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This time Devin refused to look at the girl. Instead his glance went over to the corner where Sandre’s grandson lay by the second, dying fire, his throat slashed by a family blade.
Alessan broke the silence with a deliberate cough. ‘There is also,’ he said in a curious tone, ‘another argument entirely. Only those who have spent as many nights outdoors as I have can properly appreciate the depth—as it were—of my preference for a soft bed at night. In short,’ he concluded with a grin, ‘your eloquence has quite overcome me, Devin. Lead me back to Menico at the inn. Even a bed shared with two syrenya-players who snore in marginal harmony is a serious improvement over cold ground beside Baerd’s relative silence.’
Baerd favoured him with a forbidding glare. One that Alessan appeared to weather quite easily. ‘I will refrain,’ Baerd said darkly, ‘from a recitation of your own nocturnal habits. I will wait here alone for Duke Sandre to return. We’ll have to burn this lodge tonight, for obvious reasons. There’s a body that will otherwise be missing when the servants come back in the morning. We’ll meet the three of you by the cache three mornings from now, as early as you see fit to rise from your pillows. Assuming,’ he added with heavy sarcasm, ‘that soft city living doesn’t prevent you from being able to find the cache.’
‘I’ll find it if he gets lost,’ Catriana said.
Alessan looked from one to the other of them, his expression wounded. ‘That isn’t fair,’ he protested. ‘It is just the music. You both know that.’
Devin hadn’t. Alessan was still gazing at Baerd. ‘You know it is only the music I’m going back for.’
‘Of course I know that,’ Baerd said softly. His expression changed. ‘I’m only afraid that the music will kill us both one of these days.’
Intercepting the look that passed between them then, Devin learned something new and sudden and unexpected—on a night when he’d already learned more things than he could easily handle—about the nature of bonding and about love.
‘Go,’ said Baerd with a scowl, as Alessan still hesitated. Catriana was already by the door. ‘We will meet you after the Festival. By the cache. Don’t,’ he added, ‘expect to recognize us.’
Alessan grinned suddenly, and a moment later Baerd allowed himself to smile as well. It changed his face a great deal. He didn’t, Devin realized, smile very often.
He was still thinking about that as he followed Alessan and Catriana out the door and into the darkness of the wood again.
Chapter VI
As it happened, the long path of that day and night did not lead back to the inn after all.
The three of them returned through the forest to the main road from Astibar to Ardin town. They walked in silence along the road under the arch of the autumn stars, cicadas loud in the woods on either side. Devin was glad of his woollen overshirt; it was chilly now, there might be a frost tonight.
It was strange to be abroad in the darkness so late. When they were travelling Menico was always careful to have his company quartered and settled by the dinner hour. Even with the stern measures both Tyrants had taken against thieves and brigands, the paths of the Palm were not often travelled by decent folk at night.
Folk such as he himself had been, only this morning. He had been secure in his niche and his calling, had even had—improbably enough—a triumph. He’d been poised on the edge of a genuine success. And now he was walking a road in darkness having abandoned any such prospects or security, and having sworn an oath that marked him for a death-wheel, in Chiara if not here. Both places actually, if Tomasso bar Sandre talked.
It was an odd, lonely feeling. He trusted the men he had joined—he even trusted the girl, if it came to that— but he didn’t know them very well. Not like he knew Menico or Eghano after so many years.
It occurred to him that the same dilemma applied to the cause he had just sworn to make his own: he didn’t know Tigana either, which was the whole point of what Brandin of Ygrath had done with his sorcery. Devin was in the process of changing his life for a story told under the moon, for a childhood song, an evocation of his mother, something almost purely an abstraction for him. A name.
He was honest enough to wonder if he was doing this as much for the adventure of it—for the glamour that Alessan and Baerd and the old Duke represented—as for the depth of old pain and grief he’d learned about in the forest tonight. He didn’t know the answer. He didn’t know how much Catriana fitted into his reasons, how much his father did, or pride, or the sound of Baerd’s voice speaking his loss to the night.
