Chapter 2

DEVIN WAS HAVING A BAD DAY.

At nineteen he had almost completely reconciled himself to his lack of size and to the fair-skinned boyish face the Triad had given him to go with that. It had been a long time since hed been in the habit of hanging by his feet from trees in the woods near the farm back home in Asoli, striving to stretch a little more height out of his frame.

The keenness of his memory had always been a source of pride and pleasure to him, but a number of the memories that came with it were not. He would have been quite happy to be able to forget the afternoon when the twins, returning home from hunting with a brace of grele, had caught him suspended from a tree upside down. Six years later it still rankled him that his brothers, normally so reliably obtuse, had immediately grasped what he was trying to do.

"Well help you, little one!" Povar had cried joyfully, and before Devin could right himself and scramble away Nico had his arms, Povar his feet, and his burly twin brothers were stretching him between them, cackling with great good humor all the while. Enjoying, among other things, the ambit of Devins precociously profane vocabulary.

Well, that had been the last time he actually tried to make himself taller. Very late that same night hed sneaked into the snoring twins bedroom and carefully dumped a bucket of pig slop over each of them. Sprinting like Adaon on his mountain hed been through the yard and over the farm gate almost before their roaring started.

Hed stayed away two nights, then returned to his fathers whipping. Hed expected to have to wash the sheets himself, but Povar had done that and both twins, stolidly good-natured, had already forgotten the incident.

Devin, cursed or blessed with a memory like Eanna of the Names, never did forget. The twins might be hard people to hold a grudge against—almost impossible, in fact—but that did nothing to lessen his loneliness on that farm in the lowlands. It was not long after that incident that Devin had left home, apprenticed as a singer to Menico di Ferraut whose company toured northern Asoli every second or third spring.

Devin hadnt been back since, taking a weeks leave during the companys northern swing three years ago, and again this past spring. It wasnt that hed been badly treated on the farm, it was just that he didnt fit in, and all four of them knew it. Farming in Asoli was serious, sometimes grim work, battling to hold land and sanity against the constant encroachments of the sea and the hot, hazy, grey monotony of the days.

If his mother had lived it might have been different, but the farm in Asoli where Garin of Lower Corte had taken his three sons had been a dour, womanless place—acceptable perhaps for the twins, who had each other, and for the kind of man Garin had slowly become amid the almost featureless spaces of the flatlands, but no source of nurture or warm memories for a small, quick, imaginative youngest child, whose own gifts, whatever they might turn out to be, were not those of the land.

After they had learned from Menico di Ferraut that Devins voice was capable of more than country ballads it had been with a certain collective relief that they had all said their farewells early one spring morning, standing in the predictable greyness and rain. His father and Nico had been turning back to check the height of the river almost before their parting words were fully spoken. Povar lingered though, to awkwardly cuff his little, odd brother on the shoulder.

"If they dont treat you right enough," hed said, "you can come home, Dev. Theres a place.”

Devin remembered both things: the gentle blow which had been forced to carry more of a burden of meaning down the years than such a gesture should, and the rough, quick words that had followed. The

truth was, he really did remember almost everything, except for his mother and their days in Lower Corte.

But hed been less than two years old when shed died amongst the fighting down there, and only a month older when Garin had taken his three sons north.

Since then, almost everything was held in his mind.

And if hed been a wagering man—which he wasnt, having that much of careful Asoli in his soul— hed have been willing to put a chiaro or an astin down on the fact that he couldnt recall feeling this frustrated in years. Since, if truth were told, the days when it looked as if he would never grow at all.

What, Devin dAsoli asked himself grimly, did a person have to do to get a drink in Astibar? And on the eve of the Festival, no less!

The problem would have been positively laughable were it not so infuriating. It was the doing, he learned quickly enough—in the first inn that refused to serve him his requested flask of Senzio green wine —of the pinch-buttocked, joy-killing priests of Eanna. The goddess, Devin thought fervently, deserved better of her servants.

It appeared that a year ago, in the midst of their interminable jockeying for ascendancy with the clergy of Morian and Adaon, Ean-nas priests had convinced the Tyrants token council that there was too much licentiousness among the young of Astibar and that, more to the point of course, such license bred unrest And since it was obvious that the taverns and khav rooms bred license . . .

It had taken less than two weeks for Alberico to promulgate and begin enforcing a law that no youth of less than seventeen years could buy a drink in Astibar.

Eannas dust-dry priests celebrated—in whatever ascetic fashion such men celebrated—their petty triumph over the priests of Morian and the elegant priestesses of the god: both of which deities were associated with darker passions and, inevitably, wine.

Tavern-keepers were quietly unhappy (it didnt do to be loudly unhappy in Astibar) though not so much for the loss of trade as for the insidious manner in which the law was enforced. The promulgated law had simply placed the burden of establishing a patrons age on the owner of each inn, tavern, or khav room. At the same time, if any of the ubiquitous Barbadian mercenaries should happen to drop by, and should happen—arbitrarily—to decide that a given patron looked too young . . . well, that was one tavern closed for a month and one tavern-keeper locked up for the same length of time.

All of which left the sixteen-year-olds in Astibar truly out of luck. Along with, it gradually became evident through the course of a morning, one small, boyish-looking nineteen-year-old singer from Asoli.

