Tigana by Guy Kay (novel24 txt) 📕

young tenor had an exceptional voice and he was matched by the playing of the other two. Solinghi di Senzio was immensely pleased with their effect on business over the past week.

The truth was, he would have given them employment and a room upstairs if they had made music like boarhounds in lust. Solinghi had been a friend of the dark-haired man who was now calling himself Adreano d’Astibar for almost ten years. A friend, and more than that; as it happened, almost half the patrons of the inn this spring were men who had come to Senzio expressly to meet the three musicians here. Solinghi kept his mouth shut, poured wine and beer, supervised his cooks and serving-girls, and prayed to Eanna of the Lights every night before he went to sleep that Alessan knew what he was doing.

This particular afternoon the patrons enjoying the young tenor’s rousing rendition of a Certandan ballad were rudely snapped out of their bar-pounding rhythm when the doors to the street were pushed open, revealing a largish cluster of new customers. Nothing of note in that, of course. Or not until the singer cut himself off in the middle of a chorus with a shouted greeting, the piper quickly laid down his pipes and leaped off the stage, and the harper lowered his own instrument and followed, if more slowly.

The enthusiasms of the reunion that ensued would have led to predictably cynical conclusions about the nature of the men involved, given the way of such things in Senzio, had the new party not included a pair of exceptionally attractive young women, one with short red hair, one with raven-dark. Even the harper, a dour, unsmiling fellow if ever there was one, was drawn almost against his will into the circle, to be crushed against the bony breast of a cadaverous-looking Khardhu mercenary who towered over the rest of the party.

A moment later another kind of reunion occurred. One with a different resonance that even stilled the excitement of the newly mingled group. Another man rose and walked diffidently over to the five people who had just arrived. Those who looked closely could see that his hands were trembling.

‘Baerd?’ they heard him say.

There followed a moment of silence. Then the man whom he’d addressed said ‘Naddo?’ in a tone even the most innocent Senzian could interpret. Any lingering doubts about that were laid to rest a second later by the way the two men embraced each other.

They even wept.

More than one man, eyeing the two women with frank admiration, decided that his chances of a conversation, and who knew what else, might be better than they’d first appeared if the men were all like that.

Alais had been moving through the days since Tregea in a state of excitement that brought an almost continuous flush to her pale skin and made her more delicately beautiful than she knew. What she did know is why she had been allowed to come.

From the moment the Sea Maid’s landing-boat had silently returned to the ship in the moonlit harbour of Tregea, bearing her father and Catriana and the two men they’d gone to meet, Alais had been aware that something more than friendship was involved here.

Then the dark-skinned man from Khardhu had looked at her appraisingly, and at Rovigo with an amused expression on his lined face, and her father, hesitating for only a moment, had told her who this really was. And then, quietly, but with an exhilarating confidence in her, he’d explained what these people, his new partners, were really doing here, and what he appeared to have been doing in secret with them for a great many years.

It appeared that it had not been entirely a coincidence after all that they’d met three musicians on the road outside their home during the Festival of Vines last fall.

Listening intently, trying not to miss a syllable or an implication, Alais measured her own inward response to all of this and was pleased beyond words to discover that she was not afraid. Her father’s voice and manner had much to do with that. And the simple fact that he was trusting her with this.

It was the other man—Baerd, they named him—who said to Rovigo, ‘If you are truly set on coming with us to Senzio, then we will have to find a place on the coast to put your daughter ashore.’

‘Why, exactly?’ Alais had said quickly before Rovigo could answer. She could feel her colour rising as all eyes turned to her. They were down below deck, crowded in her father’s cabin.

Baerd’s eyes were very dark by candlelight. He was a hard-looking, even a dangerous-seeming man, but his voice when he answered her was not unkind.

‘Because I don’t believe in subjecting people to unnecessary risks. There is danger in what we are about to do. There are also reasons for us to face those dangers, and your father’s assistance and that of his men if he trusts them, is important to us. For you to come would be a danger without necessity. Does that make sense?’

She forced herself to be calm. ‘Only if you judge me a child, incapable of any contribution.’ She swallowed. ‘I am the same age as Catriana and I think I now understand what is happening here. What you have been trying to do. I have . . . I can say that I have the same desire as any of you to be free.’

‘There are truths in that. I think she should come.’ It was, remarkably, Catriana. ‘Baerd,’ she went on, ‘if this is truly the time that will decide, we have no business refusing people who feel the way we do. No right to decide that they must huddle in their homes waiting to see if they are still slaves or not when the summer ends.’

Baerd looked at Catriana for a long time but said nothing. He turned to Rovigo, deferring to him with a gesture. In her father’s face Alais