chapter 10

FIVE DAYS LATER, ON THE EVE OF THE EMBER DAYS OF SPRING, they came to Castle Borso.

All that last afternoon as they moved south Devin had been watching the mountains. Any child raised in the watery lowlands of Asoli could not help but be awed by the towering southland ranges: the Braccio here in Certando, the Parravi east towards Tregea and, though hed never seen them, the rumor of the snow-clad Sfaroni, highest of all, over west where Tigana once had been.

It was late in the day. Far to the north on that same afternoon Isolla of Ygrath lay dead and dismembered under a bloody sheet in the Audience Chamber of the palace on Chiara.

The sun setting behind a thrust spur of the mountains dyed the peaks to burgundy and red and a somber purple hue. On the very highest summits the snow still shone and dazzled in the last of the light.

Devin could just make out the line of the Braccio Pass as it came down: one of the three fabled passes that had linked—in some seasons, and never easily—the Peninsula of the Palm with Quileia to the south.

In the old days, before the Matriarchy had taken deep root in Quileia there had been trade across the mountains, and the brooding piety of the springtime Ember Days had also presaged a quickening and stir of commercial life with the promise of the passes opening again. The towns and fortress-castles here in the southern highlands had been vibrant and vital then. Well-defended too, because where a trade caravan could cross, so could an army. But no King of Quileia had ever been secure enough on his throne to lead an army north; not with the High Priestesses standing by at home to see him fail or fall. Here in Certando the private armies had mostly bloodied their blades and arrows against each other, in savage southland feuds that ranged over generations and became the stuff of legend.

And then the Quileian Matriarchy had come to power after all, in the time of Achis and Pasitheia, several hundred years ago. Quileia under the priestesses had folded inward upon itself like a flower at dusk and the caravans ended.

The southland cities dwindled into villages, or, if flexible and energetic enough, they changed their character and turned their faces northward and to other things, as Avalle of the Towers had done in Tigana. Here in the Certandan highlands the mighty lords who had once held glittering court in their huge warlike castles became living anachronisms. Their forays and battles with each other—once integral to the flow of events in the Palm—became more and more inconsequential, though not the less bitter or vicious for that.

To Devin, touring with Menico di Ferraut, it had sometimes seemed that every second ballad they sang was of some lord or younger son pursued by enemies among these crags; or of ill-fated southland lovers divided by the hatred of their fathers; or of the bloody deeds of those fathers, untamed as hawks in their stern high castles among these foothills of the Braccio.

And of those ballads, whether wild with battle and blood and villages set afire, or lamenting parted lovers drowning themselves in silent pools hidden in the misty hills—of all those songs, half again, it seemed to Devin, were of the Borso clan and set in and around the massive, piled, grim splendor of Castle Borso hard under Braccio Pass.

There hadnt been any new ballads for a long time, very few in fact since the Quileian caravans had stopped. But of fresh stories and rumors there had been many in the past two decades. A great many. In her own particular way, and in her own lifetime, Alienor of Castle Borso had already become a legend among the men and women of the road.

And if these newer stories were about love, as so many of the older songs had been, they had little to do with anguished youth bewailing fate on windswept crags, and rather more to tell about certain changes within Castle Borso itself. About deep woven carpets and tapestries, about imported silk and lace and

velvet, and profoundly disconcerting works of art in rooms that had once seen hard men plan midnight raids at trestle-tables, while unruly hunting dogs had fought for flung bones among the rushes of the floor.

Riding beside Erlein in the second cart, Devin dragged his gaze away from the last shining of light on the peaks and looked at the castle they were nearing. Tucked into a fold of hills, with a moat around it and a small village just beyond, Borso was already in shadow. Even as he watched, Devin saw lights being lit in the windows. The last lights until the end of the Ember Days.

"Alienor is a friend," was all that Alessan had volunteered. "An old friend.”

That much, at least, was evident from the greeting she gave him when her seneschal—tall and stooped, with a magnificent white beard— ushered them gravely into the firelit warmth of the Great Hall.

Alessans color was unusually high when the lady of the castle unlaced her long fingers from his hair and withdrew her lips from his own. She hadnt hurried the encounter. Neither, even more interestingly, had he. Alienor stepped back, smiling a little, to survey his companions.

She favored Erlein with a nod of recognition. "Welcome back, troubadour. Two years, is it?”

"Even so, my lady. I am honored that you remember." Erleins bow harkened back to an earlier age, to the manner theyd seen before Alessan had bound him.

"You were alone then, I remember. I am pleased to see you now in such splendid company.”

Erlein opened his mouth and then closed it without replying. Alienor glanced at Alessan, a fleeting inquiry in her very dark eyes.

Receiving no response she turned to the Duke and the curiosity in her face sharpened. Thoughtfully she laid a finger against her cheek and tilted her head slightly to one side. The disguised Sandre endured her scrutiny impassively.

"Very well done," said Alienor of Borso, softly so the servants and the seneschal by the doors could not hear. "I imagine that Baerd has the whole Palm taking you for a Khardhu. I wonder who you really are, under all of that." Her smile was quite ravishing.

Devin didnt know whether to be impressed or unsettled. An instant later that particular dilemma was rendered irrelevant.

"You dont know?" said Erlein di Senzio loudly. "A terrible oversight. Allow me the introduction. My lady, may I present to you the—”

He got no further.

