Tigana (88 page)

Sandre was shaking his head. ‘I thought it was my weakness. That I just wasn’t strong enough, even with the binding.’

Erlein’s expression was odd. For a second he seemed about to respond to that, but instead he resumed his tale. ‘I used a spell to make her lose consciousness partway down, and a stronger one to catch her before she hit. Then a last to get us over the wall again. By then I was completely spent, and terrified they would trace us immediately if there was a Tracker anywhere in the castle. But they didn’t, there was too much chaos. I think something else is happening back there. We hid behind the main temple of Eanna for a time, and then I carried her here.’

‘Carried her through the streets?’ Alais asked. ‘No one noticed that?’

Erlein grinned at her, not unkindly. ‘It isn’t that unusual in Senzio, my dear.’

Alais flushed crimson, but Devin could see that she didn’t really mind. It was all right. Everything was suddenly all right.

‘We had better get down into the street then,’ Baerd said to Ducas. ‘We’ll have to get Arkin and some of the others. Regardless of whether there are Trackers, this changes things. When they don’t find her body in the garden there’s going to be an unbelievable search of the town tonight. I think there will have to be some fighting.’

Ducas smiled again, more like a wolf than ever. ‘I hope so,’ was all he said.

‘One moment,’ said Alessan quietly. ‘I want you all to witness something.’ He turned back to Erlein and hesitated, choosing his words. ‘We both know that you did this tonight without any coercion from me, and against your own best interests, in every way.’

Erlein glanced over at the bed, two sudden spots of red forming on each of his sallow cheeks. ‘Don’t make too much of it,’ he warned gruffly. ‘Every man has his moments of folly. I like red-headed women, that’s all. That’s how you trapped me in the first place, remember?’

Alessan shook his head. ‘That may be true, but it is not all, Erlein di Senzio. I bound you to this cause against your will, but I think you have just joined it freely.’

Erlein swore feelingly. ‘Don’t be a fool, Alessan! I just told you, I …’

‘I know what you just told me. I make my own judgements though, I always have. And the truth is, I have been made to realize tonight—by you and Catriana, both—that there are limits to what I wish to do or see done for any cause. Even my own.’

As Alessan finished speaking, he stepped forward quickly and laid a hand on Erlein’s brow. The wizard flinched, but Alessan steadied him. ‘I am Alessan, Prince of Tigana,’ he said clearly, ‘direct in descent from Micaela. In the name of Adaon and his gift to her children, I release you to your freedom, wizard!’

Both men suddenly staggered apart, as if a taut cord had been cut. Erlein’s face was bone-white. ‘I tell you again,’ he rasped, ‘you are a fool!’

Alessan shook his head. ‘You have called me worse than that, with some cause. But now I will name you something you will probably hate: I will unmask you as a decent man, with the same longing to be free as any of us here. Erlein, you cannot hide any more behind your moods and rancour. You cannot channel into me your own hatred of the Tyrants. If you choose to leave us, you can. I do not expect you will. Be welcome, freely, to our company.’

Erlein looked cornered, assailed. His expression was so confused Devin laughed aloud; the whole situation was clear to him now, and comical, in a bizarre, twisted way. He stepped forward and gripped the wizard.

‘I’m glad,’ he said. ‘I’m glad you’re with us.’

‘I’m not! I haven’t
said
that!’ Erlein snapped. ‘I haven’t said or done any such thing!’

‘Of course you have.’ It was Sandre, the evidence of exhaustion and pain still vivid in his lined, dark face. ‘You did it tonight. Alessan is right. He knows you better than any of us. Better, in some ways, than you know yourself, troubadour. How long have you tried to make yourself believe that nothing mattered to you but your own skin? How many people have you convinced that that was true? I’m one. Baerd and Devin. Perhaps Catriana. Not Alessan, Erlein. He just set you free to prove us all wrong.’

There was a silence. They could hear shouting from the streets below now, and the sound of running footsteps. Erlein turned to Alessan and the two men gazed at each other. Devin was suddenly claimed by an image, another of his intrusions of memory: that campfire in Ferraut, Alessan playing songs of Senzio for Erlein, an enraged shadow by the river. There were so many layers here, so many charges of meaning.

He saw Erlein di Senzio raise his hand, his left hand, with a simulation of five fingers there, and offer it to Alessan. Who met it with his right so their palms touched.

‘I suppose I am with you,’ Erlein said. ‘After all.’

‘I know,’ said Alessan.

‘Come!’
said Baerd, a second later. ‘We have work to do.’ Devin followed him, with Ducas and Sertino and Naddo, towards the back stairs beyond the window.

Just before stepping through Devin turned to look back at the bed. Erlein noticed, and followed his gaze.

‘She’s fine,’ the wizard said softly. ‘She’ll be just fine. Do what you have to do, and come back to us.’

Devin glanced up at him. They exchanged an almost shy smile. ‘Thank you,’ Devin said, meaning a number of things. Then he followed Baerd down into the tumult of the streets.

She was actually awake for a few moments before she opened her eyes. She was lying somewhere soft and unexpectedly familiar, and there were voices drifting towards and away from her, as if on a swelling of the sea, or like slow-moving fireflies in the summer nights at home. At first she couldn’t quite make the voices out. She was afraid to open her eyes.

‘I think she is awake now,’ someone was saying. ‘Will you all do me a great courtesy and leave me alone with her for a few moments?’

She knew
that
voice though. She heard the sound of a number of people rising and leaving the room. A door closed. That voice was Alessan’s.

Which meant she could not be dead. These were not Morian’s Halls, after all, with the voices of the dead surrounding her. She opened her eyes.

He was sitting on a chair drawn close to where she lay. She was in her own room in Solinghi’s inn, lying under a blanket in bed. Someone had removed the black silk gown and washed the blood from her skin. Anghiar’s blood, that had fountained from his throat.

