Tigana (89 page)

She seemed to be crying, silently, tears welling up to slide slowly down her cheeks.

‘Oh, my dear, no,’ he said, with an awkward catch to his voice. ‘I am so sorry. I am a fool. This is far too sudden, tonight, after what you have done. Not tonight. I should never have spoken. I don’t even know if you—’

He stopped just there. But only because she had covered his mouth with her fingers to make him stop. She was still crying, but there seemed to be the most amazing brightness growing inside the room, far more than candles now, more than the moons, a light like the sun beginning to rise beyond the rim of darkness.

She slipped her fingers down from his mouth and claimed the hand he had held her with.
We do with our hands what we cannot say
. She still said nothing; she couldn’t speak. She was trembling. She remembered how her hands had been shaking when she walked out earlier tonight. So little time ago she had stood in a castle window and known she was about to die. Her tears fell on his hand. She lowered her head but
others kept falling. She felt as though her heart were a bird, a trialla, only newly born, spreading wings, preparing to give voice to the song of its days.

He was on his knees beside the bed. She moved her free hand across and ran it through his hair, in a hopeless attempt at smoothing it. It seemed to be something she had wanted to do for a long time. How long? How long could such needs be present and yet never known, never acknowledged or allowed?

‘When I was young,’ she said finally, her voice breaking, but needing to speak, ‘I used to dream of this. Alessan, have I died and come back? Am I dreaming now?’

He smiled slowly, the deeply reassuring smile that she knew, that they all knew, as if her words had granted him release from his own fear, freed him to be himself again. To offer the look that had always meant that he was with them and so everything would be made all right.

But then, unexpectedly, he moved forward and lowered his head to rest it against the thin blanket covering her, as if seeking his own shelter, one that was hers to give to him. She understood; it seemed—oh, what goddess could have foretold this?—that she
did
have something to offer him. Something more than her death after all. She lifted her hands and closed them around his head, holding him to her, and it seemed to Catriana in that moment as if that newborn trialla in her soul began to sing. Of trials endured and trials to come, of doubt and dark and all the deep uncertainties that defined the outer boundaries of mortal life, but with love now present at the base of it all, like light, like the first stone of a rising tower.

There
had
been a Barbadian Tracker in Senzio, Devin learned later that night, and he
was
killed, but not by them. Nor did they have to deal with the kind of search party
they’d feared. It was nearly dawn by the time they pieced the story together.

It seemed that the Barbadians had gone wild.

Finding the poisoned Ygrathen knife on the floor by Anghiar’s body, hearing what the woman cried before she leaped, they had leaped themselves—to all the murderously obvious conclusions.

There were twenty of them in Senzio, an honour guard for Anghiar. They armed themselves, assembled, and made their way across to the western wing of the Governor’s Castle. They killed the six Ygrathens on guard there, broke down a door, and burst in upon Cullion of Ygrath, Brandin’s representative, as he struggled into his clothing. Then they took their time about killing him. The sound of his screams echoed through the castle.

Then they went back downstairs and through the courtyard to the front gates and hacked to death the four Senzian guards who had let the woman in without a proper search. It was during this that the captain of the Castle Guard came into the courtyard with a company of Senzians. He ordered them to lay down their arms.

The Barbadians were, according to most reports later, about to do so, having achieved their immediate purposes, when two of the Senzians, enraged at the butchery of their friends, fired arrows at them. Two men fell, one instantly dead, one mortally wounded. The dead one was Alberico’s Tracker. There ensued a bloody, to-the-death mêlée in the torchlit courtyard of the castle, soon slippery with blood. The Barbadians were slaughtered to the last man, taking some thirty or forty Senzians with them.

No one knew which man fired the arrow that killed Casalia the Governor as he came hastily down the stairs screaming hoarsely at them all to stop.

In the chaos that followed that death no one gave a thought
to going down to the garden for the body of the woman who had started it all. There was an increasingly wild panic in the city as the news spread through the night. A huge, terrified crowd gathered outside the castle. Shortly after midnight two horses were seen racing away from the city walls, heading south for the Ferraut border. Not long after that the five remaining members of Brandin’s party in Senzio rode away as well, in a tight cluster under the risen moons. They went north of course, towards Farsaro where the fleet was anchored.

Catriana was asleep in the other bed, her face smooth and untroubled, almost childlike in its peace. Alais could not find rest though. There was too much noise and tumult in the streets and she knew her father was down there, amidst whatever was happening.

Even after Rovigo came back in and stopped at their door to look in on the two of them and report that there seemed to be no immediate danger, Alais was still unable to sleep. Too much had happened tonight, but none of it to her, and so she was not weary as Catriana was, only excited and unsettled in oddly discontinuous ways. She couldn’t even have said all the things that were working upon her. Eventually she put on the robe she’d bought two days before in the market and went to sit on the ledge of the open window.

