She gestured, not sure what to say. “Too many things at once, I suppose. I’m not used to this.”
She saw his teeth as he smiled. “None of us are,ugg boots uk,” he said. “Believe me. But I don’t think anything else will happen tonight. We are all going to bed.”
“My father came in a while ago. He said it seemed to have quieted down.”
Devin nodded. “For now. The Governor was slain in the castle. Catriana did kill the Barbadian. There was chaos up there, and somebody seems to have shot the Tracker. I think that was what saved us.”
Alais swallowed. “My father didn’t tell me about that.”
“He probably didn’t want to disturb your night. I’ll be sorry now if I have.” He glanced past her toward the other bed. “How is she?”
“She’s all right, really. Asleep.” She registered the quick concern in his voice. But Catriana had earned that concern, that caring, tonight and before tonight, in ways Alais could scarcely even encompass within her mind.
“And how are you?” Devin asked, in a different tone, turning back to her. And there was something in that altered, deeper voice that made it difficult for her to breathe.
“I’m fine too, honestly.”
“I know you are,” he said. “Actually, you are a great deal more than that, Alais.” He hesitated for a moment, seeming suddenly awkward. She didn’t understand that, until he leaned slowly forward to kiss her full upon the lips. For the second time, if you counted the one in the crowded room downstairs, but this was really quite amazingly unlike the first. For one thing,Ugg Cardy, he didn’t hurry, and for another, they were alone and it was very dark. She felt one of his hands come up, brushing along the front of her robe before coming to rest in her hair.
He drew back unsteadily. Alais opened her eyes. He looked blurred and softened, where he stood on the landing. Footsteps went past in the lane below, slowly now, not running as before. The two of them were silent, looking at each other. Devin cleared his throat. He said, “It is … there are still two or three hours to morning. You should try to sleep, Alais. There will be a … a great deal happening in the days to come.”
She smiled. He hesitated another moment, then turned to walk along the outer landing toward the room he shared with Alessan and Erlein.
She remained sitting where she was for some time longer, looking up at the brightness of the stars, letting her racing heart gradually slow. She replayed in her mind the ragged, very young uncertainty and wonder in his voice in those last words. Alais smiled again to herself in the darkness. To someone schooled by a life of observation, that voice had revealed a great deal. And it had been simply touching her that had done this to him. Which was, if one lingered to think about it and relive the moment of that kiss, a most astonishing thing.
She was still smiling when she left the window-ledge and returned to her bed and she did fall asleep then, after all, for the last few greatly altered hours of that long night.
All through the next day everyone waited. A pall of doom like smoke hung over Senzio. The city treasurer attempted to assert control in the castle, but the leader of the Guard was disinclined to take orders from him. Their shouted confrontations went on all day. By the time someone thought to go down for the girl her body had already been taken away; no one knew where or by whose orders.
The work of the city ground to a halt. Men and women roamed the streets, feeding on rumor, choking on fear. On almost every corner a different story was heard. It was said that Rinaldo, the last Duke’s brother, had come back to the city to take command in the castle; by the middle of the day everyone had heard some version of the tale, but no one had seen the man.
A restless, nervous darkness fell. The streets remained crowded all night long. It seemed that no one in Senzio could sleep. The night was bright and very beautiful, both moons riding through a clear sky. Outside Solinghi’s inn a crowd gathered, there was no room at all inside, to hear the three musicians play and sing of freedom, and of the glory of Senzio’s past. Songs not sung since Casalia had relinquished his claim to his father’s Ducal Throne and allowed himself to be called Governor instead with emissaries from the Tyrants to advise him. Casalia was dead. Both emissaries were dead. Music drifted out from Solinghi’s into the scented summer night, spilling along the lanes, rising toward the stars.
Just after dawn, word came. Alberico of Barbadior had crossed the border the afternoon before and was advancing north with his three armies, burning villages and fields as he went. Before noon they heard from the north as well: Brandin’s fleet had lifted anchor in Farsaro Bay and was sailing south with a favorable wind.
War had come.
All through Senzio town people left their homes, left the taverns and the streets and began thronging, belatedly, to the temples of the Triad.
