‘I suppose so,’ she said, though it didn’t really strike her that way. Devin talked like this sometimes. She didn’t see the action as one of pride, or bargaining, just as a reminder to the self of how great a wrong had come to pass. A reminder, like Alessan’s blue wine.
‘My mother is not a proud woman,’ she said, surprising herself.
‘I don’t know what mine was like,’ he said in that tightened voice. ‘I don’t even know if I could say that my father is proud. I guess I don’t know very much about him either.’ He really did sound peculiar.
‘Devin,’ she said sharply, ‘lean forward. Let me look at you.’ She checked her blankets; they covered her to the chin.
Slowly he shifted forward: the candlelight spilled across his wildly dishevelled hair, the torn shirt and the visible scratches and marks of teeth. She felt a quick surge of anger, and then a slower, deeper anxiety that had nothing to do with him. Or not directly.
She masked both reactions behind a sardonic laugh. ‘She was roaming, I see. You look like you’ve been to war.’
With an effort he managed a brief smile, but there was something sombre in his eyes: she could read it even by candlelight.
It unsettled her. ‘What is it then?’ she pursued with broad sarcasm. ‘You tired her out and came here wanting more? I can tell you—’
‘No,’ he said quickly. ‘No, it isn’t that. It is … hardly that, Catriana. It has been a … difficult night.’
‘You certainly look as if it was,’ she retorted, her hands gripping the blankets.
He pushed on doggedly. ‘Not that way. It’s so strange. So complicated. I think I learned something there. I think—’
‘Devin, I really don’t want the details!’ She was angry with herself for how edgy this sort of thing made her feel.
‘No, no. Not like that, though yes, there was that at the beginning. But …’ He drew a breath. ‘I think what I learned was something about what the Tyrants have done to us. Not just Brandin, and not just in Tigana. Alberico too. Both of them, and to all of us.’
‘Such insight,’ she mocked, reflexively. ‘She must be even more skilful than you imagined.’
Which silenced him. He leaned back in the chair again and she couldn’t see his face. In the quiet that followed her breathing grew calmer.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said at length. ‘I didn’t mean that. I’m tired. I’ve had some bad dreams tonight. What do you want from me, Devin?’
‘I’m not sure,’ he said. ‘I guess, to be a friend.’
Again she felt pushed and uneasy. She resisted an instinctive, nervous urge to suggest he go write a letter to one of Rovigo’s daughters. She said, ‘I’ve never been good at that, even as a child.’
‘Nor I,’ he said, shifting forward again. He had pushed his hair into a semblance of order. He said, ‘It is more than that between you and me though. You hate me sometimes, don’t you.’
She felt her heart thump. ‘We do not have to discuss this, Devin. I don’t hate you.’
‘Sometimes you do,’ he pursued in that strange, dogged tone. ‘Because of what happened in the Sandreni Palace.’ He paused, and drew a shaky breath. ‘Because I was the first man you ever made love with.’
She closed her eyes. Tried, unsuccessfully, to will that last sentence not to have been spoken. ‘You knew?’
‘Not then. I figured it out later.’
Pieces of another puzzle. Patiently putting it together. Figuring her out. She opened her eyes and gazed bleakly at him. ‘And is it your idea that discussing this interesting subject will make us friends?’
He winced. ‘Probably not. I don’t know. I thought I’d tell you I want to be.’ There was a silence. ‘I honestly don’t know, Catriana. I’m sorry.’
Surprisingly, her shock and anger had both passed. She saw him slump back again, exhausted, and she did the same, reclining against the wooden headboard of her bed. She thought for a while, marvelling at how calm she felt.
‘I don’t hate you, Devin,’ she said finally. ‘Truly, I don’t. Nothing like that. It is an awkward memory, I won’t deny that, but I don’t think it has ever hindered us in what we have to do. Which is what really matters, isn’t it?’
‘I suppose so,’ he said. She couldn’t see his face. ‘If that is all that matters.’
‘I mean, it’s true what I said before: I’ve always been bad at making friends.’
‘Why?’
Pieces of the puzzle again. But she said, ‘As a girl, I’m not sure. Maybe I was shy, perhaps proud. I never felt easy in our village, even though it was the only home I’d ever known. But since Baerd named Tigana for me, since I heard the name, that has been all there is in the world for me. All that counts for anything at all.’
She could almost hear him thinking about that.
He said, ‘Ice is for endings.’
Which is exactly what Alienor had said to her. He went on, ‘You are still a living person, Catriana. With a heart, a life to live, access to friendship, even to love. Why are you sealing yourself down to the one thing only?’
And she heard herself reply: ‘Because my father never fought. He fled Tigana like a coward before the battles at the river.’
She could have ripped her tongue bleeding from her mouth, out at the very root, the moment she had spoken.
‘Oh,’ he said.
‘Not a word, Devin! Don’t say a word!’
He obeyed, sitting very still, almost invisible in the depths of his chair. Abruptly she blew out the candle; she didn’t want light now. And then, because it was dark, and because he was so obligingly silent, she was gradually able to regain control of herself. To move past the meaning of this moment without weeping. It took a long time in the darkness but eventually she was able to draw a long, steady breath and know she was all right.
