‘In all the ways that you forsook when you chose exile here and love of the dead over the heart and the bed of your wife.’
In any normal, any halfway normal time there would have been a reaction to this from the court. There would have had to be. Dianora heard nothing though, only the sound of a great many people breathing carefully as Brandin opened his eyes again to look down upon the singer. There was an unveiled triumph in the Ygrathen woman’s face.
‘She was invited here,’ he repeated almost wistfully. ‘I could have compelled her but I chose not to do so. She had made her feelings clear and I left the choice to her. I thought it was the kinder, fairer action. It would appear that my sin lies in not having ordered her to take ship for this peninsula.’
So many different griefs and shapes of pain seemed to be warring for pre-eminence within Dianora. Behind the King she could see d’Eymon; his face was a sickly grey. He met her eyes for only an instant then quickly looked away. Later she might think of ways to use this sudden ascendancy over him but right now she felt only pity for the man. He would offer to resign tonight, she knew. Offer, probably, to kill himself after the old fashion. Brandin would refuse, but after this nothing would be quite the same.
For a great many reasons.
Brandin said, ‘I think you have told me what I had need to know.’
‘The Chiaran acted alone,’ Isolla volunteered unexpectedly. She gestured at Camena, in the bone-cracking grip of the soldiers behind her. ‘He joined us when he visited Ygrath two years ago. Our purposes appeared to march together this far.’
Brandin nodded. ‘This far,’ he echoed quietly. ‘I thought that might be the case. Thank you for confirming it,’ he added gravely.
There was a silence. ‘You promised me an easy death,’ Isolla said, holding herself very straight.
‘I did,’ Brandin said. ‘I did promise you that.’
Dianora stopped breathing. The King looked at Isolla without expression for what seemed an unbearably long time.
‘You can have no idea,’ he said at last, in a voice little above a whisper, ‘how happy I was that you had come to make music for me again.’
Then he moved his right hand, in exactly the same casual gesture he would use to dismiss a servant or a petitioner.
Isolla’s head exploded like an overripe fruit smashed with a hammer. Dark blood burst from her neck as her body collapsed like a sack. Dianora was standing too near; the blood of the slain woman spattered thickly on her gown and face. She stumbled backwards. A hideous illusion of reptilian creatures was coiling and twisting in the place where Isolla’s head had been mashed to a formless, oozing pulp.
There was screaming everywhere and a pandemonium as the court backed away. One figure suddenly ran forward. Stumbling, almost falling in its haste, the figure jerked out a sword. Then awkwardly, with great clumsy two-handed slashes, Rhun the Fool began hacking at the dead body of the singer.
His face was weirdly distorted with rage and revulsion. Foam and mucus ran from his mouth and nose. With one savage butcher’s blow he severed an arm from the woman’s torso. Something dark and green and blind appeared to undulate from the stump of Isolla’s shoulder, leaving a trail of glistening black slime. Behind Dianora someone gagged with horror.
‘Stevan!’ she heard Rhun cry brokenly. And amid nausea and chaos and terror, an overwhelming pity suddenly laid hard siege to her heart. She looked at the frantically labouring Fool, clad exactly like the King, bearing a King’s sword. Spittle flew from his mouth.
‘Music! Stevan! Music! Stevan!’ Rhun shouted obsessively, and with each slurred, ferocious articulation of the words his slender, jewelled court sword went up and down, glinting brilliantly in the streaming light, hewing the dead body like meat. He lost his footing on the slippery floor and fell to his knees with the force of his own fury. A grey thing with eyes on waving stalks appeared to attach itself like a bloodleech to his knee.
‘Music,’ Rhun said one last time, softly, with unexpected clarity. Then the sword slipped through his fingers and he sat in a puddle of blood beside the mutilated corpse of the singer, his balding head slewed awkwardly down and to one side, his white-and-gold court garments hopelessly soiled, weeping as though his heart was broken.
Dianora turned to Brandin. The King was motionless, standing exactly as he had been throughout, his hands relaxed at his sides. He gazed at the appalling scene in front of him with a frightening detachment.
