Elena, what …? Mattio. She had him.
Join me! she sent quickly. The wizards are here. There is war.
He asked no more questions. She could feel his steadying presence in her mind as the wizards helped her open to him. She registered his own sudden, disoriented shock at the link to the other men. Two of them, no three, there was a third one there as well.
Elena, has it come? Have they sent? Donar in her mind, seizing at truth like a weapon to his hand.
I am here, love! Carenna’s mind-voice, quick and bright, exactly the same as her speech. Elena, what must we do?
Hold to each other and open to us! the deep presence of the second wizard was there to answer. We may now have a chance. There is danger, I will not lie, but if we hold together—for once in this peninsula—we may yet break through! Come, join us, we must forge our minds into a shield. I am Sandre d’Astibar and I never died. Come to us now!
Elena opened her mind to him, and reached out. And in that moment she felt as though her own body was entirely gone, as if she were no more than a conduit, like and yet very unlike what happened on the Ember Nights. A clammy fear of this unknown thing rose in her. Defiantly she fought it back. Her friends were with her, and—unbelievably—the Duke of Astibar was there, and alive, and Baerd was with him in far-off Senzio, battling against the Tyrants.
He had come to them, to her, in their own war. She had heard him weep and had lain with him in love on a hill in the Ember dark after the green moon had set. She would not fail him now. She would lead the Carlozzini to him along the pathway of her mind and her soul.
Without warning they broke through. The link was forged. She was in a high place under a fiercely blazing sun, seeing with the eyes of the Duke of Astibar on a hill in Senzio. The vision rocked with stomach-churning dislocation. Then it steadied and Elena saw men killing each other in a valley below, armies grappling together in the heat like beasts in a convulsive embrace. She heard screaming so loud she felt the sound as pain. Then she became aware of something else.
Sorcery. North of them, that hill. Brandin of Ygrath. And in that moment Elena and the three other Night Walkers understood why they had been summoned, feeling in their own minds the punishing weight of the assault they had to resist.
Back in Castle Borso, Alienor stood by, helpless and blind in her uncertainty, understanding nothing of this at all, only knowing that it was happening, that it was upon them at last. She wanted to pray, to reach back towards words not thought or spoken in almost twenty years. She saw Elena bring her hands up to cover her face.
‘Oh no,’ she heard the girl whisper in a voice thin as old parchment. ‘So strong! How can one man be so strong?’
Alienor’s hands gripped each other so tightly the knuckles were white. She waited, desperately seeking a clue to what was happening to all of them, so far to the north where she could not go.
She did not, could not hear Sandre d’Astibar’s reply to Elena:
He is strong yes, but with you we will be stronger! Oh, children, we can do it now! In the name of the Palm, together we can be strong enough!
What Alienor did see was how Elena’s hands came down, how her white face grew calm, the wild, primitive terror leaving her staring eyes.
‘Yes,’ she heard the other woman whisper. ‘Yes.’
Then there was silence in that room in Castle Borso under the Braccio Pass. Outside, the cool wind of the highlands blew the high white clouds across the sun and away, and across it and away, and a single hunting hawk hovered on motionless wings in that passing of light and shadow over the face of the mountains.
In fact, the next man scrabbling up the slope of the cliff was Ducas di Tregea. Devin had actually begun to swing his sword before he recognized who it was.
Ducas reached the summit in two hard, churning strides and stood beside him. He was a fearful sight. His face was covered in blood, dripping down into his beard. There was blood all over him, and wet on his sword. He was smiling though, a terrible red look of battle-lust and rage.
‘You are hurt!’ he said sharply to Devin.
‘I wouldn’t talk,’ Devin grunted, pressing his left hand to his torn side. ‘Come on!’
Quickly they turned back east. More than fifteen of the Ygrathens were still on their summit, pressing forward against the untrained band of men Alessan had kept back to defend the wizards. The numbers were almost even, but the Ygrathens were the picked and deadly warriors of that realm.
Even so, even with this, they were not getting through. And they would not, Devin realized with a surge of exultation in his heart, rising high over pain and grief.
