‘I do know that,’ Sandre said after a moment. ‘Which is a great deal more than I can say for my own kin.’
‘Only one of them,’ Rovigo said quickly, ‘and he is dead.’
‘He is dead,’ Sandre repeated. ‘They are all dead. I am the last of the Sandreni. And what shall we do about it, Rovigo? What shall we do with Alberico of Barbadior?’
Rovigo said nothing. It was Baerd who answered, from the water’s edge.
‘Destroy him,’ he said. ‘Destroy them both.’
P A R T F I V E
T H E M E M O R Y O F A F L A M E
C H A P T E R 1 7
Scelto woke her very early on the morning of the ritual. She had spent the night alone, as was proper, and had made offerings the evening before at the temples of Adaon and Morian both. Brandin was careful now to be seen observing all rites and proprieties of the Palm. In the temples the priests and the priestesses had been almost fawning in their solicitude. In what she was doing there was power for them and they knew it.
She’d had a short and restless sleep and when Scelto touched her awake, gently, and with a mug of khav already to hand, she felt her last dream of the night slipping away from her. Closing her eyes, only half conscious, she tried to chase it, sensing the dream receding as if down corridors of her mind. She pursued, trying to reclaim an image that would hold it, and then, just as it seemed about to fade and be lost, she remembered.
She sat up slowly in bed and reached for the khav, cradling it in both hands, seeking warmth. Not that the room was cold, but she had now remembered what day it was, and there was a chill in her heart that went beyond foreboding and touched certainty.
When Dianora had been a very small girl—perhaps five years old, a little less than that—she had had a dream of drowning one night. Sea waters closing over her head, and a vision of something dark, a shape, final and terrible, approaching to draw her down into lightless depths.
She had come awake gasping and screaming, thrashing about in bed, uncertain of where she even was.
And then her mother had been there, holding Dianora to her heart, murmuring, rocking her back and forth until the frantic sobbing ceased. When Dianora had finally lifted her head from her mother’s breast, she had seen by candlelight that her father was there as well, holding Baerd in his arms in the doorway. Her little brother had been crying too, she saw, shocked awake in his own room across the hall by her screams.
Her father had smiled and carried Baerd over to her, and the four of them had sat there in the middle of the night on Dianora’s bed while the candles cast light in circles around them, shaping an island in the dark.
‘Tell me about it,’ she remembered her father saying. Afterwards he had made shadow figures for them with his hands on the wall and Baerd, soothed and drowsy, had fallen asleep again in his lap. ‘Tell me the dream, love.’
Tell me the dream, love. On Chiara, almost thirty years after, Dianora felt an ache of loss, as if it had all been but a little while ago. Days, weeks, no time at all. When had those candles in her room lost their power to hold back the dark?
She had told her mother and father, softly so as not to wake Baerd, some of the fear coming back in the stumbling words. The waters closing over her, a shape in the depths drawing her down. She remembered her mother making the sign against evil, to unbind the truth of the dream and deflect it away.
The next morning, before opening his studio and beginning his day’s work, Saevar had taken both his children past the harbour and the palace gates and south along the beach, and he had begun to teach them to swim in a shallow cove sheltered from the waves and the west wind. Dianora had expected to be afraid when she realized where they were going, but she was never really afraid of anything when her father was with her, and she and Baerd had both discovered, with whoops of delight, that they loved the water.
She remembered—so strange, the things one remembered—that Baerd, bending over in the shallows that first morning, had caught a small darting fish between his hands, and had looked up, eyes and mouth comically round with surprise at his own achievement, and their father had shouted with laughter and pride.
Every fine morning that summer the three of them had gone to their cove to swim and by the time autumn came with its chill and then the rains Dianora felt as easy in the water as if it were a second skin to her.
Once, she remembered—and there was no surprise to this memory lingering—the Prince himself had joined them as they walked past the palace. Dismissing his retinue, Valentin strolled with the three of them to the cove and disrobed to plunge into the sea beside their father. Straight out into the waves he had gone, long after Saevar stopped, past the sheltering headland of the cove and into the choppy whitecaps of the sea. Then he had turned around and come back to them, his smile bright as a god’s, his body hard and lean, droplets of water sparkling in his golden beard.
He was a better swimmer than her father was, Dianora could see that right away, even as a child. She also knew, somehow, that it really didn’t matter. He was the Prince, he was supposed to be better at everything.
Her father remained the most wonderful man in the world, and nothing she could imagine learning was ever going to change that.
Nothing ever had, she thought, shaking her head slowly in the saishan, as if to draw free of the clinging, spidery webs of memory. Nothing ever had. Though Brandin, in another, better world, in his imaginary Finavir, perhaps …
She rubbed her eyes and then shook her head again, still struggling to come awake. She wondered suddenly if the two of them, her father and the King of Ygrath, had seen each other, had actually looked each other in the eye that terrible day by the Deisa.
Which was such a hurtful thought that she was afraid that she might begin to cry. Which would not do. Not today. No one, not even Scelto—especially not Scelto, who knew her too well—must be allowed to see anything in her for the next few hours but quiet pride, and a certainty of success.
