From the moment the Sea Maid’s landing-boat had silently returned to the ship in the moonlit harbour of Tregea, bearing her father and Catriana and the two men they’d gone to meet, Alais had been aware that something more than friendship was involved here.
Then the dark-skinned man from Khardhu had looked at her appraisingly, and at Rovigo with an amused expression on his lined face, and her father, hesitating for only a moment, had told her who this really was. And then, quietly, but with an exhilarating confidence in her, he’d explained what these people, his new partners, were really doing here, and what he appeared to have been doing in secret with them for a great many years.
It appeared that it had not been entirely a coincidence after all that they’d met three musicians on the road outside their home during the Festival of Vines last fall.
Listening intently, trying not to miss a syllable or an implication, Alais measured her own inward response to all of this and was pleased beyond words to discover that she was not afraid. Her father’s voice and manner had much to do with that. And the simple fact that he was trusting her with this.
It was the other man—Baerd, they named him—who said to Rovigo, ‘If you are truly set on coming with us to Senzio, then we will have to find a place on the coast to put your daughter ashore.’
‘Why, exactly?’ Alais had said quickly before Rovigo could answer. She could feel her colour rising as all eyes turned to her. They were down below deck, crowded in her father’s cabin.
Baerd’s eyes were very dark by candlelight. He was a hard-looking, even a dangerous-seeming man, but his voice when he answered her was not unkind.
‘Because I don’t believe in subjecting people to unnecessary risks. There is danger in what we are about to do. There are also reasons for us to face those dangers, and your father’s assistance and that of his men if he trusts them, is important to us. For you to come would be a danger without necessity. Does that make sense?’
She forced herself to be calm. ‘Only if you judge me a child, incapable of any contribution.’ She swallowed. ‘I am the same age as Catriana and I think I now understand what is happening here. What you have been trying to do. I have … I can say that I have the same desire as any of you to be free.’
‘There are truths in that. I think she should come.’ It was, remarkably, Catriana. ‘Baerd,’ she went on, ‘if this is truly the time that will decide, we have no business refusing people who feel the way we do. No right to decide that they must huddle in their homes waiting to see if they are still slaves or not when the summer ends.’
Baerd looked at Catriana for a long time but said nothing. He turned to Rovigo, deferring to him with a gesture. In her father’s face Alais could see worry and love warring with his pride in her. And then, by the light of the candles, she saw that inner battle end.
‘If we get through this alive,’ Rovigo d’Astibar said to his daughter, his life, his joy in life, ‘your mother will kill me. You know that, don’t you?’
‘I’ll try to protect you,’ Alais said gravely, though her heart was racing like a wild thing.
It had been their talk at the railing of the ship, she knew. She knew it absolutely. The two of them looking at the cliffs under moonlight after the storm.
I don’t know what it is, she had said, but I need more.
I know, her father had replied. I know you do. If I could give it, it would be yours. The world and the stars of Eanna would all be yours.
It was because of that, because he loved her and meant what he had said, that he was allowing her to come with them to where the world they knew would be put into the balance.
Of that journey to Senzio she remembered two things particularly. Standing at the rail early one morning with Catriana as they moved north up the coast of Astibar. One tiny village, and then another and another, the roofs of houses bright in the sun, small fishing boats bobbing between the Sea Maid and the shore.
‘That one is my home,’ Catriana said suddenly, breaking a silence, speaking so softly only Alais could hear. ‘And that boat with the blue sail is actually my father’s.’ Her voice was odd, eerily detached from the meaning of the words.
‘We have to stop, then!’ Alais had murmured urgently. ‘I’ll tell my father! He’ll—’
Catriana laid a hand on her arm.
‘Not yet,’ she’d said. ‘I can’t see him yet. After. After Senzio. Perhaps.’
