Elena reached the hill and began to climb. She was breathless from running but the slope was not steep. Mattio had grabbed her arm when she started to enter the river. He had said it might mean death to be among the ruined lands after moonset, but Donar had told her it would be all right now. Donar had been unable to stop smiling since Baerd had made the shadow-figure withdraw. There was a stunned, incredulous glory in his face.
Most of the Walkers had gone back, wounded and weary, intoxicated with triumph, to the field where they had claimed their weapons. From there they would be drawn home before sunrise. So it had always happened.
Carefully avoiding Mattio’s eyes, Elena had crossed the river and come after Baerd. Behind her as she went she could hear the singing begin. She knew what would follow in the sheltering hollows and the darkness of that field after an Ember victory. Elena felt her pulse accelerate with the very thought. She could guess what Mattio’s face would have revealed as she walked away from him into the river and then across. In her heart she offered him an apology, but her stride as she went did not falter, and then, halfway to the hill, she began to run, suddenly afraid for the man she sought, and for herself, alone in all this wide dark emptiness.
Baerd was sitting on the crown of the hill, where the shadow-figure had stood in front of the setting moon just before he fled. He glanced up as she approached, and a queer, frightened expression flickered for an instant across his face in the starlit dark.
Elena stopped, uncertain.
‘It is only me,’ she said, trying to catch her breath.
He was silent a moment. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I wasn’t expecting anyone. For a moment … for a moment you looked almost exactly like a … like something I saw once as a boy. Something that changed my life.’
Elena didn’t know what to say to that. She had thought no further than getting here. Now that she had found him she was suddenly unsure of herself again. She sat down on the dead earth facing him. He watched her, but said nothing else.
She took a deep breath and said, bravely, ‘You should have expected someone. You should have known that I would come.’ She swallowed hard, her heart pounding.
For a long moment Baerd was very still, his head tilted a little to one side, as if listening to the echo of her words. Then he smiled. It lit up his young, too-thin face and the hollow, wounded eyes.
‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Thank you for that, Elena.’ It was the first time he’d used her name. In the distance they could hear the singing from the cornfield. Overhead the stars were almost impossibly bright in the black arch of the sky.
Elena felt herself flushing. She glanced down and away from his direct gaze. She said, awkwardly, ‘After all, it is dangerous here in the dead lands, and you wouldn’t have known. Not having been here before. With us, I mean. You wouldn’t even know how to get back home.’
‘I have an idea,’ he said gravely. ‘I imagine we have until sunrise. And in any case, these aren’t the dead lands any more. We won them back tonight. Elena, look at the ground where you walked.’
She turned to look back. And caught her breath in wonder and delight to see that along the path she’d taken to this hill white flowers were blooming in what had been barren earth.
Even as she watched she saw that the flowers were spreading in all directions from where she had passed. Tears sprang to her eyes and spilled over, gliding unheeded down her cheeks, making her vision blur. She had seen enough though, she understood. This was the Earth’s response to what they had done tonight. Those delicate white flowers coming to life under the stars were the most beautiful things she had seen in all her days.
Quietly, Baerd said, ‘You have caused this, Elena. Your being here. You must teach Donar and Carenna and the others this. When you win the Ember war it is not only a matter of holding the line of battle. You must follow the Others and drive them back, Elena. It is possible to regain lands lost in battle years before.’
She was nodding. Hearing in his words an echo of something known and forgotten long ago. She spoke the memory: ‘The land is never truly dead. It can always come back. Or what is the meaning of the cycle of seasons and years?’ She wiped her tears away and looked at him.
His expression in the darkness was much too sad for a moment such as this. She wished she knew a way to dispel that sorrow, and not only for tonight. He said, ‘That is mostly true, I suppose. Or true for the largest things. Smaller things can die. People, dreams, a home.’
Impulsively Elena reached forward and took his hand. It was fine and slender and it lay in hers quietly but without response. In the distance, east of the river, the Night Walkers were singing songs to celebrate and welcome the spring, to cry the blessing of the season on the crops that summer would see. Elena wished with all her heart that she were wiser, that she might have an answer to what lay so deeply and hurtfully inside this man.
She said, ‘If we die that is part of the cycle. We come back in another form.’ But that was Donar’s thought, his way of speaking, not her own.
Baerd was silent. She looked at him, but she could find nothing within her to say that wouldn’t sound wrong, or be someone else’s words. So instead, thinking it might somehow help him to speak, she asked, ‘You said you knew the shadow-figure. How, Baerd? Can you tell me?’ It was a strange, almost an illicit pleasure to speak his name.
He smiled at her then, gently. He had a gentle face, especially young as it was now. ‘Donar had all the clues himself, and Mattio, all of you. You had been losing for twenty years or so they told me. Donar said I was too much tied to the transitory battles of day, do you remember?’
Elena nodded.
