Tigana

by Guy Gavriel Kay

  He came to her every night. The woman slept downstairs; their mother slept—and woke—in her own world. In the dark of Dianora’s room they escaped into each other, reaching through loss and the knowledge of wrong in search of innocence.

  He was still driven to go out some nights to walk the empty streets. Not as often as before, for which she gave thanks and sought a kind of justification for herself. A number of young men had been caught after curfew and killed on the wheels that spring. If what she was doing kept him alive she would face whatever judgement lay in wait for her in Morian’s Halls.

  She couldn’t keep him every night though. Sometimes a need she could not share or truly understand would drive him forth. He tried to explain. How the city was different under the two moons or one of them or the stars. How softer light and shadow let him see it as Tigana again. How he could walk silently down towards the sea and come upon the darkened palace, and how the rubble and ruin of it could somehow be rebuilt in his mind in darkness towards what it had been before.

  He had a need for that, he said. He never baited the soldiers and promised her he never would. He didn’t even want to see them, he said. They crashed into the illusions he wanted. He just needed to be abroad inside his memory of the city that had gone. Sometimes, Baerd told her, he would slip through gaps he knew in the harbour walls and walk along the beach listening to the sea.

  By day he laboured, a thin boy at a strong man’s job, helping to rebuild what they were permitted to rebuild. Rich merchants from Corte—their ancient enemies—had been allowed to settle in the city, to buy up the smashed buildings and residential palaces very inexpensively, and to set about restoring them for their own purposes.

  Baerd would come home at the end of a day sometimes with gashes and fresh bruises, and once the mark of a whip across his shoulders. She knew that if one company of soldiers had ended their sport with him there were others to pick it up. It was only happening here, she’d heard. Everywhere else the soldiers restrained themselves and the King of Ygrath was governing with care, to consolidate his provinces against Barbadior.

  In Lower Corte they were special, though. They had killed his son.

  She would see those marks on Baerd and she had not the heart to ask him to deny himself his lost city at night when the need rose in him. Even though she lived a hundred terrors and died half a hundred deaths every time the front door closed behind him after dark—until she heard it open again and heard his loved, familiar footstep on the stairs, and then the landing, and then he came into her room to take and hold her in his arms.

  It went on into summer and then it ended. It all ended, as her knowing heart had forewarned her from that first time in darkness, listening to the birds singing and the wind in the trees outside.

  He came home no later than he usually did from walking abroad one night when blue Ilarion had been riding alone through a high lacework of clouds. It had been a beautiful night. She had sat up late by her window watching the moonlight falling on the rooftops. She’d been in bed when he came home though, and her heart had quickened with the familiar intermingling of relief and guilt and need. He had come into her room.

  He didn’t come to bed. Instead, he sank into the chair she’d sat in by the window. With a queer, numb feeling of dread she had struck tinder and lit her candle. She sat up and looked at him. His face was very white, she could see that even by candlelight. She said nothing. She waited.

  ‘I was on the beach,’ Baerd said quietly. ‘I saw a riselka there.’

  She had always known it would end. That it had to end.

  She asked the instinctive question. ‘Did anyone else see her?’

  He shook his head.

  They looked at each other in silence. She was amazed at how calm she was, how steady her hands were upon the comforter. And in that silence a truth came home to her, one she had probably known for a long time. ‘You have only been staying for me, in any case,’ she said. A statement. No reproach in it. He had seen a riselka.

  He closed his eyes. ‘You knew?’

  ‘Yes,’ she lied.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, looking at her. But she knew that this would be easier for him if she were able to hide how new and deathly cold this actually was for her. A gift; perhaps the last gift she would give him.

  ‘Don’t be sorry,’ she murmured, her hands lying still, where he could see them. ‘Truly, I understand.’ Truly, she did, though her heart was a wounded thing, a bird with one wing only, fluttering in small circles to the ground.

  ‘The riselka—’ he began. And halted. It was an enormous, frightening thing, she knew.

