PART TWO – DIANORA Chapter 7

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    DIANORA COULD REMEMBER THE DAY SHE CAME TO THE Island.

    The air that autumn m had been much like it was today at the beginning of spring—white clouds scudding in a high blue sky as the wind had swept the Tribute Ship through the whitecaps into the harbor of Chiara. Beyond harbor and town the slopes mounting to the hills had been wild with fall colors.

    The leaves were turning: red and gold and some that g yet to green, she remembered.

    The sails of the Tribute Ship so long ago had been red and gold as well: colors of celebration in Ygrath. She khat now, she hadnt known it then. She had stood on the forward deck of the ship to gaze for the first time at the splendor of Chiaras harbor, at the long pier where the Grand Dukes used to stand to throw a ring into the sea, and from where Letizia had leaped in the first of the Ring Dives to reclaim the ring from the waters and marry her Duke: turning the Dives into the lud symbol of Chiaras pride until beautiful Ora had ged the ending of the story hundreds and hundreds of years ago, and the Ring Dives had ceased. Even so, tvery child in the Palm khat legend of the Island.

    Yo<bdi>.９9ｌiｂ?</bdi>ung girls in each province would play at diving into water for a ring and rising in triumph, with their hair shinio wed a Duke of power and glory.

    From he prow of the Tribute Ship, Dianora had looked up beyond the harbor and palace to gaze at the majesty of snow-ed Sangarios rising behind them. The Ygrathen sailors had not disturbed her silehey had allowed her to e forward to watch the Island approach. Once shed been safely aboard ship and the ship away to sea theyd been kind to her. Women thought to have a real ce at being chosen for the saishan were always treated well oribute Ships. It could make a captains fortune in Brandins court if he brought home a hostage who became a favorite of the Tyrant.

    Sitting now on the southern baly of the saishan wing, looking out from behind the ornately crafted s that hid the women from gawkers in the square below, Dianora watched the banners of Chiara and Ygrath flap in the freshening spring breeze, and she remembered how the wind had blown her hair about her face more than twelve years ago. She remembered looking from the bright sails to the slopes of the tree-clad hills running up to Sangarios, from the blue and white of the sea to the clouds in the blue sky.

    From the tumult and chaos of life in the harbor to the serene grandeur of the palace just beyond. Birds had been wheeling, g loudly about the three high masts of the Tribute Ship. The rising sun had been a dazzle of light striking along the sea from the east. So much vibran the world, so rid fair and shining a m to be alive.

    Twelve years ago, and more. She had beey-one years old, and nursing her hatred and her secret like two of Morians three swining about her heart.

    She had been chosen for the saishan.

    The circumstances of her taking had made it very likely, and Brandins celebrated grey eyes had widened appraisingly when she was led before him two days later. Shed been wearing a silken, pale- cown, she remembered, chosen to set off her dark hair and the dark brown of her eyes.

    She had beeain she would be chosen. Shed felt her triumph nor fear, even though shed been pointing her life toward that moment for five full years, even though, in that instant of Brandins choosing, walls and ss and corridors closed arouhat would defihe rest of her days. Shed had her hatred and her secret, and guarding the two of them left no room for anything else.

    Or so shed thought at twenty-one.

    For all shed seen and lived through, even by then, Dianora reflected twelve years later on her baly, shed known very little— dangerously little—about a great many things that mattered far too much.

    Even out of the wind it was cool here on the baly. The Ember Days were upon them but the flowers were just beginning in the valleys inland and on the hill slopes, and the true o of spring was

    some time off even this far north. It had been different at home, Dianora remembered; sometimes there would still be snow in the southern highlands when the springtime Ember Days had e and passed.

    Without looking backwards, Dianora raised a hand. In a moment the castrate had brought her a steaming mug ean khav. Trade restris and tariffs, Brandin was fond of saying in private, had to be handled selectively or life could be too acutely marred. Khav was one of the selected things. Only in the palace of course. Outside the walls they drank the inferior products of Corte or ral Senzio. Once a group of Senzian khav merts had e as part of a trade embassy to try to persuade him of improvements in the crop they grew and the cup it brewed. ral, indeed, Brandin had said judiciously, tasting. So ral, it hardly seems to be there.

