Guy Kay - Tigana

Erlein di Senzio laughed. Devin wheeled furiously around on him, his hands clenched into fists. And there must have been something murderous in his eyes, for the wizard quickly sobered, mockery leaving his face as if wiped away with a cloth.

There was a short silence.

Danoleon drew himself up and straightened his massive shoulders. He said, "This will have to be dealt with carefully or the story will spread. We can't have Savandi's death traced to our guests. Torre, when we leave lock this room with the body in it. After dark, when the others are asleep we will deal with him."

"He'll be missed at dinner," Torre said.

"No he won't. You are the porter. You will see him ride through the gate late this afternoon. He will be going to see his family. It fits, just after the Ember Days, and in the wake of the news from Chiara. He has ridden out often enough, and not always with my permission. I think I have an idea why now. I wonder if he ever really rode to his father's house. Unfortunately for Savandi, this time he is going to be killed by someone on the road just outside our valley."

There was a hardness to the High Priest's voice that Devin had not heard before. One of us. He looked down at the dead man again. His third killing. But this one was different. The guard in the Nievolene barn, the soldier in the hill pass, they had been doing what they had come to the Palm to do. Loyal to the power they served, hiding nothing of their nature, true to their manifest cause. He had grieved for their dying, for the lines of life that had brought him together with them.

Savandi was otherwise. This death was different. Devin searched his soul and found that he could not grieve for what he had done. It was all he could do, he realized with a sense of real uneasiness, to refrain from plunging his dagger again in the corpse. It was as if the young priest's corrosive treachery to his people, his smiling deceit, had tapped some violence of passion Devin hadn't known lay within him. Almost exactly, he thought suddenly, the way that Alienor of Castle Borso had done, in a very different sphere of life.

Or, perhaps, at the heart of things, not so very different after all. But that was too hard, too dangerous a knot to try to untie just now, in the staring presence of death. Which reminded him of something, made him suddenly aware of an absence. He looked quickly up at Danoleon.

"Where's Alessan?" he said sharply. "Why didn't he follow?"

But even before he was answered, he knew. There could only be one reason in the world why the Prince hadn't come.

The High Priest looked down at him. "He is still in my chamber. With his mother. Though I am afraid it may be over by now."

"No," Devin said. "Oh, no." And rose, and went to the door, and into the corridor, and then out through the eastern doorway of the infirmary into the slanting light of late afternoon, and began, again, to run.

Along the back curve of the temple dome, past the same small building as before and a little garden he hadn't noticed coming here, then back, flying, down the path to the High Priest's house, and up onto the portico between the pillars, as if rewinding events like a ball of wool, to the window through which he had leaped such a little while ago. As if he could race back not only past Savandi, past their coming here, but all the way back, with a sudden, incoherent longing, to where the seeds of this grief had been planted when the Tyrants came.

But time was not rewound, neither in the heart nor in the world as they knew it. It moved on, and things changed, for better or for worse; seasons changed, the hours of sunlit day went by, darkness fell and lingered and gave way to light at dawn, years spun after each other one by one, people were born, and lived by the Triad's grace, and they died.

And they died.

Alessan was still in the room, still on his knees on the simple carpet, but beside the bed now, not by the heavy, dark oak chair as before. He had moved, time had moved, the sun was further west along the curving sky.

Devin had wanted to somehow run his way back through the moments that had passed. That Alessan might not have been left alone, not with this. On his first day in Tigana since he was a boy. He was no longer a boy; there was grey in his hair. Time had run. Twenty years worth of time had run and he was home again.

And his mother lay on the High Priest's bed. Alessan's two hands were laced around one of her own, cradling it gently as one might hold a small bird that would die of fright if clutched too fast but would fly away forever if released.

Devin must have made some kind of sound at the window for the Prince looked up. Their eyes met. Devin ached inside, wordless with sorrow. His heart felt bruised, besieged. He felt hopelessly inadequate to the needs of such a time as this now was. He wished that Baerd were here, or Sandre. Even Catriana would know what to do better than he.

He said, "He is dead. Savandi. We caught him in time." Alessan nodded, acknowledging this. Then his gaze went down again to his mother's face, serene now as it had not been before. As it very likely had not been for the last long years of her life. Time, moving inexorably forward for her, taking memory, taking pride. Taking love.

"I'm sorry," Devin said. "Alessan, I'm so sorry."

The Prince looked up again, the grey eyes clear but terribly far away. Chasing images backward along a skein of years. He looked as if he would speak but did not. Instead, after another moment, he gave his small shrug, the calm, reassuring motion of acceptance, of shouldering another burden, that they all knew so well.

Devin suddenly felt as if he could not bear it anymore. Alessan's quiet acquiescence was as a final blow in his own heart. He felt torn open, wounded by the hard truths of the world, by the passing of things. He lowered his head to the windowsill and wept like a child in the presence of something too large for his capacity.

In the room Alessan knelt in silence by the bed, holding his mother's hand between his own. And the westering sun of afternoon sent light in a golden slant through the window and across the chamber floor, to fall upon him, upon the bed, upon the woman lying there, upon the golden coins that covered her grey eyes.

SPRING CAME EARLY IN ASTIBAR TOWN. IT ALMOST ALWAYS did along that sheltered northwestern side of the province, overlooking the bay and the strung-out islands of the Archipelago. East and south the unblocked winds from the sea pushed the start of the growing season back a few weeks and kept the smaller fishing boats close to shore this early in the year.

Senzio was already flowering, the traders in Astibar harbor reported, the white blossoms of the sejoia trees making the air fragrant with the promise of summer to come. Chiara was still cold it was said, but that happened sometimes in early spring on the Island. It wouldn't be long before the breezes from Khardhun gentled the air and the seas around her.

Senzio and Chiara.

Alberico of Barbadior lay down at night thinking about them, and rose up in the morning doing the same, after intense, agitated nights of little rest, shot through with lurid, disturbing dreams.

If the winter had been unsettling, rife with small incidents and rumors, the events of early spring were something else entirely. And there was nothing small, nothing only marginally provocative about them.

Everything seemed to be happening at once. Coming down from his bedchamber to his offices of state, Alberico would find his mood darkening with every step in the apprehensive anticipation of what might next be reported to him.

The windows of the palace were open now to let the mild breezes sweep through. It had been some time since it had been warm enough to do that and for much of the autumn and winter there had been bodies rotting on death-wheels in the square. Sandreni bodies, Nievolene, Scalvaiane. A dozen poets wheeled at random. Not conducive to opening windows, that. Necessary though, and lucrative, after his confiscation of the conspirators' lands. He liked when necessity and gain came together; it didn't happen often but when it did the marriage seemed to Alberico of Barbadior to represent almost the purest pleasure to be found in power.