chapter 18

NORMALLY WHEN SHE WENT UP ON THE RAMPARTS OF HER castle at sunset it was to look south, watching the play of light and the changing colors of the sky above the mountains. Of late though, as springtime turned towards the summer they had all been waiting for, Alienor found herself climbing to the northern ramparts instead, to pace the guards walk behind the crenellations or lean upon the cool rough stone, gazing into the distance, wrapped in her shawl against the chill that still came when the sun went down.

As if she could actually see as far as Senzio.

The shawl was a new one, brought by the messengers from Quileia that Baerd had told them would come. The ones who carried the messages that could, if all went right, turn the whole world upside down.

Not just the Palm: Barbadior too, where the Emperor was said to be dying, and Ygrath, and Quileia itself where, precisely because of what he was doing for them, Marius might not survive.

The Quileian messengers had stopped on their way to Fort Ortiz, as was appropriate, to pay their respects to the Lady of Castle Borso and to bring her a gift from the new King of Quileia: an indigo- colored shawl, a color almost impossible to find here in the Palm, and one which was, she knew, a mark of nobility in Quileia, It was evident that Alessan had told this Marius a fair bit about her involvement with him over the years. Which was fine. Marius of Quileia, it seemed, was one of them; in fact, as Baerd had explained it the afternoon after Alessan had ridden into the Braccio Pass and then away west, Marius was the key to everything.

Two days after the Quileians passed through, AJienor began a habit of springtime rides that took her, casually, far enough afield to necessitate one or two overnight stays at neighboring castles. At which time she relayed a quite specific message to a hah 0 dozen equally specific people.

Senzio. Before Midsummer Not long afterwards, a silk-merchant and then a singer she rather liked came down to Castle Borso with word of tremendous troop movements among the Barbadians. The roads were absolutely clogged with mercenaries marching north, they said. She had raised her eyebrows in quizzical mystification, but had allowed herself more wine than was customary each of those two nights, and had rewarded both men later, after her own fashion.

Up on the ramparts at sunset now, she heard a footstep on the stair behind her. She had been waiting for it.

Without turning, she said, "You are almost too late. The sun is nearly gone." Which was true; the color of the sky and the thin, underlit clouds in the west had darkened from pink through crimson and purple most of the way down to the indigo she wore about her shoulders.

Elena stepped out on the parapet.

"Im sorry," she said, inappropriately. She was always apologizing, still uneasy in the castle. She moved to the guards walk beside Alienor and looked out over the gathering darkness of the late-spring fields. Her long yellow hair fanned over her shoulders, the ends lifting in the breeze.

Ostensibly she was here to serve as a new lady-in-waiting to Alienor. She had brought her two young children and her few belongings into Borso two mornings after the Ember Days had ended. It was considered a good idea that she be established here well before the time that might matter. It appeared, incredibly enough, that there could actually come a time when her being here might matter.

Tomaz, the gaunt, aged Khardhu warrior had said that it would be necessary for one of them to stay here. Tomaz, who was very clearly not from Khardhun, and just as clearly unwilling to say who he really was. Alienor didnt care about that. What mattered was that Baerd and Alessan trusted him, and in this matter Baerd was deferring to the dark, hollow-cheeked man absolutely,

"One of whom, exactly?" Alienor had asked. The four of them had been alone: herself, Baerd and Tomaz, and the red-headed young girl who didnt like her, Catriana.

Baerd hesitated a long time. "One of the Night Walkers," he said finally.

She had raised her eyebrows at that, the small outward gesture serving to show all she was prepared to reveal of her inward astonishment.

"Really? Here? They are still about?”

Baerd nodded.

"And that is where you were last night when you went out?”

After a second Baerd nodded again.

The girl Catriana blinked in manifest surprise. She was clever and quite beautiful, Alienor thought, but she still had rather a great deal to learn.

"Doing what?" Alienor asked Baerd.

But this time he shook his head. She had expected that. There were limits with Baerd; she enjoyed trying to push towards them. One night, ten years ago, she had found exactly where his boundaries of privacy lay, in one dimension at least. Surprisingly perhaps, their friendship had deepened from that time on.

Now, unexpectedly, he grinned. "You could have them all stay here, of course, not just one.”

She had grimaced with a distaste only partly feigned. "One will be sufficient, thank you. Assuming it is enough for your purposes, whatever those are?" She said that last to the old man disguised as a Khardhu warrior. His skin coloring was really very good but she knew all about Baerds techniques of disguise.

Over the years he and Ales-san had shown up here in an effective diversity of appearances.

"Im not absolutely sure what our purposes are," Tomaz had replied frankly. "But insofar as we need an anchor for what Baerd wants us to at least be able to try, one of them in this castle should be enough.”

"Enough for what?" shed probed again, not really expecting anything.

"Enough for my magic to reach out and find this place," Tomaz had said bluntly.

This time it was she who blinked and Catriana who looked unruffled and superior. Which was unfair, Alienor decided afterwards; the girl must have known the old man was a wizard. That was why she hadnt reacted. Alienor had enough of a sense of humor to find their by-play amusing, and even to feel a little regretful when Catriana had gone.

Two days afterwards Elena had come. Baerd had said it would be a woman. He had asked Alienor to take care of her. She had raised her eyebrows at that as well.

On the northern ramparts she glanced over in the twilight. Elena had come up without a cloak; her hands were cupping her elbows tightly against her body. Feeling unreasonably irritated, Alienor abruptly removed her shawl and draped it over the others shoulders.

"You should know better by now," she said sharply. "It gets cold up here when the sun goes down.”

"Im sorry," Elena said again, quickly motioning to remove the shawl. "But youll be chilled now. Ill go down and get something for myself.”

"Stay where you are!" Alienor snapped. Elena froze, apprehension in her eyes. Alienor looked out past her, past the darkening fields and the emerging flickers of light where night candles and fires were being lit in houses and farms below. She looked beyond all these under the first stars of the evening, her eyes straining north, her imagination winging far beyond her sight to where the others would all be gathering now, or soon.

"Stay here," she said, more gently. "Stay with me.”

Elenas blue eyes widened in the darkness as she looked over. Her expression was grave, thoughtful.

