlein suddenly turned his head, his eyes widening with horror.
"Sandre, what are you doing?" he shrieked, grabbing wildly at the Duke. "Get out, you fool! In Eannas name, get out!”
"Not . . . yet," said Sandre dAstibar, in a voice that carried its own full measure of doom.
There had been more of them. Four more coming to his aid. Not wizards now, a different kind of magic of the Palm, one he hadnt even known about, didnt understand. But it didnt matter. They were here and on his side, if screened from his mind, and with them, with all of them bending their power to his defense, he had even been able to reach out, and forward, to assert his own strength against the enemy.
Who were falling back! There was glory after all under the sun, and hope, more than hope, a glittering vista of triumph spreading in the valley before him, a pathway made smooth with the blood of his foes, leading straight from here back across the sea and home to the Tiara.
He would bless these wizards, honor them! Make them lords of unimagined power, here in this
colony or in Barbadior. Wherever they wanted, whatever they chose. And thinking so, Alberico had felt his own magic flow like intoxicating wine in his veins and had sent it pouring forth against the Ygrathens and the men of the Western Palm, and his armies had laughed aloud in triumph and felt their swords to be suddenly as light as summer grass.
He heard them beginning to sing, the old battle-song of the Empires legions, conquering in far lands centuries ago. And they were! It was happening again. They werent just mercenaries; they were the Empires legions, for he was, or would be, the Empire. He could see it. It was here, it was shining before him in the blazing day.
Then Brandin of Ygrath rose and stepped to the rim of his hill. A distant figure alone under the sun in that high place. And a moment later, Alberico, who was a sorcerer himself, felt, for he could not have actually heard, the dark, absolute words of invocation that Brandin spoke, and his blood froze in his veins like ice in the dead of a winter night.
"He cannot," he gasped aloud. "Not after so long! He cannot do this!”
But the Ygrathen was. He was reaching for all, summoning everything, every last scintilla of his magic, holding nothing back. Nothing, not even the power that had sustained the vengeance that had kept him here all these years. He was emptying himself to shape a sorcery such as had never been wielded before.
Desperately, still half disbelieving, Alberico reached out for the wizards. To tell them to brace, to be ready. Crying that there were eight of them, nine, that they could hold against this. That all they had to do was survive this moment and Brandin would be nothing, a shell. Waste, for weeks, months, years! A hollow man with no magic in him anymore.
Their minds were closed, barred against him. They were still there though, and defending, braced.
Oh, if the horned god and the Night Queen were with him! If they were with him yet, he might still . . .
They were not. They were not with him.
For in that instant Alberico felt the wizards of the Palm cut loose, melting away without warning, with terrifying suddenness, to leave him naked and alone. On the hill Brandin had now leveled his hands and from them came blue-grey death, an occluding, obliterating presence in the air, foaming and boiling down across the valley toward him.
And the wizards were gone! He was alone.
Or almost gone, almost alone. One man was still linked, one of them had held with him! And then that one mind opened up to Alberico like the locked door of a dungeon springing back, letting light flood in.
The light of truth. And in that moment Alberico of Barbadior screamed aloud in terror and helpless rage, for illumination came at last and he understood, too late, how he had been undone, and by whom destroyed.
In the name of my sons I curse you forever, said Sandre, Duke of Astibar, his remorseless image rising in Albericos mind like an apparition of horror from the afterworld. But he was alive. Impossibly alive, and here in Senzio on that ridge, with eyes implacable and utterly merciless. He bared his teeth in a smile that summoned the night. In the name of my children and of Astibar, die now, forever cursed.
Then he cut free, he too was gone, as that blue-grey death came boiling down the valley from Brandins hill, from his outstretched hands, with blurred, annihilating speed, and Alberico, still reeling with shock, clawing frantically upward from his chair, was struck and enveloped and consumed by that death, as a tidal wave of the raging, engorged sea will take a sapling in low-lying fields.
It swept him away with it and sundered his body, still screaming, from his soul, and he died. Died in that far Peninsula of the Palm two days before his Emperor passed to the gods in Barbadior, failing at last one morning to wake from a dreamless sleep.
Albericos army heard his last scream, and their own cries of exultation turned to panic-stricken horror; in the face of that magic from the hill the Barbadians felt a fear such as men should never have had to endure sweep over them. They could scarcely grip their swords, or flee, or even stand upright before their foes who advanced untouched, unharmed, exalted, under that dread, sun-blighting sorcery, and began to carve and hew them with hard and deadly wrath.
