Tigana (16 page)

‘Few of the survivors spoke of those days,’ Baerd said.

‘Neither of my parents did,’ said Catriana awkwardly. ‘They took us as far away as they could, to a fishing village here in Astibar down the coast from Ardin, and never spoke a word of any of this.’

‘To shield you,’ Alessan said gently. His palm was still touching Devin’s. It was smaller than Baerd’s. ‘A great many of the parents who managed to survive fled so that their children might have a chance at a life unmarred by the oppression and the stigma that bore down—that still bear down—upon Tigana. Or Lower Corte as we must name it now.’

‘They ran away,’ said Devin stubbornly. He felt cheated, deprived, betrayed.

Alessan shook his head. ‘Devin, think. Don’t judge yet: think. Do you really imagine you learned that tune by chance? Your father chose not to burden you or your brothers with the danger of your heritage, but he set a stamp upon you—a tune, wordless for safety—and he sent you out into the world with something that would reveal you, unmistakably, to anyone from Tigana, but to no one else. I do not think it was chance. No more than Catriana’s mother giving her daughter a ring that marked her to anyone born where she was born.’

Devin glanced back. Catriana held out her hand for him to see. It was dark, but his eyes had adjusted to that, and he could make out a strange, twining shape upon the ring: a man, half human, half creature of the sea. He swallowed.

‘Will you tell me of him?’ he asked, turning back to Alessan. ‘Of my father?’

Of stolid, dour Garin, grim farmer in a wet grey land. Who had, it now appeared, come from bright Avalle of the towers in the southern highlands of Tigana and who had, in his youth, wooed and won a woman beloved of all who saw her. Who had fought and lived through two terrible battles by a river and who had—if Alessan was right in his last conjecture—very deliberately sent out into the world his one quick, imaginative child capable of finding what he seemed to have found tonight.

Who had also, Devin abruptly realized, almost certainly lied when he said he’d forgotten the words to the cradle song. It was all suddenly very hard.

‘I will tell you what I know of him, and gladly,’ Alessan said. ‘But not tonight, for Catriana is right and we must get ourselves away before dawn. Right now I will swear faith with you as Baerd has done. I accept your oath. You have mine. You are as kin to me from now until the ending of my days.’

Devin turned to look up at Catriana. ‘Will you accept me?’

She tossed her hair. ‘I don’t have much choice, do I?’ she said carelessly. ‘You seem to have entangled yourself rather thoroughly here.’ She lowered her left hand though as she spoke, two fingers curled. Her fingers met his own with a light, cool touch.

‘Be welcome,’ she said. ‘I swear I will keep faith with you, Devin di Tigana.’

‘And I with you. I’m sorry about this morning,’ Devin offered.

Her hand withdrew and her eyes flashed; even by starlight he could see it. ‘Oh yes,’ she said sardonically, ‘I’m sure you are. It was very clear, all along, how regrettable you found the experience!’

Alessan snorted with amusement. ‘Catriana, my darling,’ he said, ‘I just forbade him to mention any details of what happened. How do I enforce that if you bring them up yourself?’

Without the faintest trace of a smile Catriana said, ‘I am the aggrieved party here, Alessan. You don’t enforce anything on me. The rules are not the same.’

Baerd chuckled suddenly. ‘The rules,’ he said, ‘have not been the same since you joined us. Why indeed should this be any different?’

Catriana tossed her head again but did not deign to reply.

The three men stood up. Devin flexed his knees to relieve the stiffness of sitting so long in one position.

‘Ferraut or Tregea?’ Baerd asked. ‘Which border?’

‘Ferraut,’ Alessan said. ‘They’ll have me placed as Tregean as soon as Tomasso talks—poor man. If I’d been thinking clearly I would have shot him as they rode by.’

‘Oh, very clear thinking, that,’ Baerd retorted. ‘With twenty soldiers surrounding him. You would have had us all in chains in Astibar by now.’

