Tigana by Guy Kay (novel24 txt) 📕

Onestra di Chiara had been different, and because of her and after her everything had changed.

Beautiful as a legend and as proud, Grand Duke Cazal’s young bride had insisted on doing the Ring Dive herself, scorning to allocate such a glittering ceremony to some ill bred creature from the distrada on the eve of a dangerous war. She had been, all the chroniclers of the day agreed, the most beautiful vision any of them had ever seen as she walked down to the sea in the dark-green of ritual.

When she floated, lifeless, to the surface of the water some distance from the shore, in full sight of the watching throng, Duke Cazal had screamed like a girl and fainted dead away.

After which there had been rioting and a terrified pandemonium unmatched before or since on the Island. In one isolated temple of Adaon on the north shore, all the priestesses had killed themselves when one of their number brought back the news. It was the wrath of the god that was coming, so the portents were read, and Chiara almost strangled on its fear.

Duke Cazal, foolhardy and broken, was slain in battle that summer against the joined armies of Corte and Ferraut, after which Chiara endured two generations of eclipse, rising to power again only after the bitter, destructive war fought between the erstwhile allies who had beaten it. Such a process, of course, was hardly noteworthy. It had been the way of things in the Palm as far back as the records went.

But no woman had done the Ring Dive since Onestra died.

All the symbols had changed with her, the stakes had risen too high. If another woman were to die in the Dive, with that legacy of chaos and defeat.

It was far too dangerous, successive Grand Dukes declared, the one after the other, and they found ways to keep the Island safe in its sea-girt power without the sanction of that most potent ceremony.

When the Ygrathen fleet had been sighted nineteen years ago the last Grand Duke of Chiara had killed himself on the steps of Eanna’s temple, and so there had been no one to cast a ring into the sea that year, even had there been a woman willing to dive for it, in search of Morian’s intercession and the god’s.

IT WAS EERILY SILENT in the saishan when she and Scelto left her rooms. Normally at this hour the corridors would be loud with the stir and bustle of the castrates, fragrant and colourful with the scented presence of women moving languorously to the baths or to their morning meal. Today was different. The hallways were empty and still save for their own footsteps. Dianora suppressed a shiver, so strange did the deserted, echoing saishan seem.

They passed the doorway to the baths and then the entrance to the dining rooms. Both were empty and silent. They turned a corner towards the stairway that led down and out of the women’s wing, and there Dianora saw that one person at least had remained, and was waiting for them.

‘Let me look at you,’ Vencel said, the usual words. ‘I must approve you before you go down.’

The saishan head was sprawled as always among the many-coloured pillows of his rolling platform. Dianora almost smiled to see his vast bulk, and to hear the familiar words spoken.

‘Of course,’ she said, and slowly turned full circle before his scrutiny.

‘Acceptable,’ he said at length. The customary judgement, though his high distinctive voice sounded more subdued than she had ever heard it. ‘But perhaps . . . perhaps you would like to wear that vairstone from Khardhun about your throat? For luck? I brought it with me for you, from the saishan treasures.’

Almost diffidently Vencel extended a large soft hand and she saw that he was holding the red jewel she had worn the day Isolla of Ygrath had tried to kill the King.

She was about to demur when she remembered that Scelto had brought this back for her as something special for that day, just before she had dressed to go down. Remembering that, and moved by Vencel’s gesture, she said, ‘Thank you. I would be pleased to wear it.’ She hesitated. ‘Would you put it on for me?’

He smiled, almost shyly. She knelt before him and with his deft and delicate fingers the enormous saishan head clasped the jewel on its chain about her neck. Kneeling so near she was overwhelmed by the scent of tainflowers that he always wore.

Vencel withdrew his hands and leaned back to look at her. In his dark face his eyes were unwontedly soft. ‘In Khardhun we used to say to someone going on a journey, Fortune find you there and guide you home. Such is my wish today.’ He hid his hands in the billowing folds of his white robe and looked away, down the empty corridor.

‘Thank you,’ she said again, afraid to say more. She rose and glanced over at Scelto; there were tears in his eyes. He wiped them hastily away and moved to lead her down the stairs. Halfway down she looked back at Vencel, an almost inhumanly vast figure, draped in billowing white. He was gazing expressionlessly down after them, from among the brilliantly coloured panoply of his pillows, an exotic creature from another world entirely, somehow carried ashore and stranded here in the saishan of Chiara.

At the bottom of the stairs she saw that the two doors had been left unbarred. Scelto would not have to knock. Not today. He pushed the doors open and drew back to let her pass.

In the long hallway outside, the priests of Morian and the priestesses of Adaon were waiting for her. She saw the scarcely veiled triumph in their eyes, a collective glittering of expectation.

There was a sound, a drawing of breath, as she came through the doors in the green robes of a rite that had not been performed in two and a half hundred years, her hair drawn back and