Tigana by Guy Kay (novel24 txt) 📕

beyond the deserts and the rain forests—whatever lies there—is but one of many worlds the gods sent into Time. The others are said to be far off, scattered among the stars, invisible to us.’

‘There has been such a belief here as well,’ Dianora said quietly when he paused. ‘In Certando. In the highlands they once had a teaching that was much the same, though the priests of the Triad burned people for saying as much.’ It was true; there had been mass burnings for the Carlozzini heresy in the plague years, long ago.

Brandin said, ‘We never burned or wheeled people for that thought. They were laughed at sometimes, but that is another thing. What my nurse used to tell me was what her mother told her, and her mother’s mother before, I have no doubt: that some of us are born over and again into various of these worlds until, at the last, if we have earned it by the manner of our lives, we are born a final time into Finavir or Finvair which is the nearest of all the worlds to where the true gods dwell.’

‘And after that?’ she asked. His quiet words seemed to have become a part of the unfolding spell of this day.

‘After, no one knew, or would tell me. Nor did any of the parchments and books I read when I grew older.’ He shifted in his seat, his beautiful hands resting on the carved arms of the chair. ‘I never liked my nurse’s legend of Finavir. There are other kinds of stories, some of them quite different and many of them I loved, but for some reason that one stayed with me. It bothered me. It seemed to make our lives here merely a prelude, inconsequential in themselves, of importance only for where they would lead us next. I have always needed to feel that what I am doing matters, here and now.’

‘I think I would agree with you,’ she said. Her own hands were gentle in her lap now; he had shaped a different mood. ‘But why are you telling me this, if you have never liked the story?’

The simplest of questions.

And Brandin said, ‘Because during the nights this past year and more I have had recurring dreams of being reborn far away from all of this, in Finavir.’ He looked straight at her then for the first time since beginning the tale, and his grey eyes were calm and his voice was steady as he said: ‘And in all of those dreams you have been at my side and nothing has held us apart, and no one has come between.’

She had had no warning. None at all, though perhaps the clues had been there all along and she too blind to see. And suddenly she was blind now, helpless tears of shock and wonder overflowing in her eyes and a desperate, urgent hammering that she knew to be her heart.

Brandin said, ‘Dianora, I needed you so much last night I frightened myself. I did not send for you only because I had to somehow try to come to terms with what happened to me when you blocked Camena’s arrow. Solores was a court deception, no more than that: so they might not think me unmanned by danger. I spent the whole night pacing or at my desk, trying to riddle out where my life has now come. What it means that my wife and only living son should try to kill me, and fail only because of you. And thinking about that, consumed by it, I only realized near dawn that I had left you alone all night. My dear, will you ever forgive me for that?’

I want time to stop, she was thinking, wiping vainly at her tears, trying to see him clearly. I want never to leave this room, I want to hear these words spoken over and over, endlessly, until I die.

‘I made a decision on my ride,’ he said. ‘I was thinking about what Isolla had said and I was finally able to accept that she was right. Since I will not, since I cannot possibly change what I am committed to doing here, I must be prepared to pay all of the price myself, not through others in Ygrath.’

She was shaking, quite unable to stop her tears. He had not touched her, or even moved towards her. Behind him Rhun’s face was a twisted mask of pain and need, and something else. The thing she sometimes saw there, and could not face. She closed her eyes.

‘What will you do?’ she whispered. It was hard to speak.

And then he told her. All of it. Named for her the fork in the road he had chosen. She listened, her tears falling more slowly now, welling up from an overfull heart, and at length she came to understand that the wheel was coming full circle.

Listening to Brandin’s grave voice over the crackle of flames on an Ember Day, Dianora saw only images of water in her mind. The dark waters of the pool in the garden, and the vision of the sea she’d been given there. And though she had no gift of foreknowing she could see where his words were taking them, taking them all, and now she understood the showing of the pool.

She searched her heart and knew, with an enormous grief, that it was his, it had not come back to her after all. Yet even so, and most terribly of all, she knew what was about to come, what she was going to do.

She had dreamt on other nights alone through her years in the saishan of finding a path like the one that was opening for her now with the words he spoke. At one point, listening to him, thinking thus, she could bear the physical distance between them no longer. She moved from her chair to the carpet at his feet and laid her head in his lap. He touched her hair and