‘Good night,’ she said.
‘Good night,’ Catriana replied, after a moment.
Alais tried to read an invitation to further conversation in her tone, but she wasn’t sure. If Catriana wanted to talk, she decided, she had only to say something.
They blew out their bedside candles and lay silently in the semi-darkness. Alais watched the red glow of the fire, curled her toes around the hot brick Menka had put at the foot of her bed, and thought ruefully that the distance to Selvena’s side of the room had never seemed so great.
Some time later, still unsleeping though the fire was down to its embers, she heard a burst of hilarity from the three men downstairs. The warm, carrying sound of her father’s laughter somehow worked its way into her and eased her distress. He was home. She felt sheltered and safe. Alais smiled to herself in the darkness. She heard the men come upstairs soon after, and go to their separate rooms.
She remained awake for a while, with an ear perked to catch the sound of her sister in the hallway—though she didn’t really believe even Selvena would do that. She heard nothing, and eventually she fell asleep.
She dreamt of lying on a hilltop in a strange place. Of a man there with her. Lowering himself upon her. A mild moonless night glittering with stars. She lay with him upon that windy height amid a scattering of dew-drenched summer flowers, and in the high, unknown place of that dreaming Alais was filled with complex yearnings she could never have named aloud.
It was bitterly cold in the dungeon where they had thrown him at last. The stones were damp and icy, they smelled of urine and faeces. He’d only been allowed to put back on his linen underclothing and his hose. There were rats in the cell. He couldn’t see them in the blackness but he had been able to hear them from the beginning and he’d been bitten twice already as he dozed.
Earlier, he had been naked. The new Captain of the Guard—the replacement for the one who’d killed himself—had permitted his men to play with their prisoner before locking him up for the night. They all knew Tomasso’s reputation. Everyone knew his reputation. He had made sure of that; it had been part of the plan.
So the guards had stripped him in the harsh brightness of the guardroom and they had amused themselves coarsely, pricking him with their swords or with the heated poker from the fire, sliding them around his flaccid sex, prodding him in the buttocks or the belly. Bound and helpless, Tomasso had wanted only to close his eyes and wish it all away.
For some reason it was the memory of Taeri that wouldn’t let him do that. He still couldn’t believe his younger brother was dead. Or that Taeri had been so brave and so decisive at the end. It made him want to cry, thinking about it, but he was not going to let the Barbadians see that. He was a Sandreni. Which seemed to mean more to him now, naked and near the end, than it ever had before.
So he kept his eyes open and he fixed them bleakly on the new captain. He did his best to ignore the things they were doing to him, and the sniggering, brutal suggestions as to what would happen tomorrow. They weren’t very imaginative actually. He knew the morning’s reality was going to be worse. Intolerably worse.
They hurt him a little with their blades and drew blood a few times, but nothing very much—Tomasso knew they were under orders to save him for the professionals in the morning. Alberico would be present then, as well.
This was just play.
Eventually the captain grew tired of Tomasso’s steady gaze, or else he decided that there was enough blood flowing down the prisoner’s legs, puddling on the floor. He ordered his men to stop. Tomasso’s bonds were cut and they gave him back his undergarments and a filthy pest-infested strip of blanket and they took him down the stairs to the dungeons of Astibar and they threw him into the blackness of one of them.
The entrance was so low that even on his knees he’d scraped his head on the stone when they pushed him in. More blood, he realized, as his hand came away sticky. It didn’t actually seem to matter very much.
He hated the rats though. He’d always been afraid of rats. He rolled the useless blanket as tightly as he could and tried to use it as a feeble club. It was hard though in the dark.
Tomasso wished he were a physically braver man. He knew what was coming in the morning, and the thought, now that he was alone, turned his bowels to jelly.
He heard a sound, and realized a moment later that he was whimpering. He fought to keep control of himself. He was alone though, and in freezing darkness in the hands of his enemies, and there were rats. He couldn’t entirely keep the sounds from coming. He felt as if his heart was broken, as if it lay in jagged pieces at odd angles in his breast. Among the fragments he tried to assemble a curse for Herado and his betrayal, but nothing seemed equal to what his nephew had done. Nothing seemed large enough to encompass it.
