And something was in the air, a sense of quickening and of change that fit itself to the mood of burgeoning spring and then went beyond it, into danger and the potential for violence. He seemed to hear it and see it everywhere, in the tramp of armies on the march, in the lowered voices of men in taverns, looking up too quickly whenever anyone came through the door.
One morning when he woke, Rovigo had an image that lingered in his mind, of the great floes of solidly packed river ice he had glimpsed many years ago far to the south on a long voyage down the coast of Quileia. And in his mind-picture, as he lay in bed, suspended between asleep and fully awake, he had seemed to see that ice breaking up and the river waters beginning to run again, carrying the floes crashing and grinding down to the sea.
Over khav that same morning, standing in the kitchen, he had announced that he was going into town to see about equipping the Maid for her first run of the season down to Tregea, with goods, perhaps wine—perhaps Edinio’s wine—to trade for a ship’s hold’s worth of early spring wool and Tregean goat’s cheese.
It was an impulsive decision, but not an inappropriate one. He usually made a run south in the spring, if a little later in the season, mostly for trade, partly to learn what he could for Alessan. He had been doing it for years, for both reasons, ever since he’d met Alessan and Baerd, spending a long night in a southern tavern with them, and coming away with the knowledge of a shared passion of the soul and a cause that might be a lifetime in the unfolding.
So this spring voyage was a part of his yearly routine. What was not, what was truly impulsive, was his offer, between one sip of early morning khav and the next, to take Alais with him.
His eldest, his pride, his clever one. He thought her beautiful beyond words. No one had asked for her hand. And though he knew she was truly pleased for Selvena and not grieving at all for herself, this knowledge didn’t stop him from feeling a difficult sorrow whenever he looked at her amid the already building excitement of Selvena’s wedding preparations.
So he asked her, a little too casually, if she wanted to come with him, and Alix glanced up quickly from her labours in the kitchen with a sharp, worried look in her dark eyes, and Alais said, even more quickly, with a fervour rare for her: ‘Oh, Triad, yes! I would love to come!’
It happened to be her dream.
One of her oldest dreams, never requested, never even spoken aloud. Alais could feel how high her telltale colour had suddenly become. She watched her father and mother exchange a glance. There were times when she envied them that communion of their eyes. No words were spoken, they didn’t seem to need words much of the time. Then Alais saw her mother nod, and she turned in time to catch her father’s slow smile in response to that, and she knew she was going to sea in the Maid for the first time in her life.
She had wanted to do so for so long she couldn’t even think back to a time when the desire hadn’t been there. She remembered being a small girl, light enough to be lifted up by her father while her mother carried Selvena, going down to the harbour in Astibar to see the new ship that was the key to their small fortune in the world.
And she had loved it so much. The three masts—they had seemed so tall to her then—aspiring towards the sky, the dark-haired figurehead of a maiden at the prow, the bright-blue coat of fresh paint along the railings, the creak of the ropes and the timber. And the harbour itself: the smell of pitch and pine and fish and ale and cheese, wool and spice and leather. The rumble of carts laden with goods going away to some far part of the known world, or coming in from distant places with names that were a kind of magic to her.
A sailor in red and green walked by with a monkey on his shoulder and her father called a familiar greeting to him. Her father seemed to be at home here, he knew these men, the wild, exotic places from which they came and went. She heard shouts and sudden raucous laughter and voices raised in profane dispute over the weight of this or the cost of that. Then someone cried out that there were dolphins in the bay; that was when her father had lifted her up on his shoulders so she might see them.
Selvena had begun to cry at all the fierce commotion, Alais remembered, and they had gone back to their cart shortly after and ridden away, past the watchful, looming presence of the Barbadians, big, fair-haired men on their big horses, guarding the harbour of Astibar. She had been too young to understand what they were about, but her father’s abrupt silence and expressionless face, riding by them, had told her something. Later, she learned a great deal more, growing up into the occupied reality of her world.
