Tigana (77 page)

Let it go!
she wanted to say, wanted so much to say that she bit her lip holding back the words.
Oh, my love, let the spell go. Let Tigana come back and all the world’s brightness will return
.

She said nothing. Knowing that he could not do so, and knowing, for she was no longer a child, that grace could not be come by so easily. Not after all these years, not with Tigana and Stevan twined together and embedded so deep down in Brandin’s own pain. Not with what he had already done to her home. Not in the world in which they lived.

Besides which, and above everything else, there was the riselka, and her clear path unfolding with every word whispered by the fire. Dianora felt as if she knew everything that was going to be said, everything that would follow. And each passing moment was leading them—she could see it as a kind of shimmer in the room—towards the sea.

Almost a third of the Ygrathens stayed. It was more than he’d expected, Brandin told her, standing on the balcony above the harbour two weeks later, watching most of his flotilla sail away, back to their home, to what had been his home. He was exiled now, by his own will, more truly than he had ever been before.

He also told her later that same day that Dorotea was dead. She didn’t ask how, or how he knew. His sorcery was still the thing she did not ever want to face.

Shortly after that came bad tidings though. The Barbadians were beginning to move north towards and through Ferraut, all three armies apparently heading for the border of Senzio. He had not expected that, she saw. Not nearly so soon. It was too unlike careful Alberico to move with such decisiveness.

‘Something has happened there. Something is pushing him,’ Brandin said. ‘And I wish I knew what it was.’

He was weak and vulnerable now, that was the problem. He needed time and they all knew it. With the Ygrathen army mostly gone Brandin needed a chance to shape a new structure of order in the western provinces. To turn the first giddy euphoria of his announcement into the bonds and allegiances that would truly forge a kingdom. That would let him summon an army to fight in his name, among a conquered people lately so hard-oppressed.

He needed time, desperately, and Alberico wasn’t giving it to him.

‘You could send us,’ d’Eymon the Chancellor said one morning, as the dimensions of the crisis began to take shape. ‘Send the Ygrathens we have left and position the ships off the coast of Senzio. See if that will hold Alberico for a time.’

The Chancellor had stayed with them. There was never any real doubt that he would. For all his trauma—he had looked ill and old for days after Brandin’s announcement—Dianora knew that d’Eymon’s deepest loyalty, his love, though he would have shied awkwardly away from that word, was given to the man he served and not to the nation. Moving through those days almost numbed by the divisions in her own heart she envied d’Eymon that simplicity.

But Brandin flatly refused to follow his suggestion. She remembered his face as he explained, looking up from a map and strewn sheets of paper covered with numbers. The three of them together around a table in the sitting-room off the King’s bedchamber; Rhun a nervous, preoccupied fourth on a couch at the far end of the room. The King of the Western Palm still had his Fool, though the King of Ygrath was named Girald now.

‘I cannot make them fight alone,’ Brandin said quietly. ‘Not to carry the full burden of defending people I have just made them equal to. This cannot be an Ygrathen war. For one thing, they are not enough, we will lose. But it is more than
that. If we send an army or a fleet it must be made up of all of us here, or this Kingdom will be finished before I start.’

D’Eymon had risen from the table, agitated, visibly disturbed. ‘Then I must say again what I have said before: this is folly. The thing to do is to go home and deal with what has happened in Ygrath. They
need
you there.’

‘Not really, d’Eymon. I will not flatter myself. Girald has been ruling Ygrath for twenty years.’

‘Girald is a traitor and should have been executed as such with his mother!’

Brandin looked up at him, the grey eyes suddenly chilly. ‘Must we repeat this discussion? D’Eymon, I am here for a reason and you know that reason. I cannot go back on that: it would cut against the very core of what I am.’ His expression changed. ‘No man need stay with me, but I am bound myself to this peninsula by love and grief, and by my own nature, and those three things will hold me here.’

‘The Lady Dianora could come with us! With Dorotea dead you would need a Queen in Ygrath and she would be—’

‘D’Eymon! Have done.’ The tone was final, ending the discussion.

