Tigana

Let it go! she wanted to say, wanted so much to say that she bit her lip holding back the words. she wanted to say, wanted so much to say that she bit her lip holding back the words. Oh, my love, let the spell go. Let Tigana come back and all the world"s brightness will return Oh, my love, let the spell go. Let Tigana come back and all the world"s brightness will return.

She said nothing. Knowing that he could not do so, and knowing, for she was no longer a child, that grace could not be come by so easily. Not after all these years, not with Tigana and Stevan twined together and embedded so deep down in Brandin"s own pain. Not with what he had already done to her home. Not in the world in which they lived.

Besides which, and above everything else, there was the riselka, and her clear path unfolding with every word whispered by the fire. Dianora felt as if she knew everything that was going to be said, everything that would follow. And each pa.s.sing moment was leading them-she could see it as a kind of shimmer in the room-towards the sea.

Almost a third of the Ygrathens stayed. It was more than he"d expected, Brandin told her, standing on the balcony above the harbour two weeks later, watching most of his flotilla sail away, back to their home, to what had been his home. He was exiled now, by his own will, more truly than he had ever been before.

He also told her later that same day that Dorotea was dead. She didn"t ask how, or how he knew. His sorcery was still the thing she did not ever want to face.

Shortly after that came bad tidings though. The Barbadians were beginning to move north towards and through Ferraut, all three armies apparently heading for the border of Senzio. He had not expected that, she saw. Not nearly so soon. It was too unlike careful Alberico to move with such decisiveness.

"Something has happened there. Something is pushing him," Brandin said. "And I wish I knew what it was."

He was weak and vulnerable now, that was the problem. He needed time and they all knew it. With the Ygrathen army mostly gone Brandin needed a chance to shape a new structure of order in the western provinces. To turn the first giddy euphoria of his announcement into the bonds and allegiances that would truly forge a kingdom. That would let him summon an army to fight in his name, among a conquered people lately so hard-oppressed.

He needed time, desperately, and Alberico wasn"t giving it to him.

"You could send us," d"Eymon the Chancellor said one morning, as the dimensions of the crisis began to take shape. "Send the Ygrathens we have left and position the ships off the coast of Senzio. See if that will hold Alberico for a time."

The Chancellor had stayed with them. There was never any real doubt that he would. For all his trauma-he had looked ill and old for days after Brandin"s announcement-Dianora knew that d"Eymon"s deepest loyalty, his love, though he would have shied awkwardly away from that word, was given to the man he served and not to the nation. Moving through those days almost numbed by the divisions in her own heart she envied d"Eymon that simplicity.

But Brandin flatly refused to follow his suggestion. She remembered his face as he explained, looking up from a map and strewn sheets of paper covered with numbers. The three of them together around a table in the sitting-room off the King"s bedchamber; Rhun a nervous, preoccupied fourth on a couch at the far end of the room. The King of the Western Palm still had his Fool, though the King of Ygrath was named Girald now.

"I cannot make them fight alone," Brandin said quietly. "Not to carry the full burden of defending people I have just made them equal to. This cannot be an Ygrathen war. For one thing, they are not enough, we will lose. But it is more than that. If we send an army or a fleet it must be made up of all of us here, or this Kingdom will be finished before I start."

D"Eymon had risen from the table, agitated, visibly disturbed. "Then I must say again what I have said before: this is folly. The thing to do is to go home and deal with what has happened in Ygrath. They need need you there." you there."

"Not really, d"Eymon. I will not flatter myself. Girald has been ruling Ygrath for twenty years."

"Girald is a traitor and should have been executed as such with his mother!"

Brandin looked up at him, the grey eyes suddenly chilly. "Must we repeat this discussion? D"Eymon, I am here for a reason and you know that reason. I cannot go back on that: it would cut against the very core of what I am." His expression changed. "No man need stay with me, but I am bound myself to this peninsula by love and grief, and by my own nature, and those three things will hold me here."

"The Lady Dianora could come with us! With Dorotea dead you would need a Queen in Ygrath and she would be-"

"D"Eymon! Have done." The tone was final, ending the discussion.