After three summary ejections along the west side of the Street of the Temples, Devin was briefly tempted to go across the road to the Shrine of Morian, fake an ecstasy, and hope they favored Senzian green here as a means of succoring the overly ecstatic. As another, even less rational, option he contemplated breaking a window in Eannas domed shrine and testing if any of the ball-less imbeciles inside could catch him in a sprint.

He forebore to do so, as much out of genuine devotion to Eanna of the Names as to an oppressive awareness of how many very large and heavily armed Barbadian mercenaries patrolled the streets of As- tibar. The Barbadians were everywhere in the Eastern Palm of course, but nowhere was their presence so disturbingly evident as it was in Astibar where Alberico had based himself.

In the end, Devin wished a serious head-cold on himself and headed west towards the harbor and then, following his unfortunately still-functioning sense of smell, towards Tannery Lane. And there, made almost ill by the effluence of the tanners craft, which quite overwhelmed the salt of the sea, he was given an open bottle of green, no questions asked, in a tavern called The Bird, by a shambling, loose-limbed innkeeper whose eyes were probably inadequate to the dark shadows of his windowless, one-room establishment.

Even this nondescript, evil-smelling hole was completely full. Astibar was crammed to overflowing for tomorrows start of the Festival of Vines. The harvest had been a good one everywhere but in Cer-

tando, Devin knew, and there were plenty of people with astins or chiaros to spend, and in a mood to spend them too.

There were certainly no free tables to be had in The Bird. Devin wedged himself into a corner where the dark, pitted wood of the bar met the back wall, took a judicious sip of his wine—watered but not unusually so, he decided—and composed his mind and soul towards a meditation upon the perfidy and unreasonableness of women.

As embodied, specifically, by Catriana dAstibar these past two weeks.

He calculated that he had enough time before the late-afternoon rehearsal—the last before their opening engagement at the city home of a small wine-estate owner tomorrow—to muse his way through most of a bottle and still show up sober. He was the experienced trouper anyhow, he thought indignantly.

He was a partner. He knew the performance routines like a hand knew a glove. The extra rehearsals had been laid on by Menico for the benefit of the three new people in the troupe.

Including impossible Catriana. Who happened to be the reason he had stormed out of the morning rehearsal a short while before he knew that Menico planned to call the session to a halt. How, in the name of Adaon, was he supposed to react when an inexperienced new female who thought she could sing—and to whom hed been genuinely friendly since shed joined them a fortnight ago—said what shed said in front of everyone that morning?

Cursed with memory, Devin saw the nine of them rehearsing again in the rented back room on the ground floor of their inn. Four musicians, the two dancers, Menico, Catriana, and himself singing up front. They were doing Rauders "Song of Love," a piece rather predictably requested by the wine- merchants wife, a piece Devin had been singing for nearly six years, a song he could manage in a stupor, a coma, sound asleep.

And so perhaps, yes, hed been a little bored, a little distracted, had been leaning a little closer than absolutely necessary to their newest, red-headed female singer, putting perhaps the merest shading of a message into his expression and voice, but still, even so ...

"Devin, in the name of the Triad," had snapped Catriana dAs-tibar, breaking up the rehearsal entirely, "do you think you can get your mind away from your groin for long enough to do a decent harmony? This is not a difficult song!”

The affliction of a fair complexion had hurtled Devins face all the way to bright red. Menico, he saw—Menico who should have been sharply reprimanding the girl for her presumption—was laughing helplessly, even more flushed than Devin was. So were the others, all of them.

Unable to think of a reply, unwilling to compromise the tattered shreds of his dignity by yielding to his initial impulse to reach up and whack the girl across the back of her head, Devin had simply spun on his heels and left.

Hed thrown one reproachful glance at Menico as he went but was not assuaged: the troupe-leaders ample paunch was quivering with laughter as he wiped tears from his round, bearded face.

So Devin had gone looking for a bottle of Senzio green and a dark place to drink it in on a brilliant autumn morning in Astibar. Having finally found the wine and the tenuous comfort of shadows he fully expected to figure out, about half a bottle from now, what he should have said to that arrogant red-maned creature back in the rehearsal room.

If only she wasnt so depressingly tall, he thought. Morosely he filled his glass again. Looking up at the blackened crossbeams of the ceiling he briefly contemplated hanging himself from one of them: by the heels of course. For old times sake.

"Shall I buy you a drink?" someone said.

With a sigh Devin turned to cope with one of the more predictable aspects of being small and looking very young while drinking alone in a sailors bar.

What he saw was somewhat reassuring. His questioner was a soberly dressed man of middle years with greying hair and lines of worry or laughter radiating at his temples. Even so: "Thank you," Devin said, "but Ive most of my own bottle left and I prefer having a woman to being one for sailors. Im also older than I look.”

The other man laughed aloud. "In that case," he chuckled, genuinely amused, "you can give me a drink if you like while I tell you about my two marriageable daughters and the other two who are on their way to that age sooner than Im ready for. Im Rovigo dAstibar, master of the Sea Maid just in from down the coast in Tregea.”

