Tigana by Guy Kay (novel24 txt) 📕

‘What do we want to happen?’ Alessan repeated. ‘I’m not completely sure. I think I know, but I can’t be certain yet. That’s why we’re going to watch this Dive.’

They listened to the sounds of the ship in the night sea. Devin cleared his throat.

‘If she fails?’ he asked.

Alessan was silent for so long Devin didn’t think he was going to answer. Then, very softly, he said, ‘If the Certandan woman fails Brandin is lost I think. I am almost sure.’

Devin looked quickly over at him. ‘Well then, that means . . .’

‘That means a number of things, yes. One is our name come back. Another is Alberico ruling the Palm. Before the year is out, almost certainly.’

Devin tried to absorb that. If we take them then we must take them both, he remembered the Prince saying in the Sandreni lodge, with Devin hiding in the loft above.

‘And if she succeeds?’ he asked.

Alessan shrugged. In the blue and silver moonlight his profile seemed more marble than flesh. ‘You tell me. How many people of the provinces will fight against the Empire of Barbadior for a king who has been wedded to the seas of the Palm by a sea-bride from this peninsula?’

Devin thought about it.

‘A lot,’ he said at length. ‘I think a lot of people would fight.’

‘So do I,’ said Alessan. ‘Then the next question becomes, who would win? And the one after that is: Is there something we can do about it?’

‘Is there?’

Alessan looked over at him then and his mouth crooked wryly. ‘I have lived my life believing so. We may find it put to the test very soon.’

Devin stopped his questions then. It was very bright with the two moons shining. A short while later Alessan touched his shoulder and pointed with his other hand. Devin looked and saw a high, dark mass of land rising from the sea in the distance.

‘Chiara,’ said Alessan.

And so Devin saw the Island for the first time.

‘Have you ever been here before?’ he asked softly.

Alessan shook his head, never taking his eyes from that dark, mountainous shape on the horizon.

‘Only in my dreams,’ he said.

‘SHE’S COMING!’ someone shouted from the topmost rigging of the Asolini ship anchored next to them; the cry was immediately picked up and strung from ship to ship and along the harbour, peaking in a roar of anticipation.

And then falling away to an eerie, chilling silence as the massive bronze doors of Chiara Palace swung fully back to reveal the woman framed within.

Even when she began to walk the silence held. Moving slowly, she passed among the throngs assembled in the square, seeming almost oblivious to them. Devin was too far away to see her face clearly yet, but he was suddenly conscious of a terrible beauty and grace. It is the ceremony, he told himself; it is only because of where she is. He saw Danoleon behind her, moving among the other escorts, towering above them.

And then, moved by some instinct, he turned from them to Brandin of Ygrath on the pier. The King was nearer to him and he had the right angle. He could see how the man watched the woman approach. His face was utterly expressionless. Icy cold.

He’s calculating the situation, Devin thought. The numbers, the chances. He’s using all of this—the woman, the ritual, everyone gathered here with so much passion in them—for a purely political end. He realized that he despised the man for that, over and above everything else: hated him for the blank, emotionless gaze with which he watched a woman approach to risk her life for him. By the Triad, he was supposed to be in love with her!

Even the bent old man beside him, Devin saw, the King’s Fool, dressed exactly like Brandin, was wringing his hands over and about each other in obvious apprehension, anxiety and concern vivid in his face.

By contrast, the face of the King of the Western Palm was a frigid, uncaring mask. Devin didn’t even want to look at him any more. He turned back to the woman, who had come much nearer now.

And because she had, because she was almost at the water’s edge, he could see that his first sense had been right and his glib explanation wrong: Dianora di Certando clad in the sea-green robes of the Ring Dive was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen in all his life.

What do we want to happen? he had asked Alessan three nights ago, sailing to this Island.

He still didn’t know the answer. But looking down at the woman as she reached the sea a sudden fear rose in him, and an entirely unexpected pity. He grasped the rigging tightly and set himself to watch from high, high above.

She knew Brandin better than she knew anyone alive; it had been necessary, in order to survive, especially in the beginning, in order to say and do the right things in a mortally dangerous place. Then as the years slipped by necessity had somehow been alchemized into something else. Into love, actually, bitterly hard as that had been to acknowledge. She had come here to kill, with the twin snakes of memory and hatred in her heart. Instead, she had ended up understanding him better than anyone in the world because there was no one else who mattered half so much.

And so what came very near to breaking her, as she passed through that multitude of people to the pier, was seeing how ferociously he was struggling not to show what he was feeling. As if his soul was straining to escape through the doorways of his eyes, and he, being born to power, being what he was, felt it necessary to hold it in, here among so many people.

But he couldn’t hide it from her. She didn’t even have to look at Rhun to read Brandin now. He had cut himself off from his home, from all that had anchored him in