Tigana (44 page)

‘Will he try to kill himself?’ he asked Baerd abruptly.

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

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

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

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

The sun rose, and shortly after that Erlein woke.

They could see him register where he was.

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘I know,’ Alessan said quietly to him. ‘I do know.’

‘Khav?’ Sandre said again, after a moment.

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

C H A P T E R   1 0

F
ive days later, on the eve of the Ember Days of spring, they came to Castle Borso.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She favoured Erlein with a nod of recognition. ‘Welcome back, troubadour. Two years, is it?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘You don’t know?’ said Erlein di Senzio loudly. ‘A terrible oversight. Allow me the introduction. My lady, may I present to you the—’

He got no further.

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

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

The whole thing had taken perhaps three seconds.

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

‘You are a fool!’ Baerd snarled at the wizard.

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

‘You are an impetuous creature, aren’t you?’ she murmured silkily.

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

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

‘Are they?’ Catriana’s voice was indifferent, but her colour was suddenly high.

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

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

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

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

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

‘I’m sorry,’ he whispered to Erlein. ‘I couldn’t think of anything else.’

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

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

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

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

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

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