    The merts had withdrawn, sternated and pale, desperately seeking to divihe hidden meaning in the Ygrathen Tyrants words. Senzians spent much of their time doing that, Dianora had observed drily to Brandin afterward. Hed laughed. Shed always been able to amuse him, even in the days when she was too young and inexperieo do it deliberately.

    Which thought reminded her of the young castrate attendihis m. Scelto was in town colleg her gown for the reception that afternootendant was one of the  castrates, sent out from Ygrath to serve the growing saishan in the y.

    He was well trained already. Vencels methods might be harsh, but there was no denying that they worked. She decided not to tell the boy that the khav wasnt strong enough; he would very probably fall to pieces, which would be inve. Shed mention it to Scelto a him hahe matter. There was no need for Veo know: it was useful to have some of the castrates grateful to her as well as afraid.

    The fear came automatically: a fun of who she was here in the saishan. Gratitude or affe she had to work at.

    Twelve years and more this spring, she thought again, leaning forward to look down through the s at the bustling preparations in the square for the arrival of Isolla of Ygrath later that day. At twenty-one shed been at the peak, she supposed, of whatever beauty shed been granted. Shed had nothing of such grace at fifteen and sixteen she remembered—they hadnt even bothered to hide her from the Ygrathen soldiers at home.

    At een shed begun to be something else entirely, though by then she wasnt at home and Ygrath was no dao the residents of Barbadian-ruled Certando. Or not normally, she amended, reminding herself—though this was not, by any means, a thing that really needed a remihat she was Dianora di Certando here in the saishan. And across in the west wing as well, in Brandins bed.

    She was thirty-three years old, and somehow with the years that had slipped away so absurdly fast she was one of the powers of this palace. Which, of course, meant of the Palm. In the saishan only Solores di Corte could be said to vie with her for access to Brandin, and Solores was six years older than she was—one of the first years harvest of the Tribute Ships.

    Sometimes, even now, it was all a little too much, a little hard to believe. The younger castrates trembled if she even glanced slantwise at them; courtiers—whether from overseas in Ygrath or here in the four western provinces of the Palm—sought her sel and support in their petitions to Brandin; musis wrote songs for her; poets declaimed and dedicated verses that spun into hyperbolic raptures about her beauty and her wisdom. The Ygrathens would likeo the sisters of their god, the Chiarans to the fabled beauty of Ora before she did the last Ring Dive frand Duke Cazal—though the poets always stopped that analogy well before the Dive itself and the tragedies that followed.

    After one such adjective-bestrewn eifort of Doardes shed suggested to Brandin over a late, private supper that one of the measures of differeween men and women was that power made men attractive, but when a woman had power that merely made it attractive to praise her beauty.

    Hed thought about it, leaning bad stroking his  beard. Shed been aware of having taken a certain risk, but shed also known him very well by then.

    "Two questions," Brandin, Tyrant of the Western Palm, had asked, reag for the hand shed left oable. "Do you think you have power, my Dianora?”

    Shed expected that. "Only through you, and for the little time remaining before I grow old and you cease to grant me access to you." A small slash at Solores there, but discreet enough, she judged. "But so long as you ao e to you I will be seen to have power in your court, and poets will say I am more lovely now than I ever was. More lovely than the diadem of stars that s the crest of the girdled world ... or whatever the line was.”

    "The curving diadem, I think he wrote." He smiled. Shed expected a pliment then, for he was generous with those. His grey eyes had remained sober though, and direct. He said, "My sed question: Would I be attractive to you without the power that I wield?”

    And that, she remembered, had almost caught her out. It was too ued a question, and far too o the place where her twin snakes yet lived, however dormant they might be.

    Shed lowered her eyelashes to where their hands were twined. Like the snakes, she thought. She backed away quickly from that thought. Looking up, with the sly, sidelong glance she knew he loved, Dianora had said, feigning surprise: "Do you wield power here? I hadnt noticed.”

