Slowly then, Dianora nodded her head as the roar of sound finally receded; seeing that, the High Priestess of the god came forward in her crimson gown and helped her free of the dark-green robe.
Then she was standing by the water, clad only in the thin green undertunic that barely reached her knees, and Brandin was holding a ring in his hand.
‘In the name of Adaon and of Morian,’ he said, words of ritual, rehearsed and carefully prepared, ‘and always and forever in the name of Eanna, Queen of Lights, we seek nurture here and shelter. Will the sea welcome us and bear us upon her breast as a mother bears a child? Will the oceans of this peninsula accept a ring of offering in my name and in the name of all those gathered here, and send it back to us in token of our fates bound together? I am Brandin di Chiara, King of the Western Palm, and I seek your blessing now.’
Then he turned to her, as a second murmur of astonishment began at his last words, at what he’d named himself, and beneath that sound, as if cloaked and sheltered under it, he whispered something else, words only she could hear.
Then he turned towards the sea and drew back his arm, and he threw the golden ring in a high and shining arc up towards the brightness of the sky and the dazzling sun.
She saw it reach its apex and begin to fall. She saw it strike the sea and she dived.
The water was shockingly cold, so early in the year. Using the momentum of the dive she drove herself downwards, kicking hard. The green net held her hair so she could see. Brandin had thrown the ring with some care but he had known he could not simply toss it near to the pier—too many people would be looking for that. She propelled herself forward and down with half a dozen hard, driving strokes, her eyes straining ahead in the blue-green filtered light.
She might as well reach it. She might as well see if she could claim the ring before she died. She could carry it as an offering, down to Morian.
Her fear, amazingly, was entirely gone. Or perhaps it was not so amazing after all. What was the riselka, what did its vision offer if not this certainty, a sureness to carry her past the old terror of dark waters, to the last portal of Morian? It was ending now. It should have ended long ago.
She saw nothing, kicked again, forcing herself deeper and further out, towards where the ring had fallen.
There was a sureness in her, a brilliant clarity, an awareness of how events had shaped themselves towards this moment. A moment when, simply by her dying, Tigana might be redeemed at last. She knew the story of Onestra and Cazal; every person in this harbour did. They all knew what disasters had followed upon Onestra’s death.
Brandin had gambled all on this one ceremony, having no other choice in the face of battle brought to him too soon. But Alberico would take him now; there could be no other result. She knew exactly what would follow upon her death. Chaos and shrill denunciation, the perceived judgement of the Triad upon this arrogantly self-styled King of the Western Palm. There would be no army in the west to oppose the Barbadian. The Peninsula of the Palm would be Alberico’s to harvest like a vineyard, or grind like grain beneath the millstones of his ambition.
Which was a pity, she supposed, but redressing that particular sorrow would have to be someone else’s task. The soul’s quest of another generation. Her own dream, the task she’d set herself with an adolescent’s pride, sitting by a dead fire in her father’s house long years ago, had been to bring Tigana’s name back into the world.
Her only wish, if she was allowed a wish before the dark closed over her and became everything, was that Brandin would leave, would find a place to go far from this peninsula, before the end came. And that he might somehow come to know that his life, wherever he went, was a last gift of her love.
Her own death didn’t matter. They killed women who slept with conquerors. They named them traitors and they killed them in many different ways. Drowning would do.
She wondered if she would see the riselka here, sea-green creature of the sea, agent of destiny, guardian of thresholds. She wondered if she would have some last vision before the end. If Adaon would come for her, the stern and glorious god, appearing as he had to Micaela on the beach so long ago. She was not Micaela though, not bright and fair and innocent in her youth.
She didn’t think that she would see the god.
Instead, she saw the ring.
It was to her right and just above, drifting like a promise or an answered prayer down through the slow, cold waters so far below the sunlight. She reached out, in the dreamlike slowness of all motion in the sea, and she claimed it and put it on her finger that she might die as a sea-bride with sea-gold upon her hand.
