Guy Kay - Tigana

In white of course, majestic as she remembered him from when she was a girl, gripping the massive staff that had always been his signature, and towering over every man there, stood Danoleon the High Priest of Eanna in Tigana.

The man who had taken Prince Alessan away to the south. So Baerd had told her the night he saw his own riselka and went away to follow them.

She knew him, everyone had known Danoleon, his long-striding, broad-shouldered preeminence, the deep, glorious instrument that was his voice in temple services. Approaching the doors Dianora fought back a moment of wild panic before sternly controlling herself. There was no way he could recognize her. He had never known her as a child. Why should he have, the adolescent daughter of an artist loosely attached to the court? And she had changed, she was infinitely changed since then.

She couldn't take her eyes off him though. She had known d'Eymon was arranging for someone to be there from Lower Corte, but had never expected Danoleon himself. In the days when she had worked in The Queen in Stevanien it was well-known that Eanna's High Priest had withdrawn from the wider world into the goddess's Sanctuary in the southern hills.

Now he had come out, and was here, and looking at him, drinking in his reality, Dianora felt an absurd, an almost overwhelming swell of pride to see how he seemed to dominate, merely by his presence, all the people assembled there.

It was for him, and for the men and women like him, the ones who were gone and the ones who yet lived in a broken land, that she was going to do what she would do today. His eyes rested on her searchingly; they were all doing that, but it was under Danoleon's clear blue gaze that Dianora drew herself up even taller than before. Behind them all, beyond the doors which had not yet been opened, she seemed to see the riselka's path growing brighter all the time.

She stopped and they bowed to her, all six men putting a straight leg forward and bending low in a fashion of salute not used for centuries. But this was legend, ceremony, an invocation of many kinds of power, and Dianora sensed that she must now seem to them like some hieratic figure out of the tapestry scrolls of the distant past.

"My lady," said d'Eymon gravely, "if it pleases you and you are minded to allow us, we would attend upon you now and lead you to the King of the Western Palm."

Carefully said, and clearly, for all their words were to be remembered and repeated. Everything was to be remembered. One reason the priests were here, and a poet.

"It pleases me," she said simply. "Let us go." She did not say more; her own words would matter less. It was not what she would say today that was to be remembered.

She still could not take her eyes from Danoleon. He was the first man from Tigana, she realized, that she had seen since coming to the Island. In a very direct way it eased her heart that Eanna, whose children they all were, had allowed her to see this man before she went into the sea.

D'Eymon nodded a command. Slowly the massive bronze doors swung open upon the vast crowd assembled between the palace and the pier. She saw people spilling across the square to the farthest ends of the harbor, even thronging the decks of the ships at anchor there. The steady murmur of sound that had been present all morning swelled to a crescendo as the doors swung open, and then it abruptly stopped and fell away as the crowd caught sight of her. A rigid, straining silence seemed to claim Chiara under the blue arch of the sky; and out into that stillness Dianora went.

And it was then, as they moved into the brilliant sunshine along the aisle, the shining path that had been made for her passage, that she saw Brandin waiting by the sea for her, dressed like a soldier-king, without extravagance, bareheaded in the light of spring.

Something twisted within her at the sight of him, like a blade in a wound. It will end soon, she told herself steadily. Only a little longer now. It will all be over soon enough.

She went toward him then, walking like a queen, slender and tall and proud, clad in the colors of the dark-green sea with a crimson gem about her throat. And she knew that she loved him, and knew her land was lost if he was not driven away or slain, and she grieved with all her being for the simple truth that her mother and her father had had a daughter born to them all those years ago.

For someone as small as he was it was hopeless to try to see anything from the harbor square itself and even the deck of the ship that had brought them here from Corte was thronged with people who had paid the captain for a chance to view the Drive from this vantage point. Devin had made his way over to the mainmast and scrambled up to join another dozen men clinging to the rigging high above the sea. There were compensations inherent in agility.

Erlein was somewhere below amid the crowd on deck. He was still terrified, after three days here, by this enforced proximity to the sorcerer from Ygrath. It was one thing, he had said angrily, to elude Trackers in the south, another for a wizard to walk up to a sorcerer.

Alessan was somewhere among the crowd in the harbor. Devin had spotted him at one point working his way towards the pier, but couldn't see him now. Danoleon was inside the palace itself, representing Lower Corte in the ceremony. The irony of that was almost overwhelming, whenever Devin allowed himself to think about it. He tried not to because it made him afraid, for all of them.

But Alessan had been decisive when the courteously phrased request had come for the High Priest to travel north and join men of the other three provinces as formal witnesses to the Ring Dive.

"You will go, of course," the Prince had said, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. "And we shall be there as well. I need to take the measure of things on Chiara since this change."

"Are you absolutely mad?" Erlein had gasped, not bothering to hide his disbelief.

Alessan had only laughed, though not, Devin thought, with any real amusement. He had become virtually impossible to read since his mother had died. Devin felt quite inadequate to the task of bridging that space or breaking through. Several times in the days following Pasithea's death he had found himself desperately wishing that Baerd were with them.

"What about Savandi?" Erlein had demanded. "Couldn't this be a trap for Danoleon. Or for you, even?"

Alessan shook his head. "Hardly. You said yourself, no message was sent. And it is entirely plausible that he was killed by brigands in the countryside as Torre made it seem. The King of the Western Palm has larger things to worry about right now than one of his petty spies. I'm not concerned about that, Erlein, but I do thank you for your solicitude." He smiled, a wintry smile. Erlein had scowled and stalked away.

"What are you concerned about?" Devin had asked the Prince.

But Alessan hadn't answered that.

High in the rigging of the Aema Falcon Devin waited with the others for the palace doors to open, and tried to control the pounding of his heart. It was difficult though; the sense of excitement and anticipation that had been building on the Island for three days had started to become overwhelming this morning, and had taken an almost palpable shape when Brandin himself had appeared and walked calmly down to the pier with a small retinue, including one stooped, balding old man dressed exactly like the King.

"Brandin's Fool," the Cortean in the rigging next to him said, when Devin asked, pointing. "Something to do with sorcery, the way they do things in Ygrath." He grunted. "We're better off not knowing."

Devin had gazed for the first time at the man who had destroyed Tigana and tried to imagine what it would be like to have a bow in his hands right now and Baerd or Alessan's skill at archery. It was a long, but not an impossible shot, down, and across a span of water to strike a single soberly clad, bearded man standing by the sea.