    A sed later his rich, life-giving laughter had burst forth. The guards outside would hear it, she knew. And they would talk. Everyone in Chiara talked; the Islaself on gossip and rumor. There would be aale after tonight. Nothing new, only a reaffirmation in that shouted laughter of how much pleasure Brandin of Ygrath took in his dark Dianora.

    Hed carried her to the bed then, still amused, making her smile and then laugh herself at his mood.

    Hed taken his pleasure, slowly and in the myriad of ways hed taught her through the years, for in Ygrath they were versed in such things and he was—then and now— the King of Ygrath, over and above everything else he was.

    And she? On her baly now in the springtime m sunlight Dianora closed her eyes on the memory of how that night, and before that night—for years and years before that night—and after, after even until now, her own rebel body a and mind, traitors together to her soul, had slaked so desperate and deep a need in him.

    In Brandin of Ygrath. Whom she had e here to kill twelve years ago, twin snakes around the wreckage of her heart, for having done what he had doo Tigana which was her home.

    Or had been her home until he had battered and leveled and bur and killed a geion and taken away the very sound of its name. Of her own true name.

    She was Dianora di Tigana bren Saevar and her father had died at Sed Deisa, with an awkwardly- handled sword and not a sculptors chisel in his hand. Her mothers spirit had snapped like a water reed in the brutality of the occupation that followed, and her brother, whose eyes and hair were exactly like her own, whom she had loved more than her life, had been driven into exile in the wideness of the world.

    Hed been fifteen years old.

    She had no idea where he was all these years after. If he was alive, or dead, or far from this peninsula where tyrants ruled over broken provihat had once been so proud. Where the name of the proudest of them all was gone from the memory of men.

    Because of Brandin. In whose arms she had lain so many nights through the years with su ache of need, su arg of desire, every time he summoned her to him. Whose voice was knowledge and wit and grace to her, water in the dryness of her days. Whose laughter whe it free, when she could draw it forth from him, was like the healing sun slig out of clouds. Whose grey eyes were the troubling, unreadable color of the sea uhe first cold slanting light of m in spring or fall.

    In the oldest of all the stories told in Tigana it was from the grey sea at dawn that Adaon the god had risen and e to Micaela and lain with her on the long, dark, destined curving of the sand. Dianora khat story as well as she knew her name. Her true name.

    She also kwo other things at least as well: that her brother or her father would kill her with their hands if either were alive to see what she had bee. And that she would accept that ending and know it was deserved.

    Her father was dead. Her heart would scald her at the very thought of her brother so, even if death might spare him a grief so final as seeing where she had e, but ead every m she prayed to the Triad, especially to Adaon of the Waves, that he was overseas and so far away from where tidings might ever reach him of a Dianora with dark eyes like his own in the saishan of the Tyrant.

    Unless, said the quiet voice of her heart, uhe m might yet e when she could find a way to do a thing here on the Island that would still, despite all that had happened—despite the iwining of limbs at night and the sound of her own voice g aloud in need assuaged—bring baother sound into the world. Into the voien and women and children all over the Palm, and south over the mountains in Quileia, and north a a beyond all the seas.

    The sound of the name of Tigana, gone. Gone, but not, if the goddesses and the god were kind—if there was any love left in them, or pity—not forever fotten or forever lost.

    And perhaps—and this was Dianoras dream on the nights she slept alone, after Scelto had massaged and oiled her skin and had gone away with his dle to sleep outside her door—perhaps it would e to pass that if she could indeed find a way to do this thing, that her brother, far from home, would miraculously hear the name of Tigana spoken by a stranger in a world of strangers, in some distant royal court or bazaar, and somehow he would know, in a rush of wonder and joy, in the deep core of the heart she knew so well, that it was through her doing that the name was in the world again.

    She would be dead by then. She had no doubts as to that. Brandins hate in this ohing—iter of his vengeance for Stevan—was fixed and unalterable. It was the oar in the firmament of all the lands he ruled.

    She would be dead, but it would be all right, fanas name would be restored, and her brother would be alive and would know it had been she, and Brandin . . . Brandin would uand that she had found a way to do this thing while sparing his life on all the nights, the numberless nights, when she could have slain him while he slept by her side after love.

