Tigana. Guy Gavriel Kay
said you waited for us,’ Alessan murmured. ‘Will you tell me why?’
‘For the same reason you came back.’ Sandre moved for the first time, stiffly making his way to the larger fire. He seized a small log and threw it on the guttering flame. A shower of sparks flew up. He nursed it, poking with the iron until a tongue of flame licked free of the ash bed.
The Duke turned and now Devin could see his white hair and beard, and the bony hollows of his cheeks. His eyes were set deep in their sockets, but they gleamed with a cold defiance.
‘I am here,’ Sandre said, ‘and you are here because it goes on. It goes on whatever happens, whoever dies. While there is breath to be drawn and a heart with which to hate. My quest and your own. Until we die they go on.’
‘You were listening, then,’ said Alessan. ‘From in the coffin. You heard what I said?’
‘The drug had worn off by sundown. I was awake before we reached the lodge. I heard everything you said and a great deal of what you chose not to say,’ the Duke replied, straightening, a chilly hauteur in his voice. ‘I heard what you named yourself, and what you chose not to tell them. But I know who you are.’
He took a step towards Alessan. He raised a gnarled hand and pointed it straight at him.
‘I know exactly who you are, Alessan bar Valentin, Prince of Tigana!’
It was too much. Devin’s brain simply gave up trying to understand. Too many pieces of information were coming at him from too many different directions, contradicting each other ferociously. He felt dizzy, overwhelmed. He was in a room where only a little while ago he had stood among a number of men. Now four of them were dead, with a more brutal violence than he had ever thought to come upon. At the same time, the one man he’d known to be dead—the man whose mourning rites he had sung that very morning—was the only man of Astibar left alive in this lodge.
If he was of Astibar!
For if he was, how could he have just spoken the name of Tigana, given what Devin had just learned in the wood? How could he have known that Alessan was—and this, too, Devin fought to assimilate—a Prince? The son of that Valentin who had slain Stevan of Ygrath and so brought Brandin’s vengeance down upon them all.
Devin simply stopped trying to put it all together. He set himself to listen and look—to absorb as much as he could into the memory that had never failed him yet— and to let understanding come after, when he had time to think.
So resolved, he heard Alessan say, after a blank silence more than long enough to reveal the degree of his own surprise and wonder: ‘Now I understand. Finally I understand. My lord, I thought you always a giant among men. From the first time I saw you at my first Triad Games twenty-three years ago. You are even more than I took you for. How did you stay alive? How have you hidden it from the two of them all these years?’
‘Hidden what?’ It was Catriana, her voice so angry and bewildered it immediately made Devin feel better: he wasn’t the only one desperately treading water here.
‘He is a wizard,’ Baerd said flatly.
There was another silence. Then, ‘The wizards of the Palm are immune to spells not directed specifically at them,’ Alessan added. ‘This is true of all magic-users, wherever they come from, however they find access to their power. For this reason, among others, Brandin and Alberico have been hunting down and killing wizards since they came to this peninsula.’
‘And they have been succeeding because being a wizard has—alas!—nothing to do with wisdom or even simple common sense,’ Sandre d’Astibar said in a corrosive voice. He turned and jabbed viciously at the fire with the iron poker. The blaze caught fully this time and roared into red light.
‘I survived,’ said the Duke, ‘simply because no one knew. It involved nothing more complex than that. I used my power perhaps five times in all the years of my reign— and always cloaked under someone else’s magic. And I have done nothing with magic, not a flicker, since the sorcerers arrived. I didn’t even use it to feign my death. Their power is stronger than ours. Far stronger. It was clear from the time each of them came. Magic was never as much a part of the Palm as it was elsewhere. We knew this. All the wizards knew this. You would have thought they would apply their brains to that knowledge, would you not? What good is a finding spell, or a fledgling mental arrow if it leads one straight to a Barbadian death-wheel in the sun?’ There was an acid, mocking bitterness in the old Duke’s voice.
‘Or one of Brandin’s,’ Alessan murmured.
‘Or Brandin’s,’ Sandre echoed. ‘It is the one thing those two carrion birds have agreed upon—other than the dividing line running down the Palm—that theirs shall be the only magic in this land.’
‘And it is,’ said Alessan, ‘or so nearly so as to be the same thing. I have been searching for a wizard for a dozen years or more.’
‘Alessan!’ Baerd said quickly.
‘Why?’ the Duke asked in the same moment.
‘Alessan!’ Baerd repeated, more urgently.
The man Devin had just learned to be the Prince of Tigana looked over at his friend and shook his head. ‘Not this one, Baerd,’ he said cryptically. ‘Not Sandre d’Astibar.’
He turned back to the Duke and hesitated, choosing his words. Then, with an unmistakable pride, he said, ‘You will have heard the legend. It happens to be true. The line of the Princes of Tigana, all those in direct descent, can bind a wizard to them unto death.’
For the first time a gleam of curiosity, of an actual interest in something appeared in Sandre’s hooded eyes. ‘I do know that story. The only wizard who ever guessed what I was after I came into my own magic warned me once to be wary of the Princes of Tigana. He was an old man, and doddering by then. I remember laughing. You actually claim that what he said was true?’
‘It was. I am certain it still is. I have had no chance to test it though. It is our primal story: Tigana is the chosen province of Adaon of the Waves. The first of our Princes, Rahal, being born of the god by that Micaela whom we name as mortal mother of us all. And the line of the Princes has never been broken.’
Devin felt a complex stir of emotions working within himself. He didn’t even try to enumerate how many things were tangling themselves in his heart. Micaela. He listened and watched, and set himself to remember.
And he heard Sandre d’Astibar laugh.
‘I know that story too,’ the Duke said derisively. ‘That hoary, enfeebled excuse for Tiganese arrogance. Princes of Tigana! Not Dukes, oh no. Princes! Descended of the god!’ He thrust the poker towards Alessan. ‘You will stand here tonight, now, among the stinking reality of the Tyrants and of these dead men and the world of the Palm today and spew that old lie at me? You will do that?’
‘It is truth,’ said Alessan quietly, not moving. ‘It is why we are what we are. It would have been a slight to the god for his descendants to claim a lesser title. The gift of Adaon to his mortal son could not be immortality— that, Eanna and Morian forbade. But the god granted a binding power over the Palm’s own magic to his son, and to the sons and daughters of his son while a Prince or a Princess of Tigana lived in that direct line. If you doubt me and would put it to the test I will do as Baerd would have had me do and bind you with my hand upon your brow, my lord Duke. The old tale is not to be lightly dismissed, Sandre d’Astibar. If we are proud it is because we have reason to be.’
‘Not any more,’ the Duke said mockingly. ‘Not since Brandin came!’
Alessan’s face twisted. He opened his mouth and closed it.
‘How dare you!’ Catriana snapped. Bravely, Devin thought.
Prince and Duke ignored her, rigidly intent on each other. Sandre’s sardonic amusement gradually receded into the deep lines etched in his face. The bitterness remained, in eyes and stance and the pinched line of his