for the painter. ‘Eanna bless us both,’ he said to him. ‘You just saved yourself more astins than you have. I would have touched you to make a wager I would have just lost with your tidings.’
By way of reply Nerone picked up Adreano’s half-full khav mug and drained it at a pull. He looked around optimistically, but the others in the booth were guarding their drinks, knowing the painter’s habits very well. With a chuckle the dark-haired shepherd from Tregea proffered his own mug. Self-taught never to query largesse, Nerone quaffed it down. He did murmur a thank-you when the khav was drained.
Adreano noted the exchange, but his mind was racing down unfamiliar channels to an unexpected conclusion.
‘You have also,’ he said abruptly, addressing Nerone but speaking to the booth at large, ‘just reaffirmed how shrewd the Barbadian sorcerer ruling us is. Alberico has now succeeded, with one decree, in tightening his bonds with the clergy of the Triad. He’s placed a perfect condition upon the granting of the Duke’s last wish. Sandre’s heirs will have to agree—not that they’d ever not agree to some-thing—and I can’t even begin to guess how many astins it’s going to cost them to assuage the priests and priestesses enough to get them into the Sandreni Palace tomorrow morning. Alberico will now be known as the man who brought the renegade Duke of Astibar back to the grace of the Triad at his death.’
He looked around the booth, excited by the force of his own reasoning. ‘By the blood of Adaon, it reminds me of the intrigues of the old days when everything was done with this much subtlety! Wheels within the wheels that guided the fate line of the whole peninsula.’
‘Well, now,’ said the Tregean, his expression turning grave, ‘that may be the cleverest insight we’ve had this noisy day. But tell me,’ he went on, as Adreano flushed with pleasure, ‘if what Alberico’s done has just reminded you—and others, I’ve no doubt, though not likely as swiftly—of the way of things in the days before he sailed here to conquer, and before Brandin took Chiara and the western provinces, then is it not possible’—his voice was low, for Adreano’s ears alone in the riot of the room— ‘that he has been outplayed at this game after all? Outplayed by a dead man?’
Around them men were rising and settling their accounts in loud haste to be outside, where events of magnitude seemed to be unfolding so swiftly. The eastern gate was where everyone was going, to see the Sandreni bring their dead lord home after eighteen years. A quarter of an hour earlier, Adreano would have been on his feet with the others, sweeping on his triple cloak, racing to reach the gate in time for a good viewing post. Not now. His brain leapt to follow the Tregean’s voice down this new pathway, and understanding flashed in him like a rushlight in darkness.
‘You see it, don’t you?’ his new acquaintance said flatly. They were alone at the booth. Nerone had lingered to precipitously drain whatever khav had been left unfinished in the rush for the doors and had then followed the others out into the autumn sunshine and the breeze.
‘I think I do,’ Adreano said, working it out. ‘Sandre wins by losing.’
‘By losing a battle he never really cared about,’ the other amended, a keenness in his grey eyes. ‘I doubt the clergy ever mattered to him at all. They weren’t his enemy. However subtle Alberico may be, the fact is that he won this province and Tregea and Ferraut and Certando because of his army and his sorcery, and he holds the Eastern Palm only through those things. Sandre d’Astibar ruled this city and its province for twenty-five years through half a dozen rebellions and assassination attempts that I’ve heard of. He did it with only a handful of sometimes loyal troops, with his family, and with a guile that was legendary even then. What would you say to the suggestion that he refused to let the priests and priestesses into his death-room last night simply to induce Alberico to seize that as a face-saving condition today?’
Adreano didn’t know what he would say. What he did know was that he was feeling a zest, an excitement, that left him unsure whether what he wanted just then was a sword in his hand or a quill and ink to write down the words that were starting to tumble about inside him.
‘What do you think will happen?’ he asked, with a deference that would have astonished his friends.
‘I’m not sure,’ the other said frankly. ‘But I have a growing suspicion that the Festival of Vines this year may see the beginning of something none of us could have expected.’
He looked for a moment as if he would say more than that, but did not.
Instead he rose, clinking a jumble of coins onto the table to pay for his khav. ‘I must go. Rehearsal-time: I’m with a company I’ve never played with before. Last year’s plague caused havoc among the travelling musicians— that’s how I got my reprieve from the goats.’
He grinned, then glanced up at the wager board on the wall. ‘Tell your friends I’ll be here before sunset three days from now to settle the matter of Chiara’s poetic condolences. Farewell for now.’
‘Farewell,’ Adreano said reflexively, and watched as the other walked from the almost empty room.
The owner and his wife were moving about collecting mugs and glasses and wiping down the tables and benches. Adreano signalled for a last drink. A moment later, sipping his khav—unlaced this time, to clear his head—he realized that he’d forgotten to ask the musician his name.
Chapter II
Devin was having a bad day.
At nineteen he had almost completely reconciled himself to his lack of size and to the fair-skinned boyish face the Triad had given him to go with that. It had been a long time since he’d been in the habit of hanging by his feet from trees in the woods near the farm back home in Asoli, striving to stretch a little more height out of his frame.
The keenness of his memory had always been a source of pride and pleasure to him, but a number of the memories that came with it were not. He would have been quite happy to be able to forget the afternoon when the twins, returning home from hunting with a brace of grele, had caught him suspended from a tree upside down. Six years later it still rankled that his brothers, normally so reliably obtuse, had immediately grasped what he was trying to do.
‘We’ll help you, little one!’ Povar had cried joyfully, and before Devin could right himself and scramble away, Nico had his arms, Povar his feet, and his burly twin brothers were stretching him between them, cackling with great good humour all the while. Enjoying, among other things, the ambit of Devin’s precociously profane vocabulary.
Well, that had been the last time he actually tried to make himself taller. Very late that same night he’d sneaked into the snoring twins’ bedroom and carefully dumped a bucket of pig slop over each of them. Sprinting like Adaon on his mountain he’d been through the yard and over the farm gate almost before their roaring started.
He’d stayed away two nights, then returned to his father’s whipping. He’d expected to have to wash the sheets himself, but Povar had done that and both twins, stolidly good-natured, had already forgotten the incident.
Devin, cursed or blessed with a memory like Eanna of the Names, never did forget. The twins might be hard people to hold a grudge against—almost impossible, in fact—but that did nothing to lessen his loneliness on that farm in the lowlands. It was not long after that incident that Devin had left home, apprenticed as a singer to Menico di Ferraut whose company toured northern Asoli every second or third spring.
Devin hadn’t been back since, taking a week’s leave during the company’s northern swing three years ago, and again this past spring. It wasn’t that he’d been badly treated on the farm, it was just that he didn’t fit in, and all four of them knew it. Farming in Asoli was serious, sometimes grim work, battling to hold land and sanity against the constant encroachments of the sea and the hot, hazy, grey monotony of the days.
If his mother had lived it might have been different, but the farm in Asoli where Garin of Lower Corte had taken his three sons had been a dour, womanless place— acceptable perhaps for the twins, who had each other, and for the kind of man Garth had slowly become amid the almost featureless