    This was Dianoras dream. She used to be driven awake, tears cold on her cheeks, by the iy of the feelings it engendered. No one ever saw those tears but Scelto though, and Scelto she trusted more than anyone alive.

    She heard his quick light footsteps at the doorway and then briskly crossing the floor toward her baly. No one else in the saishan moved like Scelto. The castrates were notoriously proo lassitude and to eating too much—the obvious substitutions for pleasure. Not Scelto, though. Slim as hed been whe him, he still sought out those errands the other castrates strove to avoid: trips up into the steep streets of the old town, or even farther north into the hills or part Sangarios itself in search of healing herbs or leaves or simply meadow flowers for her room.

    He seemed ageless, but he hadnt been young when Vencel assigned him to Dianora and she guessed that he must be sixty now. If Vencel ever died—a hard thing to imagine, in fact—Scelto was certainly  in lio succeed him as head of the saishan.

    They had never spoken about it, but Dianora knew, as surely as she knew anything, that he would refuse the position if it were offered to him, in order to remain bound to her. She also knew—and this was the thing that touched her—that this would be true even if Brandin stopped sending for her entirely and she became merely aning igem of history in the saishan wing.

    And this was the sed thing shed never expected to find when hate had carried her through autumo Chiara oribute Ship: kindness and g and a friend behind the high walls and ornate ss of the place where women waited among men who had lost their manhood.

    Sceltos tread, rapid even after the long climb up the Great Staircase and then another flight up to the

    saishan, clicked across the mosaics of the baly floor behind her. She heard him murmur kindly to the boy and dismiss him.

    He took aep forward and coughed oo announce himself.

    "Is it terribly hideous?" she asked without turning around.

    "It will do," Scelto said, ing to stand beside her. She looked over, smiling to see his close- cropped grey hair, the thin, precise mouth, and the terribly broken hook of his nose. Ages ago, hed said when shed asked. A fight over a woman ba Ygrath. Hed killed the other man, who happeo be a noble. Whifortunate fact had cost Scelto his sex and his liberty and brought him here. Dianora had been more disturbed by the story than he seemed to be. Oher hand, she remembered thinking, it had beeo her, while for him it was only the familiar age of his life, from a long time past.

    He held up the dark red gown theyd had made in the old town. From his smile which matched her own Dianora k had been worth cajoling Vencel for the funds to have this dohe head of the saishan would want a favor later, he always did, but through such exges was the saishan run, and Dianora, looking at the gown, had s.

    "What is Solores wearing?" she asked.

    "Hala wouldnt tell me," Surmured regretfully.

    Dianora laughed aloud at the straight face he mao maintain. "Im quite sure he wouldnt," she said. "What is she wearing?”

    "Green," he said promptly. "High waisted, high neck. Two shades is below the waist. Gold sandals. A great deal of gold everywhere else. Her hair will be up, of course. She has new earrings.”

    Dianora laughed again. Scelto allowed himself a tiny smile of satisfa. "I took the liberty," he added, "of purchasing something else while I was in town.”

    He reached into a fold of his tunid handed her a small box. She ope and wordlessly held up the gem inside. In the bright m light of the baly it dazzled and shone like a third red moon to join Vidomni and blue Ilarion.

    Scelto said, "I thought it would be better with the gown than anything Vencel would offer you from the saishan jewels.”

    She shook her head wly. "It is beautiful, Scelto.  we afford this? Will I have to go without chocolate for all of the spring and summer?”

    "Not a bad idea," he said, ign her first question. "You ate two pieces this m while I was gone.”

    "Scelto!" she exclaimed. "Stop that! Go spy on Solores and see what shes spending her chiaros on. I have my habits and my pleasures, and none of them, so far as I  see, are particularly evil. Do I look fat to you?”

    Almost relutly he shook his head. "I have no idea why not," he murmured ruefully.

    "Well you keep thinking about it till you figure it out," she said with a toss of her head. "In the meahat reminds me—the boy this m was fine, except that the khav was very weak. Will you speak to him about how I like it?”

    "I did. I told him to make it a little weak.”