Unexpectedly, she smiled. And then, even more astonishingly, she moved nearer and drew her arm

through Alienors, pulling her close. Alienor stiffened for a second, then allowed herself to relax against the other woman. She had asked for companionship. For the first time in more years than she could remember, she had asked for this. A completely different kind of intimacy. It felt, of late, as if something rigid and hard was falling away inside her. She had waited for this summer, for what it might mean, for so many years.

What had the young one said, Devin? About being allowed more than the transience of desire, if only one believed it was deserved. No one had ever said such a thing to her in all the years since Cornaro of Borso had died fighting Barbadior. In which dark time his young widow, his bride, alone in a highland castle with her grief and rage, had been set upon the road towards what she had become.

He had gone with Alessan, Devin. By now, they would probably be in the north as well. Alienor looked out, letting her thoughts stream like birds arrowing away through darkness, across the miles between, to where all of their fates would be decided when Midsummer came.

Dark hair and light blown back and mingled by the wind, the two women stood together in that high place for a long time, sharing warmth, sharing the night and the waiting time.

It had long been said, sometimes in mockery, sometimes with a bemusement that bordered on awe, that as the days heated up in summer, so did the night-time passions of Senzio. The hedonistic self- indulgence of that northern province, blessed with fertile soil and gentle weather, was a byword in the Palm and even over the seas. You could get whatever you wanted in Senzio, it was said, provided you were willing to pay for it. And fight someone to keep it, the initiated often added.

Towards the end of spring that year it might have been thought that burgeoning tensions and the palpable threat of war would have dampened the nocturnal ardor of the Senzians—and their endless flow of visitors—for wine, for lovemaking in diverse combinations, and for brawling in the taverns and streets.

Someone might indeed have thought such a thing, but not anyone who knew Senzio. In fact, it actually seemed as if the looming portents of disaster—the Barbadians massed ominously on the Ferraut border, the ever-increasing numbers of ships of the Ygrathen flotilla anchored at Farsaro Island off the northwestern tip of the province—were simply spurs to the wildness of night in Senzio town. There were no curfews here; there hadnt been for hundreds of years. And though emissaries of both invading powers were prominently housed in opposite wings of what was now called the Governors Castle, Senzians still boasted that they were the only free province in the Palm.

A boast that began to ring more hollow with each passing day and sybaritic night as the entire peninsula braced itself for a conflagration.

In the face of which onrushing intrusion of reality Senzio town merely intensified the already manic pace of its dark hours. Legendary watering-holes like The Red Glove or Thetaph were packed with sweating, shouting patrons every night, to whom they dispensed their harsh, overpriced liquors and a seemingly endless stream of available flesh, male or female, in the warrens of airless rooms upstairs.

Those innkeepers who had elected, for whatever reasons, not to trade in purchased love had to offer substantially different inducements to their patrons. For the eponymous owner of Solinghis, a tavern not far from the castle, good food, decent vintages and ales, and clean rooms in which to sleep were assurances of a respectable if not an extravagant living, derived primarily from merchants and traders disinclined to traffic in the carnality of night, or at least to sleep and eat amid that overripe corruption.

Solinghis also prided itself on offering, by day or night, the best music to be found in the city at any given time.

At this particular moment, shortly before the dinner-hour one day late in the spring, the bar and table patrons of the almost full tavern were enjoying the music of an unlikely trio: a Senzian harper, a piper from Astibar, and a young Asolini tenor who—according to a rumor started a couple of days before—was the singer who had disappeared after performing Sandre dAstibars funeral rites last fall.

Rumors of every kind were rife in Senzio that spring, but few believed this one: such a prodigy was

unlikely in the extreme to be singing in a put-together group like this. But in fact the young tenor had an exceptional voice and he was matched by the playing of the other two. Solinghi di Senzio was immensely pleased with their effect on business over the past week.

The truth was, he would have given them employment and a room upstairs if they made music like boarhounds in lust. Solinghi had been a friend of the dark-haired man who was now calling himself Adreano dAstibar for almost ten years. A friend, and more than that; as it happened, almost half the patrons of the inn this spring were men who had come to Senzio expressly to meet the three musicians here. Solinghi kept his mouth shut, poured wine and beer, supervised his cooks and serving-girls, and prayed to Eanna of the Lights every night before he went to sleep that Alessan knew what he was doing.

This particular afternoon the patrons enjoying the young tenors rousing rendition of a Certandan ballad were rudely snapped out of their bar-pounding rhythm when the doors to the street were pushed open, revealing a largish cluster of new customers. Nothing of note in that, of course. Or not until the singer cut himself off in the middle of a chorus with a shouted greeting, the piper quickly laid down his pipes and leaped off the stage, and the harper lowered his own instrument and followed, if more slowly.

The enthusiasms of the reunion that ensued would have led to predictably cynical conclusions about the nature of the men involved, given the way of such things in Senzio, had the new party not included a pair of exceptionally attractive young women, one with short red hair, one with raven-dark. Even the harper, a dour, unsmiling fellow if ever there was one, was drawn almost against his will into the circle, to be crushed against the bony breast of a cadaverous looking Khardhu mercenary who towered over the rest of the party.

A moment later another kind of reunion occurred. One with a different resonance that even stilled the excitement of the newly mingled group. Another man rose and walked diffidently over to the five people who had just arrived. Those who looked closely could see that his hands were trembling.

"Baerd?" they heard him say.

There followed a moment of silence. Then the man whom hed addressed said "Naddo?" in a tone even the most innocent Senzian could interpret. Any lingering doubts about that were laid to rest a second later by the way the two men embraced each other.

They even wept.

More than one man, eyeing the two women with frank admiration, decided that his chances of a conversation, and who knew what else, might be better than theyd first appeared if the men were all like that.

Alais had been moving through the days since Tregea in a state of excitement that brought an almost continuous flush to her pale skin and made her more delicately beautiful than she knew. What she did know is why she had been allowed to come.

From the moment the Sea Maid s landing-boat had silently returned to the ship in the moonlit harbor of Tregea, bearing her father and Catriana and the two men theyd gone to meet, Alais had been aware that something more than friendship was involved here.

Then the dark-skinned man from Khardhu had looked at her appraisingly, and at Rovigo with an amused expression on his lined face, and her father, hesitating for only a moment, had told her who this really was. And then, quietly, but with an exhilarating confidence in her, hed explained what these people, his new partners, were really doing here, and what he appeared to have been doing in secret with them for a great many years.