Devin was the first to react, which surprised him, thinking about it afterwards. Hed always been quick though, and he was closest to the wizard. What he did—the only thing he could think of to do—was pivot sharply and bury his fist as hard as he could in Erleins belly.

As it was, he was only a fraction of a second ahead of Catriana on Erleins other side. She had leaped to clap her hand over the wizards mouth. The force of Devins blow doubled Erlein over with a grunt of pain. This in turn had the unintended effect of throwing Catriana off balance and stumbling forward. To be smoothly caught and braced by Alienor.

The whole thing had taken perhaps three seconds.

Erlein sank to his knees on the opulent carpet. Devin knelt beside him. He heard Alienor dismissing her servants from the room.

"You are a fool!" Baerd snarled at the wizard.

"He certainly is," Alienor agreed in a rather different tone, all exaggerated petulance and flounce.

"Why would anyone think Id want the burden of knowing the true identity of a disguised Khardhu warrior?" She was still holding Catriana around the waist, quite unnecessarily. Now she let her go, with an amused expression at the girls rapid retreat.

"You are an impetuous creature, arent you?" she murmured silk-ily.

"Not especially," said Catriana hardily, stopping a few feet away.

Alienors mouth quirked. She looked Catriana up and down with an expert eye. "I am horribly jealous of you," she pronounced at length. "And I would be, even if you had that hair chopped off and those eyes sewn shut. What magnificent men you are traveling with!”

"Are they?" Catrianas voice was indifferent, but her color was suddenly high.

"Are they?" Alienor echoed sharply. "You mean you havent established that for yourself? Dear child, what have you been doing with your nights? Of course they are! Dont waste your youth, my dear.”

Catriana looked at her levelly. "I dont think I am," she said. "But I doubt wed have the same thoughts on that subject.”

Devin winced, but Alienors answer was mild. "Perhaps not," she agreed, unruffled. "But, in truth, I think the overlap would actually be greater than you imagine." She paused. "You may also find as you get older that ice is for deaths and endings, not for beginnings. Any kind of beginnings. On the other hand, I will ensure," she added, with a smile that was all kindness, "that you have a sufficiency of blankets to keep you warm tonight.”

Erlein groaned, dragging Devins attention away from the two women. He heard Catriana say, "I thank you for your solicitude," but he missed her expression. From the tone he could hazard a guess at what it would be.

He supported Erleins head as the wizard labored to get his wind back. Alienor simply ignored them.

She was greeting Baerd now with a friendly civility—a tone that was cheerfully matched, Devin noted instinctively, by Baerds own manner towards her.

"Im sorry," he whispered to Erlein. "I couldnt think of anything else.”

Erlein waved a feeble, still-unhealed hand. Hed insisted on removing the bandages before theyd entered the castle. "Im sorry," he wheezed, surprising Devin considerably. "I forgot about the servants.”

He wiped his lips with the back of one hand. "I wont achieve much for myself if I get us all killed. Not my idea of freedom, that. Nor, frankly, is this posture my notion of middle-aged dignity. Since you knocked me down you can kindly help me up." For the first time Devin heard a faint note of amusement in the troubadours voice. A survivor, Sandre had said.

As tactfully as he could he helped the other man stand.

"The extremely violent one," Alessan was saying drily, "is Devin dAsoli. He also sings. If you are very good he may sing for you.”

Devin turned away from Erlein, but perhaps because hed been distracted by what had just happened he was quite unprepared to deal with the gaze he now encountered.

There is no possible way, he found himself thinking, that this woman is forty years old. He reflexively sketched the performers bow Menico had taught him, to cover his confusion. She was almost forty and he knew it: Alienor had been widowed two years after shed been wed, when Cornaro of Borso had died in the Barbadian invasion of Certando. The stories and descriptions of the beautiful widow in her southland castle had begun very shortly after that.

They didnt come even near to catching what she was—what he saw standing before him in a long gown of a blue so deep it was nearly black. Her hair was black, worn high upon her head and held by a diadem of white gold studded with gems. A few tendrils of hair had been artlessly allowed to fall free, framing the perfect oval of her face. Her eyes were indigo, almost violet under the long lashes, and her mouth was full and red and smiling a private smile as she looked at Devin.

He forced himself to meet that look. Doing so, he felt as though all the sluice-gates in his veins had been hurled open and his blood was a river in flood, racing through a steep wild course at an ever- increasing speed. Her smile grew deeper, more private, as if she could actually see that happening inside him, and the dark eyes grew wider for an instant.

"I suppose," said Alienor di Certando, before turning back to Alessan, "that I shall have to try to be very good then, if that will induce you to sing for me.”

Her breasts were full and high, Devin saw, could not help but see. The gown was cut very low and a diamond pendant hung against her skin, drawing the eye like a blue-white fire.

He shook his head, fighting to clear it, a little shocked at his own reaction. This was ridiculous, he told himself sternly. He had been overheated by the stories told, his imagination rendered unruly by the opulent, sensuous furnishings in the room. He looked upwards for distraction and then wished he hadnt.

On the ceiling someone not a stranger to the act of love had painted Adaons primal coupling with Eanna. The face of the goddess was very clearly that of Alienor and the painting showed—just as clearly—that she was in the very moment of rapture when the stars had streamed into being from her ecstasy.

There were indeed stars streaming all across the background of the ceiling fresco. It was, however, difficult to look at the background of the fresco. Devin forced his eyes down. What helped him reclaim his composure was meeting Catrianas glance just then: a mingled look of caustic irony and a second thing he couldnt quite recognize. For all her own splendor and the wild crimson glory of her hair, Catriana looked exceptionally young just then. Almost a child, Devin thought sagely, not yet fully realized or accomplished in her womanhood.