‘You would have deflected my arrow,’ Alessan said wryly.

‘Is there a chance he won’t speak?’ Devin interjected awkwardly. ‘I’m thinking about Menico, you see. If I’m named …’

Alessan shook his head. ‘Everyone talks under torture,’ he said soberly. ‘Especially if sorcery is involved. I’m thinking about Menico too, but there isn’t anything we can do about it, Devin. It is one of the realities of the life we live. There are people put at risk by almost everything we do. I wish,’ he added, ‘that I knew what had happened in that lodge.’

‘You wanted to check it,’ Catriana reminded him. ‘Can we afford the time?’

‘I did, and yes, I think we can,’ said Alessan crisply. ‘There remains a piece missing in all of this. I
still
don’t know how Sandre d’Astibar could have expected me to be the—’

He stopped there. Except for the drone of the cicadas and the rustling leaves it was very quiet in the woods. The trialla had gone. Alessan abruptly raised one hand and pushed it roughly through his hair. He shook his head.

‘Do you know,’ he said to Baerd, in what was almost a conversational tone, ‘how much of a fool I can be at times? It was in the palm of my hand all along!’ His voice changed. ‘Come on—and pray we are not too late!’

The fires had both died down in the Sandreni lodge. Only the stars shone above the clearing in the woods. The cluster of Eanna’s Diadem was well over west, following the moons. A nightingale was singing, as if in answer to the trialla of before, as the four of them approached. In the doorway Alessan hesitated for a moment then shrugged his shoulders in a gesture Devin already recognized. Then he pushed open the door and walked through.

By the red glow of the embers they looked—with eyes accustomed by now to darkness—on the carnage within.

The coffin still rested on its trestles, although splintered and knocked awry. Around it though, lay dead men who had been alive when they left this room. The two younger Sandreni. Nievole, a quiver of arrows in his throat and chest. The body of Scalvaia d’Astibar.

Then Devin made out Scalvaia’s severed head in a black puddle of blood a terrible distance away and he fought to control the lurch of sickness in his gorge.

‘Oh, Morian,’ Alessan whispered. ‘Oh, Lady of the Dead, be gentle to them in your Halls. They died dreaming of freedom and before their time.’

‘Three of them did,’
came a harsh, desiccated voice from deep in one of the armchairs. ‘
The fourth should have been strangled at birth.’

Devin jumped half a foot, his heart hammering with shock.

The speaker rose and stood beside the chair, facing them. He was entirely hidden in shadow. ‘I thought you would come back,’ he said.

The sixth man,
Devin realized, struggling to understand, straining to make out the tall, gaunt form by the faint glow of the embers.

Alessan seemed quite unruffled. ‘I’m sorry I kept you waiting then,’ he said. ‘It took me too long to riddle this through. Will you allow me to express my sorrow for what has happened?’ He paused. ‘And my respect for you, my lord Sandre.’

Devin’s jaw dropped open as if unhinged. He snapped it shut so hard he hurt his teeth; he hoped no one had seen. Events were moving far too fast for him.

‘I will accept the first,’ said the gaunt figure in front of them. ‘I do not deserve your respect though, nor that of anyone
else. Once perhaps; not any more. You are speaking to an old vain fool—exactly as the Barbadian named me. A man who spent too many years alone, tangled in his own spun webs. You were right in everything you said before about carelessness. It has cost me three sons tonight. Within a month, less probably, the Sandreni will be no more.

The voice was dry and dispassionate, objectively damning, devoid of self-pity. The tone of a judge in some dark hall of final adjudication.

‘What happened?’ Alessan asked quietly.

‘The boy was a traitor.’ Flat, uninflected, final.

‘Oh, my lord,’ Baerd exclaimed.
‘Family?’

‘My grandson. Gianno’s boy.’

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

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

Through the thick shadows Devin looked at the two bodies by the smaller fire. Uncle and nephew lay so close to each other they seemed almost intertwined on the far side of the coffin. The empty coffin.

