‘With … what was it? Green skin and blue hair?’ she replied, letting her court instincts guide her now. Something large was happening here though. She laboured to hide the turmoil she felt. ‘I thank you so much, my gracious lord. I suppose if I talked to Scelto and Vencel we could achieve the skip colour, and blue hair should be easy enough. If it excites you so dramatically …’
He smiled but did not laugh. ‘Green hair, not blue,’ he said, almost absently. ‘And she did, Dianora,’ he repeated, looking at her oddly. ‘She did remind me of you. I wonder why. Do you know anything about such creatures?’
‘I do not,’ she said. ‘In Certando we have no tales of green-haired women in the mountains.’ She was lying. She was lying as well as she could, wide-eyed and direct. She could scarcely believe what she had just heard, what he had seen.
Brandin’s good humour was still with him.
‘What mountain tales do you have in Certando?’ he queried, smiling expectantly.
‘Stories of hairy things that walk on legs like tree stumps and eat goats and virgins in the night.’
His smile broadened. ‘Are there any?’
‘Goats, yes,’ she said with a straight face. ‘Fewer virgins. Hairy creatures with such specific appetites are not an incentive to chastity. Are you sending out a party to search for this creature?’ A question so important she held her breath awaiting his reply.
‘I think not,’ Brandin said. ‘I suspect such things are only seen when they want to be.’
Which, she knew for a fact, was absolutely true.
‘I haven’t told anyone but you,’ he added unexpectedly.
There was no dissembling in the expression she felt come over her face at that. But over and above everything else there was something new inside her with these tidings. She badly needed to be alone to think. A vain hope. She wouldn’t get that chance for a long time yet today; best to push his story as far back as she could, with all the other things she was always pushing to the edges of her mind.
‘Thank you, my lord,’ she murmured, aware that they had been talking privately for some time. Aware, as ever, of how that would be construed.
‘In the meantime,’ Brandin suddenly said, in a quite different tone, ‘you still have not yet asked me how I did on the run. Solores, I have to tell you, made it her first question.’
Which carried them back to familiar ground.
‘Very well,’ she said, feigning indifference. ‘Do tell me. Halfway? Three-quarters?’
A glint of royal indignation flickered in the grey eyes. ‘You are presumptuous sometimes,’ he said. ‘I indulge you too much. I went, if you please, all the way to the summit and came down again this morning with a cluster of sonrai berries. I will be extremely interested to see if any of tomorrow’s runners are up and down as quickly.’
‘Well,’ she said quickly, unwisely, ‘they won’t have sorcery to help them.’
‘Dianora, have done!’
And that tone she recognized and knew she’d gone too far. As always at such moments she had a dizzying sense of a pit gaping at her feet.
She knew what Brandin needed from her; she knew the reason he granted her licence to be outrageous and impertinent. She had long understood why the wit and edge she brought to their exchanges were important to him. She was his counterbalance to Solores’s soft, unquestioning, undemanding shelter. The two of them, in turn, balancing d’Eymon’s ascetic exercise of politics and government.
And all three of them in orbit around the star that Brandin was. The voluntarily exiled sun, removed from the heavens it knew, from the lands and seas and people, bound to this alien peninsula by loss and grief and revenge decreed.
She knew all this. She knew the King very well. Her life depended on that. She did not often stray across the line that was always there, invisible but inviolate. When she did it was likely to be over something as apparently trivial as this. It was such a paradox for her how he could shrug off or laugh at or even invite her caustic commentary on court and colony—and yet bridle like a boy with affronted pride if she teased about his ability to run up and down a mountain in a morning.
At such times he had only to say her name in a certain way and endless chasms opened before her in the delicately inlaid floor of the Audience Chamber.
She was a captive here, more slave than courtesan, at the court of a Tyrant. She was also an impostor, living an ongoing lie while her country slowly died away from the memories of men. And she had sworn to kill this man, whose glance across a room was as wildfire on her skin or amber wine in her mortal blood.
Chasms, everywhere she turned.
