Tonight was different. Catriana realized with dismay that her hands were shaking. She stopped in the shadows of a lane to try to steady herself.
She reached up nervously to adjust her hair under the dark hood, fingering the jewelled black comb she’d set in it. On the ship coming here Alais, who had said she was used to doing so for her sisters, had evened and shaped her original swift cropping on the floor of the shop in Tregea. Catriana knew her appearance was perfectly acceptable now—more than that, actually, if the reactions of men in Senzio these past days meant anything.
And they had to mean something. For that was what had brought her out here in the darkness alone, pressed against a rough stone wall in a lane, waiting now for a noisy swarm of revellers to pass by in the street before her. This was a better part of town, so near the castle, but there was no truly safe quarter of Senzio for a woman alone in the streets at night.
She wasn’t out here for safety though, which is why none of the others knew where she was. They would never have let her come. Nor would she, being honest with herself, have knowingly let any of them undertake anything like this.
This was death. She was under no illusions.
All afternoon, walking through the market with Devin and Rovigo and Alais, she had been shaping this plan and remembering her mother. That single candle always lit at sunset on the first of the Ember Days. Devin’s father had done the same thing, she remembered him saying. Pride, he’d thought it was: withholding something from the Triad because of what they had allowed to happen. Her mother wasn’t a proud woman, but neither had she permitted herself to forget.
Tonight Catriana saw herself as being like one of her mother’s forbidden candles on those Ember Nights while all the rest of the world lay shrouded in darkness. She was a small flame, exactly like those candles; one that would not last the night, but one that, if the Triad had any love at all for her, might shape a conflagration before she went out.
The drunken revellers finally staggered by, heading in the direction of the harbour taverns. She waited another moment and then, muffled in her hood, went quickly into the street, keeping to the side of it and started the other way. Towards the castle.
It would be much better, she thought, if she could somehow make her hands be still and slow her racing heart. She should have had a glass of wine back at Solinghi’s before slipping away, using the outside back stairs so that none of the others would see her. She’d sent Alais down to dinner alone, pleading a woman’s illness, promising to follow soon if she could.
She had lied so easily, had even managed a reassuring smile. Then Alais was gone and she was alone, realizing in that precise instant, as the room door gently closed, that she would never see any of the others again.
In the street she shut her eyes, feeling suddenly unsteady; she put her hand on a shop-front for support, drawing deep breaths of the night air. There were tainflowers not far away, and the unmistakable fragrance of sejoia trees. She was near to the castle gardens then. She bit her lips, to force colour into them. Overhead the stars were bright and close. Vidomni was already risen in the east, with blue Ilarion to follow soon. She heard a sudden peal of laughter from the next street over. A woman’s laughter followed by shouting. The voice of a man. More laughter.
They were going the other way. As she looked up a star fell in the sky. Following its track to her left she saw the garden wall of the castle. The entrance would be further around that way. Entrances and endings, faced alone. But she had been a solitary child, and then solitary as a woman, drawn into an orbit of her own that took her away from others, even those who would be her friends. Devin and Alais only the latest of those who had tried. There had been others back home in the village before she left. She knew her mother had grieved for her proud solitude.
Pride. Again.
Her father had fled Tigana before the battles at the river.
There it was. There it was.
Carefully she drew back her hood. With real gratitude she discovered that her hands were steady now. She checked her earrings, the silver band about her throat, the jewelled ornament in her hair. Then she drew on to her hand the red glove she’d bought in the market that afternoon and she walked across the street and around the corner of the garden wall into the blaze of light at the entrance to the Governor’s Castle of Senzio.
There were four guards, two outside the locked gates, two just within. She allowed her hooded cloak to fall open, to let them see the black gown she wore beneath.
The two guards outside the gates glanced at each other and visibly relaxed, removing their hands from their swords. The other two moved nearer, the better to see by torchlight.
She stopped in front of the first pair. She smiled. ‘Would you be kind enough,’ she said, ‘to let Anghiar of Barbadior know that his red vixen has come?’ And she held up her left hand, sheathed in the bright red glove.
She had actually been amused at first by Devin’s reaction and Rovigo’s in the market-place. Casalia, the plump, unhealthy looking Governor had ridden through, side by side with the emissary from Barbadior. They had been laughing together. Brandin’s emissary from the Western Palm had been several paces behind, among a cluster of lesser Senzians. The image and the message were as clear as they could be made.
Alais and Catriana had been standing at a silk-merchant’s stall. They had turned to see the Governor go by.
He had not gone by. Instead, Anghiar of Barbadior laid a quick restraining hand on Casalia’s braceleted wrist and they stopped their prancing horses directly in front of the two women. Thinking back on it, Catriana realized that she and Alais must have made a striking pair. Anghiar, blond and beefy, with an upturned moustache and hair as long as her own was now, evidently thought so.
‘A mink and a red vixen!’ he said, in a voice pitched for Casalia’s ear. The plump Governor laughed, too quickly, a little too loudly. Anghiar’s blue eyes stripped the women to their flesh under the bright sun. Alais looked away, but not down. Catriana met the Barbadian’s gaze as steadily as she could. She would not turn away from these men. His smile only deepened. ‘A red vixen, truly,’ he repeated, but this time to her, and not to Casalia.
