Tigana (47 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Can you sing?’ was all that Alessan had said.

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

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

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

‘Who is it?’ she called.

‘Devin. Will you let me come in?’

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

‘What is it?’ she called.

‘I’m not sure, actually. May I come in?’

‘The door isn’t locked,’ she said finally. She made sure the blankets were covering her, but the room was so dark it didn’t really matter.

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

‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘You should lock your door, you know.’

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

She heard him reach for it and sink back with a sigh into the deep armchair.

‘I suppose that’s true enough,’ he said in a drained voice. ‘And I’m sorry, you don’t really need me to be telling you how to take care of yourself.’

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

He was silent. Then: ‘Catriana, I honestly don’t know why I’m here. I’m in such a strange mood tonight. I feel ridiculously sad.’

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

‘You light fires on the Ember Days?’ he asked.

‘Evidently.’

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

‘That’s strange. So did my father,’ Devin said wonderingly. ‘I’ve never thought about that. I never knew why he did it. My father was not a man who explained things.’

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

‘A reminder of Tigana?’ she said.

‘It would have to have been. As if … as if the Triad didn’t deserve full devotion or observance because of what they’d allowed.’ He paused, then in a meditative tone added, ‘It’s another example of our pride, isn’t it? Of that Tiganese arrogance Sandre always talks about. We make bargains with the Triad, we balance scales with them: they take away our name, we take away a part of their rites.’

‘I suppose so,’ she said, though it didn’t really strike her that way. Devin talked like this sometimes. She didn’t see the action as one of pride, or bargaining, just as a reminder to the self of how great a wrong had come to pass. A reminder, like Alessan’s blue wine.

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

‘I don’t know what mine was like,’ he said in that tightened voice. ‘I don’t even know if I could say that my father
is proud. I guess I don’t know very much about him either.’ He really did sound peculiar.

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

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

She masked both reactions behind a sardonic laugh. ‘She
was
roaming, I see. You look like you’ve been to war.’

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

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

‘No,’ he said quickly. ‘No, it isn’t that. It is … hardly that, Catriana. It has been a … difficult night.’

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

He pushed on doggedly. ‘Not that way. It’s so strange. So complicated. I think I learned something there. I think—’

‘Devin, I really
don’t
want the details!’ She was angry with herself for how edgy this sort of thing made her feel.

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

‘Such insight,’ she mocked, reflexively. ‘She must be even more skilful than you imagined.’

Which silenced him. He leaned back in the chair again
and she couldn’t see his face. In the quiet that followed her breathing grew calmer.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said at length. ‘I didn’t mean that. I’m tired. I’ve had some bad dreams tonight. What do you want from me, Devin?’

‘I’m not sure,’ he said. ‘I guess, to be a friend.’

Again she felt pushed and uneasy. She resisted an instinctive, nervous urge to suggest he go write a letter to one of Rovigo’s daughters. She said, ‘I’ve never been good at that, even as a child.’

‘Nor I,’ he said, shifting forward again. He had pushed his hair into a semblance of order. He said, ‘It is more than that between you and me though. You hate me sometimes, don’t you.’

She felt her heart thump. ‘We do not have to discuss this, Devin. I don’t hate you.’

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

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

‘Not then. I figured it out later.’

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

He winced. ‘Probably not. I don’t know. I thought I’d tell you I want to be.’ There was a silence. ‘I honestly don’t know, Catriana. I’m sorry.’

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

‘I don’t hate you, Devin,’ she said finally. ‘Truly, I don’t. Nothing like that. It is an awkward memory, I won’t deny that, but I don’t think it has ever hindered us in what we have to do. Which is what really matters, isn’t it?’

‘I suppose so,’ he said. She couldn’t see his face. ‘If that is all that matters.’

‘I mean, it’s true what I said before: I’ve always been bad at making friends.’

‘Why?’

Pieces of the puzzle again. But she said, ‘As a girl, I’m not sure. Maybe I was shy, perhaps proud. I never felt easy in our village, even though it was the only home I’d ever known. But since Baerd named Tigana for me, since I heard the name, that has been all there is in the world for me. All that counts for anything at all.’

She could almost hear him thinking about that.

He said, ‘Ice is for endings.’

Which is exactly what Alienor had said to her. He went on, ‘You are still a living person, Catriana. With a heart, a life to live, access to friendship, even to love. Why are you sealing yourself down to the one thing only?’

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

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

‘Oh,’ he said.

‘Not a word, Devin! Don’t say a word!’

He obeyed, sitting very still, almost invisible in the depths of his chair. Abruptly she blew out the candle; she didn’t want light now. And then, because it was dark, and because he was so obligingly silent, she was gradually able to regain control of herself. To move past the meaning of this moment without weeping. It took a long time in the darkness but
eventually she was able to draw a long, steady breath and know she was all right.

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

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

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

She thought about waking him and sending him back to his own room. It would most certainly raise eyebrows if they were seen leaving here together in the morning. She discovered, though, that she didn’t really care. She also realized that she minded less than she’d expected that he’d figured out the one truth about her and had just learned another. About her father, but really more about herself. She wondered about that, why it didn’t bother her more.

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

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

C H A P T E R   1 1

E
lena stood by the open door of Mattio’s house looking up the dark road to the moat and the raised drawbridge, watching the candles flicker and go out one by one in the windows of Castle Borso. At intervals people walked past her into the house, offering only a nod or a brief greeting if anything at all. It was a night of battle that lay ahead of them, and everyone arriving was aware of that.

From the village behind her there came no sound at all, and no light. All the candles were long snuffed out, fires banked, windows covered over, even the chinks at the base of doors blocked by cloth or rags. The dead walked on the first of the Ember Nights, everyone knew that.

There was little noise from within the house behind her, though fifteen or twenty people must have arrived by now, crowding into Mattio’s home at the edge of the village. Elena didn’t know how many more Walkers were yet to join them here, or later, at the meeting-place; she did know that there would be too few. There hadn’t been enough last year, or the year before that, and they had lost those battles very badly. The Ember Night wars were killing the Walkers faster than young ones like Elena herself were growing up to replace them. Which is why they were losing each spring, why they would almost certainly lose tonight.

It was a starry night, with only the one moon risen, the white crescent of Vidomni as she waned. It was cold as well,
here in the highlands at the very beginning of spring. Elena wrapped her arms about herself, gripping her elbows with her hands. It would be a different sky, a different feel to the night entirely, in only a few hours, when the battle began.

Carenna walked in, giving her quick warm smile, but not stopping to talk. It was not a time for talking. Elena was worried about Carenna tonight; she had just had a child two weeks before. It was too soon for her to be doing this. But she was needed, they were all needed, and the Ember Night wars did not tarry for any man or woman, or for anything that happened in the world of day.