    "You what? Scelto, I absolutely—”

    "You always begin drinking more khav at the end of winter, when the weather begins to turn, and every spring you always have trouble sleeping at night. You know this is true, my lady. Either fewer cups or weaker khav. It is my duty to try to keep you rested and tranquil.”

    Dianora eechless for a sed. "Tranquil!" she finally mao exclaim. "I might have frightehat poor child to the tips of his fingernails. I would have felt terrible!”

    "I had told him what to say," Scelto said placidly. "He would have blamed it on me.”

    "Oh, really. And what if Id reported it directly to Vencel, instead?" Dianora retorted. "Scelto, he would have had that boy starved and lashed.”

    Sceltos dignified little sniff veyed quite clearly what he thought about the likelihood of her having done any such thing.

    His expression was so wryly knowing that, against her will, Dianora found herself laughing again.

    "Very well," she said, surrendering. "The be fewer cups, because I do like it strong, Scelto. It isnt worth the drinking otherwise. Besides, I dont think thats why I t sleep at night. This season simply makes me restless.”

    "You were taken as Tribute in the spring," he murmured. "Everyone in the saishan is restless in the season they were taken." He hesitated. "I t do anything about that, my lady. But I thought perhaps the khav might be making it worse." There was  and affe in his brown eyes, almost as dark as her own.

    "You worry too much about me," she said after a moment.

    He smiled. "Who else should I worry about?" There was a little silence; Dianora could hear the noises from far below in the square.

    "Speaking of w," said Scelto in a transparent effort to ge the mood, "we may be trating too mu what Solores is doing. We may want to start keeping an eye on the young oh the green eyes.”

    "lassica?" Dianora said, surprised. "What ever for? Brandin hasnt even called her to him and shes been here a month already.”

    "Exactly," said Scelto. He paused, somewhat awkwardly, which piqued her curiosity.

    "What are you saying, Scelto?”

    "I, um, have been told by Tesios who has been looking after her that he has never seen or heard of a woman in the saishan with such . . . trol of her body or such . . . capacity for the climax of love.”

    He was blushing furiously, which made Dianora abruptly self-scious too. It was a standard practice—with some quite unstan-dard variations—for the women of the saishan to use their castrates to give them physical release if too much time went by between summoo the other wing.

    Dianora had never asked Scelto for such a service. Something about the very idea disturbed her: it seemed an abuse, in a way she couldnt articulate. He had been a man, she reminded herself frequently, who had killed someone for love of a woman. Their relationship, close as it was, had never ehat dimension. It was strange, she thought, even amusing, how shy they could both bee at the very mention of the subjed Triad k came up often enough ihouse atmosphere of the saishan.

    She turned back to the railing, looking down through the s, to give him time tain his posure. Thinking about what hed said though, she found herself feeling a certain amusement after all.

    She was already w out how and when to tell Brandin about this.

    "My friend," she said, "you may know me well, but ily the same way and for many of the same reasons I know Brandin very well.”

    She glanced back at her castrate. "He is older than you, Scelto— he is almost sixty-five—and for reasons I doirely uand he has said he must live here in the Palm another sixty years or so. All the sorcery in the world would surely not avail him to prolong his life that long if lassica is as ...

    exceptional as Tesios suggests. She would wear him out, however pleasantly, in a year or two.”

    Scelto blushed again, and glanced quickly back over his shoulder. They were quite alohough.

    Dianora laughed, partly out of genuine amusement, but more specifically to mask the recurring sorrow she felt whehis one lie had to be told: the thing she still kept from Scelto. The o that

    mattered.

    Of course she knew why Brandin o stay here in the Palm, why he o use his sorcery to prolong his life here in what was surely a place of exile for him in a land of grief.

    He had to wait for everyone born in Tigana to die.

    Only then could he leave the peninsula where his son had been slain. Only then would the full measure of the vengeance he had decreed be poured out on the bloodied ground. For no one would be left alive in the world who had any true memory of Tigana before the fall, of Avalle of the Towers, the songs and the stories and the legends, all the long, bright history-It would truly be gohen. Wiped out.

    Seventy hty years wreaking as prehensive an obliteration as millennia had on the a civilizations no one could now recall. Whole cultures that were now only an awkwardly pronouname of a place, or a deciphered, pompous title—Emperor of All the Earth—on a broken pottery shard.

