Guy Kay - Tigana

He knew how strong Brandin was; he had probed and backed quickly away from the Ygrathen's power in the year they had both come here, and that had been when he himself was in his prime. Not hollow and weakened, with a bad foot and a drooping eye after almost being killed in that cursed Sandreni lodge last year. He was not the same anymore; he knew it, if none of the others did. If he went to war it had to be a decision made in the light of that. His military edge had to be enough to offset the Ygrathen's sorcery. He needed to be certain. Surely any man not a fool could see that that had nothing to do with cowardice! Only with a careful measuring of gains and losses, risks and opportunities.

In his dreams in his tent on the border he thrust the vacuous moon faces of his captains back up into the sky, and under five moons, not two, he slowly dismembered and defiled the staked-out body of the woman from Certando.

Then the mornings would come. Digesting messages like rancid food, he would begin to wrestle again, endlessly, with the other thing that was nagging him this season like an infected wound.

Something felt wrong. Entirely wrong. There was an aspect about this whole chain of events, from the autumn onwards, that jarred within him like a jangling, dissonant chord.

Here on the border with his army all around him he was supposed to feel as if he were calling the measure of the dance. Forcing Brandin and the entire Palm to respond to his tune. Seizing control again after a winter of being impacted upon in all those trivial, disconcerting, cumulative ways. Shaping events so that Quileia would have no choice but to seek him out, so that back home in the Empire they could not mistake his power, the vigor of his will, the glory of his conquests.

That was how he was supposed to feel. How he had indeed briefly felt the morning he'd heard that Brandin had abdicated in Ygrath. When he'd ordered his three armies north to the border of Senzio.

But something had changed since that day and it was more than just the presence of opposition now waiting in the Bay of Farsaro. There was something else, something so vague and undefined he couldn't even talk about it, even if he'd had anyone to talk to, couldn't even pin it down, but it was there, nagging at him like an old wound in rain.

Alberico of Barbadior had not got to where he was, achieved this power base from which a thrust for the Tiara was imminent, without subtlety and thoughtfulness, without learning to trust his instincts.

And his instincts told him, here on the border, with his captains and his spies and his emissary in Senzio literally begging him to march, that something was wrong.

That he was not calling the tune. Someone else was. Somehow, someone else was guiding the dangerous steps of this dance. He had truly no idea who it could be, but the feeling was there each morning when he woke and it would not be shaken off. Neither would it come clear for him under the spring sun, in that border meadow bright with the banners of Barbadior, with irises and asphodels, and fragrant with the scent of the surrounding pines.

So he waited, praying to his gods for word of a death back home, agonizingly aware that the world might soon be laughing at him if he drew back, knowing, as spies kept hastening south in relays, that Brandin was getting stronger in Farsaro every day, but held there on the border by his craftiness, his instinct for survival, by that ache of doubt. Waiting for something to come clear.

Refusing, as the days slipped past, to dance to what might be someone else's tune, however seductively the hidden pipes might play.

She was numbingly afraid. This was worse, infinitely worse than the bridge in Tregea. There she had embraced and accepted danger because there was more than a hope of surviving the leap. It had been only water down below, however frigid it might be, and there had been friends waiting in the darkness around the bend to claim her from the river and chafe her back to life.

Tonight was different. Catriana realized with dismay that her hands were shaking. She stopped in the shadows of a lane to try to steady herself.

She reached up nervously to adjust her hair under the dark hood, fingering the jeweled black comb she'd set in it. On the ship coming here Alais, who had said she was used to doing so for her sisters, had evened and shaped her original swift cropping on the floor of the shop in Tregea. Catriana knew her appearance was perfectly acceptable now, more than that, actually, if the reactions of men in Senzio these past days meant anything.

And they had to mean something. For that was what had brought her out here in the darkness alone, pressed against a rough stone wall in a lane, waiting now for a noisy swarm of revelers to pass by in the street before her. This was a better part of town, so near the castle, but there was no truly safe quarter of Senzio for a woman alone in the streets at night.

She wasn't out here for safety though, which is why none of the others knew where she was. They would never have let her come. Nor would she, being honest with herself, have knowingly let any of them undertake anything like this.

This was death. She was under no illusions.

All afternoon, walking through the market with Devin and Rovigo and Alais, she had been shaping this plan and remembering her mother. That single candle always lit at sunset on the first of the Ember Days. Devin's father had done the same thing, she remembered him saying. Pride, he'd thought it was: withholding something from the Triad because of what they had allowed to happen. Her mother wasn't a proud woman, but neither had she permitted herself to forget.

Tonight Catriana saw herself as being like one of her mother's forbidden candles on those Ember Nights while all the rest of the world lay shrouded in darkness. She was a small flame, exactly like those candles; one that would not last the night, but one that, if the Triad had any love at all for her, might shape a conflagration before she went out.

The drunken revelers finally staggered by, heading in the direction of the harbor taverns. She waited another moment and then, muffled in her hood, went quickly into the street, keeping to the side of it and started the other way. Toward the castle.

It would be much better, she thought, if she could somehow make her hands be still and slow her racing heart. She should have had a glass of wine back at Solinghi's before slipping away, using the outside back stairs so that none of the others would see her. She'd sent Alais down to dinner alone, pleading a woman's illness, promising to follow soon if she could.

She had lied so easily, had even managed a reassuring smile. Then Alais was gone and she was alone, realizing in that precise instant, as the room door gently closed, that she would never see any of the others again.

In the street she shut her eyes, feeling suddenly unsteady; she put her hand on a shop-front for support, drawing deep breaths of the night air. There were tainflowers not far away, and the unmistakable fragrance of sejoia trees. She was near to the castle gardens then. She bit her lips, to force color into them. Overhead the stars were bright and close. Vidomni was already risen in the east, with blue Ilarion to follow soon. She heard a sudden peal of laughter from the next street over. A woman's laughter followed by shouting. The voice of a man. More laughter.

They were going the other way. As she looked up a star fell in the sky. Following its track to her left she saw the garden wall of the castle. The entrance would be further around that way. Entrances and endings, faced alone. But she had been a solitary child, and then solitary as a woman, drawn into an orbit of her own that took her away from others, even those who would be her friends. Devin and Alais only the latest of those who had tried. There had been others back home in the village before she left. She knew her mother had grieved for her proud solitude.