For a long time they stood locked together, swaying a little. When they drew back both of their faces looked blurred, unfocused. Devin followed them into the room. Alais was there and Rovigo. Sandre. Rinaldo, Ducas and Naddo. Sertino the wizard. All of them crowded into this one room; as if being in the room from which she’d gone would somehow hold her spirit nearer to them.
‘Did anyone think to bring wine?’ Rinaldo asked in a faint voice.
‘I did,’ Devin said, going over to the Healer. Rinaldo looked pale and exhausted. Devin glanced at Sandre’s left hand and saw that the bleeding had been stopped. He guided Rinaldo’s hand to one of the wine bottles and the Healer drank, not bothering to ask for a glass. Devin gave the other bottle to Ducas, who did the same.
Sertino was gazing at Sandre’s hand. ‘You’re going to have to get in the habit of masking those fingers,’ he said. He held up his own left hand, and Devin saw the now-familiar illusion of completeness.
‘I know,’ Sandre said. ‘I feel very weak right now though.’
‘Doesn’t matter,’ Sertino replied. ‘Two missing fingers seen will mean death for you. However weary we are, the masking must be constant. Do it. Now.’
Sandre looked up at him angrily, but the Certandan wizard’s round pink face showed nothing but concern. The Duke closed his eyes briefly, grimaced, and then slowly held up his own left hand. Devin saw five fingers there, or the illusion of such. He couldn’t seem to stop thinking about Tomasso, dead in a dungeon in Astibar.
Ducas was offering him the bottle. He took it and drank. Passed it over to Naddo, and went to sit beside Alais on the bed. She took his hand, which had never happened before. Her eyes were red with weeping, her skin looked bruised. Alessan had slumped on the floor by the door, leaning against the wall. His eyes were closed. In the light of the candles his face looked hollowed out, the cheekbones showing in angular relief.
Ducas cleared his throat. ‘We had best do some planning,’ he said awkwardly. ‘If she killed this Barbadian there will be a search through the city tonight, and Triad knows what tomorrow.’
‘Sandre used magic, as well,’ Alessan said, not opening his eyes. ‘If there’s a Tracker in Senzio he’s in danger.’
‘That we can deal with,’ Naddo said fiercely, looking from Ducas to Sertino. ‘We did it once already, remember. And there were more than twenty men with that Tracker.’
‘You aren’t in the highlands of Certando now,’ Rovigo said mildly.
‘Doesn’t matter,’ Ducas said. ‘Naddo’s right. If enough of us are down in the street and Sertino’s with us to point out the Tracker then I’d be ashamed of my men if we couldn’t contrive a brawl that killed him.’
‘There’s a risk,’ Baerd said.
Ducas suddenly smiled like a wolf, cold and hard, without a trace of mirth. ‘I’d be grateful for a risk to take tonight,’ he said. Devin understood exactly what he meant.
Alessan opened his eyes and looked up from his place against the wall. ‘Do it, then,’ he said. ‘Devin can run any messages back here to us. We’ll move Sandre out, back to the ship if we have to. If you send word that—’
He stopped, and then uncoiled in one lithe movement to his feet. Baerd had already seized his sword from where it was leaning against the wall. Devin stood up, releasing Alais’s hand.
There came another rattle of sound from the stairway outside the window. Then the window opened as a hand pulled the glass outwards and Erlein di Senzio stepped carefully over the ledge and into the room with Catriana in his arms.
In the stony silence he looked at them all for a moment, taking in the scene. Then he turned to Alessan. ‘If you are worried about magic,’ he said in a paper-thin voice, ‘then you had best be very worried. I used a great deal of power just now. If there’s a Tracker in Senzio then anyone near me is extremely likely to be captured and killed.’ He stopped, then smiled very faintly. ‘But I caught her in time. She is alive.’
The world spun and rocked for Devin. He heard himself cry out with an inarticulate joy. Sandre literally leaped to his feet and rushed to claim Catriana’s unconscious body from Erlein’s arms. He hastened to the bed and laid her down. He was crying again, Devin saw. So, unexpectedly, was Rovigo.
