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The grief in that accusation clenched itself like a fist within Devin, more tightly than Baerd could ever have known. Than anyone could have known. For no one since Marra had died really knew what memory meant to Devin d’Asoli: the way in which it had come to be the touchstone of his soul.
Memory was talisman and ward for him, gateway and hearth. It was pride and love, shelter from loss: for if something could be remembered it was not wholly lost. Not dead and gone forever. Marra could live; his dour, stern father hum a cradle song to him. And because of this, because this was at the heart of what Devin was, the old vengeance of Brandin of Ygrath smashed into him that night as if it had been newly wrought, pounding through to the vulnerable centre of how Devin saw and dealt with the world, and it cut him like a fresh and killing wound.
With an effort he forced himself to steadiness, willing the concentration that would allow him to remember this. All of this. Which seemed to matter more than ever now. Especially now, with the echo of Baerd’s last terrible words fading in the night. Devin looked at the blond-haired man with the leather bands across his brow and about his neck, and he waited. He had been quick as a boy; he was a clever man. He understood what was coming; it had fallen into place.
Older by far than he had been only an hour ago, Devin heard Alessan murmur from behind him, ‘The cradle song I heard you playing was from that last province, Devin. A song of the city of towers. No one not of that place could have learned that tune in the way you told me you did. It is how I knew you as one of us. It is why I did not stop you when you followed Catriana. I left it to Morian to see what might lie beyond that doorway.’
Devin nodded, absorbing this. A moment later he said, as carefully as he could, ‘If this is so, if I have properly understood you, then I should be one of the people who can still hear and remember the name that has been . . . otherwise taken away.’
Alessan said, ‘It is so.’
Devin discovered that his hands were shaking. He looked down at them, concentrating, but he could not make them stop.
He said, ‘Then this is something that has been stolen from me all my life. Will you . . . give it back to me? Will you tell me the name of the land where I was born?’
He was looking at Baerd by starlight, for Ilarion too was gone now, over west beyond the trees. Alessan had said it was Baerd’s to tell. Devin didn’t know why. In the darkness they heard the trialla one more time, a long, descending note, and then Baerd spoke, and for the first time in his days Devin heard someone say:
‘Tigana.’
Within him the bell he had been hearing, as if in a dream of unknown summer fields, fell silent. And within that abrupt, absolute inner stillness a surge of loss broke over him like an ocean wave. And after that wave came another, and then a third—the one bearing love and the other a heart-deep pride. He felt a strange light-headed dizzying sensation as of a summons rushing along the corridors of his blood.
Then he saw how Baerd was staring at him. Saw his face rigid and white, the fear transparent even by starlight, and something else as well: bitterest thirst—an aching, deprived hunger of the soul. And then Devin understood, and gave to the other man the release he needed.
‘Thank you,’ Devin said. He didn’t seem to be trembling any more. Around a difficult thickness in his throat he went on, for it was his turn now, his test:
‘Tigana. Tigana. I was born in the province of Tigana. My name . . . my true name is Devin di Tigana bar Garin.’
Even as he spoke, something akin to glory blazed in Baerd’s face. The fair-haired man squeezed his eyes tightly shut as if to hold that glory in, to keep it from escaping into the dispersing dark, to clutch it fiercely to his need. Devin heard Alessan draw an unsteady breath, and then, surprised, he felt Catriana touch his shoulder and then withdraw her hand.
Baerd was lost in a place beyond speech. It was Alessan who said, ‘That is one of the two names taken away, and the deepest. Tigana was our province and the name of the royal city by the sea. The fairest city under Eanna’s lights you would have heard it named. Or perhaps, perhaps only the second most fair.’
A thread of something that seemed to genuinely long to become laughter was in his voice. Laughter and love together. For the first time Devin turned to look up at him.
Alessan said, ‘If you were to have spoken with those from inland and south, in the city where the River Sperion, descending from the mountain, begins its run westward to find the sea, you would have heard it said that second way. For we were always proud, and there was always rivalry between the two cities.’
