They spent the second night at another inn beside the river, just outside the walls of Stevanien, having arrived after sundown curfew closed the city gates. They ate alone this time, and she talked to the Senzian until late. He was decent and sober, belying the clichés about his decadent province, and it was clear that he liked her. She enjoyed his company, and she was even attracted to his dry, witty manner. She went to bed alone though. This was not the village in Certando: she had no obligations.
Or not those kinds of obligations. And as for pleasure, or the ordinary needs of human interaction … she would have been honestly uncomprehending if anyone had mentioned them to her.
She was nineteen years old and in Tigana that-had-been.
In the morning, just inside the city walls, she bade farewell to the Senzian, touching palm to palm only briefly. He seemed somewhat affected by the night before but she turned and walked away before he could find whatever words his eyes were reaching for.
She found a hostelry not far away, one where her family had never stayed. She wasn’t really worried about being recognized though; she knew how much she had changed and how many girls named Dianora there were scattered across the Palm. She paid in advance for three nights’ lodging and left her belongings there.
Then she walked out into the streets of what had been Avalle of the Towers not very long ago. Avalle, on the green banks of the Sperion just before the river turned west to find the sea. There was an ache building in her as she went, and what hurt most of all, she found, was how much the same a place could be after everything had changed.
She went through the leather district and the wool district. She could remember skipping along beside her mother when they had all come inland to Avalle to see one of her father’s sculptures ceremoniously placed in some square or loggia. She even recognized the tiny shop where she’d purchased her first grey leather gloves, with coins hoarded from her naming day in the summer for just such a thing.
Grey was a colour for grown young women, not for little girls, the red-bearded artisan had teased. I know, six-year-old Dianora had said proudly that autumn long ago. Her mother had laughed. Once upon a time her mother had been a woman who laughed. Dianora could remember.
In the wool quarter she saw women and girls working tirelessly, carding and spinning as they had for centuries in doorways open to the early-summer early-morning light. Over by the river she could see and smell the dyeing sheds and yards.
When Quileia beyond the mountains to the south had folded inward upon its matriarchy, hundreds upon hundreds of years ago, Avalle had lost a great deal. More perhaps than any other city in the Palm. Once poised directly on one of the two main trade routes through the mountains, it had found itself in danger of sudden inconsequentiality. With a collective ingenuity bordering on genius the city had decisively shifted its orientation and focus.
Within a generation that city of banking and trade to north and south had become the principal centre in all of the Palm for works in leather and for sumptuously dyed wool.
Hardly missing a beat, Avalle pursued its new prosperity and its pride. And the towers kept rising.
With a catch to her heart Dianora finally acknowledged that she had been carefully working her way around the edges of Stevanien, the outlying districts, the artisans’ quarters, looking outwards only and into doorways. Not into the centre, up towards the hill. Where the towers were gone.
And so, realizing that, she did look, standing stock still in the middle of a wide square at the bottom of the street of the Woolguild. There was a small, very beautiful temple of Morian fronting the square, done in marble of a muted rose colour. She gazed at it for a moment, then looked up and beyond.
And in that moment Dianora had a truth brought home to her with finality: how something can seem quite unchanged in all the small surface details of existence where things never really change, men and women being what they are, but how the core, the pulse, the kernel of everything can still have become utterly unlike what it had been before.
The wide beautiful streets seemed even wider than before. But that was because they were almost empty. There was a muted swell of noise over to her left where the riverside market still was, but the sound was not a fraction, her memory told her, not a fraction of what it had been in mornings that were lost.
There were too few people. Too many were gone, or dead, and the Ygrathen soldiers were all the more visible because of how empty the streets were. Dianora let her gaze travel past the temple up the line of the broad boulevard beside it towards the heart of the city.
We can and we will build wide and straight, the people of Avalle had said; even in the very beginning, when towns everywhere else were tortuous warrens of twisty alleys and crooked lanes easy to defend. There will be no city like ours in all the world, and if need comes for defence we will defend ourselves from our towers.