Everything, thought Brandin of Ygrath, of the Western Palm, weeping helplessly on his hill as he looked down over the valley. He had been driven to this and had answered, had summoned all he had ever had to this final purpose, and it was enough. It was sufficient and nothing less would have been. There had been too much magic opposed to him, and death had been waiting for his people here.
He knew what he had been made to do, knew the price of holding nothing back. He had paid that price and was paying it now, would go on doing so with every breath he drew until he died. He had screamed Stevans name, aloud and in the echoing chambers of his soul, before the summoning of that power. Had known that twenty years of vengeance for that too-soon shattered life were now undone under this bronze sun. Nothing held back. It was over.
There had been men dying below him though, fighting under his banner, in his name, and there had been no retreat for them from that plain. Nor for him. He could not retreat. He had been driven to this moment, like a bear to a rocky cliff by a pack of wolves, and the price was being paid now. Everywhere the price was being paid. There was butchery in the valley; a slaughter of Barbadians. His heart was crying. He was a grieving, torn thing, all the memories of love, of a fathers loss flooding over him, another kind of tidal wave. Stevan.
He wept, adrift in an ocean of loss, far from any shore. He was aware, dimly, of Dianora beside him, clutching his hands between her own, but he was lost inside his pain, power gone now, the core of his being shattered into fragments, shards, a man no longer young, trying without any hope at all, to conceive of how to shape a life that could possibly go forward from this hill.
Then the next thing happened. For he had, in fact, forgotten something. Something he alone could possibly have known.
And so time, which truly would not stop, for grief or pity or love, carried them all forward to the moment no sorcerer or wizard or piper on his ridge had foreseen.
The weight had been the weight of mountains crushing his mind. Carefully, exquisitely judged to leave him that faintest spark of self-awareness, which was where the purest torture lay. That he might always know exactly who he was and had been, and what he was being made to do, utterly unable to control himself. Pressed flat under the burden of mountains.
Which now were gone. He straightened his back, of his own will. He turned east. Of his own will. He tried to lift his head higher but could not. He understood: too many years in the same skewed, sunken position. They had broken the bones of his shoulder several times, carefully. He knew what he looked like, what they had turned him into in that darkness long ago. He had seen himself in mirrors through the years, and in the mirrors of others eyes. He knew exactly what had been done to his body before they started on his mind.
That didnt matter now. The mountains were gone. He looked out with his own sight, reached back with his own memories, could speak, if he wished to speak, with his own thoughts, his own voice, however much it had changed.
What Rhun did was draw his sword.
Of course he had a sword. He carried whatever weapon Brandin did, was given each day the clothing the King had chosen; he was the vent, the conduit, the double, the Fool.
He was more than that. He knew exactly how much more. Brandin had left him that delicately measured scrap of awareness at the very bottom of his mind, under the burying, piled-up mountains. That had been the whole point, the essence of everything; that and the secrecy, the fact that only they two knew
and only they would ever know.
The men who had maimed and disfigured him had been blind, working on him in their darkness, knowing him only by the insistent probing of their hands upon his flesh, reaching through to bone. They had never learned who he was. Only Brandin knew, only Brandin and he himself, with that dim flickering of his identity so carefully left behind after everything else was gone. It had been so elegantly contrived, this answer to what he had done, this response to grief and rage. This vengeance.
No one living other than Brandin of Ygrath knew his true name and under the weight of mountains he had had no tongue to speak it himself, only a heart to cry for what was being done to him. The exquisite perfection of it, of that revenge.
But the mountains that had buried him were gone.
And on that thought, Valentin, Prince of Tigana, lifted his sword on a hill in Senzio.
His mind was his own, his memories: of a room without light, black as pitch, the voice of the Ygrathen King, weeping, telling what was being done to Tigana even as they spoke, and what would be done to him in the months and the years to come.
A mutilated body, his own features sorcerously imposed upon it, was death-wheeled in Chiara later that week then burned to ash and scattered to the winds.
In the black room the blind men began their work. He remembered trying not to scream at first. He remembered screaming. Much later Brandin came and began and ended his own part of that careful patient work. A torture of a different kind; much worse. The weight of mountains in his mind.
Late in that same year the Kings Fool from Ygrath died of a misadventure in the newly occupied Palace of Chiara. And shortly afterwards, Rhun, with his weak, blinking eyes, his deformed shoulder and slack mouth, his nearly crippled walk, was brought shambling up from his darkness into twenty years of night.
