PART FIVE - THE MEMORY OF A FLAME chapter 17

SCELTO WOKE HER VERY EARLY ON THE MORNING OF THE RITual. She had spent the night alone, as was proper, and had made offerings the evening before at the temples of Adaon and Morian both. Brandin was careful now to be seen observing all rites and proprieties of the Palm. In the temples the priests and the priestesses had been almost fawning in their solicitude. In what she was doing there was power for them and they knew it.

Shed had a short and restless sleep and when Scelto touched her awake, gently, and with a mug of khav already to hand, she felt her last dream of the night slipping away from her. Closing her eyes, only half conscious, she tried to chase it, sensing the dream receding as if down corridors of her mind. She pursued, trying to reclaim an image that would hold it, and then, just as it seemed about to fade and be lost, she remembered.

She sat up slowly in bed and reached for the khav, cradling it in both hands, seeking warmth. Not that the room was cold, but she had now remembered what day it was, and there was a chill in her heart that went beyond foreboding and touched certainty.

When Dianora had been a very small girl—perhaps five years old, a little less than that—she had had a dream of drowning one night. Sea waters closing over her head, and a vision of something dark, a shape, final and terrible, approaching to draw her down into lightless depths.

She had come awake gasping and screaming, thrashing about in bed, uncertain of where she even was.

And then her mother had been there, holding Dianora to her heart, murmuring, rocking her back and forth until the frantic sobbing ceased. When Dianora had finally lifted her head from her mothers breast, she had seen by candlelight that her father was there as well, holding Baerd in his arms in the doorway.

Her little brother had been crying too, she saw, shocked awake in his own room across the hall by her screams.

Her father had smiled and carried Baerd over to her, and the four of them had sat there in the middle of the night on Dianoras bed while the candles cast light in circles around them, shaping an island in the dark.

"Tell me about it," she remembered her father saying. Afterward he had made shadow figures for them with his hands on the wall and Baerd, soothed and drowsy, had fallen asleep again in his lap. "Tell me the dream, love.”

Tell me the dream, love. On Chiara, almost thirty years after, Dianora felt an ache of loss, as if it had all been but a little while ago. Days, weeks, no time at all. When had those candles in her room lost their power to hold back the dark?

She had told her mother and father, softly so as not to wake Baerd, some of the fear coming back in the stumbling words. The waters closing over her, a shape in the depths drawing her down. She remembered her mother making the sign against evil, to unbind the truth of the dream and deflect it away.

The next morning, before opening his studio and beginning his days work, Saevar had taken both his children past the harbor and the palace gates and south along the beach, and he had begun to teach them to swim in a shallow cove sheltered from the waves and the west wind. Dianora had expected to be afraid when she realized where they were going, but she was never really afraid of anything when her father was with her, and she and Baerd had both discovered, with whoops of delight, that they loved the water.

She remembered—so strange, the things one remembered—that Baerd, bending over in the shallows that first morning, had caught a small darting fish between his hands, and had looked up, eyes and mouth comically round with surprise at his own achievement, and their father had shouted with laughter and pride.

Every fine morning that summer the three of them had gone to their cove to swim and by the time autumn came with its chill and then the rains Dianora felt as easy in the water as if it were a second skin to her.

Once, she remembered—and there was no surprise to this memory lingering—the Prince himself had joined them as they walked past the palace. Dismissing his retinue, Valentin strolled with the three of them to the cove and disrobed to plunge into the sea beside their father. Straight out into the waves he had gone, long after Saevar stopped, past the sheltering headland of the cove and into the choppy whitecaps of the sea. Then he had turned around and come back to them, his smile bright as a gods, his body hard and lean, droplets of water sparkling in his golden beard.

He was a better swimmer than her father was, Dianora could see that right away, even as a child. She also knew, somehow, that it really didnt matter. He was the Prince, he was supposed to be better at everything.

Her father remained the most wonderful man in the world, and nothing she could imagine learning was ever going to change that.

Nothing ever had, she thought, shaking her head slowly in the saishan, as if to draw free of the clinging, spidery webs of memory. Nothing ever had. Though Brandin, in another, better world, in his imaginary Finavir, perhaps . . .

She rubbed her eyes and then shook her head again, still struggling to come awake. She wondered suddenly if the two of them, her father and the King of Ygrath, had seen each other, had actually looked each other in the eye that terrible day by the Deisa.

Which was such a hurtful thought that she was afraid that she might begin to cry. Which would not do. Not today. No one, not even Scelto—especially not Scelto, who knew her too well—must be allowed to see anything in her for the next few hours but quiet pride, and a certainty of success.

The next few hours. The last few hours.

The hours that would lead her to the margin of the sea and then down into the dark green waters which were the vision of the riselkas pool. Lead her to where her path came clear at last and then came, not before time, and not without a certain relief beneath the fear and all the loss, to an end.

It had unfolded with such direct simplicity, from the moment she had stood by the pool in the Kings Garden and seen an image of herself amid throngs of people in the harbor, and then alone underwater, drawn toward a shape in darkness that was no longer a source of childhood terror but, finally, of release.

That same day, in the library, Brandin had told her he was abdicating in Ygrath in favor of Girald, but that Dorotea his wife was going to have to die for what she had done. He lived his life in the eyes of the world, he said. Even had he wished to spare her, he would have no real choice.

He didnt wish to spare her, Brandin said.

Then he spoke of what else had come to him on his ride that morning through the pre-dawn mists of the Island: a vision of the Kingdom of the Western Palm. He was going to make that vision real, he said.

For the sake of Ygrath itself, and for the people here in his provinces. And for his own soul. And for her.

Only those Ygrathens willing to become people of his four joined provinces would be allowed to stay, he said; all others were free to sail home to Girald.

He would remain. Not just for Stevan and the response shaped in his heart to his sons death, though that would hold, that was constant; but to build a united realm here, a better world than he had known.

That would hold, that was constant.

Dianora had listened to him, had felt her tears beginning to fall, and had moved to lay her head in his lap beside the fire. Brandin held her, moving his hands through her dark hair.

He would need a Queen, he had said.

In a voice she had never heard before; one she had dreamt of for so long. He wanted to have sons and

daughters here in the Palm now, Brandin said. To start again and build upon the pain of Stevans loss, that something bright and fair might emerge from all the years of sorrow.

And then he spoke of love. Drawing his hands gently through her hair he spoke of loving her. Of how that truth had finally come home into his heart. Once, she would have thought it far more likely that she might grasp and hold the moons than ever hear him speak such words to her.

She wept, unable to stop, for in his words it was all gathering now, she could see how it was coming together, and such clarity and prescience was too much for a mortal soul. For her mortal soul. This was the Triads wine, and there was too much bitter sorrow at the bottom of the cup. She had seen the riselka, though, she knew what was coming, where the path would lead them now. For one moment, a handful of heartbeats, she wondered what would have happened had he whispered these same words to her the night before instead of leaving her alone with the fires of memory. And that thought hurt as much as anything ever had in all her life.

Let it go! she wanted to say, wanted so much to say that she bit her lip holding back the words. Oh, my love, let the spell go. Let Tigana come back and all the worlds brightness will return.

She said nothing. Knowing that he could not do so, and knowing, for she was no longer a child, that grace could not be come by so easily. Not after all these years, not with Tigana and Stevan twined together and embedded so deep down in Brandins own pain. Not with what he had already done to her home. Not in the world in which they lived.

Besides which, and above everything else, there was the riselka, and her clear path unfolding with every word whispered by the fire. Dianora felt as if she knew everything that was going to be said, everything that would follow. And each passing moment was leading them—she could see it as a kind of shimmer in the room—towards the sea.

Almost a third of the Ygrathens stayed. It was more than hed expected, Brandin told her, standing on the balcony above the harbor two weeks later, watching most of his flotilla sail away, back to their home, to what had been his home. He was exiled now, by his own will, more truly than he had ever been before.