The Governor laughed anyhow. They moved on, their party following, including Brandin’s emissary, looking grimly unhappy for all the beauty of the morning.
Catriana had become aware of Devin at her shoulder and Rovigo beside his daughter. She looked at them and registered the clenched fury in their eyes. It was then that she’d felt amusement, however briefly.
‘That,’ she said lightly, ‘is exactly how Baerd looked before he almost had us both killed in Tregea. I don’t think I’m prepared to repeat the experience. I have no hair left to cut.’
It was Alais, cleverer by far than Catriana had realized at first, who laughed, carrying them past the moment. The four of them walked on.
‘I would have killed him,’ Devin said quietly to her as they paused by a leather goods booth.
‘Of course you would have,’ she said easily. Then realizing how that probably sounded, and that he was quite serious in what he’d said, she squeezed his arm. Not something she would have done six months before. She was changing, they all were.
But just about then, amusement and anger both fading, Catriana began to think about something. It seemed to her that the brightness of the day slid abruptly into shadow for a moment though there were no clouds in the sky at all.
She realized afterwards that she had decided to do it almost as soon as the idea took shape in her mind.
Before the morning market had closed she had managed to be alone long enough to purchase what she needed. Earrings, gown, black comb. Red glove.
And it was while doing these things that she’d begun to think about her mother and to remember the bridge in Tregea. Not surprisingly: the mind worked in patterns like that. Such patterns were why she was doing this, why she’d even been able to think of it. When night fell she would have to come away by herself, telling none of
them. A lie of some sort for Alais. No farewells; they would stop her, just as she would have stopped any of them.
But something had to be done, they all knew it. A move had to be made, and that morning in the market Catriana had thought she’d discovered what that move might be.
She’d spent the first part of this solitary walk through darkness wishing she were braver though, that her hands would not tremble as they were. But they’d stopped shaking after all when she reached the garden wall and saw a star fall in the blue-black velvet sky.
‘We’ll have to search you, you understand,’ said one of the two guards outside the gates, a crooked smile on his face.
‘Of course,’ she murmured, stepping nearer. ‘There are so few benefits to standing watch here, aren’t there?’ The other one laughed, and drew her forward, not ungently, into the light of the torches and then a little past them, to the more private shadows at the side of the square. She heard a brief, low-pitched altercation between the two men on the other side of the gate, ending in a concise six-word order. One of them, manifestly outranked, reluctantly began heading inward through the courtyard to find Anghiar of Barbadior and tell him his dreams had just come true, or some such thing. The other hastily unlocked the gates with a key on a ring at his belt and came out to join the others.
They took some time with her, but were not unkind, nor did they presume too much in the end. If she was going to the Barbadian and found favour there, they could be at risk in offending her. She had counted on something like that. She managed to laugh softly once or twice, but not so much as to encourage them. She was thinking of patterns still, remembering the very first evening she’d come to Alessan and Baerd. The night porter at the inn groping for her as she went by, leering, sure of why she was there.
I will not sleep with you, she’d said when they opened to her knock. I have never slept with any man. So much irony in her life, looking back from these tangled shadows, the guards’ hands moving over her. What mortal knew the way their fate line would run? Inevitably perhaps, she thought about Devin in the hidden closet of the Sandreni Palace. Which had worked out rather differently in almost every way than she had expected it to. Not that she’d been thinking of futures or fates that day. Not then.
And now? What should she be thinking now, as the patterns began to unfold again? The images, she told herself, cloaked in shadow with three guards: hold hard to the images. Entrances and endings, a candle starting a blaze.
By the time they were done with her the fourth guard was back with two Barbadians. They were smiling too. But they treated her with some courtesy as they led her through the open gates and across the central courtyard. Light spilled erratically downwards from interior windows above. Before they passed inside she looked up at the stars. Eanna’s lights. Every one of them with a name.
They went into the castle through a pair of massive doors guarded by four more men, then up two long flights of marble stairs and along a bright corridor on the highest level. At the end of this last hallway a door was partly open. Beyond it, as they approached, Catriana caught a glimpse of a room elaborately furnished in dark, rich colours.
In the doorway itself stood Anghiar of Barbadior, in a blue robe to match his eyes, holding a glass of green wine and devouring her with his gaze for the second time that day.
She smiled, and let him take her red-gloved fingers in his own manicured hand. He led her into the room. He closed and locked the door. They were alone. There were candles burning everywhere.
‘Red vixen,’ he said, ‘how do you like to play?’
Devin had been edgy all week, uneasy in his own skin; he knew they all felt the same way. The combination of building tension and enforced idleness, coupled with the awareness—one had only to look at Alessan’s face sometimes—of how close they were to a culmination, created a pervasive, dangerous irritability among them all.