But the Chancellor was a brave man. ‘My lord,’ he pushed on, grim-faced, his voice low and intense, ‘if I cannot speak of this and you will not send our fleet to face Barbadior I know not how to advise you. The provinces will
not
go to war for you yet, we know that. It is too soon. They need time to see and to believe that you are one of them.’

‘And I
have
no time,’ Brandin replied with what had seemed an unnatural calm after the sharp tension of the exchange. ‘So I have to do it immediately. Advise me on that, Chancellor. How do I show them? Right now. How do I make them believe I am truly bound to the Palm?’

So there it was, and Dianora knew that the moment had come to her at last.

I cannot go back on that; it would cut against the very core of what I am
. She had never really nursed any fantasies of his ever freely releasing and unbinding his spell. She knew Brandin too well. He was not a man who went back or reversed himself. In anything. The core of what he was. In love and hate and in the defining shape of his pride.

She stood up. There was an odd rushing sound in her ears, and if she closed her eyes she was certain she would see a path stretching away, straight and clear as a line of moonlight on the sea, very bright before her. Everything was leading her there, leading all of them. He was vulnerable, and exposed, and he would never turn back.

There was an image of Tigana flowering in her heart as she rose. Even here, even now, an image of her home. In the depths of the riselka’s pool there had been a great many people gathered under banners of all the provinces as she walked down to the sea.

She placed her hands carefully on the back of her chair and looked down at him where he sat. There was grey in his beard, more, it seemed, each time she noticed it, but his eyes were as they had always been, and there was no fear, no doubt in them as they looked back at her. She drew a deep breath and spoke words that seemed to have been given to her long ago, words that seemed to have simply waited for this moment to arrive.

‘I will do it for you,’ she said. ‘I will make them believe in you. I will do the Ring Dive of the Grand Dukes of Chiara as it used to be done on the eve of war. You will marry the seas of the peninsula, and I will bind you to the Palm and to good fortune in the eyes of all the people when I bring you back the sea-ring from the sea.’

She kept her gaze steady on his own, dark and clear and calm, as she spoke at last, after so many years, the words that set her on the final path. That set him, set them all, the
living and the dead, the named and the lost, on that path. As, loving him with a sundered heart, she lied.

She finished her khav and rose from bed. Scelto had drawn the curtains back and she could see sunrise just beginning to lighten the dark sea. The sky was clear overhead and the banners in the harbour could just be seen, moving lazily in the dawn breeze. There was already a huge crowd gathered, hours before the ceremony was to start. A great many people had spent the night in the harbour square, to be sure of a place near the pier to see her dive. She thought she saw someone, a tiny figure at such a distance, lift a hand to point to her window and she stepped quickly back.

Scelto had already laid out the clothes she would wear, the garments of ritual. Dark green for the going down: her outer robe and sandals, the net that would hold her hair and the silken undertunic in which she would dive. For afterwards, after she came back from the sea, there was another robe, white, richly embroidered with gold. For when she was to represent, to
be
the bride come from the sea with a gold ring in her hand for the King.

After she came back.
If
she came back.

She was almost astonished at her own calm. It was easier actually because she hadn’t seen Brandin since early the day before, as was proper for the rite. Easier too, because of how brilliantly clear all the images seemed to be, how smoothly they had led her here, as if she was choosing or deciding nothing, only following a course set down somewhere else and long ago.

Easier, finally, because she had come to understand and accept, deeply, and with certitude, that she had been born into a world, a life, that would not let her be whole.

Not ever. This was not Finavir, or any such dream-place. This was the only life, the only world, she was to be allowed.
And in that life Brandin of Ygrath had come to this peninsula to shape a realm for his son, and Valentin di Tigana had killed Stevan, Prince of Ygrath. This had happened, could not be unmade.

And because of that death, Brandin had come down upon Tigana and her people and torn them out of the known past and the still unfolding pages of the world. And was staying here to seal that truth forever—blank and absolute—in vengeance for his son. This had happened and was happening, and had to be unmade.