The truth was that if Sandre d’Astibar could stop his son from talking, as he had promised to do, then there was nothing to prevent Devin from carrying on exactly as he had for the past six years. From having the triumph and the rewards that seemed to lie before him. He shook his head. It was astonishing in a way, but that course, with Menico on the road, performing across the Palm— the life he’d woken to this morning—seemed almost inconceivable to him now, as if he’d already crossed to the other side of some tremendous divide. Devin wondered how often men did what they did, made the choices of their lives, for reasons that were clean and uncomplicated and easily understood as they were happening.
He was jolted from his reverie by Alessan abruptly raising a hand in warning. Without a word spoken the three of them slipped into the trees again beside the road. After a moment there was a flicker of torchlight to the west and Devin heard the sound of a cart approaching. There were voices, male and female both. Revellers returning home late, he guessed. There was a Festival going on. In some ways it had begun to seem another irrelevance. They waited for the cart to go by.
It did not. The horse was pulled up, with a soft slap and jingle of reins just in front of where they were hiding. Someone jumped down, then they heard him unlocking a chain on a gate.
‘I really am hopelessly overindulgent,’ they heard him complain. ‘Every single time I look at this excuse for a crest I am reminded that I should have had an artisan design it. There are limits, or there ought to be, to what a father allows!’
Devin recognized the place and the voice in the same moment. An impulse, a striving back towards the ordinary and familiar after what had happened in the night, made him rise.
‘Trust me,’ he whispered as Alessan threw him a glance. ‘This is a friend.’
Then he stepped out into the road.
‘I thought it was a handsome design,’ he said clearly. ‘Better than most artisans I know. And, to tell the truth, Rovigo, I remember you saying the same thing to me yesterday afternoon in The Bird.’
‘I know that voice,’ Rovigo replied instantly. ‘I know that voice and I am exceedingly glad to hear it—even though you have just unmasked me before a shrewish wife and a daughter who has long been the bane of her father’s unfortunate existence. Devin d’Asoli, if I am not mistaken!’
He strode forward from the gate, seizing the cart lantern from its bracket. Devin heard relieved laughter from the two women in the cart. Behind him, Alessan and then Catriana stepped into the road.
‘You are not mistaken,’ Devin said. ‘May I introduce two of my company members: Catriana d’Astibar and Alessan di Tregea. This is Rovigo, a merchant with whom I was sharing a bottle in elegant surroundings when Catriana arranged to have me assaulted and ejected yesterday.’
‘Ah!’ Rovigo exclaimed, holding the lantern higher. ‘The sister!’
Catriana, lit by the widened cast of the flame, smiled demurely. ‘I needed to talk to him,’ she said by way of explanation. ‘I didn’t much want to go inside that place.’
‘A wise and a providential woman,’ Rovigo approved, grinning. ‘Would that my clutch of daughters were half so intelligent. No one,’ he added, ‘should much want to go inside The Bird unless they have a head-cold so virulent that it defeats all sense of smell.’
Alessan burst out laughing. ‘Well-met on a dark road, master Rovigo—the more so if you are the owner of a vessel called the Sea Maid.’
Devin blinked in astonishment.
‘I have indeed the great misfortune to own and sail that unseaworthy excuse for a vessel,’ Rovigo admitted cheerfully. ‘How do you come to know it, friend?’
Alessan seemed highly amused. ‘Because I was asked to seek you out if I could. I have tidings for you from Ferraut town. From a somewhat portly, red-faced personage named Taccio.’
‘My esteemed factor in Ferraut!’ Rovigo exclaimed. ‘Well-met, indeed! By the god, where did you encounter him?’
‘In another tavern, I am sorry to have to say. A tavern where I had been playing music and he was . . . well, escaping retribution was his own phrase. We two were, as it happened, the last patrons of the night. He wasn’t in any great hurry to return home, for what seemed to me prudent reasons, and we fell to talking.’
