Alessan said quietly, ‘I think you know my answer to that. In any case, I’m unlikely to think too highly of myself with you around to point these things out to me.’ He paused, then added, ‘Triad forfend you would ever volunteer to ride all night in any cause but your own.’
‘I,’ said Erlein flatly, ‘have no choice in the matter any more. Or have you forgotten?’
‘I have not. But I’ve no mind to repeat that quarrel now, Erlein. Ducas and his men have just put their lives at risk to save your own. If you—’
‘To save my own! I would never have been at risk if you hadn’t compelled me to—’
‘Erlein, enough! We have a great many things to do and I am not of a mind to debate.’
In the darkness Devin saw Erlein sketch a mocking bow on horseback. ‘I most humbly cry your pardon,’ he said in an exaggerated tone. ‘You really must let me know when you are of a mind to debate. You’ll concede it is an issue of some importance to me.’
Alessan was silent for what seemed a long time. Then, mildly, he said, ‘I think I can guess what is behind this now. I understand. It is meeting another wizard, isn’t it? With Sertino here you feel what has happened to you the more.’
‘Don’t pretend you understand me, Alessan!’ said Erlein furiously.
Still calmly, Alessan said, ‘Very well then, I won’t. In some ways I may never understand you and how you have lived your life—I told you that the evening we met. But for now this issue is a closed one. I will be prepared to discuss it the day the Tyrants are gone from the Palm. Not before.’
‘You will be dead before that. We will both be dead.’
‘Don’t touch him!’ Alessan said sharply. Belatedly Devin saw that Naddo had raised his good hand to strike the wizard. More quietly the Prince added, ‘If we are both dead, then our spirits can wrangle in Morian’s Halls, Erlein. Until then, no more. We will have a great deal to do together in the weeks to come.’
Ducas coughed. ‘As to that,’ he said, ‘we two also had better speak. There is a fair bit I’d like to know before I go further than this night’s work, much as it has pleased me.’
‘I know,’ said Alessan, turning to him in the dark. He hesitated. ‘Will you ride with us for a little? Only as far as the village. You and Naddo, because of his arm.’
‘Why there, and why because of the arm? I don’t understand,’ Ducas said. ‘You should know that we are not much welcome in the village. For obvious reasons.’
‘I can guess. It won’t matter. Not on an Ember Night. You will understand when we get there. Come. I want my good friend Erlein di Senzio to see something. And I suppose Sertino had better join us too.’
‘I wouldn’t miss this for all the blue wine in Astibar,’ said the pudgy Certandan wizard. It was interesting, at another time it might even have been amusing, to note what a healthy distance he continued to keep between himself and the Prince. The words he spoke were facetious, but his tone was deadly serious.
‘Come on then,’ said Alessan brusquely. He turned his horse past Erlein’s, almost brushing against the other man, and started west out of the pass. The ones he had named began to follow. Ducas spoke a few terse commands to Arkin, too low for Devin to hear. Arkin hesitated for a moment, clearly torn, wanting to come with his leader. But then, without speaking, he turned his horse the other way. When Devin glanced back a moment later, he saw that the outlaws were rifling the Barbadians’ bodies for weapons.
He turned to look over his shoulder again a few moments later but they were in open country by then, with the hills in shadow to the south and east and a grassy plain rolling north of them. The entrance to the pass could no longer even be seen. Arkin and the others would be gone from within it soon, Devin knew, leaving only the dead. Only the dead for the scavengers: one of them killed by his own sword, and another one a child.
The old man lay on his bed in the darkness of an Ember Night and the always darkness of his own affliction. Far from sleep, he listened to the wind outside and to the woman in the other room clicking her prayer beads and intoning the same litany over and over.
