‘He cannot,’ he gasped aloud. ‘Not after so long! He cannot do this!’
But the Ygrathen was. He was reaching for all, summoning everything, every last scintilla of his magic, holding nothing back. Nothing, not even the power that had sustained the vengeance that had kept him here all these years. He was emptying himself to shape a sorcery such as had never been wielded before.
Desperately, still half disbelieving, Alberico reached out for the wizards. To tell them to brace, to be ready. Crying that there were eight of them, nine, that they could hold against this. That all they had to do was survive this moment and Brandin would be nothing, a shell. Waste, for weeks, months, years! A hollow man with no magic in him any more.
Their minds were closed, barred against him. They were still there though, and defending, braced. Oh, if the horned god and the Night Queen were with him! If they were with him yet, he might still …
They were not. They were not with him.
For in that instant Alberico felt the wizards of the Palm cut loose, melting away without warning, with terrifying suddenness, to leave him naked and alone. On the hill Brandin had now levelled his hands and from them came blue-grey death, an occluding, obliterating presence in the air, foaming and boiling down across the valley towards him.
And the wizards were gone! He was alone.
Or almost gone, almost alone. One man was still linked, one of them had held with him! And then that one mind opened up to Alberico like the locked door of a dungeon springing back, letting light flood in.
The light of truth. And in that moment Alberico of Barbadior screamed aloud in terror and helpless rage, for illumination came at last and he understood, too late, how he had been undone, and by whom destroyed.
In the name of my sons I curse you forever, said Sandre, Duke of Astibar, his remorseless image rising in Alberico’s mind like an apparition of horror from the afterworld. But he was alive. Impossibly alive, and here in Senzio on that ridge, with eyes implacable and utterly merciless. He bared his teeth in a smile that summoned the night. In the name of my children and of Astibar, die now, forever cursed.
Then he cut free, he too was gone, as that blue-grey death came boiling down the valley from Brandin’s hill, from his outstretched hands, with blurred, annihilating speed, and Alberico, still reeling with shock, clawing frantically upwards from his chair, was struck and enveloped and consumed by that death, as a tidal wave of the raging, engorged sea will take a sapling in low-lying fields.
It swept him away with it and sundered his body, still screaming, from his soul, and he died. Died in that far Peninsula of the Palm two days before his Emperor passed to the gods in Barbadior, failing at last one morning to wake from a dreamless sleep.
Alberico’s army heard his last scream, and their own cries of exultation turned to panic-stricken horror; in the face of that magic from the hill the Barbadians felt a fear such as men should never have had to endure sweep over them. They could scarcely grip their swords, or flee, or even stand upright before their foes who advanced untouched, unharmed, exalted, under that dread, sun-blighting sorcery, and began to carve and hew them with hard and deadly wrath.
Everything, thought Brandin of Ygrath, of the Western Palm, weeping helplessly on his hill as he looked down over the valley. He had been driven to this and had answered, had summoned all he had ever had to this final purpose, and it was enough. It was sufficient and nothing less would have been. There had been too much magic opposed to him, and death had been waiting for his people here.
He knew what he had been made to do, knew the price of holding nothing back. He had paid that price and was paying it now, would go on doing so with every breath he drew until he died. He had screamed Stevan’s name, aloud and in the echoing chambers of his soul, before the summoning of that power. Had known that twenty years of vengeance for that too-soon shattered life were now undone under this bronze sun. Nothing held back. It was over.
There had been men dying below him though, fighting under his banner, in his name, and there had been no retreat for them from that plain. Nor for him. He could not retreat. He had been driven to this moment, like a bear to a rocky cliff by a pack of wolves, and the price was being paid now. Everywhere the price was being paid. There was butchery in the valley; a slaughter of Barbadians. His heart was crying. He was a grieving, torn thing, all the memories of love, of a father’s loss, flooding over him, another kind of tidal wave. Stevan.