He also told her later that same day that Dorotea was dead. She didnt ask how, or how he knew. His sorcery was still the thing she did not ever want to face.

Shortly after that came bad tidings though. The Barbadians were beginning to move north toward and through Ferraut, all three armies apparently heading for the border of Senzio. He had not expected that, she saw. Not nearly so soon. It was too unlike careful Alberico to move with such decisiveness.

"Something has happened there. Something is pushing him," Brandin said. "And I wish I knew what it was.”

He was weak and vulnerable now, that was the problem. He needed time and they all knew it. With the Ygrathen army mostly gone Brandin needed a chance to shape a new structure of order in the western provinces. To turn the first giddy euphoria of his announcement into the bonds and allegiances that would truly forge a kingdom. That would let him summon an army to fight in his name, among a conquered people lately so hard-oppressed.

He needed time, desperately, and Alberico wasnt giving it to him.

"You could send us," dEymon the Chancellor said one morning, as the dimensions of the crisis began to take shape. "Send the Ygrathens we have left and position the ships off the coast of Senzio. See if that will hold Alberico for a time.”

The Chancellor had stayed with them. There was never any real doubt that he would. For all his trauma—he had looked ill and old for days after Brandins announcement—Dianora knew that dEymons deepest loyalty, his love, though he would have shied awkwardly away from that word, was given to the man he served and not to the nation. Moving through those days almost numbed by the divisions in her own heart she envied dEymon that simplicity.

But Brandin flatly refused to follow his suggestion. She remembered his face as he explained,

looking up from a map and strewn sheets of paper covered with numbers. The three of them together around a table in the sitting-room off the Kings bedchamber; Rhun a nervous, preoccupied fourth on a couch at the far end of the room. The King of the Western Palm still had his Fool, though the King of Ygrath was named Girald now.

"I cannot make them fight alone," Brandin said quietly. "Not to carry the full burden of defending people I have just made them equal to. This cannot be an Ygrathen war. For one thing, they are not enough, we will lose. But it is more than that. If we send an army or a fleet it must be made up of all of us here, or this Kingdom will be finished before I start.”

DEymon had risen from the table, agitated, visibly disturbed. "Then I must say again what I have said before: this is folly. The thing to do is to go home and deal with what has happened in Ygrath. They need you there.”

"Not really, dEymon. I will not flatter myself. Girald has been ruling Ygrath for twenty years.”

"Girald is a traitor and should have been executed as such with his mother!”

Brandin looked up at him, the grey eyes suddenly chilly.

"Must we repeat this discussion? DEymon, I am here for a reason and you know that reason. I cannot go back on that: it would cut against the very core of what I am." His expression changed. "No man need stay with me, but I am bound myself to this peninsula by love and grief, and by my own nature, and those three things will hold me here.”

"The Lady Dianora could come with us! With Dorotea dead you would need a Queen in Ygrath and she would be—”

"DEymonl Have done." The tone was final, ending the discussion.

But the Chancellor was a brave man. "My lord," he pushed on, grim-faced, his voice low and intense, "if I cannot speak of this and you will not send our fleet to face Barbadior I know not how to advise you.

The provinces will not go to war for you yet, we know that. It is too soon. They need time to see and to believe that you are one of them.”

"And I have no time," Brandin replied with what had seemed an unnatural calm after the sharp tension of the exchange. "So I have to do it immediately. Advise me on that, Chancellor. How do I show them? Right now. How do I make them believe I am truly bound to the Palm?”

So there it was, and Dianora knew that the moment had come to her at last.

I cannot go back on that; it would cut against the very core of what I am. She had never really nursed any fantasies of his ever freely releasing and unbinding his spell. She knew Brandin too well. He was not a man who went back or reversed himself. In anything. The core of what he was. In love and hate and in the defining shape of his pride.

She stood up. There was an odd rushing sound in her ears, and if she closed her eyes she was certain she would see a path stretching away, straight and clear as a line of moonlight on the sea, very bright before her. Everything was leading her there, leading all of them. He was vulnerable, and exposed, and he would never turn back.

There was an image of Tigana flowering in her heart as she rose. Even here, even now, an image of her home. In the depths of the riselkas pool there had been a great many people gathered under banners of all the provinces as she walked down to the sea.

She placed her hands carefully on the back of her chair and looked down at him where he sat. There was grey in his beard, more, it seemed, each time she noticed it, but his eyes were as they had always been, and there was no fear, no doubt in them as they looked back at her. She drew a deep breath and spoke words that seemed to have been given to her long ago, words that seemed to have simply waited for this moment to arrive.

"I will do it for you," she said. "I will make them believe in you. I will do the Ring Dive of the Grand

Dukes of Chiara as it used to be done on the eve of war. You will marry the seas of the peninsula, and I will bind you to the Palm and to good fortune in the eyes of all the people when I bring you back the sea- ring from the sea.”

She kept her gaze steady on his own, dark and clear and calm, as she spoke at last, after so many years, the words that set her on the final path. That set him, set them all, the living and the dead, the named and the lost, on that path. As, loving him with a sundered heart, she lied.

She finished her khav and rose from bed. Scelto had drawn the curtains back and she could see sunrise just beginning to lighten the dark sea. The sky was clear overhead and the banners in the harbor could just be seen, moving lazily in the dawn breeze. There was already a huge crowd gathered, hours before the ceremony was to start. A great many people had spent the night in the harbor square, to be sure of a place near the pier to see her dive. She thought she saw someone, a tiny figure at such a distance, lift a hand to point to her window and she stepped quickly back.

Scelto had already laid out the clothes she would wear, the garments of ritual. Dark green for the going down: her outer robe and sandals, the net that would hold her hair and the silken undertunic in which she would dive. For afterwards, after she came back from the sea, there was another robe, white, richly embroidered with gold. For when she was to represent, to be the bride come from the sea with a gold ring in her hand for the King.

After she came back. If she came back.

She was almost astonished at her own calm. It was easier actually because she hadnt seen Brandin since early the day before, as was proper for the rite. Easier too, because of how brilliantly clear all the images seemed to be, how smoothly they had led her here, as if she was choosing or deciding nothing, only following a course set down somewhere else and long ago.

Easier, finally, because she had come to understand and accept, deeply, and with certitude, that she had been born into a world, a life, that would not let her be whole.

Not ever. This was not Finavir, or any such dreamplace. This was the only life, the only world, she was to be allowed. And in that life Brandin of Ygrath had come to this peninsula to shape a realm for his son, and Valentin di Tigana had killed Stevan, Prince of Ygrath. This had happened, could not be unmade.

And because of that death, Brandin had come down upon Tigana and her people and torn them out of the known past and the still unfolding pages of the world. And was staying here to seal that truth forever—blank and absolute—in vengeance for his son. This had happened and was happening, and had to be unmade.

So she had come here to kill him. In her fathers name and her mothers, in Baerds name and her own, and for all the lost and ruined people of her home. But on Chiara she had discovered, in grief and pain and glory, that islands were truly a world of their own, that things changed there. She had learned, long ago, that she loved him. And now, in glory and pain and wonder, had been made to understand that he loved her. This had all happened, and she had tried to unmake it, and had failed.

Hers was not a life meant to be made whole. She could see it now so clearly, and in that clarity, that final understanding, Dianora found the wellspring of her calm.

Some lives were unlucky. Some people had a chance to shape their world. It seemed—who could have foretold?—that both these things were true of her.

Of Dianora di Tigana bren Saevar, a sculptors daughter; a dark-haired dark-eyed child, gawky and unlovely in her youth, serious and grave, though with flashes of wit and tenderness, beauty coming to her late, and wisdom coming later, too much later. Coming only now.

She took no food, though shed allowed herself the khav—a last concession to years of habit. She didnt think that doing so would violate any rituals. She also knew it didnt really matter. Scelto helped her dress, and then, in silence, he carefully gathered and pinned her hair, binding it in the dark green net that

would hold it back from her eyes when she dived.