‘Eanna love us, Adaon preserve us, Morian guard our souls. Eanna love us, Adaon preserve us, Morian guard our souls. Eanna love us …’
His hearing was very good. It was a compensation most of the time, but sometimes—as tonight, with the woman praying like a demented thing—it was a curse of a particularly insidious kind. She was using her old beads; he could tell the thin, quick sound even through the wall separating their chambers. He had made her a new ring of beads of rare, polished tanchwood three years ago for her naming day. Most of the time she used that ring, but not on the Ember Days. Then she went back to her old beads and she prayed aloud for most of three days and nights.
In the earliest years here he had slept those three nights in the barn with the two boys who had brought him here, so much did her unceasing litany disturb him. But he was old now, his bones creaked and ached on windy nights such as this, so he kept to his own bed under piled blankets and endured her voice as best he could.
‘Eanna love us always, Adaon preserve us from all perils, Morian guard our souls and shelter us. Eanna love us …’
The Ember Days were a time of contrition and atonement, but they were also a time when one was to count and give thanks for one’s gifts. He was a cynical man, for sufficient and varied reasons, but he would not have called himself unreligious, and he would not, in fact, have said he’d lived a life unblessed, despite the blindness of almost two decades. He had lived much of his life in wealth and near to power. The length of his days was a blessing, and so too was the lifelong grace of his hands with wood. Only a form of play at first, a diversion, it had become something more than that in the years since they had come here.
There was also his other gift of skill, though few people knew of that. Had it been otherwise he would never have been able to shape a quiet life in this highland village, and a quiet life was essential because he was hiding. Still.
The very fact of his survival on the long, sightless journey all those years ago was a blessing of a special kind. He was under no illusions: he would never have survived without the loyalty of his two young servants. The only ones they had allowed to stay with him. The only ones who had wanted to stay.
They weren’t young nor were they servants any longer. They were farmers on land they owned with him. No longer sleeping on the front-room floor in their first small farmhouse nor out in the barn as they had in the earliest years, but in their own homes with wives beside them and children near by. Lying in darkness he offered thanks for that, as gratefully as for anything he had ever been given himself.
Either of them would have let him sleep in their home these three nights, to escape the unending drone of the woman in the other room, but he would not presume to ask so much. Not on the Ember Nights, not on any night. He had his own sense of what was appropriate, and besides, he liked his own bed more and more with the passing years.
‘Eanna love us as her children, Adaon preserve us as his children …’
He wasn’t, clearly, going to be able to fall asleep. He thought about getting up to polish a staff or a bow, but he knew Menna would hear him, and he knew she would make him pay for profaning an Ember Night with labour. Watery porridge, sour wine, his slippers cruelly moved from where he laid them down.
‘They were in my way,’ she would say when he complained. Then, when fires were allowed again: burnt meat, undrinkable khav, bitter bread. For a week, at least. Menna had her own ways of letting him know what mattered to her. After all the years they had their tacit understandings much as any old couple did, though of course he had never married her.
He knew who he was, and what was appropriate, even in this fallen state, far from home, from the memory of wealth or power. Here on this small farm-holding bought with gold fearfully hidden on his person during that long, blind journey seventeen years ago, sure that a murderous pursuit was riding close behind.
He had surviv
ed, though, and the boys. Coming to this village on a day in autumn long ago: strangers arriving in a dark time. A time when so many people had died and so many others were brutally uprooted all across the Palm in the wake of the Tyrants’ coming. But the three of them had somehow endured, had even managed to make the land put forth a living for them in good years. In Certando’s bad years latterly he had had to deplete his dwindled reserve of gold, but what else was it for, at this point?
Really, what else would it be for? Menna and the two boys—they were no longer boys, of course—were his heirs. They were all he could claim as family now. They were all he had, if one didn’t count the dreams that still came in his nights.
He was a cynical man, having seen a great deal in the days before his darkness came, and after, in a different way of seeing, but he was not so burdened by irony as to defeat wisdom. He knew that exiles always dreamt of home and that the sorely wronged never really forgot. He had no illusions about being unique in this.
‘Eanna love us, Adaon preserve us from—Triad save us!’
