Guy Kay - Tigana

Pride. Again.

Her father had fled Tigana before the battles at the river.

There it was. There it was.

Carefully she drew back her hood. With real gratitude she discovered that her hands were steady now. She checked her earrings, the silver band about her throat, the jeweled ornament in her hair. Then she drew onto her hand the red glove she'd bought in the market that afternoon and she walked across the street and around the corner of the garden wall into the blaze of light at the entrance to the Governor's Castle of Senzio.

There were four guards, two outside the locked gates, two just within. She allowed her hooded cloak fall open, to let them see the black gown she wore beneath.

The two guards outside the gates glanced at each other and visibly relaxed, removing their hands from their swords. The other two moved nearer, the better to see by torchlight.

She stopped in front of the first pair. She smiled. "Would you be kind enough," she said, "to let Anghiar of Barbadior know that his red vixen has come?" And she held up her left hand, sheathed in the bright red glove.

She had actually been amused at first by Devin's reaction and Rovigo's in the marketplace. Casalia, the plump, unhealthy looking Governor had ridden through, side by side with the emissary from Barbadior. They had been laughing together. Brandin's emissary from the Western Palm had been several paces behind, among a cluster of lesser Senzians. The image and the message were as clear as they could be made.

Alais and Catriana had been standing at a silk-merchant's stall. They had turned to see the Governor go by.

He had not gone by. Instead, Anghiar of Barbadior laid a quick restraining hand on Casalia's braceleted wrist and they stopped their prancing horses directly in front of the two women. Thinking back on it, Catriana realized that she and Alais must have made a striking pair. Anghiar, blond and beefy, with an upturned moustache and hair as long as her own was now, evidently thought so.

"A mink and a red vixen!" he said, in a voice pitched for Casalia's ear. The plump Governor laughed, too quickly, a little too loudly. Anghiar's blue eyes stripped the women to their flesh under the bright sun. Alais looked away, but not down. Catriana met the Barbadian's gaze as steadily as she could. She would not turn away from these men. His smile only deepened. "A red vixen, truly," he repeated, but this time to her, and not to Casalia.

The Governor laughed anyhow. They moved on, their party following, including Brandin's emissary, looking grimly unhappy for all the beauty of the morning.

Catriana had become aware of Devin at her shoulder and Rovigo beside his daughter. She looked at them and registered the clenched fury in their eyes. It was then that she'd felt amusement, however briefly.

"That," she said lightly, "is exactly how Baerd looked before he almost had us both killed in Tregea. I don't think I'm prepared to repeat the experience. I have no hair left to cut."

It was Alais, cleverer by far than Catriana had realized at first, who laughed, carrying them past the moment. The four of them walked on.

"I would have killed him," Devin said quietly to her as they paused by a leather goods booth.

"Of course you would have," she said easily. Then realizing how that probably sounded, and that he was quite serious in what he'd said, she squeezed his arm. Not something she would have done six months before. She was changing, they all were.

But just about then, amusement and anger both fading, Catriana began to think about something. It seemed to her that the brightness of the day slid abruptly into shadow for a moment though there were no clouds in the sky at all.

She realized afterwards that she had decided to do it almost as soon as the idea took shape in her mind.

Before the morning market had closed she had managed to be alone long enough to purchase what she needed. Earrings, gown, black comb. Red glove.

And it was while doing these things that she'd begun to think about her mother and to remember the bridge in Tregea. Not surprisingly: the mind worked in patterns like that. Such patterns were why she was doing this, why she'd even been able to think of it. When night fell she would have to come away by herself, telling none of them. A lie of some sort for Alais. No farewells; they would stop her, just as she would have stopped any of them.

But something had to be done, they all knew it. A move had to be made, and that morning in the market Catriana had thought she'd discovered what that move might be.

She'd spent the first part of this solitary walk through darkness wishing she were braver though, that her hands would not tremble as they were. But they'd stopped shaking after all when she reached the garden wall and saw a star fall in the blue-black velvet sky.

"We'll have to search you, you understand," said one of the two guards outside the gates, a crooked smile on his face.

"Of course," she murmured, stepping nearer. "There are so few benefits to standing watch here, aren't there?" The other one laughed, and drew her forward, not ungently, into the light of the torches and then a little past them, to the more private shadows at the side of the square. She heard a brief, low-pitched altercation between the two men on the other side of the gate, ending in a concise six-word order. One of them, manifestly outranked, reluctantly began heading inward through the courtyard to find Anghiar of Barbadior and tell him his dreams had just come true, or some such thing. The other hastily unlocked the gates with a key on a ring at his belt and came out to join the others.

They took some with her, but were not unkind, nor did they presume too much in the end. If she was going to the Barbadian and found favor there, they could be at risk in offending her. She had counted on something like that. She managed to laugh softly once or twice, but not so much as to encourage them. She was thinking of patterns still, remembering the very first evening she'd come to Alessan and Baerd. The night porter at the inn groping for her as she went by, leering, sure of why she was there.

I will not sleep with you, she'd said when they opened to her knock. I have never slept with any man. So much irony in her life, looking back from these tangled shadows, the guards' hands moving over her. What mortal knew the way their fate line would run? Inevitably perhaps, she thought about Devin in the hidden closet of the Sandreni Palace. Which had worked our rather differently in almost every way than she had expected it to. Not that she'd been thinking of futures or fates that day. Not then.

And now? What should she be thinking now, as the patterns began to unfold again? The images, she told herself, cloaked in shadow with three guards: hold hard to the images. Entrances and endings, a candle starting a blaze.

By the time they were done with her the fourth guard was back with two Barbadians. They were smiling too. But they treated her with some courtesy as they led her through the open gates and across the central courtyard. Light spilled erratically downward from interior windows above. Before they passed inside she looked up at the stars. Eanna's lights. Every one of them with a name.

They went into the castle through a pair of massive doors guarded by four more men, then up two long flights of marble stairs and along a bright corridor on the highest level. At the end of this last hallway a door was partly open. Beyond it, as they approached, Catriana caught a glimpse of a room elaborately furnished in dark, rich colors.

In the doorway itself stood Anghiar of Barbadior, in a blue robe to match his eyes, holding a glass of green wine and devouring her with his gaze for the second time that day.

She smiled, and let him take her red-gloved fingers in his own manicured hand. He led her into the room. He closed and locked the door. They were alone. There were candles burning everywhere.