Devin grinned and stretched across the bar for another glass: The Bird was far too crowded to bother trying to catch the owners rheumy eye, and Devin had his own reasons for not wanting to signal the man.

"Ill be happy to share the bottle with you," he said to Rovigo, "though your wife is unlikely to be well pleased if you press your daughters upon a traveling musician.”

"My wife," said Rovigo feelingly, "would turn ponderous cartwheels of delight if I brought home a cowherd from the Certandan grasslands for the oldest one.”

Devin winced. "That bad?" he murmured. "Ah, well. We can at least drink to your safe return from Tregea, and in time for Festival by a fingernail. Im Devin dAsoli bar Garin, at your service.”

"And I at yours, friend Devin, not-as-young-as-you-look. Did you have trouble getting a drink?”

Rovigo asked shrewdly.

"I was in and out of more doorways than Morian of Portals knows, and as dry when I left as when Id entered." Devin rashly sniffed the heavy air; even among the odors of the crowd and despite the lack of windows, the tannery stench from outside was still painfully discernible. "This would not have been my first or my tenth choice as a place for drinking a flask of wine.”

Rovigo smiled. "A sensible attitude. Will I seem eccentric if I tell you I always come straight here when the Sea Maid is home from a voyage? Somehow the smell speaks of land to me. Tells me Im back.”

"You dont like the sea?”

"I am quite convinced that any man who says he does is lying, has debts on land, or a shrewish wife to escape from and—" He paused, pretending to have been suddenly struck by a thought. "Come to think of it . . ." he added with exaggerated reflectiveness. Then he winked.

Devin laughed aloud and poured them both more wine. "Why do you sail then?”

"Trade is good," Rovigo said frankly. "The Maid is small enough to slip into ports down the coast or around on the western side of Senzio or Ferraut that the bigger traders never bother with. Shes also quick enough to make it worth my while running south past the mountains to Quileia. It isnt sanctioned, of course, with the trade embargo down there, but if you have contacts in a remote enough place and you dont dawdle about your business it isnt too risky and theres a profit to be made. I can take Barbadian spices from the market here, or silk from the north, and get them to places in Quileia that would never otherwise see such things. I bring back carpets, or Quileian wood carvings, slippers, jeweled daggers, sometimes casks of buinath to sell to the taverns—whatevers going at a good price. I cant do volume so I have to watch my margins, but theres a living in it as long as insurance stays down and Adaon of the Waves keeps me afloat. I go from here to the gods temple before heading home.”

"But here first," Devin smiled.

"Here first." They touched glasses and drained them. Devin refilled both.

"Whats news in Quileia?" he asked.

"As a matter of fact, I was just there," Rovigo said. "Tregea was a stop on the way back. There are tidings, actually. Marius won his combat in the Grove of Oaks again this summer.”

"I did hear about that," Devin said, shaking his head in rueful admiration. "A crippled man, and he must be fifty years old by now. What does that make it—six times in a row?”

"Seven," Rovigo said soberly. He paused, as if expecting a reaction.

"Im sorry," Devin said. "Is there a meaning to that?”

"Marius decided there was. Hes just announced that there will be no more challenges in the Oak Grove. Seven is sacred, hes proclaimed. By allowing him this latest triumph the Mother Goddess has made known her will. Marius has just declared himself King in Quileia, no longer only the consort of the High Priestess.”

"What?" Devin exclaimed, loudly enough to cause some heads to turn. He lowered his voice. "Hes declared ... a man ... I thought they had a matriarchy there.”

"So," said Rovigo, "did the late High Priestess.”

Traveling across the Peninsula of the Palm, from mountain village to remote castle or manor, to the cities that were the centers of affairs, musicians could not help but hear news and gossip of great events.

Always, in Devins brief experience, the talk had been only that: a way to ease the passing of a cold winters night around an inn fire in Certando, or to try to impress a traveler in a tavern in Corte with a murmured confiding that a pro-Barbadior party was rumored to be forming in that Ygrathen province.

It was only talk, Devin had long since concluded. The two ruling sorcerers from east and west across the seas had sliced the Palm neatly in half between them, with only hapless, decadent Senzio not formally occupied by either, looking nervously across the water both ways. Its Governor remained paralytically unable to decide which wolf to be devoured by, while the two wolves still warily circled each other after almost twenty years, each unwilling to expose itself by moving first.

The balance of power in the peninsula seemed to Devin to have been etched in stone from the time of his first awareness. Until one of the sorcerers died—and sorcerers were rumored to live a very long time—nothing much would or could come of khav room or great hall chatter.

Quileia, though, was another matter. One far beyond Devins limited experience to sort out or define.

He couldnt even guess what might be the implications of what Marius had now done in that strange country south of the mountains. What might flow from Quileias having a more than transitory King, one who did not have to go into the Oak Grove every two years and there, naked, ritually maimed, and unarmed, meet the sword-wielding foe who had been chosen to slay him and take his place. Marius had not been slain, though. Seven times he had not been slain.

And now the High Priestess was dead. Nor was it possible to miss the meaning in the way Rovigo had said that. A little overawed, Devin shook his head.

He glanced up and saw that his new acquaintance was staring at him with an odd expression.