Menna fell silent, very abruptly. And for the same reason the old man sat suddenly upright in bed, wincing at a sharp protest from his spine. They had both heard it: a sound outside in the night. In the Ember Night, when no one should be abroad.
Listening carefully he caught it again: the sound, delicate and faint, of pipes playing in the darkness outside, passing by their walls. Concentrating, the old man could make out footsteps. He counted them. Then, his heart beating dangerously fast, he swung out of bed as quickly as he could and began to dress.
‘It is the dead!’ Menna wailed in the far room. ‘Adaon preserve us from vengeful ghosts, from all harm. Eanna love us! The dead have come for us. Morian of Portals guard our souls!’
Despite his agitation the old man paused to note that Menna, even in her fear, still included him in her prayers. For a moment he was genuinely moved. In the next moment he ruefully acknowledged the inescapable fact that the succeeding two weeks of his life—at least—were likely to be sheerest domestic torment.
He was going outside, of course. He knew exactly who this was. He finished dressing and reached for his favourite stick by the door. He moved as quietly as he could, but the walls were thin and Menna’s hearing almost as good as his own: there was no point in trying to slip out unheard. She would know what he was doing. And would make him pay the price.
Because this had happened before. On Ember Nights and other nights for almost ten years now. Sure of foot inside the house he went to the front door and used his stick to roll back the chink-blocker on the floor. Then he opened the door and went out. Menna was praying again already:
‘Eanna love me, Adaon preserve me, Morian guard my soul.’
The old man smiled a wintry smile. Two weeks, at least. Watery porridge in the morning. Burnt, tasteless khav. Bitter mahgoti tea. He stood still for a moment, still smiling faintly, breathing the crisp, cool air. Mercifully, the wind had died down a little, his bones felt fine. Lifting his face to the night breeze he could almost taste the spring to come.
He closed the door carefully behind him and began tapping his way with the stick along the path towards the barn. He had carved this stick when he still had his sight. Many times he had carried it in the palace, an affectation at a dissolute court. He had never expected to need it in this way. Its head was the head of an eagle with the eyes lovingly detailed, wide and fiercely defiant.
Perhaps because he had killed for the second time in his life that night, Devin was remembering that other much larger barn from the winter just past, in Astibar.
This one was far more modest. Only two milk cows and a pair of plough horses stabled. It was well-made though, and warm, with the smell of the animals and clean straw. The walls had no chinks to admit the knife of wind, the straw was freshly piled, the floor swept clean, the tools along the walls neatly laid and stacked.
In fact, if he wasn’t careful, the smell and the feel of this barn would take him much further back than last winter: back to their own farm in Asoli, which he tried never to think about. He was tired though, bone tired, after two sleepless nights, and so he supposed he was vulnerable to such memories. His right knee ached fiercely, where he had twisted it on the mountain. It was swollen to twice its normal size and sharply sensitive to touch. He’d had to walk slowly, making a real effort not to limp.
No one spoke. No one had spoken since they had reached the outskirts of this village of some twenty homes. The only sound for the last few moments after they tethered the horses and began to walk had been Alessan’s pipes softly playing. Playing—and Devin wondered if he alone knew this, or if Naddo recognized it too—a certain nursery melody from Avalle.
Here in the barn Alessan was still playing, as gently as before. The tune was one more thing that seemed to be trying to carry Devin back to his family. He resisted: if he went that way in the condition he was in right now he would probably end up crying.
Devin tried to imagine how the haunting, elusive melody would sound to anyone huddled inside the walls of their lightless homes on this Ember Night. A company of ghosts passing by, that was what they would seem to be. The dead abroad, following a small, forgotten tune. He remembered Catriana singing in the Sandreni Woods:
But wherever I wander, by night or by day,
Where water runs swiftly or high trees sway,
My heart will carry me back and away
To a dream of the towers of Avalle.