‘It is never hard to fall to talking with Taccio,’ Rovigo assented.
Devin heard a giggle from the cart. It didn’t sound like the amusement of a ponderous, unmarriageable daughter. He was beginning to take the measure of Rovigo’s attitude to his women. In the darkness he found himself grinning.
Alessan said, ‘The worthy Taccio explained his dilemma to me, and when I came to mention that I had just joined the company of Menico di Ferraut and was bound this way for the Festival he charged me to seek you out and carry verbal confirmation of a letter he says he’s had conveyed to you.’
‘Half a dozen letters,’ Rovigo groaned. ‘To it, then: your verbal confirmation, friend Alessan.’
‘Good Taccio bade me tell you, and to swear it as true by the Triad’s grace and the three fingers of the Palm’— Alessan’s voice became a flawless parody of a sententious stage messenger—‘that did the new bed not arrive from Astibar before the winter frosts, the Dragon that slumbers uneasily by his side would awaken in wrath unimaginable and put a violent end to his life of care in your esteemed service.’
There was laughter and applause from the shadows of the cart. The mother, Devin decided, pursuing his earlier thought, didn’t sound even remotely shrewish.
‘Eanna and Adaon, who bless marriages together, forfend that such a thing should ever come to pass,’ Rovigo said piously. ‘The bed is ordered and it is made and it is ready to be shipped immediately the Festival is over.’
‘Then the Dragon shall slumber at ease and Taccio be saved,’ Alessan intoned, assuming the sonorous voice used for the ‘moral’ at the end of a children’s puppet-show.
‘Though why,’ came a mild, still-amused female voice from the cart, ‘all of you should be so intimidated by poor Ingonida I honestly don’t know. Rovigo, are we bereft entirely of our manners tonight? Will we keep these people standing in the cold and dark?’
‘Absolutely not, my beloved,’ her husband exclaimed hastily. ‘Alix, it was only the conjured vision of Ingonida in wrath that addled my brain.’
Devin found that he couldn’t stop grinning; even Catriana, he noticed, had relaxed her habitual expression of superior indifference.
‘Were you going back to town?’ Rovigo asked.
The first tricky moment—and Alessan left it to him. ‘We were,’ Devin said. ‘We’d taken a long walk to clear our heads and escape the noise, but were just about ready to brave the city again.’
‘I imagine the three of you would have been besieged by admirers all night,’ Rovigo said.
‘We do seem to have achieved a certain notoriety,’ Alessan admitted.
‘Well,’ said Rovigo earnestly, ‘all jesting aside, I could well understand if you wanted to rejoin the celebrations— they were nowhere near their peak when we left. It will go on all night, of course, but I confess I don’t like leaving the younger ones alone too late, and my unfortunate oldest, Alais, suffers from twitches and fainting spells when over-excited.’
‘How sad,’ said Alessan with a straight face.
‘Father!’ came a softly urgent protest from the cart.
‘Rovigo, stop that at once or I shall empty a basin on you in your sleep,’ her mother declared, though not, Devin judged, with any genuine anger.
‘You see the way of things?’ the merchant said, gesturing expressively with his free hand. ‘I am hounded without respite even into my dreams. But, if you are not entirely put off by the grievous stridency of my women and the prospect of three more inside very nearly as unpleasant, you are all most welcome, most humbly welcome to share a late repast and a quieter drink than you are likely to find in Astibar tonight.’
‘And three beds if you care to honour us,’ Alix added. ‘We heard you play and sing this morning at the Duke’s rites. Truly, it would be an honour if you joined us.’
‘You were in the palace?’ Devin asked, surprised.
‘Hardly,’ Rovigo murmured in a self-deprecating tone. ‘We were in the street outside among the crowd.’ He hesitated. ‘Sandre d’Astibar was a man I greatly honoured and admired. The Sandreni lands are just east of my own small holding—you have been walking by their woods even now. He was an easy-enough neighbour to the very end. I wanted to hear his mourning sung . . . and when I learned that my newest young friend’s company had been selected to perform the rites, well . . . Will you come in with us?’
