Tigana by Guy Kay (novel24 txt) 📕

trees, close to hand if he needed them. She looked at the road and saw the Barbadian troops passing by, marching and riding, raising a heavy cloud of dust all around them.

‘More of the Third Company,’ Sandre said, a cold anger in his voice.

‘It looks like they’re all going, doesn’t it?’ Baerd murmured grimly.

Which was good, it was more than good, it was exactly what they wanted. The anger, the grimness were almost wholly uncalled for; they seemed to be some instinctive male response to the nearness of the enemy. Catriana felt like shaking them both.

It was so clear, really. Baerd himself had explained it to her and Sandre, and to Alienor of Borso on the day Alessan met Marius of Quileia in the mountains and rode west with Devin and Erlein.

And listening that day, forcing herself to be composed in Alienor’s presence, Catriana had finally understood what Alessan had meant, all this time, when he’d said they would have to wait until spring. They had been waiting for Marius to say yes or no. To say if he would risk his own unstable crown and his life for them. And that day in the Braccio Pass he’d said he would. Baerd told them a little, a very little, about why.

Ten days later she and Baerd and Sandre had been on watch in the hills outside Fort Ortiz when the emissaries came riding along the road carrying the Quileian flag and were met with ceremonious honour outside the walls and escorted within by the Barbadians.

Next morning the Quileians had ridden on, not hurrying, down the road to the north. Two hours after their departure the gates of the fort had opened again and six men had ridden out in extreme haste. One of them—it was Sandre who noted it—was Siferval himself, captain of the Third Company.

‘It is done,’ Baerd had said, a kind of awe in his voice. ‘I cannot believe it, but I think we have done it!’

A little more than a week later the first troops had begun to move, and they knew he was right. It wasn’t until some days after that, in an artisans’ village in northern Certando, trading for carvings and finished cloth, that they learned, belatedly, what Brandin of Ygrath had done in Chiara. The Kingdom of the Western Palm.

‘Are you a gambling man?’ Sandre had said to Baerd. ‘The dice are rolling now, and no one will hold or control them until they stop.’ Baerd had said nothing in reply, but something stunned, near to shock, in his expression made Catriana go over and take his hand in hers. Which was not really like her at all.

But everything had changed, or was changing. Baerd was not the same since the Ember Days and their stay at Castle Borso. Something had happened to him there, too, but this part he didn’t explain. Alessan was gone, and Devin—and though she hated to admit it, she missed him almost as much as the Prince. Even their role here in the east had completely altered now.

They had waited in the highlands for the emissaries, in case something should go wrong. But now Baerd kept them moving at speed from town to town and he was stopping to speak to men and to some women Catriana had never even heard about, telling them to be ready, that there might be a summer rising.

And with some of them, not many, only a select few, his message was very specific: Senzio. Head north to Senzio before Midsummer. Have a weapon with you if you can.

And it was these last words that brought home to Catriana most sharply, most potently, the fact that the time for action had truly come. It was upon them. No more oblique disruptions or hovering on the edge of events. Events had a centre now, which was or would soon be in Senzio, and they were going there. What was to happen she didn’t yet know. If Baerd did, he wasn’t telling.

What he did tell her, and Sandre too, were the names of people.

Scores of them. Names he had held in memory, some for a dozen years. People who were with them in this, who could be trusted. Who needed to be told, here in the provinces ruled by Barbadior, that the movement of Alberico’s troops was their own signal to be ready at last. To watch the unfolding of events and be prepared to respond.

They would sit together at night, the three of them, around a campfire under stars or in a secluded corner of an inn in some hamlet or village, and Baerd would recite for them the names they needed to know.

It was only on the third night, falling asleep afterwards, that Catriana belatedly realized that the reason they needed to be told this was if Baerd were to die, with Alessan away in the west.

‘Ricaso bar Dellano,’ Baerd would say. ‘A cooper in Marsilian, the first village south of Fort Ciorone. He was born in Avalle. Could not go to war because of a lame foot. Speak to him. He will not be able to come north, but knows the others near by and will spread the word and lead our people in that district if the need for a rising comes.’

‘Ricaso bar Dellano,’ she would repeat. ‘In Marsilian.’

‘Porrena bren Cullion. In Delonghi, just inside the Tregean border on the main road from Ferraut. She’s a little older than you, Catriana. Her father died at the Deisa. She knows who to speak to.’

‘Porrena,’ Sandre would murmur, concentrating, his bony, gnarled hands clasped together. ‘In Delonghi.’ And Catriana marvelled at how many names there seemed to be, how many lives Baerd and Alessan had touched in their travels through a dozen years since returning from Quileia, readying themselves and these unknown others for a time, a season, a moment in the future—which was now. Which they had lived to see. And her heart was filled with hope as she whispered the names over