That was one memory. The other, very different, was of rounding the northern tip of Farsaro Island early in the morning and seeing the ships of Ygrath and the Western Palm anchored in the harbour there. Waiting for war. She had been afraid then, as the reality of what they were sailing towards was brought home to her in that vision, at once brightly colourful and forbidding as grey death. But she had looked over at Catriana, and her father, and then at the old Duke, Sandre, who named himself Tomaz now, and she had seen shadings of doubt and anxiety in each of them as well. Only Baerd, carefully counting the flotilla, had a different kind of expression on his face.
If she’d been forced to put a name to that look she would have said, hesitantly, that it was desire.
The next afternoon they had come to Senzio, and had moored the Maid in the crowded harbour and gone ashore, and so had come, at the end of the day, to an inn all the others seemed to know about. And the five of them had walked through the doors of that tavern into a flashing of joy bright and sudden as the sun come up from the rim of the sea.
Devin embraced her tightly and then kissed her on the lips, and then Alessan, after a moment’s visible anxiety at her presence and a searching glance at her father, did exactly the same. There was a lean-faced grey-haired man named Erlein with them, and then a number of other men in the tavern came up—Naddo was one name, Ducas another, and there was an older blind man with those two whose name she never caught. He walked with the aid of a magnificent stick. It had the most extraordinary carved eagle’s head, with eyes so piercing they seemed almost to be a compensation for the loss of his own.
There were others as well, from all over, it seemed. She missed most of their names. There was a great deal of noise. The innkeeper brought them wine: two bottles of Senzio green and a third one of Astibar’s blue wine. She had a small, careful glass of each, watching everyone, trying to sort through the chaotic babble of all that was said. Alessan and Baerd drew briefly apart for a moment, she noticed; when they returned to the table both men looked thoughtful and somewhat grim.
Then Devin and Alessan and Erlein had to go back and make their music for an hour while the others ate, and Alais, flushed and terribly excited, inwardly relived the feel of the two men’s lips upon hers. She found herself smiling shyly at everyone, afraid that her face was giving away exactly what she was feeling.
Afterwards they made their way upstairs behind the broad back of the innkeeper’s wife to their rooms. And later, when it was quiet on that upper level Catriana led her from the room they were put in, down the hall to the bedroom Devin and Alessan and Erlein shared.
They were there, and a number of other men—some of the ones she’d just met, and a few who were strangers. Her father entered a moment later with Sandre and Baerd. She and Catriana were the only women there. She had a moment to feel a little strange about that, and to think about how far she was from home, before everyone fell silent as Alessan pushed a hand through his hair and began to speak.
And as he did, Alais, concentrating, gradually came to understand with the others the dimensions, the truly frightening shape, of what he proposed to do.
At a certain point he stopped and looked at three men one by one. At Duke Sandre first, then at a round-faced Certandan named Sertino sitting with Ducas, and finally, almost challengingly, at Erlein di Senzio.
The three of them were wizards, she understood. It was a hard thing to come to terms with. Especially Sandre. The exiled Duke of Astibar. Their neighbour in the distrada all her life.
The man called Erlein was sitting on his bed, his back again
st the wall, hands crossed over his breast. He was breathing hard.
‘It is clear to me now that you have lost your mind,’ he said. His voice shook. ‘You have lived in your dreams so long you’ve lost sight of the world. And now you are going to kill people in your madness.’
Alais saw Devin open his mouth and then snap it shut without speaking.
‘All of this is possible,’ Alessan said, with an unexpected mildness. ‘It is possible I am pursuing a path of madness, though I think not. But yes, there are likely to be a great many people killed. We always knew that; the real madness would have been in pretending otherwise. For the moment though, compose your spirit and ease your soul. You know as well as I do, nothing is happening.’
‘Nothing? What do you mean?’ It was her father.
Alessan’s expression was wry, almost bitter. ‘Haven’t you noticed? You were in the harbour, you walked through the town. Have you seen any Barbadian troops? Any Ygrathens, soldiers from the west? Nothing is happening. Alberico of Barbadior has his entire army massed on the border, and the man refuses to order them north!’
