Tigana by Guy Kay (novel24 txt) 📕

quietly. ‘It has come too far. I would die and I would not save you. There is nothing I can do.’

‘How long?’ she had asked. Her only words.

He told her half a year, perhaps less, depending on how strong she was.

How strong? She was very strong. More so than any of them guessed save perhaps Danoleon, who had known her longest by far. She sent the Healer from the room, and asked Danoleon to leave, and then the one slow servant the priests had allowed to the woman they knew only as a widow from an estate north of Stevanien.

As it happened she had actually known the woman whose identity she had assumed; had had her as one of the ladies of her court for a time. A fair-haired girl, green eyes and an easy manner, quick to laugh. Melina bren Tonaro. A widow for a week; less than that. She had killed herself in the Palace by the Sea when word came of Second Deisa.

The deception was a necessary shielding of identity: Danoleon’s suggestion. Almost nineteen years ago. They would be looking for her and for the boy, the High Priest had said. The boy he was taking away, he would soon be safely gone, their dreams carried in his person, a hope living so long as he lived. She had been fair-haired herself, in those days. It had all happened such a long time ago. She had become Melina bren Tonaro and had come to the Sanctuary of Eanna in its high valley above Avalle.

Above Stevanien.

Had come, and had waited. Through the changing seasons and the unchanging years. Waited for that boy to grow into a man such as his father had been, or his brothers, and then do what a descendant in direct line of Micaela and the god should know he had to do.

Had waited. Season after season; shot birds falling from the sky.

Until last autumn, when the Healer had told her the cold large thing she had already guessed for herself. Half a year, he had said. If she was strong.

She had sent them from her room and lain in her iron bed and looked out at the leaves on the valley trees. The change of colours had come. She had loved that once; her favourite season for riding. As a girl, as a woman. It had occurred to her that these would be the last fall leaves she would ever see.

She had turned her mind from such thoughts and had begun to calculate. Days and months, and the numbering of the years. She had done the arithmetic twice, and a third time to be sure of it. She said nothing to Danoleon, not then. It was too soon.

Not until the end of winter, with all the leaves gone and ice just beginning to melt from the eaves, did she summon the High Priest and instruct him as to the letter she wanted sent to the place where she knew—as he knew, alone of all the priests—her son would be on the Ember Days that began this spring. She had done the calculations. Many times.

She had also timed it very well, and not by chance. She could see Danoleon wanting to protest, to dissuade, to speak of dangers and circumspection. But the ground was out from under his feet, she could see it in the way his large hands grew restless and the way his blue eyes moved about the room as if seeking an argument on the bare walls. She waited patiently for him to meet her gaze at last, as she knew he would, and then she saw him slowly bow his head in acceptance.

How did one deny a mother, dying, a message to her only living child? An entreaty to that child to come bid her farewell before she crossed over to Morian. Especially when that child, the boy he himself had guided south over the mountains so many years ago, was her last link to what she had been, to her own broken dreams and the lost dreams of her people?

Danoleon promised to write the letter and have it sent. She thanked him and lay back in her bed after he went out. She was genuinely weary, genuinely in pain. Hanging on. It would be half a year just past the Ember Days of spring. She had done the numbers. She would be alive to see him if he came. And he would come; she knew he would come to her.

The window had been open a little though it was still cold that day. Outside, the snow had lain in gentle drifting folds in the valley and up the slopes of the hills. She had looked out upon it but her thoughts, unexpectedly, had been of the sea. Dry-eyed, for she had not wept since everything fell, not once, not ever, she walked her memory-palaces of long ago and saw the waves come in to break and fall on the white sands of the shore, leaving shells and pearls and other gifts along the curving beach.

So Pasithea di Tigana bren Serazi. Once a princess in a palace by the sea; mother of two dead sons, and of one who yet lived. Waiting, as winter near the mountains turned to spring in that year.

‘Two things. First, we are musicians,’ said Alessan. ‘A newly formed company. Secondly: do not use my name. Not here.’ His voice had taken on the clipped, hard cadences Devin remembered from the first night in the Sandreni lodge when this had all begun for him.

They were looking down on a valley running west in the clear light of afternoon. The Sperion lay behind them. The uneven, narrow road had wound its way for hours up around the shoulders of an ascending sequence of hills until this highest point. And now the valley unrolled before them, trees and grass touched by the earliest green-gold of spring. A tributary stream, swift-running with the melting snows, slanted northwest out of