She was very far under now. The filtered light had almost disappeared this far down. She knew her last gathered air would soon be gone as well, the need for the surface becoming imperative, reflexive. She looked at the ring, Brandin’s ring, his last and only hope. She brought it to her lips, and kissed it, and then she turned her eyes, her life, her long quest, away from the surface and the sunlight, and love.
Downward she went, forcing herself as deep as she could. And it was then, just then, that the visions began to come.
She saw her father in her mind, clearly, holding his chisel and mallet, his shoulders and chest covered with a fine powder of marble, walking with the Prince in their courtyard, Valentin’s arm familiarly thrown about his shoulders, and then she saw him as he had been before he rode away, awkward and grim, to war. Then Baerd was in her mind: as a boy, sweet-natured, seemingly always laughing. Then weeping outside her door the night Naddo left them, then wrapped close in her arms in a ruined moonlit world, and lastly in the doorway of the house the night he went away. Her mother next—and Dianora felt as if she were somehow swimming back through all the years to her family. For all these images of her mother were from before the fall, before the madness had come, from a time when her mother’s voice had seemed able to gentle the evening air, her touch still soothe all fevers away, all fear of the dark.
It was dark now, and very cold in the sea. She felt the first agitation of what would soon be a desperate need for air. There came to her then, as on a scroll unrolling through her mind, vignettes of her life after she’d left home. The village in Certando. Smoke over Avalle seen from the high and distant fields. The man—she couldn’t even remember his name—who had wanted to marry her. Others who had bedded her in that small room upstairs. The Queen in Stevanien. Arduini. Rhamanus on the river galley taking her away. The opening sea before them. Chiara. Scelto.
Brandin.
And so, at the very end, it was he who was in her mind after all. And over and above the hard, quick images of a dozen years and more Dianora suddenly heard again his last words on the pier. The words she had been fighting to hold back from her awareness, had tried not to even hear or understand, for fear of what they might do to her resolve. What he might do.
My love, he’d whispered, come back to me. Stevan is gone. I cannot lose you both or I will die.
She had not wanted to hear that; anything like that. Words were power, words tried to change you, to shape bridges of longing that no one could ever really cross.
Or I will die, he had said.
And she knew, could not even try to deny within herself that it was true. That he would die. That her false, beneficent vision of Brandin living somewhere else, remembering her tenderly, was simply another lie in the soul. He would do no such thing. My love, he had called her. She knew, gods how she and her home had cause to know, what love meant to this man. How deep it went in him.
How deep. There was a roaring sound in her ears now, a pressure of water so far below the surface of the sea. Her lungs felt as if they were going to burst. She moved her head to one side, with difficulty.
There seemed to be something there, beside her in the darkness. A darting figure further out to sea. A glimmer, glimpse of a form, of a man or a god she could not say. But it could not be a man down here. Not so far below the light and the waves, and not glowing as this form was.
Another inward vision, she told herself. A last one, then. The figure seemed to be swimming slowly away from her, light shining around it like an aureole. She was spent now. There was an aching in her, of longing, a yearning for peace. She wanted to follow that gentle, impossible light. She was ready to rest, to be whole and untormented, without desire.
And then she understood, or thought she did. That figure had to be Adaon. It had to be the god coming for her. But he had turned his back. He was moving away, the calm glow receding towards blackness here in the depths of the sea.
She did not belong to him. Not yet.
She looked at her hand. The ring upon it was almost invisible, so faint was the light. But she could feel it there, and she knew whose ring it was. She knew.
Far down in the dark of the sea, terribly far below the world where mortal men and women lived and breathed the air, Dianora turned. She pushed her hands above her, touched palms together and parted them, cleaving the water upwards, hurling her body like a spear up through all the layers of the sea, of dark-green death, towards life again and all the unbridged chasms of air and light and love.
When he saw her break the surface of the sea, Devin wept. Even before he saw the flash of gold sparkling on the hand she lifted in weariness, that they all might see the ring.
