Tigana by Guy Kay (novel24 txt) 📕

new chaos settled in the west. Quileia’s choice could be forced and be no choice at all. The Empire could be made to see, on the eve of his final journey home, just what his sorcery and his armies could do. The time was offering a jewel, truly, falling from the heavens, waiting to be clasped. To be set upon his brow.

He was still uneasy though, almost uncannily so, sitting alone as the morning brightened, trying to convince himself of the truth of all this shining promise. He was more than uneasy; his mouth was dry and the spring sunlight seemed strange to him, almost painful. He wondered if he was ill. There was something gnawing away like a rat in darkness at the unlit corners of his thoughts. He forced himself to turn towards it, trying to make a torch of his careful rationality, to look within himself and root out this anxiety.

And then indeed he did see it, and understood, in that same moment, that it could not be rooted out, nor ever be acknowledged to a living soul.

For the truth, the poisonous gall of truth, was that he was afraid. Deathly afraid, in the deepest inward places of his being, of this other man. Of Brandin of Ygrath, now Brandin of the Western Palm. The name had been changed, the balance changed utterly.

The truth of fear was exactly as it had been for almost twenty years.

A short while later he left the room and went down the stairs and underground to see how they killed the messenger.

Alais knew exactly why she was being granted this unprecedented gift of a journey in the Sea Maid with her father: Selvena was getting married at the end of summer.

Catini bar Edinio, whose father owned a good-sized estate of olive trees and vineyards north of Astibar, and a modest but successful banking-house in the city, had asked Rovigo for his second daughter’s hand early in the spring. Rovigo, urgently forewarned by his second daughter, had given his consent, a decision calculated, among other things, to forestall Selvena’s oft-proclaimed intention to do away with herself should she still be living at home and unwed by the autumn. Catini was earnest and pleasant if a little dull, and Rovigo had done business with Edinio in the past and liked the man.

Selvena was tempestuously ecstatic, about plans for the wedding, about the prospect of running her own home— Edinio had offered to set the young couple up in a small house on a hill above his vineyards—and, as Rovigo overheard her telling the younger girls one evening, about the anticipated pleasures of the marriage-bed.

He was pleased for her happiness and rather looking forward to the celebration of the marriage. If he had moments of sadness that he strove to mask, he attributed it to the natural feelings of a man who saw that his girl-child had become a woman rather sooner than he had been prepared for. The sight of Selvena making a red glove for her bridal night affected Rovigo more than he had thought it would. He would turn from her bright, feverish chatter to Alais, neat and quiet and watchful, and something akin to sadness would touch his spirit amid the anticipatory bustle of the house.

Alix seemed to understand, perhaps even better than he did himself. His wife had taken to patting his shoulder at sporadic, unexpected moments, as if gentling a restive creature.

He was restive. This spring the news from the wider world was unpredictable and of seemingly enormous consequence. Barbadian troops were beginning to clog the roads as they moved up to northern Ferraut, on the border of Senzio. From the newly declared Kingdom of the Western Palm had come no clear response as yet to this provocation. Or none that had reached Astibar. Rovigo hadn’t heard a word from Alessan since well before the Ember Days, but he had been told a long time ago that this spring might mark the beginning of something new.

And something was in the air, a sense of quickening and of change that fit itself to the mood of burgeoning spring and then went beyond it, into danger and the potential for violence. He seemed to hear it and see it everywhere, in the tramp of armies on the march, in the lowered voices of men in taverns, looking up too quickly whenever anyone came through the door.

One morning when he woke, Rovigo had an image that lingered in his mind, of the great floes of solidly packed river ice he had glimpsed many years ago far to the south on a long voyage down the coast of Quileia. And in his mind-picture, as he lay in bed, suspended between asleep and fully awake, he had seemed to see that ice breaking up and the river waters beginning to run again, carrying the floes crashing and grinding down to the sea.

Over khav that same morning, standing in the kitchen, he had announced that he was going into town to see about equipping the Maid for her first run of the season down to Tregea, with goods, perhaps wine—perhaps Edinio’s wine—to trade for a ship’s hold’s worth of early spring wool and Tregean goat’s cheese.

It was an impulsive decision, but not an inappropriate one. He usually made a run south in the spring, if a little later in the season, mostly for trade, partly to learn what he could for Alessan. He had been doing it for years, for both reasons, ever since he’d met Alessan and Baerd, spending a long night in a southern tavern with them, and coming away with the knowledge of a shared passion of the soul and a cause that might be a lifetime in the unfolding.

So this spring voyage was a part of his yearly routine. What was not, what was truly impulsive, was his offer, between one sip of early morning khav and the next, to take Alais with him.

His eldest, his pride, his clever one.