When he was done she rose and submitted herself, as always before going out into the world, to his scrutiny. The sun was up now; its light flooding the room through the drawn-back curtains. In the distance the growing noise from the harbor could be heard. The crowd must be very large by now, she thought; she didnt go back to the window to look. She would see them soon enough. There was a quality of anticipation to the steady murmur of sound that gave evidence, more clearly than anything else, of the stakes being played for this morning.

A peninsula. Two different dominions here, if it came to that. Perhaps even the very Empire in Barbadior, with the Emperor ill and dying as everyone knew. And one last thing more, though only she knew this, and only she would ever know: Tigana. The final, secret coin lying on the gaming table, hidden under the card laid down in the name of love.

"Will I do?" she asked Scelto, her voice determinedly casual.

He didnt follow that lead. "You frighten me," he said quietly. "You look as though you are no longer entirely of this world. As if you have already left us all behind.”

It was uncanny how he could read her. It hurt to have to deceive him, not to have him with her on this last thing, but there was nothing he could have done, no reason to give him grief, and there were risks in the doing so.

"Im not at all sure thats flattering," she said, still lightly, "but I will attempt to think of it that way.”

He refused to smile. "I think you know how little I like this," he said.

"Scelto, Albericos entire army will be on the border of Senzio two weeks from now. Brandin has no choice. If they walk into Senzio they will not stop there. This is his very best chance, probably his only chance, to link himself to the Palm in time. You know all this." She forced herself to sound a little angry.

It was true, it was all true. But none of it was the truth. The riselka was the truth this morning, that and the dreams shed dreamt alone here in the saishan through all the years.

"I know," Scelto said, clearly unhappy. "Of course I know. And nothing I think matters at all. It is just . . .”

"Please!" she said, to stop him before he made her cry. "I dont think I can debate this with you now, Scelto. Shall we go?" Oh, my dear, she was thinking. Oh, Scelto, you will undo me yet.

He had stopped, flinching at her rebuke. She saw him swallow hard, his eyes lowered. After a moment he looked up again.

"Forgive me, my lady," he whispered. He stepped forward and, unexpectedly, took her hands, pressing them to his lips. "It is only for you that I speak. I am afraid. Please forgive.”

"Of course," she said. "Of course. There is really nothing to forgive, Scelto." She squeezed his hands tightly.

But in her heart she was bidding him farewell, knowing she must not cry. She looked into his honest, caring face, the truest friend shed had for so many years, the only real friend actually, since her childhood, and she hoped against hope that in the days to come, he would remember the way she had gripped his hands and not the casual, careless sound of her words.

"Lets go," she said again, and turned her face away from him, to begin the long walk through the palace and out into the morning and then down to the sea.

The Ring Dive of the Grand Dukes of Chiara had been the most dramatic single ritual of temporal power in the Peninsula of the Palm. From the very beginning of their dominion on the Island, the leaders of Chiara had known that theirs was a power granted by and subject to the waters that surrounded them.

The sea guarded them and fed them. It gave their ships—always the largest armada in the peninsula — access to trade and plunder, and it wrapped them about and enclosed them in a world within the world. No wonder, as the tale-tellers said, no wonder it was on the Island that Eanna and Adaon had come together

to engender Morian and make the Triad complete.

A world within the world, girdled by the sea.

It was said to have been the very first of the Grand Dukes who had begun the ceremony that became the Ring Dive. It had been different in those early days. Not actually a dive, for one thing, only a ring thrown as a gift into the sea in propitiation and token of acknowledgment, in the days when the world turned its face toward the sun and the sailing season began in earnest.

Then one spring, a long time after that, a woman dived into the sea after the ring when the Grand Duke of that time cast it in. Some said later she had been crazed with love or religious possession, others that she was only cunning and ambitious.

In either case, she surfaced from the waters of the harbor with the ring bright in her hand.

And as the crowd that had gathered to watch the Grand Duke wed the sea shouted and babbled in wild confusion and wonder the High Priest of Morian in Chiara suddenly cried aloud, in words that would run down through all the years, never to be lost: "Look and see! See how the oceans accept the Grand Duke as husband to them! How they offer back the sea-ring as a bride piece to a lover!”

And the High Priest moved to the very end of the pier beside the Duke and knelt to help the woman rise from the sea and so he set in motion everything that followed. Saronte the Grand Duke was but new to his power and as yet unwed. Letizia, who had come into the city from a farm in the distrada and had done this unprecedented thing, was yellow-haired and comely and very young. And their palms were joined together then and there over the water by Mellidar, that High Priest of Morian, and Saronte placed the sea-ring on Letizias finger.

They were wed at Midsummer. There was war that autumn against Asoli and Astibar, and young Saronte di Chiara triumphed magnificently in a naval battle in the Gulf of Corte, south of the Island. A victory whose anniversary Chiara still remembered. And from that time onward, the newly shaped ritual of the Ring Dive was enshrined for use in time of Chiaras need.

Thirty years later, near the end of Sarontes long reign, in one of the recurring squabbles for precedence among the Triads clergy, a newly anointed High Priest of Eanna revealed that Letizia had been near kin to Mellidar, the priest of Morian who had drawn her from the water and bound her to the Duke. Eannas priest invited the people of the Island to draw their own conclusions about the schemes of Morians clergy and their endless striving for preeminence and power.

A number of events, none of them pleasant, had unfolded among the Triads servants in the months following that revelation, but none of these disturbances had come near to touching the bright new sanctity of the ritual itself. The ceremony had taken hold on the imagination of the people. It seemed to speak to something deep within them, whether of sacrifice or homage, of love or danger, or, in the end, of some dark, true binding to the waters of the sea.

So the Ring Dive of the Grand Dukes remained, long after all those feuding clergy of the Triad had been lowered to their rest, their names only half-remembered, and only because of their part in the story of the Dive.

What had finally brought an end to the ceremony, in much more recent times, was the death of Onestra, wife to Grand Duke Cazal, two hundred and fifty years ago.

It was not, by any means, the first such death: the women who volunteered to dive for the Grand Dukes always had it made absolutely clear to them that their lives were worth infinitely less than the ring they sought to reclaim from the sea. To come back without the ring left one an exile from the Island for life, known and mocked throughout the whole peninsula. The ceremony was repeated with another woman, another ring, until one of the thrown rings was found and claimed.

By contrast, the woman who carried a sea-ring back to the pier was acclaimed as the luck of Chiara and her fortune was made for life. Wealth and honor, an arranged marriage into nobility. More than one had borne a child to her Grand Duke. Two had followed Letizia to the consorts throne. Girls from

families of little prospect were not chary about risking their lives for such a glittering, hallucinatory future.

Onestra di Chiara had been different, and because of her and after her everything had changed.

Beautiful as a legend and as proud, Grand Duke Cazals young bride had insisted on doing the Ring Dive herself, scorning to allocate such a glittering ceremony to some ill-bred creature from the distrada on the eve of a dangerous war. She had been, all the chroniclers of the day agreed, the most beautiful vision any of them had ever seen as she walked down to the sea in the dark-green of ritual.

When she floated, lifeless, to the surface of the water some distance from the shore, in full sight of the watching throng, Duke Cazal had screamed like a girl and fainted dead away.

After which there had been rioting and a terrified pandemonium unmatched before or since on the Island. In one isolated temple of Adaon on the north shore, all the priestesses had killed themselves when one of their number brought back the news. It was the wrath of the god that was coming, so the portents were read, and Chiara almost strangled on its fear.

Duke Cazal, foolhardy and broken, was slain in battle that summer against the joined armies of Corte and Ferraut, after which Chiara endured two generations of eclipse, rising to power again only after the bitter, destructive war fought between the erstwhile allies who had beaten it. Such a process, of course, was hardly noteworthy. It had been the way of things in the Palm as far back as the records went.

