Tigana (14 page)

Alberico put up his hood and limped from the room. Behind him the soldiers lifted up the body of the dead captain and supported the man whose face had been broken by Nievole.

They had to help the Tyrant mount his horse, which he found humiliating, but he began to feel better during the torchlit ride back to Astibar. He was utterly devoid of magic though. Even through the dulled sensations of his altered, reassembled body he could feel the void where his power should be. It would be at least two weeks, probably more, before it all came back. If it all came back. What he had done in the flashing of that instant in the lodge had drained more from him than any act of magic ever had in his life.

He was alive though, and he had just shattered the three most dangerous families left in the Eastern Palm. Even more, he had the middle Sandreni son here now as evidence, public proof of the conspiracy for the days to come. The pervert who was said to relish pain. Alberico allowed himself a tiny smile within the recesses of his hood.

It was all going to be done by law, and openly, as had been his practice almost from the day he’d taken power here. No unrest born of arbitrary exercise of might would be permitted to rear its dangerous head. They might hate him, of course they would hate him, but not one citizen of his four provinces would be able to doubt the justice or deny the legitimacy of his response to this Sandreni plot.

Or miss the point of how comprehensive that response was about to be.

With the prudent caution that was the truest wellspring of his character, Alberico of Barbadior began thinking through his actions of the next hours and days. The high gods of the Empire knew this far peninsula was a place of constant danger and needed stern governing, but the gods, who were not blind, could see that he knew how to give it what was needful. And it was growing more and more possible that the Emperor’s advisers back home, who were no more sightless than the gods, would see the same things.

And the Emperor was old.

Alberico withdrew his thoughts from these familiar, too seductive channels. He made himself focus on detail again; detail was everything in matters such as this. The neat steps of his planning clicked into place like beads on a djarra string as he rode. Drily, precisely, he assembled the orders he would give. The only commands that caused him an inward flicker of emotion were the ones concerning Tomasso bar Sandre. These, at least, did not have to be made public and they would not be. Only the confession and its revealing details needed to be known outside his palace walls. Whatever took place in certain rooms underground could be extremely private indeed. He surprised himself a little with the anticipation he felt.

At one point he remembered that he’d wanted the hunting lodge torched when they left. Smoothly he adjusted his thinking on that. Let the lesser Sandreni and their servants find the dead when they came at dawn. Let them wonder and fear. The doubt would only last a little while.

Then he would cause everything to be made extremely clear.

C H A P T E R   5

‘O
h, Morian,’ Allessan whispered, wistful regret infusing his voice. ‘I could have sent him to your judgement even now. A child could have put an arrow in his eye from here.’

Not this child
, Devin thought ruefully, gauging the distance and the light from where they were hidden among the trees north of the ribbon of road the Barbadians had just ridden along. He looked with even more respect than before at Alessan and the crossbow he’d picked up from a cache they’d looped past on the way here.

‘She will claim him when she is ready,’ Baerd said prosaically. ‘And you are the one who has spent his life saying that it will be to no good if either one of them dies too soon.’

Alessan grunted. ‘Did I shoot?’ he asked pointedly.

Baerd’s teeth flashed briefly in the moonlight. ‘I would have stopped you in any case.’

Alessan swore succinctly. Then, a moment later, relaxed into quiet amusement. The two men had a manner with each other that spoke to long familiarity. Catriana, Devin saw, had not smiled. Certainly not at him. On the other hand, he reminded himself,
he
was supposed to be the one who was angry. The present circumstances made it a little hard though. He felt anxious and proud and excited, all at once.

He was also the only one of the four of them who hadn’t noticed Tomasso, bound at wrist and ankle to his horse.

‘We’d better check the lodge,’ Baerd said as the transient mood slipped away. ‘Then I think we will have to travel very fast. Sandre’s son will name you and the boy.’

‘We had better have a talk about the boy first,’ Catriana said in a tone that made it suddenly very easy for Devin to reclaim his anger.

‘The boy?’ he repeated, raising his eyebrows. ‘I think you have evidence to the contrary.’ He let his gaze rest coldly on hers, and was rewarded to see her flush and turn away.

