Tigana by Guy Kay (novel24 txt) 📕

night, with an entirely different crowd, Ettocio shocked himself by speaking up during an argument about ancestral primacy between an Astibarian wine-dealer and another Senzian. He made the same point the tall Khardhu had made—about nine spindly fingers that had been broken one by one because they never formed a fist. The argument made sense to him; it sounded intelligent in his own mouth. He noticed men nodding slowly even as he spoke. It was an unusual, flattering response—men had seldom paid any attention to Ettocio except when he called time in the tavern.

He rather liked the new sensation. In the days that followed he found himself raising the point whenever the opportunity arose. For the first time in his life Ettocio began to get a reputation as a thoughtful man.

Unfortunately, one evening in summer he was overheard by a Barbadian mercenary standing outside the open window. They didn’t take away his licence. There was a very high level of tension across the whole of the Palm by then. They arrested Ettocio and executed him on a wheel outside his own tavern, with his severed hands stuffed in his mouth.

A great many men had heard the argument by then, though. A great many had nodded, hearing it.

Devin joined the other four about a mile south of the crossroads inn on the dusty road leading to Certando. They were waiting for him. Catriana was alone in the first cart but Devin climbed up beside Baerd in the second.

‘Bubbling like a pot of khav,’ he said cheerfully in response to a quizzical eyebrow. Alessan rode up on one side. He’d buckled on his sword, Devin saw. Baerd’s bow was on the cart, just behind the seat and within very quick reach. Devin had had occasion, several times in six months, to see just how quick Baerd’s reach could be. Alessan smiled over at him, riding bareheaded in the bright afternoon.

‘I take it you stirred the pot a little after we left?’

Devin grinned. ‘Didn’t need much stirring. The two of you have that routine down like professional players by now.’

‘So do you,’ said the Duke, cantering up on the other side of the cart. ‘I particularly admired your spluttering anger this time. I thought you were about to throw something at me.’

Devin smiled up at him. Sandre’s teeth flashed white through the improbable black of his skin.

Don’t expect to recognize us, Baerd had said when they’d parted in the Sandreni woods half a year ago. So Devin had been prepared. Somewhat, but not enough.

Baerd’s own transformation had been disconcerting but relatively mild: he’d grown a short beard and removed the padding from the shoulders of his doublet. He wasn’t as big a man as Devin had first thought. He’d also somehow changed his hair from bright yellow to what he said was his natural dark brown. His eyes were brown now as well, not the bright blue of before.

What he had done to Sandre d’Astibar was something else entirely. Even Alessan, who’d evidently had years to get used to this sort of thing, gave a low whistle when he first saw the Duke. Sandre had become—amazingly—an ageing black fighting man from Khardhun across the northern sea. One of a type that Devin knew had been common on the roads of the Palm twenty or thirty years ago in the days when merchants went nowhere except in company with each other, and Khardhu warriors with their wickedly curved blades were much in demand as insurance against outlaws.

Somehow, and this was the uncanny thing, with his own beard shaven and his white hair tinted a dark grey, Sandre’s gaunt, black face and deep-set, fierce eyes were exactly those of a Khardhu mercenary. Which, Baerd had explained, had been almost the first thing he’d noticed about the Duke when he’d seen him in daylight. It was what had suggested the rather comprehensive disguise.

‘But how?’ Devin remembered gasping.

‘Lotions and potions,’ Alessan had laughed.

It turned out, as Baerd explained later, that he and the Prince had spent a number of years in Quileia after Tigana’s fall. Disguises of this sort—colourings for skin and hair, even tints for eyes—were a perfected, important art south of the mountains. They assumed a central role in the Mysteries of the Mother Goddess, and in the less secret rites of the formal theatre, and they had played pivotal, complex parts in the tumultuous religion-torn history of Quileia.

Baerd did not say what he and Alessan had been doing there, or how he had come to learn this secret craft or possess the implements of it.

Catriana didn’t know either, which made Devin feel somewhat better. They’d asked Alessan one afternoon, and had received, for the first time, an answer that was to become routine through the fall and winter.

In the spring, Alessan told them. In the spring a great deal would be made clearer, one way or another. They were moving towards something of importance, but they would have to wait until then. He was not going to discuss it now. Before the Ember Days of spring they would leave their current Astibar–Tregea–Ferraut loop and head south across the wide grainlands of Certando. And at that point, Alessan had said, a great many things might change. One way or another, he’d repeated.

He hadn’t smiled, saying any of this, though he was a man with an easy smile.

Devin remembered how Catriana had tossed her hair then, with a knowing, almost an angry look in her blue eyes.

‘It’s Alienor, isn’t it? she demanded, virtually an accusation. ‘It’s that women at Castle Borso.’

Alessan’s mouth had twisted in surprise and then amusement. ‘Not so, my dear,’ he’d said. ‘We’ll stop at Borso, but this has nothing to do with her at all. If I didn’t know better, if I didn’t know your heart belonged only to Devin, I’d say you sounded jealous, my darling.’

The gibe had entirely the desired effect. Catriana had stormed off, and Devin, almost as embarrassed himself, had quickly changed the subject. Alessan had a