He heard another rat and lashed out blindly with his rolled weapon. He hit something and heard a squeal. Again and again he pounded at the place of that sound. He thought he had killed it. One of them. He was trembling, but the frenzy of activity seemed to help him fight back his weakness. He didn’t weep any more. He leaned back against the damp slime of the stone wall, wincing because of his open cuts. He closed his eyes, though he couldn’t see in any case, and he thought of sunlight.
It was then that he must have dozed, because he woke suddenly with a shout of pain: one of the rats had bitten viciously at his thigh. He flailed about with the blanket for a few moments, but he was shivering now and beginning to feel genuinely ill. His mouth was swollen and pulpy from Alberico’s blow in the cabin. He found it painful to swallow. He felt his forehead and decided he was feverish.
Which is why, when he saw the wan light of a candle, he was sure he was hallucinating. He was able to look around though by its glow. The cell was tiny. There was a dead rat near his right leg and there were two more living ones—big as cats—near the door. He saw, on the wall beside him, a scratched-out image of the sun with notches for days cut into the rim. It had the saddest face Tomasso could ever remember seeing. He looked at it for a long time.
Then he looked back towards the glowing light and realized with certainty that this was a hallucination, or a dream.
His father was holding the candle, dressed in the blue-silver robe of his burial, looking down with an expression different from any Tomasso could ever remember seeing on his face.
The fever must be extreme, he decided; his mind was conjuring forth in this abyss an image of something his shattered heart so desperately desired. A look of kindness—and even, if one wanted to reach for the word, even of love—in the eyes of the man who’d whipped him as a child and then designated him as useful for two decades of plotting against a Tyrant.
Which had ended tonight. Which would truly end, most horribly, for Tomasso in the morning, amid pain he didn’t even have the capacity to imagine. He liked this dream though, this fever-induced fantasy. There was light in it. It kept the rats away. It even seemed to ease the bone-numbing cold of the wet stones beneath him and against his back.
He lifted an unsteady hand towards the flame. Through a dry throat and torn, puffy lips he croaked something. What he wanted to say was, ‘I’m sorry,’ to the dream-image of his father, but he couldn’t make the words come right.
This was a dream though, his dream, and the image of Sandre seemed to understand.
‘You have nothing to be sorry for,’ Tomasso heard his dream-father say. So gently. ‘It was my fault and only mine. Through all those years and at the end. I knew Gianno’s limitations from the start. I had too many hopes for you as a child. It … affected me too much. After.’
The candle seemed to waver a little. A part of Tomasso, a corner of his heart, seemed to be knitting itself slowly back together, even though this was only a dream, only his own longing. A last feeble fantasy of being loved before they flayed him.
‘Will you let me tell you how sorry I am for the folly that has condemned you to this? Will you hear me if I tell you I have been proud of you, in my fashion?’
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Tomasso let himself weep. The words were balm for the deepest ache he knew. Crying made the light blur and swim though, and so he raised his shaking hands, and kept trying to wipe the tears away. He wanted to speak but his shattered mouth could not form words. He nodded his head though, over and over. Then he had a thought and he raised his left hand—the heart hand, of oaths and fidelity—towards this dream of his father’s ghost.
And slowly Sandre’s hand came down, as if from a long, long way off, from years and years away, seasons lost and forgotten in the turning of time and pride, and father and son touched fingertips together.
It was a more solid contact than Tomasso had thought it would be. He closed his eyes for a moment, yielding to the intensity of his feelings. When he opened them his father’s image seemed to be holding something out towards him. A vial of some liquid. Tomasso did not understand.
‘This is the last thing I can do for you,’ the ghost said in a strange, unexpectedly wistful voice. ‘If I were stronger I could do more, but at least they will not hurt you in the morning now. They will not hurt you any more, my son. Drink it, Tomasso, drink it and this will all be gone. All go away, I promise you. Then wait for me, Tomasso, wait if you can in Morian’s Halls. I would like to walk with you there.’