  ‘She makes it clear,’ he went on earnestly. ‘The fork of the prophecy. That I have to go away.’

  She saw the love for her in his eyes. She willed herself to be strong enough. Strong enough to help him go away from her. Oh, my brother, she was thinking. And will you leave me now?

  She said, ‘I know she makes it clear, Baerd. I know you have to leave. It will be marked on the lines of your palm.’ She swallowed. This was harder than she could ever have imagined. She said, ‘Where will you go?’ My love, she added, but not aloud, only inside, in her heart.

  ‘I’ve thought about that,’ he said.

  He sat up straighter now. She could see him taking strength from her calm. She clung to that with everything she had.

  ‘I’m going to look for the Prince,’ he said.

  ‘What, Alessan? We don’t even know if he’s alive,’ she said in spite of herself.

  ‘There’s word he is,’ Baerd said. ‘That his mother is in hiding with the priests of Eanna, and that the Prince has been sent away. If there is any hope, any dream for us, for Tigana, it will lie with Alessan.’

  ‘He’s fifteen years old,’ she said. Could not stop herself from saying. And so are you, she thought. Baerd, where did our childhood go?

  By candlelight his dark eyes were not those of a boy. ‘I don’t think age matters,’ he said. ‘This is not going to be a quick or an easy thing, if it can ever be done at all. He will be older than fifteen when the time comes.’

  ‘So will you,’ she said.

  ‘And so will you,’ Baerd echoed. ‘Oh, Dia, what will you do?’ No one else but her father ever called her that. Stupidly it was the name that nearly broke her control.

  She shook her head. ‘I don’t know,’ she said honestly. ‘Look after mother. Marry. There is money for a while yet if I’m careful.’ She saw his stricken look and moved to quell it. ‘You are not to worry about it, Baerd. Listen to me: you have just seen a riselka! Will you fight your fate to clear rubble in this city for the rest of your days? No one has easy choices any more, and mine will not be as hard as most. I may,’ she had added, tilting her head defiantly, ‘try to think of some way to chase the same dream as you.’

  It astonished her, looking back, that she had actually said this on that very night. As if she herself had seen the riselka and her own path had been made clear, even as Baerd’s forked away from her.

  Lonely and cold in the saishan she was not half so cold or alone as she had been that night. He had not lingered once she’d given her dispensation. She had risen and dressed and helped him pack a very few things. He had flatly refused any of the silver. She assembled a small satchel of food for his first sunrise on the long road alone. At the doorway, in the darkness of the summer night, they had held each other close, clinging without words. Neither wept, as if both knew the time for tears had passed.

  ‘If the goddesses love us, and the god,’ Baerd said, ‘we will surely meet again. I will think of you each and every day of my life. I love you, Dianora.’

  ‘And I you,’ she’d said to him. ‘I think you know how much. Eanna light your path and bring you home.’ That was all she’d said. All she could think to say.

  After he’d gone she had sat in the front room wrapped in an old shawl of her mother’s, gazing sightlessly at the ashes of last night’s fire until the sun came up.

  By then th
e hard kernel of her own plan had been formed.

  The plan that had brought her here, all these years after, to this other lonely bed on an Ember Night of ghosts when she should not have had to be alone. Alone with all her memories, with the reawakening they carried, and the awareness of what she had allowed to happen to her here on the Island. Here in Brandin’s court. Here with Brandin.

  And so it was that two things came to Dianora that Ember Night in the saishan.

  The memories of her brother had been the first, sweeping over her in waves, image after image until they ended with the ashes of that dead fire.

  The second, following inexorably, born of that same long-ago year, born of memory, of guilt, of the whirlwind hurts that came with lying here alone and so terribly exposed on this night of all nights … the second thing, spun forth from all these interwoven things, was, finally, the shaping of a resolution. A decision, after so many years. A course of action she now knew she was going to take. Had to take, whatever might follow.

