Tigana (96 page)

He stepped under the canopy. Brandin was ahead of him near the edge of the hill. He had never struck a man from behind in all his days. He moved to one side, stumbling a little, and came up on the King’s right hand. No one looked at him. He was Rhun.

He was not.

‘You should have killed me by the river,’
he said, very clearly. Slowly, Brandin turned his head, as if just now remembering something. Valentin waited until their eyes met and held before he drove his sword into the Ygrathen’s heart, the way a Prince killed his enemies, however many
years it might take, however much might have to be endured before such an ending was allowed.

Dianora could not even scream she was so stunned, so unprepared. She saw Brandin stagger backwards, a blade in his chest. Then Rhun—
Rhun!
—jerked it clumsily free and so much blood followed. Brandin’s eyes were wide with astonishment and pain, but they were clear, so luminously clear. And so was his voice as she heard him say:

‘Both of us?’ He swayed, still on his feet. ‘Father and son, both?
What a harvest, Prince of Tigana
.’

Dianora heard the name as a white burst of sound in her brain. Time seemed to change, to slow unbearably. She saw Brandin sinking to his knees; it seemed to take forever for him to fall. She tried to move towards him; her body would not respond. She heard an elongated, weirdly distorted sound of anguish, and saw stark agony in d’Eymon’s face as the Chancellor’s blade ripped into and through Rhun’s side.

Not Rhun.
Not Rhun
. Valentin the Prince.

Brandin’s Fool. All those years. The thing that had been done to him! And she beside him, beside that suffering.
All those years
. She wanted to scream. She could not make a sound, could scarcely breathe.

She saw him falling too, the maimed, broken form crumpling to the ground beside Brandin. Who was still on his knees, a red wound in his chest. And who was looking at her now, only at her. A sound finally escaped her lips as she sank down beside him. He reached out, so slowly, with such a colossal effort of will, with all the control he had, and he took her hand.

‘Oh, love,’ she heard him say. ‘It is as I told you. We should have met in Finavir.’

She tried again to speak, to answer him, but tears were streaming down her face and closing her throat. She gripped
his hand as tightly as she could, trying to will life from herself over into him. He slumped sideways against her shoulder, and so she lowered him to her lap and wrapped her arms around him, the way she had last night, only last night when he slept. She saw the brilliantly clear grey eyes slowly grow cloudy, and then dark. She was holding him like that when he died.

She lifted her head. The Prince of Tigana, on the ground beside them, was looking at her with so much compassion in his newly clear eyes. Which was a thing she could not possibly endure. Not from him: not with what he had suffered and what she was, what she herself had done. If he only
knew,
what words would he have for her, what look would there be in those eyes? She could not bear it. She saw him open his mouth as if to speak, then his eyes flicked quickly to one side.

A shadow crossed the sun. She looked up and saw d’Eymon’s sword lifted high. Valentin raised a hand, pleading, to ward it.

‘Wait!’
she gasped, forcing the one word out.

And d’Eymon, almost mad with his own grief yet stayed for her voice. Held back his sword. Valentin lowered his hand. She saw him draw breath against the massive final reality of his own wound, and then, closing his eyes to the pain and the fierce light, she heard him speak. Not a cry, only the one word spoken in a clear voice. The one word which was—oh, what else could it have ever been?—the name of his home, offered as a shining thing for the world again to know.

And Dianora saw then that d’Eymon of Ygrath
did
know it. That he did hear the name. Which meant that all men now could, that the spell was broken. Valentin opened his eyes and looked up at the Chancellor, reading the truth of that knowledge in d’Eymon’s face, and Dianora saw that the Prince of Tigana was smiling as the Chancellor’s sword came down from its great height and drove into his heart.

Even in death the smile remained on the terribly afflicted face. And the echo of his last word, the single name, seemed to Dianora to be hanging yet and spreading outward in ripples through the air around the hill, above the valley where the Barbadians were all dying now.

She looked down at the dead man in her arms, cradling his head and the greying hair, and she could not stop her tears.
In Finavir,
he had said. Last words. Another named place, farther away than dream. And had been right, as so many many times he had been right. They ought to have met, if the gods had any kindness, any pity at all for them, in another world than this. Not here. For love was what it was, but it was not enough. Not here.

She heard a sound from under the canopy and turned in time to see d’Eymon slump forward against Brandin’s chair. The hilt of his sword was against the seat-back of the chair. The blade was buried in his breast. She saw it and she pitied him his pain but she could not properly grieve. There was nothing left within her for such a sorrow. D’Eymon of Ygrath could not matter now. Not with the two men lying here with her, beside each other. She could pity, oh, she could pity any man or woman born, but she could not grieve for any but these two. Not now.

Not ever, she realized.

She looked over then and saw Scelto, still on his knees, the only other living person on this hill. He too was weeping. But for her, she realized, even more than for the dead. His first tears had always been for her. He seemed to be far away though. Everything seemed oddly remote. Except Brandin. Except Valentin.