But the Chancellor was a brave man. "My lord," he pushed on, grim-faced, his voice low and intense, "if I cannot speak of this and you will not send our fleet to face Barbadior I know not how to advise you. The provinces will not not go to war for you yet, we know that. It is too soon. They need time to see and to believe that you are one of them." go to war for you yet, we know that. It is too soon. They need time to see and to believe that you are one of them."

"And I have have no time," Brandin replied with what had seemed an unnatural calm after the sharp tension of the exchange. "So I have to do it immediately. Advise me on that, Chancellor. How do I show them? Right now. How do I make them believe I am truly bound to the Palm?" no time," Brandin replied with what had seemed an unnatural calm after the sharp tension of the exchange. "So I have to do it immediately. Advise me on that, Chancellor. How do I show them? Right now. How do I make them believe I am truly bound to the Palm?"

So there it was, and Dianora knew that the moment had come to her at last.

I cannot go back on that; it would cut against the very core of what I am. She had never really nursed any fantasies of his ever freely releasing and unbinding his spell. She knew Brandin too well. He was not a man who went back or reversed himself. In anything. The core of what he was. In love and hate and in the defining shape of his pride.

She stood up. There was an odd rushing sound in her ears, and if she closed her eyes she was certain she would see a path stretching away, straight and clear as a line of moonlight on the sea, very bright before her. Everything was leading her there, leading all of them. He was vulnerable, and exposed, and he would never turn back.

There was an image of Tigana flowering in her heart as she rose. Even here, even now, an image of her home. In the depths of the riselka"s pool there had been a great many people gathered under banners of all the provinces as she walked down to the sea.

She placed her hands carefully on the back of her chair and looked down at him where he sat. There was grey in his beard, more, it seemed, each time she noticed it, but his eyes were as they had always been, and there was no fear, no doubt in them as they looked back at her. She drew a deep breath and spoke words that seemed to have been given to her long ago, words that seemed to have simply waited for this moment to arrive.

"I will do it for you," she said. "I will make them believe in you. I will do the Ring Dive of the Grand Dukes of Chiara as it used to be done on the eve of war. You will marry the seas of the peninsula, and I will bind you to the Palm and to good fortune in the eyes of all the people when I bring you back the sea-ring from the sea."

She kept her gaze steady on his own, dark and clear and calm, as she spoke at last, after so many years, the words that set her on the final path. That set him, set them all, the living and the dead, the named and the lost, on that path. As, loving him with a sundered heart, she lied.

She finished her khav and rose from bed. Scelto had drawn the curtains back and she could see sunrise just beginning to lighten the dark sea. The sky was clear overhead and the banners in the harbour could just be seen, moving lazily in the dawn breeze. There was already a huge crowd gathered, hours before the ceremony was to start. A great many people had spent the night in the harbour square, to be sure of a place near the pier to see her dive. She thought she saw someone, a tiny figure at such a distance, lift a hand to point to her window and she stepped quickly back.

Scelto had already laid out the clothes she would wear, the garments of ritual. Dark green for the going down: her outer robe and sandals, the net that would hold her hair and the silken undertunic in which she would dive. For afterwards, after she came back from the sea, there was another robe, white, richly embroidered with gold. For when she was to represent, to be be the bride come from the sea with a gold ring in her hand for the King. the bride come from the sea with a gold ring in her hand for the King.

After she came back. If If she came back. she came back.

She was almost astonished at her own calm. It was easier actually because she hadn"t seen Brandin since early the day before, as was proper for the rite. Easier too, because of how brilliantly clear all the images seemed to be, how smoothly they had led her here, as if she was choosing or deciding nothing, only following a course set down somewhere else and long ago.

Easier, finally, because she had come to understand and accept, deeply, and with cert.i.tude, that she had been born into a world, a life, that would not let her be whole.

Not ever. This was not Finavir, or any such dream-place. This was the only life, the only world, she was to be allowed. And in that life Brandin of Ygrath had come to this peninsula to shape a realm for his son, and Valentin di Tigana had killed Stevan, Prince of Ygrath. This had happened, could not be unmade.

And because of that death, Brandin had come down upon Tigana and her people and torn them out of the known past and the still unfolding pages of the world. And was staying here to seal that truth forever-blank and absolute-in vengeance for his son. This had happened and was happening, and had to be unmade.