‘You said you waited for us,’ Alessan murmured. ‘Will you tell me why?’

‘For the same reason you came back.’ Sandre moved for the first time, stiffly making his way to the larger fire. He seized a small log and threw it on the guttering flame. A shower of sparks flew up. He nursed it, poking with the iron until a tongue of flame licked free of the ash bed.

The Duke turned and now Devin could see his white hair and beard, and the bony hollows of his cheeks. His eyes were set deep in their sockets, but they gleamed with a cold defiance.

‘I am here,’ Sandre said, ‘and you are here because it goes on. It goes on whatever happens, whoever dies. While there is breath to be drawn and a heart with which to hate. My quest and your own. Until we die they go on.’

‘You were listening, then,’ said Alessan. ‘From in the coffin. You heard what I said?’

‘The drug had worn off by sundown. I was awake before we reached the lodge. I heard everything you said and a great deal of what you chose not to say,’ the Duke replied, straightening, a chilly hauteur in his voice. ‘I heard what you named yourself, and what you chose not to tell them. But I know who you are.’

He took a step towards Alessan. He raised a gnarled hand and pointed it straight at him.

‘I know
exactly
who you are, Alessan bar Valentin, Prince of Tigana!’

It was too much. Devin’s brain simply gave up trying to understand. Too many pieces of information were coming at him from too many different directions, contradicting each other ferociously. He felt dizzy, overwhelmed. He was in a room where only a little while ago he had stood among a number of men. Now four of them were dead, with a more brutal violence than he had ever thought to come upon. At the same time, the one man he’d
known
to be dead—the man whose mourning rites he had sung that very morning—was the only man of Astibar left alive in this lodge.

If he
was
of Astibar!

For if he was, how could he have just spoken the name of Tigana, given what Devin had just learned in the wood? How could he have known that Alessan was—and this, too,
Devin fought to assimilate—a Prince? The son of that Valentin who had slain Stevan of Ygrath and so brought Brandin’s vengeance down upon them all.

Devin simply stopped trying to put it all together. He set himself to listen and look—to absorb as much as he could into the memory that had never failed him yet—and to let understanding come after, when he had time to think.

So resolved, he heard Alessan say, after a blank silence more than long enough to reveal the degree of his own surprise and wonder: ‘Now I understand. Finally I understand. My lord, I thought you always a giant among men. From the first time I saw you at my first Triad Games twenty-three years ago. You are even more than I took you for. How did you stay alive? How have you hidden it from the two of them all these years?’

‘Hidden what?’ It was Catriana, her voice so angry and bewildered it immediately made Devin feel better: he wasn’t the only one desperately treading water here.

‘He is a wizard,’
Baerd said flatly.

There was another silence. Then, ‘The wizards of the Palm are immune to spells not directed specifically at them,’ Alessan added. ‘This is true of all magic-users, wherever they come from, however they find access to their power. For this reason, among others, Brandin and Alberico have been hunting down and killing wizards since they came to this peninsula.’

‘And they have been succeeding because being a wizard has—alas!—nothing to do with wisdom or even simple common sense,’ Sandre d’Astibar said in a corrosive voice. He turned and jabbed viciously at the fire with the iron poker. The blaze caught fully this time and roared into red light.

‘I survived,’ said the Duke, ‘simply because no one knew. It involved nothing more complex than that. I used my
power perhaps five times in all the years of my reign—and always cloaked under someone else’s magic. And I have done
nothing
with magic, not a flicker, since the sorcerers arrived. I didn’t even use it to feign my death. Their power is stronger than ours. Far stronger. It was clear from the time each of them came. Magic was never as much a part of the Palm as it was elsewhere. We knew this. All the wizards knew this. You would have thought they would apply their brains to that knowledge, would you not? What good is a finding spell, or a fledgling mental arrow if it leads one straight to a Barbadian death-wheel in the sun?’ There was an acid, mocking bitterness in the old Duke’s voice.