from the mountain, begins its run westward to find the sea, you would have heard it said that second way. For we were always proud, and there was always rivalry between the two cities.’
In the end, hard as he tried, his voice could only carry loss.
‘You were born in that inland city, Devin, and so was I. We are children of that high valley and of the silver running of that mountain river. We were born in Avalle. In Avalle of the Towers.’
There was music in Devin’s mind again, with that name, but this time it was different from the bells he’d heard before. This time it was a music that took him back a long way, all the way to his father and his childhood.
He said, ‘You do know the words then, don’t you?’
‘Of course I do,’ said Alessan gently.
‘Please?’ Devin asked.
But it was Catriana who answered him, in the voice a young mother might have used, rocking her child to sleep on an evening long ago:
Springtime morning in Avalle
And I don’t care what the priests say:
I’m going down to the river today
On a springtime morning in Avalle.
When I’m all grown up, come what may,
I’ll build a boat to carry me away
And the river will take it to Tigana Bay
And the sea even further from Avalle.
But wherever I wander, by night or by day,
Where water runs swiftly or high trees sway,
My heart will carry me back and away To
a dream of the towers of Avalle.
A dream of my home in Avalle.
The sweet sad words to the tune he’d always known drifted down to Devin, and with them came something else. A sense of loss so deep it almost drowned the light grace of Catriana’s song. No breaking waves now, or trumpets along the blood: only the waters of longing. A longing for something taken away from him before he’d even known it was his—taken so completely, so comprehensively he might have lived his whole life through without ever knowing it was gone.
And so Devin wept as Catriana sang. Small boys, young-looking for their age, learned very early in northern Asoli how risky it was to cry where someone might see. But something too large for Devin to deal with had overtaken him in the forest tonight.
If he understood properly what Alessan had just said, this song was one his mother would have sung to him.
His mother whose life had been ripped away by Brandin of Ygrath. He bowed his head, though not to shield the tears, and listened as Catriana finished that bitter-sweet cradle song: a song of a child defying orders and authority, even when young, who was self-reliant enough to want to build a ship alone and brave enough to want to sail it into the wideness of the world, never turning back. Nor ever losing or forgetting the place where it all began.
A child very much as Devin saw himself.
Which was one of the reasons he wept. For he had been made to lose and forget those towers, he’d been robbed of any dream he himself might ever have had of Avalle. Or Tigana on its bay.
So his tears followed one another downward in darkness as he mourned his mother and his home. And in the shadows of that wood not far from Astibar those two griefs fused to each other in Devin and became welded in the forge of his heart with what memory meant to him and the loss of memory: and out of that blazing something took shape in Devin that was to change the running of his life line from that night.
He dried his eyes on his sleeve and looked up. No one spoke. He saw that Baerd was looking at him. Very deliberately Devin held up his left hand, the hand of the heart. Very carefully he folded his third and fourth fingers down so that what showed was a simulacrum of the shape of the Peninsula of the Palm.
The position for taking an oath.
Baerd lifted his right hand and made the same gesture. They touched fingertips together, Devin’s small palm against the other man’s larger, calloused one.
Devin said, ‘If you will have me I am with you. In the name of my mother who died in that war I swear I will not break faith with you.’
‘Nor I with you,’ said Baerd. ‘In the name of Tigana gone.’
There was a rustling as Alessan sank to his knees beside them. ‘Devin, I should be cautioning you,’ he said soberly. ‘This is not a thing in which to move too fast. You can be one with our cause without having to break your life apart to come with us.’
‘He has no choice,’ Catriana murmured, moving nearer on the other side. ‘Tomasso bar Sandre will name you both to the torturers tonight or tomorrow. I’m afraid the singing career of Devin d’Asoli may be over just as it truly begins.’ She looked down on the three men, her eyes unreadable in the darkness.
‘It is over,’ Devin said quietly. ‘It ended when I learned my name.’ Catriana’s expression did not change; he had no idea what she was thinking.
‘Very well,’ said Alessan. He held up his own left hand, two fingers down. Devin met it with his right. Alessan hesitated. ‘An oath in your mother’s name is stronger for me than you could have guessed,’ he said.
‘You knew her?’
‘We both did,’ Baerd said quietly. ‘She was ten years older than us, but every adolescent boy in Tigana was a little in love with Micaela. And most of the grown men too, I think.’
Another new name, and all the hurt that came with it. Devin’s father had never spoken it. His sons had never even known their mother’s name. There were more avenues to sorrow in this night than Devin could have imagined.
‘We all envied and admired your father more than I can tell you,’ Alessan added. ‘Though I was pleased that an Avalle man won her in the end. I can remember when you were born, Devin. My father sent a gift to your naming day. I don’t remember what it was.’
‘You admired my father?’ Devin said, stunned.
Alessan heard that and his voice changed. ‘Do not judge him by what he became. You only knew him after Brandin smashed a whole generation and their world. Ending their lives or blighting their souls. Your mother was dead, Avalle fallen, Tigana gone. He had fought and survived both battles by the Deisa.’ Above them Catriana made a small sound.
‘I never knew,’ Devin protested. ‘He never told us any of that.’ There was a new ache inside him. So many avenues.
‘Few of the survivors spoke of those days,’ Baerd said.
‘Neither of my parents did,’ said Catriana awkwardly. ‘They took us as far away as they could, to a fishing village here in Astibar down the coast from Ardin, and never spoke a word of any of this.’
‘To shield you,’ Alessan said gently. His palm was still touching Devin’s. It was smaller than Baerd’s. ‘A great many of the parents who managed to survive fled so that their children might have a chance at a life unmarred by the oppression and the stigma that bore down—that still bear down—upon Tigana. Or Lower Corte as we must name it now.’
‘They ran away,’ said Devin stubbornly. He felt cheated, deprived, betrayed.
Alessan shook his head. ‘Devin, think. Don’t judge yet: think. Do you really imagine you learned that tune by chance? Your father chose not to burden you or your brothers with the danger of your heritage, but he set a stamp upon you—a tune, wordless for safety—and he sent you out into the world with something that would reveal you, unmistakably,