In the end, hard as he tried, his voice could only carry loss.
‘You were born in that inland city, Devin, and so was I. We are children of that high valley and of the silver running of that mountain river. We were born in Avalle. In Avalle of the Towers.’
There was music in Devin’s mind again, with that name, but this time it was different from the bells he’d heard before. This time it was a music that took him back a long way, all the way to his father and his childhood.
He said, ‘You do know the words then, don’t you?’
‘Of course I do,’ said Alessan gently.
‘Please?’ Devin asked.
But it was Catriana who answered him, in the voice a young mother might have used, rocking her child to sleep on an evening long ago:
Springtime morning in Avalle
And I don’t care what the priests say:
I’m going down to the river today
On a springtime morning in Avalle.
When I’m all grown up, come what may,
I’ll build a boat to carry me away
And the river will take it to Tigana Bay
And the sea even further from Avalle.
But wherever I wander, by night or by day,
Where water runs swiftly or high trees sway,
My heart will carry me back and away To
a dream of the towers of Avalle.
A dream of my home in Avalle.
The sweet sad words to the tune he’d always known drifted down to Devin, and with them came something else. A sense of loss so deep it almost drowned the light grace of Catriana’s song. No breaking waves now, or trumpets along the blood: only the waters of longing. A longing for something taken away from him before he’d even known it was his—taken so completely, so comprehensively he might have lived his whole life through without ever knowing it was gone.
And so Devin wept as Catriana sang. Small boys, young-looking for their age, learned very early in northern Asoli how risky it was to cry where someone might see. But something too large for Devin to deal with had overtaken him in the forest tonight.
If he understood properly what Alessan had just said, this song was one his mother would have sung to him.
His mother whose life had been ripped away by Brandin of Ygrath. He bowed his head, though not to shield the tears, and listened as Catriana finished that bitter-sweet cradle song: a song of a child defying orders and authority, even when young, who was self-reliant enough to want to build a ship alone and brave enough to want to sail it into the wideness of the world, never turning back. Nor ever losing or forgetting the place where it all began.
A child very much as Devin saw himself.
Which was one of the reasons he wept. For he had been made to lose and forget those towers, he’d been robbed of any dream he himself might ever have had of Avalle. Or Tigana on its bay.
So his tears followed one another downward in darkness as he mourned his mother and his home. And in the shadows of that wood not far from Astibar those two griefs fused to each other in Devin and became welded in the forge of his heart with what memory meant to him and the loss of memory: and out of that blazing something took shape in Devin that was to change the running of his life line from that night.
He dried his eyes on his sleeve and looked up. No one spoke. He saw that Baerd was looking at him. Very deliberately Devin held up his left hand, the hand of the heart. Very carefully he folded his third and fourth fingers down so that what showed was a simulacrum of the shape of the Peninsula of the Palm.
The position for taking an oath.
Baerd lifted his right hand and made the same gesture. They touched fingertips together, Devin’s small palm against the other man’s larger, calloused one.
Devin said, ‘If you will have me I am with you. In the name of my mother who died in that war I swear I will not break faith with you.’
‘Nor I with you,’ said Baerd. ‘In the name of Tigana gone.’
There was a rustling as Alessan sank to his knees beside them. ‘Devin, I should be cautioning you,’ he said soberly. ‘This is not a thing in which to move too fast. You can be one with our cause without having to break your life apart to come with us.’
‘He has no choice,’ Catriana murmured, moving nearer on the other side. ‘Tomasso bar Sandre will name you both to the torturers tonight or tomorrow. I’m afraid the singing career of Devin d’Asoli may be over just as it truly begins.’ She looked down on the three men, her eyes unreadable in the darkness.
‘It is over,’ Devin said quietly. ‘It ended when I learned my name.’ Catriana’s expression did not change; he had no idea what she was thinking.