And now this morning he had seen a riselka. He, and very possibly a second man as well. Fighting back her fear she forced herself to shrug casually, to arch her eyebrows above a face schooled to bland unconcern.
‘This amuses me,’ she said, reaching for self-possession, knowing precisely what his need in her was, even now. Especially now. ‘You profess to be pleased, even touched, by Solores’s doubtlessly agitated query about your mountain run. The first thing she asked, you say. How she must have wondered whether or not you succeeded! And yet when I— knowing as surely as I know my own name that you were up on the summit this morning—treat it lightly, as something small, never in doubt … why then the King grows angry. He bids me sternly to have done! But tell me, my lord, in all fairness, which of us, truly, has honoured you more?’
For a long time he was silent and she knew that the court would be avidly marking the expression on his face. For the moment she cared nothing for them. Or even for her past, or his encounter on the mountainside. There was one specific chasm here that began and ended in the depths of the grey eyes that were now searching her own.
When he spoke it was in a different voice again, but this tone she happened to know exceedingly well and, in spite of everything that had just been said, and in spite of where they were and who was watching them, she felt herself go weak suddenly. Her legs trembled, but not with fear now.
‘I could take you,’ said Brandin, King of Ygrath, thickly, his face flushed, ‘on the floor of this room right now before all of my gathered court.’
Her throat was dry. She felt a nerve flutter beneath the skin of her wrist. Her own colour was high, she knew. She swallowed with some difficulty.
‘Perhaps tonight would be wiser,’ she murmured, trying to keep her tone light but not really managing it, unable to hide the swift response in her eyes—spark to spark like the onset of a blaze. The jewelled khav chalice trembled in her hand. He saw that, and she saw that he did and that her response, as always, served as kindling for his own desire. She sipped at her drink, holding it with both hands, clinging to self-control.
‘Better tonight, surely,’ she said again, overwhelmed as always by what was happening to her. She knew what he needed her to say though, now, at this moment, in this room of state thronged with his court and emissaries from home.
She said it, looking him in the eyes, articulating carefully:
‘After all, my lord, at your age you should marshal your strength. You did run partway up a hill this morning.’
An instant later, for the second time, the Chiaran court of Brandin of Ygrath saw their King throw back his handsome, bearded head and they heard him laugh aloud in delight. Not far away, Rhun the Fool cackled in simultaneous glee.
‘Isolla of Ygrath!’
This time there were trumpets and a drum, as well as the herald’s staff resounding as it struck the floor by the double doors at the southern end of the Audience Chamber.
Standing most of the way towards the throne, Dianora had time to observe the stately progress of the woman Brandin had called the finest musician in Ygrath. The assembled court of Chiara was lined several rows deep, flanking the approach to the King.
‘A handsome woman still,’ murmured Neso of Ygrath, ‘and she’s fifty years old if she’s a day.’ Somehow he had managed to end up next to her in the front row.
His unc
tuous tone irritated her, as always, but she tried not to let it show. Isolla was clad in the simplest possible robe of dark blue, betted at the waist with a slender gold chain. Her hair, brown with hints of grey, was cut unfashionably short—although the spring and summer fashion might change after today, Dianora thought. The colony always took its cue in these matters from Ygrath.
Isolla walked confidently, not hurrying, down the aisle formed by the courtiers. Brandin was already smiling a welcome. He was always immensely pleased when one or another of Ygrath’s artists made the long, often dangerous, sea voyage to his second court.
Several steps behind Isolla, and carrying her lute in its case as if it were an artifact of immeasurable worth, Dianora saw—with genuine surprise—the poet Camena di Chiara, clad in his ubiquitous triple-layered cloak. There were murmurs from the assembly: she wasn’t the only one caught off-guard by this.
Instinctively she threw a glance across the aisle to where Doarde stood with his wife and daughter. She was in time to see the spasm of hate and fear that flickered across his face as his younger rival approached. An instant later the revealing expression was gone, replaced by a polished mask of sneering disdain at Camena’s vulgar lowering of himself to serve as porter for an Ygrathen.