Devin wheeled back to where Erlein stood. In time to see Alessan cross the room in two swift strides and wrap the exhausted wizard in a bear hug that lifted Erlein, feebly protesting, clean off the ground. Alessan released him and stepped back, the grey eyes shining, his face lit by a grin he couldn’t seem to control. Erlein tried, without success, to preserve his own customary cynical expression. Then Baerd came up and, without warning, seized the wizard by the shoulders and kissed him on both cheeks.
Again the troubadour struggled to look fierce and displeased. Again he failed. With an entirely unconvincing attempt at his usual scowl, he said, ‘Careful, you. Devin flattened me to the ground when you all ran out the door. I’m still bruised.’ He threw a glare at Devin, who smiled happily back at him.
Sertino handed Erlein a bottle. He drank, a long, thirsty pull. He wiped at his mouth. ‘It wasn’t hard to guess from the way you were running that something was seriously wrong. I started to follow, but I don’t run very fast any more so I decided to use magic. I got to the far end of the garden wall just as Alessan and Devin reached the near side.’
‘Why?’ Alessan asked sharply, wonder in his voice. ‘You never use your magic. Why now?’
Erlein shrugged elaborately. ‘I’d never seen all of you run anywhere like that before.’ He grimaced. ‘I suppose I was carried away.’
Alessan was smiling again; he couldn’t seem to hold it in for very long. Every few seconds he glanced quickly over at the bed, as if to reassure himself of who was lying there. ‘Then what?’ he asked.
‘Then I saw her in the window, and figured out what was happening. So I … I used my magic to get over the wall and I was waiting in the garden beneath the window.’ He turned to Sandre. ‘You sent an astonishing spell from so far, but you didn’t have a chance. You couldn’t know, never having tried, but you can’t stop someone falling that way. You have to be beneath them. And they usually have to be unconscious. That kind of magic works on our own bodies almost exclusively; if we want to apply it to someone else their will has to be suspended or everything gets muddled when they see what is happening and their mind begins to fight it.’
Sandre was shaking his head. ‘I thought it was my weakness. That I just wasn’t strong enough, even with the binding.’
Erlein’s expression was odd. For a second he seemed about to respond to that, but instead he resumed his tale. ‘I used a spell to make her lose consciousness partway down, and a stronger one to catch her before she hit. Then a last to get us over the wall again. By then I was completely spent, and terrified they would trace us immediately if there was a Tracker anywhere in the castle. But they didn’t, there was too much chaos. I think something else is happening back there. We hid behind the main temple of Eanna for a time, and then I carried her here.’
‘Carried her through the streets?’ Alais asked. ‘No one noticed that?’
Erlein grinned at her, not unkindly. ‘It isn’t that unusual in Senzio, my dear.’
Alais flushed crimson, but Devin could see that she didn’t really mind. It was all right. Everything was suddenly all right.
‘We had better get down into the street then,’ Baerd said to Ducas. ‘We’ll have to get Arkin and some of the others. Regardless of whether there are Trackers, this changes things. When they don’t find her body in the garden there’s going to be an unbelievable search of the town tonight. I think there will have to be some fighting.’
Ducas smiled again, more like a wolf than ever. ‘I hope so,’ was all he said.
‘One moment,’ said Alessan quietly. ‘I want you all to witness something.’ He turned back to Erlein and hesitated, choosing his words. ‘We both know that you did this tonight without any coercion from me, and against your own best interests, in ever
y way.’
Erlein glanced over at the bed, two sudden spots of red forming on each of his sallow cheeks. ‘Don’t make too much of it,’ he warned gruffly. ‘Every man has his moments of folly. I like red-headed women, that’s all. That’s how you trapped me in the first place, remember?’
Alessan shook his head. ‘That may be true, but it is not all, Erlein di Senzio. I bound you to this cause against your will, but I think you have just joined it freely.’
Erlein swore feelingly. ‘Don’t be a fool, Alessan! I just told you, I …’
‘I know what you just told me. I make my own judgements though, I always have. And the truth is, I have been made to realize tonight—by you and Catriana, both—that there are limits to what I wish to do or see done for any cause. Even my own.’
