And then in the stillness of that pass, with the only other sounds the whistle of wind between the hills and the stirring of the horses on the young grass, he heard: ‘My name is Alessan di Tigana bar Valentin. If you are as old as you appear to be, Naddo di Tigana, you will know who I am.’
With a prickling of hairs on his neck and a shiver he could not control, Devin saw Naddo drop to his knees on the cold ground even before the last words were spoken.
‘Oh, my Prince!’ the wounded man cried in a raw voice. And covering his face with his one good hand, he wept.
‘Prince?’ said Ducas, very softly. There was a restive movement among the outlaws. ‘Sertino, you will explain this to me!’
Sertino the wizard looked from Alessan to Erlein, and then down at the weeping man. A curious, almost a frightened, expression crossed his pale, round face.
He said, ‘They are from Lower Corte. It had a different name before Brandin of Ygrath came. He has used his sorcery to take that name away. Only people born there, and wizards because of our own magic, can hear the true name. That is what is happening here.’
‘And “Prince”? Naddo called him that.’
Sertino was silent. He looked over at Erlein, and there was still that odd, uneasy look on his face. He said, ‘Is it true?’
And Erlein di Senzio, with an ironic half-smile, replied, ‘Just don’t let him cut your hair, brother. Unless you like being bound into slavery.’
Sertino’s mouth fell open. Ducas slapped his knee with his hat. ‘Now that,’ he snapped, ‘I do not understand at all. There is too much of this I do not understand. I want explanations, from all of you!’ His voice was harsh, much louder than before. He did not look at Alessan though.
‘I understand it well enough, Ducas,’ came a voice from behind them. It was Magian, the captain of the group that had driven them into the gap. He moved his horse forward as they turned to look at him. ‘I understand that we have made our fortunes tonight. If this is the Prince of a province Brandin hates then all we need do is take him west to Fort Forese across the border and turn him over to the Ygrathens there. With a wizard to boot. And who knows, one of them probably likes boys in his bed, too. Singing boys.’ His smile was a wide, loose thing in the shadows.
He said, ‘There will be rewards. Land. Perhaps even …’
He said nothing more than that. Ever. In rigid disbelief Devin saw Magian’s mouth fall open and his eyes grow briefly wide, then the man slid slowly sideways off his horse to fall with a clatter of sword and bow on the ground beside Erlein.
There was a long-handled dagger in his back.
One of the outlaws from the line behind him, not hurrying at all, dismounted and pulled the dagger free. He wiped it carefully clean on the dead man’s surcoat before sheathing it again at his belt.
‘Not a good idea, Magian’s,’ he said quietly, straightening to look at Ducas. ‘Not a good idea at all. We aren’t informers here, and we don’t serve the Tyrants.’
Ducas slapped his hat back on his head, visibly fighting for control. He took a deep breath. ‘As it happens, I agree. But as it also happens, Arkin, we have a rule here about weapons drawn against each other.’
Arkin was very tall, almost gaunt, and his long face was white, Devin saw, even among the shadows of dusk. He said, ‘I know that, Ducas. It is wasteful. I know. You will have to forgive me.’
Ducas said nothing for a long time. Neither did anyone else. Devin, looking past the dead man, saw the two wizards gazing fixedly at each other in the shadows.
Arkin was still looking at Ducas.
Who finally broke the silence. ‘You are fortunate that I agree with you,’ he said.
Arkin shook his head. ‘We would not have stayed together this long otherwise.’
Alessan neatly dismounted from his horse. He walked over towards Ducas, ignoring the arrows still trained on him. ‘If you are hunting Barbadians,’ he said quietly, ‘I have some idea as to why. I am doing the same thing, in my own way.’ He hesitated. ‘You can do as your dead man suggested: turn me in to Ygrath, and yes, I suspect there would be a reward. Or you can kill us here, and have done with us. You can also let us go our own way from this place. But there is one other, quite different thing you can do.’
‘Which is?’ Ducas seemed to have regained his self-control. His voice was calm again, as it had been at the beginning.
‘Join me. In what I seek to do.’
‘Which is?’