So she had come here to kill him. In her father"s name and her mother"s, in Baerd"s name and her own, and for all the lost and ruined people of her home. But on Chiara she had discovered, in grief and pain and glory, that islands were truly a world of their own, that things changed there. She had learned, long ago, that she loved him. And now, in glory and pain and wonder, had been made to understand that he loved her. This had all happened, and she had tried to unmake it, and had failed.

Hers was not a life meant to be made whole. She could see it now so clearly, and in that clarity, that final understanding, Dianora found the wellspring of her calm.

Some lives were unlucky. Some people had a chance to shape their world. It seemed-who could have foretold?-that both these things were true of her.

Of Dianora di Tigana bren Saevar, a sculptor"s daughter; a dark-haired dark-eyed child, gawky and unlovely in her youth, serious and grave, though with flashes of wit and tenderness, beauty coming to her late, and wisdom coming later, too much later. Coming only now.

She took no food, though she"d allowed herself the khav-a last concession to years of habit. She didn"t think that doing so would violate any rituals. She also knew it didn"t really matter. Scelto helped her dress, and then, in silence, he carefully gathered and pinned her hair, binding it in the dark green net that would hold it back from her eyes when she dived.

When he was done she rose and submitted herself, as always before going out into the world, to his scrutiny. The sun was up now, its light flooding the room through the drawn-back curtains. In the distance the growing noise from the harbour could be heard. The crowd must be very large by now, she thought; she didn"t go back to the window to look. She would see them soon enough. There was a quality of antic.i.p.ation to the steady murmur of sound that gave evidence, more clearly than anything else, of the stakes being played for this morning.

A peninsula. Two different dominions here, if it came to that. Perhaps even, the very Empire in Barbadior, with the Emperor ill and dying as everyone knew. And one last thing more, though only she knew this, and only she would ever know: Tigana. The final, secret coin lying on the gaming table, hidden under the card laid down in the name of love.

"Will I do?" she asked Scelto, her voice determinedly casual.

He didn"t follow that lead. "You frighten me," he said quietly. "You look as though you are no longer entirely of this world. As if you have already left us all behind."

It was uncanny how he could read her. It hurt to have to deceive him, not to have him with her on this last thing, but there was nothing he could have done, no reason to give him grief, and there were risks in the doing so.

"I"m not at all sure that"s flattering," she said, still lightly, "but I will attempt to think of it that way."

He refused to smile. "I think you know how little I like this," he said.

"Scelto, Alberico"s entire army will be on the border of Senzio two weeks from now. Brandin has no choice. If they walk into Senzio they will not stop there. This is his very best chance, probably his only chance, to link himself to the Palm in time. You know all this." She forced herself to sound a little angry.

It was true, it was all true. But none of it was the truth truth. The riselka was the truth this morning, that and the dreams she"d dreamt alone here in the saishan through all the years.

"I know," Scelto said, clearly unhappy. "Of course I know. And nothing I think matters at all. It is just ...

"Please!" she said, to stop him before he made her cry. "I don"t think I can debate this with you now, Scelto. Shall we go?" Oh, my dear Oh, my dear, she was thinking. Oh, Scelto, you will undo me yet Oh, Scelto, you will undo me yet.

He had stopped, flinching at her rebuke. She saw him swallow hard, his eyes lowered. After a moment he looked up again.

"Forgive me, my lady," he whispered. He stepped forward and, unexpectedly, took her hands, pressing them to his lips. "It is only for you that I speak. I am afraid. Please forgive."

"Of course," she said. "Of course. There is really nothing to forgive, Scelto." She squeezed his hands tightly.

But in her heart she was bidding him farewell, knowing she must not cry. She looked into his honest, caring face, the truest friend she"d had for so many years, the only real friend actually, since her childhood, and she hoped against hope that in the days to come, he would remember the way she had gripped his hands and not the casual, careless sound of her words.

"Let"s go," she said again, and turned her face away from him, to begin the long walk through the palace and out into the morning and then down to the sea.

The Ring Dive of the Grand Dukes of Chiara had been the most dramatic single ritual of temporal power in the Peninsula of the Palm. From the very beginning of their dominion on the Island, the leaders of Chiara had known that theirs was a power granted by and subject to the waters that surrounded them. The sea guarded them and fed them. It gave their ships-always the largest armada in the peninsula-access to trade and plunder, and it wrapped them about and enclosed them in a world within the world. No wonder, as the taletellers said, no wonder it was on the Island that Eanna and Adaon had come together to engender Morian and make the Triad complete.