It was very bright here now, almost blindingly so in the sunlight. Brandin was just ahead of him. The girl was holding his hand.
The girl. The girl was Saevars daughter.
He had known her the moment she was first brought to be presented to the King. She had changed in five years, greatly changed, and she would change much more as the years spun past, but her eyes were her fathers, exactly, and Valentin had watched Dianora grow up. When he had heard her named, that first day, as a woman from Cer-tando, the dim, allowed spark of his mind had flickered and burned, for he knew, he knew what she had come to do.
Then, as the months passed and the years, he watched helplessly with his rheumy eyes from under the crush of his mountains, as the terrible interwovenness of things added love to everything else. He was bound to Brandin unimaginably and he saw what happened. More, he was made to be a part of it, by the very nature of the relationship between the Kings and the Fools of Ygrath.
It was he who first gave expression—beyond his control, he had no control—to what was growing in the heart of the King. Back in a time when Brandin still refused to admit even the idea of love into a soul and a life shaped by vengeance and loss it was Rhun—Valentin— who would find himself staring at Dianora, at Saevars dark-haired daughter, with another mans soul in his eyes.
No more, not ever again. The long night had been rolled back. The sorcery that had bound him was gone. It was over; he stood in sunlight and could speak his true name if he chose. He took an awkward step forward and then, more carefully, another. No one noticed him though. They never noticed him. He was the Fool. Rhun. Even that name, chosen by the King. Only the two of them ever to know. Not for the world, this. The privacy of pride. He had even understood. Perhaps the most terrible thing of all: he had understood.
He stepped under the canopy. Brandin was ahead of him near the edge of the hill. He had never
struck a man from behind in all his days. He moved to one side, stumbling a little, and came up on the Kings right hand. No one looked at him. He was Rhun.
He was not.
"You should have killed me by the river," he said, very clearly. Slowly, Brandin turned his head, as if just now remembering something. Valentin waited until their eyes met and held before he drove his sword into the Ygrathens heart, the way a Prince killed his enemies, however many years it might take, however much might have to be endured before such an ending was allowed.
Dianora could not even scream she was so stunned, so unprepared. She saw Brandin stagger backward, a blade in his chest. Then Rhun— Rhun!—jerked it clumsily free and so much blood followed.
Brandins eyes were wide with astonishment and pain, but they were clear, so luminously clear. And so was his voice as she heard him say: "Both of us?" He swayed, still on his feet. "Father and son, both? What a harvest. Prince of Tigana.”
Dianora heard the name as a white burst of sound in her brain. Time seemed to change, to slow unbearably. She saw Brandin sinking to his knees; it seemed to take forever for him to fall. She tried to move toward him; her body would not respond. She heard an elongated, weirdly distorted sound of anguish, and saw stark agony in dEymons face as the Chancellors blade ripped into and through Rhuns side.
Not Rhun. Not Rhun. Valentin the Prince.
Brandins Fool. All those years. The thing that had been done to him! And she beside him, beside that suffering. All those years. She wanted to scream. She could not make a sound, could scarcely breathe.
She saw him falling too, the maimed, broken form crumpling to the ground beside Brandin. Who was still on his knees, a red wound in his chest. And who was looking at her now, only at her. A sound finally escaped her lips as she sank down beside him. He reached out, so slowly, with such a colossal effort of will, with all the control he had, and he took her hand.
"Oh, love," she heard him say. "It is as I told you. We should have met in Finavir.”
She tried again to speak, to answer him, but tears were streaming down her face and closing her throat. She gripped his hand as tightly as she could, trying to will life from herself over into him. He slumped sideways against her shoulder, and so she lowered him to her lap and wrapped her arms around him, the way she had last night, only last night when he slept. She saw the brilliantly clear grey eyes slowly grow cloudy, and then dark. She was holding him like that when he died.
She lifted her head. The Prince of Tigana, on the ground beside them, was looking at her with so much compassion in his newly clear eyes. Which was a thing she could not possibly endure. Not from him: not with what he had suffered and what she was, what she herself had done. If he only knew, what words would he have for her, what look would there be in those eyes? She could not bear it. She saw him open his mouth as if to speak, then his eyes flicked quickly to one side.
A shadow crossed the sun. She looked up and saw dEymons sword lifted high. Valentin raised a hand, pleading, to ward it.
"Wait!" she gasped, forcing the one word out.