For the last time she looked down at the man for whose love she had betrayed her home and all her dead and her own vengeance sworn before a fire in her father’s house so long ago. She looked down upon what remained of Brandin
of Ygrath with his soul gone, and slowly, tenderly, Dianora lowered her head and kissed him upon the lips in farewell. ‘In Finavir,’ she said. ‘My love.’ Then she laid him on the ground beside Valentin and she stood.

Looking south she saw that three men and the woman with red hair had descended the slope of the wizard’s ridge and were beginning to swiftly cross the uneven ground between. She turned to Scelto whose eyes had now a terrible foreknowledge in them. He knew her, she remembered, he loved her and he knew her much too well. He knew all save the one thing, and that one secret she would take away with her. That was her own.

‘In a way,’ she said to him, gesturing at the Prince, ‘it would almost be better if no one ever knew who he was. But I don’t think we can do that. Tell them, Scelto. Stay, and tell them when they get here. Whoever they are, they ought to know.’

‘Oh, my lady,’ he whispered, weeping. ‘Must it end like this?’

She knew what he meant. Of course she knew. She would not dissemble with him now. She looked at the people—whoever they were—coming quickly across the ground from the south. The woman. A brown-haired man with a sword, another darker one, a third man, smaller than the other two.

‘Yes,’ she said to Scelto, watching them approach. ‘Yes, I think it must.’

And so she turned and left him with the dead on that hill, to wait for those who were coming even now. She left the valley behind, the hill, left all the noises of battle and pain, walking down the northernmost of the goatherds’ tracks as it wound west along the slope of the hill out of sight of everyone. There were flowers growing along the path: sonrai berries, wild lilies, irises, anemones, yellow and white, and then there was a scarlet one. In Tregea they said that flower had been made red by the blood of Adaon where he fell.

There were no men or women on that slope to see her or to stay her as she went, nor was the distance very far to level ground and then to the beginnings of the sand and finally to the margin of the sea where there were gulls wheeling and crying overhead.

There was blood on her garments. She discarded them in a small pile on the wide sweep of that white sand. She stepped into the water—it was cool, but not nearly so cold as the sea of Chiara had been on the morning of the Dive. She walked out slowly until it came to her hips and then she began to swim. Straight out, heading west, towards where the sun would set when it finally went down to end this day. She was a good swimmer; her father had taught her and her brother long ago after a dream she had had. Valentin the Prince had even come with them once to their cove. Long ago.

When she began, at length, to tire she was very far from the shore, out where the blue-green of the ocean near land changes to the darker blue of the deep. And there she dived, pushing herself downward, away from the blue of the sky and the bronze sun and it seemed to her as she went down that there was an odd illumination appearing in the water, a kind of path here in the depths of the sea.

She had not expected that. She had not thought any such thing would be here for her. Not after all that had happened, all that she had done. But there was indeed a path, a glow of light defining it. She was tired now, and deep, and her vision was beginning to grow dim. She thought she saw a shape flicker at the edge of the shimmering light. She could not see very clearly though, there seemed to be a kind of mist coming down over her. She thought for a moment the shape might be the riselka, though she had not earned that, or even Adaon, though she had no claim at all upon the god. But then it seemed to Dianora that there was a last gathering of brightness in her mind at the very end, and the mist fell back
a little, and she saw that for her it was neither of these, after all, not the riselka, nor the god.

It was Morian, come in kindness, come in grace, to bring her home.

Alone of the living on a hill with the dead, Scelto stood and composed himself as best he could, waiting for those he could see beginning to climb the slope.

When the three men and the tall woman reached the summit he knelt in submission as they surveyed in silence what had happened here. What death had claimed upon this hill. He was aware that they might kill him, even as he knelt. He wasn’t sure that he cared.

The King was lying only an arm’s length away from Rhun who had slain him. Rhun, who had been a Prince here in the Palm. Prince of Tigana. Lower Corte. If he had a space of time later, Scelto sensed that the pieces of this story might begin to come together for him. Even numbed as he was now, he could feel a lancing hurt in his mind if he dwelt upon that history. So much done in the name of the dead.

She would be near the water by now. She would not be coming back this time. He had not expected her to return on the morning of the Dive; she had tried to hide it, but he had seen something in her when she woke that day. He hadn’t understood why, but he had known that she was readying herself to die.

She
had
been ready, he was certain of it; something had changed for her by the water’s edge that day. It would not change again.

‘You are?’

He looked up. A lean, black-haired man, silvering at the temples, was looking down at him with a clear grey gaze. Eyes curiously like Brandin’s had been.

‘I am Scelto. I was a servant in the saishan, a messenger today.’

‘You were here when they died?’

Scelto nodded. The man’s voice was calm, though there was a discernible sense of effort in that, as if he were trying with his tone to superimpose some pattern of order upon the chaos of the day.

‘Will you tell me who killed the King of Ygrath?’

‘His Fool,’ Scelto said quietly, trying to match the manner of the other man. In the distance below them the noises of battle were subsiding at last.

‘How? At Brandin’s request?’ It was one of the other men, a hard-looking, bearded figure with dark eyes and a sword in his hand.

Scelto shook his head. He felt overwhelmingly weary all of a sudden. She would be swimming. She would be a long way out by now. ‘No. It was an attack. I think …’ He lowered his head, fearful of presuming.