Still, Dianora considered, this was an Ygrathen court. Camena, she guessed in a flash of intuition, had probably had one of his verses set to music. If Isolla was about to sing a song of his it would be a dazzling coup for the Chiaran poet. More than sufficient to explain why he would offer to further exalt Isolla—and Ygrathen artists—by serving as a bearer for her.
The politics of art, Dianora decided, was at least as complex as that of provinces and nations.
Isolla had stopped, as was proper, about fifteen steps from the dais of the Island Throne, very close to where Dianora and Neso stood.
Neatly she proceeded to perform the triple obeisance. Very graciously—a mark of high honour—Brandin rose to his feet to bid her welcome. He was smiling. So was Rhun, behind him and to his left.
For no reason she would ever afterwards be able to name or explain Dianora turned from monarch and musician back to the poet bearing the lute. Camena had stopped a further half a dozen paces behind Isolla and had knelt on the marble floor.
What detracted from the grace of the tableau was the dilation of his eyes. Nilth leaves, Dianora concluded instantly. He’s drugged himself. She saw beads of perspiration on the poet’s brow. It was not warm in the Audience Chamber.
‘You are most welcome, Isolla,’ Brandin was saying with genuine pleasure. ‘It has been far too long since we have seen you, or heard you play.’
Dianora saw Camena make a small adjustment in the way he held the lute. She thought he was preparing to open the case. It did not look like an ordinary lute though. In fact—
Afterwards she was able to know one thing only with certainty: it had been the story of the riselka that made her so sharp to see. The story, and the fact that Brandin wasn’t certain if the second man—his guard—had seen her or not.
One man meant a fork in the path. Two men meant a death.
Either way, something was to happen. And now it did.
All eyes but hers were on Brandin and Isolla. Only Dianora saw Camena slip the velvet cover off the lute. Only Dianora saw that it was not, in fact, a lute. And only she had heard Brandin’s tale of the riselka.
‘Die, Isolla of Ygrath!’ Camena screamed hoarsely; his eyes bulged as he hurled the velvet away and levelled the crossbow he carried.
With the lightning reaction of a man half his years Brandin reflexively threw out his hand to cast a sorcerer’s shield around the threatened singer.
Exactly as he was expected to, Dianora realized.
‘Brandin, no!’ she screamed. ‘It’s you!’
And seizing the gape-mouthed Neso of Ygrath by the near shoulder she propelled herself and him both into the aisle.
The crossbow bolt, aimed meticulously to the left of Isolla on a line for Brandin’s heart, buried itself instead in the shoulder of a stupefied Neso. He shrieked in pain and shock.
Her momentum drove Dianora stumbling to her knees beside Isolla. She looked up. And for the rest of her days never forgot the look she met in the singer’s eyes.
She turned away from it. The emotion, the hatred was too raw. She felt physically ill, trembling with aftershock. She forced herself to stand; she looked at Brandin. He hadn’t even lowered his hand. There was still the shimmer of a protective barrier around Isolla.
Who had never been in danger at all.
The guards had Camena by now. He’d been dragged to his feet. Dianora had never seen anyone look so white. Even his eyes were white, from the drug. For a moment she thought he was going to faint, but then Camena threw his head back as far as he could in the iron grip of the Ygrathen soldiers. He opened his mouth, as if in agony.
‘Chiara!’ he cried once, and then, ‘Freedom for Chiara!’ before they silenced him, brutally.
The echoes rang for a long time. The room was large and the stillness was almost absolute. No one dared to move. Dianora had a sense that the court wasn’t even breathing. No one wanted the slightest attention drawn to them.
On the mosaic-inlaid floor Neso moaned again in fear and pain, breaking the tableau. Two soldiers knelt to tend to him. Dianora was still afraid she was going to be sick; she couldn’t make her hands stop trembling. Isolla of Ygrath had not moved.