And dEymon, almost mad with his own grief yet stayed for her voice. Held back his sword. Valentin lowered his hand. She saw him draw breath against the massive final reality of his own wound, and then, closing his eyes to the pain and the fierce light, she heard him speak. Not a cry, only the one word spoken in a clear voice. The one word which was—oh, what else could it have ever been?—the name of his home, offered as a shining thing for the world again to know.
And Dianora saw then that dEymon of Ygrath did know it. That he did hear the name. Which meant that all men now could, that the spell was broken. Valentin opened his eyes and looked up at the Chancellor, reading the truth of that knowledge in dEymons face, and Dianora saw that the Prince of
Tigana was smiling as the Chancellors sword came down from its great height and drove into his heart.
Even in death the smile remained on the terribly afflicted face. And the echo of his last word, the single name, seemed to Dianora to be hanging yet and spreading outward in ripples through the air around the hill, above the valley where the Barbadians were all dying now.
She looked down at the dead man in her arms, cradling his head and the greying hair, and she could not stop her tears. In Finavir, he had said. Last words. Another named place, farther away than dream.
And had been right, as so many many times he had been right. They ought to have met, if the gods had any kindness, any pity at all for them, in another world than this. Not here. For love was what it was, but it was not enough. Not here.
She heard a sound from under the canopy and turned in time to see dEymon slump forward against Brandins chair. The hilt of his sword was against the seat-back of the chair. The blade was buried in his breast. She saw it and she pitied him his pain but she could not properly grieve. There was nothing left within her for such a sorrow. DEymon of Ygrath could not matter now. Not with the two men lying here with her, beside each other. She could pity, oh, she could pity any man or woman born, but she could not grieve for any but these two. Not now.
Not ever, she realized.
She looked over then and saw Scelto, still on his knees, the only other living person on this hill. He too was weeping. But for her, she realized, even more than for the dead. His first tears had always been for her. He seemed to be far away though. Everything seemed oddly remote. Except Brandin. Except Valentin.
For the last time she looked down at the man for whose love she had betrayed her home and all her dead and her own vengeance sworn before a fire in her fathers house so long ago. She looked down upon what remained of Brandin of Ygrath with his soul gone, and slowly, tenderly, Dianora lowered her head and kissed him upon the lips in farewell. "In Finavir," she said. "My love." Then she laid him on the ground beside Valentin and she stood.
Looking south she saw that three men and the woman with red hair had descended the slope of the wizards ridge and were beginning to swiftly cross the uneven ground between. She turned to Scelto whose eyes had now a terrible foreknowledge in them. He knew her, she remembered, he loved her and he knew her much too well. He knew all save the one thing, and that one secret she would take away with her. That was her own.
"In a way," she said to him, gesturing at the Prince, "it would almost be better if no one ever knew who he was. But I dont think we can do that. Tell them, Scelto. Stay, and tell them when they get here.
Whoever they are, they ought to know.”
"Oh, my lady," he whispered, weeping. "Must it end like this?”
She knew what he meant. Of course she knew. She would not dissemble with him now. She looked at the people—whoever they were—coming quickly across the ground from the south. The woman.
A brown-haired man with a sword, another darker one, a third man, smaller than the other two.
"Yes," she said to Scelto, watching them approach. "Yes, I think it must.”
And so she turned and left him with the dead on that hill, to wait for those who were coming even now. She left the valley behind, the hill, left all the noises of battle and pain, walking down the northernmost of the goatherds tracks as it wound west along the slope of the hill out of sight of everyone.
There were flowers growing along the path: sonrai berries, wild lilies, irises, anemones, yellow and white, and then there was a scarlet one. In Tregea they said that flower had been made red by the blood of Adaon where he fell.
There were no men or women on that slope to see her or to stay her as she went, nor was the distance very far to level ground and then to the beginnings of the sand and finally to the margin of the sea where there were gulls wheeling and crying overhead.
There was blood on her garments. She discarded them in a small pile on the wide sweep of that white sand. She stepped into the water —it was cool, but not nearly so cold as the sea of Chiara had been on the morning of the Dive. She walked out slowly until it came to her hips and then she began to swim. Straight out, heading west, toward where the sun would set when it finally went down to end this day. She was a good swimmer; her father had taught her and her brother long ago after a dream she had had. Valentin the Prince had even come with them once to their cove. Long ago.
When she began, at length, to tire she was very far from the shore, out where the blue-green of the ocean near land changes to the darker blue of the deep. And there she dived, pushing herself downward, away from the blue of the sky and the bronze sun and it seemed to her as she went down that there was an odd illumination appearing in the water, a kind of path here in the depths of the sea.