    Brandin could go home after sixty years. He could do whatever he chose. By then she would be long dead and so too would be those from Tigana even youhahose born up to the very year of the quest—the last iors.

    The last children who could hear ahe name of the land that had been their owy years, Brandin was giving himself. More than enough, given lifespans in the Palm.

    Eighty years to oblivion. To the broken, meaningless pottery shard. The books were gone already, and the paintings, tapestries, sculptures, music: torn or smashed or burned ierrible year after Valentins fall when Brandin had e down upon them in the agony of a fathers loss, bringing them the reciprocal agony of a querors hate.

    The worst year of Dianoras life. Seeing so much of beauty and splendor crumble to rubble and dust or burn down to ashes of loss. Shed been fifteen, then sixteen. Still too young to prehend the full reality of what was being eradicated. For her fathers death and the destru of his art—the works of his hands and days—she could mourn bitterly. And so too for the deaths of friends and the sudden terrors of an occupied impoverished city. The larger losses, the implications for the future, she couldnt really grasp back then.

    Many iy had gone mad that year.

    Others had fled, taking their children away to try to shape a life far from the burning or the memory of burning, of hammers smashing into the statues of the Princes in the long covered loggia of the Palace by the Sea. Some had withdrawn so far into themselves—a madness of another kind—that only the merest spark was left within to make them eat and sleep and somehow walk through the waste spaces of their days.

    Her mother had been one of those.

    On the baly in Chiara so many years later, Dianora looked up at Scelto and realized, from the blinking  in his face, that shed been silent for too long.

    She forced a smile. Shed been here for a long time; she was good at dissembling. At smiling when it was needful. Even with Scelto whom she hated to deceive. And especially with Brandin, whom she had to deceive, or die.

    "lassica is not a ," she said mildly, resuming the versation as if nothing had happened.

    Indeed, nothing had happened— only old memories e baothing of weight or import in the world, nothing that mattered or could matter. Only loss.

    She said, skillfully laughing, "She is far too unintelligent to divert him and too young to relax him as Solores does. Im glad of your information though—I think we  use it. Tell me, is Tesios growing weary tending her? Should I speak to Vencel about assigning someone younger? Or perhaps more than one?”

    She made him smile, even as he flushed again. It always seemed to go this way. If she could make

    them smile or laugh it would brush away the clouds like a wind, a springtime or an autumn wind, leaving behind the high clear blue of the sky.

    Dianora wished, with an ag heart, that shed known how to do that eighteen years ago. For her mother and her brother. For both of them so long ago. No laughter then. No laughter anywhere, and the blue skies a mockery, looking down upon ruin.

    Vencel, more awesomely obese every time she saw him, approved Soloress gown, Nesaias, Chylmoenes, and then her own. Only the four of them—experienced enough to know how to cope with the exigencies of a formal reception—were going down to the Audience Chamber. The envy in the saishan during the past week had been acute enough to produce a st, Scelto had said wryly more than once. Dianora hadnt noticed; she was used to it.

    Vencels shrewd eyes widened from deep in the manifold creases of his dark face as he studied her.

    She had the gem on her brow, set in a band of white gold that held back her hair. Sprawled on his couch of pillows, the head of the saishan played with the billowing folds of his elephantine white robe. The sun shining through the arch of a window behind him glinted distragly from his bald head.

    "I do not recall that stone among our treasures," he murmured in his high, discerting voice. It was a voice so utterly insequential that it might lead oo uimate the speaker. Which, as a good many people had discovered over the years, was a serious, sometimes a mortal mistake.

    "It isnt," Dianora replied cheerfully. "Though after we return this afternoon may I ask you to guard it in my name among the other treasures?”

    Sceltos suggestion, that. Vencel could be corrupt and venal about a great many things, but not when it came to the formal aspects of his office. He was too clever for that. Again, a truth some had paid the ultimate price to discover.

    He nodded benignly now. "It seems a very fione from this distance." Obediently, Dianora stepped nearer and ined her head graciously to let him see it more clearly. The st of tainflowers that he always wore after winters end enveloped her. It was too sweet, but not unpleasant.

