But there were golden rings, very much of this world, on her long fingers, and one dazzling blue gem gleamed from a necklace that hung down over her robe. Her hair was gathered and bound up in a black net, a style long out of fashion in the Palm. Devin knew with absolute certainty that current fashion would mean nothing, less than nothing, to this woman. Her eyes looked at him just then with swift, unsettling appraisal, before moving on to Erlein, and then resting, finally, upon her son.
The son she had not seen since he was fourteen years old.
Her eyes were grey like Alessan’s, but they were harder than his, glittering and cold, hiding their depths, as if some semi-precious stone had been caught and set just below the surface. They glinted, fierce and challenging, in the light of the room, and just before she spoke again—not even waiting for an answer to her first question—Devin realized that what they were seeing in those eyes was rage.
It was in the arrogant face, in the high carriage and the fingers that held hard to the arms of her chair. An inner fire of anger that had passed, long ago, beyond the realm of words or any other form of expression. She was dying, and in hiding, while the man who had killed her husband ruled her land. It was there, it was all there, for anyone who knew but half the tale.
Devin swallowed and fought an urge to draw back towards the door, out of range. A moment later he realized that he needn’t bother; as far as the woman in the chair was concerned he was a cipher, a nothing. He wasn’t even there. Her question had not been meant to be answered; she didn’t really care who they were. She had someone else to deal with.
For a long time, a sequence of moments that seemed to hang forever in the silence, she looked Alessan up and down without speaking, her white, imperious features quite unreadable. At last, slowly shaking her head, she said: ‘Your father was such a handsome man.’
Devin flinched at the words and the tone, but Alessan seemed scarcely to react at all. He nodded in calm agreement. ‘I know he was. I remember. And so were my brothers.’ He smiled, a small, ironic smile. ‘The strain must have run out just before it got to me.’
His voice was mild, but when he finished he glanced sharply at Danoleon, and the High Priest read a message there. He, in turn, murmured something to Torre who quickly left the room.
To stand guard in front, Devin realized, feeling a chill despite the fire. Words had just been spoken here that could kill them all. He looked over at Erlein and saw that the wizard had slipped his harp out of its case. His expression grim, the Senzian took a position near the eastern window and quietly began tuning his instrument.
Of course, Devin thought: Erlein knew what he was doing. They had come in here ostensibly to play for a dying woman. It would be odd if no music emerged from this room. On the other hand, he didn’t much feel like singing just now.
‘Musicians,’ the woman in the chair said with contempt to her son. ‘How splendid. Have you come to play a jingle for me now? To show me how skilful you are in such an important thing? To ease a mother’s soul before I die?’ There was something almost unbearable in her tone.
Alessan did not move, though he too had gone pale now. In no other way did he betray his tension though, save perhaps in the almost too-casual stance, the exaggerated simulation of ease.
‘If it would please you, my lady mother, I will play for you,’ he said quietly. ‘There was time I can remember when the prospect of music would indeed have brought you pleasure.’
The eyes of the woman in the chair glittered coldly. ‘There was a time for music. When we ruled here. When the men of our family were men in more than name.’
‘Oh, I know,’ said Alessan, a little sharply. ‘True men and wondrous proud, all of them. Men who would have stormed the ramparts of Chiara alone and killed Brandin long ago, if only through his abject terror at their ferocious determination. Mother, can you not let it rest, even now? We are the last of our family and we have not spoken in nineteen years.’ His voice changed, softened, grew unexpectedly awkward. ‘Must we wrangle yet, can our speech be no more than the letters were? Did you ask me here simply to say again what you have written so many times?’
The old woman shook her head. Arrogant and grim, implacable as the death that had come for her.
‘No, not that,’ she said. ‘I have not so much breath in me to waste. I summoned you here to receive a mother’s dying curse upon your blood.’
‘No!’ Devin exclaimed before he could stop himself.