She had not expected that. She had not thought any such thing would be here for her. Not after all that had happened, all that she had done. But there was indeed a path, a glow of light defining it. She was tired now, and deep, and her vision was beginning to grow dim. She thought she saw a shape flicker at the edge of the shimmering light. She could not see very clearly though, there seemed to be a kind of mist coming down over her. She thought for a moment the shape might be the riselka, though she had not earned that, or even Adaon, though she had no claim at all upon the god. But then it seemed to Dianora that there was a last gathering of brightness in her mind at the very end, and the mist fell back a little, and she saw that for her it was neither of these, after all, not the riselka, nor the god.
It was Morian, come in kindness, come in grace, to bring her home.
Alone of the living on a hill with the dead, Scelto stood and composed himself as best he could, waiting for those he could see beginning to climb the slope.
When the three men and the tall woman reached the summit he knelt in submission as they surveyed in silence what had happened here. What death had claimed upon this hill. He was aware that they might kill him, even as he knelt. He wasnt sure that he cared.
The King was lying only an arms length away from Rhun who had slain him. Rhun, who had been a Prince here in the Palm. Prince of Tigana. Lower Corte. If he had a space of time later, Scelto sensed that the pieces of this story might begin to come together for him. Even numbed as he was now, he could feel a lancing hurt in his mind if he dwelt upon that history. So much done in the name of the dead.
She would be near the water by now. She would not be coming back this time. He had not expected her to return on the morning of the Dive; she had tried to hide it, but he had seen something in her when she woke that day. He hadnt understood why, but he had known that she was readying herself to die.
She had been ready, he was certain of it; something had changed for her by the waters edge that day.
It would not change again.
"You are?”
He looked up. A lean, black-haired man, silvering at the temples, was looking down at him with a clear grey gaze. Eyes curiously like Brandins had been.
"I am Scelto. I was a servant in the saishan, a messenger today.”
"You were here when they died?”
Scelto nodded. The mans voice was calm, though there was a discernible sense of effort in that, as if he were trying with his tone to superimpose some pattern of order upon the chaos of the day.
"Will you tell me who killed the King of Ygrath?”
"His Fool," Scelto said quietly, trying to match the manner of the other man. In the distance below them the noises of battle were subsiding at last.
"How? At Brandins request?" It was one of the other men, a hard-looking, bearded figure with dark eyes and a sword in his hand.
Scelto shook his head. He felt overwhelmingly weary all of a sudden. She would be swimming. She
would be a long way out by now. "No. It was an attack. I think . . ." He lowered his head, fearful of presuming.
"Go on," said the first man gently. "You are in no danger from us. I have had enough of blood today.
More than enough.”
Scelto looked up at that, wondering. Then he said, "I think that when the King used his last magic he was too intent on the valley and he forgot about Rhun. He used so much in that spell that he released the Fool from his binding.”
"He released more than that," the grey-eyed man said softly. The tall woman had come to stand beside him. She had red hair and deep blue eyes; she was young and very beautiful.
She would be far out among the waves. It would all be over soon. He had not said farewell. After so many years. Despite himself, Scelto choked back a sob. "May I know," he asked them, not even sure why he needed this, "may I know who you are?”
And quietly, without arrogance or even any real assertion, the dark-haired man said, "My name is Alessan bar Valentin, the last of my line. My father and brothers were killed by Brandin almost twenty years ago. I am the Prince of Tigana.”
Scelto closed his eyes.
In his mind he was hearing Brandins voice again, clear and cold, laden with irony, even with his mortal wound: What a harvest. Prince of Tigana. And Rhun, just before he died, speaking that same name under the dome of the sky.
His own revenge was here then.
"Where is the woman?" the third man asked suddenly, the younger, smaller one. "Where is Dianora di Certando who did the Ring Dive? Was she not here?”
It would be over by now. It would be calm and deep and dark for her. Green tendrils of the sea would grace her hair and twine about her limbs. She would finally be at rest, at peace.
Scelto looked up. He was weeping, he didnt even try to stop, or hide his tears now. "She was here,”
he said. "She has gone to the sea again, to an ending in the sea.”
He didnt think they would care. That they could possibly care about that, any of them, but he saw then that he was wrong. All four of them, even the grim, warlike one with the brown hair, grew abruptly still and then turned, almost as one, to look west past the slopes and the sand to where the sun was setting over the water.
