She’d told Brandin as much once, only to learn that he found the poet’s pompousness amusing. For genuine art, he’d murmured, he looked elsewhere.
And you destroyed it, she’d wanted to say.
Wanted so much to say. Remembering with an almost physical pain the broken head and sundered torso of her father’s last Adaon on the steps of the Palace by the Sea. The one for which her brother, finally old enough, had served as model for the young god. She remembered looking dry-eyed at the wreckage of that sculpted form, wanting to weep and not knowing where her tears were any more.
She glanced back at Doarde’s daughter, at her young, scarcely contained exhilaration. Seventeen.
Just after her own seventeenth naming day she had stolen half of the silver from her father’s hidden strong-box, begging pardon of his spirit and her mother’s blessing in her heart, and asking the compassion of Eanna who saw all beneath the shining of her lights.
She’d gone without saying good-bye, though she had looked in a last time by carried candlelight, upon the thin, worn figure of her mother, uneasily asleep in the wideness of her bed. Dianora was hardened, as for battle; she did not weep.
Four days later she’d crossed the border into Certando, having forded the river at a lonely place north of Avalle. She’d had to be careful getting there—Ygrathen soldiers were still ranging the countryside and in Avalle itself they were hammering at the towers, bringing them down. Some yet stood, she could see them from her crossing-place, but most were rubble by then, and what she saw of Avalle was through a screen of smoke.
It wasn’t even Avalle by then, either. The spell had been laid down. Brandin’s magic. The city where the pall of smoke and summer dust hung so heavily was now called Stevanien. Dianora could remember not being able to understand how a man could name the ugly wreckage of a place once so fair after a child he had loved. Later that would become clearer to her: the name had nothing to do with Brandin’s memory of Stevan. It was solely for those living there, and elsewhere in what had been Tigana: a constant, inescapable reminder of whose death had meant their ruin. The Tiganese now lived in a province named Lower Corte—and Corte had been their bitterest foe for centuries. The city of Tigana was the city of Lower Corte now.
And Avalle of the Towers was Stevanien. The vengeance of the King of Ygrath went deeper than occupation and burning and rubble and death. It encompassed names and memory, the fabric of identity; it was a subtle thing, and merciless.
There were a number of refugees in the summer Dianora went east, but none had anything remotely resembling her own fixed purpose and so most of them went much further away: to the far side of the Certandan grainlands, to Ferraut, Tregea, Astibar itself. Willing, anxious even, to live under the spreading tyranny of the Barbadian lord in order to put as much distance as they could between themselves and their images of what Brandin of Ygrath had done to their home.
But Dianora was clinging to those images, she was nursing them within her breast, feeding them with hate, shaping hatred with memory. Twin snakes inside her.
She only went a handful of miles across the border into Certando. The late-summer fields of corn had been yellow and tall, she remembered, but all the men were gone, away to the north and east where Alberico of Barbadior, having carefully consolidated his conquests of Ferraut and Astibar, was now moving south.
He was master of Certando by the end of the fall, and had taken Borifort in Tregea—the last major stronghold to stand against him—by the following spring after a winter siege.
Long before then Dianora had found what she was looking for, in the western highlands of Certando. A hamlet—twenty houses and a tavern—south of Sinave and Forese, the two great forts that watched each other on either side of the border that divided Certando from what she learned to call Lower Corte.
The land so near the southern mountains was not nearly as good as it was farther north. The growing season was shorter. Cold winds swept down from the Braccio and Sfaroni ranges early in fall bringing snow soon after and a long white winter. Wolves would howl in the wintry nights and sometimes in the morning strange footmarks could be found in the deep snow—marks that came down from the mountains and then returned.
Once, long ago, the village had been near to one of the roads forking northeast from the main highway down from the Sfaroni Pass—in the days when there was still overland trade with Quileia to the south. That was why the ancient tavern was so large in a village now so small, why it had four rooms upstairs for the travellers who had not come for a great many years.
Dianora hid her father’s silver south of the village on a thickly wooded slope away from the goatherd runs, and she went to work as a serving girl in the tavern. There was no money to pay her of course. She worked for her room and the scanty board available that first summer and fall, and she laboured in the fields with the other women and the young boys to bring home what they could of the harvest.
She told them she was from the north, near Ferraut. That her mother was dead and her father and brother had gone to war. She said her uncle had begun to abuse her and so she had run away. She was good with accents and she had the northern speech right enough for them to believe her. Or at least to ask no questions. There were many transients in the Palm in those days, questions were seldom pushed too far. She ate little and worked as hard as any in the fields. There was actually little enough to do in the inn, with the men away to war. She slept in one of the rooms upstairs, she even had it to herself. They were kind enough to her after their fashion, and given the nature of things in that time.
When the light and the place were right—morning usually, and in certain of the higher fields—she could look away to the west across the border towards the river and see the remaining towers and the smoke above what had been Avalle. One morning, late in the year, she realized that she couldn’t see anything any more. That she hadn’t, in fact, seen anything for some time. The last tower was gone.
