Tigana by Guy Kay (novel24 txt) 📕

She said, ‘If we die that is part of the cycle. We come back in another form.’ But that was Donar’s thought, his way of speaking, not her own.

Baerd was silent. She looked at him, but she could find nothing within her to say that wouldn’t sound wrong, or be someone else’s words. So instead, thinking it might somehow help him to speak, she asked, ‘You said you knew the shadow-figure. How, Baerd? Can you tell me?’ It was a strange, almost an illicit pleasure to speak his name.

He smiled at her then, gently. He had a gentle face, especially young as it was now. ‘Donar had all the clues himself, and Mattio, all of you. You had been losing for twenty years or so they told me. Donar said I was too much tied to the transitory battles of day, do you remember?’

Elena nodded.

‘He wasn’t wholly wrong,’ Baerd went on. ‘I saw Ygrathen soldiers here, and they were not truly so of course. I understand that now. Dearly as I might have wished them to be. But I wasn’t wholly wrong either.’ For the first time his hand put an answering pressure on her own. ‘Elena, evil feeds on itself. And the evils of day, however transitory, must add to the power of what you face here on the Ember Nights. They must, Elena, it cannot but be so. Everything connects. We cannot afford to look only at our own goals. That is the lesson the dearest friend of my life has taught me. The Tyrants in our peninsula have shaped a wrong that goes deeper than who governs in a given year. And that evil has spilled over into this battlefield where you fight Darkness in the name of Light.’

‘Darkness adding to Darkness,’ she said. She wasn’t certain what had led her to say that.

‘Exactly,’ Baerd said. ‘Exactly so. I understand your battles here now, how far they go beyond my own war in the daylight world. But going far beyond doesn’t mean there is no connection. That was Donar’s mistake. It was before him all along, if only he could have seen.’

‘And the naming,’ Elena asked. ‘What did the naming have to do with it?’

‘Naming has everything to do with it,’ Baerd said quietly. He withdrew his hand from hers and rubbed it across his eyes. ‘Names matter even more here in this place of magic than they do at home where we mortals live and die.’ He hesitated. And after a silence made deeper by the singing far away, he whispered, ‘Did you hear me name myself?’

It seemed almost a silly question. He had cried it at the top of his voice. All of them had heard. But his expression was too intense for her to do anything but answer.

‘I did,’ she said: ‘You named yourself Baerd di Tigana bar Saevar.’

And moving very slowly then, very deliberately, Baerd reached for and claimed her hand, and brought it to his lips, as though she were the lady of one of the highland castles, and not only the wheelwright’s widowed daughter from the village below Borso.

‘Thank you,’ he said, in a queer voice. ‘Thank you so much. I thought . . . I thought it might possibly be different tonight. Here.’

The back of her hand was tingling where his lips had touched her and her pulse was suddenly erratically fast. Fighting for composure, Elena asked, ‘I don’t understand. What did I do?’

His sorrow was still there, but somehow it seemed gentler now, less naked in his face. He said, quite calmly, ‘Tigana is the name of a land that was taken away. Its loss is part of the evil that brought the shadow-figure to this hill, and to all your other battlefields for twenty years now. Elena, you won’t understand this completely, you can’t, but believe me when I tell you that you could not have heard the name of that land back in your village, whether by the light of day or under the two moons. Not even if I spoke it to you from as near as we are now, or cried it louder than I did within the stream.’

And now, finally, she did understand. Not the difficult sum of what he was trying to convey, but the thing that mattered more for her: the source of his grief, of that look in the dark of his eyes.

‘And Tigana is your home,’ she said. Not a question. She knew.

He nodded. Very calm. He was still holding her hand, she realized. ‘Tigana is my home,’ he echoed. ‘Men call it Lower Corte now.’

She was silent a long moment, thinking hard. Then, ‘You must speak of this to Donar,’ she said. ‘Before morning takes us back. There may be something he knows about such matters, something he can do to help. And he will want to help.’

Something flickered in his face. ‘I’ll do that,’ he said. ‘I’ll speak to him before I go.’

They were both silent then. Before I go. Elena pushed that away as best she could. She became aware that her mouth was dry and her heart was still pounding, almost as it had in battle. Baerd did not move. He looked so young. Fifteen, he had said. She glanced away, uncertain again, and saw that all around them now the hill itself was covered with a carpet of white flowers.

‘Look!’ she said, delighted and awed.

He looked around, and smiled then, from the heart.

‘You brought them with you,’ he said.

Below them and east, in the field of corn across the river only a few voices were still singing. Elena knew what that would mean. This was the first of the Ember Nights of spring. The beginning of the year, of the cycle of sowing and harvest. And tonight they had won the Ember war. She knew what would be happening among the men and women in that field. Overhead, the stars seemed to