But no woman had done the Ring Dive since Onestra died.

All the symbols had changed with her, the stakes had risen too high. If another woman were to die in the Dive, with that legacy of chaos and defeat . . .

It was far too dangerous, successive Grand Dukes declared, the one after the other, and they found ways to keep the Island safe in its sea-girt power without the sanction of that most potent ceremony.

When the Ygrathen fleet had been sighted nineteen years ago the last Grand Duke of Chiara had killed himself on the steps of Eannas temple, and so there had been no one to cast a ring into the sea that year, even had there been a woman willing to dive for it, in search of Morians intercession and the gods.

It was eerily silent in the saishan when she and Scelto left her rooms. Normally at this hour the corridors would be loud with the stir and bustle of the castrates, fragrant and colorful with the scented presence of women moving languorously to the baths or to their morning meal. Today was different. The hallways were empty and still save for their own footsteps. Dianora suppressed a shiver, so strange did the deserted, echoing saishan seem.

They passed the doorway to the baths and then the entrance to the dining rooms. Both were empty and silent. They turned a corner toward the stairway that led down and out of the womens wing, and there Dianora saw that one person at least had remained, and was waiting for them.

"Let me look at you," Vencel said, the usual words. "I must approve you before you go down.”

The saishan head was sprawled as always among the many-colored pillows of his rolling platform.

Dianora almost smiled to see his vast bulk, and to hear the familiar words spoken.

"Of course," she said, and slowly turned full circle before his scrutiny.

"Acceptable," he said at length. The customary judgment, though his high distinctive voice sounded more subdued than she had ever heard it. "But perhaps . . . perhaps you would like to wear that vairstone from Khardhun about your throat? For luck? I brought it with me for you, from the saishan treasures.”

Almost diffidently Vencel extended a large soft hand and she saw that he was holding the red jewel she had worn the day Isolla of Ygrath had tried to kill the King.

She was about to demur when she remembered that Scelto had brought this back for her as something special for that day, just before she had dressed to go down. Remembering that, and moved by VencePs gesture, she said, "Thank you. I would be pleased to wear it." She hesitated. "Would you put it on for me?”

He smiled, almost shyly. She knelt before him and with his deft and delicate fingers the enormous saishan head clasped the jewel on its chain about her neck. Kneeling so near she was overwhelmed by the scent of tainflowers that he always wore.

Vencel withdrew his hands and leaned back to look at her. In his dark face his eyes were unwontedly soft. "In Khardhun we used to say to someone going on a journey Fortune find you there and guide you home. Such is my wish today." He hid his hands in the billowing folds of his white robe and looked away, down the empty corridor.

"Thank you," she said again, afraid to say more. She rose and glanced over at Scelto; there were tears in his eyes. He wiped them hastily away and moved to lead her down the stairs. Halfway down she looked back at Vencel, an almost inhumanly vast figure, draped in billowing white. He was gazing expressionlessly down after them, from among the brilliantly colored panoply of his pillows, an exotic creature from another world entirely, somehow carried ashore and stranded here in the saishan of Chiara.

At the bottom of the stairs she saw that the two doors had been left unbarred. Scelto would not have to knock. Not today. He pushed the doors open and drew back to let her pass.

In the long hallway outside the priests of Morian and the priestesses of Adaon were waiting for her.

She saw the scarcely veiled triumph in their eyes, a collective glittering of expectation.

There was a sound, a drawing of breath, as she came through the doors in the green robes of a rite that had not been performed in two and a half hundred years, her hair drawn back and bound in a net green as the sea.

Trained to control, being what they were, the clergy quickly fell silent. And in silence they made way for her, to follow behind in orderly rows of crimson and smoke-grey.

She knew they would make Scelto trail behind them. He could not be part of this procession of the rites. She knew she had not properly said farewell to him. Hers was not a life meant to be made whole.

They went west down the corridor to the Grand Staircase. At the top of the wide marble stairs Dianora paused and looked down, and she finally understood why the saishan had been so silent. All the women and the castrates were gathered below. They had been allowed out, permitted to come this far to see her pass by. Holding her head very high and looking neither left nor right she set her foot on the first stair and started down. She was no longer herself, she thought. No longer Dianora, or not only Dianora.

She was merging further into legend with every step she took.

And then, at the bottom of the staircase, as she stepped onto the mosaic-inlaid tiles of the floor, she realized who was waiting by the palace doors to escort her out and her heart almost stopped.

There was a cluster of men there. DEymon, for one, and Rhamanus as well, who had stayed in the Palm as shed been sure he would, and had been named as Brandins First Lord of the Fleet. Beside them was Doarde the poet, representing the people of Chiara. She had expected him: it had been dEymons clever idea that the participation of one Island poet could help counterbalance the crime and death of another. Next to Doarde was a burly, sharp-faced man in brown velvet hung about with a ransoms worth of gold. A merchant from Corte, and a successful one clearly enough; very possibly one of the ghouls who had made their fortune preying on the ruins of Tigana two decades ago. Behind him was a lean grey- clad priest of Morian who was obviously from Asoli. She could tell from his coloring, the native Asolino all had that look about them.

She also knew he was from Asoli because the last of the men waiting for her there was from Lower Corte and she knew him. A figure from her own internal legends, from the myths and hopes that had sustained her life this far. And this was the one whose presence here almost froze the blood in her veins.

In white of course, majestic as she remembered him from when she was a girl, gripping the massive staff that had always been his signature, and towering over every man there, stood Danoleon the High Priest of Eanna in Tigana.

The man who had taken Prince Alessan away to the south. So Baerd had told her the night he saw his

own riselka and went away to follow them.

She knew him, everyone had known Danoleon, his long-striding, broad-shouldered preeminence, the deep, glorious instrument that was his voice in temple services. Approaching the doors Dianora fought back a moment of wild panic before sternly controlling herself. There was no way he could recognize her.

He had never known her as a child. Why should he have—the adolescent daughter of an artist loosely attached to the court? And she had changed, she was infinitely changed since then.

She couldnt take her eyes off him though. She had known dEymon was arranging for someone to be there from Lower Corte, but had never expected Danoleon himself. In the days when she had worked in The Queen in Stevanien it was well-known that Eannas High Priest had withdrawn from the wider world into the goddesss Sanctuary in the southern hills.

Now he had come out, and was here, and looking at him, drinking in his reality, Dianora felt an absurd, an almost overwhelming swell of pride to see how he seemed to dominate, merely by his presence, all the people assembled there.

It was for him, and for the men and women like him, the ones who were gone and the ones who yet lived in a broken land, that she was going to do what she would do today. His eyes rested on her searchingly; they were all doing that, but it was under Danoleons clear blue gaze that Dianora drew herself up even taller than before. Behind them all, beyond the doors which had not yet been opened, she seemed to see the riselkas path growing brighter all the time.

She stopped and they bowed to her, all six men putting a straight leg forward and bending low in a fashion of salute not used for centuries. But this was legend, ceremony, an invocation of many kinds of power, and Dianora sensed that she must now seem to them like some hieratic figure out of the tapestry scrolls of the distant past.

"My lady," said dEymon gravely, "if it pleases you and you are minded to allow us, we would attend upon you now and lead you to the King of the Western Palm.”

Carefully said, and clearly, for all their words were to be remembered and repeated. Everything was to be remembered. One reason the priests were here, and a poet.

"It pleases me," she said simply. "Let us go." She did not say more; her own words would matter less.

It was not what she would say today that was to be remembered.

She still could not take her eyes from Danoleon. He was the first man from Tigana, she realized, that she had seen since coming to the Island. In a very direct way it eased her heart that Eanna, whose children they all were, had allowed her to see this man before she went into the sea.