Tomasso still did not understand, but the tone was so mild, so reassuring. He took the dream-vial. Again it was more substantial than he’d expected it to be.
His father nodded encouragement. With trembling hands Tomasso fumbled and removed the stopper. Then with a last gesture—a final mocking parody of himself—he raised it in a wide, sweeping, elaborate salute to his own powers of fantasy and he drained it to the dregs, which were bitter.
His father’s smile was so sad. Smiles are not supposed to be sad, Tomasso wanted to say. He had said that to a boy once, in a temple of Morian at night, in a room where he was not supposed to be. His head felt heavy. He felt as if he were about to fall alseep, even though he already was asleep, and dreaming in his fever. He really didn’t understand. He especially didn’t understand why his father, who was dead, should ask him to wait in Morian’s Halls.
He looked up again, wanting to ask about that. His vision seemed to be going completely strange on him though.
He knew this was so, because the image of his father, looking down upon him, seemed to be crying. There were tears in his father’s eyes.
Which was impossible. Even in a dream.
‘Farewell,’ he heard.
Farewell, he tried to say, in return.
He wasn’t sure if he’d actually managed to form the word, or if he’d only thought it, but just then a darkness more encompassing than he had ever known came down over him like a blanket or a mantle, and the difference between the spoken and the unspoken ceased to matter any more.
P A R T T W O
D I A N O R A
C H A P T E R 7
Dianora could remember the day she came to the Island.
The air that autumn morning had been much like it was today at the beginning of spring—white clouds scudding in a high blue sky as the wind had swept the Tribute Ship through the whitecaps into the harbour of Chiara. Beyond harbour and town the slopes mounting to the hills had been wild with fall colours. The leaves were turning: red and gold and some that clung yet to green, she remembered.
The sails of the Tribute Ship so long ago had been red and gold as well: colours of celebration in Ygrath. She knew that now, she hadn’t known it then. She had stood on the forward deck of the ship to gaze for the first time at the splendour of Chiara’s harbour, at the long pier where the Grand Dukes used to stand to throw a ring into the sea, and from where Letizia had leaped in the first of the Ring Dives to reclaim the ring from the waters and marry her Duke: turning the Dives into the luck and symbol of Chiara’s pride until beautiful Onestra had changed the ending of the story hundreds and hundreds of years ago, and the Ring Dives had ceased. Even so, every child in the Palm knew that legend of the Island. Young girls in each province would play at diving into water for a ring and rising in triumph, with their hair shining wet, to wed a Duke of power and glory.
From near the prow of the Tribute Ship, Dianora had looked up beyond the harbour and palace to gaze at the majesty of snow-crowned Sangarios rising behind them. The Ygrathen sailors had not disturbed her silence. They had allowed her to come forward to watch the Island approach. Once she’d been safely aboard ship and the ship away to sea they’d been kind to her. Women thought to have a real chance at being chosen for the saishan were always treated well on the Tribute Ships. It could make a captain’s fortune in Brandin’s court if he brought home a hostage who became a favourite of the Tyrant.
Sitting now on the southern balcony of the saishan wing, looking out from behind the ornately crafted screen that hid the women from gawkers in the square below, Dianora watched the banners of Chiara and Ygrath flap in the freshening spring breeze, and she remembered how the wind had blown her hair about her face more than twelve years ago. She remembered looking from the bright sails to the slopes of the tree-clad hills running up to Sangarios, from the blue and white of the sea to the clouds in the blue sky. From the tumult and chaos of life in the harbour to the serene grandeur of the palace just beyond. Birds had been wheeling, crying loudly about the three high masts of the Tribute Ship. The rising sun had been a dazzle of light striking along the sea from the east. So much vibrancy in the world, so rich and fair and shining a morning to be alive.
Twelve years ago, and more. She had been twenty-one years old, and nursing her hatred and her secret like two of Morian’s three snakes twining about her heart.
She had been chosen for the saishan.
The circumstances of her taking had made it very likely, and Brandin’s celebrated grey eyes had widened appraisingly when she was led before him two days later. She’d been wearing a silken, pale-coloured gown, she remembered, chosen to set off her dark hair and the dark brown of her eyes.