This time Devin left it to Alessan.
Who said, still highly amused, his teeth flashing white in the darkness, ‘We could not dream of refusing an offer so gracious. It will allow us to toast the safe journey of Taccio’s new bed and the restful slumbers of his Dragon!’
‘Oh, poor Ingonida,’ said Alix from the cart, trying unsuccessfully not to laugh. ‘You are all so unfair!’
INSIDE, THERE WAS LIGHT and warmth and continuing laughter. There were also three undeniably attractive young women whose names flew past Devin—amid screams and blushes—much too fast to be caught. The oldest of these three though—about seventeen, he guessed—had a musical lilt to her voice and an exceptionally flirtatious glance.
Alais was different.
In the light of the hallway of her home the merchant’s oldest daughter turned out to be small and grave and slender. She had long, very straight black hair and eyes of the mildest shade of blue Devin could remember seeing. Beside her, Catriana’s own blue gaze looked more challenging than ever and her tumbling red hair resembled nothing so much as the mane of a lioness.
They were ushered by insistent female hands and voices into immensely comfortable chairs in a sitting-room furnished in shades of green and gold. A huge country fire blazed on the hearth, repudiating the autumn chill. A large carpet in a design that was unmistakably Quileian, even to Devin’s untutored eye, covered the floor. The seventeen-year-old—Selvena, it emerged— sank gracefully down upon it at Devin’s feet. She looked up at him and smiled. He received, and chose to ignore, a quick, sardonic glance from Catriana as she took a seat nearer to the fire. Alais was elsewhere for the moment, helping her mother.
Just then Rovigo reappeared, flushed and triumphant from some back room, carrying three bottles.
‘I hope,’ he said, beaming down upon them, ‘that you all have a taste for Astibar’s blue wine?’
And for Devin that simple question cast an entirely benevolent aura of fate over his impulsive action in the darkness outside. He glanced over at Alessan, and was rewarded with an odd smile that seemed to him to acknowledge many things.
Rovigo quickly began uncorking and pouring the wine. ‘If any of my wretched females are bothering you,’ he said over his shoulder, ‘feel free to swat them away like cats.’ A curl of blue smoke could be seen rising from each glass.
Selvena settled her gown more becomingly about her on the carpet, ignoring her father’s gibe with an ease that bespoke long familiarity with this sort of thing. Her mother—neat, trim, competent, a laughably far cry from Rovigo’s description in The Bird—came in with Alais and an elderly household servant. In a very short while a sideboard was covered with a remarkable variety of food.
Devin accepted a glass from Rovigo, savouring the icy-clean bouquet. He leaned back in his chair and prepared to be extremely content for the next little while. Selvena rose at a glance from her mother, but only to fill a plate of food for Devin. She brought it back to him, smiling, and settled on the carpet again, marginally nearer than before. Alais served Alessan and Catriana while the two youngest daughters sank down on the floor by their father. He aimed a mock-ferocious cuff at each of them.
Devin doubted if he’d ever seen a man so obviously happy to be where he was. It must have shown in the amused irony of his glance, for Rovigo, catching the look, shrugged.
‘Daughters,’ he lamented, sorrowfully shaking his head.
‘“Ponderous cartwheels”,’ Devin reminded him, looking pointedly at the merchant’s wife. Rovigo winced. Alix, laughter-lines crinkling at her temples, had overheard the exchange.
‘He did it again, did he?’ she said, tilting her head to one side. ‘Let me guess: I was of elephantine proportions and formidably evil disposition, and the four girls had scarcely enough good features among them to make up one passably acceptable woman. Am I right?’
Laughing aloud, Devin turned to see Rovigo—not at all discomfited—beaming with pride at his wife. ‘Exactly right,’ Devin said to Alix, ‘but I must say in his defence that I’ve never heard anyone give such a description so happily.’