DEymon nodded a command. Slowly the massive bronze doors swung open upon the vast crowd assembled between the palace and the pier. She saw people spilling across the square to the farthest ends of the harbor, even thronging the decks of the ships at anchor there. The steady murmur of sound that had been present all morning swelled to a crescendo as the doors swung open, and then it abruptly stopped and fell away as the crowd caught sight of her. A rigid, straining silence seemed to claim Chiara under the blue arch of the sky; and out into that stillness Dianora went.

And it was then, as they moved into the brilliant sunshine along the aisle, the shining path that had been made for her passage, that she saw Brandin waiting by the sea for her, dressed like a soldier-king, without extravagance, bareheaded in the light of spring.

Something twisted within her at the sight of him, like a blade in a wound. It will end soon, she told herself steadily. Only a little longer now. It will all be over soon enough.

She went toward him then, walking like a queen, slender and tall and proud, clad in the colors of the dark-green sea with a crimson gem about her throat. And she knew that she loved him, and knew her land was lost if he was not driven away or slain, and she grieved with all her being for the simple truth that her mother and her father had had a daughter born to them all those years ago.

For someone as small as he was it was hopeless to try to see anything from the harbor square itself

and even the deck of the ship that had brought them here from Corte was thronged with people who had paid the captain for a chance to view the Drive from this vantage point. Devin had made his way over to the mainmast and scrambled up to join another dozen men clinging to the rigging high above the sea.

There were compensations inherent in agility.

Erlein was somewhere below amid the crowd on deck. He was still terrified, after three days here, by this enforced proximity to the sorcerer from Ygrath. It was one thing, he had said angrily, to elude Trackers in the south, another for a wizard to walk up to a sorcerer.

Alessan was somewhere among the crowd in the harbor. Devin had spotted him at one point working his way towards the pier, but couldnt see him now. Danoleon was inside the palace itself, representing Lower Corte in the ceremony. The irony of that was almost overwhelming, whenever Devin allowed himself to think about it. He tried not to because it made him afraid, for all of them.

But Alessan had been decisive when the courteously phrased request had come for the High Priest to travel north and join men of the other three provinces as formal witnesses to the Ring Dive.

"You will go, of course," the Prince had said, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. "And we shall be there as well. I need to take the measure of things on Chiara since this change.”

"Are you absolutely mad?" Erlein had gasped, not bothering to hide his disbelief.

Alessan had only laughed, though not, Devin thought, with any real amusement. He had become virtually impossible to read since his mother had died. Devin felt quite inadequate to the task of bridging that space or breaking through. Several times in the days following Pasitheas death he had found himself desperately wishing that Baerd were with them.

"What about Savandi?" Erlein had demanded. "Couldnt this be a trap for Danoleon. Or for you, even?”

Alessan shook his head. "Hardly. You said yourself, no message was sent. And it is entirely plausible that he was killed by brigands in the countryside as Torre made it seem. The King of the Western Palm has larger things to worry about right now than one of his petty spies. Im not concerned about that, Erlein, but I do thank you for your solicitude." He smiled, a wintry smile. Erlein had scowled and stalked away.

"What are you concerned about?" Devin had asked the Prince.

But Alessan hadnt answered that.

High in the rigging of the Aema Falcon Devin waited with the others for the palace doors to open, and tried to control the pounding of his heart. It was difficult though; the sense of excitement and anticipation that had been building on the Island for three days had started to become overwhelming this morning, and had taken an almost palpable shape when Brandin himself had appeared and walked calmly down to the pier with a small retinue, including one stooped, balding old man dressed exactly like the King.

"Brandins Fool," the Cortean in the rigging next to him said, when Devin asked, pointing.

"Something to do with sorcery, the way they do things in Ygrath." He grunted. "Were better off not knowing.”

Devin had gazed for the first time at the man who had destroyed Tigana and tried to imagine what it would be like to have a bow in his hands right now and Baerd or Alessans skill at archery. It was a long, but not an impossible shot, down, and across a span of water to strike a single soberly clad, bearded man standing by the sea.

Imagining the flight of that arrow in the morning sun, he remembered another conversation with Alessan, at the rail of the Falcon the night they reached Chiara.

"What do we want to happen?" Devin had asked.

Word had reached the Gulf of Corte just before they sailed that most of the Second Company of

Albericos Barbadian mercenaries had now been pulled back from the border forts and cities in Ferraut and were marching with the other armies towards Senzio. Hearing that, Alessans face had gone pale, and there was a sudden hard glitter in his gray eyes.

Much like his mothers, Devin had thought, but would not dream of saying.

On the ship Alessan had turned to him briefly at the question and then looked back out to sea. It was very late, nearer dawn than midnight. Neither of them had been able to sleep. Both moons were overhead and the water gleamed and sparkled with their mingled light.

"What do we want to happen?" Alessan repeated. "Im not completely sure. I think I know, but I cant be certain yet. Thats why were going to watch this Dive.”

They listened to the sounds of the ship in the night sea. Devin cleared his throat.

"If she fails?" he asked.

Alessan was silent for so long Devin didnt think he was going to answer. Then, very softly, he said, "If the Certandan woman fails Brandin is lost I think. I am almost sure.”

Devin looked quickly over at him. "Well then, that means . . .”

"That means a number of things, yes. One is our name come back. Another is Alberico ruling the Palm. Before the year is out, almost certainly.”

Devin tried to absorb that. If we take them then we must take them both, he remembered the Prince saying in the Sandreni lodge, with Devin hiding in the loft above.

"And if she succeeds?" he asked.

Alessan shrugged. In the blue and silver moonlight his profile seemed more marble than flesh. "You tell me. How many people of the provinces will fight against the Empire of Barbadior for a king who has been wedded to the seas of the Palm by a sea-bride from this peninsula?”

Devin thought about it.

"A lot," he said at length. "I think a lot of people would fight.”

"So do I," said Alessan. "Then the next question becomes, who would win? And the one after that is: Is there something we can do about it?”

"Is there?”

Alessan looked over at him then and his mouth crooked wryly. "I have lived my life believing so. We may find it put to the test very soon.”

Devin stopped his questions then. It was very bright with the two moons shining. A short while later Alessan touched his shoulder and pointed with his other hand. Devin looked and saw a high, dark mass of land rising from the sea in the distance.

"Chiara," said Alessan.

And so Devin saw the Island for the first time.

"Have you ever been here before?" he asked softly.

Alessan shook his head, never taking his eyes from that dark, mountainous shape on the horizon.

"Only in my dreams," he said.

"Shes coming!" someone shouted from the topmost rigging of the Asolini ship anchored next to them; the cry was immediately picked up and strung from ship to ship and along the harbor, peaking in a roar of anticipation.

And then falling away to an eerie, chilling silence as the massive bronze doors of Chiara Palace swung fully back to reveal the woman framed within.

Even when she began to walk the silence held. Moving slowly, she passed among the throngs assembled in the square, seeming almost oblivious of them. Devin was too far away to see her face clearly

yet, but he was suddenly conscious of a terrible beauty and grace. It is the ceremony, he told himself; it is only because of where she is. He saw Danoleon behind her, moving among the other escorts, towering above them.

And then, moved by some instinct, he turned from them to Brandin of Ygrath on the pier. The King was nearer to him and he had the right angle. He could see how the man watched the woman approach.

His face was utterly expressionless. Icy cold.

Hes calculating the situation. Devin thought. The numbers, the chances. Hes using all of this—the woman, the ritual, everyone gathered here with so much passion in them—for a purely political end. He realized that he despised the man for that, over and above everything else: hated him for the blank, emotionless gaze with which he watched a woman approach to risk her life for him. By the Triad, he was supposed to be in love with her!

Even the bent old man beside him, Devin saw, the Kings Fool, dressed exactly like Brandin, was wringing his hands over and about each other in obvious apprehension, anxiety and concern vivid in his face.

By contrast, the face of the King of the Western Palm was a frigid, uncaring mask. Devin didnt even want to look at him anymore. He turned back to the woman, who had come much nearer now.