It appeared that it had not been entirely a coincidence after all that theyd met three musicians on the road outside their home during the Festival of Vines last fall.

Listening intently, trying not to miss a syllable or an implication, Alais measured her own inward response to all of this and was pleased beyond words to discover that she was not afraid. Her fathers voice and manner had much to do with that. And the simple fact that he was trusting her with this.

It was the other man—Baerd, they named him—who said to Rovigo, "If you are truly set on coming with us to Senzio, then we will have to find a place on the coast to put your daughter ashore.”

"Why, exactly?" Alais had said quickly before Rovigo could answer. She could feel her color rising as all eyes turned to her. They were down below deck, crowded in her fathers cabin.

Baerds eyes were very dark by candlelight. He was a hard-looking, even a dangerous-seeming man, but his voice when he answered her was not unkind.

"Because I dont believe in subjecting people to unnecessary risks. There is danger in what we are about to do. There are also reasons for us to face those dangers, and your fathers assistance and that of his men if he trusts them, is important to us. For you to come would be a danger without necessity. Does that make sense?”

She forced herself to be calm. "Only if you judge me a child, incapable of any contribution." She swallowed. "I am the same age as Catriana and I think I now understand what is happening here. What you have been trying to do. I have ... I can say that I have the same desire as any of you to be free.”

"There are truths in that. I think she should come." It was, remarkably, Catriana. "Baerd," she went on, "if this is truly the time that will decide, we have no business refusing people who feel the way we do.

No right to decide that they must huddle in their homes waiting to see if they are still slaves or not when the summer ends.”

Baerd looked at Catriana for a long time but said nothing. He turned to Rovigo, deferring to him with a gesture. In her fathers face Alais could see worry and love warring with his pride in her. And then, by the light of the candles, she saw that inner battle end.

"If we get through this alive," Rovigo dAstibar said to his daughter, his life, his joy in life, "your mother will kill me. You know that, dont you?”

"Ill try to protect you," Alais said gravely, though her heart was racing like a wild thing.

It had been their talk at the railing of the ship, she knew. She knew it absolutely. The two of them looking at the cliffs under moonlight after the storm.

I dont know what it is, she had said, but I need more.

I know, her father had replied. I know you do. If I could give it, it would be yours. The world and the stars of Eanna would all be yours.

It was because of that, because he loved her and meant what he had said, that he was allowing her to come with them to where the world they knew would be put into the balance.

Of that journey to Senzio she remembered two things particularly. Standing at the rail early one morning with Catriana as they moved north up the coast of Astibar. One tiny village, and then another and another, the roofs of houses bright in the sun, small fishing boats bobbing between the Sea Maid and the shore.

"That one is my home," Catriana said suddenly, breaking a silence, speaking so softly only Alais could hear. "And that boat with the blue sail is actually my fathers." Her voice was odd, eerily detached from the meaning of the words.

"We have to stop, then!" Alais had murmured urgently. "Ill tell my father! Hell—”

Catriana laid a hand on her arm.

"Not yet," shed said. "I cant see him yet. After. After Senzio. Perhaps.”

That was one memory. The other, very different, was of rounding the northern tip of Farsaro Island early in the morning and seeing the ships of Ygrath and the Western Palm anchored in the harbor there.

Waiting for war. She had been afraid then, as the reality of what they were sailing towards was brought home to her in that vision, at once brightly colorful and forbidding as grey death. But she had looked over at Catriana, and her father, and then at the old Duke, Sandre, who named himself Tomaz now, and she had seen shadings of doubt and anxiety in each of them as well. Only Baerd, carefully counting the flotilla,

had a different kind of expression on his face.

If shed been forced to put a name to that look she would have said, hesitantly, that it was desire.

The next afternoon they had come to Senzio, and had moored the Maid in the crowded harbor and gone ashore, and so had come, at the end of the day, to an inn all the others seemed to know about. And the five of them had walked through the doors of that tavern into a flashing of joy bright and sudden as the sun come up from the rim of the sea.

Devin embraced her tightly and then kissed her on the lips, and then Alessan, after a moments visible anxiety at her presence and a searching glance at her father, did exactly the same. There was a lean-faced grey-haired man named Erlein with them, and then a number of other men in the tavern came up—Naddo was one name, Ducas another, and there was an older blind man with those two whose name she never caught. He walked with the aid of a magnificent stick. It had the most extraordinary carved eagles head, with eyes so piercing they seemed almost to be a compensation for the loss of his own.

There were others as well, from all over, it seemed. She missed most of their names. There was a great deal of noise. The innkeeper brought them wine: two bottles of Senzio green and a third one of Astibars blue wine. She had a small, careful glass of each, watching everyone, trying to sort through the chaotic babble of all that was said. Alessan and Baerd drew briefly apart for a moment, she noticed; when they returned to the table both men looked thoughtful and somewhat grim.

Then Devin and Alessan and Erlein had to go back and make their music for an hour while the others ate, and Alais, flushed and terribly excited, inwardly relived the feel of the two mens lips upon hers. She found herself smiling shyly at everyone, afraid that her face was giving away exactly what she was feeling.

Afterwards they made their way upstairs behind the broad back of the innkeepers wife to their rooms. And later, when it was quiet on that upper level Catriana led her from the room they were put in, down the hall to the bedroom Devin and Alessan and Erlein shared.

They were there, and a number of other men—some of the ones shed just met, and a few who were strangers. Her father entered a moment later with Sandre and Baerd. She and Catriana were the only women there. She had a moment to feel a little strange about that, and to think about how far she was from home, before everyone fell silent as Alessan pushed a hand through his hair and began to speak.

And as he did, Alais, concentrating, gradually came to understand with the others the dimensions, the truly frightening shape, of what he proposed to do.

At a certain point he stopped and looked at three men one by one. At Duke Sandre first, then at a round-faced Certandan named Sertino sitting with Ducas, and finally, almost challengingly, at Erlein di Senzio.

The three of them were wizards, she understood. It was a hard thing to come to terms with. Especially Sandre. The exiled Duke of Astibar. Their neighbor in the distrada all her life.

The man called Erlein was sitting on his bed, his back against the wall, hands crossed over his breast.

