Tigana by Guy Kay (novel24 txt) 📕

Catriana had become aware of Devin at her shoulder and Rovigo beside his daughter. She looked at them and registered the clenched fury in their eyes. It was then that she’d felt amusement, however briefly.

‘That,’ she said lightly, ‘is exactly how Baerd looked before he almost had us both killed in Tregea. I don’t think I’m prepared to repeat the experience. I have no hair left to cut.’

It was Alais, cleverer by far than Catriana had realized at first, who laughed, carrying them past the moment. The four of them walked on.

‘I would have killed him,’ Devin said quietly to her as they paused by a leather goods booth.

‘Of course you would have,’ she said easily. Then realizing how that probably sounded, and that he was quite serious in what he’d said, she squeezed his arm. Not something she would have done six months before. She was changing, they all were.

But just about then, amusement and anger both fading, Catriana began to think about something. It seemed to her that the brightness of the day slid abruptly into shadow for a moment though there were no clouds in the sky at all.

She realized afterwards that she had decided to do it almost as soon as the idea took shape in her mind.

Before the morning market had closed she had managed to be alone long enough to purchase what she needed. Earrings, gown, black comb. Red glove.

And it was while doing these things that she’d begun to think about her mother and to remember the bridge in Tregea. Not surprisingly: the mind worked in patterns like that. Such patterns were why she was doing this, why she’d even been able to think of it. When night fell she would have to come away by herself, telling none of them. A lie of some sort for Alais. No farewells; they would stop her, just as she would have stopped any of them.

But something had to be done, they all knew it. A move had to be made, and that morning in the market Catriana had thought she’d discovered what that move might be.

She’d spent the first part of this solitary walk through darkness wishing she were braver though, that her hands would not tremble as they were. But they’d stopped shaking after all when she reached the garden wall and saw a star fall in the blue-black velvet sky.

‘WE’LL HAVE TO SEARCH you, you understand,’ said one of the two guards outside the gates, a crooked smile on his face.

‘Of course,’ she murmured, stepping nearer. ‘There are so few benefits to standing watch here, aren’t there?’ The other one laughed, and drew her forward, not ungently, into the light of the torches and then a little past them, to the more private shadows at the side of the square. She heard a brief, low-pitched altercation between the two men on the other side of the gate, ending in a concise six-word order. One of them, manifestly outranked, reluctantly began heading inward through the courtyard to find Anghiar of Barbadior and tell him his dreams had just come true, or some such thing. The other hastily unlocked the gates with a key on a ring at his belt and came out to join the others.

They took some time with her, but were not unkind, nor did they presume too much in the end. If she was going to the Barbadian and found favour there, they could be at risk in offending her. She had counted on something like that. She managed to laugh softly once or twice, but not so much as to encourage them. She was thinking of patterns still, remembering the very first evening she’d come to Alessan and Baerd. The night porter at the inn groping for her as she went by, leering, sure of why she was there.

I will not sleep with you, she’d said when they opened to her knock. I have never slept with any man. So much irony in her life, looking back from these tangled shadows, the guards’ hands moving over her. What mortal knew the way their fate line would run? Inevitably perhaps, she thought about Devin in the hidden closet of the Sandreni Palace. Which had worked out rather differently in almost every way than she had expected it to. Not that she’d been thinking of futures or fates that day. Not then.

And now? What should she be thinking now, as the patterns began to unfold again? The images, she told herself, cloaked in shadow with three guards: hold hard to the images. Entrances and endings, a candle starting a blaze.

By the time they were done with her the fourth guard was back with two Barbadians. They were smiling too. But they treated her with some courtesy as they led her through the open gates and across the central courtyard. Light spilled erratically downwards from interior windows above. Before they passed inside she looked up at the stars. Eanna’s lights. Every one of them with a name.

They went into the castle through a pair of massive doors guarded by four more men, then up two long flights of marble stairs and along a bright corridor on the highest level. At the end of this last hallway a door was partly open. Beyond it, as they approached, Catriana caught a glimpse of a room elaborately furnished in dark, rich colours.

In the doorway itself stood Anghiar of Barbadior, in a blue robe to match his eyes, holding a glass of green wine and devouring her with his gaze for the second time that day.

She smiled, and let him take her red-gloved fingers in his own manicured hand. He led her into the room. He closed and locked the door. They were alone. There were candles burning everywhere.

‘Red vixen,’ he said, ‘how do you like to play?’

Devin had been edgy all week, uneasy in his own skin; he knew they all felt the same way. The combination of