Which were gone. The squat ugly skyline jarred Dianora with a painful discontinuity. It was as if the eye was tricked, looking ceaselessly for something it knew had to be there.
From the earliest days of that broad, elegant city on the banks of the Sperion towers had been associated with Avalle. Assertions of Tiganese pride—sheer arrogance they called it in the provinces of Corte and Chiara and Astibar. They were symbols of internecine rivalry as well—as each noble family or wealthy guild of bankers or traders or artisans thrust its own tower as high as and then higher than they could truly afford. Graceful or warlike, red stone or sandy or grey, the towers of Avalle pushed up towards Eanna’s heaven like a forest within the city walls.
The domestic conflicts had actually become dangerous for a time, with murder and sabotage not nearly uncommon enough, and the best masons and architects claiming stupefying fees. It had been the third Prince Alessan in Tigana by the sea who had put an end to the insanity in the simplest possible way more than two hundred years ago.
He commissioned Orsaria, the most celebrated of the architects, to build for him a palace in Avalle. And that palace was to have a tower, said Prince Alessan, that would be—and would remain, by force of law—the highest in the city.
So it had been. The spire of the Prince’s Tower, slender and graceful, wrapped in bands of green and white to serve as a memory of the sea this far inland, put an end to the competition for the summit of Avalle. And from then on also, by that Prince Alessan’s example which became custom and then tradition, the princes and princesses of Tigana were born in Avalle, in the palace beneath that spire, to mark them as belonging to both of the cities: to Tigana of the Waves and Avalle of the Towers.
There had been over seventy towers once, Dianora knew, crowned in glory by that green and white pre-eminence. Once? Four years ago.
What, Dianora thought, her vision hurting for that absence, is a person who moves through her days as she has always moved, who speaks and walks and labours, eats, makes love, sleeps, sometimes even finds access to laughter, but whose heart has been cut out from her living body? Leaving no scar at all to be seen. No wound by which to remember the sliding blade.
The rubble had all been cleared away. There was no smoke, save from over by the dyeworks, to mar the clear blue of the sky. The day was mild and bright, birds sang a welcome to the coming warmth. There was nothing, nothing at all to show that there had ever been towers in this place. In this low, steadily dwindling town of Stevanien here in its remote corner of the Peninsula of the Palm, in the most oppressed province of them all.
What is such a person? Dianora thought again. That person whose heart was gone? She had no answer, how could she have an answer? Loss coiled to life within her, and hate followed it again, as if both of them were new-born, colder and sharper than before.
She walked up that wide boulevard into the centre of Stevanien. She passed the soldiers’ barracks and the doors of the Governor’s Palace. Not far away she found The Queen. She was hired immediately. To start that same night. Help was badly needed. Help was hard to find. Arduini of Ygrath, who did all his own hirin
g, decided that this pretty creature from Certando had a certain style to her. She would have to do something though, he admonished her, about that wretchedly vulgar highland accent. She promised to try.
Within six months she was speaking almost like a native of the city, he observed. By then he had her out of the kitchen and into the front room waiting on tables, clad in the cream and dark-brown colours around which he had designed his establishment. Colours that happened to suit her very well.
She was quiet, deft, unassuming and polite. She remembered names and patrons’ preferences. She learned quickly. Four months later, in the spring before she turned twenty-one, Arduini offered her the coveted position at the front of The Queen greeting guests and supervising the staff in the three rooms of dining.
She astonished him by refusing. She astonished a great many people. But Dianora knew that this would be far too prominent a position for her own purposes. Which had not changed. If she was to travel north into Corte soon, and clearly marked by now as being from Certando, she needed to have been associated with The Queen, but not so very prominently. Prominent people had questions asked about them, that much she knew.
So she feigned an attack of country-girl anxiety the night Arduini made his offer. She broke two glasses and dropped a platter. Then she spilled Senzian green wine on the Governor himself.