The lady of Castle Borso was complete in what she was, from her sandaled feet to the band in her lustrous hair. Her nails, Devin noticed belatedly, were painted the same blue-black dangerous color as her gown.

He swallowed, and looked away again.

"I expected you yesterday," Alienor was saying to Alessan. "I was waiting for you and Id made myself beautiful for you but you didnt come.”

"Just as well, then," Alessan murmured, smiling. "Had I seen you any more beautiful than you are now I might never have found the strength to leave.”

Her mouth curled mischievously. She turned to the others. "You see how the man torments me? Not a quarter of an hour in my home and he speaks of leaving. Am I well served in such a friend?”

The question was addressed, as it happened, directly to Devin. His throat was dry; her glance did disruptive things to the orderly flow of messages from brain to tongue. He essayed a smile, suspecting rather that the expression produced fell somewhere between the fatuous and the imbecilic.

Wine, Devin thought desperately. He was in serious need of an effective glass of something.

As if summoned by an art of timing more subtle than wizardry three servants in blue livery reappeared, each bearing seven glasses on a tray. Two of the trays, Devin saw, bore a red wine that was almost certainly Certandan.

The wine in the third set of glasses was blue.

Devin turned to Alessan. The Prince was looking at Alienor with an expression that spoke to something private and shared far in the past. For a moment her own expression and demeanor altered: as if she had laid aside for an instant the reflexive spinning of her webs of enticement. And Devin, a far more perceptive man than he had been six months before, thought he saw the hint of a sadness in her eyes.

Then she spoke and he was certain that hed seen it. In some subtle way it calmed him, and shed a different, milder light on the mood in the room.

"It is not a thing I am likely to forget," she said softly to Alessan, gesturing towards the blue wine.

"Nor I," he replied. "Since it began here.”

She was silent a moment, eyelids lowered. Then the moment passed. Alienors eyes were sparkling again when they lifted. "I have the usual collection of letters for you. But one is very recent," she said.

"Brought two days ago by a very young priest of Eanna who was terrified of me the whole time he was

here. He wouldnt even stay the night though he only arrived at sunset. I swear he rode out so fast he must have feared Id have his robe off if he lingered for a meal.”

"And would you have?" Alessan grinned.

She made a face. "Unlikely. Eannas sort are seldom worth the trouble. Though he was pretty. Almost as pretty as Baerd, come to think of it.”

Baerd, quite unperturbed, simply smiled. Alienors glance lingered flirtatiously on him. There too, Devin noted. An exchange that spoke to events and things shared a long way back. He felt young suddenly, and out of his depth.

"Where is the new message from?" Alessan asked.

Alienor hesitated. "West," was all she said. She glanced at the rest of them with a veiled question in her eyes.

Alessan noted it. "You may speak freely. I trust every man and woman here." He was careful not to even look at Erlein. Devin did look, but if hed expected a reaction from the wizard he was disappointed.

With a gesture Alienor dismissed her servants. The old seneschal had already withdrawn to see to the preparation of their rooms. When they were alone Alienor walked over to a writing-table by one of the four blazing fireplaces and claimed a sealed envelope from a drawer. She came back and gave it to Alessan.

"It is from Danoleon himself," she said. "From your own province whose name I cannot yet hear or say.”

And that, Devin had not expected at all.

"Forgive me," Alessan murmured. He strode quickly toward the nearest fire, tearing the letter open as he went. Alienor became very busy offering glasses of the red wine. Devin took a long drink from his.

Then he noticed that Baerd had not touched his wine and that his gaze was fixed on Alessan across the room. Devin followed the look. The Prince had finished reading. He was standing rigidly, staring into the fire.

"Alessan?" Baerd said.

Alienor turned swiftly at that. Alessan did not move; seemed not to have even heard.

"Alessan?" Baerd said again, more urgently. "What is it?”

Slowly the Prince of Tigana turned from the flames to look at them. Or not really at them, Devin amended inwardly. At Baerd. There was something bleak and cold in his face. Ice is for endings, Devin thought involuntarily.

"It is from Danoleon, Im afraid. From the Sanctuary." Alessans voice was flat. "My mother is dying.

I will have to start home tomorrow.”

Baerds face had gone as white as Alessans. "The meeting?" he said. "The meeting tomorrow?”

"That first," Alessan said. "After the meeting, whatever happens, I must ride home.”

Given the shock of that news and the impact Alessans words and manner had on all of them, the knock on Devins chamber door late that night came as a disorienting surprise.

He had not been asleep. "Wait," he called softly and struggled quickly into his breeches. He pulled a loose shirt on over his head and padded in his stockings across the floor, wincing at the cold of the stones where the carpeting ended. His hair disordered, feeling rumpled and confused, he opened the door.

In the hallway outside, holding a single candle that cast weird, flickering shadows along the corridor wall was Alienor herself.

"Come," was all she said. She did not smile and he could not see her eyes behind the flame. Her robe was a creamy white, lined with fur. It was fastened at the throat but Devin could discern the swell of her breasts beneath. Her hair had been loosened, tumbling over her shoulders and down her back in a black

cascade.

Devin hesitated, his mouth dry again, his mind scattered and lagging. He put up a hand to try to straighten the hopeless tangle of his hair.

