Tigana by Guy Kay (novel24 txt) 📕

It went on into summer and then it ended. It all ended, as her knowing heart had forewarned her from that first time in darkness, listening to the birds singing and the wind in the trees outside.

He came home no later than he usually did from walking abroad one night when blue Ilarion had been riding alone through a high lacework of clouds. It had been a beautiful night. She had sat up late by her window watching the moonlight falling on the rooftops. She’d been in bed when he came home though, and her heart had quickened with the familiar intermingling of relief and guilt and need. He had come into her room.

He didn’t come to bed. Instead, he sank into the chair she’d sat in by the window. With a queer, numb feeling of dread she had struck tinder and lit her candle. She sat up and looked at him. His face was very white, she could see that even by candlelight. She said nothing. She waited.

‘I was on the beach,’ Baerd said quietly. ‘I saw a riselka there.’

She had always known it would end. That it had to end.

She asked the instinctive question. ‘Did anyone else see her?’

He shook his head.

They looked at each other in silence. She was amazed at how calm she was, how steady her hands were upon the comforter. And in that silence a truth came home to her, one she had probably known for a long time. ‘You have only been staying for me, in any case,’ she said. A statement. No reproach in it. He had seen a riselka.

He closed his eyes. ‘You knew?’

‘Yes,’ she lied.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, looking at her. But she knew that this would be easier for him if she were able to hide how new and deathly cold this actually was for her. A gift; perhaps the last gift she would give him.

‘Don’t be sorry,’ she murmured, her hands lying still, where he could see them. ‘Truly, I understand.’ Truly, she did, though her heart was a wounded thing, a bird with one wing only, fluttering in small circles to the ground.

‘The riselka—’ he began. And halted. It was an enormous, frightening thing, she knew.

‘She makes it clear,’ he went on earnestly. ‘The fork of the prophecy. That I have to go away.’

She saw the love for her in his eyes. She willed herself to be strong enough. Strong enough to help him go away from her. Oh, my brother, she was thinking. And will you leave me now?

She said, ‘I know she makes it clear, Baerd. I know you have to leave. It will be marked on the lines of your palm.’ She swallowed. This was harder than she could ever have imagined. She said, ‘Where will you go?’ My love, she added, but not aloud, only inside, in her heart.

‘I’ve thought about that,’ he said.

He sat up straighter now. She could see him taking strength from her calm. She clung to that with everything she had.

‘I’m going to look for the Prince,’ he said.

‘What, Alessan? We don’t even know if he’s alive,’ she said in spite of herself.

‘There’s word he is,’ Baerd said. ‘That his mother is in hiding with the priests of Eanna, and that the Prince has been sent away. If there is any hope, any dream for us, for Tigana, it will lie with Alessan.’

‘He’s fifteen years old,’ she said. Could not stop herself from saying. And so are you, she thought. Baerd, where did our childhood go?

By candlelight his dark eyes were not those of a boy. ‘I don’t think age matters,’ he said. ‘This is not going to be a quick or an easy thing, if it can ever be done at all. He will be older than fifteen when the time comes.’

‘So will you,’ she said.

‘And so will you,’ Baerd echoed. ‘Oh, Dia, what will you do?’ No one else but her father ever called her that. Stupidly it was the name that nearly broke her control.

She shook her head. ‘I don’t know,’ she said honestly. ‘Look after mother. Marry. There is money for a while yet if I’m careful.’ She saw his stricken look and moved to quell it. ‘You are not to worry about it, Baerd. Listen to me: you have just seen a riselka! Will you fight your fate to clear rubble in this city for the rest of your days? No one has easy choices any more, and mine will not be as hard as most. I may,’ she had added, tilting her head defiantly, ‘try to think of some way to chase the same dream as you.’

It astonished her, looking back, that she had actually said this on that very night. As if she herself had seen the riselka and her own path had been made clear, even as Baerd’s forked away from her.

Lonely and cold in the saishan she was not half so cold or alone as she had been that night. He had not lingered once she’d given her dispensation. She had risen and dressed and helped him pack a very few things. He had flatly refused any of the silver. She assembled a small satchel of food for his first sunrise on the long road alone. At the doorway, in the darkness of the summer night, they had held each other close, clinging without words. Neither wept, as if both knew the time for tears had passed.

‘If the goddesses love us, and the god,’ Baerd said, ‘we will surely meet again. I will think of you each and every day of my life. I love you, Dianora.’

‘And I you,’ she’d said to him. ‘I think you know how much. Eanna light your path and bring you home.’ That was all she’d said. All she could think to say.

After he’d gone she had sat in the front room wrapped in an old shawl of her mother’s, gazing sightlessly at the ashes of last night’s