He wept, adrift in an ocean of loss, far from any shore. He was aware, dimly, of Dianora beside him, clutching his hands between her own, but he was lost inside his pain, power gone now, the core of his being shattered into fragments, shards, a man no longer young, trying, without any hope at all, to conceive of how to shape a life that could possibly go forward from this hill.
Then the next thing happened. For he had, in fact, forgotten something. Something he alone could possibly have known.
And so time, which truly would not stop, for grief or pity or love, carried them all forward to the moment no sorcerer or wizard or piper on his ridge had foreseen.
The weight had been the weight of mountains crushing his mind. Carefully, exquisitely judged to leave him that faintest spark of self-awareness, which was where the purest torture lay. That he might always know exactly who he was and had been, and what he was being made to do, utterly unable to control himself. Pressed flat under the burden of mountains.
Which now were gone. He straightened his back, of his own will. He turned east. Of his own will. He tried to lift his head higher but could not. He understood: too many years in the same skewed, sunken position. They had broken the bones of his shoulder several times, carefully. He knew what he looked like, what they had turned him into in that darkness long ago. He had seen himself in mirrors through the years, and in the mirrors of others’ eyes. He knew exactly what had been done to his body before they started on his mind.
That didn’t matter now. The mountains were gone. He looked out with his own sight, reached back with his own memories, could speak, if he wished to speak, with his own thoughts, his own voice, however much it had changed.
What Rhun did was draw his sword.
Of course he had a sword. He carried whatever weapon Brandin did, was given each day the clothing the King had chosen; he was the vent, the conduit, the double, the Fool.
He was more than that. He knew exactly how much more. Brandin had left him that delicately measured scrap of awareness at the very bottom of his mind, under the burying, piled-up mountains. That had been the whole point, the essence of everything; that and the secrecy, the fact that only they two knew and only they would ever know.
The men who had maimed and disfigured him had been blind, working on him in their darkness, knowing him only by the insistent probing of their hands upon his flesh, reaching through to bone. They had never learned who he was. Only Brandin knew, only Brandin and he himself, with that dim flickering of his identity so carefully left behind after everything else was gone. It had been so elegantly contrived, this answer to what he had done, this response to grief and rage. This vengeance.
No one living other than Brandin of Ygrath knew his true name and under the weight of mountains he had had no tongue to speak it himself, only a heart to cry for what was being done to him. The exquisite perfection of it, of that revenge.
But the mountains that had buried him were gone.
And on that thought, Valentin, Prince of Tigana, lifted his sword on a hill in Senzio.
His mind was his own, his memories: of a room without light, black as pitch, the voice of the Ygrathen King, weeping, telling what was being done to Tigana even as they spoke, and what would be done to him in the months and the years to come.
A mutilated body, his own features sorcerously imposed upon it, was death-wheeled in Chiara later that week then burned to ash and scattered to the winds.
In the black room the blind men began their work. He remembered trying not to scream at first. He remembered scr
eaming. Much later Brandin came and began and ended his own part of that careful patient work. A torture of a different kind; much worse. The weight of mountains in his mind.
Late in that same year the King’s Fool from Ygrath died of a misadventure in the newly occupied Palace of Chiara. And shortly afterwards, Rhun, with his weak, blinking eyes, his deformed shoulder and slack mouth, his nearly crippled walk, was brought shambling up from his darkness into twenty years of night.
It was very bright here now, almost blindingly so in the sunlight. Brandin was just ahead of him. The girl was holding his hand.
The girl. The girl was Saevar’s daughter.
He had known her the moment she was first brought to be presented to the King. She had changed in five years, greatly changed, and she would change much more as the years spun past, but her eyes were her father’s, exactly, and Valentin had watched Dianora grow up. When he had heard her named, that first day, as a woman from Certando, the dim, allowed spark of his mind had flickered and burned, for he knew, he knew what she had come to do.