"Youre a thoughtful young man, arent you?" the merchant said.

Devin shrugged, suddenly self-conscious. "Not unduly. I dont know. Certainly not with any insight. I dont hear news like yours every afternoon. What do you think it will mean?”

One answer he was not to receive.

The tavern-keeper, who had quite efficiently succeeded in ignoring Rovigos intermittent signaling for another bottle of wine now strode to their end of the bar, black anger visible on his features even in the darkened room.

"You!" he hissed. "Your name Devin?”

Taken aback, Devin nodded reflexive agreement. The tavern-keepers expression grew even more malevolent.

"Get out of here!" he rasped. "Your Triad-cursed sisters outside. Says your fathers ordered you home and—Morian blast you both!— that hes minded to turn me in for serving an underage. You gutter- spawned maggot, Ill teach you to put me at risk of being shut down on the eve of the Festival!”

Before Devin could move, a full pitcher of soured black wine was flung into his face, stinging like fire. He scrambled back, wiping at his streaming eyes, swearing furiously.

When he could see again it was to observe an extraordinary sight.

Rovigo—not a big man—had moved along the bar and had grabbed the keeper by the collar of his greasy tunic. Without apparent effort he had the man pulled halfway over the bar top, feet kicking ineffectually in mid-air. The collar was twisted to a degree sufficient to cause the helpless tavern-owners face to begin turning a mottled shade of crimson.

"Goro, I do not like my friends being abused," Rovigo said calmly. "The lad has no father here and I doubt he has a sister." He cocked an eyebrow at Devin who shook his dripping head vehemently.

"As I say," Rovigo continued, not even breathing hard, "he has no sister here. He is also patently not underage—as should be obvious to any tavern-owner not blinded by swilling buckets of his own slop after hours. Now, Goro, will you placate me a little by apologizing to Devin dAsoli, my new friend, and offering him two bottles of corked vintage Certando red, by way of showing your sincere contrition? In return I may be persuaded to let you have a cask of the Quileian buinath thats sitting on the Sea Maid even now. At an appropriate price or course, given what you can extort for that stuff at Festival-time.”

Goros face had accomplished a truly dangerous hue. Just as Devin felt obliged to caution Rovigo, the tavern-owner gave a jerky, convulsive nod and the merchant untwisted the collar a little. Goro dragged fetid tavern air into his lungs as if it were scented with Chiaran mountain tainflowers and spluttered a three word apology to Devin.

"And the wine?" Rovigo reminded him kindly.

He lowered the other man—still without any evident exertion— enough for Goro to fumble below the bar and resurface with two bottles of what certainly appeared to be Certandan red.

Rovigo let slip another notch of the tightened collar.

"Vintage?" he inquired patiently.

Goro twitched his head up and down.

"Well then," Rovigo declared, releasing Goro completely, "it appears we are quits. I suppose," he said, turning to Devin, "that you should go see who is pretending to be your sister outside.”

"I know who it is," Devin said grimly. "Thank you, by the way. Im used to fighting my own battles, but its pleasant to have an ally now and again.”

"It is always pleasant to have an ally," Rovigo amended. "But it seems obvious to me that you arent keen on dealing with this sister, so Ill leave you to do it in private. Do let me once more commend my own daughters to your kind remembrance. Theyve been quite well brought up, all things considered.”

"I have no doubt of that at all," Devin said. "If I can do you a service in return I will. Im with the company of Menico di Ferraut and were here through the Festival. Your wife might enjoy hearing us perform. If you let me know youve come Ill make sure you have good places at either of our public performances, free of charge.”

"I thank you. And if your path or your curiosity leads you southeast of town, now or later in the year, our land is about five miles along the road on the right-hand side. Theres a small temple of Adaon just before and my gate has a crest with a ship on it. One of the girls designed it. They are all," he grinned, "very talented.”

Devin laughed and the two men touched palms formally. Rovigo turned back to reclaim their corner of the bar. Devin, dismally aware that he was soaked with evil-smelling wine from light-brown hair to waist, with stains splotching his hose as well, walked outside clutching his two bottles of Certandan red.

He squinted owlishly in the sunshine for a few seconds before spotting Catriana dAstibar on the other side of the lane, scarlet hair blazing in the light, a handkerchief pressed firmly beneath her nose.

Devin strode briskly into the road and almost collided with a tanners cart. A brief and satisfying exchange of opinions ensued. The tanner rumbled on and Devin, vowing inwardly not to be put on the defensive this time, crossed the lane to where Catriana had been ex-pressionlessly observing the

altercation.

"Well," he said caustically, "I do appreciate your coming all this way to apologize, but you might have chosen a different way of finding me if you were sincere. I rather prefer my clothes unsaturated with spoiled wine. You will offer to wash them for me, of course.”

Catriana simply ignored all of this, looking him up and down coldly. "You are going to need a wash and a change," she said, from behind the scented handkerchief. "I hadnt counted on that much of a reaction inside. But not having a surplus of astins to spend on bribes I couldnt think of a better way to get tavern-owners to bother looking for you." It was an explanation, Devin noted, but not an apology.

"Forgive me," he said, with exaggerated contrition. "I must talk with Menico—it seems we arent paying you enough, in addition to all our other transgressions. You must be used to better things.”