  She lay there, chilled, hopelessly awake, and she was aware that the cold she felt came far more from within than without. Somewhere in the palace, she knew, the torturers would be attending to Camena di Chiara who had tried to kill a Tyrant and free his home. Who had done so knowing he would die and how he would die.

  Even now they would be with him, administering their precise measures of pain. With a professional pride in their skill they would be breaking his fingers one by one, his wrists and his arms. His toes and ankles and legs. They would be doing it carefully, even tenderly, solicitously guarding the beat of his heart, so that after they had broken his back—which was always the last—they could strap him alive on a wheel and take him out to the harbour square to die in the sight of his people.

  She would never have dreamt Camena had such courage or so much passion in his heart. She had derided him as a poseur, a wearer of three-layered cloaks, a minor, trivial artist angling for ascension at court.

  Not any more. Yesterday afternoon had compelled a new shape to her image of him. Now that he had done what he had done, now that his body had been given to the torturers and then the wheel there was a question that could no more be buried than could her memories of Baerd. Not tonight. Not unsheltered as she was and so awake.

  What, the thought came knifing home like a winter wind in the soul, did Camena’s act make her?

  What did it make of that long-ago quest a sixteen-year-old girl had so proudly set herself the night her brother went away? The night he’d seen a riselka under moonlight by the sea and gone in search of his Prince.

  She knew the answers. Of course she did. She knew the names that belonged to her. The names she had earned here on the Island. They burned like sour wine in a wound. And burning inside, even as she shivered, Dianora strove one more time to school her heart to begin the deathly hard, never yet successful, journey back to her own dominion from that room on the far wing of the palace where lay the King of Ygrath.

  That night was different though. Something had changed that night, because of what had happened, because of the finality, the absoluteness of what she herself had done in the Audience Chamber. Acknowledging that, trying to deal with it, Dianora began to sense, as if from a very great distance, her heart’s slow, painful retreat from the fires of love. A returning, and then a turning back, to the memory of other fires at home. Fields burning, a city burning, a palace set aflame.

  No comfort there of course. No comfort anywhere at all. Only an absolute reminder of who she was and why she was here.

  And lying very still in darkness on an Ember Night when country doors and windows were all closed against the dead and the magic in the fields, Dianora told softly to herself the whole of the old foretelling verse:

  One man sees a riselka

  his life forks there.

  Two men see a riselka

  one of them shall die.

  Three men see a riselka

  one is blessed, one forks, one shall die.

  One woman sees a riselka

  her path comes clear to her.

  Two women see a riselka

  one of them shall bear a child.

  Three women see a riselka

  one is blessed, one is clear, one shall bear a child.

  In the morning, she said to herself amid cold and fire and all the myriad confusions of the heart. In the morning it will begin as it should have begun and ended long ago.

  The Triad knew how bitter, how impossible all choices had seemed to her. How faint and elusive had been her dream within these walls of making it all come right for all of them. But of one truth she was now, finally, certain: she had needed something to be made clear along the twisting paths to betrayal that seemed to have become her life—and from Brandin’s own lips she had learned how that clear path might be offered her.

  In the morning she would begin.

  Until then she could lie here, achingly awake and alone, as on another night at home so many years ago, and she could remember.

  P A R T T H R E E

  E M B E R T O E M B E R

  C H A P T E R 9

  It was cold in the gully by the side of the road. There was a thin, sheltering line of birch trees between them and the gates of the Nievolene estate, but even so the wind was a knife whenever it picked up.

  There had been snow last night, a rare thing this far north, even in midwinter. It had made for a white, chilled second night of riding from Ferraut town where they had started, but Alessan had refused to slow their pace. He had said increasingly little as the night wore on, and Baerd said little at the best of times. Devin had swallowed his questions and concentrated on keeping up.