She shook her head. "Leave it like that," she said. Her free hand with the long dark nails came up and pushed through his brown curls. "Leave it," she said again, and turned.

He followed her. Her and the single candle and the unleashed chaos of his blood down a long corridor then a shorter one, through an angled sequence of empty public rooms then up a curving flight of stairs.

At the top of the stairs an orange spill of light came from beyond a pair of open doors. Devin passed through those doors behind the Lady of Castle Borso. He had time to register the blaze of the fire, the rich, intricate hangings on the walls, the profusion of extravagant carpets on the floor, and the huge canopied bed strewn with pillows of all colors and sizes. A lean hunting dog, grey and graceful, regarded him from by the fire but did not rise.

Alienor laid her candle down. She closed the two doors and turned to him, leaning back against the polished wood. Her eyes were enormous, uncannily black. Devin felt his pulse like a hammer. The rush of his blood seemed loud in his veins.

"I am burning up," Alienor said.

Somewhere a part of him, where proportion lived and irony took shape, wanted to protest, even to be amused at such a pronouncement. But as he looked at her he saw the quickening draw of her breathing and how shallow it was, saw the deep flush of her coloring . . . one of his hands as if of its own will came up and touched her cheek. It was burning hot.

With a sound deep in her throat Alienor trapped his hand with one of her own and sank her teeth in the flesh of his palm.

And with that pain desire was loosed in Devin as it never had been in his life. He heard an oddly distorted sound and realized it had come from him. He took a half-step toward her and she was in his arms. Her fingers locked and twisted in his hair and her mouth met his with an avidness, a hunger that raked the rising fires of his own need to a point where awareness fled and drifted far away.

Everything was gone, or going. Tigana. Alessan, Alais, Catriana. His memories. Memory itself, that was his most sure anchor and his pride. Even the memory of the hallways to this room, the roads and years and rooms, all the other rooms that led to this one. And her.

He tore at the fastenings of her robe and buried his face between her breasts as they spilled free. She gasped, and her hands clawed at his shirt until it came away. He felt her nails tear the skin along his back.

He twisted his head and bit her then and tasted blood. He heard her laugh.

Never, ever, had he done such a thing before.

Somehow they seemed to be on the bed among the colored splay of the pillows. And then Alienor was naked above him, impaled on his sex, her mouth descending to his own as the two of them surged together through the arc of an act that strove to cast the world away. As far away as it could be hurled.

For an instant Devin thought he understood. In some unthinking flash of visceral illumination he thought he grasped why Alienor did this. The nature of her need, which was not what it seemed to be.

Given another moment, a still place in the firmament, he could have reached out to put a name to it, a frame for the blurred awareness. He reached . . .

She cried out with her climax. Her hands slid along his skin, curving down. Desire obliterated thought, any straining towards thought. With a racking twist he virtually threw her to one side and swung himself above her, never leaving the warm shelter between her thighs. Cushions scattered around them, fell on the floor. Her eyes were tightly shut, her mouth forming soundless words.

Devin began to drive himself into her as if to drive away all the demons and the hurts, all the brutal deadening truths that were the world of the Palm in their day. His own climax when it came left him

shuddering and limp, lost to where he was, only dimly clinging to what he knew to be his name.

He heard her whispering it softly, over and over. She moved gently out from under him. He rolled over on his back, eyes closed. He felt her fingers glide along his skin. He could not move. She was playing with his hands, caressing and guiding them out from his sides. Her lips and fingers danced down his chest and belly, over his satiated sex and further down, exploring along his thighs and legs, and down.

By the time he was aware of what shed done he was bound hand and foot to the four posts of her bed, spreadeagled beneath her. His eyes flew open, startled and alarmed. He struggled. Uselessly—he was held in bonds of silk looped and knotted.

"That," said Alienor in a husky voice, "was a wonderful beginning to a night. Shall I teach you something now?" She reached, naked and magnificent, flushed and scored with his marks upon her, and brought something up from the floor beside the bed. His eyes grew wide when he saw what it was she held.

"You are binding me against my will," Devin said, a little desperately. "This is not my idea of how to come together in love." He twisted hard again, at shoulder and hip; the silken bonds held firm.

Alienors answering smile was luminous. She was more beautiful in that moment than he could ever have imagined a woman being. In the huge dark pools of her eyes something stirred, primal and dangerous and terrifyingly arousing. He felt, improbably soon, a quickening in his sex. She saw it. Her smile deepened. One long fingernail stroked lightly, almost meditatively along his gathering tumescence.

"It will be," murmured his dark lady, the Lady of Castle Borso. Her lips parted showing the sharp white teeth behind. He registered the taut firmness of her nipples as she opened her legs to straddle him again. He saw her caress what she had claimed from the carpet by the bed. Beyond her, by the fire, the wolfhound had its handsome head raised, watching them.

"It will be," Alienor said again. "Trust me. Let me teach you now, and show you, this, and then this, and soon it will be your idea of how to come together. Oh yes, Devin, it will be very soon.”

She moved upon his body and the candlelight was deflected and then hidden as she came down over him. He struggled but only for a moment for his heart was pounding again and desire was overwhelmingly upon him, just as Alienor was, just as her own complex needs could be seen rising in her again, in the darkness of her eyes before they closed, in her movements above him, and in the ragged, reaching, upward straining of her breath.