He was breathing hard.

"It is clear to me now that you have lost your mind," he said. His voice shook. "You have lived in your dreams so long youve lost sight of the world. And now you are going to kill people in your madness.”

Alais saw Devin open his mouth and then snap it shut without speaking.

"All of this is possible," Alessan said, with an unexpected mildness. "It is possible I am pursuing a path of madness, though I think not. But yes, there are likely to be a great many people killed. We always knew that; the real madness would have been in pretending otherwise. For the moment though, compose your spirit and ease your soul. You know as well as I do, nothing is happening.”

"Nothing? What do you mean?" It was her father.

Alessans expression was wry, almost bitter. "Havent you noticed? You were in the harbor, you walked through the town. Have you seen any Barbadian troops? Any Ygrathens, soldiers from the west?

Nothing is happening. Alberico of Barbadior has his entire army massed on the border, and the man refuses to order them north!”

"He is afraid," said Sandre flatly in the silence that followed. "Hes afraid of Brandin.”

"Perhaps," her father said thoughtfully. "Or else he is just cautious. Too cautious.”

"What do we do then?" asked the red-bearded Tregean named Ducas.

Alessan shook his head. "I dont know. I honestly dont know. This is one thing I never expected. You tell me," he said. "How do we make him cross the border? How do we bring him to war?" He looked at Ducas and then at each of the others in the room.

No one answered him.

They would think he was a coward. They were fools. They were all fools. Only a fool went lightly into war. Especially a war such as this, that risked everything for a gain he hardly cared about. Senzio?

The Palm? What did they matter? Should he throw twenty years away for them?

Every time a messenger arrived from back in Astibar something in him leaped with hope. If the Emperor had died . . .

If the Emperor had died he and his men were gone. Away from this blighted peninsula, home to claim an Emperors Tiara in Barbadior. That was his war, the one he wanted to fight. The one that mattered, the only thing that had really mattered all these years. He would sail home with three armies and wrest the Tiara from the court favorites hovering there like so many ineffectual fluttering moths.

And after that he could make war back here, with all the gathered might of Barbadior. Then let Brandin of Ygrath, of the Western Palm, whatever he chose to name himself, then let him try to stand before Alberico, Emperor of Barbadior.

Gods, the sweetness of it ...

But no such message came from the east, no such glittering reprieve. And so the bald reality was that he found himself camped with his mercenaries here on the border between Ferraut and Senzio, preparing to face the armies of Ygrath and the Western Palm, knowing that the eyes of the entire world would be upon them now. If he lost, he lost everything. If he won . . . well that depended on the cost. If too many of his men died here, what kind of an army would he have to lead home?

And too many men dying was a vivid prospect now. Ever since what had happened in the harbor of Chiara. Most of the Ygrathen army had indeed sailed home, exactly as anticipated, leaving Brandin crippled and exposed. Which is why Alberico had moved, why the three companies were here and he with them. The flow and shape of events had seemed to be on their side, in the clearest possible way.

Then the Certandan woman had fished a ring from the water for Brandin.

She haunted his dreams, that never-seen woman. Three times now shed surfaced like a nightmare in his life. Back when Brandin had first claimed her for his saishan she had nearly drawn him into an insane war. Siferval had wanted to fight, Alberico remembered. The Third Company captain had proposed storming across the border into Lower Corte and sacking Stevanien itself.

Gods. Alberico shuddered even now, long years after, at the thought of such a war far to the west against the Ygrathens in all their power. He had swallowed his bile and absorbed all the mocking gibes Brandin sent east. Even then, long ago, he had preserved his discipline, kept his eyes on the real prize back home.

But he might have had the Peninsula of the Palm without effort this spring, a pure gift fallen from the sky, if that same Dianora di Certando had not saved the Ygrathens life two months ago. It had been there for him, gently floating down: with Brandin assassinated the Ygrathens would have all sailed home and the western provinces would have lain open before him like so much ripe fruit.

Quileias crippled King would have hobbled across the mountains to abase himself before Alberico, begging for the trade he needed. No elaborate letters then about fearing the mighty power of Ygrath. It would have all been so easy, so ... elegant.

But it was not so, because of the woman. The woman from one of his own provinces. The irony was coruscating, it was like acid in his soul. Certando was his and Dianora di Certando was the only reason Brandin was alive.

And now—her third time in his life—she was the only reason there was an army from the west, a flotilla anchored in the Bay of Farsaro, waiting for Alberico to make the slightest move.

"They are fewer than us," his spies reported daily. "And not as well armed.”

Fewer, the three captains echoed each other in mindless litany. Not as well armed, they gibbered. We must move, they chorused, their imbecilic faces looming in his dreams, set close together, hanging like lurid moons too near the earth.

Anghiar, his emissary in the Governors Castle at Senzio, sent word that Casalia still favored them; that the Governor realized that Brandin was not as strong as they. That he had been persuaded to see the virtue of tilting even further towards the Barbadior. The emissary from the Western Palm, one of the few Ygrathens who had decided to stay with Brandin, was having a more difficult time each passing day gaining audience with the Governor, but Anghiar dined with plump, sybaritic Casalia almost every night.

So now even Anghiar, who had grown lazy and self-indulgent, morally corrupt as any Senzian during his years there, was saying the same thing as all the others: Senzio is a vineyard ripe for harvesting.

Come!

Ripe for harvesting? Didnt they understand? Didnt any of them realize that there was sorcery to reckon with?

He knew how strong Brandin was; he had probed and backed quickly away from the Ygrathens power in the year they had both come here, and that had been when he himself was in his prime. Not hollow and weakened, with a bad foot and a drooping eye after almost being killed in that cursed Sandreni lodge last year. He was not the same anymore; he knew it, if none of the others did. If he went to war it had to be a decision made in the light of that. His military edge had to be enough to offset the Ygrathens sorcery. He needed to be certain. Surely any man not a fool could see that that had nothing to do with cowardice! Only with a careful measuring of gains and losses, risks and opportunities.

In his dreams in his tent on the border he thrust the vacuous moon faces of his captains back up into the sky, and under five moons, not two, he slowly dismembered and defiled the staked-out body of the woman from Certando.

Then the mornings would come. Digesting messages like rancid food, he would begin to wrestle again, endlessly, with the other thing that was nagging him this season like an infected wound.