Briefly rewarded.

‘Unworthy, Devin,’ Alessan said. ‘I hope not to hear that note from you again. Catriana violated all I know of her nature in doing what she did this morning. If you are intelligent enough to have come here you will be more than intelligent enough to now understand why she did it. You might suspend your own pride long enough to think about how she is feeling.’

It was mildly said, but Devin felt as if he had just been punched in the stomach. Swallowing awkwardly, he looked from Alessan back to Catriana, but her gaze was fixed on the stars, away from and above them all. Finally, shamed, he looked down at the darkened forest floor. He felt fourteen years old again.

‘I don’t particularly appreciate that, Alessan,’ he heard Catriana saying coldly. ‘I fight my own wars. You know it.’

‘Not to mention,’ Baerd added casually, ‘the dazzling inappropriateness of your chastising anyone alive for having too much pride.’

Alessan chose to ignore that. To Catriana he said, ‘Bright star of Eanna, do you think I don’t know how you can fight? This is different though. What happened this morning cannot be allowed to matter. I can’t have this becoming a battle between you if Devin is to be one of us.’

‘If he
what?
’ Catriana wheeled on him. ‘Are you mad? Is it the music? Because he can sing? Why should someone from Asoli possibly be—’

‘Hold peace!’ Alessan said sharply. Catriana fell abruptly silent.

Not having any good idea where to look or what to feel, Devin continued to simulate an intense interest in the loamy forest soil beneath his feet. His mind and heart were whirling with confusion.

Alessan’s voice was gentler when he resumed. ‘Catriana, what happened this morning was not his fault either. You are not to blame him. You did what you felt you had to do and it did not succeed. He cannot be blamed or cursed for following you as innocently as he did. If you must, curse me for not stopping him as he went through the door. I could have.’

‘Why didn’t you then?’ Baerd asked.

Devin remembered Alessan looking at him as he’d paused in the archway of that inner door that had seemed a gateway to a land of dreaming.

‘Yes, why?’ he asked awkwardly, looking up. ‘Why did you let me follow?’

The moonlight was purely blue now. Vidomni was over west behind the tops of the trees. Only Ilarion was overhead among the stars, making the night strange with her shining.
Ghostlight,
the country folk called it when the blue moon rode alone.

Alessan had the light behind him so his eyes were hidden. For a moment the only sounds were the night noises of the forest: rustle of leaf in breeze, of grass, the dry crackle of the woodland floor, quick flap of wings to a branch near by. Somewhere north of them a small animal cried out and another answered it.

Alessan said: ‘Because I knew the tune his father taught him as a child and I know who his father is and he isn’t from
Asoli. Catriana, my dear, it isn’t just the music, whatever you may think of my own weaknesses. He is one of us, my darling. Baerd, will you test him?’

On the most conscious, rational level, Devin understood almost none of this. None the less he felt himself beginning to grow cold even as Alessan spoke. He had a swooping sense, like the descent of a hunting bird, that he had come to where Morian’s portal had led him, here in the shadows of this wood under the waxing blue moon.

Nor was he made easier when he turned to Baerd and saw the stricken look on the face of the other man. Even by the distorting moonlight he could see how pale Baerd had become.

‘Alessan …’ Baerd began, his voice roughened.

‘You are dearer to me than anyone alive,’ Alessan said, calm and grave. ‘You have been more than a brother to me. I would not hurt you for the world, and especially not in this. Never in this. I would not ask unless I was sure. Test him, Baerd.’

Still Baerd hesitated, which made Devin’s own anxiety grow; he understood less and less of what was happening. Only that it seemed to matter to the others, a great deal.

For a long moment no one moved. Finally Baerd, walking carefully, as if holding tightly to control of himself, took Devin by the arm and led him a dozen steps further into the wood to a small clearing among a circle of trees.

Neatly he lowered himself to sit cross-legged on the ground. After a moment’s hesitation Devin did the same. There was nothing he could do but follow the leads he was being given; he had no idea where they were going.
Not on the road I’m on,
he remembered Catriana saying in the palace that morning. He linked his hands together to keep them steady; he felt cold, and it had little to do with the chill of night.