A world within the world, girdled by the sea.

It was said to have been the very first of the Grand Dukes who had begun the ceremony that became the Ring Dive. It had been different in those early days. Not actually a dive, for one thing, only a ring thrown as a gift into the sea in propitiation and token of acknowledgement, in the days when the world turned its face towards the sun and the sailing season began in earnest.

Then one spring, a long time after that, a woman dived into the sea after the ring when the Grand Duke of that time cast it in. Some said later she had been crazed with love or religious possession, others that she was only cunning and ambitious.

In either case, she surfaced from the waters of the harbour with the ring bright in her hand.

And as the crowd that had gathered to watch the Grand Duke wed the sea shouted and babbled in wild confusion and wonder, the High Priest of Morian in Chiara suddenly cried aloud, in words that would run down through all the years, never to be lost: "Look and see! See how the oceans accept the Grand Duke as husband to them! How they offer back the sea-ring as a bride piece to a lover!"

And the High Priest moved to the very end of the pier beside the Duke and knelt to help the woman rise from the sea and so he set in motion everything that followed. Saronte the Grand Duke was but new to his power and as yet unwed. Letizia, who had come into the city from a farm in the distrada and had done this unprecedented thing, was yellow-haired and comely and very young. And their palms were joined together then and there over the water by Mellidar, that High Priest of Morian, and Saronte placed the sea-ring on Letizia"s finger.

They were wed at Midsummer. There was war that autumn against Asoli and Astibar, and young Saronte di Chiara triumphed magnificently in a naval battle in the Gulf of Corte, south of the Island. A victory whose anniversary Chiara still remembered. And from that time onward, the newly shaped ritual of the Ring Dive was enshrined for use in time of Chiara"s need.

Thirty years later, near the end of Saronte"s long reign, in one of the recurring squabbles for precedence among the Triad"s clergy, a newly anointed High Priest of Eanna revealed that Letizia had been near kin to Mellidar, the priest of Morian who had drawn her from the water and bound her to the Duke. Eanna"s priest invited the people of the Island to draw their own conclusions about the schemes of Morian"s clergy and their endless striving for pre-eminence and power.

A number of events, none of them pleasant, had unfolded among the Triad"s servants in the months following that revelation, but none of these disturbances had come near to touching the bright new sanct.i.ty of the ritual itself. The ceremony had taken hold on the imagination of the people. It seemed to speak to something deep within them, whether of sacrifice or homage, of love or danger, or, in the end, of some dark, true binding to the waters of the sea.

So the Ring Dive of the Grand Dukes remained, long after all those feuding clergy of the Triad had been lowered to their rest, their names only half-remembered, and only because of their part in the story of the Dive.

What had finally brought an end to the ceremony, in much more recent times, was the death of Onestra, wife to Grand Duke Cazal, two hundred and fifty years ago.

It was not, by any means, the first such death: the women who volunteered to dive for the Grand Dukes always had it made absolutely clear to them that their lives were worth infinitely less than the ring they sought to reclaim from the sea. To come back without the ring left one an exile from the Island for life, known and mocked throughout the whole peninsula. The ceremony was repeated with another woman, another ring, until one of the thrown rings was found and claimed.

By contrast, the woman who carried a sea-ring back to the pier was acclaimed as the luck of Chiara and her fortune was made for life. Wealth and honour, an arranged marriage into n.o.bility. More than one had borne a child to her Grand Duke. Two had followed Letizia to the consort"s throne. Girls from families of little prospect were not chary about risking their lives for such a glittering, hallucinatory future.

Onestra di Chiara had been different, and because of her and after her everything had changed.

Beautiful as a legend and as proud, Grand Duke Cazal"s young bride had insisted on doing the Ring Dive herself, scorning to allocate such a glittering ceremony to some ill-bred creature from the distrada on the eve of a dangerous war. She had been, all the chroniclers of the day agreed, the most beautiful vision any of them had ever seen as she walked down to the sea in the dark-green of ritual.