Tearfully she went to Arduini and begged for more time to grow sure of herself. He agreed. It helped that he was in love with her by then. He invited her, gracefully, to become his mistress. In this, too, she demurred, pleading the inevitable tension that such a liaison would elicit within the staff, badly damaging The Queen. It was the right argument; his establishment was Arduini’s true mistress.
In fact, Dianora had resolved to let no man touch her now. She was in Ygrathen territory and she had a purpose. The rules had changed. She had tentatively decided to leave in the fall, north towards Corte. She had been weighing possibilities and excuses for doing so when events had overtaken her so spectacularly.
Slowly circling the Audience Chamber, Dianora paused to greet Doarde’s wife whom she liked. The poet seized the opportunity to present his daughter. The girl blushed, but dipped her head, hands pressed together, in a creditable manner. Dianora smiled at her and moved on.
A steward caught up to her, bearing khav in a black chalice set with red gemstones. A gift, years ago, from Brandin. It was her trademark on occasions such as this: she never drank anything stronger than khav at public receptions. With a guilty glance towards the doorway where she knew Scelto would be stationed against the wall, she took a grateful sip of the hot drink. Praise the Triad and the growers of Tregea, it was dark and rich and very strong.
‘My dear lady Dianora, you are looking more magnificent than ever.’
She turned, smoothly suppressing an expression of distaste. She had recognized the voice: Neso of Ygrath, a minor nobleman from overseas who had recently arrived at Brandin’s court on the first ship of the season, solely in the hope of becoming a major nobleman in the colony. He was, so far as Dianora had been able to tell, talentless and venal.
She smiled radiantly at him and allowed him to touch her hand. ‘My dear Neso, how kind of you to lie so skilfully to an ageing woman.’
She rather liked saying that sort of thing: for, as Scelto had shrewdly observed once, if she was old, what did that make Solores?
Neso hastened to offer all the emphatic, predictable denials. He praised her gown and the vairstone, noting with a courtier’s eye and tongue how exquisitely the stones of her chalice echoed her colours that day. Then, lowering his voice towards an unearned intimacy he asked her for the eighth time at least if she happened to have heard anything further about the planned disposition of that very trivial office of Taxing Master in north Asoli.
It was, in fact, a lucrative position. The incumbent had made his fortune, or enough for his own purposes evidently, and was returning to Ygrath in a few weeks. Dianora hated that sort of graft and she had even been bold enough to say so to Brandin once. A little amused—which had irritated her—he had prosaically pointed out how difficult it was to get men to serve in places as devoid of attraction as the north of Asoli without offering them a chance at modest wealth.
His grey eyes beneath the thick dark eyebrows had rested upon her as she’d wrestled and then finally come to terms with the depressing truth inherent in this. She’d finally looked up and nodded a reluctant agreement. Which made him burst into laughter.
‘I am so relieved,’ chuckled Brandin of Ygrath, ‘that my clumsy reasoning and government meet with your approval.’ She had gone red to the roots of her hair, but then, catching his mood, had laughed herself at the absurdity of her presumption. That had been several years ago.
Now all she did was try, discreetly, to see that positions such as this one did not go to the most transparently greedy of the motley crew of petty Ygrathen courtiers from whom Brandin had to choose. Neso, she had resolved, was not getting this posting if she could help it. The problem was that d’Eymon seemed, for inscrutable reasons of his own, to be favouring Neso’s appointment. She’d already asked Scelto to see if he could find out why.
Now she let her smile fade to an earnestly benevolent look of concern as she gazed at the sleek, plump Ygrathen. Lowering her voice but without leaning towards him she murmured, ‘I am doing what I can. You should know that there seems to be some opposition.’
Neso’s eyes narrowed on the far side of the curl of smoke rising from her khav. With practised subtlety they flicked past her right shoulder to where she knew d’Eymon would still be standing by the King’s door. Neso looked back at her, eyebrows raised very slightly.
Dianora gave a small, apologetic shrug.
‘Have you a … suggestion?’ Neso asked, his brow furrowed with anxiety.