In the face of such a mood Alais had been extraordinary, a blessing of grace these past few days. Rovigo’s daughter had seemed to grow wiser and gentler and yet more at ease among them with each passing day, as if sensing a need, a reason for her to be here, and so moving to fill that need. Observant, unceasingly cheerful, effortlessly conversational, with questions and bright responses and a declared passion for long anecdotes from all of them, she had, almost single-handedly, prevented three or four mealtimes from degenerating into sullen grimness or fractious rancour. Blind Rinaldo the Healer seemed almost in love with her, so much did he seem to flourish when she was by his side. He wasn’t the only one of them, either, Devin thought, almost grateful that the tensions of the time were preventing him from addressing his own inward feelings.
In the hothouse atmosphere of Senzio, Alais’s delicate, pale beauty and diffident grace singled her out like some flower transplanted here from a garden in a cooler, milder world. Which was, of course, exactly true. An observer himself, Devin would catch Rovigo gazing at his daughter as she drew one or another of their new companions into conversation, and the look in the man’s eyes spoke volumes.
Now, at the end of dinner, having spent the last half-hour turning their market expedition of the morning and afternoon into a veritable sea-voyage of discovery, Alais excused herself briefly and went back upstairs. Her departure was followed by an abrupt return of grimness to the table, an inexorable reversion to the single dominating preoccupation of their lives. Even Rovigo was not immune: he leaned towards Alessan and asked a sharp, low-voiced question about the latest foray outside the city walls.
Alessan and Baerd, with Ducas and Arkin and Naddo, had been scouting the distrada, searching out likely battlefields, and so the best place for them to position themselves when the time came for their own last roll of dice. Devin didn’t much like thinking about that. It had to do with magic, and magic always bothered him. Besides which, there had to be a battle for anything to happen, and Alberico of Barbadior was hunkered down in his meadow on the border and showing no signs of moving at all. It was enough to drive men mad.
They had begun spending more time apart from each other in the days and evenings, partly for reasons of caution, but undeniably because too much proximity in this mood was good for none of them. Baerd and Ducas were in one of the harbour taverns tonight, braving the blandishments of the flesh-merchants to keep in touch with the Tregean’s men and Rovigo’s sailors, and a number of the others who had made their way north in response to a long-awaited summons.
They also had a rumour to spread: about Rinaldo di Senzio, the Governor’s exiled uncle, said to be somewhere in the city stirring up revolution against Casalia and the Tyrants. Devin had briefly wondered about the wisdom of that, but Alessan had explained, even before Devin could ask: Rinaldo was greatly changed in eighteen years; few people even knew he had been blinded. He had been a much-loved man: for Casalia to have released such a word would have been dangerous back then. They had gouged Rinaldo’s eyes to neutralize him, and then kept it very quiet.
The old man, huddled quietly now in a corner of Solinghi’s, was unlikely in the extreme to be recognized, and the only thing they could really do these days was contribute as much as they could to raising tensions in the city. If the Governor could be made more anxious, the emissaries a little more uneasy …
Rinaldo said little, though it was he himself who had first suggested starting the rumour. He seemed to be coiling or gathering himself; with a war to come the demands on a Healer would be severe, and Rinaldo was not young any more. When he did speak it was mostly with Sandre. The two old men, enemies from rival provinces in the time before the Tyrants, now eased and distracted each other with whispered recollections from bygone years, stories of men and women who had almost all crossed to Morian long ago.
Erlein di Senzio was seldom with them the past few days. He played his music with Devin and Alessan but tended to eat and drink alone, sometimes in Solinghi’s, more often elsewhere. A few of his fellow Senzians had recognized the troubadour over the course of their time here, though Erlein seemed n
o more effusive with them than he was with any of their own party. Devin had seen him walking one morning with a woman who looked so much like him he was sure she was his sister. He had thought of walking over to be introduced, but hadn’t felt up to enduring Erlein’s abrasiveness. One might have naively thought that as events hung fire here, poised on the edge of a climax, the wizard would lay down his own grudges finally. It was not so.
He wasn’t worried about Erlein’s absences because Alessan wasn’t. For the man to betray them in any way was certain death for himself. Erlein might be enraged and bitter and sullen, but he wasn’t, by any stretch, a fool.
He had gone elsewhere to dine this evening as well, though he would have to be back in Solinghi’s soon; they were due to play in a few minutes and for their music Erlein was never late. The music was their only sanctuary of harmony these last few days, but Devin knew that only really applied to the three of them. What some of the others scattered about the city were doing for release he couldn’t imagine. Or, yes he could. This was Senzio.
‘Something’s wrong!’ blind Rinaldo said abruptly beside him, tilting his head as if sniffing the air. Alessan stopped sketching the distrada terrain on the tablecloth and looked up quickly. So did Rovigo. Sandre had already half-risen from his chair.
Alais hurried up to the table. Even before she spoke Devin felt a finger of dread touch him.
‘Catriana’s gone!’ she said, fighting to keep her voice low. Her eyes flicked from her father to Devin, then rested on Alessan.
‘What? How?’ Rovigo said sharply. ‘We would have had to see her when she came down, surely?’
‘The back stairs outside,’ Alessan said. His hands, Devin, noticed, had suddenly flattened on the tabletop. The Prince stared at Alais. ‘What else?’
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