In the same second Danoleon took a long stride forward. ‘My lady, no indeed,’ he said, anguish in his deep voice. ‘This is not—’
‘I am dying,’ Pasithea bren Serazi interrupted harshly. There were spots of bright unnatural colour in her cheeks. ‘I do not have to listen to you any more, Danoleon. To anyone. Wait, you told me, all these years. Be patient, you said. Well, I have no more time for patience. I will be dead in a day. Morian waits for me. I have no more time to linger while my craven child gambols about the Palm playing ditties at rustic weddings.’
There came a discordant jangling of harpstrings.
‘That,’ said Erlein di Senzio from the eastern window, ‘is ignorant and unfair!’ He stopped, as if startled by his own outburst. ‘Triad knows, I have no cause to love your son. And it is now more than clear to me whence his arrogance comes and his lack of care for other lives, for anything but his own goals. But if you name him a coward simply for not trying to kill Brandin of Ygrath then you are dying a vain, foolish woman. Which, to be perfectly frank, does not surprise me at all in this province!’
He leaned back against the ledge, breathing hard, looking at no one. In the silence that followed Alessan finally moved. His stillness had seemed inhuman, unnatural, now he sank to his knees beside his mother’s chair.
‘You have cursed me before,’ he said gravely. ‘Remember? I have lived much of my life in the shadow of that. In many ways it would have been easier to die years ago: Baerd and I slain trying to kill the Tyrant in Chiara … perhaps even killing him, through some miracle of intervention. Do you know, we used to speak of it at night, every single night, when we were in Quileia, still boys. Shaping half a hundred different plans for an assassination on the Island. Dreaming of how we would be loved and honoured after death in a province with its name restored because of us.’
His voice was low, almost hypnotic in its cadence. Devin saw Danoleon, his face working with emotion, sink back into the other armchair. Pasithea was still as marble, as expressionless and cold. Devin moved quietly towards the fire, in a vain attempt to quell the shivering that had come over him. Erlein was still by the window. He was playing his harp again, softly, single notes and random chords, not quite a tune.
‘But we grew older,’ Alessan went on, and an urgency, a terrible need to be understood had come into his voice. ‘And one Midsummer’s Eve Marius became Year King in Quileia, with our aid. After that when we three spoke the talk was different. Baerd and I began to learn some true things about power and the world. And that was when it changed for me. Something new came to me in that time, building and building, a thought, a dream, larger and deeper than trying to kill a Tyrant. We came back to the Palm and began to travel. As musicians, yes. And as artisans, merchants, athletes one time in a Triad Game year, as masons and builders, guards to a Senzian banker, sailors on a dozen different merchant-ships. But even before those journeys had begun, Mother, even before we came back north over the mountains, it had all changed for me. I was finally clear about what my task in life was to be. About what had to be done, or tried. You know it, Danoleon knows; I wrote you years ago what my new understanding was, and I begged your blessing for it. It was such a simple truth: we had to take both Tyrants together, that this whole peninsula might again be free.’
His mother’s voice overrode his steady passion then, harsh, implacable, unforgiving: ‘I remember. I remember the day that letter came. And I will tell you again what I wrote you then to that harlot’s castle in Certando: you would buy Corte’s freedom, and Asti
bar’s and Tregea’s at the price of Tigana’s name. Of our very existence in the world. At the cost of everything we ever had or were before Brandin came. At the price of vengeance and our pride.’
‘Our pride,’ Alessan echoed, so softly now they could barely hear. ‘Oh, our pride. I grew up knowing all about our pride, Mother. You taught me, even more than Father did. But I learned something else, later, as a man. In my exile. I learned about Astibar’s pride. About Senzio’s and Asoli’s and Certando’s. I learned how pride had ruined the Palm in the year the Tyrants came.’
‘The Palm?’ Pasithea demanded, her voice shrill. ‘What is the Palm? A spur of land. Rock and earth and water. What is a peninsula that we should care for it?’
‘What is Tigana?’ Erlein di Senzio asked bluntly, his harp silent in his hands.
Pasithea’s glance was withering. ‘I would have thought a bound wizard should know that!’ she said corrosively, meaning to wound. Devin blinked at the speed of her perception; no one had told her about Erlein, she had deduced it in minutes from a scattering of clues.