And because she had, because she was almost at the waters edge, he could see that his first sense had been right and his glib explanation wrong: Dianora di Certando clad in the sea-green robes of the Ring Dive was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen in all his life.

What do we want to happen? he had asked Alessan three nights ago, sailing to this Island.

He still didnt know the answer. But looking down at the woman as she reached the sea a sudden fear rose in him, and an entirely unexpected pity. He grasped the rigging tightly and set himself to watch from high, high above.

She knew Brandin better than anyone alive; it had been necessary, in order to survive, especially in the beginning, in order to say and do the right things in a mortally dangerous place. Then as the years slipped by necessity had somehow been alchemized into something else. Into love, actually, bitterly hard as that had been to acknowledge. She had come here to kill, with the twin snakes of memory and hatred in her heart. Instead, she had ended up understanding him better than anyone in the world because there was no one else who mattered half so much.

And so what came very near to breaking her, as she passed through that multitude of people to the pier, was seeing how ferociously he was struggling not to show what he was feeling. As if his soul were straining to escape through the doorways of his eyes, and he, being born to power, being what he was, felt it necessary to hold it in, here among so many people.

But he couldnt hide it from her. She didnt even have to look at Rhun to read Brandin now. He had cut himself off from his home, from all that had anchored him in life, he was here among an alien people he had conquered, asking for their aid, needing their belief in him. She was his lifeline now, his only bridge to the Palm, his only link, really, to any kind of future here, or anywhere.

But Tiganas ruin lay between the two of them like a chasm in the world. The lesson of her days, Dianora thought, was simply this: that love was not enough. Whatever the songs of the troubadours might say. Whatever hope it might seem to offer, love was simply not enough to bridge the chasm in her world.

Which was why she was here, what the riselkas vision in the garden had offered her: an end to the terrible, bottomless divisions in her heart. At a price, however, that was not negotiable. One did not bargain with the gods.

She came up to Brandin at the end of the pier and stopped and the others stopped behind her. A sigh, rising and falling away like a dying of wind, moved through the square. With an odd trick of the mind her vision seemed to detach itself from her eyes for a moment, to look down on the pier from above. She could see how she must appear to the people gathered there: inhuman, otherworldly.

As Onestra must have seemed before the last Dive. Onestra had not come back, and devastation had followed upon that. Which was why this was her chance: the dark doorway history offered to release, and to the incarnation of her long dream in the saishan.

The sunlight was very bright, gleaming and dancing on the blue-green sea. There was so much color and richness in the world. Beyond Rhun, she saw a woman in a brilliant yellow robe, an old man in blue and yellow, a younger, dark-haired man in brown with a child upon his shoulders. All come to see her dive. She closed her eyes for a moment, before she turned to look at Brandin. It would have been easier not to, infinitely easier, but she knew that there were dangers in not meeting his gaze. And, in the end, here at the end, this was the man she loved.

Last night, lying awake, watching the slow transit of the moons across her window, she had tried to think of what she could say to him when she reached the end of the pier. Words beyond those of the ritual, to carry layers of meaning down through the years.

But there, too, lay danger, a risk of undoing everything this moment was to become. And words, the ones she would want to say, were just another reaching out towards making something whole, werent they? Towards bridging the chasms. And in the end that was the point, wasnt it? There was no bridge across for her.

Not in this life.

"My lord," she said formally, carefully, "I know I am surely unworthy, and I fear to presume, but if it is pleasing to you and to those assembled here I will try to bring you the sea-ring back from the sea.”

Brandins eyes were the color of skies before rain. His gaze never wavered from her face. He said, "There is no presumption, love, and infinite worthiness. You ennoble this ceremony with your presence here.”

Which confused her, for these were not the words they had prepared. But then he looked away from her, slowly, as if turning away from light.

"People of the Western Palm!" he cried, and his voice was clear and strong, a Kings, a leader of men, carrying resonantly across the square and out among the tall ships and the fishing boats. "We are asked by the Lady Dianora if we find her worthy to dive for us. If we will place our hopes of fortune in her, to seek the Triads blessing in the war Barbadior brings down upon us. What is your reply? She waits to hear!”

And amid the thunderous roar of assent that followed, a roar as loud and sure as they had known it would be after so much pent-up anticipation, Dianora felt the brutal irony of it, the bitter jest, seize hold of her.

Our hopes of fortune. In her? The Triads blessing. Through her?

In that moment, for the first time, here at the very margin of the sea, she felt fear come in to lay a finger on her heart. For this truly was a ritual of the gods, a ceremony of great age and numinous power and she was using it for her own hidden purposes, for something shaped in her mortal heart. Could such a thing be allowed, however pure the cause?

She looked back then at the palace and the mountains that had defined her life for so long. The snows were gone from the peak of Sangarios. It was on that summit that Eanna was said to have made the stars.

And named them all. Dianora looked away and down, and she saw Danoleon gazing at her from his great height. She looked into the calm, mild blue of his eyes and felt herself reach out and back through time to take strength and sureness from his quietude.

Her fear fell away like a discarded garment. It was for Danoleon, and for those like him who had died, for the books and the statues and the songs and the names that were lost that she was here. Surely the Triad would understand that when she was brought to her final accounting for this heresy? Surely Adaon would remember Micaela by the sea? Surely Eanna of the Names would be merciful?

Slowly then, Dianora nodded her head as the roar of sound finally receded; seeing that, the High Priestess of the god came forward in her crimson gown and helped her free of the dark-green robe.

Then she was standing by the water, clad only in the thin green undertunic that barely reached her knees, and Brandin was holding a ring in his hand.

"In the name of Adaon and of Morian," he said, words of ritual, rehearsed and carefully prepared, "and always and forever in the name of Eanna, Queen of Lights, we seek nurture here and shelter. Will the sea welcome us and bear us upon her breast as a mother bears a child? Will the oceans of this peninsula accept a ring of offering in my name and in the name of all those gathered here, and send it back to us in token of our fates bound together? I am Brandin di Chiara, King of the Western Palm, and I seek your blessing now.”

Then he turned to her, as a second murmur of astonishment began at his last words, at what hed named himself, and beneath that sound, as if cloaked and sheltered under it, he whispered something else, words only she could hear.

Then he turned towards the sea and drew back his arm, and he threw the golden ring in a high and shining arc up towards the brightness of the sky and the dazzling sun.

She saw it reach its apex and begin to fall. She saw it strike the sea and she dived.

The water was shockingly cold, so early in the year. Using the momentum of the dive she drove herself downwards, kicking hard. The green net held her hair so she could see. Brandin had thrown the ring with some care but he had known he could not simply toss it near to the pier—too many people would be looking for that. She propelled herself forward and down with half a dozen hard, driving strokes, her eyes straining ahead in the blue-green filtered light.

She might as well reach it. She might as well see if she could claim the ring before she died. She could carry it as an offering, down to Morian.

Her fear, amazingly, was entirely gone. Or perhaps it was not so amazing after all. What was the riselka, what did its vision offer if not this certainty, a sureness to carry her past the old terror of dark waters, to the last portal of Morian? It was ending now. It should have ended long ago.

She saw nothing, kicked again, forcing herself deeper and further out, towards where the ring had fallen.

There was a sureness in her, a brilliant clarity, an awareness of how events had shaped themselves towards this moment. A moment when, simply by her dying, Tigana might be redeemed at last. She knew the story of Onestra and Cazal; every person in this harbor did. They all knew what disasters had followed upon Onestras death.

Brandin had gambled all on this one ceremony, having no other choice in the face of battle brought to him too soon. But Alberico would take him now; there could be no other result. She knew exactly what would follow upon her death. Chaos and shrill denunciation, the perceived judgment of the Triad upon this arrogantly self-styled King of the Western Palm. There would be no army in the west to oppose the Barbadian. The Peninsula of the Palm would be Albericos to harvest like a vineyard, or grind like grain beneath the millstones of his ambition.