She could not move, Dianora realized: Brandin was holding her in a mindlock like a flower pressed flat on a sheet. The soldiers lifted Neso and helped him from the room. Dianora stepped back herself, leaving Isolla alone before the King. Fifteen very proper paces away.
‘Camena was a tool,’ Brandin said softly. ‘Chiara has virtually nothing to do with this. Do not think that I am unaware of that. I can offer you nothing now but an easier death. You must tell me why you did this.’ His voice was rigidly measured, careful and uninflected. Dianora had never heard such a tone from him. She looked at Rhun: the Fool was weeping, tears streaking his distorted features.
Brandin lowered his hand, freeing Isolla to move and speak.
The blazing flash of hatred left her features. In its place was a defiant pride. Dianora wondered if she had actually thought the deception would work. If after the King had been slain she had really expected to walk freely from this room. And if not—if she had not expected to do so—what did that mean?
Holding herself very straight, Isolla gave part of an answer. ‘I am dying,’ she said to Brandin. ‘The physicians have given me less than a season before the growth inside reaches my brain. Already there are songs I can no longer remember. Songs that have been mine for forty years.’
‘I am sorry to hear it,’ said Brandin formally, his courtesy so perfect it seemed a violation of human nature. He said, ‘All of us die, Isolla. Some very young. Not all of us plot the death of our King. You have more to tell me before I may grant you release from pain.’
For the first time Isolla seemed to waver. She lowered her gaze from his eerily serene grey eyes. Only after a long moment did she say, ‘You had to have known that there would be a price for what you did.’
‘Exactly what is it that I did?’
Her head came up. ‘You exalted a dead child above the living one, and revenge above your wife. And more highly than your own land. Have you spared a thought, a fraction of a thought, for any of them while you pursued your unnatural vengeance for Stevan?’
Dianora’s heart thudded painfully. It was a name not spoken in Chiara. She saw Brandin’s lips tighten in a way she had seen only a handful of times. But when he spoke his voice was as rigidly controlled as before.
‘I judged that I had considered them fairly. Girald has governance in Ygrath as he was always going to have. He even has my saishan, as a symbol of that. Dorotea I invited here several times a year for the first several years.’
‘Invited here that she might wither and grow old while you kept yourself young. A thing n
o Sorcerer-King of Ygrath has ever done before, lest the gods punish the land for that impiety. But for Ygrath you never spared a thought, did you? And Girald? He is no King—his father is. That is your title, not his. What does the key to a saishan mean against that reality? He is even going to die before you, Brandin, unless you are slain. And what will happen then? It is unnatural! It is all unnatural, and there is a price to be paid.’
‘There is always a price,’ he said softly. ‘A price for everything. Even for living. I had not expected to pay it in my own family.’ There was a silence. ‘Isolla, I must extend my years to do what I am here to do.’
‘Then you pay for it,’ Isolla repeated, ‘and Girald pays and Dorotea. And Ygrath.’
And Tigana, Dianora thought, no longer trembling, her own ache come back like a wound in her. Tigana pays too— in broken statues and fallen towers, in children slain and a name gone.
She watched Brandin’s face. And Rhun’s.
‘I hear you,’ the King said at length to the singer. ‘I have heard more than you have chosen to say. I need only one thing further. You must tell me which of them did this.’ It was said with visible regret. Rhun’s ugly face was screwed up tightly, his hands gestured with a random helplessness.
‘And why,’ said Isolla, drawing herself up and speaking with the frigid hauteur of one who had nothing left to lose, ‘should you imagine their purposes to be at odds in this? Why the one or the other, King of Ygrath?’ Her voice rang out, harsh as the message it bore.
Slowly he nodded. The hurt was clear in him now; Dianora could see it in the way he stood and spoke, however much he controlled himself. She didn’t even need to look at Rhun.
‘Very well,’ Brandin said. ‘And you, Isolla? What could they have offered to make you do this thing? Can you really hate me so much?’
The woman hesitated only for an instant. Then, as proudly, as defiantly as before, she said, ‘I can love the Queen so much.’
Brandin closed his eyes. ‘How so?’
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