‘There is always a price,’ he said quietly, almost to himself, through the incessant screaming and tumult that filled the Audience Chamber. Dianora took one hesitant step towards him then, but he had already turned and, with d’Eymon quickly following, Brandin left the room through the door behind the dais.
With his departure the slithering, oleaginous creatures immediately disappeared, but not the mangled body of the singer or the pitiful, crumpled figure of the Fool. Dianora seemed to be alone near them; everyone else had surged back towards the doors. Isolla’s blood felt hot where it had landed on her skin.
People were tripping and pushing each other in their frantic haste to quit the room now that the King was gone. She saw the soldiers hustling Camena di Chiara away through a side door. Other soldiers came forward with a sheet to cover Isolla’s body. They had to move Rhun away to do it; he didn’t seem to understand what was happening. He was still weeping, his face grotesquely screwed up like a hurt child’s. Dianora moved a hand to wipe at her cheek and her fingers came away streaked with blood. The soldiers placed the sheet over the singer’s body. One of them gingerly picked up the arm Rhun had severed and pushed it under the sheet as well. Dianora saw him do that. There seemed to be blood all over her face. On the very edge of losing all control she looked around for help, any kind of help.
‘Come, my lady,’ said a desperately needed voice that was somehow by her side. ‘Come. Let me take you back to the saishan.’
‘Oh, Scelto,’ she whispered. ‘Please. Please do that, Scelto.’
The news blazed through the dry tinder of the saishan setting it afire with rumour and fear. An assassination attempt from Ygrath. With Chiaran participation.
And it had very nearly succeeded.
Scelto hustled Dianora down the corridor to her rooms and with a bristling protectiveness slammed the door on the nervous, fluttering crowd that clung and hovered in the hallway like so many silk-clad moths. Murmuring continuously he undressed and washed her, and then wrapped her carefully into her warmest robe. She was shivering uncontrollably, unable to speak. He lit the fire and made her sit before it. In docile submission she drank the mahgoti tea he prepared as a sedative. Two cups of it, one after the other. Eventually the trembling stopped. She still found it difficult to speak. He made her stay in the chair before the fire. She didn’t want to leave it anyway.
Her brain felt battered, numb. She seemed to be utterly incapable of marshalling any understanding, of shaping an adequate response to what had just happened.
One thought only kept driving the others away, pounding in her head like the hammer of a herald’s staff on the floor. A thought so impossible, so disabling, that she tried, with all she could, through the blinding pulse of an onrushing headache, to block it out. She couldn’t. The hammering crashed through, again and again: she had saved his life.
Tigana had been a single pulsebeat away from coming back into the world. The pulse-beat of Brandin that the crossbow would have ended.
Home was a dream she’d had yesterday. A place where children used to play. Among towers near the mountains, by a river, on curving sweeps of white or golden sand beside a palace at the edge of the sea. Home was a longing, a desperate dream, a name in her dreams. And this afternoon she had done the one thing she could possibly have done to bar that name from the world, to lock it into a dream. Until all the dreams, too, died.
How was she to deal with that? How possibly to cope with what it meant? She had come here to kill Brandin of Ygrath, to end his life that lost Tigana might
live again. And instead …
The shivering started once more. Fussing and murmuring, Scelto built up the fire and brought yet another blanket for her knees and feet. When he saw the tears on her face he made a queer helpless sound of distress. Someone knocked loudly on her door some time later and she heard Scelto driving them away with language she had never known him to use before.
Gradually, very slowly, she began to pull herself together. From the colour of the light that gently drifted down through the high windows she knew that the afternoon would be waning towards dusk. She rubbed her cheeks and eyes with the backs of her hands. She sat up. She had to be ready when twilight came; twilight was when Brandin sent to the saishan.
She rose from her chair, pleased to find that her legs were steadier. Scelto rushed up, protesting, but when he saw her face he quickly checked himself. Without another word he led her through the inner doors and down that hallway to the baths. His ferocious glare silenced the attendants there. She had a sense that he would have struck them if they had spoken; she had never heard of him doing a single violent act. Not since he had killed a man and lost his own manhood.