‘He is afraid,’ said Sandre flatly in the silence that followed. ‘He’s afraid of Brandin.’
‘Perhaps,’ her father said thoughtfully. ‘Or else he is just cautious. Too cautious.’
‘What do we do then?’ asked the red-bearded Tregean named Ducas.
Alessan shook his head. ‘I don’t know. I honestly don’t know. This is one thing I never expected. You tell me,’ he said. ‘How do we make him cross the border? How do we bring him to war?’ He looked at Ducas and then at each of the others in the room.
No one answered him.
They would think he was a coward. They were fools. They were all fools. Only a fool went lightly into war. Especially a war such as this, that risked everything for a gain he hardly cared about. Senzio? The Palm? What did they matter? Should he throw twenty years away for them?
Every time a messenger arrived from back in Astibar something in him leaped with hope. If the Emperor had died …
If the Emperor had died he and his men were gone. Away from this blighted peninsula, home to claim an Emperor’s Tiara in Barbadior. That was his war, the one he wanted to fight. The one that mattered, the only thing that had really mattered all these years. He would sail home with three armies and wrest the Tiara from the court favourites hovering there like so many ineffectual, fluttering moths.
And after that he could make war back here, with all the gathered might of Barbadior. Then let Brandin of Ygrath, of the Western Palm, whatever he chose to name himself, then let him try to stand before Alberico, Emperor of Barbadior.
Gods, the sweetness of it …
But no such message came from the east, no such glittering reprieve. And so the bald reality was that he found himself camped with his mercenaries here on the border between Ferraut and Senzio, preparing to face the armies of Ygrath and the Western Palm, knowing that the eyes of the entire world would be upon them now. If he lost, he lost everything. If he won … well that depended on the cost. If too many of his men died here, what kind of an army would he have to lead home?
And too many men dying was a vivid prospect now. Ever since what had happened in the harbour of Chiara. Most of the Ygrathen army had indeed sailed home, exactly as anticipated, leaving Brandin crippled and exposed. Which is why Alberico had moved, why the three companies were here and he with them. The flow and shape of events had seemed to be on their side, in the clearest possible way.
Then the Certandan woman had fished a ring from the water for Brandin.
She haunted his dreams, that never-seen woman. Three times now she’d surfaced like a nightmare in his life. Back when Brandin had first claimed her for his saishan she had nearly drawn him into an insane war. Siferval had wanted to fight, Alberico remembered. The Third Company captain had proposed storming across the border into Lower Corte and sacking Stevanien itself.
Gods. Alberico shuddered even now, long years after, at the thought of such a war far to the west against the Ygrathens in all their power. He had swallowed his bile and absorbed all the mocking jibes Brandin sent east. Even then, long ago, he had preserved his discipline, kept his eyes on the real prize back home.
But he might have had the Peninsula of the Palm without effort this spring, a pure gift fallen from the sky, if that same Dianora di Certando had not saved the Ygrathen’s life two months ago. It had been there for him, gently floating down: with Brandin assassinated the Ygrathens would have all sailed home and the western provinces would have lain open before him like so much ripe fruit.
Quileia’s crippled King would have hobbled across the mountains to abase himself before Alberico, begging for the trade he needed. No elaborate letters then about fearing the mighty power of Ygrath. It would all have been so easy, so … elegant.
But it was not so, because of the woman. The woman from one of his own provinces. The irony was coruscating, it was like acid in his soul. Certando was his and Dianora di Certando was the only reason Brandin was alive.
And now—her third time in his life—she was the only reason there was an army from the west, a flotilla anchored in the Bay of Farsaro, waiting for Alberico to make the slightest move.
‘They are fewer than us,’ his spies reported daily. ‘And not as well armed.’
Fewer, the three captains echoed each other in mindless litany. Not as well armed, they gibbered. We must move, they chorused, their imbecilic faces looming in his dreams, set close together, hanging like lurid moons too near the earth.