Something felt wrong. Entirely wrong. There was an aspect about this whole chain of events—from the autumn onwards—that jarred within him like a jangling, dissonant chord.

Here on the border with his army all around him he was supposed to feel as if he were calling the measure of the dance. Forcing Brandin and the entire Palm to respond to his tune. Seizing control again after a winter of being impacted upon in all those trivial, disconcerting, cumulative ways. Shaping events so that Quileia would have no choice but to seek him out, so that back home in the Empire they could not mistake his power, the vigor of his will, the glory of his conquests.

That was how he was supposed to feel. How he had indeed briefly felt the morning hed heard that Brandin had abdicated in Ygrath. When hed ordered his three armies north to the border of Senzio.

But something had changed since that day and it was more than just the presence of opposition now waiting in the Bay of Farsaro. There was something else, something so vague and undefined he couldnt even talk about it—even if hed had anyone to talk to— couldnt even pin it down, but it was there, nagging at him like an old wound in rain.

Alberico of Barbadior had not got to where he was, achieved this power base from which a thrust for the Tiara was imminent, without subtlety and thoughtfulness, without learning to trust his instincts.

And his instincts told him, here on the border, with his captains and his spies and his emissary in Senzio literally begging him to march, that something was wrong.

That he was not calling the tune. Someone else was. Somehow, someone else was guiding the dangerous steps of this dance. He had truly no idea who it could be, but the feeling was there each morning when he woke and it would not be shaken off. Neither would it come clear for him under the spring sun, in that border meadow bright with the banners of Barbadior, with irises and asphodels, and fragrant with the scent of the surrounding pines.

So he waited, praying to his gods for word of a death back home, agonizingly aware that the world might soon be laughing at him if he drew back, knowing, as spies kept hastening south in relays, that Brandin was getting stronger in Farsaro every day, but held there on the border by his craftiness, his instinct for survival, by that ache of doubt. Waiting for something to come clear.

Refusing, as the days slipped past, to dance to what might be someone elses tune, however seductively the hidden pipes might play.

She was numbingly afraid. This was worse, infinitely worse than the bridge in Tregea. There she had embraced and accepted danger because there was more than a hope of surviving the leap. It had been only water down below, however frigid it might be, and there had been friends waiting in the darkness around the bend to claim her from the river and chafe her back to life.

Tonight was different. Catriana realized with dismay that her hands were shaking. She stopped in the shadows of a lane to try to steady herself.

She reached up nervously to adjust her hair under the dark hood, fingering the jeweled black comb shed set in it. On the ship coming here Alais, who had said she was used to doing so for her sisters, had evened and shaped her original swift cropping on the floor of the shop in Tregea. Catriana knew her appearance was perfectly acceptable now—more than that, actually, if the reactions of men in Senzio these past days meant anything.

And they had to mean something. For that was what had brought her out here in the darkness alone, pressed against a rough stone wall in a lane, waiting now for a noisy swarm of revelers to pass by in the street before her. This was a better part of town, so near the castle, but there was no truly safe quarter of Senzio for a woman alone in the streets at night.

She wasnt out here for safety though, which is why none of the others knew where she was. They would never have let her come. Nor would she, being honest with herself, have knowingly let any of them undertake anything like this.

This was death. She was under no illusions.

All afternoon, walking through the market with Devin and Rovigo and Alais, she had been shaping this plan and remembering her mother. That single candle always lit at sunset on the first of the Ember Days. Devins father had done the same thing, she remembered him saying. Pride, hed thought it was: withholding something from the Triad because of what they had allowed to happen. Her mother wasnt a proud woman, but neither had she permitted herself to forget.

Tonight Catriana saw herself as being like one of her mothers forbidden candles on those Ember Nights while all the rest of the world lay shrouded in darkness. She was a small flame, exactly like those candles; one that would not last the night, but one that, if the Triad had any love at all for her, might shape a conflagration before she went out.

The drunken revelers finally staggered by, heading in the direction of the harbor taverns. She waited another moment and then, muffled in her hood, went quickly into the street, keeping to the side of it and started the other way. Toward the castle.

It would be much better, she thought, if she could somehow make her hands be still and slow her

racing heart. She should have had a glass of wine back at Solinghis before slipping away, using the outside back stairs so that none of the others would see her. Shed sent Alais down to dinner alone, pleading a womans illness, promising to follow soon if she could.

She had lied so easily, had even managed a reassuring smile. Then Alais was gone and she was alone, realizing in that precise instant, as the room door gently closed, that she would never see any of the others again.

In the street she shut her eyes, feeling suddenly unsteady; she put her hand on a shop-front for support, drawing deep breaths of the night air. There were tainflowers not far away, and the unmistakable fragrance of sejoia trees. She was near to the castle gardens then. She bit her lips, to force color into them.

Overhead the stars were bright and close. Vidomni was already risen in the east, with blue Ilarion to follow soon. She heard a sudden peal of laughter from the next street over. A womans laughter followed by shouting. The voice of a man. More laughter.

They were going the other way. As she looked up a star fell in the sky. Following its track to her left she saw the garden wall of the castle. The entrance would be further around that way. Entrances and endings, faced alone. But she had been a solitary child, and then solitary as a woman, drawn into an orbit of her own that took her away from others, even those who would be her friends. Devin and Alais only the latest of those who had tried. There had been others back home in the village before she left. She knew her mother had grieved for her proud solitude.

Pride. Again.

Her father had fled Tigana before the battles at the river.

There it was. There it was.

Carefully she drew back her hood. With real gratitude she discovered that her hands were steady now. She checked her earrings, the silver band about her throat, the jeweled ornament in her hair. Then she drew onto her hand the red glove shed bought in the market that afternoon and she walked across the street and around the corner of the garden wall into the blaze of light at the entrance to the Governors Castle of Senzio.

There were four guards, two outside the locked gates, two just within. She allowed her hooded cloak fall open, to let them see the black gown she wore beneath.

The two guards outside the gates glanced at each other and visibly relaxed, removing their hands from their swords. The other two moved nearer, the better to see by torchlight.

She stopped in front of the first pair. She smiled. "Would you be kind enough," she said, "to let Anghiar of Barbadior know that his red vixen has come?" And she held up her left hand, sheathed in the bright red glove.