She hesitated for the first time. "Must we discuss this in the middle of Tannery Lane?" she said.

Without a word Devin sketched a performance bow and gestured for her to lead the way. She started walking away from the harbor and he fell in stride beside her. They were silent for several minutes, until out of the range of the tannery smells. With a faint sigh Catriana put away her handkerchief.

"Where are you taking me?" Devin asked.

Another transgression, it seemed. The blue eyes flashed with anger.

"In the name of the Triad where would I be taking you?" Catri-anas voice dripped with sarcasm. "We are going to my room at the inn for a session of love-making like Eanna and Adaon at the dawn of days.”

"Oh, good," Devin snapped, his own anger rekindling. "Why dont we pool our funds and buy another woman to come play Morian —just so I dont get bored, you understand.”

Catriana paled, but before she could open her mouth Devin grabbed her arm with his free hand and swung her around to face him in the street. Looking up into those blue eyes (and cursing the fact that he had to do that) he snapped: "Catriana, what exactly have I done to you? Why do I deserve that sort of answer? Or what you did this morning? Ive been pleasant to you from the day we signed you on—and if youre a professional you know that isnt always the case in troupes on the road. If you must know, Marra, the woman you replaced, was my closest friend in the company. She died of the plague in Certando. I could have made life very hard for you. I didnt and Im not. I did let you know from the first that I found you attractive. Im not aware that there is a sin in that if it is done with courtesy.”

He released her arm, abruptly conscious that he had been gripping it very hard and that they were in an extremely public place, even with the early-afternoon lull. Instinctively he looked around; thankfully there were no Barbadians passing just then. There was a familiar tight feeling in his chest, as of the apprehended return of pain, that always came with the thought of Marra. The first true friend of his life.

Two neglected children, with voices that were gifts of Eanna, telling each other fears and dreams for three years in changing beds across the Palm at night. His first lover. First death.

Catriana, released, remained where she was, and there was a look in her own eyes—perhaps at the naming of death—that made him abruptly revise his estimate of her age downwards. Hed thought she was older than him; now he wasnt sure.

He waited, breathing quickly after his outburst, and at length he heard her say very softly, "You sing too well.”

Devin blinked. It was not at all what hed expected.

"I have to work very hard at performing," she went on, her face flushing for the first time. "Rauder is hard for me—all of his music. And this morning you were doing the Song of Love without even thinking about it, amusing the others, trying to charm me ... Devin, I have to concentrate when I sing! You were making me nervous and I snap at people when Im nervous.”

Devin drew a careful breath and looked around the empty sunlit street for a moment, thinking. He

said, "Do you know . . . has anyone ever told you . . . that it is possible and even useful to tell things like this to people—especially the people who have to work with you?”

She shook her head. "Not for me. Ive never been able to talk like that, not ever.”

"Why do it now, then?" he risked. "Why did you come after me?”

A longer pause than before. A cluster of artisans apprentices swept around the corner, hooting with reflexive ribaldry at the sight of the two of them standing together. There was no malice in it though, and they went by without causing any trouble. A few red and golden leaves skipped over the cobbles in the breeze.

"Somethings happened," Catriana dAstibar said, "and Menico told us all that you are the key to our chances.”

"Menico sent you after me?" It was almost completely improbable, after nearly six years together.

"No," Catriana said, quickly shaking her head. "No, he said youd be back in time, that you always were. I was nervous though, with so much at stake. I couldnt just wait around. Youd left a little, urn, upset, after all.”

"A little," Devin agreed gravely, noting that she finally had the grace to look apologetic. He would have felt even more secure if he hadnt continued to find her so attractive. He couldnt stop himself from wondering—even now—what her breasts would look like, freed from the stiffness of her high-cut bodice.

Marra would have told him, he knew, and even helped him with a conquest. They had done that for each other, and shared the tales after, traveling through that last year on the road before Certando where she died.

"You had better tell me whats happened," he said, forcing his thoughts back to the present. There was danger in fantasies and in memories, both.

"The exiled Duke, Sandre, died last night," Catriana said. She looked around but the street was empty again. "For some reason—no one is sure why—Alberico is allowing his body to lie in state at the Sandreni Palace tonight and tomorrow morning, and then . . .”

She paused, the blue eyes bright. Devin, his pulse suddenly leaping, finished it for her: "A funeral? Full rites? Dont tell me!”

"Full rites! And Devin, Menicos been asked to audition this afternoon! We have a chance to do the most talked-about performance in the whole of the Palm this year!" She looked very young now. And quite unsettlingly beautiful. Her eyes were shining like a childs.

"So you came to get me," he murmured, nodding his head slowly "before I drank myself into a useless stupor of frustrated desire." He had the edge now, for the first time. It was a pleasant turnabout, especially coupled with the real excitement of her news. He began walking, forcing her to fall in stride with him. For a change.

"It isnt like that," she protested. "Its just that this is so important. Menico said your voice would be the key to our hopes . . . that you were at your best in the mourning rites.”

"I dont know whether to be nattered by that, or insulted that you actually thought Id be so unprofessional as to miss a rehearsal on the eve of the Festival.”

