Guy Kay - Tigana

Instead, she saw the ring.

It was to her right and just above, drifting like a promise or an answered prayer down through the slow, cold waters so far below the sunlight. She reached out, in the dreamlike slowness of all motion in the sea, and she claimed it and put it on her finger that she might die as a sea-bride with sea-gold upon her hand.

She was very far under now. The filtered light had almost disappeared this far down. She knew her last gathered air would soon be gone as well, the need for the surface becoming imperative, reflexive. She looked at the ring, Brandin's ring, his last and only hope. She brought it to her lips, and kissed it, and then she turned her eyes, her life, her long quest, away from the surface and the sunlight, and love.

Downward she went, forcing herself as deep as she could. And it was then, just then, that the visions began to come.

She saw her father in her mind, clearly, holding his chisel and mallet, his shoulders and chest covered with a fine powder of marble, walking with the Prince in their courtyard, Valentin's arm familiarly thrown about his shoulders, and then she saw him as he had been before he rode away, awkward and grim, to war. Then Baerd was in her mind: as a boy, sweet-natured, seemingly always laughing. Then weeping outside her door the night Naddo left them, then wrapped close in her arms in a ruined moonlit world, and lastly in the doorway of the house the night he went away. Her mother next, and Dianora felt as if she were somehow swimming back through all the years to her family. For her these images of her mother were from before the fall, before the madness had come, from a time when her mother's voice had seemed able to gentle the evening air, her touch still soothe all fevers away, all fear of the dark.

It was dark now, and very cold in the sea. She felt the first agitation of what would soon be a desperate need for air. There came to her then, as on a scroll unrolling through her mind, vignettes of her life after she'd left home. The village in Certando. Smoke over Avalle seen from the high and distant fields. The man, she couldn't even remember his name, who had wanted to marry her. Others who had bedded her in that small room upstairs. The Queen in Stevanien. Arduini. Rhamanus on the river galley taking her away. The opening sea before them. Chiara. Scelto.

Brandin.

And so, at the very end, it was he who was in her mind after all. And over and above the hard, quick images of a dozen years and more Dianora suddenly heard again his last words on the pier. The words she had been fighting to hold back from her awareness, had tried not to even hear or understand, for fear of what they might do to her resolve. What he might do.

My love, he'd whispered, come back to me. Stevan is gone. I cannot lose you both or I will die.

She had not wanted to hear that; anything like that. Words were power, words tried to change you, to shape bridges of longing that no one could ever really cross.

Or I will die, he had said.

And she knew, could not even try to deny within herself that it was true. That he would die. That her false, beneficent vision of Brandin living somewhere else, remembering her tenderly, was simply another lie in the soul. He would do no such thing. My love, he had called her. She knew, gods how she and her home had cause to know, what love meant to this man. How deep it went in him.

How deep. There was a roaring sound in her ears now, a pressure of water so far below the surface of the sea. Her lungs felt as if they were going to burst. She moved her head to one side, with difficulty.

There seemed to be something there, beside her in the darkness. A darting figure further out to sea. A glimmer, glimpse of a form, of a man or a god she could not say. But it could not be a man down here. Not so far below the light and the waves, and not glowing as this form was.

Another inward vision, she told herself. A last one, then. The figure seemed to be swimming slowly away from her, light shining around it like an aureole. She was spent now. There was an aching in her, of longing, a yearning for peace. She wanted to follow that gentle, impossible light. She was ready to rest, to be whole and untormented, without desire.

And then she understood, or thought she did. That figure had to be Adaon. It had to be the god coming for her. But he had turned his back. He was moving away, the calm glow receding away towards blackness here in the depths of the sea.

She did not belong to him. Not yet.

She looked at her hand. The ring upon it was almost invisible, so faint was the light. But she could feel it there, and she knew whose ring it was. She knew.

Far down in the dark of the sea, terribly far below the world where mortal men and women lived and breathed the air, Dianora turned. She pushed her hands above her, touched palms together and parted them, cleaving the water upwards, hurling her body like a spear up through all the layers of the sea, of dark-green death, towards life again and all the unbridged chasms of air and light and love.

When he saw her break the surface of the sea, Devin wept. Even before he saw the flash of gold sparkling on the hand she lifted in weariness, that they all might see the ring.

Wiping at his streaming eyes, his voice raw from screaming with all the others on the ship, on all the ships, all through the harbor of Chiara, he then saw something else.

Brandin of Ygrath, who had named himself Brandin di Chiara, had dropped to his knees on the pier and had buried his face in his hands. His shoulders were shaking helplessly. And Devin understood then how wrong he had been before: that this was not, after all, a man who was only pleased and happy that a stratagem had worked.

With agonizing slowness the woman swam to the pier. An eager priest and priestess helped her from the sea and supported her and wrapped her shivering form in a robe of white and gold. She could scarcely stand. But Devin, still weeping, saw her lift her head high as she turned to Brandin and offered him the sea-ring in a trembling hand.

Then he saw the King, the Tyrant, the sorcerer who had ruined them with his bitter, annihilating power, gather the woman into his arms, gently, with tenderness, but with the unmistakable urgency of a man deprived and hungry for too long.

Alessan reached up and removed the child from his shoulders, setting it carefully down beside its mother. She smiled at him. Her hair was yellow as her gown. He smiled back, reflexively, but found himself turning away. From her, from the man and woman embracing feverishly next to them. He felt physically ill. There was a quite substantial level of jubilant chaos erupting all around in the harbor. His stomach was churning. He closed his eyes, fighting nausea and dizziness, the tumultuous overflow.

When he opened his eyes it was to gaze at the Fool, Rhun, they had said his name was. It was deeply unsettling to see how, with the King releasing his own feelings, clutching the woman in that grip of transparent need, the Fool, the surrogate, seemed suddenly empty and hollow. There was a blank, weighted sadness to him, jarring in its discontinuity amid the exultation all around. Rhun seemed a still, silent point of numbness amid a world of tumult and weeping and laughter.

Alessan looked at the bent, balding figure with his weirdly deformed face, and felt a blurred, disorienting kinship to the man. As if the two of them were linked here, if only in their inability to know how to react to all of this.

He had to have been shielding himself, Alessan repeated in his mind for the tenth time, the twentieth. He had to. He looked at Brandin again, and then away, hurting with confusion and grief.

For how many years in Quileia had he and Baerd spun adolescent plots of making their way here? Of coming upon the Tyrant and killing him, their cries of Tigana's name ringing in the air, hurtling back into the world.