Guy Kay - Tigana

Every village seemed to need one such woman, and she was the obvious candidate here. She tried to make herself not mind, but this was the most difficult thing yet. She had a mission though, a reason for being here, a vengeance to enact, and this, even this, she would tell herself, going up the stairs with someone, was a part of it. She hardened herself, but not always, and not quite enough.

Perhaps that showed through. Several men asked her to marry them. One day she caught herself thinking about one of them as she wiped down the tables after lunch. He was quiet and kind, shy when he took her upstairs, and his eyes would follow her movements in the tavern with a fierce concentration whenever he was there.

That day was when she knew it was time for her to leave.

She was a little surprised to realize that almost three years had gone by. It was spring.

She slipped away one night, again without a farewell, remembering her arrival even as she went. Meadow flowers were blooming beside the path into the hills. The air was clean and mild. By the mingled light of the two moons she found her buried silver and walked away without looking back, taking the road north towards the fort at Sinave. She was nineteen years old.

Nineteen, and sometime in the past two years she had grown beautiful. Her angular boniness had softened, even as her face lost its last traces of girlhood. It was oval, wide at the cheekbones, almost austere. It changed when she laughed though, and for some reason she still knew how to laugh, becoming warm and animated, the unexpected dance in her dark eyes seeming to promise things that went deeper than amusement. Men who had seen her laughing or who had caused her to smile at them would encounter that look again in their dreams, or in the memories that lay on the border of sleep and dream, years after Dianora had gone away.

At Sinave the Barbadians disturbed her, with their oppressive size and careless, casual brutality. She forced herself to be calm and to linger there. Two weeks would be enough she judged. She had to leave an impression and a memory.

A carefully constructed memory of an ambitious, pretty country girl from some hamlet near the mountains. A girl usually silent during the tavern talk at night but who, when she did speak, told vivid, memorable tales of her home village to the south. Told them with the distinctively laconic diction and round vowels that would have marked her anywhere in the Palm as being from the highlands of Certando.

The tales were usually sad, most stories were in those years, but once in a while Dianora would offer a wonderfully droll imitation of some highland rustic voicing his considered opinion on great affairs in the wider world, and those at the table where she was sitting would laugh for a long time.

She appeared to them to have some money, earned very likely in the way that pretty girls usually came to have some money. But she shared a room with another woman at the better of the two hostelries within the walls of the fort, and neither of them was ever seen to invite a man upstairs. Or to accept an invitation to go elsewhere. The Barbadian soldiers might have been a problem, indeed they had been over the winter, but orders had come from Astibar, and the mercenaries were under a tighter rein that spring.

What she wanted to do, Dianora confided one night to the loosely knit group of young men and women she had joined, was to work in a tavern or dining-place that saw a better class of person coming through its doors. She'd had two hands full and more, thank you, of the other sort of inn, she declared.

Someone mentioned The Queen in Stevanien, across the border in Lower Corte.

With a heartfelt, inward sigh of relief Dianora began asking questions about it.

Questions to which she'd known the answers for three days; during which time she'd sat among these selfsame people every night planting subtle hints in the hope that the name might emerge spontaneously. Subtlety, she'd finally decided, was wasted among young Certandans here on the border, and so she'd practically had to drag the conversation over to the subject she wanted.

Now she listened, seemingly enraptured and wide-eyed, as two of her recent acquaintances animatedly described the newest, most elegant Ygrathen innovation in Lower Corte. A dining-place that boasted a master chef brought all the way from Ygrath itself by the current Governor of Stevanien and its distrada. The Governor, it emerged, was notoriously fond of wine and food, and of good music played in comfortable chambers. He had helped establish the new chef in a set of rooms on the ground floor of a former banking-house, and now he basked in the reflected glory of the most elaborate, most luxurious eating-place in the Palm. He dined there himself several times a week, Dianora learned.

For the second time.

She'd picked up all of this in gossip among the merchants during her days checking out the prices and styles of clothing available in Fort Sinave. She needed some things fit for the city, she knew. It might make a difference.

From the very first time she'd heard the name she'd realized that The Queen would be perfect for the next stage of her plan to change her past.

What she learned from the merchants was that no one from Lower Corte was allowed to dine here. Traders from Corte were cordially greeted, as were those from farther afield, in Asoli or Chiara itself. Any Ygrathen, naturally, soldier, merchant or whoever he might be, come to seek his fortune in the newest colony, was graciously ushered in to salute the portrait of Queen Dorotea that hung on the wall opposite the door. Even those merchants crossing the line that divided the Eastern Palm from the West were more than welcome to leave some of whatever currency they carried in The Queen.

It was only the King's true enemies, the denizens of Lower Corte, of Stevanien itself, who were forbidden to stain or sully the ambience with their postulent, heir-murdering presence.

They never did, Dianora learned from a Ferraut trader bound back north and east with leather from Stevanien that he expected to sell at a profit, even with that year's tariff levels. What the inhabitants of Stevanien had done in response to the ban was simply refuse to work for the new establishment. Neither as servers or kitchen help or stable hands, nor even as musicians or artisans to help decorate and maintain the splendid rooms.

The Governor, when he learned what was happening, had vowed in red-faced rage to force the contemptible inhabitants to work wherever they were required by their masters of Ygrath. Force them with dungeon and lash and a death-wheel or three if needed.

The master chef, Arduini, had demurred.

One did not, Arduini had said, in a much-quoted display of artistic temperament, build up and maintain an establishment of quality by using enforced, surly labor. His standards were simply too high for that. Even the stable-boys at his restaurant, said Arduini of Ygrath, were to be trained and willing, and to have a certain style to them.

There had been widespread hilarity when that was reported: stylish stable-hands, indeed. But, Dianora learned, the amusement had turned to respect quite soon, because Arduini, pretentious or not, did know what he was doing. The Queen, the Ferraut trader told her, was like an oasis amid the deserts of Khardhun. In dispirited, broken Stevanien it cast a warm glow of Ygrathen civility and grace. The merchant lamented, though discreetly on this side of the border, the complete absence of any such traits in the Barbadians who had occupied his own province.

But yes, he said, in response to Dianora's apparently casual question, Arduini was still struggling with staff problems. Stevanien was a backwater, and a backwater, moreover, in the most oppressively taxed and militarily subjugated province in the Palm. It was next to impossible to get people to travel there, or stay, and since none of the trickle of adventurers from Ygrath had come so far from home to wash dishes or clear tables or tend to a stable, however stylish a stable it might be, there appeared to be a chronic need for workers from elsewhere in the Palm.