Wiping at his streaming eyes, his voice raw from screaming with all the others on the ship, on all the ships, all through the harbour of Chiara, he then saw something else.
Brandin of Ygrath, who had named himself Brandin di Chiara, had dropped to his knees on the pier and had buried his face in his hands. His shoulders were shaking helplessly. And Devin understood then how wrong he had been before: that this was not, after all, a man who was only pleased and happy that a strategem had worked.
With agonizing slowness the woman swam to the pier. An eager priest and priestess helped her from the sea and supported her and wrapped her shivering form in a robe of white and gold. She could scarcely stand. But Devin, still weeping, saw her lift her head high as she turned to Brandin and offered him the sea-ring in a trembling hand.
Then he saw the King, the Tyrant, the sorceror who had ruined them with his bitter, annihilating power, gather the woman into his arms, gently, with tenderness, but with the unmistakable urgency of a man deprived and hungry for too long.
Alessan reached up and removed the child from his shoulders, setting it carefully down beside its mother. She smiled at him. Her hair was yellow as her gown. He smiled back, reflexively, but found himself turning away. From her, from the man and woman embracing feverishly next to them. He felt physically ill. There was a quite substantial level of jubilant chaos erupting all around in the harbour. His stomach was churning. He closed his eyes, fighting nausea and dizziness, the tumultuous overflow.
When he opened his eyes it was to gaze at the Fool—Rhun, they had said his name was. It was deeply unsettling to see how, with the King releasing his own feelings, clutching the woman in that grip of transparent need, the Fool, the surrogate, seemed suddenly empty and hollow. There was a blank, weighted sadness to him, jarring in its discontinuity amid the exultation all around. Rhun seemed a still, silent point of numbness amid a world of tumult and weeping and laughter.
Alessan looked at the bent, balding figure with his weirdly deformed face, and felt a blurred, disorienting kinship to the man. As if the two of them were linked here, if only in their inability to know how to react to all of this.
He had to have been shielding himself, Alessan repeated in his mind for the tenth time, the twentieth. He had to. He looked at Brandin again, and then away again, hurting with confusion and grief.
For how many years in Quileia had he and Baerd spun adolescent plots of making their way here? Of coming upon the Tyrant and killing him, their cries of Tigana’s name ringing in the air, hurtling back into the world.
And this morning, now, he’d been scarcely fifteen feet away, unsuspected, unknown, with a dagger at his belt and only one row of people between him and the man who’d tortured and killed his father.
He had to have been shielding himself against a blade.
But the thing was, the simple fact was, that Alessan couldn’t know that. He hadn’t tested it; hadn’t tried. He had stood and watched. Observed. Played out his own cool plan of shaping events, steering them towards some larger abstraction.
His eyes hurt; there was a dull pulsing behind them, as if the sun was too bright for him. The woman in yellow had not moved away; she was still looking up at him with a slantwise glance hard not to understand. He didn’t know where the child’s father was, but it was clear that the woman didn’t greatly care just now. It would be interesting, he thought, with that perverse, detached quirk of his mind that was always there, to see how many children were born in Chiara nine months from now.
He smiled at her again, meaninglessly, and made some form of mumbled excuse. Then he started back alone through the celebrating, uproarious crowd towards the inn where the three of them had been paying for their room by making music these past three days. Music might help right now, he thought. Very often music was the only thing that helped. His heart was still racing weirdly, as it had started to do when the woman broke the surface of the water with the ring on her hand after so long undersea.
So long a time he had actually begun to calculate if there was anything he could do to make use of the shock and fear that was going to follow upon her death.
And then she had come up, had been there before them in the water and, in the second before the roaring of the crowd began, Brandin of Ygrath, who had been rigidly motionless from the moment she dived, had collapsed to his knees as if struck from behind by a blow that had robbed him of all his strength.
And Alessan had found himself feeling ill and hopelessly confused even as the screams of triumph and ecstasy began to sweep across the harbour and the ships.