She said: ‘Tigana is the land where Adaon lay with Micaela when the world was young and gave her his love and a child and a god’s gift of power to that child and those who came after. And now the world has spun a long way from that night and the last descendant of that union is in this room with the entire past of his people falling through his hands.’ She leaned forward, her grey eyes blazing, her voice rising in indictment. ‘Falling through his hands. He is a fool and a coward, both. There is so much more than freedom in a peninsula in any single generation at stake in this!’
She fell back, coughing, pulling a square of blue silk from a pocket in her robe. Devin saw Alessan begin a movement up from his knees, and then check himself. His mother coughed, rackingly, and Devin saw, before he could turn his eyes away, that the silk came away red when she was done. On the carpet beside her Alessan bowed his head.
Erlein di Senzio, from the far side of the room, perhaps too far to see the blood, said, ‘And shall I now tell you the legends of Senzio’s pre-eminence? Of Astibar’s? Will you hear me sing the story of Eanna on the Island shaping the stars from the glory of her love-making with the god? Do you know Certando’s claim to be the heart and soul of the Palm? Do you remember the Carlozzini? The Night Walkers in their highlands two hundred years ago?’
The woman in the armchair pushed herself straight again glaring at him. Fearing her, hating her words and manner and the terrible thing she was doing to her son, Devin none the less felt humbled in the face of so much courage and such a force of will.
‘But that is the point,’ she said more softly, sparing her strength. ‘That is the heart of this. Can you not see it? I do remember those stories. Anyone with an education or a library, any fool who has ever heard a troubadour’s sentimental wailing can remember them. Can hear twenty different songs of Eanna and Adaon on Sangarios. Not us, though. Don’t you see? Not Tigana any more. Who will sing of Micaela under the stars by the sea when we are gone? Who will be here to sing, when one more generation has lived and died away in the world?’
‘I will,’ said Devin, his hands at his sides.
He saw Alessan’s head come up as Pasithea turned to fix him with her cold eyes. ‘We all will,’ he said, as firmly as he could. He looked at the Prince and then, forcing himself, back to the dying old woman raging in her pride. ‘The whole Palm will hear that song again, my lady. Because your son is not a coward. Nor some vain fool seeking a young death and shallow fame. He is trying for the larger thing and he is going to do it. Something has happened this spring and because of it he is going to do what he has said he will do: free this peninsula and bring back Tigana’s name into the world.’
He finished, breathing in hard gasps as if he had been running a race. A moment later, he felt himself go crimson with mortification. Pasithea bren Serazi was laughing. Mocking him, her frail thin body rocking in the chair. Her high laughter turned into another desperate fit of coughing; the blue silk came up, and when it was withdrawn there was a great deal of blood again. She clutched at the arms of her chair to steady herself.
‘You are a child,’ she pronounced finally. ‘And my son is a child for all the grey in his hair. And I have no doubt that Baerd bar Saevar is exactly the same, with half the grace and the gifts his father had. “Something has happened this spring,”’ she mimicked with cruel precision. Her voice grew hard and cold as midwinter ice: ‘Do you infants have any idea what has really just happened in the Palm?’
Slowly her son rose from his knees to stand before her. ‘We have been riding for a number of days and nights. We have heard no tidings. What is it?’
‘I told you there was news,’ Danoleon said quickly. ‘But I had no chance to give you the—’
‘I am pleased,’ Pasithea interrupted. ‘So very pleased. It seems I still have something to tell my son before I leave him forever. Something he hasn’t learned or thought out all by himself already.’ She pushed herself erect again in the chair, her eyes cold and bright like frost under blue moonlight. There was something wild and lost in her voice though, trying to break through. Some terrible fear, and of more than death. She said:
‘A messenger came yesterday at sunset, at the end of the Ember Days. An Ygrathen, riding from Stevanien with news from Chiara. News so urgent Brandin had sent it by his sorcerous link to all his Governors with instructions to spread the tidings.’
‘And the tidings are?’ Alessan had braced himself, as if preparing to receive a blow.