And before the night was over, before the half of it had passed, with the last candles of winter burning down, she had proven herself right, terribly, over and over again. And at the end even, she was the one who lay bound and open between the four pillars of the world that was her bed and Devin was no longer quite sure of who he was that he should be doing to her the things he was. The things that made her whisper and then cry aloud his name as she did, over and again. But he did know that she had changed him and had found a place within him where his need to seek oblivion was equal to her own.

The candle on his side of the bed burned out some time later. There was a small, scented drifting of smoke. The pattern of light and shade in the room changed; neither of them was asleep, they both noticed it. The fire was down to its embers; the dog still lay before it, its magnificent head stretched out on its paws.

"You had better go," Alienor said, stroking his near shoulder absently. "While theres a candle for you to carry. It is easy to lose your way in the dark.”

"You observe the Ember Days?" he asked, a little surprised at such piety. "No fires?”

"No fires," she said ruefully. "Half my household staif would leave me, and I dont even want to guess at what the tenant farmers or the villagers would do. Storm the castle. Call down some ancient curse with ears of corn soaked in blood. These are the southern highlands, Devin—they take their rites seriously up here.”

"As seriously as you take yours?”

She smiled at that and stretched like a cat. "I suppose so. The fanners will do things tonight and tomorrow that I prefer not to know about." With a sinuous motion she curled downwards towards the foot of the bed and reached for something on the carpet by the bedposts. Her body was a smooth, candlelit curve of white flesh, with the marks he had made on her still showing red.

She straightened and handed him his breeches. It felt abrupt, a dismissal, and Devin gave her a long stare, not moving. She met the look, but her eyes were neither hard nor dismissive.

"Dont be angry," Alienor said softly. "You were too splendid to be leaving in anger. Im telling you truths: I do observe the Ember rites and it is hard to find your way back without a light." She hesitated a moment, then added, "And I have always slept alone since my husband died.”

Devin said nothing. He rose and dressed. His shirt he found halfway between the bed and the doors. It was shredded so badly it should have been amusing. He wasnt amused though. In fact, he was angry— or some feeling beyond anger, or beside it, a more complex thing. Lying naked and uncovered among the scattered pillows of her bed, Alienor watched him clothe himself. He looked at her, marveling still at her feline magnificence and even—despite the change of mood— even aware of how easy it would be for her to stir his desire again.

But as he gazed at her a dormant thought surfaced from wherever thought had been driven in the primitive frenzy of the last few hours. He arranged the shirt as best he could and walked over to claim one of the candles in a brass holder.

She had turned on her side to follow his movements, her head now resting on one hand, the black hair tumbling about her, her body offered to his sight as a gift, a glory in the shifting light. Her eyes were wide and direct, her smile generous, even kind.

"Good-night," she said. "I dont know whether you know it, but you are welcome back should you choose to come one day.”

He hadnt expected that. He knew, without having to be told, that she was honoring him with this. But his thought, his disquiet from before was strong now and intermingled with other images, so that, although he smiled in return and nodded, it was neither pride nor honor that he felt.

"Good-night," he said and turned to go.

At the doors he stopped and, as much because he had remembered Alessan saying that the blue wine had begun with her as for any other single reason that he knew—then or later—Devin turned back to her.

She had not moved. He looked, drinking in the opulence of the chamber and the proffered beauty of the woman on the bed. Even as he stood there another candle died on the far side of the room.

"Is this what happens to us?" Devin said then, quietly, reaching for words to frame this new, hard thought. "When we are no longer free. Is this what happens to our love?”

He could see her eyes change, even from this distance and in this wavering of light and dark. For a long time she looked back at him.

"You are clever," she said finally. "Alessan has chosen well in you.”

He waited.

"Ah!" said Alienor throatily, simulating astonishment. "He actually wants an answer. A true answer from a lady in her castle at the edge of the world." It may have been a trick of the uncertain light, but she seemed to look away then, beyond where Devin stood, even beyond the tapestried walls of her room.

"It is one of the things that happens to us," she said at last. "A kind of insurrection in the dark that somehow stands against the laws of day that bind us and cannot be broken now.”

Devin thought about it.

"Possibly that," he agreed softly, working it through. "Or else an admission somewhere in the soul that we deserve no more than this, nothing that goes deeper. Since we are not free and have accepted that.”

He saw her flinch then, and close her eyes.

"Did I deserve that?" she asked.

A terrible sadness passed over Devin. He swallowed with some difficulty. "No," he said. "No, you didnt.”

Her eyes were still closed when he left the room.

He felt heavy and burdened, beyond merely tired; laden with the weight of his thoughts, slowed by them. He stumbled going down the stairwell and had to fling out his free hand to brace himself against the stone wall. The motion left the candle unguarded and it went out.

It was very dark then. The castle was utterly still. Moving carefully, Devin reached the bottom of the stairs and he put the spent flame down on a ledge there. At intervals, high in the walls, tall thin windows let slanting moonlight fall across the corridor but the angle and the hour did not allow for any real illumination.

Briefly he considered going back for another candle but then, after standing still a moment to let his eyes adjust, Devin set out along what he thought to be the way they had come.

He was lost very soon, though not really alarmed. In his present mood there seemed to be something apposite about padding thus silently down the darkened hallways of this ancient highland castle in the dead of night, the stones cold against his feet.