Then, as the months passed and the years, he watched helplessly with his rheumy eyes from under the crush of his mountains, as the terrible interwovenness of things added love to everything else. He was bound to Brandin unimaginably and he saw what happened. More, he was made to be a part of it, by the very nature of the relationship between the Kings and the Fools of Ygrath.
It was he who first gave expression—beyond his control, he had no control—to what was growing in the heart of the King. Back in a time when Brandin still refused to admit even the idea of love into a soul and a life shaped by vengeance and loss it was Rhun—Valentin—who would find himself staring at Dianora, at Saevar’s dark-haired daughter, with another man’s soul in his eyes.
No more, not ever again. The long night had been rolled back. The sorcery that had bound him was gone. It was over; he stood in sunlight and could speak his true name if he chose. He took an awkward step forward and then, more carefully, another. No one noticed him though. They never noticed him. He was the Fool. Rhun. Even that name, chosen by the King. Only the two of them ever to know. Not for the world, this. The privacy of pride. He had even understood. Perhaps the most terrible thing of all: he had understood.
He stepped under the canopy. Brandin was ahead of him near the edge of the hill. He had never struck a man from behind in all his days. He moved to one side, stumbling a little, and came up on the King’s right hand. No one looked at him. He was Rhun.
He was not.
‘You should have killed me by the river,’ he said, very clearly. Slowly, Brandin turned his head, as if just now remembering something. Valentin waited until their eyes met and held before he drove his sword into the Ygrathen’s heart, the way a Prince killed his enemies, however many years it might take, however much might have to be endured before such an ending was allowed.
Dianora could not even scream she was so stunned, so unprepared. She saw Brandin stagger backwards, a blade in his chest. Then Rhun—Rhun!—jerked it clumsily free and so much blood followed. Brandin’s eyes were wide with astonishment and pain, but they were clear, so luminously clear. And so was his voice as she heard him say:
‘Both of us?’ He swayed, still on his feet. ‘Father and son, both? What a harvest, Prince of Tigana.’
Dianora heard the name as a white burst of sound in her brain. Time seemed to change, to slow unbearably. She saw Brandin sinking to his knees; it seemed to take forever for him to fall. She tried to move towards him; her body would not respond. She heard an elongated, weirdly distorted sound of anguish, and saw stark agony in d’Eymon’s face as the Chancellor’s blade ripped into and through Rhun’s side.
Not Rhun. Not Rhun. Valentin the Prince.
Brandin’s Fool. All those years. The thing that had been done to him! And she beside him, beside that suffering. All those years. She wanted to scream. She could not make a sound, could scarcely breathe.
She saw him falling too, the maimed, broken form crumpling to the ground beside Brandin. Who was still on his knees, a red wound in his chest. And who was looking at her now, only at her. A sound finally escaped her lips as she sank down beside him. He reached out, so slowly, with such a colossal effort of will, with all the control he had, and he took her hand.
‘Oh, love,’ she heard him say. ‘It is as I told you. We should have met in Finavir.’
She tried again to speak, to answer him, but tears were streaming down her face and closing her throat. She gripped his hand as tightly as she could, trying to will life from herself over into him. He slumped sideways against her shoulder, and so she lowered him to her lap and wrapped her arms around him, the way she had last night, only last night when he slept. She saw the brilliantly clear grey eyes slowly grow cloudy, and then dark. She was holding him like that when he died.
She lifted her head. The Prince of Tigana, on the ground beside them, was looking at her with so much compassion in his newly clear eyes. Which was a thing she could not possibly endure. Not from him: not with what he had suffered and what she was, what she herself had done. If he only knew, what words would he have for her, what look would there be in those eyes? She could not bear it. She saw him open his mouth as if to speak, then his eyes flicked quickly to one side.
A shadow crossed the sun. She looked up and saw d’Eymon’s sword lifted high. Valentin raised a hand, pleading, to ward it.