He wondered where she was tonight. And Sandre. Baerd. He wondered if he would ever see any of them again. Earlier this evening, pursued into the pass, he had thought he was about to die. And now, two hours later, they had killed twenty-five Barbadians with those same outlaws who had pursued them, and three of the outlaws were here with them in this unknown barn listening to Alessan play a cradle song.
He didn’t think he would understand the strangeness of life if he lived to be a hundred years old.
There was a sound outside and the door swung open. Devin stiffened involuntarily. So did Ducas di Tregea, a hand reaching for his sword. Alessan looked at the door, but his fingers never faltered on the pipes and the music continued.
An old man, slightly stooped, but with a leonine combed-back mane of white hair, stood for a moment, backlit by the sudden moonlight, before he stepped inside and pushed the door closed behind him with a stick he carried. After that it was dark again in the barn and hard to see for a few moments.
No one spoke. Alessan did not even look up again. Tenderly, with feeling, he finished the tune. Devin looked at him as he played and wondered if he was the only man here who understood what music meant to the Prince. He thought about what Alessan had been through in this past day alone, about what it was he was riding towards, and something complicated and awkward stirred in his heart as he listened to the wistful ending of the song. He saw the Prince set his pipes aside with a motion of regret. Laying down his release, taking up the burdens again. All the burdens that seemed to be his legacy, the price of his blood.
‘Thank you for coming, old friend,’ he said now, quietly, to the man in the doorway.
‘You owe me, Alessan,’ the old man said in a clear strong voice. ‘You have condemned me to sour milk and spoiled meat for a month.’
‘I was afraid of that,’ Alessan said in the darkness. Devin could hear affection and an unexpected amusement in his voice. ‘Menna has not changed, then?’
The other man snorted. ‘Menna and change do not coexist,’ he said. ‘You are with new people, and a friend is missing. What has happened? Is he all right?’
‘He is fine. A half-day’s ride east. There is much to tell. I came with some reason, Rinaldo.’
‘So much is clear to me. One man with a leg that is torn inside. Another with an arrow wound. The two wizards are not happy but I can do nothing about their missing fingers and neither is ill. The sixth man is now afraid of me, but he need not be.’
Devin gasped with astonishment. Beside him Du
cas swore aloud.
‘Explain this!’ he growled furiously. ‘Explain everything!’
Alessan was laughing. So, more softly, was the man he had called Rinaldo. ‘You are a spoiled and petty old man,’ the Prince said, still chuckling, ‘and you enjoy shocking people simply for the sake of doing it. You should be ashamed of yourself.’
‘There are so few pleasures left to me in my age,’ the other retorted. ‘Would you deny me this one too? There is much to tell, you say? Tell me.’
Alessan’s voice grew sober. ‘I had a meeting in the mountains this morning.’
‘Ah, I was wondering about that! And what follows?’
‘Everything, Rinaldo. Everything follows. This summer. He said yes. We will have the letters. One to Alberico, one to Brandin, and one to the Governor of Senzio.’
‘Ah,’ said Rinaldo again. ‘The Governor of Senzio.’ He said it softly, but could not quite disguise the excitement in his voice. He took a step forward into the room. ‘I never dreamt I would live to see this day. Alessan, we are going to act?’
‘We have already begun. Ducas and his men joined with us tonight in battle. We killed a number of Barbadians and a Tracker pursuing a wizard with us.’
‘Ducas? That is who this is?’ The old man gave a low whistle, a curiously incongruous sound. ‘Now I know why he is afraid. You have your share of enemies in this village, my friend.’
‘I am aware of that,’ said Ducas drily.
‘Rinaldo,’ Alessan said, ‘do you remember the siege of Borifort when Alberico first came? The stories about a red-bearded captain, one of the leaders of the Tregeans there? The one who was never found?’
‘Ducas di Tregea? This is he?’ Again the whistle. ‘Well-met then, Captain, though not, as a matter of fact, for the first time. If I remember rightly, you were in the company of the Duke of Tregea when I paid a formal visit there some twenty years ago.’