There are no wrong turnings. Only paths we had not known we were meant to walk, Who had told him that? The words had come unbidden to his mind from some recess of memory. He turned into an unfamiliar corridor and passed through a long room hung with paintings. Part of the way through, he found a voice for the words: it had been the old priest of Morian at the goddesss temple by his familys farm in Asoli. He had taught the twins and then Devin how to read and do sums, and when it appeared that the youngest boy, the small one, could sing he had given Devin his first lessons in the rudiments of harmony.

No wrong turnings, Devin thought again. And then, with a shiver he could not suppress, he remembered that this was not just the nadir of a night, it was the end of winter, the first of the Ember Days—when the dead were said to walk abroad.

The dead. Who were his dead? Marra. His mother, whom he had never known. Tigana? Could a country, a province, be said to have died? Could it be lost and mourned like a living soul? He thought of the Barbadian he had slain in the Nievolene barn.

He did quicken his pace then, over the dark, sporadically moonlit stones of the vast and silent castle.

It seemed to Devin that he walked for an endless time—or a time outside of time—passing no one, hearing nothing save for his own breathing or the soft tread of his feet, before he finally recognized a statue in an alcove. He had admired it by torchlight earlier in the evening. He knew his room was just ahead and around a corner to the right. Somehow he had come entirely the wrong way along the whole far wing of Castle Borso.

He also knew, from earlier in the evening, that the room directly opposite the small fine statue of the bearded archer drawing a bow, was Catrianas.

He looked up and down the corridor but saw only greater and lesser shadows among the bands of white moonlight falling from above. He listened, and heard no sound. If the dead were abroad they were silent.

No wrong turnings, Ploto the priest had told him long ago.

He thought of Alienor, lying with her eyes closed among her bright cushions and all her candles and he was sorry for what hed said to her at the end. He was sorry for many things. Alessans mother was dying. His own was dead.

Ice is for deaths and endings, Alienor had said to Catriana in the hall.

He was cold, and very sad. He moved forward and ended the silence, knocking gently on Catrianas door.

Shed had a restless night, for many reasons. Alienor had disturbed her: both the unbridled sensuousness that emanated from the woman, and the obviously close, unknown past she shared with Alessan and Baerd.

Catriana hated unknown things, information hidden from her. She still didnt know what Alessan was going to do tomorrow, what this mysterious meeting in the highlands was all about, and ignorance made her uneasy and even, on a less acknowledged level, afraid.

She wished she could be more like Devin sometimes, matching his seemingly tranquil acceptance of what he could or could not know. She has seen him storing away the pieces of what he did leam and patiently waiting to receive another piece, and then putting them together like the tiles of a childrens puzzle game.

Sometimes she admired that, sometimes it made her wild and contemptuous to see him so accepting of Alessans occasional reticence or Baerds chronic reserve. Catriana needed to know. She had been ignorant for so much of her life, shielded from her own history in that tiny fishing village in Astibar. She felt that there was so much lost time to be regained. Sometimes it made her want to weep.

That was how shed been feeling this evening before drifting into a shallow, uneasy sleep and a dream of home. She often dreamt of home since shed left, especially of her mother.

This time she saw herself walking through the village just after sunrise, passing the last house— Tendos, she even saw his dog—and then rounding the familiar curve of the shore to where her father had bought a derelict cottage and repaired it and raised a family.

In her dream she saw the boat already far out, trawling among the early-morning swell of the sea. It seemed to be springtime. Her mother was in the doorway of the cottage mending nets in the good light of the sunrise. Her eyes had been going bad for years and it was hard for her to work with her needle in the evenings. Catriana had gradually taken over the night-time needlework in her last year at home.

It was a beautiful morning in the dream. The stones of the beach gleamed and the breeze was fresh and light off the water. All the other boats were out as well, taking advantage of the morning, but it was easy to tell which one was their own. Catriana walked up the path and stood by the newly mended porch, waiting for her mother to look up and see her and leap to her feet with a cry, and fold her daughter in her arms.

Her mother did glance up from her work, but only to gaze seaward, squinting toward the light, to check the position of their boat. An old habit, a nervous one, and one that had probably done much to hurt her eyes. Shed a husband and three sons in that small boat though.

She didnt see her daughter at all. Catriana realized with a queer pain that she was invisible here.

Because she had gone, because she had left them and wasnt there any longer. There was more grey, she saw, in her mothers hair, and her heart ached as she stood there in mild sunlight to see how worn and hard her mothers hands were, and how tired the kind face was. She had always thought of her mother as a young woman, until Tiena, the baby, had died in the plague six years ago. Things had changed after that.

It isnt fair, she thought, and in the dream she cried aloud and was not heard.

Her mother sat on a wooden chair on the porch in the early light, working on the nets, occasionally looking up to check the position of one small boat among so many bobbing on this alien eastern sea so far from the one shed loved.

Catriana woke, her body twisting violently away from all the hurts embedded in that image. She opened her eyes, waiting for her heartbeat to slow, lying under several blankets in a room in Castle Borso.

Alienors castle.

Alienor, who was the same age as Catrianas worn, tired mother. It truly was not fair. Why should she be carrying such guilt, seeing such sad, hurtful images in her sleep, for having gone away? Why, when it

was her mother who had given her the ring when she was fourteen, in the year the baby died. The ring that marked her as from Tigana and by the sea for anyone who knew the ancient symbols, and for no one else.

The ring that had so marked her for Alessan bar Valentin two years ago when he and Baerd had seen her selling eels and fresh-caught telanquy in Ardin town just up the coast from the village.