    She had feared Vencel once—a fear mixed of physical revulsion at his grossness and rumors of the things he liked to do with the younger castrates and some of the women who were in the saishan for purely political reasons,,with no hope of ever seeing the outside world or the west wing of the palad Brandins chambers. Long ago though she and the saishan head had reached their uanding. Solores had the same unspoken pact with Vencel, and out of the delicate balance achieved thereby the three of them trolled, as best they could, their enclosed, over-intense, inse-laden world of idle, frustrated women, and half-men.

    With a surprisingly delicate finger Veouched the gem on her brow. He smiled. "A good stone,”

    he said again, this time in judgment. His breath was fragrant. "I must talk to Scelto about it. I know about such things, you see. Vairstones e from the north, you see. From my own land. They are mined in Khardhun. For years and years I used to play with them as tris, a monarchs toys. In the days when I was more than I am now. For as you know, I have been a King in Khardhun.”

    Dianora nodded gravely. For this too art of the unspoken terms of her relationship with Vehat however many times he might speak this wild fabrication of a lie—and he said it many times a day, in one variant or another—she was to nod knowingly, reflectively, as if p the message hidden in the grandeur of his fall.

    Only in her rooms aloh Scelto could she give way to fits of girlish giggling at the very thought of the vasty saishan head being more than he was now, or at the subversive, deadly imitatioo could give of VencePs speed gestures.

    "You do that wonderfully," she might say ily, as Scelto dressed her hair, or polished her curved slippers till they shone.

    "It is a thing I know about, you see," he would reply if certain they were alone, his voice pitched high

    above its normal range. He would gesticulate slowly, expansively. "For as you are aware, I have been a King in Khardhun.”

    She would laugh like a little girl who knew just how naughty she was being, the more out of trol because of that very fact.

    She had asked Brandin about it once. His Khardhun campaign had been only a marginal success, she learned. He was frank with her about such things by then. There was real magi Khardhun, in that hot northern land across the sea, beyond the coastal villages and the desert wastes. A magic far greater than anything in the Peninsula of the Palm and equal to the sorcery of Ygrath.

    Brandin had takey aablished a tenuous trol over some lands that lay on the fringes of the great desert stretg north. There had been losses though, serious losses she gathered. The Khardhu had long been celebrated for their skill in battle, nor was this unknown in the Palm: many of them had served as well-paid meraries in the warring provinces before the Tyrants had e and made all such feuding irrelevant.

    Vencel had been a herald captured late in the campaign, Brandin told her. Hed already been unmanned: a thing they did to messengers in the north, for no reason Brandin had uood. It had been maly evident where the castrate belonged when brought back to Ygrath. He had already, Brandin firmed, been enormous.

    Dianora straightened as Vencel withdrew his finger from the red gleam of the vairstone.

    "Will you escort us down?" she asked. A ritual.

    "I think not," he said judiciously, as if actually giving thought to the matter. "Perhaps Scelto and Hala  mahat office between them. I have some matters that need my attentiohis afternoon, you see.”

    "I uand." Dianlanced over at Solores and each of them raised a spread palm in respectful salute. In fact, Vencel hadhe saishan wing in at least five years. Even wheoured the rooms on this floor it was on a cleverly trived rolling platform of cushions. Dianora could not remember the last time shed actually seen him stand upright. Scelto and Soloress Hala atteo virtually all the formal out-of-saishan duties. Vencel believed in delegating.

    They went dowairway that led out from the saishan to the world. One flight below they accepted the scrutiny—respectful but careful—of the two guards posted outside the heavy bronze doors that barred access to and from the level where the women were. Dianora respoo their cautious glances with a smile. One of them retur shyly. The guards were ged often; she didnt kher of these two, but a smile was a start at bonding and a friend never hurt.

    Scelto and Hala, dressed unobtrusively in browhe four women out of the saishan wing along the main corridor of the palace to the Grand Staircase in the ter. There the two castrates paused to let the women precede them. With some pride but not with hauteur— they were the captives and es of a queror—Dianora and Solores led the way down the sweeping stair.