So she had come here to kill him. In her father’s name and her mother’s, in Baerd’s name and her own, and for all the lost and ruined people of her home. But on Chiara she had discovered, in grief and pain and glory, that islands were truly a world of their own, that things changed there. She had learned, long ago, that she loved him. And now, in glory and pain and wonder, had been made to understand that he loved her. This had all happened, and she had tried to unmake it, and had failed.

Hers was not a life meant to be made whole. She could see it now so clearly, and in that clarity, that final understanding, Dianora found the wellspring of her calm.

Some lives were unlucky. Some people had a chance to shape their world. It seemed—who could have foretold?—that both these things were true of her.

Of Dianora di Tigana bren Saevar, a sculptor’s daughter; a dark-haired dark-eyed child, gawky and unlovely in her youth, serious and grave, though with flashes of wit and tenderness, beauty coming to her late, and wisdom coming later, too much later. Coming only now.

She took no food, though she’d allowed herself the khav—a last concession to years of habit. She didn’t think that doing so would violate any rituals. She also knew it didn’t really matter. Scelto helped her dress, and then, in
silence, he carefully gathered and pinned her hair, binding it in the dark green net that would hold it back from her eyes when she dived.

When he was done she rose and submitted herself, as always before going out into the world, to his scrutiny. The sun was up now, its light flooding the room through the drawn-back curtains. In the distance the growing noise from the harbour could be heard. The crowd must be very large by now, she thought; she didn’t go back to the window to look. She would see them soon enough. There was a quality of anticipation to the steady murmur of sound that gave evidence, more clearly than anything else, of the stakes being played for this morning.

A peninsula. Two different dominions here, if it came to that. Perhaps even, the very Empire in Barbadior, with the Emperor ill and dying as everyone knew. And one last thing more, though only she knew this, and only she would ever know: Tigana. The final, secret coin lying on the gaming table, hidden under the card laid down in the name of love.

‘Will I do?’ she asked Scelto, her voice determinedly casual.

He didn’t follow that lead. ‘You frighten me,’ he said quietly. ‘You look as though you are no longer entirely of this world. As if you have already left us all behind.’

It was uncanny how he could read her. It hurt to have to deceive him, not to have him with her on this last thing, but there was nothing he could have done, no reason to give him grief, and there were risks in the doing so.

‘I’m not at all sure that’s flattering,’ she said, still lightly, ‘but I will attempt to think of it that way.’

He refused to smile. ‘I think you know how little I like this,’ he said.

‘Scelto, Alberico’s entire army will be on the border of Senzio two weeks from now. Brandin has no choice. If they walk into Senzio they will not stop there. This is his very
best chance, probably his only chance, to link himself to the Palm in time. You know all this.’ She forced herself to sound a little angry.

It was true, it was all true. But none of it was the
truth
. The riselka was the truth this morning, that and the dreams she’d dreamt alone here in the saishan through all the years.

‘I know,’ Scelto said, clearly unhappy. ‘Of course I know. And nothing I think matters at all. It is just …

‘Please!’ she said, to stop him before he made her cry. ‘I don’t think I can debate this with you now, Scelto. Shall we go?’
Oh, my dear
, she was thinking.
Oh, Scelto, you will undo me yet
.

He had stopped, flinching at her rebuke. She saw him swallow hard, his eyes lowered. After a moment he looked up again.

‘Forgive me, my lady,’ he whispered. He stepped forward and, unexpectedly, took her hands, pressing them to his lips. ‘It is only for you that I speak. I am afraid. Please forgive.’

‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Of course. There is really nothing to forgive, Scelto.’ She squeezed his hands tightly.

But in her heart she was bidding him farewell, knowing she must not cry. She looked into his honest, caring face, the truest friend she’d had for so many years, the only real friend actually, since her childhood, and she hoped against hope that in the days to come, he would remember the way she had gripped his hands and not the casual, careless sound of her words.