Which was a pity, she supposed, but redressing that particular sorrow would have to be someone elses task. The souls quest of another generation. Her own dream, the task shed set herself with an adolescents pride, sitting by a dead fire in her fathers house long years ago, had been to bring Tiganas name back into the world.

Her only wish, if she were allowed a wish before the dark closed over her and became everything, was that Brandin would leave, would find a place to go far from this peninsula, before the end came. And that he might somehow come to know that his life, wherever he went, was a last gift of her love.

Her own death didnt matter. They killed women who slept with conquerors. They named them traitors and they killed them in many different ways. Drowning would do.

She wondered if she would see the riselka here, sea-green creature of the sea, agent of destiny, guardian of thresholds. She wondered if she would have some last vision before the end. If Adaon would

come for her, the stern and glorious god, appearing as he had to Micaela on the beach so long ago. She was not Micaela though, not bright and fair and innocent in her youth. She didnt think that she would see the god.

Instead, she saw the ring.

It was to her right and just above, drifting like a promise or an answered prayer down through the slow, cold waters so far below the sunlight. She reached out, in the dreamlike slowness of all motion in the sea, and she claimed it and put it on her finger that she might die as a sea-bride with sea-gold upon her hand.

She was very far under now. The filtered light had almost disappeared this far down. She knew her last gathered air would soon be gone as well, the need for the surface becoming imperative, reflexive. She looked at the ring, Brandins ring, his last and only hope. She brought it to her lips, and kissed it, and then she turned her eyes, her life, her long quest, away from the surface and the sunlight, and love.

Downward she went, forcing herself as deep as she could. And it was then, just then, that the visions began to come.

She saw her father in her mind, clearly, holding his chisel and mallet, his shoulders and chest covered with a fine powder of marble, walking with the Prince in their courtyard, Valentins arm familiarly thrown about his shoulders, and then she saw him as he had been before he rode away, awkward and grim, to war.

Then Baerd was in her mind: as a boy, sweet-natured, seemingly always laughing. Then weeping outside her door the night Naddo left them, then wrapped close in her arms in a ruined moonlit world, and lastly in the doorway of the house the night he went away. Her mother next—and Dianora felt as if she were somehow swimming back through all the years to her family. For ah 1 these images of her mother were from before the fall, before the madness had come, from a time when her mothers voice had seemed able to gentle the evening air, her touch still soothe all fevers away, all fear of the dark.

It was dark now, and very cold in the sea. She felt the first agitation of what would soon be a desperate need for air. There came to her then, as on a scroll unrolling through her mind, vignettes of her life after shed left home. The village in Certando. Smoke over Avalle seen from the high and distant fields. The man—she couldnt even remember his name—who had wanted to marry her. Others who had bedded her in that small room upstairs. The Queen in Stevanien. Arduini. Rhamanus on the river galley taking her away. The opening sea before them. Chiara. Scelto.

Brandin.

And so, at the very end, it was he who was in her mind after all. And over and above the hard, quick images of a dozen years and more Dianora suddenly heard again his last words on the pier. The words she had been fighting to hold back from her awareness, had tried not to even hear or understand, for fear of what they might do to her resolve. What he might do.

My love, hed whispered, come back to me. Stevan is gone. I cannot lose you both or I will die.

She had not wanted to hear that; anything like that. Words were power, words tried to change you, to shape bridges of longing that no one could ever really cross.

Or I will die, he had said.

And she knew, could not even try to deny within herself that it was true. That he would die. That her false, beneficent vision of Brandin living somewhere else, remembering her tenderly, was simply another lie in the soul. He would do no such thing. My love, he had called her. She knew, gods how she and her home had cause to know, what love meant to this man. How deep it went in him.

How deep. There was a roaring sound in her ears now, a pressure of water so far below the surface of the sea. Her lungs felt as if they were going to burst. She moved her head to one side, with difficulty.

There seemed to be something there, beside her in the darkness. A darting figure further out to sea. A glimmer, glimpse of a form, of a man or a god she could not say. But it could not be a man down here.

Not so far below the light and the waves, and not glowing as this form was.

Another inward vision, she told herself. A last one, then. The figure seemed to be swimming slowly away from her, light shining around it like an aureole. She was spent now. There was an aching in her, of longing, a yearning for peace. She wanted to follow that gentle, impossible light. She was ready to rest, to be whole and untormented, without desire.

And then she understood, or thought she did. That figure had to be Adaon. It had to be the god coming for her. But he had turned his back. He was moving away, the calm glow receding away towards blackness here in the depths of the sea.

She did not belong to him. Not yet.

She looked at her hand. The ring upon it was almost invisible, so faint was the light. But she could feel it there, and she knew whose ring it was. She knew.

Far down in the dark of the sea, terribly far below the world where mortal men and women lived and breathed the air, Dianora turned. She pushed her hands above her, touched palms together and parted them, cleaving the water upwards, hurling her body like a spear up through all the layers of the sea, of dark-green death, towards life again and all the unbridged chasms of air and light and love.

When he saw her break the surface of the sea, Devin wept. Even before he saw the flash of gold sparkling on the hand she lifted in weariness, that they all might see the ring.

Wiping at his streaming eyes, his voice raw from screaming with all the others on the ship, on all the ships, all through the harbor of Chiara, he then saw something else.

Brandin of Ygrath, who had named himself Brandin di Chiara, had dropped to his knees on the pier and had buried his face in his hands. His shoulders were shaking helplessly. And Devin understood then how wrong he had been before: that this was not, after all, a man who was only pleased and happy that a stratagem had worked.

With agonizing slowness the woman swam to the pier. An eager priest and priestess helped her from the sea and supported her and wrapped her shivering form in a robe of white and gold. She could scarcely stand. But Devin, still weeping, saw her lift her head high as she turned to Brandin and offered him the sea-ring in a trembling hand.

Then he saw the King, the Tyrant, the sorcerer who had ruined them with his bitter, annihilating power, gather the woman into his arms, gently, with tenderness, but with the unmistakable urgency of a man deprived and hungry for too long.

Alessan reached up and removed the child from his shoulders, setting it carefully down beside its mother. She smiled at him. Her hair was yellow as her gown. He smiled back, reflexively, but found himself turning away. From her, from the man and woman embracing feverishly next to them. He felt physically ill. There was a quite substantial level of jubilant chaos erupting all around in the harbor. His stomach was churning. He closed his eyes, fighting nausea and dizziness, the tumultuous overflow.

When he opened his eyes it was to gaze at the Fool—Rhun, they had said his name was. It was deeply unsettling to see how, with the King releasing his own feelings, clutching the woman in that grip of transparent need, the Fool, the surrogate, seemed suddenly empty and hollow. There was a blank, weighted sadness to him, jarring in its discontinuity amid the exultation all around. Rhun seemed a still, silent point of numbness amid a world of tumult and weeping and laughter.

Alessan looked at the bent, balding figure with his weirdly deformed face, and felt a blurred, disorienting kinship to the man. As if the two of them were linked here, if only in their inability to know how to react to all of this.

He had to have been shielding himself, Alessan repeated in his mind for the tenth time, the twentieth.

He had to. He looked at Brandin again, and then away, hurting with confusion and grief.

For how many years in Quileia had he and Baerd spun adolescent plots of making their way here? Of coming upon the Tyrant and killing him, their cries of Tiganas name ringing in the air, hurtling back into the world.

And this morning, now, hed been scarcely fifteen feet away, unsuspected, unknown, with a dagger at his belt and only one row of people between him and the man whod tortured and killed his father.

He had to have been shielding himself against a blade.

But the thing was, the simple fact was, that Alessan couldnt know that. He hadnt tested it; hadnt tried. He had stood and watched. Observed. Played out his own cool plan of shaping events, steering them towards some larger abstraction.

