Tigana by Guy Kay (novel24 txt) 📕

‘Thank you, my lord,’ she murmured, aware that they had been talking privately for some time. Aware, as ever, of how that would be construed.

‘In the meantime,’ Brandin suddenly said, in a quite different tone, ‘you still have not yet asked me how I did on the run. Solores, I have to tell you, made it her first question.’

Which carried them back to familiar ground.

‘Very well,’ she said, feigning indifference. ‘Do tell me. Halfway? Three-quarters?’

A glint of royal indignation flickered in the grey eyes. ‘You are presumptuous sometimes,’ he said. ‘I indulge you too much. I went, if you please, all the way to the summit and came down again this morning with a cluster of sonrai berries. I will be extremely interested to see if any of tomorrow’s runners are up and down as quickly.’

‘Well,’ she said quickly, unwisely, ‘they won’t have sorcery to help them.’

‘Dianora, have done!’

And that tone she recognized and knew she’d gone too far. As always at such moments she had a dizzying sense of a pit gaping at her feet.

She knew what Brandin needed from her; she knew the reason he granted her licence to be outrageous and impertinent. She had long understood why the wit and edge she brought to their exchanges were important to him. She was his counterbalance to Solores’s soft, unquestioning, undemanding shelter. The two of them, in turn, balancing d’Eymon’s ascetic exercise of politics and government.

And all three of them in orbit around the star that Brandin was. The voluntarily exiled sun, removed from the heavens it knew, from the lands and seas and people, bound to this alien peninsula by loss and grief and revenge decreed.

She knew all this. She knew the King very well. Her life depended on that. She did not often stray across the line that was always there, invisible but inviolate. When she did it was likely to be over something as apparently trivial as this. It was such a paradox for her how he could shrug off or laugh at or even invite her caustic commentary on court and colony—and yet bridle like a boy with affronted pride if she teased about his ability to run up and down a mountain in a morning.

At such times he had only to say her name in a certain way and endless chasms opened before her in the delicately inlaid floor of the Audience Chamber.

She was a captive here, more slave than courtesan, at the court of a Tyrant. She was also an impostor, living an ongoing lie while her country slowly died away from the memories of men. And she had sworn to kill this man, whose glance across a room was as wildfire on her skin or amber wine in her mortal blood.

Chasms, everywhere she turned.

And now this morning he had seen a riselka. He, and very possibly a second man as well. Fighting back her fear she forced herself to shrug casually, to arch her eyebrows above a face schooled to bland unconcern.

‘This amuses me,’ she said, reaching for self-possession, knowing precisely what his need in her was, even now. Especially now. ‘You profess to be pleased, even touched, by Solores’s doubtlessly agitated query about your mountain run. The first thing she asked, you say. How she must have wondered whether or not you succeeded! And yet when I—knowing as surely as I know my own name that you were up on the summit this morning—treat it lightly, as something small, never in doubt . . . why then the King grows angry. He bids me sternly to have done! But tell me, my lord, in all fairness, which of us, truly, has honoured you more?’

For a long time he was silent and she knew that the court would be avidly marking the expression on his face. For the moment she cared nothing for them. Or even for her past, or his encounter on the mountainside. There was one specific chasm here that began and ended in the depths of the grey eyes that were now searching her own.

When he spoke it was in a different voice again, but this tone she happened to know exceedingly well and, in spite of everything that had just been said, and in spite of where they were and who was watching them, she felt herself go weak suddenly. Her legs trembled, but not with fear now.

‘I could take you,’ said Brandin, King of Ygrath, thickly, his face flushed, ‘on the floor of this room right now before all of my gathered court.’

Her throat was dry. She felt a nerve flutter beneath the skin of her wrist. Her own colour was high, she knew. She swallowed with some difficulty.

‘Perhaps tonight would be wiser,’ she murmured, trying to keep her tone light but not really managing it, unable to hide the swift response in her eyes—spark to spark like the onset of a blaze. The jewelled khav chalice trembled in her hand. He saw that, and she saw that he did and that her response, as always, served as kindling for his own desire. She sipped at her drink, holding it with both hands, clinging to self-control.

‘Better tonight, surely,’ she said again, overwhelmed as always by what was happening to her. She knew what he needed her to say though, now, at this moment, in this room of state thronged with his court and emissaries from home.

She said it, looking him in the eyes, articulating carefully:

‘After all, my lord, at your age you should marshal your strength. You did run partway up a hill this morning.’

An instant later, for the second time, the Chiaran court of Brandin of Ygrath saw their King throw back his handsome, bearded head and they heard him laugh aloud in delight. Not far away, Rhun the Fool cackled in simultaneous glee.

‘ISOLLA OF YGRATH!’

This time there were trumpets and a drum, as well as the herald’s staff resounding as it struck the floor by the double doors at the