She had actually been amused at first by Devins reaction and Rovigos in the marketplace. Casalia, the plump, unhealthy looking Governor had ridden through, side by side with the emissary from Barbadior. They had been laughing together. Brandins emissary from the Western Palm had been several paces behind, among a cluster of lesser Senzians. The image and the message were as clear as they could be made.

Alais and Catriana had been standing at a silk-merchants stall. They had turned to see the Governor go by.

He had not gone by. Instead, Anghiar of Barbadior laid a quick restraining hand on Casalias braceleted wrist and they stopped their prancing horses directly in front of the two women. Thinking back on it, Catriana realized that she and Alais must have made a striking pair. Anghiar, blond and beefy, with an upturned moustache and hair as long as her own was now, evidently thought so.

"A mink and a red vixen!" he said, in a voice pitched for Casalias ear. The plump Governor laughed, too quickly, a little too loudly. Anghiars blue eyes stripped the women to their flesh under the bright sun.

Alais looked away, but not down. Catriana met the Barbadians gaze as steadily as she could. She would

not turn away from these men. His smile only deepened. "A red vixen, truly," he repeated, but this time to her, and not to Casalia.

The Governor laughed anyhow. They moved on, their party following, including Brandins emissary, looking grimly unhappy for all the beauty of the morning.

Catriana had become aware of Devin at her shoulder and Rovigo beside his daughter. She looked at them and registered the clenched fury in their eyes. It was then that shed felt amusement, however briefly.

"That," she said lightly, "is exactly how Baerd looked before he almost had us both killed in Tregea. I dont think Im prepared to repeat the experience. I have no hair left to cut.”

It was Alais, cleverer by far than Catriana had realized at first, who laughed, carrying them past the moment. The four of them walked on.

"I would have killed him," Devin said quietly to her as they paused by a leather goods booth.

"Of course you would have," she said easily. Then realizing how that probably sounded, and that he was quite serious in what hed said, she squeezed his arm. Not something she would have done six months before. She was changing, they all were.

But just about then, amusement and anger both fading, Catriana began to think about something. It seemed to her that the brightness of the day slid abruptly into shadow for a moment though there were no clouds in the sky at all.

She realized afterwards that she had decided to do it almost as soon as the idea took shape in her mind.

Before the morning market had closed she had managed to be alone long enough to purchase what she needed. Earrings, gown, black comb. Red glove.

And it was while doing these things that shed begun to think about her mother and to remember the bridge in Tregea. Not surprisingly: the mind worked in patterns like that. Such patterns were why she was doing this, why shed even been able to think of it. When night fell she would have to come away by herself, telling none of them. A lie of some sort for Alais. No farewells; they would stop her, just as she would have stopped any of them.

But something had to be done, they all knew it. A move had to be made, and that morning in the market Catriana had thought shed discovered what that move might be.

Shed spent the first part of this solitary walk through darkness wishing she were braver though, that her hands would not tremble as they were. But theyd stopped shaking after all when she reached the garden wall and saw a star fall in the blue-black velvet sky.

"Well have to search you, you understand," said one of the two guards outside the gates, a crooked smile on his face.

"Of course," she murmured, stepping nearer. "There are so few benefits to standing watch here, arent there?" The other one laughed, and drew her forward, not ungently, into the light of the torches and then a little past them, to the more private shadows at the side of the square. She heard a brief, low-pitched altercation between the two men on the other side of the gate, ending in a concise six-word order. One of them, manifestly outranked, reluctantly began heading inward through the courtyard to find Anghiar of Barbadior and tell him his dreams had just come true, or some such thing. The other hastily unlocked the gates with a key on a ring at his belt and came out to join the others.

They took some with her, but were not unkind, nor did they presume too much in the end. If she was going to the Barbadian and found favor there, they could be at risk in offending her. She had counted on something like that. She managed to laugh softly once or twice, but not so much as to encourage them.

She was thinking of patterns still, remembering the very first evening shed come to Alessan and Baerd.

The night porter at the inn groping for her as she went by, leering, sure of why she was there.

I will not sleep with you, shed said when they opened to her knock. I have never slept with any man.

So much irony in her life, looking back from these tangled shadows, the guards hands moving over her.

What mortal knew the way their fate line would run? Inevitably perhaps, she thought about Devin in the hidden closet of the Sandreni Palace. Which had worked our rather differently in almost every way than she had expected it to. Not that shed been thinking of futures or fates that day. Not then.

And now? What should she be thinking now, as the patterns began to unfold again? The images, she told herself, cloaked in shadow with three guards: hold hard to the images. Entrances and endings, a candle starting a blaze.

By the time they were done with her the fourth guard was back with two Barbadians. They were smiling too. But they treated her with some courtesy as they led her through the open gates and across the central courtyard. Light spilled erratically downward from interior windows above. Before they passed inside she looked up at the stars. Eannas lights. Every one of them with a name.

They went into the castle through a pair of massive doors guarded by four more men, then up two long flights of marble stairs and along a bright corridor on the highest level. At the end of this last hallway a door was partly open. Beyond it, as they approached, Catriana caught a glimpse of a room elaborately furnished in dark, rich colors.

In the doorway itself stood Anghiar of Barbadior, in a blue robe to match his eyes, holding a glass of green wine and devouring her with his gaze for the second time that day.

She smiled, and let him take her red-gloved fingers in his own manicured hand. He led her into the room. He closed and locked the door. They were alone. There were candles burning everywhere.

"Red vixen," he said, "how do you like to play?”

Devin had been edgy all week, uneasy in his own skin; he knew they all felt the same way. The combination of building tension and enforced idleness, coupled with the awareness—one had only to look at Alessans face sometimes—of how close they were to a culmination, created a pervasive, dangerous irritability among them all.

In the face of such a mood Alais had been extraordinary, a blessing of grace these past few days.

Rovigos daughter had seemed to grow wiser and gentler and yet more at ease among them with each passing day, as if sensing a need, a reason for her to be here, and so moving to fill that need. Observant, unceasingly cheerful, effortlessly conversational, with questions and bright responses and a declared passion for long anecdotes from all of them, she had, almost single-handedly, prevented three or four mealtimes from degenerating into sullen grimness or fractious rancor. Blind Rinaldo the Healer seemed almost in love with her, so much did he seem to flourish when she was by his side. He wasnt the only one of them, either, Devin thought, almost grateful that the tensions of the time were preventing him from addressing his own inward feelings.