Anghiar, his emissary in the Governor’s Castle at Senzio, sent word that Casalia still favoured them; that the Governor realized that Brandin was not as strong as they. That he had been persuaded to see the virtue of tilting even further towards Barbadior. The emissary from the Western Palm, one of the few Ygrathens who had decided to stay with Brandin, was having a more difficult time each passing day gaining audience with the Governor, but Anghiar dined with plump, sybaritic Casalia almost every night.
So now even Anghiar, who had grown lazy and self-indulgent, morally corrupt as any Senzian during his years there, was saying the same thing as all the others: Senzio is a vineyard ripe for harvesting. Come!
Ripe for harvesting? Didn’t they understand? Didn’t any of them realize that there was sorcery to reckon with?
He knew how strong Brandin was; he had probed and backed quickly away from the Ygrathen’s power in the year they had both come here, and that had been when he himself was in his prime. Not hollow and weakened, with a bad foot and a drooping eye after almost being killed in that cursed Sandreni lodge last year. He was not the same any more; he knew it, if none of the others did. If he went to war it had to be a decision made in the light of that. His military edge had to be enough to offset the Ygrathen’s sorcery. He needed to be certain. Surely any man not a fool could see that that had nothing to do with cowardice! Only with a careful measuring of gains and losses, risks and opportunities.
In his dreams in his tent on the border he thrust the vacuous moon faces of his captains back up into the sky, and under five moons, not two, he slowly dismembered and defiled the staked-out body of the woman from Certando.
Then the mornings would come. Digesting messages like rancid food, he would begin to wrestle again, endlessly, with the other thing that was nagging him this season like an infected wound.
Something felt wrong. Entirely wrong. There was an aspect about this whole chain of events—from the autumn onwards—that jarred within him like a jangling, dissonant chord.
Here on the border with his army all around him he was supposed to feel as if he were calling the measure of the dance. Forcing Brandin and the entire Palm to respond to his tune. Seizing control again after a winter of being impacted upon in all those trivial, disconcerting, cumulative ways. Shaping events so that Quileia would have no choice but to seek him out, so that back home in the Empire they could not mistake his power, the vigour of his will, the glory of his
conquests.
That was how he was supposed to feel. How he had indeed briefly felt the morning he’d heard that Brandin had abdicated in Ygrath. When he’d ordered his three armies north to the border of Senzio.
But something had changed since that day and it was more than just the presence of opposition now waiting in the Bay of Farsaro. There was something else, something so vague and undefined he couldn’t even talk about it—even if he’d had anyone to talk to—couldn’t even pin it down, but it was there, nagging at him like an old wound in rain.
Alberico of Barbadior had not got to where he was, achieved this power base from which a thrust for the Tiara was imminent, without subtlety and thoughtfulness, without learning to trust his instincts.
And his instincts told him, here on the border, with his captains and his spies and his emissary in Senzio literally begging him to march, that something was wrong.
That he was not calling the tune. Someone else was. Somehow, someone else was guiding the dangerous steps of this dance. He had truly no idea who it could be, but the feeling was there each morning when he woke and it would not be shaken off. Neither would it come clear for him under the spring sun, in that border meadow bright with the banners of Barbadior, with irises and asphodels, and fragrant with the scent of the surrounding pines.
So he waited, praying to his gods for word of a death back home, agonizingly aware that the world might soon be laughing at him if he drew back, knowing, as spies kept hastening south in relays, that Brandin was getting stronger in Farsaro every day, but held there on the border by his craftiness, his instinct for survival, by that ache of doubt. Waiting for something to come clear.
Refusing, as the days slipped past, to dance to what might be someone else’s tune, however seductively the hidden pipes might play.
She was numbingly afraid. This was worse, infinitely worse than the bridge in Tregea. There she had embraced and accepted danger because there was more than a hope of surviving the leap. It had been only water down below, however frigid it might be, and there had been friends waiting in the darkness around the bend to claim her from the river and chafe her back to life.