She let them bathe her, let the scented oils soften her skin. There had been blood on it that afternoon. The waters swirled around her and then away. The attendants washed her hair. After, Scelto painted the nails of her fingers and toes. A soft shade, dusty rose. Far from the colour of blood, far from anger or grief. Later she would paint her lips the same shade. She doubted they would make love, though. She would hold him and be held. She went back to her room to wait for the summons.
From the light she knew when evening had fallen. Everyone in the saishan always knew when evening fell. The day revolved towards and then away from the hour of darkness. She sent Scelto outside, to receive the word when it came.
A short time after he came back and told her that Brandin had sent for Solores.
Anger flamed wildly within her. It exploded like … like the head of Isolla of Ygrath in the Audience Chamber. Dianora could scarcely draw breath, so fierce was her sudden rage. Never in her life had she felt anything like this—this white-hot cauldron in her heart. After Tigana fell, after her brother was driven away, her hatred had been a shaped thing, controlled, channelled, driven by purpose, a guarded flame that she’d known would have to burn a long time.
This was an inferno. A cauldron boiling over inside her, prodigious, overmastering, sweeping all before it like a lava flow. Had Brandin been in her room at that moment she could have ripped his heart out with her nails and teeth—as the women tore Adaon on the mountainside. She saw Scelto take an involuntary backwards step away from her; she had never known him to fear her or anyone else before. It was not an observation that mattered now.
What mattered, all that mattered, the only thing, was that she had saved the life of Brandin of Ygrath today, trampling into muck and spattered blood the clear, unsullied memory of her home and the oath she’d sworn in coming here so long ago. She had violated the essence of everything she once had been; violated herself more cruelly than had any man who’d ever lain with her for a coin in that upstairs room in Certando.
And in return? In return, Brandin had just sent for Solores di Corte, leaving her to spend tonight alone.
Not, not a thing he should have done.
It did not matter that even within the fiery heat of her own blazing Dianora could understand why he might have done this thing. Understand how little need he would have tonight for wit or intelligence, for sparkle, for questions or suggestions. Or desire. His need would be for the soft, unthinking, reflexive gentleness that Solores gave. That she herself apparently did not. The cradling worship, tenderness, the soothing voice. He would need shelter tonight. She could understand: it was what she needed too, needed desperately, after what had happened.
But she needed it from him.
And so it came to be that, alone in her bed that night, sheltered by no one and by nothing, Dianora found herself naked and unable to hide from what came when the fires of rage finally died.
She lay unsleeping through the first and then through the second chiming of the bells that marked off the triads of the dark hours, but before the third chiming that heralded the coming of grey dawn two things had happened within her.
The first was the inexorable return of the single strand of memory she’d always been careful to block out from among all the myriad griefs of the year Tigana was occupied. But she truly was unsheltered and exposed in the dark of that Ember Night, drifting terribly far from whatever moorings her soul had found.
While Brandin, on the far wing of the palace, sought what comfort he could in Solores di Corte, Dianora lay as in an open space and alone, unable to deflect any of the images that now came sweeping back from years ago. Images of love and pain and the loss of love in pain that were far too keen—too icy keen a wind in the heart—to be allowed at any normal time.
But the finger of death had rested on Brandin of Ygrath that day, and she alone had guided it away, steering the King past the darkest portal of Morian, and tonight was an Ember Night, a night of ghosts and shadows. It could not be anything like a normal time, and it was not. What came to Dianora, terribly, one after another in unceasing progression like waves of the dark sea, were her last memories of her brother before he went away.
He had been too young to fight by the Deisa. No one under fifteen, Prince Valentin had proclaimed before riding sternly north to war. Alessan, the Prince’s youngest child, had been taken away south in hiding by Danoleon, the High Priest of Eanna, when word came that Brandin was coming down upon them.