His eyes hurt; there was a dull pulsing behind them, as if the sun were too bright for him. The woman in yellow had not moved away; she was still looking up at him with a slantwise glance hard not to understand. He didnt know where the childs father was, but it was clear that the woman didnt greatly care just now. It would be interesting, he thought, with that perverse, detached quirk of his mind that was always there, to see how many children were born in Chiara nine months from now.

He smiled at her again, meaninglessly, and made some form of mumbled excuse. Then he started back alone through the celebrating, uproarious crowd towards the inn where the three of them had been paying for their room by making music these past three days. Music might help right now, he thought.

Very often music was the only thing that helped. His heart was still racing weirdly, as it had started to do when the woman broke the surface of the water with the ring on her hand after so long undersea.

So long a time he had actually begun to calculate if there was anything he could do to make use of the shock and fear that was going to follow upon her death.

And then she had come up, had been there before them in the water and, in the second before the roaring of the crowd began, Brandin of Ygrath, who had been rigidly motionless from the moment she dived, had collapsed to his knees as if struck from behind by a blow that had robbed him of all his strength.

And Alessan had found himself feeling ill and hopelessly confused even as the screams of triumph and ecstasy began to sweep across the harbor and the ships.

This is fine, he told himself now, forcing his way past a wildly dancing ring of people. This will fit, it can be made to fit. It is coming together. As I planned. There will be war. They will face each other. In Senzio. As I planned.

His mother was dead. He had been fifteen feet away from Brandin of Ygrath with a blade in his belt.

It was too bright in the square, and much too loud. Someone grabbed his arm as he went by and tried to draw him into a whirling circle. He pulled away. A woman careened into his arms and kissed him full upon the lips before she disengaged. He didnt know her. He didnt know anyone here. He stumbled through the crowd, pushed and pulled this way and that, trying numbly to steer himself, a cork in a flood, towards The Trialla, where his room was, and a drink, and music.

Devin was already at the crowded bar when he finally made it back. Erlein was nowhere to be seen yet. Probably still on the ship; staying afloat, as far from Brandin as he could. As if the sorcerer had the faintest scintilla of interest in pursuing wizards right now.

Devin, mercifully, said nothing at all. Only pushed over a full glass and a flagon of wine. Alessan drained the glass and then another very quickly. He had poured and tasted a third when Devin quickly touched his arm and he realized, with a sense of almost physical shock, that hed forgotten his oath. The blue wine. Third glass.

He pushed the flagon away and buried his head in his hands.

Someone was speaking beside him. Two men arguing.

"Youre actually going to do it? Youre a goat-begotten fool!" the first one snarled.

"Im joining up," the second replied, in the flat accents of Asoli. "After what that woman did for him I figure Brandins blessed with luck. And someone who styles himself Brandin di Chiara is a long sight better than that butcher from Barbadior. What are you, friend, afraid of fighting?”

The other man gave a harsh bark of laughter. "You simple-minded dolt," he said. He flattened his voice in broad mimicry. "After what that woman did for him. We all know what she did for him, night after night. That woman is the Tyrants whore. She spent a dozen years coupling with the man who conquered us all. Spreading her legs for him for her own gain. And here you are, here all of you are, making a whore into a Queen over you.”

Alessan pushed his head up from his hands. He shifted his feet, pivoting for leverage. Then, without a word spoken, he hammered a fist with all the strength of his body and all the tormented confusion of his heart into the speakers face. He felt bones crack under his blow; the man flew backwards into the bar and halfway over it, scattering glasses and bottles with a splintering crash.

Alessan looked down at his fist. It was covered with blood across the knuckles, and already beginning to swell. He wondered if hed broken his hand. He wondered if he was going to be thrown out of the bar, or end up in a free-wheeling brawl for this stupidity.

It didnt happen. The Asolini who had proclaimed his readiness for war clapped him on the back with a hard, cheerful blow and the owner of The Trialla—their employer, in fact—grinned broadly, completely ignoring the shards of broken glass along the bar.

"I was hoping someone would shut him up!" he roared over the raucous tumult in the room. Someone else came over and wrung Ales-sans hand, which hurt amazingly. Three men were shouting insistent demands to buy him a drink. Four others picked up the unconscious man and began carting him unceremoniously away in search of medical aid. Someone spat on the mans shattered face as he was carried by.

Alessan turned away from that, back to the bar. There was a single glass of Astibar blue wine in front of him. He looked quickly at Devin who said nothing at all.

Tigana, he murmured under his breath, as a Cortean sailor behind him bellowed his praise and ruffled his hair and someone else pushed over to pound his back, Oh, Tigana, let my memory of you be like a blade in my soul.

He drained the glass. Someone—not Devin—immediately reached to pick it up and smash it on the floor. Which started a predictable sequence of other men doing the same with their own drinks. As soon as he decently could he made his way out of the room and went upstairs. He remembered to touch Devins arms in thanks as he went. In their room he found Erlein lying on his bed, hands behind his head, gazing fixedly at the ceiling. The wizard glanced over as Alessan came in, and his eyes quickly narrowed and grew frankly curious.

Alessan said nothing. He fell onto his pallet and closed his eyes which were still hurting. The wine, naturally hadnt helped. He couldnt stop thinking about the woman, what she had done, how she had looked rising like some supernatural creature from the sea. He couldnt force out of his mind the image of Brandin the Tyrant falling to his knees and burying his face in his hands.

Hiding his eyes, but not before Alessan, fifteen feet away, only that, had seen the shattering relief and the blaze of love that had shone through like the white light of a falling star.

His hand hurt terribly, but he flexed it gingerly and didnt think hed broken anything. He honestly couldnt have said why hed felled that man. Everything hed said about the woman from Certando was true. All of it was true, yet none of it was the real truth. Everything about today was brutally confusing.

Erlein, unexpectedly tactful, cleared his throat in a way that offered a question.

"Yes?" Alessan said wearily, not opening his eyes.

"This is what you wanted to happen, isnt it?" the wizard asked, unwontedly hesitant.

With an effort Alessan opened his eyes and looked over. Erlein was propped on one elbow gazing at him, his expression thoughtful and subdued. "Yes," he said at length, "this is what I wanted.”

Erlein nodded slowly. "It means war, then. In my province.”

His head was still throbbing, but less than before. It was quieter up here, though the noise from below still penetrated, a dull, steady background of celebration.

"In Senzio, yes," he said.

He felt a terrible sadness. So many years of planning, and now that they were here, where were they?

His mother was dead. She had cursed him before she died, but had let him take her hand as the ending came. What did that mean? Could it be made to mean what he needed it to?

He was on the Island. Had seen Brandin of Ygrath. What would he tell Baerd? The slender dagger at his side felt heavy as a sword. The woman had been so much more beautiful than hed expected her to be.

Devin had had to give him the blue wine; he couldnt believe that. Hed hurt a hapless, innocent man so brutally just now, had shattered the bones of his face. I must look truly terrible, he thought, for even Erlein to be so gentle with me now. They were going to war in Senzio. This is what I wanted, he repeated to himself.

"Erlein, Im sorry," he said, risking it, trying to struggle upwards from this sorrow.

He braced for a stinging reply, he almost wanted one, but Erlein said nothing at all at first. And when he spoke it was mildly. "I think it is time," was what he said. "Shall we go down and play? Would that help?”

Would that help? Since when did his people—Erlein, even—need to minister to him so much?

They went back down the stairs. Devin was waiting for them on the makeshift stage at the back of the Trialla. Alessan took up his Tregean pipes. His right hand was hurting and swollen, but it was not going to keep him from making music. He needed music now, very badly. He closed his eyes and began to play.

They fell silent for him in the densely crowded room. Erlein waited, his hands motionless on the harp, and Devin did, leaving him a space in which to reach upwards alone, yearning towards that high note where confusion and pain and love and death and longing could all be left behind him for a very little while.