been rendered definitively trivial.
What was not trivial, what was in fact of the vastest importance imaginable was the undeniable fact that Catriana’s lips were busy at his neck and ear, and that even as his hands moved—as of their own imperative accord—to touch her eyelids and throat and then drift downward to the dreamt-of swell of her breasts, her own fingers were nimble among the drawstrings at his waist, setting him free.
‘Oh, Triad!’ he heard himself moan as her cool fingers stroked him. ‘Why didn’t you tell me before that you liked it dangerous?’ He twisted his head sharply and their lips met fiercely for the first time. He began gathering the folds of her gown up about her hips.
She settled back on a ledge against the wall behind her to make it easier for him, her own breath now rapid and shallow as well.
‘There will be six of us,’ Devin heard from the room outside. ‘By second moonrise I want you to be . . .’
Catriana’s hands suddenly tightened in his hair, almost painfully, and at that moment the last folds of her robe rode free of her hips and Devin’s fingers slipped in among her undergarments and found the portal he’d been longing for.
She made a small unexpected sound and went rigid for just a second, before becoming extremely soft in his arms. His fingers gently stroked the deepest folds of her flesh. She drew an awkward, reaching breath, then shifted again, very slightly and guided Devin into her. She gasped, her teeth sinking hard into his shoulder. For a moment, lost in astonished pleasure and sharp pain, Devin was motionless, holding her close to him, murmuring almost soundlessly, not knowing what he was saying.
‘Enough! The others are here,’ the third voice outside rasped crisply.
‘Even so,’ said the first. ‘Remember then, you two come your own ways from town—not together!—to join us tonight. Whatever you do be sure you are not followed or we are dead.’
There was a brief silence. Then the door on the farthest side of the room opened and Devin, beginning now to thrust slowly, silently into Catriana, finally recognized the voice he’d been hearing.
For the same speaker continued talking, but now he assumed the delicate, remembered, intonations of the day before.
‘At last!’ fluted Tomasso d’Astibar bar Sandre. ‘We feared dreadfully that you’d all contrived to lose yourselves in these dusty recesses, never to be found again!’
‘No such luck, brother,’ a voice growled in reply. ‘Though after eighteen years it wouldn’t have been surprising. I need two glasses of wine very badly. Sitting still for that kind of music all morning is cursed thirsty work.’
In the closet Devin and Catriana clung to each other, sharing a breathless laughter. Then a newer urgency came over Devin, and it seemed to him it was in her as well, and there was suddenly nothing in the peninsula that mattered half so much as the gradually accelerating rhythm of the movements they made together.
Devin felt her fingernails splay outwards on his back. Feeling his climax gathering he cupped his hands beneath her; she lifted her legs and wrapped them around him. A moment later her teeth sank into his shoulder a second time and in that moment he felt himself explode, silently, into her.
For an unmeasured, enervated space of time they remained like that, their clothing damp where it had been crushed against skin. To Devin the voices from the two rooms outside seemed to come from infinitely far away. From other worlds entirely. He really didn’t want to move at all.
At length however, Catriana carefully lowered her legs to the ground to bear her own weight. He traced her cheekbones with a finger in the blackness.
Behind him the lords and merchants of Astibar were still shuffling past the body of the Duke so many had hated and some few had loved. To Devin’s left the younger generation of the Sandreni ate and drank, toasting an end to exile. Devin, wrapped close with Catriana, still sheathed within her warmth, could not have hoped to find words to say what he was feeling.
Suddenly she seized one of his tracing fingers and bit it, hard. He winced, because it hurt. She didn’t say anything though.
AFTER THE SANDRENI LEFT, Catriana found the latch and they slipped out into the room again. Quickly they reorganized their clothes. Pausing only long enough to seize a chicken-wing apiece, they hastily retraced their path back through the rooms leading to the stairway. They met three liveried servants coming the other way and Devin, feeling exceptionally alert and alive now, claimed Catriana’s fingers and winked at the servants as they passed.
She withdrew her hand a moment later.
He glanced over. ‘What’s wrong?’
She shrugged. ‘I’d as soon it wasn’t proclaimed throughout the Sandreni Palace and beyond,’ she murmured, looking straight ahead.
Devin lifted his eyebrows. ‘What would you rather they thought about us being upstairs? I just gave them the obvious, boring explanation. They won’t even bother to talk about it. This sort of thing happens all the time.’
‘Not to me,’ said Catriana quietly.
‘I didn’t mean it that way!’ Devin protested, taken aback. But unfortunately they were going down the stairs by then, and so it was with a quite unexpected sense of estrangement that he paused to let her re-enter the room before him.
More than a little confused, he took his place behind Menico as they prepared to go back out into the courtyard.
He had only a minor supporting role in the first two hymns and so he found his thoughts wandering back over the scene just played out upstairs. Back, and then back again, with the memory that seemed to be his birthright focusing like a beam of sunlight upon one detail then another, illuminating and revealing what he had missed the first time around.
And so it was that by the time it was his own turn to step forward to end and crown the mourning rites, seeing the three clergy leaning forward expectantly, noting how Tomasso struck a pose of rapt attentiveness, Devin was able to give the ‘Lament for Adaon’ an undivided soul, for he was confused no longer, but quite decided in what he was going to do.
He began softly in the middle range with the two syrenyae, building and shaping the ancient story of the god. Then, when the pipes of Alessan came in, Devin let his voice leap upward in response to them, as though in flight from mountain glen to crag to chasm brink.
He sang the dying of the god with a voice made pure in the cauldron of his own heart and he pitched the notes to rise above that courtyard and beyond it, out among the streets and squares of high-walled Astibar.
High walls he intended to pass beyond that night— beyond, and then following a trail he would find, into a wood where lay a hunting lodge. A lodge where pall-bearers were to carry the body of the Duke, and where a number of men—six, the clear voice of his memory reminded him—were to gather in a meeting that Catriana d’Astibar had just done the very best she could short of murder to prevent him learning about. He strove to turn the acrid taste of that knowledge into grief for Adaon, to let it guide and infuse the path of the ‘Lament’.
Better for both of us, he remembered her saying, and he could recapture in his mind the regret and the unexpected softness in her voice. But a certain kind of pride at Devin’s age is perhaps stronger than at any other age of mortal man, and he had already decided, before even he began to sing, here in this crowded courtyard among the great of Astibar, that he was going to be the judge of what was better, not her.
So Devin sang the rending of the god at the hands of the women, and he gave that dying on the Tregean mountain slope all he had to give it, making his voice an arrow arching outwards to seek the heart of everyone who heard.
He let Adaon fall from the high cliff, he heard the sound of the pipes recede and fall and he let his grieving voice spiral downward with the god into Casadel as the song came to its end.
And so too, that morning, did a part of Devin’s life. For when a portal of Morian’s has been crossed there is, as everyone knows,