‘He wasn’t wholly wrong,’ Baerd went on. ‘I saw Ygrathen soldiers here, and they were not truly so of course. I understand that now. Dearly as I might have wished them to be. But I wasn’t wholly wrong either.’ For the first time his hand put an answering pressure on her own. ‘Elena, evil feeds on itself. And the evils of day, however transitory, must add to the power of what you face here on the Ember Nights. They must, Elena, it cannot but be so. Everything connects. We cannot afford to look only at our own goals. That is the lesson the dearest friend of my life has taught me. The Tyrants in our peninsula have shaped a wrong that goes deeper than who governs in a given year. And that evil has spilled over into this battlefield where you fight Darkness in the name of Light.’
‘Darkness adding to Darkness,’ she said. She wasn’t certain what had led her to say that.
‘Exactly,’ Baerd said. ‘Exactly so. I understand your battles here now, how far they go beyond my own war in the daylight world. But going far beyond doesn’t mean there is no connection. That was Donar’s mistake. It was before him all along, if only he could have seen.’
‘And the naming,’ Elena asked. ‘What did the naming have to do with it?’
‘Naming has everything to do with it,’ Baerd said quietly. He withdrew his hand from hers and rubbed it across his eyes. ‘Names matter even more here in this place of magic than they do at home where we mortals live and die.’ He hesitated. And after a silence made deeper by the singing far away, he whispered, ‘Did you hear me name myself?’
It seemed almost a silly question. He had cried it at the top of his voice. All of them had heard. But his expression was too intense for her to do anything but answer.
‘I did,’ she said: ‘You named yourself Baerd di Tigana bar Saevar.’
And moving very slowly then, very deliberately, Baerd reached for and claimed her hand, and brought it to his lips, as though she were the lady of one of the highland castles, and not only the wheelwright’s widowed daughter from the village below Borso.
‘Thank you,’ he said, in a queer voice. ‘Thank you so much. I thought … I thought it might possibly be different tonight. Here.’
The back of her hand was tingling where his lips had touched her and her pulse was suddenly erratically fast. Fighting for composure, Elena asked, ‘I don’t understand. What did I do?’
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br /> His sorrow was still there, but somehow it seemed gentler now, less naked in his face. He said, quite calmly, ‘Tigana is the name of a land that was taken away. Its loss is part of the evil that brought the shadow-figure to this hill, and to all your other battlefields for twenty years now. Elena, you won’t understand this completely, you can’t, but believe me when I tell you that you could not have heard the name of that land back in your village, whether by the light of day or under the two moons. Not even if I spoke it to you from as near as we are now, or cried it louder than I did within the stream.’
And now, finally, she did understand. Not the difficult sum of what he was trying to convey, but the thing that mattered more for her: the source of his grief, of that look in the dark of his eyes.
‘And Tigana is your home,’ she said. Not a question. She knew.
He nodded. Very calm. He was still holding her hand, she realized. ‘Tigana is my home,’ he echoed. ‘Men call it Lower Corte now.’
She was silent a long moment, thinking hard. Then, ‘You must speak of this to Donar,’ she said. ‘Before morning takes us back. There may be something he knows about such matters, something he can do to help. And he will want to help.’
Something flickered in his face. ‘I’ll do that,’ he said. ‘I’ll speak to him before I go.’
They were both silent then. Before I go. Elena pushed that away as best she could. She became aware that her mouth was dry and her heart was still pounding, almost as it had in battle. Baerd did not move. He looked so young. Fifteen, he had said. She glanced away, uncertain again, and saw that all around them now the hill itself was covered with a carpet of white flowers.
‘Look!’ she said, delighted and awed.
He looked around, and smiled then, from the heart.
‘You brought them with you,’ he said.
Below them and east, in the field of corn across the river only a few voices were still singing. Elena knew what that would mean. This was the first of the Ember Nights of spring. The beginning of the year, of the cycle of sowing and harvest. And tonight they had won the Ember war. She knew what would be happening among the men and women in that field. Overhead, the stars seemed to have come nearer, to be almost as close to them as the flowers.
She swallowed, and summoned her courage again. She said: ‘There are other things that are different about tonight. Here.’
‘I know,’ Baerd said softly.
And then he moved, finally, and was on his knees before her among all the young white flowers. He released her palm then, but only to take her face between his two hands, so carefully it seemed as if he feared she might break or bruise to his touch. Over the rapidly growing thunder of her pulse, Elena heard him whisper her name once, as if it were a kind of prayer, and she had time to answer with his—with all of his name, as a gift—before he lowered his mouth to hers.
She could not have spoken after that, for desire and need crashed over her and bore her away as something—a chip of wood, a fragment of bark—carried by a huge and rushing wave. Baerd was with her, though. They were together here in this place, and then they were naked among the newly sprung white flowers of that hill.
And as she drew him down and into her, feeling the keenness of longing and an aching tenderness, Elena looked up for a moment past his shoulder at all the circling, luminous stars of the Ember Night. And it came to her as a wonderful and joyous thought that every single diamond of those stars would have a name.
Then Baerd’s rhythm changed above her, and her own awakened desire with it, and all thoughts scattered from her like dust strewn between those stars. She moved her head so her mouth could seek and find his own and she closed her arms around him and gathered him to her and closed her eyes, and they let that high wave carry them into the beginning of spring.