‘I’d start by smiling a little,’ she said with deliberate tartness. There was no point in intriguing in such a way that the whole court knew of it.
Neso forced an immediate laugh and then applauded stagily as if she’d offered an irresistible witticism.
‘Forgive me,’ he said, smiling as ordered. ‘This matters a great deal to me.’
It matters a great deal more to the people of Asoli, you greedy bloodleech, Dianora thought. She laid a hand lightly on Neso’s puffed sleeve.
‘I know it does,’ she said kindly. ‘I will do what I can. If circumstances … allow me to.’
Neso, whatever he was, was no stranger to this sort of thing. Once more the false laugh greeted her non-existent jest. ‘I hope to be able to assist the circumstances,’ he murmured.
She smiled again and withdrew her hand. It was enough. Scelto was going to receive some more money that afternoon. She hoped it would come to a decent part of the vairstone’s cost. As for d’Eymon, she would probably end up talking directly to him later in the week. Or as directly as discussions ever got with that man.
Sipping at her khav she moved on. People came up to her wherever she went. It was bad politics in Brandin’s court not to be on good terms with Dianora di Certando. Conversing absently and inconsequentially she kept an ear pitched for the discreet raps of the Herald’s staff that would be Brandin’s sole announcement. Rhun, she noted, was making faces at himself in one of the mirrors and laughing at the effect. He was in high humour, which was a good sign. Turning the other way she suddenly noticed a face she liked. One that was undeniably central to her own history.
It could be said, in many ways, to have been the Governor’s own fault. So anxious was he to assuage the evident frustration of Rhamanus, captain of that year’s Tribute Ship, that he ordered the Certandan serving-girl—who had apologized so very charmingly after the spilled-wine incident some time ago—to bring rather more of The Queen’s best vintages than were entirely good for any of them at the table.
Rhamanus, young enough to still be ambitious, old enough to feel his chances slipping away, had made some pointedly acid remarks earlier in the day on board the river galley about th
e state of affairs in Stevanien and its environs. So much of a backwater, so desultory in its collection of duties and taxes, he murmured a little too casually, that he wasn’t even sure if the galley run upriver in spring was worthwhile … under the present administrative circumstances.
The Governor, long past the point of ambition but needing a few more years here skimming his share of border tariffs and internal levies, along with the criminal justice fines and confiscations, had winced inwardly and cursed the conjunctions of his planets. Why, when he strove so hard to be decent and uncontentious in everything he did, to leave any waters he entered as unruffled as possible, did he have so little luck?
Short of a massive midsummer military assertion there was no way to force more money or goods out of this impoverished region. If Brandin had seriously wanted to extract real wealth out of Stevanien he would have been better advised not to have so successfully smashed the city and its distrada to its knees.
Not that the Governor would have even dreamt of letting such a furtive thought come anywhere near his lips. But the reality was that he was doing the best he could. If he squeezed the leather or the wool guilds any harder than he was they would simply start to fold. Stevanien, already thinly inhabited—and particularly bereft of men in their prime years—would become a town of ghosts and empty squares. And he had explicit instructions from the King to prevent that.
If the King’s various orders and demands rammed so violently up against each other, in such patent contradiction, what, in all fairness, was a middle-echelon administrator to do?
Not that such a plaint could be used with this bristly, unhappy Rhamanus. What care would the captain have for the Governor’s dilemmas? The Tribute Ship captains were judged by what came home to Chiara in their holds. Their job was to put as much pressure on the local administrators as they could—even to the point, sometimes, of forcing them to surrender a portion of their own levies to bring the contents of the ship nearer to the mark. The Governor had already resigned himself, dismally, to doing just that by the end of the week if the last hurried sweep of the distrada that he’d ordered didn’t produce enough to satisfy Rhamanus. It wouldn’t, he knew. This was an ambitious captain he was dealing with, and there had been a tenuous harvest in Corte last fall—Rhamanus’s next stop.