Around that time the men had begun to come home, beaten and weary. There was work again in the kitchen and waiting on tables or behind the counter of the bar. She was also expected—and had been preparing herself for this as best she could all through the fall—to take a man up to her room if he offered the going rate.
Every village seemed to need one such woman, and she was the obvious candidate here. She tried to make herself not mind, but this was the most difficult thing yet. She had a mission though, a reason for being here, a vengeance to enact, and this, even this, she would tell herself, going up the stairs with someone, was a part of it. She hardened herself, but not always, and not quite enough.
Perhaps that showed through. Several men asked her to marry them. One day she caught herself thinking about one of them as she wiped down the tables after lunch. He was quiet and kind, shy when he took her upstairs, and his eyes would follow her movements in the tavern with a fierce concentration whenever he was there.
That day was when she knew it was time for her to leave.
She was a little surprised to realize that almost three years had gone by. It was spring.
She slipped away one night, again without a farewell, remembering her arrival even as she went. Meadow flowers were blooming beside the path into the hills. The air was clean and mild. By the mingled light of the two moons she found her buried silver and walked away without looking back, taking the road north towards the fort at Sinave. She was nineteen years old.
Nineteen, and sometime in the past two years she had grown beautiful. Her angular boniness had softened, even as her face lost its last traces of girlhood. It was oval, wide at the cheekbones, almost austere. It changed when she laughed though—and for some reason she still knew how to laugh—becoming warm and animated, the unexpected dance in her dark eyes seeming to promise things that went deeper than amusement. Men who had seen her laughing or who had caused her to smile at them would encounter that look again in their dreams, or in the memories that lay on the border of sleep and dream, years after Dianora had
gone away.
At Sinave the Barbadians disturbed her, with their oppressive size and careless, casual brutality. She forced herself to be calm and to linger there. Two weeks would be enough, she judged. She had to leave an impression and a memory.
A carefully constructed memory of an ambitious, pretty country girl from some hamlet near the mountains. A girl usually silent during the tavern talk at night but who, when she did speak, told vivid, memorable tales of her home village to the south. Told them with the distinctively laconic diction and round vowels that would have marked her anywhere in the Palm as being from the highlands of Certando.
The tales were usually sad—most stories were in those years—but once in a while Dianora would offer a wonderfully droll imitation of some highland rustic voicing his considered opinion on great affairs in the wider world, and those at the table where she was sitting would laugh for a long time.
She appeared to them to have some money, earned very likely in the way that pretty girls usually came to have some money. But she shared a room with another woman at the better of the two hostelries within the walls of the fort, and neither of them was ever seen to invite a man upstairs. Or to accept an invitation to go elsewhere. The Barbadian soldiers might have been a problem—indeed they had been over the winter—but orders had come from Astibar, and the mercenaries were under a tighter rein that spring.
What she wanted to do, Dianora confided one night to the loosely knit group of young men and women she had joined, was to work in a tavern or dining-place that saw a better class of person coming through its doors. She’d had two hands full and more, thank you, of the other sort of inn, she declared.
Someone mentioned The Queen in Stevanien, across the border in Lower Corte.
With a heartfelt, inward sigh of relief Dianora began asking questions about it.
Questions to which she’d known the answers for three days; during which time she’d sat among these selfsame people every night planting subtle hints in the hope that the name might emerge spontaneously. Subtlety, she’d finally decided, was wasted among young Certandans here on the border, and so she’d practically had to drag the conversation over to the subject she wanted.
Now she listened, seemingly enraptured and wide-eyed, as two of her recent acquaintances animatedly described the newest, most elegant Ygrathen innovation in Lower Corte. A dining-place that boasted a master chef brought all the way from Ygrath itself by the current Governor of Stevanien and its distrada. The Governor, it emerged, was notoriously fond of wine and food, and of good music played in comfortable chambers. He had helped establish the new chef in a set of rooms on the ground floor of a former banking-house, and now he basked in the reflected glory of the most elaborate, most luxurious eating-place in the Palm. He dined there himself several times a week, Dianora learned.
For the second time.
She’d picked up all of this in gossip among the merchants during her days checking out the prices and styles of clothing available in Fort Sinave. She needed some things fit for the city, she knew. It might make a difference.
From the very first time she’d heard the name she’d realized that The Queen would be perfect for the next stage of her plan to change her past.
What she learned from the merchants was that no one from Lower Corte was allowed to dine there. Traders from Corte were cordially greeted, as were those from farther afield, in Asoli or Chiara itself. Any Ygrathen, naturally, soldier, merchant or whoever he might be—come to seek his fortune in the newest colony—was graciously ushered in to salute the portrait of Queen Dorotea that hung on the wall opposite the door. Even those merchants crossing the line that divided the Eastern Palm from the West were more than welcome to leave some of whatever currency they carried in The Queen.
It was only the King’s true enemies, the denizens of Lower Corte, of Stevanien itself, who were forbidden to stain or sully the ambience with their pustulent, heir-murdering presence.
They never did, Dianora learned from a Ferraut trader bound back north and east with leather from Stevanien that he expected to sell at a profit, even with that year’s tariff levels. What the inhabitants of Stevanien had done in response to the ban was simply refuse to work for the new establishment. Not as servers or kitchen help or stable hands, nor even as musicians or artisans to help decorate and maintain the splendid rooms.