‘Very well,’ said Alessan. He held up his own left hand, two fingers down. Devin met it with his right. Alessan hesitated. ‘An oath in your mother’s name is stronger for me than you could have guessed,’ he said.
‘You knew her?’
‘We both did,’ Baerd said quietly. ‘She was ten years older than us, but every adolescent boy in Tigana was a little in love with Micaela. And most of the grown men too, I think.’
Another new name, and all the hurt that came with it. Devin’s father had never spoken it. His sons had never even known their mother’s name. There were more avenues to sorrow in this night than Devin could have imagined.
‘We all envied and admired your father more than I can tell you,’ Alessan added. ‘Though I was pleased that an Avalle man won her in the end. I can remember when you were born, Devin. My father sent a gift to your naming day. I don’t remember what it was.’
‘You admired my father?’ Devin said, stunned.
Alessan heard that and his voice changed. ‘Do not judge him by what he became. You only knew him after Brandin smashed a whole generation and their world. Ending their lives or blighting their souls. Your mother was dead, Avalle fallen, Tigana gone. He had fought and survived both battles by the Deisa.’ Above them Catriana made a small sound.
‘I never knew,’ Devin protested. ‘He never told us any of that.’ There was a new ache inside him. So many avenues.
‘Few of the survivors spoke of those days,’ Baerd said.
‘Neither of my parents did,’ said Catriana awkwardly. ‘They took us as far away as they could, to a fishing village here in Astibar down the coast from Ardin, and never spoke a word of any of this.’
‘To shield you,’ Alessan said gently. His palm was still touching Devin’s. It was smaller than Baerd’s. ‘A great many of the parents who managed to survive fled so that their children might have a chance at a life unmarred by the oppression and the stigma that bore down—that still bear down—upon Tigana. Or Lower Corte as we must name it now.’
‘They ran away,’ said Devin stubbornly. He felt cheated, deprived, betrayed.
Alessan shook his head. ‘Devin, think. Don’t judge yet: think. Do you really imagine you learned that tune by chance? Your father chose not to burden you or your brothers with the danger of your heritage, but he set a stamp upon you—a tune, wordless for safety—and he sent you out into the world with something that would reveal you, unmistakably, to anyone from Tigana, but to no one else. I do not think it was chance. No more than Catriana’s mother giving her daughter a ring that marked her to anyone born where she was born.’
Devin glanced back. Catriana held out her hand for him to see. It was dark, but his eyes had adjusted to that, and he could make out a strange, twining shape upon the ring: a man, half human, half creature of the sea. He swallowed.
‘Will you tell me of him?’ he asked, turning back to Alessan. ‘Of my father?’
Of stolid, dour Garin, grim farmer in a wet grey land. Who had, it now appeared, come from bright Avalle of the towers in the southern highlands of Tigana and who had, in his youth, wooed and won a woman beloved of all who saw her. Who had fought and lived through two terrible battles by a river and who had—if Alessan was right in his last conjecture— very deliberately sent out into the world his one quick, imaginative child capable of finding what he seemed to have found tonight.
Who had also, Devin abruptly realized, almost certainly lied when he said he’d forgotten the words to the cradle song. It was all suddenly very hard.
‘I will tell you what I know of him, and gladly,’ Alessan said. ‘But not tonight, for Catriana is right and we must get ourselves away before dawn. Right now I will swear faith with you as Baerd has done. I accept your oath. You have mine. You are as kin to me from now until the ending of my days.’
Devin turned to look up at Catriana. ‘Will you accept me?’
She tossed her hair. ‘I don’t have much choice, do I?’ she said carelessly. ‘You seem to have entangled yourself rather thoroughly here.’ She lowered her left hand though as she spoke, two fingers curled. Her fingers met his own with a light, cool touch.
‘Be welcome,’ she said. ‘I swear I will keep faith with you, Devin di Tigana.’