They would not, because facing them, side by side, swinging blades together in their longed-for battle after all the long waiting years that had run by, were Alessan, Prince of Tigana, and Baerd bar Saevar, the only brother of his soul, and the two of them were absolute and deadly, and even beautiful, if killing could be so.
Devin and Ducas rushed over. But by the time they got there five Ygrathens only were left, then three. Then only two. One of them made as if to lay down his sword. Before he could do so, a figure moved forward with an awkward, deceptive swiftness from the ring guarding the wizards. Dragging his lame foot, Ricaso came up to the Ygrathen. Before anyone could stay him he swung his old, half-rusted blade in a passionate, scything arc, cleaving through the links in armour to bury itself in the man’s breast.
Then he fell to his knees on the ground beside the soldier he’d killed, weeping as though his soul was pouring out of him.
Which left one of them only. And the last was the leader, the large, broad-chested man Devin had seen down below. The man’s hair was plastered flat to his head, he was red-faced with heat and exhaustion, sucking hard for breath, but his eyes glared at Alessan.
‘Are you fools?’ he gasped. ‘Fighting for the Barbadian? Instead of with a man who has joined the Palm? Do you want to be slaves?’
Slowly Alessan shook his head. ‘It is twenty years too late for Brandin of Ygrath to join the Palm. It was too late the day he landed here with an invading force. You are a brave man. I would prefer not to kill you. Will you give us an oath in your own name and lay down your sword in surrender?’
Beside Devin, Ducas snarled angrily. But before the Tregean could speak, the Ygrathen said: ‘My name is Rhamanus. I offer it to you in pride, for no dishonour has ever attached to that name. You will have no oath from me though. I swore one to the King I love before I led his Guard here. I told him I would stop you or die. It is an oath I will keep.’
He raised his sword towards Alessan, and gestured—though not seriously, Devin realized afterwards—to strike at the Prince. Alessan did not even move to ward the blow. It was Baerd whose blade came up and then swept downward to bite with finality into the neck of the Ygrathen, driving him to the ground.
‘Oh, my King,’ they heard the man say then, thickly, through the blood rising in his mouth. ‘Oh, Brandin, I am so sorry.’
Then he rolled over on his back and lay still, his sightless eyes staring straight at the burning sun.
The sun had been burning hot as well, the morning he had defied the Governor and taken a young serving-girl for tribute down the river from Stevanien, so many years ago.
Dianora saw a man raise his sword on that hill. She turned her head away so she would not see Rhamanus die. There was an ache in her, a growing void; she felt as if all the chasms of her life were opening in the ground before her feet. He had been an enemy, the man who had seized her to be a slave. Sent to claim tribute for Brandin, he had burned villages and homes in Corte and Asoli. He had been an Ygrathen. Had sailed to the Palm in the invading fleet, had fought in the last battle by the Deisa.
He had been her friend.
One of her only friends. Brave and decent and loyal all his life to his King. Kind and direct, ill-at-ease in a subtle court …
Dianora realized that she was weeping for him, for the good life cloven like a tree by that stranger’s descending sw
ord.
‘They have failed, my lord.’ It was d’Eymon, his voice actually showing—or was she imagining it?—the faintest hint of emotion. Of sorrow. ‘All of the Guards are down, and Rhamanus. The wizards are still there.’
From his chair under the canopy Brandin opened his eyes. His gaze was fixed on the valley below and he did not turn. Dianora saw that his face was chalk-white now with strain, even in the red heat of the day. She wiped quickly at her tears: he must not see her thus if he should chance to look. He might need her; whatever strength or love she had to give. He must not be distracted with concern for her. He was one man alone, fighting so many.
And more, in fact, than she even knew. For the wizards had reached the Night Walkers in Certando by now. They were linked, and they were all bending the power of their minds to Alberico’s defence.
From the plain below there came a roar, even above the steady noise of battle. Cheering and wild shouts from the Barbadians. Dianora could see their white-clad messengers sprinting forward from the rear where Alberico was. She saw that the men of the Western Palm had been stopped in their advance. They were still outnumbered, terribly so. If Brandin could not help them now then all was done, all over. She looked south towards that hill where the wizards were, where Rhamanus had been cut down. She wanted to curse them all, but she could not.
