Guy Kay - Tigana

He set the candle on a crate and stood, hands on wide hips, looking down at Baerd. His clothes were very fine, and his black beard was neatly trimmed to a point. And scented, Baerd realized a second later.

Grinning, he rose to his feet and gestured at Tremazzo's finery, pretending to sniff the air. The apothecary grimaced. "Customers," he grunted. "It is the fashion of the day. What they expect now in a shop like this. Soon we'll be as bad as Senzio. Was it you that caused all the hue and cry this afternoon?" No more than that; no greeting, no effusions. Tremazzo had always been thus, cool and direct as a wind out of the mountains.

"I'm afraid so," Baerd replied. "Did the soldier die?"

"Hardly," Tremazzo said in his familiar, dismissive tones. "You aren't strong enough for that."

"Was there word of a woman caught?"

"Not that I heard. Who is she?"

"One of us, Tremazzo. Now listen, there is real news, and I need you to find a Khardu warrior and give him a message from me."

Tremazzo's eyes widened briefly as Baerd began, then narrowed with concentration as the story unfolded. It didn't take long to explain. Tremazzo was nothing if not quick. The bulky apothecary was not a man to venture north to Senzio himself, but he could contact others who were and let them know. And he should be able to find Sandre at their inn. He went down the ladder once more and returned, puffing, with a wheel of bread and some cold meat, and a flask of good wine to go with them.

They touched palms briefly, then he left in search of Sandre. Sitting among the sundry items stored above an apothecary's shop, Baerd ate and drank, waiting for darkness to fall. When he was sure the sun had set he slipped out onto the roof again and started back north through the town. After a while he worked his way down to the ground and, careful of the torches of the watch, threaded eastward through the winding streets to the place at the edge of the city where Catriana had come ashore from her winter leap. There, he sat down in the grass by the river in the almost windless night and settled himself to wait.

He had never really feared he would be caught. He'd had too many years of living this way, body honed and hardened, senses sharpened, mind quick to remember things, to seize and act upon opportunity.

None of which explained or excused what he'd done to get them into this in the first place. His impulsive blow at the drunken Barbadian had been an act of unthinking stupidity, regardless of the fact that it was also something that most of the people in that square had longed to do themselves at one time or another. In the Palm of the Tyrants today one suppressed such longings or died. Or watched people one cared for die.

Which lead him back to Catriana. In the starry spring darkness he remembered her emerging like a ghost from winter water. He lay silent in the grass thinking of her, and then, after a time, perhaps predictably, of Elena. And then, always and forever, certain as dawn or dusk or the turning of the seasons, of Dianora who was dead or lost to him somewhere in the world.

There was a rustle, too small to be alarming, in the leaves of a tree behind him. A moment later a trialla began to sing. He listened to it, and to the river flowing, alone and at home in the dark, a man shaped and defined by his need for solitude and the silent play of memory.

His father, as it happened, had done the same thing by the Deisa, the night before he died.

A short time later an owl called from along the riverbank just west of him. He hooted softly in reply, silencing the trialla's song. Sandre came up silently, scarcely disturbing the grass. He crouched down and then sat, grunting slightly. They looked at each other.

"Catriana?" Baerd murmured.

"I don't know. Not caught though, I think. I would have heard. I lingered in the square and around it. Saw the guards come back. The man you hit is all right. They were laughing at him, after. I think this will pass."

Baerd deliberately relaxed his tensed muscles. He said, conversationally, "I am a very great fool sometimes, had you noticed?"

"Not really. You'll have to tell me about it some time. Who was the extremely large man who accosted me?"

"Tremazzo. He's been with us for a long while. We used his upper storage room for meetings when we lived here, and after."

Sandre grunted. "He came up to me outside the inn and offered to sell me a potion to ensure the lust of any woman or boy I desired."

Baerd found himself grinning. "Rumors of Khardu habits precede you."

"Evidently." Sandre's teeth flashed white in the darkness. "Mind you, it was a good price. I bought two vials of the stuff."

Laughing quietly, Baerd felt a curious sensation, as if his heart were expanding outward toward the man here with him. He remembered Sandre the night they had met, when all the plans of his old age had been undone, when a final, savage end had come for the whole Sandreni family. A night that had not come to an end until the Duke had used his magic to go into Alberico's dungeons and kill his own son. Tomasso. Any woman or boy I desired.

Baerd felt humbled by the strength of the old man with him. Not once in half a year and more of hard traveling, through the bitter cold and rutted tracks of winter, had Sandre breathed so much as a request for a halt or an easier pace. Not once had he balked at a task, shown weariness, been slow to rise in the predawn dampness of the road. Not once given any sign of the rage or the grief that must have choked him whenever word reached them of more bodies death-wheeled in Astibar. He had given them a gift of all he had, his knowledge of the Palm, the world, and especially of Alberico; a lifetime's worth of subtlety and leadership, offered without arrogance and without reserve, nothing held back.

It was men such as this, Baerd thought, who had been the glory and the grief of the Palm in the days before it fell. Glory in the grandeur of their power, and grief in their hatreds and their wars that had let the Tyrants come and take the provinces one by one in their solitary pride.

And sitting there by the river in darkness Baerd felt again, with certainty, in the deep core of his heart, that what Alessan was doing, what he and Alessan were doing, was right. That theirs was a goal worth the striving for, this reaching out for wholeness in the Palm, with the Tyrants driven away and the provinces bound together in a sharing of the years that would come. A goal worth all the days and nights of a man's life, whether or not it was ever reached, could ever be made real. A goal that lay beside and was bound together with the other vast and bitter thing, which was Tigana and her name.

Certain things were hard for Baerd bar Saevar, almost impossible in fact, and had been since his youth had been torn away from him in the year Tigana fell. But he had lain with a woman on an Ember Night just past, in a place of deepest magic, and had felt in that green darkness as if the stern bindings that wrapped and held his heart were loosening. And this was a dark place too, a quiet one with the river flowing, and things had begun to take shape in the Palm that he had feared would never happen while he lived.

"My lord," he said softly to the old man sitting there with him, "do you know that I have come to love you in the time we have been together?"

"By the Triad!" Sandre said, a little too quickly. "And I haven't even given you the potion!"

Baerd smiled, said nothing, able to guess at the bindings the old Duke must have within himself. A moment later though, he heard Sandre murmur, in a very different voice:

"And I you, my friend. All of you. You have given me a second life and a reason for living it. Even a hope that a future worth knowing might lie ahead of us. For that you have my love until I die."