"Dont be either," Catriana dAstibar said, with a hint of returning asperity. "We dont have time for either. Just be good this afternoon. Be the best youve ever been.”

He ought to resist it, Devin knew, but his spirits were suddenly much too high.

"In that case, are you sure were not going to your room?" he asked blandly.

More than he could know hung in the balance for the moment that followed. Then Catriana dAstibar laughed aloud and freely for the first time.

"Now that," said Devin, grinning, "is much better. I honestly wasnt sure if you had a sense of

humor.”

She grew quiet. "Sometimes Im not sure either," she said, almost absently. Then, in a rather different voice: "Devin, I want this contract more than I can tell you.”

"Well of course," he replied. "It could make our careers.”

"Thats right," Catriana said. She touched his shoulder and repeated, "I want this more than I can say.”

He might have sought a promise in that touch had he been a little less perceptive, and had it not been for the way she spoke the words. There was, in fact, nothing at all of ambition in that tone, nor of desire in the way that Devin had come to know desire.

What he heard was longing, and it reached towards a space inside him that he hadnt known was there.

"Ill do what I can," he said after a moment, thinking, for no good reason, of Marra and the tears hed shed.

On the farm in Asoli they had known he was gifted with music quite early but it was an isolated place and none of them had a frame of reference whereby to properly judge or measure such things.

One of Devins first memories of his father—one that he summoned often because it was a soft image of a hard man—was of Garin humming the tune of some old cradle song to help Devin fall asleep one night when he was feverish.

The boy—four perhaps—had woken in the morning with his fever broken, humming the tune to himself with perfect pitch. Garins face had taken on the complex expression that Devin would later learn to associate with his fathers memories of his wife. That morning though, Garin had kissed his youngest child. The only time Devin could remember that happening.

The tune became a thing they shared. An access to a limited intimacy. They would hum it together in rough, untutored attempts at harmony. Later Garin bought a scaled-down three string syrenya for his youngest child on one of his twice-yearly trips to the market in Asoli town. After that there were actually a few evenings Devin did like to remember, when he and his father and the twins would sing ballads of the sea and hills by the fire at night before bed. Escapes from the drear, wet flatness of Asoli.

When he grew older he began to sing for some of the other farmers. At weddings or naming days, and once with a traveling priest of Morian he sang counterpoint during the autumn Ember Days on the "Hymn to Morian of Portals." The priest wanted to bed him, after, but by then Devin was learning how to avoid such requests without giving offense.

Later yet, he began to be called upon in the taverns. There were no age laws for drinking in northern Asoli, where a boy was a man when he could do a day in the fields, and a girl was a woman when she first bled.

And it had been in a tavern called The River in Asoli town itself on a market day that Devin, just turned fourteen, had been singing "The Ride from Corso to Corte" and had been overheard by a portly, bearded man who turned out to be a troupe-leader named Menico di Ferraut and who had taken him away from the farm that week and changed his life.

"Were next," Menico said, nervously smoothing his best satin doublet over his paunch. Devin, idly picking out his earliest cradle song on one of the spare syrenyae, smiled reassuringly up at his employer.

His partner now, actually.

Devin hadnt been an apprentice since he was seventeen. Menico, tired of refusing offers to buy the contract of his young tenor had finally offered Devin journeyman status in the GuiJd and a regular salary—after first making clear how very much the young man owed him, and how loyalty was the only marginally adequate way to repay such a large debt of gratitude. Devin knew that, in fact, and he liked Menico anyway.

A year later, after another sequence of offers from rival troupe-leaders during the summer wedding season in Corte, Menico had made Devin a ten-percent partner in the company. After making the same speech, almost word for word, as the last time.

The honor, Devin knew, was considerable; only old Eghano who played drums and the Certandan deep strings, and who had been with Menico since the company was formed, had another partnership share. Everyone else was an apprentice or a journeyman on short-term contract. Especially now, when the aftermath of a plague spring in the south had every troupe in the Palm short of bodies and scrambling to fill with temporary musicians, dancers, or singers.

A haunting thread of sound, barely audible, plucked Devins attention away from his syrenya. He looked over and smiled. Alessan, one of the three new people, was lightly tracing the melody of the cradle song Devin had been playing. On the shepherd pipes of Tregea it sounded unearthly and strange.

Alessan, black-haired, though greying at the temples, winked at him over the busyness of his fingers on the pipes. They finished the piece together, pipes and syrenya, and humming tenor voice.

"I wish I knew the words," Devin said regretfully as they ended. "My father taught me that tune as a child, but he could never remember how the words went.”

Alessans lean, mobile face was reflective. Devin knew little about the Tregean after two weeks of rehearsal other than that the man was extraordinarily good on the pipes and quite reliable. As Meniccs partner, that was all that should matter to him. Alessan was seldom around the inn outside of practice- time, but he was always there and punctual for the rehearsals slated.

"I might be able to dredge them up for you if I thought about it," he said, pushing a hand through his hair in a characteristic gesture. "Its been a long time but I knew the words once." He smiled.

"Dont worry about it," Devin said. "Ive survived this long without them. Its just an old song, a memento of my father. If you stay with us we can make it a winter project to try to track them down.”