She had not been a trusting person at eighteen. She could not have said, then or now, why shed trusted the two of them and joined them for that walk upriver out of town when the market was done. If pushed to an answer she would have said that there was something about Baerd that had reassured her.

It was on that walk that they had told her about her ring and about Tigana, and the axis of her life had tilted another way. A new running of time had begun from that moment, and with it the need to know.

At home that evening after dinner, after the boys had gone to bed, she told her parents that she now knew where they were from, and what her ring meant. And she asked her father what he was going to do to help her bring Tigana back, and what he had been doing all these years. It was the only time in her life shed ever seen her mild, innocuous father in a rage, and the only time hed ever struck her.

Her mother wept Her father stormed about the house in the awkward manner of a man unused to raging, and he swore upon the Triad that hed not taken his wife and daughter away before the Ygrathen invasion and the fall only to be sucked back into that ancient grief now.

And thus had Catriana learned the second thing that had changed her life.

The youngest of the boys had begun crying. Her father had stomped out then, slamming the door, rattling the windows. Catriana and her mother had looked at each other in silence a long time while a frightened child gradually subsided in the loft above their heads. Catriana held up her hand and showed the ring shed worn for the past four years. She had looked a question with her eyes, and her mother had nodded once, not weeping now. The embrace they exchanged was one they both expected to be their last.

Catriana had found Alessan and Baerd at the best-known of the inns in Ardin town. It had been a bright night, she remembered, both moons high and nearly full. The night watchman at the inn had leered at her and groped when she sidled by him up the stairs toward the room hed identified.

She had knocked and Alessan had opened to her name. His grey eyes, even before she spoke, had been curiously dark, as if anticipating a burden or a grief.

"I am coming with you," she had said. "My father was a coward. We fled before the invasion. I intend to make that up. I will not sleep with you though. Ive never slept with any man. Can I trust you both?”

Awake in Castle Borso she blushed in the darkness, remembering that. How impossibly young she must have sounded to them. Neither man had laughed though, or even smiled. She would never forget that.

"Can you sing?" was all that Alessan had said.

She fell asleep again, thinking about music, about all the songs shed sung with him, crossing the Palm for two years. This time when she dreamt it was about water—about swimming in the sea at home, her greatest, sweetest joy. Diving for shells at summer twilight among the startled flashing fish, feeling the water wrap her like a second skin.

Then without warning or transition the dream changed and she was on the bridge in Tregea again in a gathering of winter dark and wind, more terrified than she had imagined a soul could be. Only herself to blame, her own pride, her gnawing, consuming, unslaked need to make redress for the fact that they had fled. She saw herself mount and balance on the railing again, saw the racing, black tumultuous water far below, heard, even over the loud rush of the river, the pounding of her heart . . .

And woke a second time just before the nightmare of her leap. Woke because what she had heard as the beat of her heart was a knocking at her door.

"Who is it?" she called.

"Devin. Will you let me come in?”

Abruptly she sat up in bed and pulled the topmost blanket to her chin.

"What is it?" she called.

"Im not sure, actually. May I come in?”

"The door isnt locked," she said finally. She made sure the blankets were covering her, but the room was so dark it didnt really matter.

She heard him enter, but saw only the outline of his form.

"Thank you," he said. "You should lock your door, you know.”

She wondered if he had any idea how much she hated being told things like that. "The only person likely to be roaming tonight was our hostess, and she was unlikely to be coming for me. Theres a chair to your left.”

She heard him reach for it and sink back with a sigh into the deep armchair. "I suppose thats true enough," he said in a drained voice. "And Im sorry, you dont really need me to be telling you how to take care of yourself.”

She listened for irony but heard none. "I seem to have managed tolerably well without your guidance," she said mildly.

He was silent. Then: "Catriana, I honestly dont know why Im here. Im in such a strange mood tonight. I feel ridiculously sad.”

There was something extremely odd in his voice. She hesitated a moment, then, carefully adjusting the blankets, reached over to strike a flint.

"You light fires on the Ember Days?" he asked.

"Evidently.”

She lit the candle by her bed. Then, somewhat regretting the waspishness of that reply, added, "My mother used to light one—just one, as a reminder to the Triad, she used to say. Though I only understood what she meant after I met Alessan.”

"Thats strange. So did my father," Devin said wonderingly. "Ive never thought about that. I never knew why he did it. My father was not a man who explained things.”

She turned to look at him, but he was deep in the chair and the wings hid his face.

"A reminder of Tigana?" she said.

"It would have to have been. As if ... as if the Triad didnt deserve full devotion or observance because of what theyd allowed." He paused, then in a meditative tone added, "Its another example of our pride, isnt it? Of that Tiganese arrogance Sandre always talks about. We make bargains with the Triad, we balance scales with them: they take away our name, we take away a part of their rites.”

"I suppose so," she said, though it didnt really strike her that way. Devin talked like this sometimes.

She didnt see the action as one of pride, or bargaining, just as a reminder to the self of how great a wrong had come to pass. A reminder, like Alessans blue wine.

"My mother is not a proud woman," she said, surprising herself.

"I dont know what mine was like," he said in that tightened voice. "I dont even know if I could say that my father is proud. I guess I dont know very much about him either." He really did sound peculiar.

"Devin," she said sharply, "lean forward. Let me look at you." She checked her blankets; they covered her to the chin.

Slowly he shifted forward: the candlelight spilled across his wildly disheveled hair, the torn shirt and the visible scratches and marks of teeth. She felt a quick surge of anger, and then a slower, deeper anxiety that had nothing to do with him. Or not directly.