She had been certain she would be chosen. She’d felt neither triumph nor fear, even though she’d been pointing her life towards that moment for five full years, even though, in that instant of Brandin’s choosing, walls and screens and corridors closed around her that would define the rest of her days. She’d had her hatred and her secret, and guarding the two of them left no room for anything else.
Or so she’d thought at twenty-one.
For all she’d seen and lived through, even by then, Dianora reflected twelve years later on her balcony, she’d known very little—dangerously little—about a great many things that mattered far too much.
Even out of the wind it was cool here on the balcony. The Ember Days were upon them but the flowers were just beginning in the valleys inland and on the hill slopes, and the true onset of spring was some time off even this far north. It had been different at home, Dianora remembered; sometimes there would still be snow in the southern highlands, when the springtime Ember Days had come and passed.
Without looking backwards, Dianora raised a hand. In a moment the castrate had brought her a steaming mug of Tregean khav. Trade restrictions and tariffs, Brandin was fond of saying in private, had to be handled selectively or life could be too acutely marred. Khav was one of the selected things. Only in the palace of course. Outside the walls they drank the inferior products of Corte or neutral Senzio. Once a group of Senzian khav merchants had come as part of a trade embassy to try to persuade him of improvements in the crop they grew and the cup it brewed. Neutral, indeed, Brandin had said judiciously, tasting. So neutral, it hardly seems to be there.
The merchants had withdrawn, consternated and pale, desperately seeking to divine the hidden meaning in the Ygrathen Tyrant’s words. Senzians spent much of their time doing that, Dianora had observed drily to Brandin afterwards. He’d laughed. She’d always been able to amuse him, even in the days when she was too young and inexperienced to do it deliberately.
Which thought reminded her of the young castrate attending her this morn
ing. Scelto was in town collecting her gown for the reception that afternoon; her attendant was one of the newest castrates, sent out from Ygrath to serve the growing saishan in the colony.
He was well trained already. Vencel’s methods might be harsh, but there was no denying that they worked. She decided not to tell the boy that the khav wasn’t strong enough; he would very probably fall to pieces, which would be inconvenient. She’d mention it to Scelto and let him handle the matter. There was no need for Vencel to know: it was useful to have some of the castrates grateful to her as well as afraid. The fear came automatically: a function of who she was here in the saishan. Gratitude or affection she had to work at.
Twelve years and more this spring, she thought again, leaning forward to look down through the screen at the bustling preparations in the square for the arrival of lsolla of Ygrath later that day. At twenty-one she’d been at the peak, she supposed, of whatever beauty she’d been granted. She’d had nothing of such grace at fifteen and sixteen, she remembered—they hadn’t even bothered to hide her from the Ygrathen soldiers at home.
At nineteen she’d begun to be something else entirely, though by then she wasn’t at home and Ygrath was no danger to the residents of Barbadian-ruled Certando. Or not normally, she amended, reminding herself—though this was not, by any means, a thing that really needed a reminder—that she was Dianora di Certando here in the saishan. And across in the west wing as well, in Brandin’s bed.
She was thirty-three years old, and somehow with the years that had slipped away so absurdly fast she was one of the powers of this palace. Which, of course, meant of the Palm. In the saishan only Solores di Corte could be said to vie with her for access to Brandin, and Solores was six years older than she was—one of the first year’s harvest of the Tribute Ships.
Sometimes, even now, it was all a little too much, a little hard to believe. The younger castrates trembled if she even glanced slantwise at them; courtiers—whether from overseas in Ygrath or here in the four western provinces of the Palm—sought her counsel and support in their petitions to Brandin; musicians wrote songs for her; poets declaimed and dedicated verses that spun into hyperbolic raptures about her beauty and her wisdom. The Ygrathens would liken her to the sisters of their god, the Chiarans to the fabled beauty of Onestra before she did the last Ring Dive for Grand Duke Cazal—though the poets always stopped that analogy well before the Dive itself and the tragedies that followed.