The Governor, when he learned what was happening, had vowed in red-faced rage to force the contemptible inhabitants to work wherever they were required by their masters of Ygrath. Force them with dungeon and lash and a death-wheel or three if needed.
The master chef, Arduini, had demurred.
One did not, Arduini had said, in a much-quoted display of artistic temperament, build up and maintain an establishment of quality by using enforced, surly labour. His standards were simply too high for that. Even the stable-boys at his restaurant, said Arduini of Ygrath, were to be trained and willing, and to have a certain style to them.
There had been widespread hilarity when that was reported: stylish stable-hands, indeed. But, Dianora learned, the amusement had turned to respect quite soon, because Arduini, pretentious or not, did know what he was doing. The Queen, the Ferraut trader told her, was like an oasis amid the deserts of Khardhun. In dispirited, broken Stevanien it cast a warm glow of Ygrathen civility and grace. The merchant lamented, though discreetly on this side of the border, the complete absence of any such traits in the Barbadians who had occupied his own province.
But yes, he said, in response to Dianora’s apparently casual question, Arduini was still struggling with staff problems. Stevanien was a backwater, and a backwater, moreover, in the most oppressively taxed, and militarily subjugated province in the Palm. It was next to impossible to get people to travel there, or stay, and since none of the trickle of adventurers from Ygrath had come so far from home to wash dishes or clear tables or tend to a stable—however stylish a stable it might be—there appeared to be a chronic need for workers from elsewhere in the Palm.
In that moment Dianora had changed every plan she had. She cast the line of her life, with a silent prayer to Adaon, in the direction of this chance information. She had been intending, with some real apprehension, to go northwest to Corte. That had always been the next-to-last destination in her plans. She had seriously wondered, almost every night as she lay awake, whether three years in Certando would be enough to shake off anyone pursuing the true history of her life. She’d had no good ideas about what else she could do, though.
Now she did.
And so it was that a few nights later, in the largest of the taverns in Fort Sinave, a cheerful crowd of young people watched their new friend drink more than was good for her for the first time since she’d arrived. More than one of the men saw cause for cautious optimism in that, with respect to possibilities later in the evening.
‘You’ve settled it then!’ Dianora cried in her attractive, south-country voice. She leaned for support against the shoulder of a bemused cartwright. ‘Hand to the new plough for me tomorrow. I’m over the border as soon as I can to visit The Queen of Ygrath! Triad bless her days!’
Triad shelter and hold my soul, she was thinking as she spoke, absolutely sober, cold to her bones with the sense of the words she was so glibly shouting.
They silenced her, laughing uproariously—in part to cover her words. In Barbadian Certando it was a long way from the path of wisdom to thus salute Ygrath’s Queen. Dianora giggled quite endearingly but she subsided. The cartwright and another man tried to see her up to her room afterwards, but found themselves charmingly put off and drinking together amid off-duty mercenaries in the one all-night tavern Fort Sinave possessed.
She was just a little too untutored, too country, to succeed in her ambitious hopes, they agreed sagely. They also agreed, a few drinks later, that she had the most extraordinarily appealing smile. Something about her eyes, what happened to them when she was pleased.
In the morning Dianora was dressed and packed and wa
iting very early at the main gate of the fort. She struck a bargain for passage to Stevanien with a pleasant-enough middle-aged merchant from Senzio carrying Barbadian spices for the luxury trade. His only reason for going to dreary, flattened Stevanien, she learned as they started west, was the new restaurant, The Queen. She took that coincidence as a good omen, closing the fingers of her left hand over the thumb three times to make the wish come true.
The roads were better than she remembered; certainly the merchants travelling them seemed to feel safer. Rolling along in the cart, she asked the Senzian about it. He grinned sardonically.
‘The Tyrants have cleaned out most of the highway brigands. Just a matter of protecting their own interests. They want to make sure no one else robs us before they do with their border tariffs and taxes.’ He spat, discreetly, into the dust of the road. ‘Personally I preferred the brigands. There were ways of dealing with them.’
Not long after that she saw evidence of what he was talking about: they passed two death-wheels beside the roadway, the bodies of would-be thieves spreadeagled upon them, spiralling lazily in the sun, severed hands rotting in their mouths. The smell was very bad.
The Senzian stopped just across the border to do some dealing in the fort at Forese. He also paid his transit duties there scrupulously, waiting patiently in line to have his cart examined and levied. The death-wheels, he pointed out to her after, in the acerbic Senzian manner, were not reserved for highway thieves and captured wizards.
Thus delayed, they spent the night at a coach-house on the well-travelled road, joining a party of Ferraut traders for dinner. Dianora excused herself early and went to bed. She’d paid for a room alone and took the precaution of pushing an oak dresser in front of her door. Nothing disturbed her though, except her dreams. She was back in Tigana and yet she wasn’t, because it wasn’t there. She whispered the name to herself like a talisman or a prayer before falling into a restless sleep shot through with images of destruction from the burning year.
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