‘The tidings? The tidings, my feckless child, are that Brandin has just abdicated as King of Ygrath. He is sending his army home. And his Governors. All those who choose to stay with him must become citizens of this peninsula. Of a new dominion: the Kingdom of the Western Palm. Chiara, Corte, Asoli, Lower Corte. Four provinces under Brandin on the Island. He has announced that we are free of Ygrath, no longer a colony. Taxes are to be shared equally among us now, and they have been cut in half. Beginning yesterday. Cut by considerably more than half here in Lower Corte. Our burden will now be equal with the others. The messenger said that the people of this province—the people your father ruled—were singing Brandin’s name in the streets of Stevanien.’
Alessan, moving very carefully, as if he were carrying something large and heavy that might shift and fall, turned towards Danoleon. Who was nodding his head.
‘It seems that there was an assassination attempt on the Island three days ago,’ the High Priest said. ‘Originating in Ygrath: the Queen and Brandin’s son, the Regent. It apparently failed only because of one of his Tribute women. The one from Certando who almost started a war. You may remember that, twelve, fourteen years ago? It seems that in the wake of this Brandin has changed his mind about what he has been doing. Not about staying in the Palm, or about Tigana and his revenge, but about what must be done in Ygrath if he continues here.’
‘And he is going to continue here,’ Pasithea said. ‘Tigana will die, still be lost forever to his vengeance, but our people will be singing the Tyrant’s name as it dies. The name of the man who killed your father.’
Alessan was nodding his head reflexively. He seemed, in fact, scarcely to be listening, as if he had suddenly withdrawn entirely inside himself. Pasithea fell silent in the face of that, looking at her son. It grew deathly still in the room. Outside, far away, the uncontrolled shouts and laughter of the children in the field came to their ears again, the louder for the silence within. Devin listened to that distant mirth and tried to slow the chaos of his heart, to attempt to deal with what they had just heard.
He looked at Erlein, who had laid down his harp on the window-ledge and walked a few steps into the room, his expression troubled and wary. Devin tried desperately to think, to gather his scattered thoughts, but the news had caught him hopelessly unprepared. Free of Ygrath. Which was what they wanted, wasn’t it? Except that it wasn’t. Brandin was staying, they were not free of him, or the weight of his magic. And Tigana? What of
Tigana now?
And then, quite unexpectedly, there was something else bothering him. Something different. A distracting, niggling awareness tugging at the corner of his mind. Telling him there was something he should know, should remember.
Then, equally without warning, the something slid forward and into place. In fact …
In fact, he knew exactly what was wrong.
Devin closed his eyes for a moment, fighting a sudden paralysing fear. Then, as quietly as he could, he began working his way along the western wall away from the fireplace where he had been standing all this time.
Alessan was speaking now, almost to himself. He said: ‘This changes things of course. It changes a great deal. I’m going to need time to think it through, but I believe it may actually help us. This may truly be a gift not a curse.’
‘How? Are you genuinely simple?’ his mother snapped. ‘They are singing the Tyrant’s name in the streets of Avalle!’
Devin winced at the old name, the desperate pain at the heart of that cry, but he forced himself to keep moving. A terrifying certainty was rising within him.
‘I hear you, I understand. But don’t you see?’ Alessan dropped to his knees on the carpet again, close to his mother’s chair. ‘The Ygrathen army is going home. If he has to fight a war it will have to be with an army of our people and what few Ygrathens stay with him. What … oh, Mother … what do you think the Barbadian in Astibar will do when he hears this?’
‘He will do nothing,’ Pasithea said flatly. ‘Alberico is a timorous man spun neck-deep in his own webs, all of which lead back to the Emperor’s Tiara. At least a quarter of the Ygrathen army will stay with Brandin. And those people singing are the most oppressed people in the peninsula. If they are joyous, what do you think is happening elsewhere? Do you not imagine an army can be raised in Chiara and Corte and Asoli to fight against Barbadior for a man who has renounced his own Kingdom for this peninsula?’ She began coughing again, her body rocking even more harshly than before.