‘And I with you. I’m sorry about this morning,’ Devin offered.
Her hand withdrew and her eyes flashed; even by starlight he could see it. ‘Oh yes,’ she said sardonically, ‘I’m sure you are. It was very clear, all along, how regrettable you found the experience!’
Alessan snorted with amusement. ‘Catriana, my darling,’ he said, ‘I just forbade him to mention any details of what happened. How do I enforce that if you bring them up yourself?’
Without the faintest trace of a smile Catriana said, ‘I am the aggrieved party here, Alessan. You don’t enforce anything on me. The rules are not the same.’
Baerd chuckled suddenly. ‘The rules,’ he said, ‘have not been the same since you joined us. Why indeed should this be any different?’
Catriana tossed her head again but did not deign to reply.
The three men stood up. Devin flexed his knees to relieve the stiffness of sitting so long in one position.
‘Ferraut or Tregea?’ Baerd asked. ‘Which border?’
‘Ferraut,’ Alessan said. ‘They’ll have me placed as Tregean as soon as Tomasso talks—poor man. If I’d been thinking clearly I would have shot him as they rode by.’
‘Oh, very clear thinking, that,’ Baerd retorted. ‘With twenty soldiers surrounding him. You would have had us all in chains in Astibar by now.’
‘You would have deflected my arrow,’ Alessan said wryly.
‘Is there a chance he won’t speak?’ Devin interjected awkwardly. ‘I’m thinking about Menico, you see. If I’m named . . .’
Alessan shook his head. ‘Everyone talks under torture,’ he said soberly. ‘Especially if sorcery is involved. I’m thinking about Menico too, but there isn’t anything we can do about it, Devin. It is one of the realities of the life we live. There are people put at risk by almost everything we do. I wish,’ he added, ‘that I knew what had happened in that lodge.’
‘You wanted to check it,’ Catriana reminded him. ‘Can we afford the time?’
‘I did, and yes, I think we can,’ said Alessan crisply. ‘There remains a piece missing in all of this. I still don’t know how Sandre d’Astibar could have expected me to be the—’
He stopped there. Except for the drone of the cicadas and the rustling leaves it was very quiet in the woods. The trialla had gone. Alessan abruptly raised one hand and pushed it roughly through his hair. He shook his head.
‘Do you know,’ he said to Baerd, in what was almost a conversational tone, ‘how much of a fool I can be at times? It was in the palm of my hand all along!’ His voice changed. ‘Come on—and pray we are not too late!’
The fires had both died down in the Sandreni lodge. Only the stars shone above the clearing in the woods. The cluster of Eanna’s Diadem was well over west, following the moons. A nightingale was singing, as if in answer to the trialla of before, as the four of them approached. In the doorway Alessan hesitated for a moment then shrugged his shoulders in a gesture Devin already recognized. Then he pushed open the door and walked through.
By the red glow of the embers they looked—with eyes accustomed by now to darkness—on the carnage within.
The coffin still rested on its trestles, although splintered and knocked awry. Around it though, lay dead men who had been alive when they left this room. The two younger Sandreni. Nievole, a quiver of arrows in his throat and chest. The body of Scalvaia d’Astibar.
Then Devin made out Scalvaia’s severed head in a black puddle of blood a terrible distance away and he fought to control the lurch of sickness in his gorge.
‘Oh, Morian,’ Alessan whispered. ‘Oh, Lady of the Dead, be gentle to them in your Halls. They died dreaming of freedom and before their time.’
‘Three of them did,’ came a harsh, desiccated voice from deep in one of the armchairs. ‘The fourth should have been strangled at birth.’
Devin jumped half a foot, his heart hammering with shock.
The speaker rose and stood beside the chair, facing them. He was entirely hidden in shadow. ‘I thought you would come back,’ he said.
The sixth man, Devin realized, struggling to understand, straining to make out the tall, gaunt form by the faint glow of the embers.