Her love of the ships and the harbour had never gone away. Whenever she could she would go with Rovigo down to the water. It was easier in winter, when they all moved to the town house in Astibar, but even in spring and summer and early fall she would find excuses, reasons and ways to accompany him into town and down to where the Maid was berthed. She gloried in the scene, and at night she dreamt her dreams of oceans opening before her and salt spray off the waves.
Dreams. She was a woman. Women did not go to sea. And dutiful, intelligent daughters never troubled their fathers by even asking to be allowed such a thing. But it seemed that, sometimes, on some mornings completely unforeseen, Eanna could look down from among her lights in the sky, and smile, and something miraculous might be freely offered that would never have been sought.
It seemed she was a good sailor, adjusting easily to the swing and roll of the ship on the waves as the coastline of Astibar scrolled by on their right. They sailed north along the bay and then threaded their way through the islands of the Archipelago and into the wideness of the open sea, Rovigo and his five seamen handling the ship with an ease that seemed to her both relaxed and precise. Alais was exhilarated, watching everything in this unknown world with an intensity that made them laugh and tease her for it. There was no malice in the jests though; she had known all five of these men for most of her life.
They swung around the northern tip of the province: a cape of storms, one of the men told her. But that spring day it was an easy, mild place, and she stood at the railing as they turned back south, and watched the green hills of her province pass by, sloping down to the white sand of the shores and the fishing villages dotted along the coast.
A few nights later there was a storm, off the cliffs of northern Tregea. Rovigo had seen it coming at sunset, or smelled it in the air, but the coastline was rocky and forbidding here, with no place to put in for shelter. They braced for the squall, a respectful distance off shore to keep clear of the rocks. When it hit, Alais was down below in her cabin, to keep out of the way.
Even this weather, she was grateful to discover, didn’t bother her very much. There was nothing pleasant about it, feeling the Sea Maid groan and shake, buffeted in darkness by wind and rain, but she told herself that her father had endured infinitely worse in thirty years at sea, and she was not going to let herself be frightened or discomfited by a minor spring squall from the east.
She made a point of going back up on deck as soon as she felt the waves and the wind die down. It was still raining, and she covered her head with the hood of her cape. Careful to stay clear of where the men were labouring, she stood at one rail and looked up. East of them the swiftly scudding clouds revealed rifts of clear sky and briefly Vidomni’s light shone through. Later the wind died down even more, the rain stopped and the clouds broke up, and she saw Eanna’s bright, far stars come out above the sea, like a promise, like a gift. She pushed back her hood and shook out her dark hair. She took a deep breath of the fresh clean air, and knew a moment of perfect happiness.
She looked over and saw that her father was watching her. She smiled at him. He did not return the smile, but as he walked over she could see that his eyes were tender and grave. He leaned on the rail beside her, looking west at the coastline. Water glistened in his hair and in the short beard he was growing. Not far away—a series of dark, massive forms touched by the moonlight—the cliffs of Tregea moved slowly by.
‘It is in you,’ her f
ather said quietly, over the slap and sigh of the waves. ‘In your heart and in your blood. You have it more than I do, from my father and from his.’ He was silent a moment, then slowly shook his head. ‘But Alais, my darling, a woman cannot live a life at sea. Not in the world as it is.’
Her dream. Clear and bright as the glitter of white Vidomni’s light upon the waves. Laid out and then undone in such simple words.
She swallowed. Said, a speech long rehearsed, never spoken: ‘You have no sons. I am eldest. Will you surrender the Maid and all you have worked to achieve when you … when you no longer wish to pursue this life?’
‘When I die?’
He said it gently, but something heavy and hurtful took shape, pressing upon her heart. She looped her hand through the crook of his arm, holding tight, and moved nearer to him, to lean her head on his shoulder.
They were silent, watching the cliffs go by and the play of moonlight on the sea. The ship was never quiet, but she liked the noises it made. She had fallen asleep the past few nights hearing the Sea Maid’s endless litany of sounds as a night song.