The next few hours. The last few hours.
The hours that would lead her to the margin of the sea and then down into the dark green waters which were the vision of the riselka’s pool. Lead her to where her path came clear at last and then came, not before time, and not without a certain relief beneath the fear and all the loss, to an end.
It had unfolded with such direct simplicity, from the moment she had stood by the pool in the King’s Garden and seen an image of herself amid throngs of people in the harbour, and then alone underwater, drawn towards a shape in darkness that was no longer a source of childhood terror but, finally, of release.
That same day, in the library, Brandin had told her he was abdicating in Ygrath in favour of Girald, but that Dorotea his wife was going to have to die for what she had done. He lived his life in the eyes of the world, he said. Even had he wished to spare her, he would have no real choice.
He didn’t wish to spare her, Brandin said.
Then he spoke of what else had come to him on his ride that morning through the pre-dawn mists of the Island: a vision of the Kingdom of the Western Palm. He was going to make that vision real, he said. For the sake of Ygrath itself, and for the people here in his provinces. And for his own soul. And for her.
Only those Ygrathens willing to become people of his four joined provinces would be allowed to stay, he said; all others were free to sail home to Girald.
He would remain. Not just for Stevan and the response shaped in his heart to his son’s death, though that would hold, that was constant, but to build a united realm here, a better world than he had known.
That would hold, that was constant.
Dianora had listened to him, had felt her tears beginning to fall, and had moved to lay her head in his lap beside the fire. Brandin held her, moving his hands through her dark hair.
He would need a Queen, he had said.
In a voice she had never heard before; one she had dreamt of for so long. He wanted to have sons and daughters here in the Palm now, Brandin
said. To start again and build upon the pain of Stevan’s loss, that something bright and fair might emerge from all the years of sorrow.
And then he spoke of love. Drawing his hands gently through her hair he spoke of loving her. Of how that truth had finally come home into his heart. Once, she would have thought it far more likely that she might grasp and hold the moons than ever hear him speak such words to her.
She wept, unable to stop, for in his words it was all gathering now, she could see how it was coming together, and such clarity and prescience was too much for a mortal soul. For her mortal soul. This was the Triad’s wine, and there was too much bitter sorrow at the bottom of the cup. She had seen the riselka, though, she knew what was coming, where the path would lead them now. For one moment, a handful of heartbeats, she wondered what would have happened had he whispered these same words to her the night before instead of leaving her alone with the fires of memory. And that thought hurt as much as anything ever had in all her life.
Let it go! she wanted to say, wanted so much to say that she bit her lip holding back the words. Oh, my love, let the spell go. Let Tigana come back and all the world’s brightness will return.
She said nothing. Knowing that he could not do so, and knowing, for she was no longer a child, that grace could not be come by so easily. Not after all these years, not with Tigana and Stevan twined together and embedded so deep down in Brandin’s own pain. Not with what he had already done to her home. Not in the world in which they lived.
Besides which, and above everything else, there was the riselka, and her clear path unfolding with every word whispered by the fire. Dianora felt as if she knew everything that was going to be said, everything that would follow. And each passing moment was leading them—she could see it as a kind of shimmer in the room—towards the sea.
Almost a third of the Ygrathens stayed. It was more than he’d expected, Brandin told her, standing on the balcony above the harbour two weeks later, watching most of his flotilla sail away, back to their home, to what had been his home. He was exiled now, by his own will, more truly than he had ever been before.
He also told her later that same day that Dorotea was dead. She didn’t ask how, or how he knew. His sorcery was still the thing she did not ever want to face.
Shortly after that came bad tidings though. The Barbadians were beginning to move north towards and through Ferraut, all three armies apparently heading for the border of Senzio. He had not expected that, she saw. Not nearly so soon. It was too unlike careful Alberico to move with such decisiveness.
‘Something has happened there. Something is pushing him,’ Brandin said. ‘And I wish I knew what it was.’
He was weak and vulnerable now, that was the problem. He needed time and they all knew it. With the Ygrathen army mostly gone Brandin needed a chance to shape a new structure of order in the western provinces. To turn the first giddy euphoria of his announcement into the bonds and allegiances that would truly forge a kingdom. That would let him summon an army to fight in his name, among a conquered people lately so hard-oppressed.
He needed time, desperately, and Alberico wasn’t giving it to him.
‘You could send us,’ d’Eymon the Chancellor said one morning, as the dimensions of the crisis began to take shape. ‘Send the Ygrathens we have left and position the ships off the coast of Senzio. See if that will hold Alberico for a time.’
The Chancellor had stayed with them. There was never any real doubt that he would. For all his trauma—he had looked ill and old for days after Brandin’s announcement—Dianora knew that d’Eymon’s deepest loyalty, his love, though he would have shied awkwardly away from that word, was given to the man he served and not to the nation. Moving through those days almost numbed by the divisions in her own heart she envied d’Eymon that simplicity.
But Brandin flatly refused to follow his suggestion. She remembered his face as he explained, looking up from a map and strewn sheets of paper covered with numbers. The three of them together around a table in the sitting-room off the King’s bedchamber; Rhun a nervous, preoccupied fourth on a couch at the far end of the room. The King of the Western Palm still had his Fool, though the King of Ygrath was named Girald now.
