course. For old time’s sake.
‘Shall I buy you a drink?’ someone said.
With a sigh Devin turned to cope with one of the more predictable aspects of being small and looking very young while drinking alone in a sailor’s bar.
What he saw was somewhat reassuring. His questioner was a soberly dressed man of middle years with greying hair and lines of worry or laughter radiating at his temples. Even so:
‘Thank you,’ Devin said, ‘but I’ve most of my own bottle left and I prefer having a woman to being one for sailors. I’m also older than I look.’
The other man laughed aloud. ‘In that case,’ he chuckled, genuinely amused, ‘you can give me a drink if you like while I tell you about my two marriageable daughters and the other two who are on their way to that age sooner than I’m ready for. I’m Rovigo d’Astibar, master of the Sea Maid just in from down the coast in Tregea.’
Devin grinned and stretched across the bar for another glass.
The Bird was far too crowded to bother trying to catch the owner’s rheumy eye, and Devin had his own reasons for not wanting to signal the man.
‘I’ll be happy to share the bottle with you,’ he said to Rovigo, ‘though your wife is unlikely to be well pleased if you press your daughters upon a travelling musician.’
‘My wife,’ said Rovigo feelingly, ‘would turn ponderous cartwheels of delight if I brought home a cowherd from the Certandan grasslands for the oldest one.’
Devin winced. ‘That bad?’ he murmured. ‘Ah, well. We can at least drink to your safe return from Tregea, and in time for Festival by a fingernail. I’m Devin d’Asoli bar Garin, at your service.’
‘And I at yours, friend Devin, not-as-young-as-you-look. Did you have trouble getting a drink?’ Rovigo asked shrewdly.
‘I was in and out of more doorways than Morian of Portals knows, and as dry when I left as when I’d entered.’ Devin rashly sniffed the heavy air; even among the odours of the crowd and despite the lack of windows, the tannery stench from outside was still painfully discernible. ‘This would not have been my first or my tenth choice as a place for drinking a flask of wine.’
Rovigo smiled. ‘A sensible attitude. Will I seem eccentric if I tell you I always come straight here when the Sea Maid is home from a voyage? Somehow the smell speaks of land to me. Tells me I’m back.’
‘You don’t like the sea?’
‘I am quite convinced that any man who says he does is lying, has debts on land, or a shrewish wife to escape from and—’ He paused, pretending to have been suddenly struck by a thought. ‘Come to think of it . . .’ he added with exaggerated reflectiveness. Then he winked.
Devin laughed aloud and poured them both more wine. ‘Why do you sail then?’
‘Trade is good,’ Rovigo said frankly. ‘The Maid is small enough to slip into ports down the coast or around on the western side of Senzio or Ferraut that the bigger traders never bother with. She’s also quick enough to make it worth my while running south past the mountains to Quileia. It isn’t sanctioned, of course, with the trade embargo down there, but if you have contacts in a remote enough place and you don’t dawdle about your business it isn’t too risky and there’s a profit to be made. I can take Barbadian spices from the market here, or silk from the north, and get them to places in Quileia that would never otherwise see such things. I bring back carpets, or Quileian wood carvings, slippers, jewelled daggers, sometimes casks of buinath to sell to the taverns—whatever’s going at a good price. I can’t do volume so I have to watch my margins, but there’s a living in it as long as insurance stays down and Adaon of the Waves keeps me afloat. I go from here to the god’s temple before heading home.’
‘But here first.’ Devin smiled.
‘Here first.’ They touched glasses and drained them. Devin refilled both.
‘What’s news in Quileia?’ he asked.
‘As a matter of fact, I was just there,’ Rovigo said. ‘Tregea was a stop on the way back. There are tidings, actually. Marius won his combat in the Grove of Oaks again this summer.’
‘I did hear about that,’ Devin said, shaking his head in rueful admiration. ‘A crippled man, and he must be fifty years old by now. What does that make it—six times in a row?’
‘Seven,’ Rovigo said soberly. He paused, as if expecting a reaction.
‘I’m sorry,’ Devin said. ‘Is there a meaning to that?’
‘Marius decided there was. He’s just announced that there will be no more challenges in the Oak Grove. Seven is sacred, he’s proclaimed. By allowing him this latest triumph the Mother Goddess has made known her will. Marius has just declared himself King in Quileia, no longer only the consort of the High Priestess.’
‘What?’ Devin exclaimed, loudly enough to cause some heads to turn. He lowered his voice. ‘He’s declared . . . a man . . . I thought they had a matriarchy there.’
‘So,’ said Rovigo, ‘did the late High Priestess.’
Travelling across the Peninsula of the Palm, from mountain village to remote castle or manor, to the cities that were the centres of affairs, musicians could not help but hear news and gossip of great events. Always, in Devin’s brief experience, the talk had been only that: a way to ease the passing of a cold winter’s night around an inn fire in Certando, or to try to impress a traveller in a tavern in Cone with a murmured confiding that a proBarbadior party was rumoured to be forming in that Ygrathen province.
It was only talk, Devin had long since concluded. The two ruling sorcerers from east and west across the seas had sliced the Palm neatly in half between them, with only hapless, decadent Senzio not formally occupied by either, looking nervously across the water both ways. Its Governor remained paralytically unable to decide which wolf to be devoured by, while the two wolves still warily circled each other after almost twenty years, each unwilling to expose itself by moving first.
The balance of power in the peninsula seemed to Devin to have been etched in stone from the time of his first awareness. Until one of the sorcerers died—and sorcerers were rumoured to live a very long time—nothing much would or could come of khav room or great hall chatter.
Quileia, though, was another matter. One far beyond Devin’s limited experience to sort out or define. He couldn’t even guess what might be the implications of what Marius had now done in that strange country south of the mountains. What might flow from Quileia’s having a more than transitory King, one who did not have to go into the Oak Grove every two years and there, naked, ritually maimed, and unarmed, meet the sword-wielding foe who had been chosen to slay him and take his place. Marius had not been slain, though. Seven times he had not been slain.
And now the High Priestess was dead. Nor was it possible to miss the meaning in the way Rovigo had said that. A little overawed, Devin shook his head.
He glanced up and saw that his new acquaintance was staring at him with an odd expression.
‘You’re a thoughtful young man, aren’t you?’ the merchant said.
Devin shrugged, suddenly self-conscious. ‘Not unduly. I don’t know. Certainly not with any insight. I don’t hear news like yours every afternoon. What do you think it will mean?’
One answer he was not to receive.
The tavern-keeper, who had quite efficiently succeeded in ignoring Rovigo’s intermittent signalling for another bottle of wine, now strode to their end of the bar, black anger visible on his features even in the darkened room.
‘You!’ he hissed. ‘Your name Devin?’
Taken aback, Devin nodded reflexive agreement. The tavern-keeper’s expression grew even more malevolent.
‘Get