"I am deeply sorry to hear that," said the man named Alessan. "I saw her do the Ring Dive in Chiara.
She was beautiful and astonishingly brave.”
The brown-haired man stepped forward, an unexpected hesitation in his eyes. He wasnt as stern as he had first seemed, Scelto realized, and he was younger as well.
"Tell me," the man. "Was she ... did she ever . . ." He stopped, in confusion. The other man, the Prince, looked at him with compassion in his eyes.
"She was from Certando, Baerd. Everyone knows the story.”
Slowly, the other man nodded his head. But when he turned away it was to look out toward the sea again. They dont seem like conquerors, Scelto thought. They didnt seem like men in the midst of a triumph. They just looked tired, as at the end of a very long journey.
"So it wasnt me, after all," the grey-eyed man was saying, almost to himself. "After all my years of dreaming. It was his own Fool who killed him. It had nothing to do with us." He looked at the two dead men lying together, then back at Scelto. "Who was the Fool? Do we know?”
She was gone, claimed by the dark sea far down. She was at rest. And Scelto was so tired. Tired of grief and blood and pain, of these bitter cycles of revenge. He knew what was going to happen to this man
the moment he spoke.
They ought to know, she had said, before she walked away to the sea, and it was true, of course it was true. Scelto looked up at the grey-eyed man.
"Rhun?" he said. "An Ygrathen bound to the King many years ago. No one very important, my lord.”
The Prince of Tigana nodded his head, his expressive mouth quirking with an inward-directed irony.
"Of course," he said. "Of course. No one very important. Why should I have thought it would be otherwise?”
"Alessan," said the younger man from the front of the hill, "I think it is over. Down below, I mean. I think ... I think the Barbadians are all dead.”
The Prince lifted his head and so did Scelto. Men of the Palm and of Ygrath would be standing beside each other down in that valley.
"Are you going to kill us all now?" Scelto asked him.
The Prince of Tigana shook his head. "I told you, I have had enough of blood. There is a great deal to be done, but I am going to try to do it without any more killing now.”
He went to the southern rim of the hill and lifted his hand in some signal to the men on his own ridge.
The woman went over and stood beside him, and he put an arm around her shoulders. A moment later they heard the notes of a horn ring out over the valley and the hills, clear and high and beautiful, sounding an end to battle.
Scelto, still on his knees, wiped at his eyes with a grimy hand. He looked over and saw that the third man, the one who had tried to ask him something, was still gazing out to sea. There was a pain there he could not understand. There had been pain everywhere today though. He had had it in his grasp, even now, to speak truth and unleash so much more.
His eyes swung slowly down again, away from the hard blue sky and the blue-green sea, past the man at the western edge of the hill, past dEymon of Ygrath slumped across the Kings chair with his own blade in his breast, and his gaze came to rest on the two dead men beside each other on the ground, so near that they could have touched had they been alive.
He could keep their secret. He could live with it.
EPILOGUE THREE MEN ON HORSES IN THE SOUTHERN HIGHLANDS LOOKING over a valley to the east. There are pine and cedar woods beyond, hills on either side. The Sperion River sparkles in the distance, flowing down out of the mountains, not far from where it will begin its long curve west to find the sea. The air is bright and cool, with a feel of autumn in the breeze. The colors of the leaves will be changing soon and the year-round snow on the highest peaks of the mountains will begin moving down, closing the pass.
In the tranquil green of the valley below them, Devin sees the dome of Eannas temple flash in the morning sunlight. Beyond the Sanctuary he can just make out the winding trail they had ridden down in the spring, coming here from the east across the border. It seems a lifetime ago. He turns in the saddle and looks north over the rolling, gradually subsiding hills.
"Will we be able to see it from here, later?”
Baerd glances over and then follows his gaze. "What, Avalle and the Towers? Easily, on any clear day. Meet me here in a years time and youll see my green-and-white Princes Tower, I promise you.”
"Where are you getting the marble?" Sandre asks.
"Same place as Orsaria did for the original tower. The quarry is still available, believe it or not, about two days ride west of us near the coast.”
"And youll have it carried here?”
"By sea to Tigana, then on river barges up the Sperion. The same way they did it back then." Baerd has shaved his beard again. He looks years younger, Devin finds himself thinking.
"How do you know so much about it?" Sandre asks with lazy mockery. "I thought all you knew was archery and how not to fall on your face when you were out alone in the dark.”
