Tigana by Guy Kay (novel24 txt) 📕

exposed fingers, cleaving through. He hears someone cry out. Alais, not the Duke.

But in the moment the knife cuts clean through flesh to grind against stone there is a swift and dazzling flash. Sandre’s darkened face is illuminated by a corona of white light that flares like a star about his head and dies away, leaving them blinded for a moment in the after-image of its glow.

Alais is on the Duke’s other side, kneeling to quickly wrap a square of cloth about his bleeding hand. Sandre lifts that hand, with an effort, silent in the face of pain. Without a word spoken, Alais helps him, her fingers supporting his arm.

From high above they hear a sharp, distant crash, the sound of men shouting. Silhouetted in the tall window, Catriana becomes suddenly taut. She screams something. They are too far away to make out the words. Too terribly far. They see her turn though, to the darkness, to the night.

‘Oh, my dear, no! Not this!’ Alessan’s voice is a ragged whisper scoured up from his heart.

Too late. Far, far too late.

On his knees in the dusty road, Devin sees her fall.

Not wheeling or tumbling to death, but graceful as she has always been, a diver cleaving the night downwards. Sandre thrusts forward his maimed wizard’s hand, straining upwards. He speaks rapid words Devin cannot understand. There is a sudden weirdly distorting blur in the night, a shimmer as of unnatural heat in the air. Sandre’s hand is aimed straight at the falling woman. Devin’s heart stops for a moment, seizing at this wild, impossible hope.

Then it starts beating again, heavy as age, as death. Whatever Sandre has tried, it is not enough. He is too far, it is too hard a spell, he is too new to this power. Any of these, all, none. Catriana falls. Unstayed, unchecked, beautiful as a moonlit fantasy of a woman who can fly. Down to a broken, crumpled ending behind the garden wall.

Alais bursts into desperate sobs. Sandre covers his eyes with his good hand, his body rocking back and forth. Devin can hardly see for the tears in his eyes. High above them, in the window where she had stood, the blurred forms of men appear, looking downward into the darkness of the garden.

‘We have to move away!’ Rovigo croaks, the words scarcely intelligible. ‘They will be searching.’

It is true. Devin knows it is. And if there is any gift, anything at all they can offer back to Catriana now, to where she might be watching with Morian, it is that her dying should not have been meaningless or in vain.

Devin forces himself up from his knees, he helps Sandre to rise. Then he turns to Alessan. Who has not moved, nor taken his eyes from the high window where there are still men standing and gesturing. Devin remembers the Prince the afternoon his mother died. This is the same. This is worse. He wipes at his eyes with the backs of his hands. Turns to Rovigo: ‘We are too many to stay together. You and Sandre take Alais. Be very careful. They may recognize her—she was with Catriana when the Governor saw them. We’ll go another way and meet you in our rooms.’

Then he takes Alessan by the arm, and turns him—the Prince does not resist, follows his lead. The two of them start south, stumbling down a lane that will take them away from the castle, from the garden where she lies. He realizes he is still holding Sandre’s bloodied dagger. He jams it into his belt.

He thinks about the Duke, about what Sandre has just done to himself. He remembers—his mind playing its familiar tricks with time and memory—a night in the Sandreni lodge last fall. His own first night that has led him here. When Sandre told them he could not take Tomasso out of the dungeon alive because he lacked the power. Because he’d never sacrificed his fingers in the wizard’s binding.

And now he has. For Catriana, not his son, and to no good at all. There is something that hurts so much in all of this. Tomasso is nine months dead, and now she lies in a garden in Senzio, dead as any of the men of Tigana who fell in war by the Deisa years ago.

Which was the whole point for her, Devin knows. She had told him as much in Alienor’s castle. He begins to cry again, unable to stop himself. A moment later he feels Alessan’s hand upon his shoulder.

‘Hold hard, for a little longer yet,’ the Prince says. His first words since her fall. ‘You lead me and I’ll lead you, and afterwards we will mourn together, you and I.’ He leaves the hand on Devin’s shoulder. They make their way through the dark lanes and the torchlit ones.

There is already an uproar in the streets of Senzio as they go, a careening, breathless thread of rumour about some happening at the castle. The Governor is dead, someone shouts feverishly, sprinting wildly past them. The Barbadians have crossed the border, a woman screams, leaning out from a window above a tavern. She has red hair, Devin sees, and he looks away. There are no guards in the streets yet; they walk quickly and are not stopped by anyone.

Thinking back upon that walk, later, Devin realizes that never, not for a single moment, did he doubt that Catriana had killed the Barbadian before she jumped.

Back at Solinghi’s Devin wanted nothing more than to go upstairs to his room and close his eyes and be away from people, from all the invading tumult of the world. But as they came through the door, he and the Prince, a loud, impatient cheer suddenly rose in the packed front room, running swiftly towards the back as well. They were well overdue for the first of the evening’s performances, and Solinghi’s was jammed with people who’d come to hear them play, regardless of the increasing noises from outside.

Devin