‘To drive both Tyrants from the Palm before this summer is out.’
Naddo looked up suddenly, a brightness in his face. ‘Really, my lord? We can do this? Even now?’
‘There is a chance,’ Alessan said. ‘Especially now. For the first time there is a chance.’ He looked back at Ducas. ‘Where were you born?’
‘In Tregea,’ the other man said after a pause. ‘In the mountains.’
Devin had a moment to think about how completely things had shifted here, that Alessan should be asking the questions now. He felt a stirring within him, of hope renewed and of pride.
The Prince was nodding his head. ‘I thought it might be so. I have heard the stories of a red-headed Captain Ducas who was one of the leaders at Borifort in Tregea during the Barbadian siege there. They never found him after the fort fell.’ He hesitated. ‘I could not help but notice the colour of your hair.’
For a moment the two men were motionless as in a tableau, one on the ground the other on his horse. Then, quite suddenly, Ducas di Tregea smiled.
‘What is left of my hair,’ he murmured wryly, sweeping off his hat again with a wide gesture.
Releasing his reins he swung down off his horse and, striding forward, held out an open palm to Alessan. Who met both—the smile and offered hand—with his own.
Devin found himself gasping with the rush of relief that swept over him, and then cheering wildly at the top of his voice with twenty outlaws in that dark Certandan pass.
What he noticed though, even as the cheering reached a crescendo, was that neither wizard was shouting. Erlein and Sertino sat very still, almost rigid on their horses, as if concentrating on something. They gazed at each other, expressions identically grim.
And because he noticed, because he seemed to be becoming the sort of man who saw things like this, Devin was the first to fall silent, and he had even instinctively raised a hand to quiet the others. Alessan and Ducas lowered their linked palms and gradually, as silence returned to the pass, everyone looked at the wizards.
‘What is it?’ Ducas said.
Sertino turned to him. ‘Tracker. Northeast of us, quite close. I just felt the probe. He’ll not find me though, I’ve done no magic for a long time.’
‘I have,’ said Erlein di Senzio. ‘Earlier today, in the Braccio Pass. Only a light spell, a screen for someone. Evidently it was enough. There must have been a Tracker in one of the southern forts.’
‘There almost always is,’ Sertino said flatly.
‘What,’ Ducas said, ‘were you doing in the Braccio Pass?’
‘Gathering flowers,’ Alessan said. ‘I’ll tell you later. Right now we have Barbadians to deal with. How many will be with the Tracker?’
‘Not less than twenty. Probably more. We have a camp in the hills south of here. Shall we run for it?’
‘They’ll follow,’ Erlein said. ‘He’s got me traced. The spill of my magic will mark me for another day at least.’
‘I don’t much feel like hiding in any case,’ Alessan said softly. Devin turned quickly to look at him. So did Ducas. Awkwardly, Naddo rose to his feet.
‘How good, exactly, are your men here?’ Alessan said, a challenge in his tone and in the grey eyes.
And in the shadows of what was now almost full-dark Devin saw the Tregean outlaw leader’s teeth suddenly flash. ‘They are good enough, and to spare, to deal with a score of Barbadians. This will be more than we’ve ever tackled, but we’ve never fought beside a Prince before. I think,’ he added, in a meditative voice, ‘
that I too am grown tired of hiding, suddenly.’
Devin looked over at the wizards. It was hard to make out their features in the dark, but Erlein said, in a hard-edged voice: ‘Alessan, the Tracker will have to be killed immediately, or he’ll send an image of this place back to Alberico.’
‘He will be,’ said Alessan quietly. And in his voice, too, there was a new note. The presence of something Devin had never heard. A second later he realized that it was death.
Alessan’s cloak flapped in a gust of wind. Very deliberately he drew his hood over his face.
The hard thing for Devin was that Alberico’s Tracker turned out to be twelve years old.
They sent Erlein riding west out of the pass, as the lure. He was the one being followed. He had Sertino di Certando, the other wizard, and two other men with them, one of whom was the wounded Naddo, who insisted on being of use even though he could not fight. They had taken the arrow from his arm and bandaged it as best they could. It was clear that he was in difficulty, but even more clear that in the presence of Alessan he was not about to give way to that.