Menico would approve of that last bit, he knew. The troupe-leader had declared Alessan di Tregea to be a find, and cheap at the wages hed asked.

The other mans expressive mouth crooked sideways, a little wryly. "Old songs and memories of fathers are important," he said. "Is yours dead then?”

Devin made the warding sign with his hand out and two fingers curled down.

"Not last I heard, though Ive not seen him in almost six years. Menico spoke to him when he went through the north of Asoli last time, took him some chiaros for me. I dont go back to the farm.”

Alessan considered that. "Dour Asolini stock?" he guessed. "No place for a boy with ambition and a voice like yours?" His tone was shrewd.

"Almost exactly," Devin admitted ruefully. "Though I wouldnt have called myself ambitious.

Restless, more. And we werent originally from Asoli in fact. Came there from Lower Corte when I was a small child.”

Alessan nodded. "Even so," he said. The man had a bit of a know-it-all manner, Devin decided, but he could play the Tregean pipes. The way they might even have sounded on Adaons own mountain in the south.

In any case, they had no time to pursue the matter.

"Were on!" Menico said, hastily re-entering the room where they were waiting amid the dust and covered furniture of the long-unused Sandreni Palace.

"We do the Lament for Adaon first," he announced, telling them something theyd all known for hours. He wiped his palms on the side of his doublet. "Devin that ones yours—make me proud, lad." His standard exhortation. "Then all of us are together on the Circling of Years. Catriana my love you are sure you can go high enough, or should we pitch down?”

"Ill go high enough," Catriana replied tersely. Devin thought her tone spoke to simple nervousness,

but when her gaze met his for a second he recognized that earlier look again: the one that reached somewhere beyond desire towards a shore he didnt know.

"Id very much like to get this contract," Alessan di Tregea said just then, mildly enough.

"How extremely surprising!" Devin snapped, discovering as he spoke that he too was nervous after all. Alessan laughed though, and so did old Eghano walking through the door with them: Eghano who had seen far too much in too many years of touring to ever be made edgy by a mere audition. Without saying a word, he had, as he always had, an immediately calming effect on Devin.

"Ill do the best I can," Devin said after a moment and for the second time that afternoon, not really certain to whom he was saying it, or why.

In the end, whether because of the Triad or in spite of them—as his father used to say—his best was enough.

The principal auditor was a delicately scented, extravagantly dressed scion of the Sandreni, a man— in his late thirties, Devin guessed—who made it manifest, in his limp posture and the artificially exaggerated shadows that ringed his eyes, why Alberico the Tyrant didnt appear to be much worried about the descendants of Sandre dAstibar.

Ranged behind this diverting personage were the priests of Eanna and Morian in white and smoke grey. Beside them, vivid by contrast, sat a priestess of Adaon in crimson, with her hair cropped very short.

It was autumn of course, and the Ember Days were coming on: Devin wasnt surprised by her hair.

He was surprised to see the clergy there for the audition. They made him uncomfortable—another legacy of his father—but this wasnt a situation where he could allow that to affect him, and so he dismissed them from his thoughts.

He focused on the Dukes elegant son, the only one who really mattered now. He waited, reaching as Menico had taught him for a still point inside himself.

Menico cued Nieri and Aldine, the two thin dancers in their grey-blue, almost translucent, chemises of mourning and their black gloves. A moment later, after their first linked pass across the floor, he looked at Devin.

And Devin gave him, gave them all, the lament for Adaons autumnal dying among the mountain cypresses, as he never had before.

Alessan di Tregea was with him all the way with the high, heart-piercing grief of the shepherd pipes and together the two of them seemed to lift and carry Nieri and Aldine beyond the surface steps of their dance across the recently swept floor and into the laconic, precise articulation of ritual that the "Lament”

demanded and was so rarely granted.

When they finished, Devin, traveling slowly back to the Sandreni Palace from the cedar and cypress slopes of Tregea where the god had died—and where he died again each and every autumn—saw that Sandre dAstibars son was weeping. The tracks of his tears had smudged the carefully achieved shadowing around his eyes—which meant, Devin realized abruptly, that he hadnt wept for any of the three companies before them.

Marra, young and intolerantly professional would have been scornful of those tears, he knew: "Why hire a mongrel and bark yourself?" she would say when their mourning rituals were interrupted or marked by displays from their patrons.

Devin had been less stern back then. And was even less so now since shed died and he had found himself rather desperately fighting back a shameful public grief when Burnet di Corte had led his company through her mourning rites in Certando as a gesture of courtesy to Menico.

Devin also knew, by the smoldering look the Sandreni scion gave him from within the smeared dark rings around his eyes, and the scarcely less transparent glance from Morians fat-fingered priest— why in the name of the Triad were the Triad so ill-served!—that though they might have just won the Sandreni

contract he was going to have to be careful in this palace tomorrow. He made a mental note to bring his knife.

They had won the contract. The second number hardly mattered, which is why cunning Menico had begun with the "Lament." Afterwards Menico carefully introduced Devin as his partner when San-dres son asked to meet him. He turned out to be the middle son of three, named Tomasso. The only one, he explained huskily, holding one of Devins hands tightly between both his own, with an ear for music and an eye for dance adequate to choosing performers equal to so august an occasion as his fathers funeral rites.

