Tigana (60 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He did not answer for a long time and she was afraid to look at him. Rhun, too far away to hear, had none the less stopped leafing through his book and was looking over at them.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then, abruptly, she remembered what else had occurred to him yesterday. On the mountainside, at a place where a grey rock stood beside the runners’ track.
One man sees a riselka: his path forks there
.

Brandin turned back towards the fire, one leg crossed over the other. He laid the point of the iron down on the hearthstone, leaning it against his chair.

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

‘I’m afraid to,’ she said, truthfully.

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

‘You aren’t very … like yourself either this morning.’

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

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

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

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

‘I did,’ he said. ‘I saw it clearly.’

She looked away and down again, at her hands in her lap.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brandin said, ‘We never burned or wheeled people for that thought. They were laughed at sometimes, but that is another thing. What my nurse used to tell me was what her mother told her, and her mother’s mother before, I have no doubt: that some of us are born over and again into various of these worlds until, at the last, if we have earned it by the manner of our lives, we are born a final time into Finavir or Finvair which is the nearest of all the worlds to where the true gods dwell.’

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

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

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

The simplest of questions.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

C H A P T E R   1 4

‘R
ide!’ Alessan cried, pointing towards a gap in the hills. ‘There’s a village beyond!’

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