  They had crossed the Astibar border in darkness and arrived at the Nievolene lands just after dawn. The horses were tethered in a grove about a half-mile to the southwest, and the three men had made their way to this gully on foot. Devin dozed off at intervals through the morning. The snow made the landscape strange and crisp and lovely when the sun was out, but around mid-afternoon the grey clouds had gathered heavily overhead and it was only cold now, not beautiful at all. It had snowed again, briefly, about an hour before.

  When Devin heard the jingle of horses approaching through the greyness, he realized that the Triad, for once, were holding open palms towards them. Or that, alternatively, the goddesses and the god had decided to give them a chance to do something fatally rash. He pressed himself as flat as he could to the wet ground of the gully. He thought of Catriana and the Duke, warm and sheltered with Taccio in Ferraut.

  A company of about a dozen Barbadian mercenaries materialized out of the grey landscape. They were laughing and singing in boisterous exuberance. Their horses’ breath and their own made white puffs of smoke in the cold. Flat in the gully Devin watched them go by. He heard Baerd’s soft breathing beside him. The Barbadians stopped at the gates of what had once been Nievolene lands. They weren’t any more, of course, not since the confiscations of the fall. The company leader dismounted and strode to the locked gates. With a flourish that drew cheers and laughter from his men he unlocked the iron gates with two keys on an ornate chain.

  ‘First Company,’ Alessan murmured under his breath. His first words in hours. ‘He chose Karalius. Sandre said he would.’

  They watched the gates swing open and saw the horses canter through. The last man locked the iron gates behind him.

  Baerd and Alessan waited another few moments then rose to their feet. Devin stood up as well, wincing at how stiff he felt.

  ‘We’ll need to find the tavern in the village,’ Baerd said, his voice so unusually grim that Devin glanced sharply at him in the growing gloom. The other man’s features were unreadable.

  ‘Not to go inside, though,’ Alessan said. ‘What we do here, we do unknown.’

  Baerd nodded. He pulled a much-creased paper from an inner pocket of his sheepskin vest. ‘Shall we start with Rovigo’s man?’

  Rovigo’s man turned out to be a retired mariner who lived in the vil
lage a mile to the east. He told them where the tavern was. He also, for a fairly significant sum of money, gave them a name: that of a known informer for Grancial and his Second Company of Barbadians. The old sailor counted his money, spat once, meaningfully, then told them where the man lived, and something of his habits.

  Baerd killed the informer, strangling him two hours later as he walked along a country lane from his small farm towards the village tavern. It was full-dark by then. Devin helped him carry the body back towards the Nievolene gates and hide it in the gully.

  Baerd didn’t speak, and Devin could think of nothing to say. The informer was a paunchy, balding man of middle years. He didn’t look especially evil. He looked like a man surprised on the way to his favourite tavern. Devin wondered if he’d had a wife and children. They hadn’t asked Rovigo’s man about that; he was just as happy they hadn’t.

  They rejoined Alessan at the edge of the village. He was keeping watch on the tavern from there. Without speaking he pointed to a large dun-coloured horse among those tethered outside the inn. A soldier’s horse. The three of them doubled back west half a mile and lay down to wait again, prone and watchful by the side of the road. Devin realized he wasn’t cold any more, or tired; he hadn’t had time to think about such things.

  Later that night under the cold white gaze of Vidomni in the clearing winter sky Alessan killed the man they’d been waiting for. By the time Devin heard the soft jingle of the soldier’s horse, the Prince was no longer by his side and it had been mostly accomplished.

  Devin heard a soft sound, more like a cough than a cry. The horse snorted in alarm, and Devin belatedly rose up to try to deal with the animal. By then, though, he realized that Baerd wasn’t beside him either. When he finally clambered out of the ditch to the road, the soldier—wearing the insignia of the Second Company—was dead and Baerd had the horse under control. The man, obviously off duty, from the casual look of his uniform, had evidently been on his way back to the border fort. The Barbadian was a big man, they all were, but this one’s face seemed very young under the moonlight.