In the almost deserted front room of Solinghi’s that afternoon one man continued to play the Tregean pipes, faster and faster and higher and higher, in a wild, almost forgotten tune.
Chapter 20
THE SEA WAS AT THEIR BACK, AT THE END OF A LONG goatherds’ track that wound down the slope to the sands just south of where they’d beached the ships and come ashore. About two miles north of them the walls of Senzio rose up, and from this height Dianora could see the gleaming of the temple domes and the ramparts of the castle. The sun, rising over the pine forests to the east, was bronze in a close, deep blue sky. It was warm already this early in the day; it would be very hot by mid-morning.
By which time the fighting would have begun.
Brandin was conferring with d’Eymon and Rhamanus and his captains, three of them newly appointed from the provinces. From Corte and Asoli and Chiara itself. Not from Lower Corte, of course, though there were a number of men from her province in the army below them in the valley. She had wondered briefly, lying awake one night in the flagship off Farsaro, if Baerd was one of them. She knew he wouldn’t be though. Just as Brandin could not change in this, neither could her brother. It went on. However much might alter, this single thing would go on until the last generation that knew Tigana died.
And she? Since the Dive, since rising from the sea, she had been trying hard not to think at all. Simply to move with the events she had set in motion. To accept the shining fact of Brandin’s love for her and the terrible uncertainties of this war. She no longer saw the riselka’s path in her mind’s eye. She had some sense of what that meant, but she made an effort not to dwell upon it during the day. Nights were different; dreams were always different. She was owner and captive, both, of a bitterly divided heart.
With her two guards just behind her she moved forward on the crown of the hill and looked out over the wide east-west running valley. The dense green pine woods were beyond, with olive trees growing on steeper ridges to the south and a plateau north leading to Senzio town.
Down below the two armies were just stirring, men emerging from their tents and sleeping-rolls, horses being saddled and harnessed, swords cleaned, bowstrings fitted and readied. Metal glinted in the young sun all along the valley. The sound of voices carried easily up to her in the clear bright air. There was just enough breeze to take the banners and lift them to be seen. Their own device was new: a golden image of the Palm itself, picked out against a background of deep blue for the sea. The meaning of Brandin’s chosen image was as clear as he could make it, they were fighting in the name of the Western Palm, but the truer claim was to everything. To a united peninsula with Barbadior driven away. It was a good symbol, Dianora knew. It was also the proper, the necessary step for this peninsula. But it was being taken by the man who had been King of Ygrath.
There were even Senzians in Brandin’s army, besides the men of the four western provinces. Several hundred had joined them from the city in the two days since they’d landed in the southern part of the bay. With the Governor dead and a squabble for meaningless power going on in the castle, the official policy of Senzian neutrality was in tatters. Helped, no one doubted, by Alberico’s decision to torch the lands through which he had come, in retaliation for Barbadian deaths in the city. Had the Barbadians moved faster Rhamanus might have had trouble landing the fleet in the face of opposition, but the winds had been with them, and they reached the city a full day before Alberico. Which let Brandin choose the obvious hill from which to overlook the valley, and to align his men where he wanted them. It was an advantage, they all knew it.
It had seemed less of one the next morning when the three armies of Barbadior arrived emerging out of the smoke of burning to the south. They had two banners, not one: the Empire’s red mountain and golden tiara against their white background, and Alberico’s own crimson boar on a yellow field. The red in both banners seemed to dot the plain like stains of blood, while horsemen and foot-soldiers arrayed themselves in crisp, precisely drilled ranks along the eastern side of the valley. The soldiers of the Barbadian Empire had conquered most of the known world to the east.
Dianora had stood on the hill watching them come. It seemed to take forever. She went away into their tent and then came back, several times. The sun began to set. It was over behind her in the west above the sea before Alberico’s mercenaries had all marched or ridden into the valley.
“Three to one, perhaps a little better than that,” Brandin had said, coming up beside her. His short greying hair was uncovered, ruffled by the late afternoon breeze.
“Are they too many?” she had asked, quietly so no one else would hear.