They were men of the Palm. They were her own people. But her own people were dying in the valley as well, under the heavy blades of the Empire. The sun was a brand overhead. The sky a blank, pitiless dome.
She looked at d’Eymon. Neither of them spoke. They heard quick footsteps on the slope. Scelto stumbled up, fighting for breath.
‘My lord,’ he gasped, dropping to his knees beside Brandin’s chair, ‘we are hard-pressed … in the centre and on the right. The left is holding … but barely. I am ordered … to ask if you want us to fall back.’
And so it had come.
I hate that man, he had said to her last night, before falling asleep in utter weariness. I hate everything he stands for.
There was a silence on the hill. It seemed to Dianora as if she could hear her own heartbeat with some curious faculty of the ear, discerning it even above the sounds from below. The noises in the valley seemed, oddly, to have receded now. To be growing fainter every second.
Brandin stood up.
‘No,’ he said quietly. ‘We do not fall back. There is nowhere to retreat, and not before the Barbadian. Not ever.’ He was gazing bleakly out over Scelto’s kneeling form, as if he would penetrate the distance with his eyes to strike at Alberico’s heart.
But there was something else in him now: something new, beyond rage, beyond the grimness of resolution and the everlasting pride. Dianora sensed it, but she could not understand. Then he turned to her and she saw in the depths of that grey gaze a bottomless well of pain opening up such as she had never seen in him. Never seen in anyone, in all her days. Pity and grief and love, he had said last night. Something was happening; her heart was racing wildly. She felt her hands beginning to shake.
‘My love,’ Brandin said. Mumbled, slurred it. She saw death in his eyes, an abscess of loss that seemed to be leaving him almost blind, stripping his soul. ‘Oh, my love,’ he said again. ‘What have they done? See what they will make me do. Oh, see what they make me do!’
‘Brandin!’ she cried, terrified, not understanding at all. Beginning again to weep, frantically. Grasping only the open sore of hurt he had become. She reached out towards him, but he was blind, and already turning away, east, towards the rim of the hill and the valley below.
‘All right,’ said Rinaldo the Healer, and lifted his hands away. Devin opened his eyes and looked down. His wound had closed; the bleeding had stopped. The sight of it made him feel queasy; the unnatural speed of the healing, as if his senses still expected to find a fresh wound there. ‘You are going to have an easy scar for women to know you by in the dark,’ Rinaldo added drily. Ducas gave a bark of laughter.
Devin winced and carefully avoided meeting Alais’s eye. She was right beside him, wrapping a roll of linen around his torso to bind the wound. He looked at Ducas instead, whose own cut above his eye had been closed by Rinaldo in the same way. Arkin, who had also survived the skirmish down below, was bandaging it. Ducas, his red beard matted and sticky with blood, looked like some fearful creature out of childhood night terrors.
‘Is that too tight?’ Alais asked softly.
Devin drew a testing breath and shook his head. The wound hurt, but he seemed to be all right.
‘You saved my life,’ he murmured to her. She was behind him now, tying up the ends of his bandage. Her hands stopped for a moment and then resumed.
‘No I didn’t,’ she said in a muffled voice. ‘He was down. He couldn’t have hurt you. All I did was kill a man.’ Catriana, standing near them, glanced over. ‘I … I wish I hadn’t,’ Alais said. And began to cry.
Devin swallowed and tried to turn, to offer comfort, but Catriana was quicker than he, and had already gathered Alais in her arms. He looked at them, wondering bitterly what real comfort there could be to offer on this bare ridge in the midst of war.
‘Erlein! Now! Brandin is standing!’ Alessan’s cry knifed through all other sounds. His heart suddenly thumping again, Devin went quickly towards the Prince and the wizards.
‘It is upon us then,’ said Erlein, in a hard, flat voice to the other two. ‘I will have to pull out now, to track him. Wait for my signal, but move when I give it!’
‘We will,’ Sertino gasped. ‘Triad save us all.’ Sweat was pouring down the pudgy wizard’s face. His hands were shaking with strain.