He heard Alessan and Catriana following them but he didn’t look back. For the moment what was important was the enormous thing—whatever it was—that he could see building in Baerd’s eyes. The blond-haired man had appeared so effortlessly competent until this moment and now, absurdly, he seemed to have become terribly fragile. Someone who could be shattered with unsettling ease. Abruptly, and for the second time in that long day, Devin felt as if he were crossing over into a country of dream, leaving behind the simple, defined boundaries of the daylight world.

And in this mood, under the blue light of Ilarion, he heard Baerd begin the tale, so that it came to him that first time like a spell, something woven in words out of the lost spaces of his childhood. Which is what, in the end, it was.

‘In the year Alberico took Astibar,’ said Baerd, ‘while the provinces of Tregea and Certando were each preparing to fight him alone, and before Ferraut had fallen, Brandin, King of Ygrath, came to this peninsula from the west. He sailed his fleet into the Great Harbour of Chiara and he took the Island. He took it easily, for the Grand Duke killed himself, seeing how many ships had come from Ygrath. This much I suspect that you know.’

His voice was low. Devin found himself leaning forward, straining to hear. A trialla was singing sweetly, sadly, from a branch behind him. Alessan and Catriana made no sound at all. Baerd went on.

‘In that year the Peninsula of the Palm became a battleground in an enormous balancing game between Ygrath and the Empire of Barbadior. Neither thought it could afford to give the other free rein here, halfway between the two of them. Which is one of the reasons Brandin came. The other reason, as we learned afterwards, had to do with his younger, most-beloved son, Stevan. Brandin of Ygrath
sought to carve out a second realm for his child to rule. What he found was something else.’

The trialla was still singing. Baerd paused to listen, as if finding in its liquescent voice, gentler even than the nightingale’s, an echo to something in his own.

‘The Chiarans, attempting to rally a resistance in the mountains, were massacred on the slopes of Sangarios. Brandin took Asoli province soon after, and word of his power ran before him. He was very strong in his sorcery, even stronger than Alberico, and though he had fewer soldiers than the Barbadians in the east, his were more completely loyal and better trained. For where Alberico was only a wealthy, ambitious minor lord of the Empire using hired mercenaries, Brandin
ruled
Ygrath and his were the picked soldiers of that realm. They moved south through Corte almost effortlessly, defeating each province’s army one by one, for none of us acted together in that year. Or after, naturally.’ Baerd’s voice wasn’t quite detached enough for the irony he was trying for.

‘From Corte, Brandin himself turned east with the smaller part of his army to meet Alberico in Ferraut and pin him down there. He sent Stevan south to take the last free province in the west and then cross over to join him in Ferraut to meet the Barbadians in the battle that I think they all expected would shape the fate of the Palm.

‘It was a mistake, though he could not really have known it then, eighteen years ago. Newly landed here, ignorant of the natures of the different provinces in this peninsula. I suppose he wanted Stevan to have a taste of leadership on his own. He gave him most of the army and his best commanders, relying on his own sorcery to hold Alberico until the others joined him.’

Baerd paused for a moment, his blue eyes focused inward. When he resumed, there was a new timbre to his voice; it
seemed to Devin to be carrying many different things, all of them old, and all of them sorrowful.

‘At the line of the River Deisa,’ Baerd said, ‘a little more than halfway between Certando and the sea at Corte, Stevan was met by the bitterest resistance either of the invading armies was to find in the Palm. Led by their Prince—for in their pride they had always named their ruler so—the people of that last province in the west met the Ygrathens and held them, and beat them back from the river with heavy losses on both sides.

‘And Prince Valentin of that province … the province you know as Lower Corte, slew Stevan of Ygrath, Brandin’s beloved son, on the bank of the river at sunset after a bitter day of death.’

Devin could almost taste the keenness of old grief in the words. He saw Baerd glance over for the first time to where Alessan was standing. Neither man spoke. Devin never took his own eyes away from Baerd. He concentrated as if his life depended on his doing so, treating each word spoken as if it were a jewelled mosaic piece to be set into the memory that was his own pride.