As Alessan finished speaking, he stepped forward quickly and laid a hand on Erlein’s brow. The wizard flinched, but Alessan steadied him. ‘I am Alessan, Prince of Tigana,’ he said clearly, ‘direct in descent from Micaela. In the name of Adaon and his gift to her children, I release you to your freedom, wizard!’
Both men suddenly staggered apart, as if a taut cord had been cut. Erlein’s face was bone-white. ‘I tell you again,’ he rasped, ‘you are a fool!’
Alessan shook his head. ‘You have called me worse than that, with some cause. But now I will name you something you will probably hate: I will unmask you as a decent man, with the same longing to be free as any of us here. Erlein, you cannot hide any more behind your moods and rancour. You cannot channel into me your own hatred of the Tyrants. If you choose to leave us, you can. I do not expect you will. Be welcome, freely, to our company.’
Erlein looked cornered, assailed. His expression was so confused Devin laughed aloud; the whole situation was clear to him now, and comical, in a bizarre, twisted way. He stepped forward and gripped the wizard.
‘I’m glad,’ he said. ‘I’m glad you’re with us.’
‘I’m not! I haven’t said that!’ Erlein snapped. ‘I haven’t said or done any such thing!’
‘Of course you have.’ It was Sandre, the evidence of exhaustion and pain still vivid in his lined, dark face. ‘You did it tonight. Alessan is right. He knows you better than any of us. Better, in some ways, than you know yourself, troubadour. How long have you tried to make yourself believe that nothing mattered to you but your own skin? How many people have you convinced that that was true? I’m one. Baerd and Devin. Perhaps Catriana. Not Alessan, Erlein. He just set you free to prove us all wrong.’
There was a silence. They could hear shouting from the streets below now, and the sound of running footsteps. Erlein turned to Alessan and the two men gazed at each other. Devin was suddenly claimed by an image, another of his intrusions of memory: that campfire in Ferraut, Alessan playing songs of Senzio for Erlein, an enraged shadow by the river. There were so many layers here, so many charges of meaning.
He saw Erlein di Senzio raise his hand, his left hand, with a simulation of five fingers there, and offer it to Alessan. Who met it with his right so their palms touched.
‘I suppose I am with you,’ Erlein said. ‘After all.’
‘I know,’ said Alessan.
‘Come!’ said Baerd, a second later. ‘We have work to do.’ Devin followed him, with Ducas and Sertino and Naddo, towards the back stairs beyond the window.
Just before stepping through Devin turned to look back at the bed. Erlein noticed, and followed his gaze.
‘She’s fine,’ the wizard said softly. ‘She’ll be just fine. Do what you have to do, and come back to us.’
Devin glanced up at him. They exchanged an almost shy smile. ‘Thank you,’ Devin said, meaning a number of things. Then he followed Baerd down into the tumult of the streets.
She was actually awake for a few moments before she opened her eyes. She was lying somewhere soft and unexpectedly familiar, and there were voices drifting towards and away from her, as if on a swelling of the sea, or like slow-moving fireflies in the summer nights at home. At first she couldn’t quite make the voices out. She was afraid to open her eyes.
‘I think she is awake now,’ someone was saying. ‘Will you all do me a great courtesy and leave me alone with her for a few moments?’
She knew that voice though. She heard the sound of a number of people rising and leaving the room. A door closed. That voice was Alessan’s.
Which meant she could not be dead. These were not Morian’s Halls, after all, with the voices of the dead surrounding her. She opened her eyes.
He was sitting on a chair drawn close to where she lay. She was in her own room in Solinghi’s inn, lying under a blanket in bed. Someone had removed the black silk gown and washed the blood from her skin. Anghiar’s blood, that had fountained from his throat.
The rush of memory was dizzying.
Quietly, Alessan said, ‘You are alive. Erlein was waiting in the garden below you. He rendered you unconscious and then caught you with his magic as you fell and brought you back.’