He looked at her quickly, then took her hand. He often did that now, as if unable to bear not having touched her for any length of time. Their love-making since the Dive had taken on an urgency that would leave them both shattered and drained afterwards, scarcely able to form thoughts of any kind. Which was at the center of things for her, Dianora knew: she wanted to numb her mind, to still the voices and the memories. Obliterate the image of that clear, straight path disappearing in the darkness of the sea.
On the hill the day the Barbadians came Brandin laced his fingers through her own and said, “They may be too many. It is hard to judge. I am stronger in my power than Alberico in his. I think that on this hill I am worth the difference in the armies.”
Quietly spoken, a careful statement of relevant facts. No arrogance, only the steady, always enduring pride. And why should she doubt his sorcery? She knew exactly what it had done in war some twenty years ago.
That conversation had been yesterday. Afterwards she had turned to watch the sun go down into the sea. The night had been bright and glorious, with Vidomni waxing and Ilarion at her full, blue and mysterious, a moon of fantasy, of magic. She had wondered if they would have time to be alone that night, but in fact Brandin had been down on the plain among the tents of his army through most of the dark hours, and speaking with his captains after that. D’Eymon, she knew was going to remain up here with him tomorrow, and Rhamanus, more a sailor than a military commander, would be on the hill as well to lead the men of the King’s Guard in defense, if matters came to that. If matters came to that they were probably dead, she knew.
Both moons had set by the time Brandin came back to their tent on that hill above the sea. Awake in bed, waiting, she could see his weariness. He had maps with him, sketches of terrain to study one last time, but she made him put them down.
He came over to the bed still fully clothed and lay down. After a moment he rested his head in her lap. Neither of them spoke for a long time. Then Brandin shifted a little and looked up at her.
“I hate that man down there,” he said quietly. “I hate everything he stands for. There is no passion in him, no love, no pride. Only ambition. Nothing matters but that. Nothing in the world can move him to pity or grief but his own fate. Everything is a tool, an instrument. He wants the Emperor’s Tiara, everyone knows it, but he doesn’t want it for anything. He only wants. I doubt anything in his life has ever moved him to feel anything for anyone else . . . love, loss, anything.”
He subsided. He was repeating himself in his exhaustion. She pressed her fingers against his temples, looking down at his face as he turned again and his eyes closed and his brow gradually grew smooth under her touch. Eventually his breathing steadied and she knew he was asleep. She stayed awake, her hands moving like a blind woman’s over him, knowing from the light outside that the moons were down, knowing the morning was war and that she loved this man more than the world.
She must have slept, because the sky was grey with the coming of dawn when she opened her eyes again, and Brandin was gone. There was a red anemone on the pillow beside her. She looked at it without moving for a moment, then picked it up and crushed it to her face inhaling the fragile scent. She wondered if he knew the legend of that flower here. Almost certainly not, she thought.
She rose, and a few moments later Scelto came in with a mug of khav in his hand. He was wearing the stiff leather vest of a messenger; lightweight inadequate armor against arrows. He had volunteered to be one of the score of such men running orders and messages up and down the hill. He had come to her first though, as he had every morning in the saishan for a dozen years. Dianora was afraid that thinking about that would make her cry: a brutal omen on such a day. She managed a smile and told him to go back to the King, who needed him more this morning.
After he left, she slowly drank her khav, listening to the growing noises outside. Then she washed and dressed herself and went out of the tent into the rising sun.
Two men of the King’s Guard were waiting for her. They went wherever she did, a discreet step or two behind, but not more than that. She would be guarded today, she knew. She looked for Brandin and saw Rhun first. They were both near the front of the flattened ridge, both bare-headed, without armor, though with identical swords belted at their sides. Brandin had chosen to dress today in the simple brown of an ordinary soldier.
She was not fooled. None of them were, or could be.
Not long after that they saw him step alone toward the edge of his hill and raise one hand above his head for all the men in both armies to see. Without a word spoken, any warning at all, a dazzling blood-crimson flare of light sprang from that upthrust hand like a flame into the deep blue of the sky. From below they heard a roar of sound, as,buy ugg boots, crying their King’s name aloud, Brandin’s outnumbered army moved forward across the valley to meet the soldiers of Alberico in a battle that had been coming for almost twenty years.
“Not yet,” Alessan said steadily, for the fifth time, at least. “We have waited years, we must not be too soon now.”
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