Baerd smiles. "I was always going to be a builder. I have my fathers love of stone if not his gift. Im a craftsman though, and I knew how to look at things, even back then. I think I know as much as any man alive about how Orsaria built his towers and his palaces. Including one in Astibar, Sandre. Would you like me to tell you where your secret passages are?”
Sandre laughs aloud. "Dont boast, you presumptuous mason. On the other hand, it has been almost twenty years since I was in that palace, you may have to remind me of where they are.”
Grinning, Devin looks over at the Duke. It has taken him a long time to adjust to seeing Sandre without his dark Khardhu guise. "You will be going back after the wedding, then?" he asks, feeling a sadness at the thought of another parting ahead.
"I think I must, though I will say that Im torn. I feel too old for governing anyone now. And it isnt as if I have any heirs to groom.”
After a moments stillness, Sandre takes them smoothly past the darkness of those memories: "To be honest, the thing that interests me most right now is what Ive been doing here in Tigana. The mind- linking with Erlein and Sertino and the wizards weve managed to find.”
"And the Night Walkers?" Devin asks.
"Indeed, Baerds Carlozzini as well. I must say Im pleased that the four of them are coming with Alienor to the wedding.”
"Not as pleased as Baerd is, Im sure," Devin adds slyly. Baerd gives him a look, and pretends to be absorbed in scanning the distant line of the road south of them.
"Well, hardly as pleased," Sandre agrees. "Though I do hope hell spare his Elena for a small part of the time shes here. If we are going to change the attitude of this peninsula to magic theres no better time to start than now, wouldnt you say?”
"Oh, certainly," Devin says, grinning broadly.
"Shes not my Elena," Baerd murmurs, keeping his eyes firmly fixed on the road.
"She isnt?" Sandre asks in mock surprise. "Then whos this Baerd person she keeps using me to relay messages to? Would you know the fellow?”
"Never heard of him," Baerd says laconically. He keeps a straight face for a moment longer, then gives way to laughter. "Im beginning to remember why I preferred keeping to myself. And what about Devin, if youre on that subject? You dont think Alais would be sending him messages if she could?”
"Devin," says the Duke airily, "is a mere child, far too young and innocent to be getting involved with women, especially the likes of that guileful, experienced creature from Astibar." He attempts to look stern and fails; both of the others know his real opinion of Rovigos daughter.
"There are no inexperienced women in Astibar," Baerd retorts. "And besides, hes old enough. He even has a battle scar on his ribs to show her.”
"Shes seen it already," Devin says, enjoying this enormously. "She taped it up after Rinaldo healed me," he adds hastily as both of the others raise their eyebrows. "No thrill there." He tries and fails to conceive of Alais as guileful and deceptive. The memory of her on the window-ledge in Senzio keeps coming back to him of late though; the particular smile on her face as he stumbled along the outside landing to his own room.
"They are coming, arent they?" the Duke asks. "It occurs to me that I could sail home with Rovigo.”
"Theyll be here," Devin confirms. "They had a wedding of their own last week, or theyd have arrived by now.”
"I see you are intimately versed in their timing," Baerd says with a straight face. "Just what do you plan to do after the wedding?”
"Actually," Devin says, "I wish I knew. There must be ten different things Ive thought about." He evidently sounds more serious than hed meant to, for both of his friends turn their attention fully to him.
"Such as?" Sandre asks, Devin takes a breath and lets it out. He holds up both hands and starts counting on his fingers. "Find my father and help him settle here again. Find Menico di Ferraut and put together the company we should have had before you people side-tracked me. Stay with Alessan and Catriana in Tigana and help them with whatever they have to do. Learn how to handle a ship at sea; dont ask me why. Stay in Avalle and build a tower with Baerd." He hesitates; the others are smiling. He plunges onward: "Spend another night with Alienor at Borso. Spend my life with Alais bren Rovigo. Start chasing down the words and music of all the songs weve lost. Go over the mountains to Quileia and find the twenty-seven tree in the sacred grove. Start training for the sprint race in next summers Triad Games. Learn how to shoot a bow—which reminds me, you did promise me that, Baerd!”
He stops, because they are laughing now, and so is he, a little breathlessly. "You must have gone past ten somewhere in that list," Baerd chuckles.
"There are more," Devin says. "Do you want them?”
"I dont think I could stand it," Sandre says. "You remind me too painfully of how old I am and how young you are.”
Devin sobers at those words. He shakes his head. "Never think that. I dont think there was a moment last year when I didnt have to work to keep up with you wherever we went." He smiles at a thought "You arent old, Sandre, youre the youngest wizard in the Palm.”