‘Erlein,’ Alessan began urgently. ‘He must use it all. You know what you—’
‘Hush! I know exactly what I must do. Alessan, you have set this in motion, you brought us all here to Senzio, every single person, the living and the dead. Now it is up to us. Be still, unless you want to pray.’
Devin looked north to Brandin’s hill. He saw the King step forward from under his canopy.
‘Oh, Triad,’ he heard Alessan whisper then in a queerly high voice. ‘Adaon, remember us. Remember your children now!’ The Prince sank to his knees. ‘Please,’ he whispered again. ‘Please, let me have been right!’
On his hill to the north of them Brandin of Ygrath stretched forth one hand and then the other under the burning sun.
Dianora saw him move forward to the very edge of the hill, out from the canopy into the white blaze of the light. Scelto scrambled away. Beneath them the armies of the Western Palm were being hammered back now, centre and left and right. The cries of the Barbadians had taken on a quality of triumphant malice that fell like blows upon the heart.
Brandin lifted his right hand and levelled it ahead. Then he brought up his left beside it so that the palms were touching each other, the ten fingers pointing together. Pointing straight to where Alberico of Barbadior was, at the rear of his army.
And Brandin of the Western Palm, who had been the King of Ygrath when he first came to this peninsula, cried aloud then, in a voice that seemed to flay and shred the very air:
‘Oh, my son! Stevan, forgive me what I do!’
Dianora stopped breathing. She thought she was going to fall. She reached out a hand for support and didn’t even realize it was d’Eymon who braced her.
Then Brandin spoke again, in a voice colder than she had ever heard him use, words none of them could understand. Only the sorcerer down in the valley would know, only he could grasp the enormity of what was happening.
She saw Brandin spread his legs, as if to brace himself. Then she saw what followed.
‘Now!’ Erlein di Senzio screamed. ‘Both of you! Get the others out! Cut free now!’
‘They’re loose!’ Sertino cried. ‘I’m out!’ He collapsed in a heap to the ground as if he might never rise again.
Something was happening on the other hill. In the middle of day, under the brilliant sun, the sky seemed to be changing, to be darkening
where Brandin stood. Something—not smoke, not light, some kind of change in the very nature of the air—seemed to be pouring from his hands, boiling east and down, disorienting to the eye, blurred, unnatural, like a rushing doom.
Erlein suddenly turned his head, his eyes widening with horror.
‘Sandre, what are you doing?’ he shrieked, grabbing wildly at the Duke. ‘Get out, you fool! In Eanna’s name, get out!’
‘Not … yet,’ said Sandre d’Astibar, in a voice that carried its own full measure of doom.
There had been more of them. Four more coming to his aid. Not wizards now, a different kind of magic of the Palm, one he hadn’t even known about, didn’t understand. But it didn’t matter. They were here and on his side, if screened from his mind, and with them, with all of them bending their power to his defence, he had even been able to reach out, and forward, to assert his own strength against the enemy.
Who were falling back! There was glory after all under the sun, and hope, more than hope, a glittering vista of triumph spreading in the valley before him, a pathway made smooth with the blood of his foes, leading straight from here back across the sea and home to the Tiara.
He would bless these wizards, honour them! Make them lords of unimagined power, here in this colony or in Barbadior. Wherever they wanted, whatever they chose. And thinking so, Alberico had felt his own magic flow like intoxicating wine in his veins and had sent it pouring forth against the Ygrathens and the men of the Western Palm, and his armies had laughed aloud in triumph and felt their swords to be suddenly as light as summer grass.
He heard them beginning to sing, the old battle-song of the Empire’s legions, conquering in far lands centuries ago. And they were! It was happening again. They weren’t just mercenaries; they were the Empire’s legions, for he was, or would be, the Empire. He could see it. It was here, it was shining before him in the blazing day.
Then Brandin of Ygrath rose and stepped to the rim of his hill. A distant figure alone under the sun in that high place. And a moment later, Alberico, who was a sorcerer himself, felt, for he could not have actually heard, the dark, absolute words of invocation that Brandin spoke, and his blood froze in his veins like ice in the dead of a winter night.