Tigana by Guy Kay (novel24 txt) 📕

she said at last. ‘A kind of insurrection in the dark that somehow stands against the laws of day that bind us and cannot be broken now.’

Devin thought about it.

‘Possibly that,’ he agreed softly, working it through. ‘Or else an admission somewhere in the soul that we deserve no more than this, nothing that goes deeper. Since we are not free and have accepted that.’

He saw her flinch then, and close her eyes.

‘Did I deserve that?’ she asked.

A terrible sadness passed over Devin. He swallowed with some difficulty. ‘No,’ he said. ‘No, you didn’t.’

Her eyes were still closed when he left the room.

HE FELT HEAVY and burdened, beyond merely tired; leaden with the weight of his thoughts, slowed by them. He stumbled going down the stairwell and had to fling out his free hand to brace himself against the stone wall. The motion left the candle unguarded and it went out.

It was very dark then. The castle was utterly still. Moving carefully, Devin reached the bottom of the stairs and he put the spent flame down on a ledge there. At intervals, high in the walls, tall thin windows let slanting moonlight fall across the corridor but the angle and the hour did not allow for any real illumination.

Briefly he considered going back for another candle but then, after standing still a moment to let his eyes adjust, Devin set out along what he thought to be the way they had come.

He was lost very soon, though not really alarmed. In his present mood there seemed to be something apposite about padding thus silently down the darkened hallways of this ancient highland castle in the dead of night, the stones cold against his feet.

There are no wrong turnings. Only paths we had not known we were meant to walk.

Who had told him that? The words had come unbidden to his mind from some recess of memory. He turned into an unfamiliar corridor and passed through a long room hung with paintings. Part of the way through, he found a voice for the words: it had been the old priest of Morian at the goddess’s temple by his family’s farm in Asoli. He had taught the twins and then Devin how to read and do sums, and when it appeared that the youngest boy, the small one, could sing he had given Devin his first lessons in the rudiments of harmony.

No wrong turnings, Devin thought again. And then, with a shiver he could not suppress, he remembered that this was not just the nadir of a night, it was the end of winter, the first of the Ember Days—when the dead were said to walk abroad.

The dead. Who were his dead? Marra. His mother, whom he had never known. Tigana? Could a country, a province, be said to have died? Could it be lost and mourned like a living soul? He thought of the Barbadian he had slain in the Nievolene barn.

He did quicken his pace then, over the dark, sporadically moonlit stones of the vast and silent castle.

It seemed to Devin that he walked for an endless time—or a time outside of time—passing no one, hearing nothing save for his own breathing or the soft tread of his feet, before he finally recognized a statue in an alcove. He had admired it by torchlight earlier in the evening. He knew his room was just ahead and around a corner to the right. Somehow he had come entirely the wrong way along the whole far wing of Castle Borso.

He also knew, from earlier in the evening, that the room directly opposite the small fine statue of the bearded archer drawing a bow, was Catriana’s.

He looked up and down the corridor but saw only greater and lesser shadows among the bands of white moonlight falling from above. He listened, and heard no sound. If the dead were abroad they were silent.

No wrong turnings, Ploto the priest had told him long ago.

He thought of Alienor, lying with her eyes closed among her bright cushions and all her candles, and he was sorry for what he’d said to her at the end. He was sorry for many things. Alessan’s mother was dying. His own was dead.

Ice is for deaths and endings, Alienor had said to Catriana in the hall.

He was cold, and very sad. He moved forward and ended the silence, knocking gently on Catriana’s door.

SHE’D HAD A RESTLESS night, for many reasons. Alienor had disturbed her: both the unbridled sensuousness that emanated from the woman, and the obviously close, unknown past she shared with Alessan and Baerd.

Catriana hated unknown things, information hidden from her. She still didn’t know what Alessan was going to do tomorrow, what this mysterious meeting in the highlands was all about, and ignorance made her uneasy and even, on a less acknowledged level, afraid.

She wished she could be more like Devin sometimes, matching his seemingly tranquil acceptance of what he could or could not know. She had seen him storing away the pieces of what he did learn and patiently waiting to receive another piece, and then putting them together like the tiles of a children’s puzzle game.

Sometimes she admired that, sometimes it made her wild and contemptuous to see him so accepting of Alessan’s occasional reticence or Baerd’s chronic reserve. Catriana needed to know. She had been ignorant for so much of her life, shielded from her own history in that tiny fishing village in Astibar. She felt that there was so much lost time to be regained. Sometimes it made her want to weep.

That was how she’d been feeling this evening before drifting into a shallow, uneasy sleep and a dream of home. She often dreamt of home since she’d left, especially of her mother.

This time she saw herself walking through the village just after sunrise, passing the last house—Tendo’s, she even saw his dog—and then rounding the familiar curve of the shore to where her father had bought a derelict cottage and repaired it