Tigana by Guy Kay (novel24 txt) 📕

to find their byplay amusing, and even to feel a little regretful when Catriana had gone.

Two days afterwards Elena had come. Baerd had said it would be a woman. He had asked Alienor to take care of her. She had raised her eyebrows at that as well.

On the northern ramparts she glanced over in the twilight. Elena had come up without a cloak; her hands were cupping her elbows tightly against her body. Feeling unreasonably irritated, Alienor abruptly removed her shawl and draped it over the other’s shoulders.

‘You should know better by now,’ she said sharply. ‘It gets cold up here when the sun goes down.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Elena said again, quickly motioning to remove the shawl. ‘But you’ll be chilled now. I’ll go down and get something for myself.’

‘Stay where you are!’ Alienor snapped. Elena froze, apprehension in her eyes. Alienor looked out past her, past the darkening fields and the emerging flickers of light where night candles and fires were being lit in houses and farms below. She looked beyond all these under the first stars of the evening, her eyes straining north, her imagination winging far beyond her sight to where the others would all be gathering now, or soon.

‘Stay here,’ she said, more gently. ‘Stay with me.’

Elena’s blue eyes widened in the darkness as she looked over. Her expression was grave, thoughtful. Unexpectedly, she smiled. And then, even more astonishingly, she moved nearer and drew her arm through Alienor’s, pulling her close. Alienor stiffened for a second, then allowed herself to relax against the other woman. She had asked for companionship. For the first time in more years than she could remember, she had asked for this. A completely different kind of intimacy. It felt, of late, as if something rigid and hard was falling away inside her. She had waited for this summer, for what it might mean, for so many years.

What had the young one said, Devin? About being allowed more than the transience of desire, if only one believed it was deserved. No one had ever said such a thing to her in all the years since Cornaro of Borso had died fighting Barbadior. In which dark time his young widow, his bride, alone in a highland castle with her grief and rage, had been set upon the road towards what she had become.

He had gone with Alessan, Devin. By now, they would probably be in the north as well. Alienor looked out, letting her thoughts stream like birds arrowing away through darkness, across the miles between, to where all of their fates would be decided when Midsummer came.

Dark hair and light blown back and mingled by the wind, the two women stood together in that high place for a long time, sharing warmth, sharing the night and the waiting time.

It had long been said, sometimes in mockery, sometimes with a bemusement that bordered on awe, that as the days heated up in summer, so did the nighttime passions of Senzio. The hedonistic self-indulgence of that northern province, blessed with fertile soil and gentle weather, was a byword in the Palm and even over the seas. You could get whatever you wanted in Senzio, it was said, provided you were willing to pay for it. And fight someone to keep it, the initiated often added.

Towards the end of spring that year it might have been thought that burgeoning tensions and the palpable threat of war would have dampened the nocturnal ardour of the Senzians—and their endless flow of visitors—for wine, for love-making in diverse combinations, and for brawling in the taverns and streets.

Someone might indeed have thought such a thing, but not anyone who knew Senzio. In fact, it actually seemed as if the looming portents of disaster—the Barbadians massed ominously on the Ferraut border, the ever-increasing numbers of ships of the Ygrathen flotilla anchored at Farsaro Island off the northwestern tip of the province—were simply spurs to the wildness of night in Senzio town. There were no curfews here; there hadn’t been for hundreds of years. And though emissaries of both invading powers were prominently housed in opposite wings of what was now called the Governor’s Castle, Senzians still boasted that they were the only free province in the Palm.

A boast that began to ring more hollow with each passing day and sybaritic night as the entire peninsula braced itself for a conflagration.

In the face of which onrushing intrusion of reality Senzio town merely intensified the already manic pace of its dark hours. Legendary watering-holes like The Red Glove or Thetaph were packed with sweating, shouting patrons every night, to whom they dispensed their harsh, overpriced liquors and a seemingly endless stream of available flesh, male or female, in the warrens of airless rooms upstairs.

Those innkeepers who had elected, for whatever reasons, not to trade in purchased love had to offer substantially different inducements to their patrons. For the eponymous owner of Solinghi’s, a tavern not far from the castle, good food, decent vintages and ales, and clean rooms in which to sleep were assurances of a respectable if not an extravagant living, derived primarily from merchants and traders disinclined to traffic in the carnality of night, or at least to sleep and eat amid that overripe corruption. Solinghi’s also prided itself on offering, by day or night, the best music to be found in the city at any given time.

At this particular moment, shortly before the dinner-hour one day late in the spring, the bar and table patrons of the almost full tavern were enjoying the music of an unlikely trio: a Senzian harper, a piper from Astibar, and a young Asolini tenor who—according to a rumour started a couple of days before—was the singer who had disappeared after performing Sandre d’Astibar’s funeral rites last fall.

Rumours of every kind were rife in Senzio that spring, but few believed this one: such a prodigy was unlikely in the extreme to be singing in a put-together group like this. But in fact the