Tigana Guy Kay (books to read in a lifetime txt) 📖

By then the hard kernel of her own plan had been formed.

The plan that had brought her here, all these years after, to this other lonely bed on an Ember Night of ghosts when she should not have had to be alone. Alone with all her memories, with the reawakening they carried, and the awareness of what she had allowed to happen to her here on the Island. Here in Brandin’s court. Here with Brandin.

And so it was that two things came to Dianora that Ember Night in the saishan.

The memories of her brother had been the first, sweeping over her in waves, image after image until they ended with the ashes of that dead fire.

The second, following inexorably, born of that same long-ago year, born of memory, of guilt, of the whirlwind hurts that came with lying here alone and so terribly exposed on this night of all nights . . . the second thing, spun forth from all these interwoven things, was, finally, the shaping of a resolution. A decision, after so many years. A course of action she now knew she was going to take. Had to take, whatever might follow.

She lay there, chilled, hopelessly awake, and she was aware that the cold she felt came far more from within than without. Somewhere in the palace, she knew, the torturers would be attending to Camena di Chiara who had tried to kill a Tyrant and free his home. Who had done so knowing he would die and how he would die.

Even now they would be with him, administering their precise measures of pain. With a professional pride in their skill they would be breaking his fingers one by one, his wrists and his arms. His toes and ankles and legs. They would be doing it carefully, even tenderly, solicitously guarding the beat of his heart, so that after they had broken his back—which was always the last—they could strap him alive on a wheel and take him out to the harbour square to die in the sight of his people.

She would never have dreamt Camena had such courage or so much passion in his heart. She had derided him as a poseur, a wearer of three-layered cloaks, a minor, trivial artist angling for ascension at court.

Not any more. Yesterday afternoon had compelled a new shape to her image of him. Now that he had done what he had done, now that his body had been given to the torturers and then the wheel there was a question that could no more be buried than could her memories of Baerd. Not tonight. Not unsheltered as she was and so awake.

What, the thought came knifing home like a winter wind in the soul, did Camena’s act make her?

What did it make of that long-ago quest a sixteen-year-old girl had so proudly set herself the night her brother went away? The night he’d seen a riselka under moonlight by the sea and gone in search of his Prince.

She knew the answers. Of course she did. She knew the names that belonged to her. The names she had earned here on the Island. They burned like sour wine in a wound. And burning inside, even as she shivered, Dianora strove one more time to school her heart to begin the deathly hard, never yet successful, journey back to her own dominion from that room on the far wing of the palace where lay the King of Ygrath.

That night was different though. Something had changed that night, because of what had happened, because of the finality, the absoluteness of what she herself had done in the Audience Chamber. Acknowledging that, trying to deal with it, Dianora began to sense, as if from a very great distance, her heart’s slow, painful retreat from the fires of love. A returning, and then a turning back, to the memory of other fires at home. Fields burning, a city burning, a palace set aflame.

No comfort there of course. No comfort anywhere at all. Only an absolute reminder of who she was and why she was here.

And lying very still in darkness on an Ember Night when country doors and windows were all closed against the dead and the magic in the fields, Dianora told softly to herself the whole of the old foretelling verse:

One man sees a riselka his

life forks there.

Two men see a riselka

one of them shall die.

Three men see a riselka

one is blessed, one forks, one shall die.

One woman sees a riselka

her path comes clear to her.

Two women see a riselka

one of them shall bear a child.

Three women see a riselka

one is blessed, one is clear, one shall bear a child.

In the morning, she said to herself amid cold and fire and all the myriad confusions of the heart. In the morning it will begin as it should have begun and ended long ago.

The Triad knew how bitter, how impossible all choices had seemed to her. How faint and elusive had been her dream within these walls of making it all come right for all of them. But of one truth she was now, finally, certain: she had needed something to be made clear along the twisting paths to betrayal that seemed to have become her life—and from Brandin’s own lips she had learned how that clear path might be offered her.

In the morning she would begin.

Until then she could lie here, achingly awake and alone, as on another night at home so many years ago, and she could remember.

Part Three

Ember to Ember

Chapter IX

It was cold in the gully by the side of the road. There was a thin, sheltering line of birch trees between them and the gates of the Nievolene estate, but even so the wind was a knife whenever it picked up.

There had been snow last night, a rare thing this