Guy Kay - Tigana

He was still thinking about that as he followed Alessan and Catriana out the door and into the darkness of the wood again.

IT HAPPENED, THE LONG PATH OF THAT DAY AND NIGHT DID not lead back to the inn after all.

The three of them returned through the forest to the main road from Astibar to Ardin town. They walked in silence along the road under the arch of the autumn stars, cicadas loud in the woods on either side. Devin was glad of his woolen overshirt; it was chilly now, there might be a frost tonight.

It was strange to be abroad in the darkness so late. When they were traveling Menico was always careful to have his company quartered and settled by the dinner hour. Even with the stern measures both Tyrants had taken against thieves and brigands, the paths of the Palm were not often traveled by decent folk at night.

Folk such as he himself had been, only this morning. He had been secure in his niche and his calling, had even had, improbably enough, a triumph. He'd been poised on the edge of a genuine success. And now he was walking a road in darkness having abandoned any such prospects or security, and having sworn an oath that marked him for a death-wheel, in Chiara if not here. Both places actually, if Tomasso bar Sandre talked.

It was an odd, lonely feeling. He trusted the men he had joined, he even trusted the girl, if it came to that, but he didn't know them very well. Not like he knew Menico or Eghano after so many years.

It occurred to him that the same dilemma applied to the cause he had just sworn to make his own: he didn't know Tigana either, which was the whole point of what Brandin of Ygrath had done with his sorcery. Devin was in the process of changing his life for a story told under the moon, for a childhood song, an evocation of his mother, something almost purely an abstraction for him. A name.

He was honest enough to wonder if he was doing this as much for the adventure of it, for the glamor that Alessan and Baerd and the old Duke represented, as for the depth of old pain and grief he'd learned about in the forest tonight. He didn't know the answer. He didn't know how much Catriana fitted into his reasons, how much his father did, or pride, or the sound of Baerd's voice speaking his loss to the night.

The truth was that if Sandre d'Astibar could stop his son from talking, as he had promised to do, then there was nothing to prevent Devin from carrying on exactly as he had for the past six years. From having the triumph and the rewards that seemed to lie before him. He shook his head. It was astonishing in a way, but that course, with Menico on the road, performing across the Palm, the life he'd woken to this morning, seemed almost inconceivable to him now, as if he'd already crossed to the other side of some tremendous divide. Devin wondered how often men did what they did, made the choices of their lives, for reasons that were clean and uncomplicated and easily understood as they were happening.

He was jolted from his reverie by Alessan abruptly raising a hand in warning. Without a word spoken the three of them slipped into the trees again beside the road. After a moment there was a flicker of torchlight to the west and Devin heard the sound of a cart approaching. There were voices, male and female both. Revelers returning home late, he guessed. There was a Festival going on. In some ways it had begun to seem another irrelevance. They waited for the cart to go by.

It did not. The horse was pulled up, with a soft slap and jingle of reins just in front of where they were hiding. Someone jumped down, then they heard him unlocking a chain on a gate.

"I really am hopelessly overindulgent," they heard him complain. "Every single time I look at this excuse for a crest I am reminded that I should have had an artisan design it. There are limits, or there ought to be, to what a father allows!"

Devin recognized the place and the voice in the same moment. An impulse, a striving back toward the ordinary and familiar after what had happened in the night, made him rise.

"Trust me," he whispered as Alessan threw him a glance. "This is a friend."

Then he stepped out into the road.

"I thought it was a handsome design," he said clearly. "Better than most artisans I know. And, to tell the truth, Rovigo, I remember you saying the same thing to me yesterday afternoon in The Bird."

"I know that voice," Rovigo replied instantly. "I know that voice and I am exceedingly glad to hear it, even though you have just unmasked me before a shrewish wife and a daughter who has long been the bane of her father's unfortunate existence. Devin d'Asoli, if I am not mistaken!"

He strode forward from the gate, seizing the cart lantern from its bracket. Devin heard relieved laughter from the two women in the cart. Behind him, Alessan and then Catriana stepped into the road.

"You are not mistaken," Devin said. "May I introduce two of my company members: Catriana d'Astibar and Alessan di Tregea. This is Rovigo, a merchant with whom I was sharing a bottle in elegant surroundings when Catriana arranged to have me assaulted and ejected yesterday."

"Ah!" Rovigo exclaimed, holding the lantern higher. "The sister!"

Catriana, lit by the widened cast of the flame, smiled demurely. "I needed to talk to him," she said by way of explanation. "I didn't much want to go inside that place."

"A wise and a providential woman," Rovigo approved, grinning. "Would that my clutch of daughters were half so intelligent. No one," he added, "should much want to go inside The Bird unless they have a head-cold so virulent that it defeats all sense of smell."

Alessan burst out laughing. "Well-met on a dark road, Master Rovigo, the more so if you are the owner of a vessel called the Sea Maid."

Devin blinked in astonishment.

"I have indeed the great misfortune to own and sail that un-seaworthy excuse for a vessel," Rovigo admitted cheerfully. "How do you come to know it, friend?"

Alessan seemed highly amused. "Because I was asked to seek you out if I could. I have tidings for you from Ferraut town. From a somewhat portly, red-faced personage named Taccio."

"My esteemed factor in Ferraut!" Rovigo exclaimed. "Well met, indeed! By the god, where did you encounter him?"

"In another tavern, I am sorry to have to say. A tavern where I had been playing music and he was… well, escaping retribution was his own phrase. We two were, as it happened, the last patrons of the night. He wasn't in any great hurry to return home, for what seemed to me prudent reasons, and we fell to talking."

"It is never hard to fall to talking with Taccio," Rovigo assented.

Devin heard a giggle from the cart. It didn’t sound like the amusement of a ponderous, unmarriageable daughter. He was beginning to take the measure of Rovigo's attitude to his women. In the darkness he found himself grinning.

Alessan said, "The worthy Taccio explained his dilemma to me, and when I came to mention that I had just joined the company of Menico di Ferraut and was bound this way for the Festival he charged me to seek you out and carry verbal confirmation of a letter he says he's had conveyed to you."

"Half a dozen letters," Rovigo groaned. "To it, then: your verbal confirmation, friend Alessan."

"Good Taccio bade me tell you, and to swear it as true by the Triad's grace and the three fingers of the Palm", Alessan's voice became a flawless parody of a sententious stage messenger, "that did the new bed not arrive from Astibar before the winter frosts, the Dragon that slumbers uneasily by his side would awaken in wrath unimaginable and put a violent end to his life of care in your esteemed service."

There was laughter and applause from the shadows of the cart. The mother, Devin decided, pursuing his earlier thought, didn't sound even remotely shrewish.