C H A P T E R 1 2
The cold and a cramped stiffness woke Devin about an hour before sunrise. It took him a moment to remember where he was. It was still dark in the room. He massaged his neck and listened to Catriana’s quiet breathing from under her blankets in the bed. A rueful expression crossed his face.
It was strange, he reflected, twisting his head from side to side to try to ease the soreness, how only a few hours in a soft armchair could leave one feeling more knotted and uncomfortable than a whole night out on cold ground.
He felt surprisingly awake though, given the night he’d just had and the fact that he couldn’t have been asleep for more than three hours or so. He considered going back to his own bed but realized that he wasn’t going to be able to sleep any more that night. He decided to go down to the kitchens and see if any of the household staff could be induced to make him a pot of khav.
He left the room, concentrating on closing the door silently behind him. So much so that when he saw Alessan standing in the hallway watching him from in front of his own door he jumped involuntarily.
The Prince walked over, eyebrows arched.
Devin shook his head firmly. ‘We just talked. I slept in the chair. Got a kink in my neck to show for it.’
‘I’m sure,’ Alessan murmured.
‘No, really,’ Devin insisted.
‘I’m sure,’ Alessan repeated. He smiled. ‘I believe you. If you had essayed more I would have heard screaming—yours with an unpleasant injury, most likely.’
‘Very likely,’ Devin agreed. They walked away from Catriana’s door.
‘How was Alienor though?’
Devin felt himself going red. ‘How …?’ he began, then gradually became aware of the condition of his clothing and the amused scrutiny Alessan was giving him.
‘Interesting,’ he offered.
Alessan smiled again. ‘Come downstairs with me and help solve a problem. I need some khav for the road anyhow.’
‘I was on the way to the kitchens myself. Give me two minutes to change my clothes.’
‘Not a bad idea,’ Alessan murmured, eyeing the torn shirt. ‘I’ll meet you down there.’
Devin ducked into his own chamber and quickly changed. For good measure he pulled on the vest Alais had sent him. Thinking of her, of her sheltered, quiet innocence, took him back—by polarity—to what had happened last night. He stood stock-still in the middle of his room for a moment and tried to properly grasp what he had done, and had had done to him.
Interesting, he had just called it. Language. The process of sharing with words seemed such a futile exercise sometimes. A remnant of the sadness he’d felt, leaving Alienor, washed back over him and it picked up Catriana’s sorrows too. He felt as if he’d been washed up by the sea on some grey beach at a bleak hour.
‘Khav,’ Devin said aloud. ‘Or I’ll never get out of this mood.’
On the way downstairs he realized, belatedly, what Alessan had meant by ‘for the road’. His meeting, wherever it was, was today—the encounter they’d been pointing towards for half a year.
And after that he would be riding west. To Tigana. Where his mother lay dying in a Sanctuary of Eanna.
Wide awake, his mind snapping from night reflections into the sharper agitations of the day, Devin followed a glow of light to the huge kitchens of Castle Borso and he paused in the arched doorway, looking within.
Sitting by the roaring fire, Alessan was carefully sipping steaming khav from an oversized mug. In a chair beside him Erlein di Senzio was doing the same. The two men were both gazing into the flames while all around them there was already a purposeful stir and bustle in the kitchen.
Devin stood in the doorway a moment, unnoticed, and found himself looking closely at the two men. In their silent gravity they seemed to him to be a part of a frieze, a tableau, emblematic in some complex way of all such pre-dawn hours for those on the long roads. Neither man was a stranger to this hour, Devin knew, to sitting thus before a castle kitchen fire among the servants in the last dark hour before dawn, easing into wakefulness and a fugitive warmth, preparing for the road again and whatever turnings it might offer in the day that had not yet begun.
For years they had each been travelling. There had to be so many images that overlapped and could evoke the same mood, emotions, the same sounds and smells. Like this one: darkness outside, the edge of grey dawn and the castle stir the sun would bring, chill of the corridors and knowledge of wind outside the walls, cut by the crackle and roar of the kitchen fire; the reassuring steam and smell rising from their cradled mugs; sleep and dream receding, the mind slowly turning forward to the day that lay ahead swathed in ground mist. Looking at their stillness amid the bustle of the kitchen Devin felt another return of the sadness that seemed to be his legacy from this long strange night in the highlands.
Sadness, and a distinct stir of longing. Devin realized that he wanted that shared history for himself, wanted to be a part of that self-contained, accomplished fraternity of men who knew this scene so well. He was young enough to savour the romance of it, but old enough—especially after this past winter and his time with Menico—to guess at the price demanded for those memories and the contained, solitary, competent look of the two men in front of him.
He stepped through the doorway. A pretty servant noticed him and smiled shyly. Without a word she brought him a mug of scalding khav. Alessan glanced over at him and hooked a third chair with his long leg, pulling it into a position near him by the fire. Devin walked over and sank gratefully down near the warmth. His stiffened neck was still bothering him.
‘I didn’t even have to be charming,’ Alessan reported cheerfully. ‘Erlein was already here and had started in on a fresh pot of khav. There were people in the kitchen all night to keep the fires going. Couldn’t have lit new ones on an Ember Day.’
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