A short while later, under the stars and the low eastward crescent of Vidomni, the Barbadians entered the pass. There were twenty-five of them, and the Tracker. Six carried torches, which made things easier. Though not for them.
Alessan’s arrow and Ducas’s met in the Tracker’s breast, fired from slopes on opposite sides of the defile. Eleven of the mercenaries fell under that first rain of arrows before Devin found himself galloping furiously down with Alessan and half a dozen other men out of their concealment in hollows in the pass. They angled to close the western exit, even as Ducas and nine men sealed off the eastern end the Barbadians had entered from.
And so on that Ember Night, in the company of outlaws in the highlands of Certando far from his lost home, Alessan bar Valentin, Prince of Tigana, fought the first true battle of his long war of return. After the drawn-out years of manoeuvring, of subtle gathering of intelligence and the delicate guiding of events, he drew blade against the forces of a Tyrant in that moonlit pass.
No subterfuge, no hidden manipulation any more from the wings of the stage. This was battle, for the time had come.
Marius of Quileia had made a promise to him that day, against wisdom and experience and beyond hope. And with Marius’s promise everything had changed. The waiting was over. He could loosen the rigid bonds that had held his heart so tightly leashed all these years. Tonight in this pass he could kill: in memory of his father and his brothers and all the dead of the River Deisa and after, in that year when he himself had not been permitted to die.
They had spirited him away and hidden him in Quileia south of the mountains, with Marius, then a captain of the High Priestess’s guard. A man with his own reasons for fostering and concealing a young Prince from the northlands. That had been almost nineteen years ago, when the hiding had begun.
He was tired of hiding. The time of running was over now; the season of war had begun. True, it was Barbadior, not Ygrath, whose soldiers drew blade against them now, but in the end it was all the same. Both Tyrants were the same. He had been saying that for all the years since he’d come back north to the peninsula with Baerd. It was a truth hammered into shape like metal on the hard forge of his heart. They had to take them both, or be no nearer freedom than before.
And in the Braccio Pass this morning the taking had begun. The keystone had been set in the arch of his design. And so tonight in this dark defile he could unbind his pent-up passion, his own long memories of loss, and set his sword arm free.
Devin, labouring to keep up with the Prince, rode into his first combat with raw panic and exhilaration labouring for mastery in his breast. He did not shout as most of the outlaws did; he was concentrating as much as anything else on ignoring the ache in his wounded leg. He gripped the dark sword Baerd had bought for him, holding it with the blade curving upwards as he had been taught in wintry morning lessons that seemed unimaginably remote from this night’s happenings.
He saw Alessan drive straight into the circled ranks of the mercenaries, unswerving as one of his arrows, as if to put behind him in this one act of direct response all the years when such a thing was not allowed.
Frantically, gritting his teeth, Devin followed in Alessan’s wake. He was alone though, and half a dozen lengths behind, when a yellow-bearded Barbadian loomed up beside him, enormous on his horse. Devin cried out in shock. Only some blind survival instinct and the reflexes he had been born with saved his life. He pulled his horse hard to the left, veering for a space he saw, and then leaning back to his right, as low to the ground as he could manage, he cut upwards with all his strength. He felt a searing pain in his wounded leg and almost fell. The windrush of the Barbadian’s blade sliced empty air where Devin’s head had been. A heartbeat later Devin felt his own wickedly curved sword cleave through leathery armour and into flesh.
The Barbadian screamed, a liquid, bubbling sound. He swayed wildly on his mount as his sword fell from his grasp. He brought one hand to his mouth in a curiously childlike gesture. Then, like the slow toppling of a mountain tree, he slid sideways in his saddle and crashed to the ground.
Devin had already pulled his sword free. Wheeling his horse in a tight circle, he looked for adversaries. No one was coming though. Alessan and the others were ahead of him, pounding against the mercenaries, driving to meet Ducas and Arkin’s group pressing forward from the east.