It was very late by then, both moons were west, down over the sea. She couldn’t see the harbour—Solinghi’s was too far inland—but she knew it was there, with the
Sea Maid
bobbing at anchor in the night breeze. There were people in the streets even now, she could see shadowy forms pass in the lane below, and she heard occasional shouts from the direction of the tavern quarter, but nothing more now than the ordinary noises of a city without a curfew, prone to be awake and loud at night.

She wondered how near to dawn it was, how long she would have to stay awake if she wanted to see the sunrise. She thought she might wait for it. This was not a night for sleep; or not for her, Alais amended, glancing back at Catriana. She remembered the other time the two of them had shared a room. Her own room at home.

She was a long way from home. She wondered what her mother had thought, receiving Rovigo’s letter of carefully phrased almost-explanation sent by courier across Astibar from the port of Ardin town as they sailed north to Senzio. She wondered, but in another way she knew: the trust shared between her parents was one of the sustaining, defining elements of her own world.

She looked up at the sky. The night was still dark, the stars overhead even more bright now that the moons were setting; it probably lacked several hours yet till dawn. She heard a woman’s laughter below and realized with an odd sensation that that was the one sound she’d not heard earlier that night amid the tumult in the streets. In a curious, quite unexpected way, the woman’s breathless sound, and then a man’s murmur following close upon it served to reassure her: in the midst of all else, whatever might come, certain things would still continue as they always had.

There was a footstep on the wood of the stairway outside. Alais leaned backwards on the window-ledge, belatedly realizing she could probably be seen from below.

‘Who is it?’ she called, though softly, so as not to disturb Catriana.

‘Only me,’ Devin said, coming up to stand on the landing outside the room.. She looked at him. His clothing was muddy, as if he’d tumbled or rolled somewhere, but his voice was calm. It was too dark to properly see his eyes. ‘Why are you awake?’ he asked.

She gestured, not sure what to say. ‘Too many things at once, I suppose. I’m not used to this.’

She saw his teeth as he smiled. ‘None of us are,’ he said. ‘Believe me. But I don’t think anything else will happen tonight. We are all going to bed.’

‘My father came in a while ago. He said it seemed to have quieted down.’

Devin nodded. ‘For now. The Governor was slain in the castle. Catriana did kill the Barbadian. There was chaos up there, and somebody seems to have shot the Tracker. I think that was what saved us.’

Alais swallowed. ‘My father didn’t tell me about that.’

‘He probably didn’t want to disturb your night. I’ll be sorry now if I have.’ He glanced past her towards the other bed. ‘How is she?’

‘She’s all right, really. Asleep.’ She registered the quick concern in his voice. But Catriana had earned that concern, that caring, tonight and before tonight, in ways Alais could scarcely even encompass within her mind.

‘And how are you?’ Devin asked, in a different tone, turning back to her. And there was something in that altered, deeper voice that made it difficult for her to breathe.

‘I’m fine too, honestly.’

‘I know you are,’ he said. ‘Actually, you are a great deal more than that, Alais.’

He hesitated for a moment, seeming suddenly awkward. She didn’t understand that, until he leaned slowly forward to kiss her full upon the lips. For the second time, if you counted the one in the crowded room downstairs, but this was really quite amazingly unlike the first. For one thing, he didn’t hurry, and for another, they were alone and it was very dark. She felt one of his hands come up, brushing along the front of her robe before coming to rest in her hair.

He drew back unsteadily. Alais opened her eyes. He
looked blurred and softened, where he stood on the landing. Footsteps went past in the lane below, slowly now, not running as before. The two of them were silent, looking at each other. Devin cleared his throat. He said, ‘It is … there are still two or three hours to morning. You should try to sleep, Alais. There will be a … a great deal happening in the days to come.’

She smiled. He hesitated another moment, then turned to walk along the outer landing towards the room he shared with Alessan and Erlein.

She remained sitting where she was for some time longer, looking up at the brightness of the stars, letting her racing heart gradually slow. She replayed in her mind the ragged, very young uncertainty and wonder in his voice in those last words. Alais smiled again to herself in the darkness. To someone schooled by a life of observation, that voice had revealed a great deal. And it had been simply touching her that had done this to him. Which was, if one lingered to think about it and relive the moment of that kiss, a most astonishing thing.

She was still smiling when she left the window-edge and returned to her bed and she did fall asleep then, after all, for the last few greatly altered hours of that long night.

All through the next day everyone waited. A pall of doom like smoke hung over Senzio. The city treasurer attempted to assert control in the castle, but the leader of the Guard was disinclined to take orders from him. Their shouted confrontations went on all day. By the time someone thought to go down for the girl her body had already been taken away; no one knew where or by whose orders.