She said, her head still on his shoulder, ‘Could I be taught? To help you in your business, I mean. Even if not to actually sail on the journeys.’
Her father said nothing for a time. Leaning against him, she could feel his steady breathing. His hands were loosely clasped together over the rail.
He said, ‘That can be done, Alais. If you want it, it can be done. Women run businesses all over the Palm. Widows, most often, but not only them.’ He hesitated. ‘Your mother could keep this going, I think, if she wanted to, if she had good advisors.’ He turned his head to look down at her, but she did not lift hers from his shoulder. ‘It is a sharp, cold life though, my darling. For a woman, for a man, without a hearth at the end of day for warmth. Without love to carry you outward and home.’
She closed her eyes at that. There was something here that went to the heart of things. They had never pressed her, never harried or urged, though she was almost twenty years old and it was time, it was well past time. And she had had that one strange dream many nights through the dark of the winter just past: herself and a shadowy figure against the moon, a man in a high, unknown place, among flowers, under the arch of stars, his body lowered to her own, her hands reaching to gather him.
She lifted her head, withdrew her arm. Said carefully, looking down at the waves: ‘I like Catini. I’m happy for Selvena. She’s ready, she’s wanted this for so long and I think he’ll be good to her. But, father, I need more than what she will have. I don’t know what it is, but I need more.’
Her father stirred then. She watched him draw a deep breath and then slowly let it out. ‘I know,’ she heard him say. ‘I know you do, my darling. If I knew what, or how, and could give it, it would be yours. The world and the stars of Eanna would all be yours.’
She cried then, which she seldom did. But she loved him and had caused him grief, and he had spoken just now, twice, of dying one day, and the white moon on the cliffs and sea after the storm was like nothing she had ever known or was likely to know again.
Catriana couldn’t see the road as she climbed the slope from the dell, but from the distant sounds and the way Baerd and Sandre were both standing, rigidly watchful on the grass at the edge of the trees, she could tell that something was wrong. Men, she had long since concluded, were significantly worse than women at hiding their feelings in situations such as this.
Her hair still wet after bathing in the pond—a favourite place of hers, one they had passed every time they went back and forth between Ferraut and Certando—she hurried up the slope to see what was happening.
The two men said nothing as she appeared beside them. The cart had been pulled into the shade off the north–south road and the two horses let free to graze. Baerd’s bow and quiver were lying in the grass beside the trees, close to hand if he needed them. She looked at the road and saw the Barbadian troops passing by, marching and riding, raising a heavy cloud of dust all around them.
‘More of the Third Company,’ Sandre said, a cold anger in his voice.
‘It looks like they’re all going, doesn’t it?’ Baerd murmured grimly.
Which was good, it was more than good, it was exactly what they wanted. The anger, the grimness were almost wholly uncalled for; they seemed to be some instinctive male response to the nearness of the enemy. Catriana felt like shaking them both.
It was so clear, really. Baerd himself had explained it to her and Sandre, and to Alienor of Borso on the day Alessan met Marius of Quileia in the mountains and rode west with Devin and Erlein.
And listening that day, forcing herself to be composed in Alienor’s presence, Catriana had finally understood what Alessan had meant, all this time, when he’d said they would have to wait until spring. They had been waiting for Marius to say yes or no. To say if he would risk his own unstable crown and his life for them. And that day in the Braccio Pass he’d said he would. Baerd told them a little, a very little, about why.
Ten days later she and Baerd and Sandre had been on watch in the hills outside Fort Ortiz when the emissaries came riding along the road carrying the Quileian flag and were met with ceremonious honour outside the walls and escorted within by the Barbadians.
Next morning the Quileians had ridden on, not hurrying, down the road to the north. Two hours after their departure the gates of the fort had opened again and six men had ridden out in extreme haste. One of them—it was Sandre who noted it—was Siferval himself, captain of the Third Company.