When she floated, lifeless, to the surface of the water some distance from the sh.o.r.e, in full sight of the watching throng, Duke Cazal had screamed like a girl and fainted dead away.

After which there had been rioting and a terrified pandemonium unmatched before or since on the Island. In one isolated temple of Adaon on the north sh.o.r.e, all the priestesses had killed themselves when one of their number brought back the news. It was the wrath of the G.o.d that was coming, so the portents were read, and Chiara almost strangled on its fear.

Duke Cazal, foolhardy and broken, was slain in battle that summer against the joined armies of Corte and Ferraut, after which Chiara endured two generations of eclipse, rising to power again only after the bitter, destructive war fought between the erstwhile allies who had beaten it. Such a process, of course, was hardly noteworthy. It had been the way of things in the Palm as far back as the records went.

But no woman had done the Ring Dive since Onestra died.

All the symbols had changed with her, the stakes had risen too high. If another woman were to die in the Dive, with that legacy of chaos and defeat.

It was far too dangerous, successive Grand Dukes declared, the one after the other, and they found ways to keep the Island safe in its sea-girt power without the sanction of that most potent ceremony.

When the Ygrathen fleet had been sighted nineteen years ago the last Grand Duke of Chiara had killed himself on the steps of Eanna"s temple, and so there had been no one to cast a ring into the sea that year, even had there been a woman willing to dive for it, in search of Morian"s intercession and the G.o.d"s.

It was eerily silent in the saishan when she and Scelto left her rooms. Normally at this hour the corridors would be loud with the stir and bustle of the castrates, fragrant and colourful with the scented presence of women moving languorously to the baths or to their morning meal. Today was different. The hallways were empty and still save for their own footsteps. Dianora suppressed a shiver, so strange did the deserted, echoing saishan seem.

They pa.s.sed the doorway to the baths and then the entrance to the dining rooms. Both were empty and silent. They turned a corner towards the stairway that led down and out of the women"s wing, and there Dianora saw that one person at least had remained, and was waiting for them.

"Let me look at you," Vencel said, the usual words. "I must approve you before you go down."

The saishan head was sprawled as always among the many-coloured pillows of his rolling platform. Dianora almost smiled to see his vast bulk, and to hear the familiar words spoken.

"Of course," she said, and slowly turned full circle before his scrutiny.

"Acceptable," he said at length. The customary judgement, though his high distinctive voice sounded more subdued than she had ever heard it. "But perhaps ... perhaps you would like to wear that vairstone from Khardhun about your throat? For luck? I brought it with me for you, from the saishan treasures."

Almost diffidently Vencel extended a large soft hand and she saw that he was holding the red jewel she had worn the day Isolla of Ygrath had tried to kill the King.

She was about to demur when she remembered that Scelto had brought this back for her as something special for that day, just before she had dressed to go down. Remembering that, and moved by Vencel"s gesture, she said, "Thank you. I would be pleased to wear it." She hesitated. "Would you put it on for me?"

He smiled, almost shyly. She knelt before him and with his deft and delicate fingers the enormous saishan head clasped the jewel on its chain about her neck. Kneeling so near she was overwhelmed by the scent of tainflowers that he always wore.

Vencel withdrew his hands and leaned back to look at her. In his dark face his eyes were unwontedly soft. "In Khardhun we used to say to someone going on a journey, Fortune find you there and guide you home Fortune find you there and guide you home. Such is my wish today." He hid his hands in the billowing folds of his white robe and looked away, down the empty corridor.

"Thank you," she said again, afraid to say more. She rose and glanced over at Scelto; there were tears in his eyes. He wiped them hastily away and moved to lead her down the stairs. Halfway down she looked back at Vencel, an almost inhumanly vast figure, draped in billowing white. He was gazing expressionlessly down after them, from among the brilliantly coloured panoply of his pillows, an exotic creature from another world entirely, somehow carried ash.o.r.e and stranded here in the saishan of Chiara.

At the bottom of the stairs she saw that the two doors had been left unbarred. Scelto would not have to knock. Not today. He pushed the doors open and drew back to let her pa.s.s.

In the long hallway outside, the priests of Morian and the priestesses of Adaon were waiting for her. She saw the scarcely veiled triumph in their eyes, a collective glittering of expectation.