and easily understood as they were happening.
He was jolted from his reverie by Alessan abruptly raising a hand in warning. Without a word spoken the three of them slipped into the trees again beside the road. After a moment there was a flicker of torchlight to the west and Devin heard the sound of a cart approaching. There were voices, male and female both. Revellers returning home late, he guessed. There was a Festival going on. In some ways it had begun to seem another irrelevance. They waited for the cart to go by.
It did not. The horse was pulled up, with a soft slap and jingle of reins just in front of where they were hiding. Someone jumped down, then they heard him unlocking a chain on a gate.
‘I really am hopelessly overindulgent,’ they heard him complain. ‘Every single time I look at this excuse for a crest I am reminded that I should have had an artisan design it. There are limits, or there ought to be, to what a father allows!’
Devin recognized the place and the voice in the same moment. An impulse, a striving back towards the ordinary and familiar after what had happened in the night, made him rise.
‘Trust me,’ he whispered as Alessan threw him a glance. ‘This is a friend.’
Then he stepped out into the road.
‘I thought it was a handsome design,’ he said clearly. ‘Better than most artisans I know. And, to tell the truth, Rovigo, I remember you saying the same thing to me yesterday afternoon in The Bird.’
‘I know that voice,’ Rovigo replied instantly. ‘I know that voice and I am exceedingly glad to hear it—even though you have just unmasked me before a shrewish wife and a daughter who has long been the bane of her father’s unfortunate existence. Devin d’Asoli, if I am not mistaken!’
He strode forward from the gate, seizing the cart lantern from its bracket. Devin heard relieved laughter from the two women in the cart. Behind him, Alessan and then Catriana stepped into the road.
‘You are not mistaken,’ Devin said. ‘May I introduce two of my company members: Catriana d’Astibar and Alessan di Tregea. This is Rovigo, a merchant with whom I was sharing a bottle in elegant surroundings when Catriana arranged to have me assaulted and ejected yesterday.’
‘Ah!’ Rovigo exclaimed, holding the lantern higher. ‘The sister!’
Catriana, lit by the widened cast of the flame, smiled demurely. ‘I needed to talk to him,’ she said by way of explanation. ‘I didn’t much want to go inside that place.’
‘A wise and a providential woman,’ Rovigo approved, grinning. ‘Would that my clutch of daughters were half so intelligent. No one,’ he added, ‘should much want to go inside The Bird unless they have a head-cold so virulent that it defeats all sense of smell.’
Alessan burst out laughing. ‘Well-met on a dark road, master Rovigo—the more so if you are the owner of a vessel called the Sea Maid.’
Devin blinked in astonishment.
‘I have indeed the great misfortune to own and sail that unseaworthy excuse for a vessel,’ Rovigo admitted cheerfully. ‘How do you come to know it, friend?’
Alessan seemed highly amused. ‘Because I was asked to seek you out if I could. I have tidings for you from Ferraut town. From a somewhat portly, red-faced personage named Taccio.’
‘My esteemed factor in Ferraut!’ Rovigo exclaimed. ‘Well-met, indeed! By the god, where did you encounter him?’
‘In another tavern, I am sorry to have to say. A tavern where I had been playing music and he was . . . well, escaping retribution was his own phrase. We two were, as it happened, the last patrons of the night. He wasn’t in any great hurry to return home, for what seemed to me prudent reasons, and we fell to talking.’
‘It is never hard to fall to talking with Taccio,’ Rovigo assented.
Devin heard a giggle from the cart. It didn’t sound like the amusement of a ponderous, unmarriageable daughter. He was beginning to take the measure of Rovigo’s attitude to his women. In the darkness he found himself grinning.
Alessan said, ‘The worthy Taccio explained his dilemma to me, and when I came to mention that I had just joined the company of Menico di Ferraut and was bound this way for the Festival he charged me to seek you out and carry verbal confirmation of a letter he says he’s had conveyed to you.’
‘Half a dozen letters,’ Rovigo groaned. ‘To it, then: your verbal confirmation, friend Alessan.’
‘Good Taccio bade me tell you, and to swear it as true by the Triad’s grace and the three fingers of the Palm’— Alessan’s voice became a flawless parody of a sententious stage messenger—‘that did the new bed not arrive from Astibar before the winter frosts, the Dragon that slumbers uneasily by his side would awaken in wrath unimaginable and put a violent end to his life of care in your esteemed service.’
There was laughter and applause from the shadows of the cart. The mother, Devin decided, pursuing his earlier thought, didn’t sound even remotely shrewish.
‘Eanna and Adaon, who bless marriages together, forfend that such a thing should ever come to pass,’ Rovigo said piously. ‘The bed is ordered and it is made and it is ready to be shipped immediately the Festival is over.’
‘Then the Dragon shall slumber at ease and Taccio be saved,’ Alessan intoned, assuming the sonorous voice used for the ‘moral’ at the end of a children’s puppet-show.
‘Though why,’ came a mild, still-amused female voice from the cart, ‘all of you should be so intimidated by poor Ingonida I honestly don’t know. Rovigo, are we bereft entirely of our manners tonight? Will we keep these people standing in the cold and dark?’
‘Absolutely not, my beloved,’ her husband exclaimed hastily. ‘Alix, it was only the conjured vision of Ingonida in wrath that addled my brain.’
Devin found that he couldn’t stop grinning; even Catriana, he noticed, had relaxed her habitual expression of superior indifference.
‘Were you going back to town?’ Rovigo asked.
The first tricky moment—and Alessan left it to him. ‘We were,’ Devin said. ‘We’d taken a long walk to clear our heads and escape the noise, but were just about ready to brave the city again.’
‘I imagine the three of you would have been besieged by admirers all night,’ Rovigo said.
‘We do seem to have achieved a certain notoriety,’ Alessan admitted.
‘Well,’ said Rovigo earnestly, ‘all jesting aside, I could well understand if you wanted to rejoin the celebrations— they were nowhere near their peak when we left. It will go on all night, of course, but I confess I don’t like leaving the younger ones alone too late, and my unfortunate oldest, Alais, suffers from twitches and fainting spells when over-excited.’
‘How sad,’ said Alessan with a straight face.
‘Father!’ came a softly urgent protest from the cart.
‘Rovigo, stop that at once or I shall empty a basin on you in your sleep,’ her mother declared, though not, Devin judged, with any genuine anger.
‘You see the way of things?’ the merchant said, gesturing expressively with his free hand. ‘I am hounded without respite even into my dreams. But, if you are not entirely put off by the grievous stridency of my women and the prospect of three more inside very nearly as unpleasant, you are all most welcome, most humbly welcome to share a late repast and a quieter drink than you are likely to find in Astibar tonight.’
‘And three beds if you care to honour us,’ Alix added. ‘We heard you play and sing this morning at the Duke’s rites. Truly, it would be an honour if you joined us.’
‘You were in the palace?’ Devin asked, surprised.
‘Hardly,’ Rovigo murmured