In the hothouse atmosphere of Senzio Alaiss delicate, pale beauty and diffident grace singled her out like some flower transplanted here from a garden in a cooler, milder world. Which was, of course, exactly true. An observer himself, Devin would catch Rovigo gazing at his daughter as she drew one or another of their new companions into conversation, and the look in the mans eyes spoke volumes.

Now, at the end of dinner, having spent the last half-hour turning their market expedition of the morning and afternoon into a veritable sea-voyage of discovery, Alais excused herself briefly and went back upstairs. Her departure was followed by an abrupt return of grimness to the table, an inexorable reversion to the single dominating preoccupation of their lives. Even Rovigo was not immune: he leaned towards Alessan and asked a sharp, low-voiced question about the latest foray outside the city walls.

Alessan and Baerd, with Ducas and Arkin and Naddo, had been scouting the distrada, searching out likely battlefields, and so the best place for them to position themselves when the time came for their own last roll of dice. Devin didnt much like thinking about that. It had to do with magic, and magic always bothered him. Besides which, there had to be a battle for anything to happen, and AJberico of Barbadior

was hunkered down in his meadow on the border and showing no signs of moving at all. It was enough to drive men mad.

They had begun spending more time apart from each other in the days and evenings, partly for reasons of caution, but undeniably because too much proximity in this mood was good for none of them.

Baerd and Ducas were in one of the harbor taverns tonight, braving the blandishments of the flesh- merchants to keep in touch with the Tregeans men and Rovigos sailors, and a number of the others who had made their way north in response to a long-awaited summons.

They also had a rumor to spread: about Rinaldo di Senzio, the Governors exiled uncle, said to be somewhere in the city stirring up revolution against Casalia and the Tyrants. Devin had briefly wondered about the wisdom of that, but Alessan had explained, even before Devin could ask: Rinaldo was greatly changed in eighteen years; few people even knew he had been blinded. He had been a much-loved man: for Casalia to have released such a word would have been dangerous back then. They had gouged Rinaldos eyes to neutralize him, and then kept it very quiet The old man, huddled quietly now in a corner of Solinghis, was unlikely in the extreme to be recognized, and the only thing they could really do these days was contribute as much as they could to raising tensions in the city. If the Governor could be made more anxious, the emissaries a little more uneasy . . .

Rinaldo himself said little, though it was he himself who had first suggested starting the rumor. He seemed to be coiling or gathering himself; with a war to come the demands on a Healer would be severe, and Rinaldo was not young anymore. When he did speak it was mostly with Sandre. The two old men, enemies from rival provinces in the time before the Tyrants, now eased and distracted each other with whispered recollections from bygone years, stories of men and women who had almost all crossed to Morian long ago.

Erlein di Senzio was seldom with them the past few days. He played his music with Devin and Alessan but tended to eat and drink alone, sometimes in Solinghis, more often elsewhere. A few of his fellow Senzians had recognized the troubadour over the course of their time here, though Erlein seemed no more effusive with them than he was with any of their own party. Devin had seen him walking one morning with a woman who looked so much like him he was sure she was his sister. He had thought of walking over to be introduced, but hadnt felt up to enduring Erleins abrasiveness. One might have naively thought that as events hung fire here, poised on the edge of a climax, the wizard would lay down his own grudges finally. It was not so.

He wasnt worried about Erleins absences because Alessan wasnt. For the man to betray them in any way was certain death for himself. Erlein might be enraged and bitter and sullen, but he wasnt, by any stretch, a fool.

He had gone elsewhere to dine this evening as well, though he would have to be back in Solinghis soon; they were due to play in a few minutes and for their music Erlein was never late. The music was their only sanctuary of harmony these last few days, but Devin knew that only really applied to the three of them. What some of the others scattered about the city were doing for release he couldnt imagine. Or, yes he could. This was Senzio.

"Somethings wrong!" Blind Rinaldo said abruptly beside him, tilting his head as if sniffing the air.

Alessan stopped sketching the distrada terrain on the tablecloth and looked up quickly. So did Rovigo.

Sandre had already half-risen from his chair.

Alais hurried up to the table. Even before she spoke Devin felt a finger of dread touch him.

"Catrianas gone!" she said, fighting to keep her voice low. Her eyes flicked from her father to Devin, then rested on Alessan.

"What? How?" Rovigo said sharply. "We would have had to see her when she came down, surely?”

"The back stairs outside," Alessan said. His hands, Devin, noticed, had suddenly flattened on the

tabletop. The Prince stared at Alais. "What else?”

The girls face was white. "She changed her clothes. I dont understand why. She bought a black silk gown and some jewelry in the market this afternoon. I was going to ask her about it but I ... I didnt want to presume. Shes so hard to ask questions of. But theyre gone. All the things she bought.”

"A silk gown?" Alessan said incredulously, his voice rising. "What in Morians name . . . ?”

But Devin already knew. He knew absolutely.

Alessan hadnt been with them that morning, neither had Sandre. They had no way of understanding.

A bone-deep fear dried his mouth and began hammering at his heart. He stood up, tipping over his chair, spilling his wine.

"Oh, Catriana," he said. "Catriana, no!" Stupidly, fatuously, as if she were in the room, and could still be stopped, still be kept among them, dissuaded from going out into the dark alone with her silk and jewels, with her unfathomable courage and her pride.

"What? Devin, tell me, what is it?" Sandre, voice like a knife. Alessan said nothing. Only turned, the grey eyes bracing for pain.

"Shes gone to the castle," Devin said flatly. "Shes gone to kill Anghiar of Barbadior. She thinks that will start the war.”

Even as he spoke he was moving, rational thought quite gone, something deeper than that, infinitely deeper, driving him, though if she had reached the castle already there was no hope, no hope at all.

He was flying when he reached the door. Even so, Alessan was right beside him, with Rovigo only a step behind. Devin knocked someone down as they burst into the darkness. He didnt look back.

Eanna, show grace, he prayed silently, over and over as they raced toward the risen moons. Goddess of Light, let it not be like this. Not like this.