‘It is done,’ Baerd had said, a kind of awe in his voice. ‘I cannot believe it, but I think we have done it!’
A little more than a week later the first troops had begun to move, and they knew he was right. It wasn’t until some days after that, in an artisans’ village in northern Certando, trading for carvings and finished cloth, that they learned, belatedly, what Brandin of Ygrath had done in Chiara. The Kingdom of the Western Palm.
‘Are you a gambling man?’ Sandre had said to Baerd. ‘The dice are rolling now, and no one will hold or control them until they stop.’ Baerd had said nothing in reply, but something stunned, near to shock, in his expression made Catriana go over and take his hand in hers. Which was not really like her at all.
But everything had changed, or was changing. Baerd was not the same since the Ember Days and their stay at Castle Borso. Something had happened to him there, too, but this part he didn’t explain. Alessan was gone, and Devin—and though she hated to admit it, she missed him almost as much as the Prince. Even their role here in the east had completely altered now.
They had waited in the highlands for the emissaries, in case something should go wrong. But now Baerd kept them moving at speed from town to town and he was stopping to speak to men and to some women Catriana had never even heard about, telling them to be ready, that there might be a summer rising.
And with some of them, not many, only a select few, his message was very specific: Senzio. Head north to Senzio before Midsummer. Have a weapon with you if you can.
And it was these last words that brought home to Catriana most sharply, most potently, the fact that the time for action had truly come. It was upon them. No more oblique disruptions or hovering on the edge of events. Events had a centre now, which was or would soon be in Senzio, and they were going there. What was to happen she didn’t yet know. If Baerd did, he wasn’t telling.
What he did tell her, and Sandre too, were the names of people.
Scores of them. Names he had held in memory, some for a dozen years. People who were with them in this, who could be trusted. Who needed to be told, here in the provinces ruled by Barbadior, that the movement of Alberico’s troops was their own signal to be ready at last. To watch the unfolding of events and be prepared to respond.
They would sit together at night, the three of them, around a campfire under stars or in a secluded corner of an inn in some hamlet or village, and Baerd would recite for them the names they n
eeded to know.
It was only on the third night, falling asleep afterwards, that Catriana belatedly realized that the reason they needed to be told this was if Baerd were to die, with Alessan away in the west.
‘Ricaso bar Dellano,’ Baerd would say. ‘A cooper in Marsilian, the first village south of Fort Ciorone. He was born in Avalle. Could not go to war because of a lame foot. Speak to him. He will not be able to come north, but knows the others near by and will spread the word and lead our people in that district if the need for a rising comes.’
‘Ricaso bar Dellano,’ she would repeat. ‘In Marsilian.’
‘Porrena bren Cullion. In Delonghi, just inside the Tregean border on the main road from Ferraut. She’s a little older than you, Catriana. Her father died at the Deisa. She knows who to speak to.’
‘Porrena,’ Sandre would murmur, concentrating, his bony, gnarled hands clasped together. ‘In Delonghi.’ And Catriana marvelled at how many names there seemed to be, how many lives Baerd and Alessan had touched in their travels through a dozen years since returning from Quileia, readying themselves and these unknown others for a time, a season, a moment in the future—which was now. Which they had lived to see. And her heart was filled with hope as she whispered the names over and over to herself like talismans of power.
They rode through the next weeks, through the flowering of spring, at an almost reckless pace, barely simulating their role as merchants. Making bad, hasty transactions where they stopped, unwilling to linger to bargain for better ones. Pausing only long enough to find the man or woman who was the key in that village or this cluster of farms, the one who knew the others and would carry the word.
They were losing money, but they had astins to spare from Alienor. Catriana, being honest with herself, realized that she was still reluctant to acknowledge the role that woman had played in Alessan’s doings for so many years. Years in which she herself had been growing up in ignorance, a child in a fishing village in Astibar.
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