It was almost over, Devin realized. There was nothing, really, for him to do. With a complex mixture of emotions that he didn’t even try to understand just then, he watched the Prince’s blade rise and fall three times and he saw three Barbadians die. One by one the six torches dropped to the ground and were extinguished. And then—only moments after they had ridden into the pass, it seemed to Devin—the last of the Barbadians had been cut down and slain.
It was then that he saw what was left of the Tracker and realized how young he had been. The body had been hideously trampled in the mêlée. It lay twisted and splayed unnaturally. Somehow the face had been spared, though for Devin, looking down, that was actually the worst thing. The two arrows were still embedded in the child’s body, though the upper shaft of one of them had been broken off.
Devin turned away. He stroked the horse Alienor had given him, and whispered to it. Then he forced himself to ride back towards the man he’d killed. This was not the same as the sleeping soldier in the Nievolene barn. It was not, he told himself. This had been open warfare and the Barbadian had been armed and armoured, and he had swung his massive blade seeking Devin’s life. Had the Barbadians and the Tracker come upon him and Alessan and Erlein alone in the wilderness Devin had no illusions, none at all, as to what their fate would have been.
It was not the same as in the barn. He said it within himself once again, as he gradually became aware of the eerie, disorienting calm that seemed to have descended upon the pass. The wind still blew, as cold as before. He glanced up, and realized belatedly that Alessan had quietly ridden to his side and was also looking down at the man Devin had slain. Both horses stamped and snorted, made restless by the frenzy just past and the smell of blood.
‘Devin, believe me, I am sorry,’ Alessan murmured softly, so that no one else would hear. ‘It is hardest the first time, and I gave you no chance to prepare.’
Devin shook his head. He felt drained, almost numb. ‘You didn’t have much choice. Maybe it was better this way.’ He cleared his throat awkwardly. ‘Alessan, you have larger things to worry about. I chose freely in the Sandreni Woods last fall. You aren’t responsible for me.’
‘In a way I am.’
‘Not in a way that matters. I made my own choice.’
‘Doesn’t friendship matter?’
Devin was silent, rendered suddenly diffident. Alessan had a way of doing that to you. After a moment the Prince added, almost as an afterthought, ‘I was your age when I came back from Quileia.’
For a moment he seemed about to add so
mething, but in the end he did not. Devin had an idea of what he meant though, and something kindled quietly within him like a candle.
For a moment longer they looked down at the dead man. Only a crescent, Vidomni’s pale light was still bright enough to show the staring pain in his face.
Devin said, ‘I chose freely, and I understand the need, but I don’t think I’m ever going to get used to this.’
‘I know I never have,’ said Alessan. He hesitated. ‘Either one of my brothers would have been so much better at what I was kept alive to do.’
Devin turned then, trying to read the expression on the Prince’s face in the shadows. After a moment he said, ‘I never knew them, but will you allow me to say that I doubt it? Truly I doubt it, Alessan.’
After a moment the Prince touched his shoulder. ‘Thank you. There are those who would disagree, I’m afraid. But thank you, none the less.’
And with those words he seemed to remember something, or be recalled to something. His voice changed. ‘We had better ride. I must speak with Ducas, and then we’ll have to catch up with Erlein and go on. We’ve a lot of ground to cover yet.’ He looked at Devin appraisingly. ‘You must be exhausted. I should have asked before: how is your leg? Can you ride?’
‘I’m fine,’ Devin protested quickly. ‘Of course I can ride.’
Someone behind them laughed sardonically. They both turned. To discover that Erlein and the others had, in fact, returned to the pass.
‘Tell me,’ the wizard said to Alessan, sharp mockery in his voice, ‘what did you expect him to say? Of course he’ll tell you he can ride. He’d ride all night, half-dead, for you. So would this one’—he gestured towards Naddo behind him—‘on barely an hour’s acquaintance. I wonder, Prince Alessan, how does it feel to have such a power over the hearts of men?’
Ducas had ridden over while Erlein was speaking. He said nothing though, and it was too dark now, with the torches extinguished, to make out anyone’s features clearly. One had to judge by the words, and the inflections given them.