‘Thank you,’ she said, not entirely sure what she was thanking him for. Mostly, the silence.
There was no reply. She waited a moment then softly called his name. Again no answer. She listened, and eventually was able to make out the steady rise and fall of his breathing in sleep.
She had enough of a sense of irony to find that amusing. He had evidently had a difficult night though, and not just in the obvious ways.
She thought about waking him and sending him back to his own room. It would most certainly raise eyebrows if they were seen leaving here together in the morning. She discovered, though, that she didn’t really care. She also realized that she minded less than she’d expected that he’d figured out the one truth about her and had just learned another. About her father, but really more about herself. She wondered about that, why it didn’t bother her more.
She considered putting one of the blankets over him but resisted the impulse. For some reason she didn’t really want him waking in the morning and knowing she’d done that. Rovigo’s daughters did that sort of thing, not her. Or no: the younger daughter would have had him in this bed and inside her by now, strange moods and exhaustion notwithstanding. The older? Would have woven a new quilt at miraculous speed and tucked it around him with a note attached as to the lineage of the sheep that had given the wool and the history of the pattern she’d chosen.
Catriana smiled to herself in the darkness and settled back to sleep. Her restlessness seemed to have passed and she did not dream again. When she woke, just after dawn, he was gone. She didn’t learn until later just how far.
C H A P T E R 1 1
Elena stood by the open door of Mattio’s house looking up the dark road to the moat and the raised drawbridge, watching the candles flicker and go out one by one in the windows of Castle Borso. At intervals people walked past her into the house, offering only a nod or a brief greeting if anything at all. It was a night of battle that lay ahead of them, and everyone arriving was aware of that.
From the village behind her there came no sound at all, and no light. All the candles were long snuffed out, fires banked, windows covered over, even the chinks at the base of doors b
locked by cloth or rags. The dead walked on the first of the Ember Nights, everyone knew that.
There was little noise from within the house behind her, though fifteen or twenty people must have arrived by now, crowding into Mattio’s home at the edge of the village. Elena didn’t know how many more Walkers were yet to join them here, or later, at the meeting-place; she did know that there would be too few. There hadn’t been enough last year, or the year before that, and they had lost those battles very badly. The Ember Night wars were killing the Walkers faster than young ones like Elena herself were growing up to replace them. Which is why they were losing each spring, why they would almost certainly lose tonight.
It was a starry night, with only the one moon risen, the white crescent of Vidomni as she waned. It was cold as well, here in the highlands at the very beginning of spring. Elena wrapped her arms about herself, gripping her elbows with her hands. It would be a different sky, a different feel to the night entirely, in only a few hours, when the battle began.
Carenna walked in, giving her quick warm smile, but not stopping to talk. It was not a time for talking. Elena was worried about Carenna tonight; she had just had a child two weeks before. It was too soon for her to be doing this. But she was needed, they were all needed, and the Ember Night wars did not tarry for any man or woman, or for anything that happened in the world of day.
She nodded in response to a couple she didn’t know. They followed Carenna past her into the house. There was dust on their clothing; they had probably come from a long way east, timing their arrival here for after the sundown closing of the doors and windows in the town and in all the lonely farmhouses out in the night of the fields. Behind all those doors and windows, Elena knew, the people of the southern highlands would be waiting in darkness and praying.
Praying for rain and then sun, for the earth to be fruitful through spring and summer to the tall harvest of fall. For the seedlings of grain, of corn, to flourish when sown, take root and then rise, yellow and full of ripened promise, from the dark, moist, giving soil. Praying—though they knew nothing within their wrapped dark homes of what would actually happen tonight—for the Night Walkers to save the fields, the season, the grain, save and succour all their lives.
Elena instinctively reached up to finger the small leather ornament she wore about her neck. The ornament that held the shrivelled remnant of the caul in which she had been born, as all the Walkers had been—sheathed in the transparent birthing sac as they came crying from the womb.
A symbol of good fortune, birthwomen named the caul elsewhere in the Palm. Children born sheathed in that sac were said to be destined for a life blessed by the Triad.
Here at the remote southern edges of the peninsula, in these wild highlands beneath the mountains, the teachings and the lore were different. Here the ancient rites went deeper, further back, were passed from hand to hand, from mouth to mouth down from their beginnings long ago. In the highlands of Certando a child born with a caul was not said to be guarded from death at sea, or naïvely named for fortune.
It was marked for war.
For this war, fought each year on the first of the Ember Nights that began the spring and so began the year. Fought in the fields and for the fields, for the not yet risen seedlings that were hope and life and the offered promise of earth renewed. Fought for those in the great cities, cut off from the truths of the land, ignorant of such things, and fought for all the living here in Certando, huddled behind their walls, who knew only enough to pray and to be afraid of sounds in the night that might be the dead abroad.
From behind Elena a hand touched her shoulder. She turned to see Mattio looking quizzically at her. She shook her head, pushing her hair back with one hand.
‘Nothing yet,’ she said.
Mattio did not speak, but the pale moonlight showed his eyes bleak above the full black beard. He squeezed her shoulder, out of a habit of reassurance more than anything else, before turning to go back inside.
