Tigana by Guy Kay (novel24 txt) 📕

kept a precise log of where they had been and what they had said and done there. Devin had assured her they could rely on his memory, but she kept her notes none the less.

In public the Duke now called himself ‘Tomaz’. ‘Sandre’ was an uncommon-enough name in the Palm, and for a mercenary from Khardhun it would be sufficiently odd to be a risk. Devin remembered growing thoughtful when the Duke had told them his new name back in the fall. He’d wondered what it was like to have had to kill his son. Even to outlive his sons. To know that the bodies of everyone even distantly related to himself were being spreadeagled alive on the death-wheels of Barbadior. He tried to imagine how all of that would feel.

Life, the processes of living and what it did to you, seemed to Devin to grow more painfully complex all through that fall and winter. Often he thought of Marra, arbitrarily cut off on the way to her maturity, to whatever she had been about to become. He missed her with a dull ache that could grow into something heavy and difficult at times. She would have been someone to talk to about such things. The others had their own concerns and he didn’t want to burden them. He wondered about Alais bren Rovigo, if she would have understood these things he was wrestling with. He didn’t think so; she had lived too sheltered, too secluded a life for such thoughts to trouble her. He dreamt of her one night though, an unexpectedly intense series of images. The next morning he rode beside Catriana in the lead cart, unwontedly quiet, stirred and unsettled by the nearness of her, the crimson fall of her hair in the pale winter landscape.

Sometimes he thought about the soldier in the Nievolene barn—who had lost a roll of dice and carried a jug of wine to a lonely place away from the singing, and had had his throat slit there while he slept. Had that soldier been born into the world only to become a rite of passage for Devin di Tigana?

That was a terrible thought. Eventually, mulling it over through the long, cold winter rides, Devin worked his way through to deciding it was untrue. The man had interacted with other people through his days. Had caused pleasure and sorrow, doubtless, and had surely known both things. The moment of his ending was not what defined his journey under Eanna’s lights, or however that journey was named in the Empire of Barbadior.

It was difficult to sort out though. Had Stevan of Ygrath lived and died so that his father’s grief might work the destruction of a small province and its people and their memories? Had Prince Valentin di Tigana been born only to swing the killing blade that caused this to happen? And what about his youngest son then?

And what about the youngest son of the Asolini farmer who had fled from Avalle when it became Stevanien? Truly, it was hard to puzzle through.

In Senzio one morning, with the first elusive hints of spring softening the northern air, Baerd had come back from the celebrated weapons market with a bright, beautifully balanced sword for Devin. There was a black jewel in the hilt. He offered no explanation, but Devin knew it had to do with what had happened in the Nievolene barn. The gift did nothing to answer any of his new questions, but it helped him none the less. Baerd began giving him lessons during their midday breaks on the road.

Devin worried about Baerd, in part because he knew that Alessan did.

His first impression in the cabin had been mostly wrong: a big, blond man, intimidatingly cool and competent. But Baerd was dark-haired and not actually large at all and, though his competence ran to such an astonishing number of things that it could still be intimidating after six months, he wasn’t really cool. Only guarded, careful. Closed tightly around the kernel of the hurt he had lived with for a long time.

In some ways, Devin realized, Alessan had it easier than Baerd. The Prince could find a temporary release in talk, in laughter, and most of all, and almost always, in music. Baerd seemed to have no release at all; he walked through a world shaped and reshaped every single moment around the knowledge that Tigana was gone.

It would drive him out at night sometimes, away from sleep, or from a fire they’d built up by a road. He would rise without warning, neatly, quietly, and go out into the darkness alone.

Devin would watch Alessan watching Baerd as he went away.

‘I knew a man like him once,’ Sandre said gravely one night after Baerd had left a warm room in a tavern for a fog-shrouded winter night in the Tregean hills near Borifort. ‘He used to have to go away by himself to fight off a need to kill.’

‘That would be a part of it,’ Alessan had said.

Thoughts of winter, mood of a winter’s night.

But it was spring now, and as the sap of the earth rose green-gold to the warming light so did Devin feel his own mood lifting to the stir and quickening of the world through which they rode.

Wait for springtime, Alessan had said amid the browns and reds of autumn trees and the bare, harvested vines. And spring was upon them now, with the Ember Days approaching fast and at last—at long last—they were on the road for Certando and whatever answers lay there. Devin could not quell and did not want to quell the sense rising within him like sap in the green woods that whatever was going to happen was going to begin to happen soon.

In the second cart beside Baerd he felt gloriously, importantly alive. Ahead of them the glint of afternoon sunlight in Catriana’s hair was doing something strange and wonderful to his blood. He was aware of Baerd giving him a curious scrutiny,