‘Wait!’ she gasped, forcing the one word out.
And d’Eymon, almost mad with his own grief yet stayed for her voice. Held back his sword. Valentin lowered his hand. She saw him draw breath against the massive final reality of his own wound, and then, closing his eyes to the pain and the fierce light, she heard him speak. Not a cry, only the one word spoken in a clear voice. The one word which was—oh, what else could it have ever been?—the name of his home, offered as a shining thing for the world again to know.
And Dianora saw then that d’Eymon of Ygrath did know it. That he did hear the name. Which meant that all men now could, that the spell was broken. Valentin opened his eyes and looked up at the Chancellor, reading the truth of that knowledge in d’Eymon’s face, and Dianora saw that the Prince of Tigana was smiling as the Chancellor’s sword came down from its great height and drove into his heart.
Even in death the smile remained on the terribly afflicted face. And the echo of his last word, the single name, seemed to Dianora to be hanging yet and spreading outward in ripples through the air around the hill, above the valley where the Barbadians were all dying now.
She looked down at the dead man in her arms, cradling his head and the greying hair, and she could not stop her tears. In Finavir, he had said. Last words. Another named place, farther away than dream. And had been right, as so many many times he had been right. They ought to have met, if the gods had any kindness, any pity at all for them, in another world than this. Not here. For love was what it was, but it was not enough. Not here.
She heard a sound from under the canopy and turned in time to see d’Eymon slump forward against Brandin’s chair. The hilt of his sword was against the seat-back of the chair. The blade was buried in his breast. She saw it and she pitied him his pain but she could not properly grieve. There was nothing left within her for such a sorrow. D’Eymon of Ygrath could not matter now. Not with the two men lying here with her, beside each other. She could pity, oh, she could pity any man or woman born, but she could not grieve for any but these two. Not now.
Not ever, she realized.
She looked over then and saw Scelto, still on his knees, the only other living person on this hill. He too was weeping. But for her, she realized, even more than for the dead. His first tears had always been for her. He seemed to be far away though. Everything seemed oddly remote. Except Brandin. Except Valentin.
For the last time she looked down at the man for whose love she had betrayed her home and all her dead and her own vengeance sworn before a fire in her father’s house so long ago. She looked down upon wha
t remained of Brandin of Ygrath with his soul gone, and slowly, tenderly, Dianora lowered her head and kissed him upon the lips in farewell. ‘In Finavir,’ she said. ‘My love.’ Then she laid him on the ground beside Valentin and she stood.
Looking south she saw that three men and the woman with red hair had descended the slope of the wizard’s ridge and were beginning to swiftly cross the uneven ground between. She turned to Scelto whose eyes had now a terrible foreknowledge in them. He knew her, she remembered, he loved her and he knew her much too well. He knew all save the one thing, and that one secret she would take away with her. That was her own.
‘In a way,’ she said to him, gesturing at the Prince, ‘it would almost be better if no one ever knew who he was. But I don’t think we can do that. Tell them, Scelto. Stay, and tell them when they get here. Whoever they are, they ought to know.’
‘Oh, my lady,’ he whispered, weeping. ‘Must it end like this?’
She knew what he meant. Of course she knew. She would not dissemble with him now. She looked at the people—whoever they were—coming quickly across the ground from the south. The woman. A brown-haired man with a sword, another darker one, a third man, smaller than the other two.
‘Yes,’ she said to Scelto, watching them approach. ‘Yes, I think it must.’
And so she turned and left him with the dead on that hill, to wait for those who were coming even now. She left the valley behind, the hill, left all the noises of battle and pain, walking down the northernmost of the goatherds’ tracks as it wound west along the slope of the hill out of sight of everyone. There were flowers growing along the path: sonrai berries, wild lilies, irises, anemones, yellow and white, and then there was a scarlet one. In Tregea they said that flower had been made red by the blood of Adaon where he fell.