Elena watched him go, heavy-striding, solid and capable. Through the open doorway she saw him sit down again at the long trestle-table, across from Donar. She gazed at the two of them for a moment, thinking about Verzar, about love and then desire.
She turned away again to look out into the night towards the huge brooding outline of the castle in whose shadow she had spent her whole life. She felt old suddenly, far older than her years. She had two small children sleeping with her mother and father tonight in one of those shut-up cottages where no lights burned. She also had a husband sleeping in the burying field—a casualty, one of so many, of the terrible battle a year ago when the numbers of the Others seemed to have grown so much larger than ever before and so cruelly, malevolently triumphant.
Verzar had died a few days after that defeat, as all the victims of the night battles did.
Those touched by death in the Ember Night wars did not fall in the fields. They acknowledged that cold, final touch in their souls—like a finger on the heart, Verzar had said to her—and they came home to sleep and wake and walk through a day or a week or a month before yielding to the ending that had claimed them for its own.
In the north, in the cities, they spoke of the last portal of Morian, of longed-for grace in her dark Halls. Of priestly intercessions invoked with candles and tears.
Those born with the caul in the southern highlands, those who fought in the Ember wars and saw the shapes of the Others who came to battle there, did not speak in such a way.
Not that they would ever be so foolish as to deny Morian of Portals or Eanna or Adaon; only that they knew that there were powers older and darker than the Triad, powers that went beyond this peninsula, beyond even, Donar had once told her, this very world with its two moons and its sun. Once a year the Night Walkers of Certando would have—would be forced to have—a glimpse of these truths under a sky that was not their own.
Elena shivered. There would be more claimed for death tonight, she knew, and so fewer to fight the next year, and fewer the next. And where it would end she did not know. She was not educated in such things. She was twenty-two, a mother and a widow and a wheelwright’s daughter in the highlands. She was also a child born with the caul of the Night Walkers into a time when all the battles were being lost, year by year.
She was also known to have the best eyesight in the dark of all of them, which is why Mattio had placed her here by the door, watching the road for the one Donar had said might come.
It was a dry season; the moat, as he’d expected, was shallow. Once, long ago, the lords of Castle Borso had been pleased to keep their moat stocked with creatures that could kill a man. Baerd didn’t expect to find such things; not now, not for a long time now.
He waded across, hip-deep, under the high stars and the thin light of Vidomni in the sky. It was cold, but it had been many years since the elements bothered him much. Nor did it disturb him to be abroad on an Ember Night. Indeed, it had become a ritual of his own over the years: knowing that all across the Palm the holy days were observed and marked by people waiting in silent darkness behind their walls offered him a deepened sense of the solitude his soul seemed to need. He was profoundly drawn to this sense of moving through a scarcely breathing world that lay as if crouched in primitive darkness under the stars with no mortal fires cast back at the sky—only whatever flames the Triad created for themselves with lightning out of the heavens.
If there were ghosts and spirits awake in the night he wanted to see them. If the dead of his past were walking abroad he wanted to beg their forgiveness.
His own pain was spun of images that would not let him go. Images of vanished serenity, of pale marble under moonlight such as this, of graceful porticos shaped of harmonies a man might spend a lifetime studying to understand, of quiet voices heard and almost understood by a drowsy child in another room, of sure, confident laughter following, then morning sunlight in a known courtyard and a steady, strong, sculptor’s hand upon his shoulder. A father’s hand.
Then fi
re and blood and ashes on the wind, turning the noon sun red.
Smoke and death, and marble hammered into fragments, the head of the god flying free, to bounce like a boulder on scorched earth and then be ground remorselessly down into powder like fine sand. Like the sand on the beaches walked in the dark later that year, infinite and meaningless by the cold uncaring sea.
These were the bleak visitants, the companions of his nights, these and more, endlessly, through almost nineteen years. He carried, like baggage, like a cart yoked to his shoulders, like a round stone in his heart, images of his people, their world destroyed, their name obliterated. Truly obliterated: a sound that was drifting, year by year, further away from the shores of the world of men, like some tide withdrawing in the grey hour of a winter dawn. Very like such a tide, but different as well, because tides came back.
He had learned to live with the images because he had no choice, unless it was a choice to surrender. To die. Or retreat into madness as his mother had. He defined himself by his griefs; he knew them as other men knew the shape of their own hands.
But the one thing that could drive him awake, barred utterly from the chambers of sleep or any kind of rest, what could force him abroad now, as he had been driven abroad as a boy in a ruined place, was, in the end, none of these things. Neither a flash of splendour gone, nor an image of death and loss. It was, instead, over and above everything else, the remembrance of love among those ashes of ruin.
Against the memory of a spring and summer with Dianora, with his sister, his barriers could not hold in the dark.
And so Baerd would go out into the nights across the Palm, doubly moonlit, or singly, or dark with only stars. Among the heathered summer hills of Ferraut, or through the laden vineyards of autumn in Astibar or Senzio, along snow-mantled mountain slopes in Tregea, or here, on an Ember Night at the beginning of spring in the highlands.
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