Devin, used to this, politely retrieved his fingers, grateful for Menicos experienced tact: presented as a partner he had some slight immunity from overly aggressive wooers, even among the nobility. He was introduced to the clergy next, and promptly knelt before Adaons priestess in red.

"Your sanction, sister-of-the-god, for what I sang, and for what I am asked to do tomorrow.”

Out of the corner of his eye he saw the priest of Morian clench his chubby, ringed fingers at his sides.

He accepted the blessing and protection of Adaon—the priestesss index finger tracing the gods symbol on his brow—in the knowledge that he had successfully defused one priests burgeoning desire. When he rose and turned, it was to catch a wink—dangerous in that room and among that company—from Alessan di Tregea, at the back with the others. He suppressed a grin, but not his surprise: the shepherd was disconcertingly perceptive.

Menicos first price was immediately accepted by Tomasso dAs-tibar bar Sandre, confirming in Devins mind what a sorry creature he was to bear such a magnificent name and lineage.

It would have interested him—and led him a step or two further down the head road towards maturity—to learn that Duke Sandre himself would have accepted the same price, or twice as much, and in exactly the same manner. Devin was not quite twenty though, and even Menico, three times his age, would loudly curse himself back at the inn amid the celebratory wine for not having quoted even more than the extortionate sum he had just received in full.

Only Eghano, aged and placid, softly drumming two wooden spoons on their trestle table, said, "Leave well enough. We need not hold out a greedy palm. There will be more of these from now on. If you are wise youll leave a tithe at each of the temples tomorrow. We will earn it back with interest when they choose musicians for the Ember Days.”

Menico, in high good humor, swore even more magnificently than before, and announced a set intention to offer Eghanos wrinkled body as a tithe to the fleshy priest of Morian instead. Eghano smiled toothlessly and continued his soft drumming.

Menico ordered them all to bed not long after the evening meal. Theyd have an early start tomorrow, pointing towards the most important performance of their lives. He beamed benevolently as Aldine led Nieri from the room. The girls would share a bed that night Devin was sure, and for the first time, he suspected. He wished them joy of each other, knowing that they had come together magically as dancers that afternoon and also knowing—for it had happened to him once— how that could spill over into the candles of a late night in bed.

He looked around for Catriana but she had gone upstairs already. Shed kissed him briefly on the cheek though, right after Menicos fierce embrace back in the Sandreni Palace. It was a start; it might be a start.

He bade good night to the others and went up to the single room that was the one luxury hed demanded of Menicos tour budget after Marra had died.

He expected to dream of her, because of the mourning rites, because of unslaked desire, because he dreamt of her most nights. Instead he had a vision of the god.

He saw Adaon on the mountainside in Tregea, naked and magnificent. He saw him torn apart in frenzy and in flowing blood by his priestesses—suborned by their womanhood for this one autumn

morning of every turning year to the deeper service of their sex. Shredding the flesh of the dying god in the service of the two goddesses who loved him and who shared him as mother, daughter, sister, bride, all through the year and through all the years since Eanna named the stars.

Shared him and loved him except on this one morning in the falling season. This morning that was shaped to become the harbinger, the promise of spring to come, of winters end. This one single morning on the mountain when the god who was a man had to be slain. Torn and slain, to be put into his place which was the earth. To become the soil, which would be nurtured in turn by the rain of Ean-nas tears and the moist sorrowings of Morians endless underground streams twisting in their need. Slain to be reborn and so loved anew, more and more with each passing year, with each and every time of dying on these cypress-clad heights. Slain to be lamented and then to rise as a god rises, as a man does, as the wheat of summer fields. To rise and then lie down with the goddesses, with his mother and his bride, his sister and his daughter, with Eanna and Morian under sun and stars and the circling moons, the blue one and the silver.

Devin dreamt, terribly, that primal scene of women running on the mountainside, their long hair streaming behind them as they pursued the man-god to that high chasm above the torrent of Casadel.

He saw their clothing torn from them as they cried each other on to the hunt. Saw branches of mountain trees, of spiny, bristling shrubs, claw their garments away, saw them render themselves deliberately naked for greater speed to the chase, seizing blood-red berries of sonrai to intoxicate themselves against what they would do high above the icy waters of Casadel.

He saw the god turn at last, his huge dark eyes wild and knowing, both, as he stood at the chasm brink, a stag at bay at the deemed, decreed, perennial place of his ending. And Devin saw the women come upon him there, with their flying hair and blood flowing along their bodies and he saw Adaon bow his proud, glorious head to the doom of their rending hands and their teeth and their nails.

And there at the end of the chase Devin saw that the womens mouths were open wide as they cried to each other in ecstasy or anguish, in unrestrained desire or madness or bitter grief, but in his dream there was no sound at all to those cries. Instead, piercing through the whole of that wild scene among cedar and cypress on the mountainside, the only thing Devin heard was the sound of Tregean shepherd pipes playing the tune of his own childhood fever, high and far away.

And at the end, at the very last, Devin saw that when the women came upon the god and caught him and closed about him at that high chasm over Casadel, his face when he turned to his rending was that of Alessan.