She let her eyes fall shut again as she struggled to deal with all of this. With the fact of life, the rise and fall of her chest as she breathed, the beat of her heart, this curiously light-headed sensation, as if she might drift away on the slightest of breezes.
But she wouldn’t. She was in Solinghi’s and Alessan was beside her. He had asked all the others to leave. She turned her head and looked at him again. He was extremely pale.
‘We thought you had died,’ he said. ‘We saw you fall from outside the garden wall. What Erlein did, he did on his own. None of us knew. We thought you had died,’ he repeated after a moment.
She thought about that. Then she said: ‘Did I achieve anything? Is anything happening?’
He pushed a hand through his hair. ‘It is too soon to tell for certain. I think you did, though. There is a great deal of commotion in the streets. If you listen you can hear it.’
Concentrating, she could indeed make out the sounds of shouting and running feet passing beneath the window.
Alessan seemed unnaturally subdued, struggling with something. It was very peaceful in the room though. The bed was softer than she had remembered it being. She waited, looking at him, noting the perennial unruliness of his hair where his hands were always pushing through it.
He said, carefully, ‘Catriana, I cannot tell you how frightened I was tonight. You must listen to me now, and try to think this through, because it is something that matters very much.’ His expression was odd, and there was something in his voice she couldn’t quite pin down.
He reached out and laid his hand over hers where it lay upon the blanket. ‘Catriana, I do not measure your worth by your father’s. None of us ever has. You must stop doing this to yourself. There was never anything for you to redeem. You are what you are, in and of yourself.’
This was difficult ground for her, the most difficult of all, and she found that her heartbeat had quickened. She watched him, blue eyes on his grey ones. His long, slender fingers were covering her own. She said:
‘We arrive with a past, a history. Families matter. He was a coward and he fled.’
Alessan shook his head; there was still something strained in his expression. ‘We have to be so careful,’ he murmured. ‘So very careful when we judge them, and what they did in those days. There are reasons why a man with a wife and an infant daughter might choose—other than fear for himself—to stay with the two of them and try to keep them alive. Oh, my dear, in all these years I have seen so many men and women who went away for their children.’
She could feel her tears starting now and she fought to blink them back. She hated talking about this. It was the hard kernel of pain at the core of all she did.
‘But it was before the Deisa,’ she whispered. ‘He left before the battles. Even the one we won.’
Again he shook his head, wincing at the sight of her distress. He lifted her hand suddenly and carried it to his lips. She could not remember his ever having done that before. There was something c
ompletely strange about all of this.
‘Parents and children,’ he said, so softly she almost missed the words. ‘It is so hard; we are so quick to judge.’ He hesitated. ‘I don’t know if Devin told you, but my mother cursed me in the hour before she died. She called me a traitor and a coward.’
She blinked, moved to sit up. Too suddenly. She was dizzy and terribly weak. Devin hadn’t told her any such thing; he had said next to nothing about that day.
‘How could she?’ she said, anger rising in her, against this woman she had never seen. ‘You? A coward? Doesn’t … didn’t she know anything about …’
‘She knew almost all of it,’ he said quietly. ‘She simply disagreed as to where my duty lay. That is what I am trying to say, Catriana: it is possible to differ on such matters, and to reach a place as terrible as that one was for both of us. I am learning so many things so late. In this world, where we find ourselves, we need compassion more than anything, I think, or we are all alone.’
She managed this time to push herself up higher in the bed. She looked at him, imagining that day, those words of his mother. She remembered what she herself had said to her father on her own last night at home, words that had driven him violently out of the house into the dark. He had still been out there somewhere, alone, when she had gone away.
She swallowed. ‘Did it … did it end like that with your mother? Was that how she died?’
‘She never unsaid the words, but she let me take her hand before the end. I don’t think I’ll ever know if that meant …
‘Of course it did!’ she said quickly. ‘Of course it did, Alessan. We all do that. We do with our hands, our eyes, what we are afraid to say.’ She surprised herself; she hadn’t known she knew any such thing.
He smiled then, and looked down to where his fingers still covered hers. She felt herself colouring. He said, ‘There is a truth there. I am doing that now, Catriana. Perhaps I am a coward, after all.’