He said nothing though. He sped toward the castle in the dark, fear in his heart like a living thing, bringing the terrible knowledge of death.

Devin knew how fast he could run, had prided himself on his speed all his life. But moving as if possessed, scarcely touching the ground, Alessan was with him when they reached the Governors Castle.

They careened around a corner side by side and came to the garden wall and there they stopped, looking upward past the branches of a huge, spreading sejoia tree. They could hear Rovigo come up behind them, and someone else further back. They did not turn to see. They were both looking at the same thing.

There was a figure silhouetted against torchlight in one of the highest windows. A figure they knew.

Wearing a long dark gown.

Devin dropped to his knees in the moonlit lane. He thought about climbing the wall, about screaming her name aloud. The sweet scent of tainflowers surrounded him. He looked at Alessans face, and then quickly away from what he saw there.

How did she like to play?

Mostly, she didnt, and especially not like this. She had not been the playing kind. She had liked swimming, and walks along the beach in the mornings, mostly alone. Other walks inland into the woods, picking mushrooms or mahgoti leaves for tea. She had liked music always, and the more since meeting Alessan. And yes, some six or seven years ago she had begun to have her own intermittent dreams of finding love and passion somewhere in the world. Not often though, and the man seldom had a face in those dreams.

There was a mans face with her now though, and this was not a dream. Nor was it play. It was death.

Entrances and endings. A candle shaping fire before it went out.

She was lying on his bed, naked to his sight and touch save for the jewelry shining at wrist and throat and ears and in her hair. Light blazed from all corners of the room. It seemed that Anghiar liked to watch his women respond to what he did. Come on top of me, hed murmured in her ear. Later, she had replied.

He had laughed, a husky sound deep in his throat, and had moved to be above her, naked as well, save for his ruffled white shirt which hung open showing the delicate blond hairs on his chest.

He was a skillful lover, a deeply experienced one. It was what let her kill him, in the end.

He lowered his head to her breasts before entering her. He took one nipple in his mouth, surprisingly gently, and began to run his tongue in circles over it.

Catriana closed her eyes for a moment. She made a sound, one she thought was right. She stretched her hands catlike above her head, moving her body sinuously under the pressure of his mouth and hands.

She touched the black comb in her hair. Red vixen. She moaned again. His hands were on her thighs, moving upward and between, his mouth was still at her breast. She slid the comb free, pressed the catch so the blade sprang open. And then, moving without haste, as if she had all the time in the world, as if this single moment were the gathered sum of all the moments of her life, she brought her weapon down and plunged it into his throat.

Which meant that his life was over.

You could buy anything you wanted in Senzios weapon market. Anything at all. Including a womans ornament with a hidden blade. And poison on the blade. An ornament for the hair, in black, with shining jewels, one of which released the spring that freed the blade. An exquisite, deadly thing.

Grafted in Ygrath, of course. For that was central to her plan tonight.

Anghiars head snapped back in shock. His mouth twisted in an involuntary snarl as his eyes bulged wide in staring agony. There was blood pumping from his throat, soaking into the sheets and the pillows, covering her.

He screamed, a terrible sound. He rolled off her, off the bed, onto the carpeted floor, clutching desperately at his throat. He screamed again. There was so much blood pulsing from him. He tried to stop it, pressing his hands to the wound. It didnt matter. It wasnt the wound that would kill him. She watched him, heard the screaming stop, followed by a wet, bubbling sound. Anghiar of Barbadior toppled slowly over on one side, mouth still open, blood leaking from his throat onto the carpet. And then his blue eyes clouded and closed.

Catriana looked down at her hands. They were steady as stone. And so was the beat of her heart. In a moment that was all the moments in her life. Entrances and endings.

There was a furious pounding on the locked door. Frantic shouting, a panic-stricken volley of curses.

She was not yet done. They could not be allowed to take her. She knew what sorcery could do to the mind. If they had her alive they had all of her friends. They would know everything. She was under no illusions, had known there was a final step from the time she formed this plan.

They were battering against the door now. It was large and heavy, would hold a moment or two. She rose up and put on the gown again. She did not want to be naked now, she couldnt have really said why.

Bending over the bed she took the Ygrathen weapon, that glittering agency of death, and, careful of the treated blade, laid it beside Anghiar to be quickly found. It was necessary that it be found.

There was a sharp splintering sound from the door, more shouting, a tumult of noise in the corridor.

She thought about setting fire to the room—candle to blaze, it appealed to her—but no, they had to find Anghiars body and exactly what had killed him. She opened the casement window and stepped up on the ledge. The window was elegantly designed, easily tall enough for her to stand upright before it. She looked outward and down for a moment. The room was over the garden, far above it. More than high enough. The scent of the sejoia trees came drifting up, and the heavy sweetness of tainflowers, and there were other night flowers whose names she did not know. Both moons had risen now, Vidomni and Ilarion watching her. She looked at them for a moment but it was to Morian she prayed, for it was toward Morian she was crossing, through the last portal of all.

She thought of her mother. Of Alessan. Of his dream that had become hers, and for which she was now to die in a land not her own. Briefly she thought of her father, knowing how much this all had to do

with making redress, with the way each generation seemed to put its mark upon the next, one way or another. Let it be enough, she prayed then, aiming the thought like an arrow of the mind toward Morian in her Halls.

The door burst inward with a grinding crash. Half a dozen men stumbled into the room. It was time.

Catriana turned back from the stars and the two moons and the garden. She looked down at the men from the window-ledge. There was a singing in her heart, a crescendo of hope and pride.

"Death to Barbadiors servants!" she screamed at the top of her voice. "Freedom for Senziol" she cried, and then: "Long live King Brandin of the Palm!”

One man, quicker than the others, reacted, springing across the room. He was not quite quick enough, not as fast as she. She had already turned, the acid of those last, necessary words eating in her brain. She saw the moons again, Eannas stars, the wide, waiting darkness between them and beyond.

She leaped. Felt the night wind in her face and in her hair, saw the dark ground of the garden begin to hurtle up toward her, heard voices for an instant, and then none at all, only the loud, rushing wind. She was alone, falling. She had always been alone it seemed. Endings. A candle. Memories. A dream, a prayer of flames, that they might come. Then a last doorway, an unexpectedly gentle darkness seemed to open wide before her in the air. She closed her eyes just before she went through.