That was after Stevan had been slain. After the one victory. They had all known—the weary men who had fought and survived, and the women and the aged and the children left behind—that Brandin’s coming would mark the end of the world they had lived in and loved.
They hadn’t known then how literally true that was: what the Sorcerer-King of Ygrath could do and what he did. This they were to learn in the days and months that followed as a hard and brutal thing that grew like a tumour and then festered in the souls of those who survived.
The dead of Deisa are the lucky ones. So it was said, more and more often, in whispers and in pain in the year Tigana died, by those who endured the dying.
Dianora and her brother were left with a mother whose mind had snapped like a bowstring with the tidings of Second Deisa. Even as the vanguard of the Ygrathens entered the city itself, occupying the streets and squares of Tigana, the noble houses and the delicately coloured Palace by the Sea, she seemed to let slip her last awareness of the world to wander, mute and gentle, through a space neither of her children could travel to with her.
Sometimes she would smile and nod at invisible things as she sat amid the rubble of their courtyard that summer, with smashed marble all around her, and her daughter’s heart would ache like an old wound in the rains of winter.
Dianora set herself to run the household as best she could, though three of the servants and apprentices had died with her father. Two others ran away not long after the Ygrathens came and the destruction began. She couldn’t even blame them. Only one of the women and the youngest of the apprentices stayed with them.
Her brother and the apprentice waited until the long wave of burnings and demolition had passed, then they sought work clearing away rubble or repairing walls as a limited rebuilding started under Ygrathen orders. Life began to return towards a normality. Or what passed for normality in a city now called Lower Corte in a province of that name.
In a world where the very word Tigana could not be heard by anyone other than themselves. Soon they stopped using it in public places. The pain was too great: the twisting feeling inside that came with the blank look of incomprehension on the faces of the Ygrathens or the traders and bankers from Corte who had swarmed quickly down to seek what profit they could among the rubble and the slow rebuilding of a city. It was a hurt for which, truly, there was no name.
Dianora could remember
, with jagged, sharp-edged clarity, the first time she’d called her home Lower Corte. They all could, all the survivors: it was, for each of them, a moment embedded like a fish hook in the soul. The dead of Deisa, First or Second, were the lucky ones, so the phrase went that year.
She watched her brother come into a bitter maturity that first summer and fall, grieving for his vanished smile, laughter lost, the childhood too soon gone, not knowing how deeply the same hard lessons and absences were etched in her own hollow, unlovely face. She was sixteen in the late summer, he turned fifteen in the fall. She made a cake on his naming day, for the apprentice, the one old woman, her mother, her brother and herself. They had no guests; assembly of any kind was forbidden throughout that year. Her mother had smiled when Dianora gave her a slice of the dark cake—but Dianora had known the smile had nothing to do with any of them.
Her brother had known it too. Preternaturally grave he had kissed his mother on the forehead and then his sister, and had gone out into the night. It was, of course, illegal to be abroad after nightfall, but something kept driving him out to walk the streets, past the random fires that still smouldered on almost every corner. It was as if he was daring the Ygrathen patrols to catch him. To punish him for being fourteen in the season of war.
Two soldiers were knifed in the dark that fall. Twenty death-wheels were hoisted in swift response. Six women and five children were among those bound aloft to die. Dianora knew most of them; there weren’t so very many people left in the city, they all knew each other. The screaming of the children, then their diminishing cries were things she needed shelter from in her nights forever after.
No more soldiers were killed.
Her brother continued to go out at night. She would lie awake until she heard him come in. He always made a sound, deliberately, so she would hear him and be able to fall asleep. Somehow, he knew she would be awake, though she had never said a word.
He would have been handsome, with his dark hair and deep brown eyes, if he hadn’t been so thin and if the eyes were not shadowed and ringed by sleeplessness and grief. There was not a great deal of food that first winter—most of the harvest had been burned, and the rest confiscated—but Dianora did the best she could to feed the five of them. About the look in his eyes there was nothing she could do. Everyone had that look that year. She could see it in her mirror.