He was rewarded with Alix’s quick laughter and a wonderfully grave smile over her shoulder from Alais, busy at the sideboard.
Rovigo raised his glass, moving it in small circles to make a pattern in the air with the icy smoke. ‘Will you join me in drinking to the memory of our Duke and to the glory of music? I don’t believe in making idle toasts with blue wine.’
‘Nor do I,’ Alessan said quietly. He lifted his own glass. ‘To memory,’ he said very deliberately. ‘To Sandre d’Astibar. To music.’ Then he added something else, under his breath, before sipping from the wine.
Devin drank, tasting, for only the third or fourth time in his life, the astonishingly rich, cold complexity of Astibar’s blue wine. There was nothing like it anywhere else in the Palm. And its price reflected that fact. He looked over and saluted Rovigo with his glass.
‘To all of you,’ Catriana said suddenly. ‘To kindness on a dark road.’ She smiled—a smile without any edge or mockery to it. Devin was surprised, then decided it was unfair for him to feel that way.
Not on the road I’m on, she’d said in the Sandreni Palace. And that was something he could understand now. For he too was on that road after all, despite what she’d done to keep him from it. He tried to catch her eye but failed. She was talking to Alix, now seated beside her. Briefly reflective, Devin turned his attention to his food.
A moment later Selvena touched his foot lightly. ‘Will you sing for us?’ she asked with a delicious smile. She didn’t move her hand. ‘Alais heard you, and my parents, but the rest of us have been here all day.’
‘Selvena!’ Mother and older sister snapped the name together. Selvena flinched as if struck but, Devin noticed, it was to her father that she turned, biting her lip. He was looking at her soberly.
‘Dear heart,’ he said, in a voice far removed from the raillery of before, ‘you have a lesson to learn. Our friends make music for their livelihood. They are our guests here tonight. One does not, light of my life, ask guests to work in one’s home.’ Selvena’s eyes brimmed with tears. She lowered her head.
In the same serious tone Rovigo said to Devin, ‘Will you accept an apology? She meant it in good faith, I can assure you of that.’
‘I know she did,’ Devin protested, as Selvena sniffled softly at his feet. ‘There is no apology needed.’
‘Truly, none,’ Alessan added, setting his plate of food aside. ‘We make music to live, indeed, but we also make music because doing so is most truly to live. It is not work to play among friends, Rovigo.’
Selvena wiped her eyes and looked up at him gratefully.
‘I shall be happy to sing,’ Catriana said. She glanced briefly at Selvena. ‘Unless of course it was only Devin you had in mind?’
Devin winced, even though the slash had not been directed at him. Selvena flinched again, badly flustered for the second time in as many minutes. Out of the corner of his eye Devin saw an intriguing expression cross Alais’s face.
Selvena began protesting earnestly that of course she’d meant all three of them. Alessan seemed amused by the entire exchange. Devin had a sudden intuition, looking at him, that this relaxed, sociable man was at least as close to the centre of the Prince of Tigana as was the arrogantly precise figure he’d seen in the forest cabin.
He escapes this way, he thought suddenly. And even as the idea entered his mind he knew that it was true. He had heard the man play the ‘Lament for Adaon’.
‘Well,’ said Rovigo, smiling at Catriana, ‘if you are gracious enough to indulge a shameless child I blush to acknowledge as my own, it happens that I do have a set of Tregean pipes in the house—the Triad alone know why. I seem to remember once having a doting father’s fancy that one of these creatures might emerge with a talent of some sort.’
Alix, from several feet away, mimed a blow with a spoon at her husband. Unabashed, his good spirits restored, Rovigo sent the youngest girl off to fetch the pipes while he set about refilling everyone’s glass.
Devin caught Alais looking at him from the seat she’d taken next to the fire. Reflexively he smiled at her. She didn’t smile back, but her gaze, mild and serious, did not break away. He felt a small, unsettling skip to the rhythm of his heart.