The rush of memory was dizzying.

Quietly, Alessan said, ‘You are alive. Erlein was waiting in the garden below you. He rendered you unconscious and then caught you with his magic as you fell and brought you back.’

She let her eyes fall shut again as she struggled to deal with all of this. With the fact of life, the rise and fall of her chest as she breathed, the beat of her heart, this curiously light-headed sensation, as if she might drift away on the slightest of breezes.

But she wouldn’t. She was in Solinghi’s and Alessan was beside her. He had asked all the others to leave. She turned her head and looked at him again. He was extremely pale.

‘We thought you had died,’ he said. ‘We saw you fall from outside the garden wall. What Erlein did, he did on his own. None of us knew. We thought you had died,’ he repeated after a moment.

She thought about that. Then she said: ‘Did I achieve anything? Is anything happening?’

He pushed a hand through his hair. ‘It is too soon to tell for certain. I think you did, though. There is a great deal of commotion in the streets. If you listen you can hear it.’

Concentrating, she could indeed make out the sounds of shouting and running feet passing beneath the window.

Alessan seemed unnaturally subdued, struggling with something. It was very peaceful in the room though. The bed was softer than she had remembered it being. She waited, looking at him, noting the perennial unruliness of his hair where his hands were always pushing through it.

He said, carefully, ‘Catriana, I cannot tell you how frightened I was tonight. You must listen to me now, and try to think this through, because it is something that matters very much.’ His expression was odd, and there was something in his voice she couldn’t quite pin down.

He reached out and laid his hand over hers where it lay upon the blanket. ‘Catriana, I do not measure your worth by your father’s. None of us ever has. You must stop doing this to yourself. There was never anything for you to redeem. You are what you are, in and of yourself.’

This was difficult ground for her, the most difficult of all, and she found that her heartbeat had quickened. She watched him, blue eyes on his grey ones. His long, slender fingers were covering her own. She said:

‘We arrive with a past, a history. Families matter. He was a coward and he fled.’

Alessan shook his head; there was still something strained in his expression. ‘We have to be so careful,’ he
murmured. ‘So very careful when we judge them, and what they did in those days. There are reasons why a man with a wife and an infant daughter might choose—other than fear for himself—to stay with the two of them and try to keep them alive. Oh, my dear, in all these years I have seen so many men and women who went away for their children.’

She could feel her tears starting now and she fought to blink them back. She hated talking about this. It was the hard kernel of pain at the core of all she did.

‘But it was
before
the Deisa,’ she whispered. ‘He left before the battles. Even the one we won.’

Again he shook his head, wincing at the sight of her distress. He lifted her hand suddenly and carried it to his lips. She could not remember his ever having done that before. There was something completely strange about all of this.

‘Parents and children,’ he said, so softly she almost missed the words. ‘It is so hard; we are so quick to judge.’ He hesitated. ‘I don’t know if Devin told you, but my mother cursed me in the hour before she died. She called me a traitor and a coward.’

She blinked, moved to sit up. Too suddenly. She was dizzy and terribly weak. Devin hadn’t told her any such thing; he had said next to nothing about that day.

‘How could she?’ she said, anger rising in her, against this woman she had never seen. ‘You? A coward? Doesn’t … didn’t she know anything about …’

‘She knew almost all of it,’ he said quietly. ‘She simply disagreed as to where my duty lay. That is what I am trying to say, Catriana: it is possible to differ on such matters, and to reach a place as terrible as that one was for both of us. I am learning so many things so late. In this world, where we find ourselves, we need compassion more than anything, I think, or we are all alone.’

She managed this time to push herself up higher in the bed. She looked at him, imagining that day, those words of his mother. She remembered what she herself had said to her father on her own last night at home, words that had driven him violently out of the house into the dark. He had still been out there somewhere, alone, when she had gone away.

She swallowed. ‘Did it … did it end like that with your mother? Was that how she died?’

‘She never unsaid the words, but she let me take her hand before the end. I don’t think I’ll ever know if that meant …

‘Of course it did!’ she said quickly. ‘Of course it did, Alessan. We all do that. We do with our hands, our eyes, what we are afraid to say.’ She surprised herself; she hadn’t known she knew any such thing.

He smiled then, and looked down to where his fingers still covered hers. She felt herself colouring. He said, ‘There is a truth there. I am doing that now, Catriana. Perhaps I am a coward, after all.’

He had sent the others from the room. Her heart was still beating very fast. She looked at his eyes and then quickly away, afraid that after what she had just said it would look like she was probing. She felt like a child again, confused, certain that she was missing something here. She had always, always hated not understanding what was happening. But at the same time there seemed to be this very odd, extraordinary warmth growing inside her, and a queer sensation of light, brighter than the candles in the room should have allowed.

Fighting to control her breathing, needing an answer, but absurdly afraid of what it might be, she stammered, ‘I … would you … explain that to me? Please?’

She watched him closely this time, watched him smile, saw what kindled in his eyes, she even read his lips as they moved.

‘When I saw you fall,’ he murmured, his hand still holding hers, ‘I realized that I was falling with you, my dear. I finally understood, too late, what I had denied to myself for so long, how absolutely I had debarred myself from something important, even the acknowledging of its possibility, while Tigana was still gone. The heart … has its own laws though, Catriana, and the truth is … the truth is that you are the law of mine. I knew it when I saw you in that window. In the moment before you leaped I knew that I loved you. Bright star of Eanna, forgive me the manner of this, but you are the harbour of my soul’s journeying.’

Bright star of Eanna
. He had always called her that, from the very beginning. Lightly, easily, a name among others, a teasing for when she bridled, a term of praise when she did something well.
The harbour of his soul
.