Tigana by Guy Kay (novel24 txt) 📕

with close interest. You have not yet given Brandin a final decision, and will delay as long as you can. You send your warmest regards to the Emperor.’

Devin was lost. He reverted to his trick of the winter: listen, remember, think about it later. Marius’s eyes were bright though, and the cold, unsettling smile was back.

‘And my third letter?’ he asked.

‘Is to the Governor of the Province of Senzio. Offering immediate trade, no tariffs, first choice of prime goods, secure anchorage in your harbours for their ships. Expressing deep admiration for Senzio’s brave independence and enterprise in the face of adversity.’ Alessan paused. ‘And this third letter, naturally—’

‘Will be intercepted by Alberico of Barbadior. Pigeon, do you know what you would be setting in motion? How incredibly dangerous a game this is?’

‘Wait a minute!’ Erlein di Senzio suddenly interjected, starting to rise.

‘You be silent!’ Alessan literally snarled the command in a voice Devin had never heard him use.

Erlein’s mouth snapped shut. He subsided, breathing harshly, his eyes coals of anger and burgeoning understanding. Alessan didn’t even look at him. Neither did Marius. The two of them sat on a golden carpet high in the mountains, seemingly oblivious to the existence of anything in the world but each other.

‘You do know, don’t you?’ Marius said finally. ‘You know exactly.’ There was a certain wonder in his voice.

Alessan nodded. ‘I’ve had enough time to think about it, Triad knows. Once the trade-routes open I think my province and its name are lost. With what you can offer him, Brandin will be a hero in the west, not a Tyrant. He will be so secure that there will be nothing I can do, Bear. Your Kingship may be my undoing. And my home’s.’

‘Are you sorry you helped me to it?’

Devin watched Alessan wrestle with that. There were currents of emotion running here, far beneath the surface of what he could see and understand. He listened, and remembered.

‘I should be sorry,’ Alessan murmured at length. ‘In a way it is a kind of treachery that I am not. But no, how can I possibly regret what we worked so hard to achieve?’ His smile was wistful.

Marius said, ‘You know I love you, Pigeon. Both of you.’

‘I know. We both know.’

‘You know what I am facing back home.’

‘I do. I have reason to remember.’

In the silence that followed Devin felt a sadness come over him, an echo of his mood at the end of the night. A sense of the terrible spaces that always seemed to lie between people. The gulfs that had to be crossed for even a simple touching.

And how much wider those gulfs must be for men such as these two, with their long dreams and the burdens of being who they were, and what. How hard it seemed, how brutally hard, for hands to reach out across so much history and such a weight of responsibility and loss.

‘Oh, Pigeon,’ said Marius of Quileia, his voice little more than a whisper, ‘you may have been an arrow shot from the white moon into my heart eighteen years ago. I love you as my son, Alessan bar Valentin. I will give you six months and your three letters. Build a bonfire to my memory if you hear that I have died.’

Even with what little he understood, on the uttermost edges of this, Devin felt a lump gather in his throat, making it difficult to swallow. He looked at the two of them and he couldn’t have said which man he admired more in that moment. The one who had asked, knowing what he asked, or the one who had given, knowing what he gave. He had an awareness though, humbling, inescapable, of how far yet he had to travel—a distance he might never traverse— before he could name himself a man after the fashion of these two.

‘Does either of you have any idea,’ Erlein di Senzio broke into the stillness, his voice grim as death, ‘how many innocent men and women may be butchered because of what you are about to do?’

Marius said nothing. Alessan wheeled on the wizard though.

‘Have you any idea,’ he said, his eyes like chips of grey ice, ‘how close I am to killing you for saying that?’ Erlein paled but did not draw back. Nor did his own eyes flinch away.

‘I did not ask to be born into this time, charged by my birth with trying to set it right,’ Alessan said, his voice held tightly again as if under a leash. ‘I was the youngest child. This should have been my brothers’ burden, either or both of them. They died by the Deisa. Among the lucky ones.’ Bitterness cracked through for a moment.

And was beaten back. ‘I am trying to act for the whole of the Palm. Not just for Tigana and her lost name. I have been reviled as a traitor and a fool for doing so. My mother has cursed me because of this. I will accept that from her. To her I will hold myself accountable for blood and death and the destruction of what Tigana was if I fail. I will not hold myself subject to your judgement, Erlein di Senzio! I do not need you to tell me who or what is at risk in this. I need you to do what I tell you, nothing more! If you are going to die a slave you might as well be mine as anyone else’s. You are going to fight with me, Senzian. Whether through your will or against it you are going to fight with me for freedom!’

He fell silent. Devin felt himself trembling, as if a titanic thunderstorm had shaken the sky above the mountains and gone.

‘Why do you let him live?’ Marius of Quileia asked.

Alessan fought to collect himself He seemed to consider the matter. ‘Because he is a brave man in his own way,’ he answered at length. ‘Because it is true that his people will be placed in