‘I cannot make them fight alone,’ Brandin said quietly. ‘Not to carry the full burden of defending people I have just made them equal to. This cannot be an Ygrathen war. For one thing, they are not enough, we will lose. But it is more than that. If we send an army or a fleet it must be made up of all of us here, or this Kingdom will be finished before I start.’
D’Eymon had risen from the table, agitated, visibly disturbed. ‘Then I must say again what I have said before: this is folly. The thing to do is to go home and deal with what has happened in Ygrath. They need you there.’
‘Not really, d’Eymon. I will not flatter myself. Girald has been ruling Ygrath for twenty years.’
‘Girald is a traitor and should have been executed as such with his mother!’
Brandin looked up at him, the grey eyes suddenly chilly. ‘Must we repeat this discussion? D’Eymon, I am here for a reason and you know that reason. I cannot go back on that: it would cut against the very core of what I am.’ His expression changed. ‘No man need stay with me, but I am bound myself to this peninsula by love and grief, and by my own nature, and those three things will hold me here.’
‘The Lady Dianora could come with us! With Dorotea dead you would need a Queen in Ygrath and she would be—’
‘D’Eymon! Have done.’ The tone was final, ending the discussion.
But the Chancellor was a brave man. ‘My lord,’ he pushed on, grim-faced, his voice low and intense, ‘if I cannot speak of this and you will not send our fleet to face Barbadior I know not how to advise you. The provinces will not go to war for you yet, we know that. It is too soon. They need time to see and to believe that you are one of them.’
‘And I have no time,’ Brandin replied with what had seemed an unnatural calm after the sharp tension of the exchange. ‘So I have to do it immediately. Advise me on that, Chancellor. How do I show them? Right now. How do I make them believe I am truly bound to the Palm?’
So there it was, and Dianora knew that the moment had come to her at last.
I cannot go back on that; it would cut against the very core of what I am. She had never really nursed any fantasies of his ever freely releasing and unbinding his spell. She knew Brandin too well. He was not a man who went back or reversed himself. In anything. The core of what he was. In love and hate and in the defining shape of his pride.
She stood up. There was an odd rushing sound in her ears, and if she closed her eyes she was certain she would see a path stretching away, straight and clear as a line of moonlight on the sea, very bright before her. Everything was leading her there, leading all of them. He was vulnerable, and exposed, and he would never turn back.
There was an image of Tigana flowering in her heart as she rose. Even here, even now, an image of her home. In the depths of the riselka’s pool there had been a great many people gathered under banners of all the provinces as she walked down to the sea.
She placed her hands carefully on the back of her chair and looked down at him where he sat. There was grey in his beard, more, it seemed, each time she noticed it, but his eyes were as they had always been, and there was no fear, no doubt in them as they looked back at her. She drew a deep breath and spoke words that seemed to have been given to her long ago, words that seemed to have simply waited for this moment to arrive.
‘I will do it for you,’ she said. ‘I will make them believe in you. I will do the Ring Dive of the Grand Dukes of Chiara as it used to be done on the eve of war. You will marry the seas of the peninsula, and I will bind you to the Palm and to good fortune in the eyes of all the people when I bring you back the sea-ring from the sea.’
She kept her gaze steady on his own, dark and clear and calm, as she spoke at last, after so many years, the words that set her on the final path. That set him, s
et them all, the living and the dead, the named and the lost, on that path. As, loving him with a sundered heart, she lied.
She finished her khav and rose from bed. Scelto had drawn the curtains back and she could see sunrise just beginning to lighten the dark sea. The sky was clear overhead and the banners in the harbour could just be seen, moving lazily in the dawn breeze. There was already a huge crowd gathered, hours before the ceremony was to start. A great many people had spent the night in the harbour square, to be sure of a place near the pier to see her dive. She thought she saw someone, a tiny figure at such a distance, lift a hand to point to her window and she stepped quickly back.
Scelto had already laid out the clothes she would wear, the garments of ritual. Dark green for the going down: her outer robe and sandals, the net that would hold her hair and the silken undertunic in which she would dive. For afterwards, after she came back from the sea, there was another robe, white, richly embroidered with gold. For when she was to represent, to be the bride come from the sea with a gold ring in her hand for the King.
After she came back. If she came back.
She was almost astonished at her own calm. It was easier actually because she hadn’t seen Brandin since early the day before, as was proper for the rite. Easier too, because of how brilliantly clear all the images seemed to be, how smoothly they had led her here, as if she was choosing or deciding nothing, only following a course set down somewhere else and long ago.
Easier, finally, because she had come to understand and accept, deeply, and with certitude, that she had been born into a world, a life, that would not let her be whole.
Not ever. This was not Finavir, or any such dream-place. This was the only life, the only world, she was to be allowed. And in that life Brandin of Ygrath had come to this peninsula to shape a realm for his son, and Valentin di Tigana had killed Stevan, Prince of Ygrath. This had happened, could not be unmade.