to charm me . . . Devin, I have to concentrate when I sing! You were making me nervous and I snap at people when I’m nervous.’
Devin drew a careful breath and looked around the empty sunlit street for a moment, thinking. He said, ‘Do you know . . . has anyone ever told you . . . that it is possible and even useful to tell things like this to people— especially the people who have to work with you?’
She shook her head. ‘Not for me. I’ve never been able to talk like that. Not ever.’
‘Why do it now, then?’ he risked. ‘Why did you come after me?’
A longer pause than before. A cluster of artisans’ apprentices swept around the corner, hooting with reflexive ribaldry at the sight of the two of them standing together. There was no malice in it though, and they went by without causing any trouble. A few red and golden leaves skipped over the cobbles in the breeze.
‘Something’s happened,’ Catriana d’Astibar said, ‘and Menico told us all that you are the key to our chances.’
‘Menico sent you after me?’ It was almost completely improbable, after nearly six years together.
‘No,’ Catriana said, quickly shaking her head. ‘No, he said you’d be back in time, that you always were. I was nervous though, with so much at stake. I couldn’t just wait around. You’d left a little, um, upset, after all.’
‘A little,’ Devin agreed gravely, noting that she finally had the grace to look apologetic. He would have felt even more secure if he hadn’t continued to find her so attractive. He couldn’t stop himself from wondering—even now— what her breasts would look like, freed from the stiffness of her high-cut bodice. Marra would have told him, he knew, and even helped him with a conquest. They had done that for each other, and shared the tales after, travelling through that last year on the road before Certando where she died.
‘You had better tell me what’s happened,’ he said, forcing his thoughts back to the present. There was danger in fantasies and in memories, both.
‘The exiled Duke, Sandre, died last night,’ Catriana said. She looked around but the street was empty again. ‘For some reason—no one is sure why—Alberico is allowing his body to lie in state at the Sandreni Palace tonight and tomorrow morning, and then . . .’
She paused, the blue eyes bright. Devin, his pulse suddenly leaping, finished it for her:
‘A funeral? Full rites? Don’t tell me!’
‘Full rites! And Devin, Menico’s been asked to audition this afternoon! We have a chance to do the most talked-about performance in the whole of the Palm this year!’ She looked very young now. And quite unsettlingly beautiful. Her eyes were shining like a child’s.
‘So you came to get me,’ he murmured, nodding his head slowly, ‘before I drank myself into a useless stupor of frustrated desire.’ He had the edge now, for the first time. It was a pleasant turnabout, especially coupled with the real excitement of her news. He began walking, forcing her to fall in stride with him. For a change.
‘It isn’t like that,’ she protested. ‘It’s just that this is so important. Menico said your voice would be the key to our hopes . . . that you were at your best in the mourning rites.’
‘I don’t know whether to be flattered by that, or insulted that you actually thought I’d be so unprofessional as to miss a rehearsal on the eve of the Festival.’
‘Don’t be either,’ Catriana d’Astibar said, with a hint of returning asperity. ‘We don’t have time for either. Just be good this afternoon. Be the best you’ve ever been.’
He ought to resist it, Devin knew, but his spirits were suddenly much too high.
‘In that case, are you sure we’re not going to your room?’ he asked blandly.
More than he could know hung in the balance for the moment that followed. Then Catriana d’Astibar laughed aloud and freely for the first time.
‘Now that,’ said Devin, grinning, ‘is much better. I honestly wasn’t sure if you had a sense of humour.’
She grew quiet. ‘Sometimes I’m not sure either,’ she said, almost absently. Then, in a rather different voice: ‘Devin, I want this contract more than I can tell you.’
‘Well of course,’ he replied. ‘It could make our careers.’
‘That’s right,’ Catriana said. She touched his shoulder and repeated, ‘I want this more than I can say.’
He might have sought a promise in that touch had he been a little less perceptive, and had it not been for the way she spoke the words. There was, in fact, nothing at all of ambition in that tone, nor of desire in the way that Devin had come to know desire.
What he heard was longing, and it reached towards a space inside him that he hadn’t known was there.
‘I’ll do what I can,’ he said after a moment, thinking, for no good reason, of Marra and the tears he’d shed.
ON THE FARM in Asoli they had known he was gifted with music quite early, but it was an isolated place and none of them had a frame of reference whereby to properly judge or measure such things.
One of Devin’s first memories of his father—one that he summoned often because it was a soft image of a hard man—was of Garin humming the tune of some old cradle song to help Devin fall asleep one night when he was feverish.
The boy—four perhaps—had woken in the morning with his fever broken, humming the tune to himself with perfect pitch. Garin’s face had taken on the complex expression that Devin would later learn to associate with his father’s memories of his wife. That morning though, Garin had kissed his youngest child. The only time Devin could remember that happening.
The tune became a thing they shared. An access to a limited intimacy. They would hum it together in rough, untutored attempts at harmony. Later Garin bought a scaled-down three-string syrenya for his youngest child on one of his twice-yearly trips to the market in Asoli town. After that there were actually a few evenings Devin did like to remember, when he and his father and the twins would sing ballads of the sea and hills by the fire at night before bed. Escapes from the drear, wet flatness of Asoli.
When he grew older he began to sing for some of the other farmers. At weddings or naming days, and once with a travelling priest of Morian he sang counterpoint during the autumn Ember Days on the ‘Hymn to Morian of Portals’. The priest wanted to bed him, after, but by then Devin was learning how to avoid such requests without giving offence.
Later yet, he began to be called upon in the taverns. There were no age laws for drinking in northern Asoli, where a boy was a man when he could do a day in the fields, and a girl was a woman when she first bled.
And it had been in a tavern called The River in Asoli town itself on a market day that Devin, just turned fourteen, had been singing ‘The Ride from Corso to Corte’ and had been overheard by a portly, bearded man who turned out to be a troupe-leader named Menico di Ferraut and who had taken him away from the farm that week and changed his life.
‘WE’RE NEXT,’ Menico said, nervously smoothing his best satin doublet over his paunch. Devin, idly picking out his earliest cradle song on one of the spare syrenyae, smiled reassuringly up at his employer. His partner now, actually.
Devin hadn’t been an apprentice since he was seventeen. Menico, tired of refusing offers to buy the contract of his young tenor, had finally offered Devin journeyman status in the Guild and a regular salary—after first making clear how very much the young man owed him, and how loyalty was the only marginally adequate way to repay such a large debt of gratitude. Devin knew that, in fact, and he liked Menico anyway.
A year later, after another sequence of offers from rival troupe-leaders during the summer wedding season in Corte, Menico had made Devin a ten-per-cent partner in the company. After making the same speech, almost word for word,