Tigana by Guy Kay (novel24 txt) 📕

robe. She was shivering uncontrollably, unable to speak. He lit the fire and made her sit before it. In docile submission she drank the mahgoti tea he prepared as a sedative. Two cups of it, one after the other. Eventually the trembling stopped. She still found it difficult to speak. He made her stay in the chair before the fire. She didn’t want to leave it anyway.

Her brain felt battered, numb. She seemed to be utterly incapable of marshalling any understanding, of shaping an adequate response to what had just happened.

One thought only kept driving the others away, pounding in her head like the hammer of a herald’s staff on the floor. A thought so impossible, so disabling, that she tried, with all she could, through the blinding pulse of an onrushing headache, to block it out. She couldn’t. The hammering crashed through, again and again: she had saved his life.

Tigana had been a single pulsebeat away from coming back into the world. The pulse-beat of Brandin that the crossbow would have ended.

Home was a dream she’d had yesterday. A place where children used to play. Among towers near the mountains, by a river, on curving sweeps of white or golden sand beside a palace at the edge of the sea. Home was a longing, a desperate dream, a name in her dreams. And this afternoon she had done the one thing she could possibly have done to bar that name from the world, to lock it into a dream. Until all the dreams, too, died.

How was she to deal with that? How possibly to cope with what it meant? She had come here to kill Brandin of Ygrath, to end his life that lost Tigana might live again. And instead . . .

The shivering started once more. Fussing and murmuring, Scelto built up the fire and brought yet another blanket for her knees and feet. When he saw the tears on her face he made a queer helpless sound of distress. Someone knocked loudly on her door some time later and she heard Scelto driving them away with language she had never known him to use before.

Gradually, very slowly, she began to pull herself together. From the colour of the light that gently drifted down through the high windows she knew that the afternoon would be waning towards dusk. She rubbed her cheeks and eyes with the backs of her hands. She sat up. She had to be ready when twilight came; twilight was when Brandin sent to the saishan.

She rose from her chair, pleased to find that her legs were steadier. Scelto rushed up, protesting, but when he saw her face he quickly checked himself. Without another word he led her through the inner doors and down that hallway to the baths. His ferocious glare silenced the attendants there. She had a sense that he would have struck them if they had spoken; she had never heard of him doing a single violent act. Not since he had killed a man and lost his own manhood.

She let them bathe her, let the scented oils soften her skin. There had been blood on it that afternoon. The waters swirled around her and then away. The attendants washed her hair. After, Scelto painted the nails of her fingers and toes. A soft shade, dusty rose. Far from the colour of blood, far from anger or grief. Later she would paint her lips the same shade. She doubted they would make love, though. She would hold him and be held. She went back to her room to wait for the summons.

From the light she knew when evening had fallen. Everyone in the saishan always knew when evening fell. The day revolved towards and then away from the hour of darkness. She sent Scelto outside, to receive the word when it came.

A short time after he came back and told her that Brandin had sent for Solores.

Anger flamed wildly within her. It exploded like . . . like the head of Isolla of Ygrath in the Audience Chamber. Dianora could scarcely draw breath, so fierce was her sudden rage. Never in her life had she felt anything like this—this white-hot cauldron in her heart. After Tigana fell, after her brother was driven away, her hatred had been a shaped thing, controlled, channelled, driven by purpose, a guarded flame that she’d known would have to burn a long time.

This was an inferno. A cauldron boiling over inside her, prodigious, overmastering, sweeping all before it like a lava flow. Had Brandin been in her room at that moment she could have ripped his heart out with her nails and teeth— as the women tore Adaon on the mountainside. She saw Scelto take an involuntary backwards step away from her; she had never known him to fear her or anyone else before. It was not an observation that mattered now.

What mattered, all that mattered, the only thing, was that she had saved the life of Brandin of Ygrath today, trampling into muck and spattered blood the clear, unsullied memory of her home and the oath she’d sworn in coming here so long ago. She had violated the essence of everything she once had been; violated herself more cruelly than had any man who’d ever lain with her for a coin in that upstairs room in Certando.

And in return? In return, Brandin had just sent for Solores di Corte, leaving her to spend tonight alone.

Not, not a thing he should have done.

It did not matter that even within the fiery heat of her own blazing Dianora could understand why he might have done this thing. Understand how little need he would have tonight for wit or intelligence, for sparkle, for questions or suggestions. Or desire. His need would be for the soft, unthinking, reflexive gentleness that Solores gave. That she herself apparently did not. The cradling worship, tenderness, the soothing voice. He would need shelter tonight. She could understand: it was what she needed too, needed