She masked both reactions behind a sardonic laugh. "She was roaming, I see. You look like youve been to war.”

With an effort he managed a brief smile, but there was something somber in his eyes: she could read it even by candlelight.

It unsettled her. "What is it then?" she pursued with broad sarcasm, "You tired her out and came here wanting more? I can tell you—”

"No," he said quickly. "No, it isnt that. It is ... hardly that, Catriana. It has been a ... difficult night.”

"You certainly look as if it was," she retorted, her hands gripping the blankets.

He pushed on doggedly. "Not that way. Its so strange. So complicated. I think I learned something there. I think—”

"Devin, I really dont want the details!" She was angry with herself for how edgy this sort of thing made her feel.

"No, no. Not like that, though yes, there was that at the beginning. But . . ." He drew a breath. "I think what I learned was something about what the Tyrants have done to us. Not just Brandin, and not just in Tigana. Alberico too. Both of them, and to all of us.”

"Such insight," she mocked, reflexively. "She must be even more skillful than you imagined.”

Which silenced him. He leaned back in the chair again and she couldnt see his face. In the quiet that followed her breathing grew calmer.

"Im sorry," she said at length. "I didnt mean that. Im tired. Ive had some bad dreams tonight. What do you want from me, Devin?”

"Im not sure," he said. "I guess, to be a friend.”

Again she felt pushed and uneasy. She resisted an instinctive, nervous urge to suggest he go write a letter to one of Rovigos daughters. She said, "Ive never been good at that, even as a child.”

"Nor I," he said, shifting forward again. He had pushed his hair into a semblance of order. He said, "It is more than that between you and I though. You hate me sometimes, dont you.”

She felt her heart thump. "We do not have to discuss this, Devin. I dont hate you.”

"Sometimes you do," he pursued in that strange, dogged tone. "Because of what happened in the Sandreni Palace." He paused, and drew a shaky breath. "Because I was the first man you ever made love with.”

She closed her eyes. Tried, unsuccessfully, to will that last sentence not to have been spoken. "You knew?”

"Not then. I figured it out later.”

Pieces of another puzzle. Patiently putting it together. Figuring her out. She opened her eyes and gazed bleakly at him. "And is it your idea that discussing this interesting subject will make us friends?”

He winced. "Probably not. I dont know. I thought Id tell you I want to be." There was a silence. "I honestly dont know, Catriana. Im sorry.”

Surprisingly, her shock and anger had both passed. She saw him slump back again, exhausted, and she did the same, reclining against the wooden headboard of her bed. She thought for a while, marveling at how calm she felt.

"I dont hate you, Devin," she said finally. "Truly, I dont. Nothing like that. It is an awkward memory, I wont deny that, but I dont think it has ever hindered us in what we have to do. Which is what really matters, isnt it?”

"I suppose so," he said. She couldnt see his face. "If that is all that matters.”

"I mean, its true what I said before: Ive always been bad at making friends.”

"Why?”

Pieces of the puzzle again. But she said, "As a girl, Im not sure. Maybe I was shy, perhaps proud. I

never felt easy in our village, even though it was the only home Id ever known. But since Baerd named Tigana for me, since I heard the name, that has been all there is in the world for me. All that counts for anything at all.”

She could almost hear him thinking about that.

He said, "Ice is for endings.”

Which is exactly what Alienor had said to her. He went on, "You are still a living person, Catriana.

With a heart, a life to live, access to friendship, even to love. Why are you sealing yourself down to the one thing only?”

And she heard herself reply: "Because my father never fought. He fled Tigana like a coward before the battles at the river.”

She could have ripped her tongue bleeding from her mouth, out at the very root, the moment she had spoken.

"Oh," he said.

"Not a word, Devin! Dont say a word!”

He obeyed, sitting very still, almost invisible in the depths of his chair. Abruptly she blew out the candle; she didnt want light now. And then, because it was dark, and because he was so obligingly silent she was gradually able to regain control of herself. To move past the meaning of this moment without weeping. It took a long time in the darkness but eventually she was able to draw a long, steady breath and know she was all right.

"Thank you," she said, not entirely sure what she was thanking him for. Mostly, the silence.

There was no reply. She waited a moment then softly called his name. Again no answer. She listened, and eventually was able to make out the steady rise and fall of his breathing in sleep.

She had enough of a sense of irony to find that amusing. He had evidently had a difficult night though, and not just in the obvious ways.

She thought about waking him and sending him back to his own room. It would most certainly raise eyebrows if they were seen leaving here together in the morning. She discovered, though, that she didnt really care. She also realized that she minded less than shed expected that hed figured out the one truth about her and had just learned another. About her father, but really more about herself. She wondered about that, why it didnt bother her more.

She considered putting one of the blankets over him but resisted the impulse. For some reason she didnt really want him waking in the morning and knowing shed done that. Rovigos daughters did that sort of thing, not she. Or no: the younger daughter would have had him in this bed and inside her by now, strange moods and exhaustion notwithstanding. The older? Would have woven a new quilt at miraculous speed and tucked it around him with a note attached as to the lineage of the sheep that had given the wool and the history of the pattern shed chosen.

Catriana smiled to herself in the darkness and settled back to sleep. Her restlessness seemed to have passed and she did not dream again. When she woke, just after dawn, he was gone. She didnt learn until later just how far.