Sandres expression is wry. He holds up his left hand; they can clearly see the two missing fingers.
"Theres truth to that. And I may be the first to break the habit of screening what we are, because I never got into the habit.”
"Youre serious about dropping the screening?" Baerd asks.
"Utterly serious. If we are to survive in this peninsula as a whole nation in the world we are going to
need magic to match Barbadior and Ygrath. And Khardhun, come to think of it. And I dont even know what powers they have in Quileia now; it has been too many years since we dealt with them. We can no longer hide our wizards, or the Carlozzini, we cant afford to be as ignorant as weve always been about how magic is shaped here. Even the Healers, we dont understand anything about them. We have to learn our magic, value it, search wizards out and train them, find ways to control them too. The Palm has to discover magic, or magic will undo us again one day the way it did twenty years ago.”
"You think we can do that first thing though?" Devin asks. "Make a nation here, out of the nine we are?”
"I know we can. And I think we will. I will wager you both right now that Alessan di Tigana is named King of the Palm at the Triad Games next year.”
Devin turns quickly to Baerd, whose color has suddenly risen. "Would he take it?" he asks. "Would he do that, Baerd?”
Baerd looks at Sandre and then slowly back to Devin. "Who else could?" he answers finally. "I dont even think he has a choice. The knitting together of this peninsula has been his lifes cause since he was fifteen years old. He was already on that path when I found him in Quileia. I think ... I think what hed really like to do is find Menico with you, Devin, and spend a few years making music with you two, and Erlein, and Catriana, and some dancers, and someone who can play the syrenya.”
"But?" Sandre asks.
"But hes the man who saved us all, everyone knows it, everyone knows who he is now. After a dozen years of being on the roads he knows more people who matter in each province than anyone else.
Hes the one who gave the rest of us the vision. And hes the Prince of Tigana, too, and in his prime. Im afraid"—he grimaces at the word— "I dont see how he can avoid this, even if he wanted to. I think for Alessan it is just beginning now.”
They are silent a moment.
"What about you?" Devin asks. "Will you go with him? What do you want?”
Baerd smiles. "What do I want? Nothing nearly so high. Id badly like to find my sister, but Im beginning to accept that shes . . . gone, and I think that I may never know where, or how. Ill be there for Alessan whenever he needs me, but what I most want to do is build things. Houses, temples, bridges, a palace, half a dozen towers here in Avalle. I need to see things rising, and I ... I suppose its part of the same thing, but I want to start a family. We need children here again. Too many people died." He looks away for a moment toward the mountains and then back again. "You and I may be the lucky ones, Devin.
We arent Princes or Dukes or wizards. Were only ordinary men, with a life to start.”
"I told you he was waiting for Elena," Sandre says gently. Not a gibe, the voice of a friend, speaking with deep aflFection. Baerd smiles, looking into the distance again. And in that moment his expression changes, it grows charged with a fierce, bright pleasure: "Look!" he cries, pointing. "Here he comes!”
From the south, winding out of the mountains and the hills of the highlands along a road that has not been used in hundreds of years there comes a caravan, many-colored, stretching back a long way. There is music playing beside it and ahead, with men and women riding and on foot, donkeys and horses laden with goods, at least fifty banners flapping in the wind. And now the tunes drift up to the three of them, bright and gay, and all the colors are flashing in the morning light as Marius, King of Quileia comes riding down from the mountain pass to the wedding of his friend.
He is to spend the night in the Sanctuary where he will be formally welcomed by the High Priest of Eanna—whom he will remember as the man who brought a fourteen-year-old boy to him over the mountains long ago. There are barges waiting in Avalle to take them down the river to Tigana in the morning.
But the right of first greeting is Baerds, in Alessans name, and he has asked the two of them to ride
here with him.
"Come on!" he cries now, joy in his face. He urges his horse forward down the sloping path. Devin and Sandre glance at each other and hasten to follow.
"I will never understand," Devin shouts, as they catch up to Baerd, "how you can possibly be so pleased to see a man who calls you Pigeon Two!”
Sandre gives a cackle of glee. Baerd laughs aloud, and mimes a blow at Devin. The three of them are still laughing as they slow their horses to swing around a cluster of sonrai bushes at a wide curve in the downward trail.
And it is there that they see the riselka, three men see a riselka, sitting on a rock beside the sunlit path, her long sea-green hair blowing back in the freshening breeze.