This is fine, he told himself now, forcing his way past a wildly dancing ring of people. This will fit, it can be made to fit. It is coming together. As I planned. There will be war. They will face each other. In Senzio. As I planned.
His mother was dead. He had been fifteen feet away from Brandin of Ygrath with a blade in his belt.
It was too bright in the square, and much too loud. Someone grabbed his arm as he went by and tried to draw him into a whirling circle. He pulled away. A woman careened into his arms and kissed him full upon the lips before she disengaged. He didn’t know her. He didn’t know anyone here. He stumbled through the crowd, pushed and pulled this way and that, trying numbly to steer himself, a cork in a flood, towards The Trialla, where his room was, and a drink, and music.
Devin was already at the crowded bar when he finally made it back. Erlein was nowhere to be seen yet. Probably still on the ship; staying afloat, as far from Brandin as he could. As if the sorceror had the faintest scintilla of interest in pursuing wizards right now.
Devin, mercifully, said nothing at all. Only pushed over a full glass and a flagon of wine. Alessan drained the glass and then another very quickly. He had poured and tasted a third when Devin quickly touched his arm and he realized, with a sense of almost physical shock, that he’d forgotten his oath. The blue wine. Third glass.
He pushed the flagon away and buried his head in his hands.
Someone was speaking beside him. Two men arguing.
‘You’re actually going to do it? You’re a goat-begotten fool!’ the first one snarled.
‘I’m joining up,’ the second replied, in the flat accents of Asoli. ‘After what that woman did for him I figure Brandin’s blessed with luck. And someone who styles himself Brandin di Chiara is a long sight better than that butcher from Barbadior. What are you, friend, afraid of fighting?’
The other man gave a harsh bark of laughter. ‘You simpleminded dolt,’ he said. He flattened his voice in broad mimicry. ‘After what that woman did for him. We all know what she did for him, night after night. That woman is the Tyrant’s whore. She spent a dozen years coupling
with the man who conquered us all. Spreading her legs for him for her own gain. And here you are, here all of you are, making a whore into a Queen over you.’
Alessan pushed his head up from his hands. He shifted his feet, pivoting for leverage. Then, without a word spoken, he hammered a fist with all the strength of his body and all the tormented confusion of his heart into the speaker’s face. He felt bones crack under his blow; the man flew backwards into the bar and halfway over it, scattering glasses and bottles with a splintering crash.
Alessan looked down at his fist. It was covered with blood across the knuckles, and already beginning to swell. He wondered if he’d broken his hand. He wondered if he was going to be thrown out of the bar, or end up in a freewheeling brawl for this stupidity.
It didn’t happen. The Asolini who had proclaimed his readiness for war clapped him on the back with a hard, cheerful blow and the owner of The Trialla—their employer, in fact—grinned broadly, completely ignoring the shards of broken glass along the bar.
‘I was hoping someone would shut him up!’ he roared over the raucous tumult in the room. Someone else came over and wrung Alessan’s hand, which hurt amazingly. Three men were shouting insistent demands to buy him a drink. Four others picked up the unconscious man and began carting him unceremoniously away in search of medical aid. Someone spat on the man’s shattered face as he was carried by.
Alessan turned away from that, back to the bar. There was a single glass of Astibar blue wine in front of him. He looked quickly at Devin, who said nothing at all.
‘Tigana,’ he murmured under his breath, as a Cortean sailor behind him bellowed his praise and ruffled his hair and someone else pushed over to pound his back. ‘Oh, Tigana, let my memory of you be like a blade in my soul.’
He drained the glass. Someone—not Devin—immediately reached to pick it up and smash it on the floor. Which started a predictable sequence of other men doing the same with their own drinks. As soon as he decently could he made his way out of the room and went upstairs. He remembered to touch Devin’s arm in thanks as he went. In their room he found Erlein lying on his bed, hands behind his head, gazing fixedly at the ceiling. The wizard glanced over as Alessan came in, and his eyes quickly narrowed and grew frankly curious.
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