    They were noticed of course. The women of the saishan were always noticed when they came out.

    There were a number of people milling about in the marbled vestibule waiting to ehe Audience Chamber; they made way for the four of them. Some of the newer men smiled in a mahat had taken Dianora some time to accept.

    Others knew her better and their expressions were rather different. In the arched doorway to the largest of the formal reception rooms she and Solores paused again side by side, this time entirely for effect—the blown beside the green—and then walked together into the crowded room of state.

    As she did so—every siime she did so—Dianora offered an inward voig of gratitude for the impulse that had led Brandin to ge the rules for his saishan here in the y he now ruled.

    In Ygrath, she khis would never have been allowed. For a man other than the King or one of the castrates to see, let alone hold verse with a saishan woman was death for both of them. And,

    Vencel had told her once, for the head of the saishan wing as well.

    Things had been different here in Chiara almost from the start. Over the years Dianora had learned enough to know that some of her gratitude should go to Dorotea, Queen of Ygrath, and her decision to remain there with Girald, her elder son, and not apany her husband into his self-imposed exile abroad. Doroteas choice, or, depending on to whom one listened, Brandins decision not to demand the pany of his Queen.

    Somewhat instinctively Dianora alreferred the latter version of the story, but she was wise enough to know why that was so, and this was one of the things she never spoke about with Brandin. Not that the matter was taboo; he wasnt that kind of man. It was simply that she wasnt sure if or how she could deal with whatever answer he gave her if the question was ever asked.

    In any case, with Dorotea remaining in Ygrath there were few high-born court ladies willing to risk the seas and the Queens displeasure in journeying to the y in the Palm. Which meant areme scarcity of women at Brandins new court in Chiara, and this, in turo a ge in the role of the saishan. The more so since—especially in the early years—Brandin had deliberately ordered the Tribute Ships to search out daughters of distinguished houses in Corte or Asoli. On Chiara he made the choices himself. From Lower Corte, which had once borne a different name, he took no women at all, as a matter of absolute policy. The hatred there ran both ways and too deep, and the saishan was not a place to let it fester.

    Hed sent for only a few of the women from his saishan in Ygrath, leaving it largely intact. The politics were straightforward: trol of the saishan was a symbol that would firm the status and authority of Girald, now ruling as Regent of Ygrath in his fathers name.

    With such ges here in the y, the new saishan was a very different place from the old; Vencel and Scelto had both told her that. It had another kind of mood to it, a different character entirely.

    It also had, among all those women from Corte and Chiara and Asoli and the handful from Ygrath, one woman named Dianora, from Certando. From Barbadian-ruled Certando.

    Or so everyone in the palace thought.

    It had almost started a war, Dianora remembered.

    In the days after her brother left home, sixteen-year-old Dianora di Tigana, daughter of a sculptor who had died in the war, and of a mother who had scarcely spoken sihat day, resolved that she would point her own life towards the killing of the Tyrant on Chiara.

    Hardening herself, the way she heard that men in battle were forced to do—the way her father must have tried to do by the Deisa— she had begun preparing to leave her mother in the hollow, eg house that had once been a place crowded with joy. Where the Prince of Tigana had walked in their courtyard, an arm flung about her fathers shoulders, discussing and praising the works in progress there.

    Dianora could remember.

    Entering the Audience Chamber she checked and approved her refle in the wall of gold-plated mirrors on the far side of the room, then her eyes sought, instinctively, those of dEymon of Ygrath, the cellor. The seost powerful man in the court.

    He redictably, already looking towards Solores and herself, his glance precisely as bleak as it always was. It was a look that had bothered Dianora when first she came. Shed thought dEymon had taken a dislike to her, or, worse, that he somehow suspected her. It wasnt long before she realized that he disliked and suspected virtually every person who ehis palace. Everyone received the same glacial, appraising scrutiny. It had beely so, she gathered, in Ygrath as well. DEymons loyalty to Brandin was fanatical and unwavering, and so was his zeal in proteg his King.

    Over the years Dianora had developed a respect, grudging at first, and then less so, for the grim Ygrathen. She ted it as one of her own triumphs that he seemed to trust her now. For years now—in fact —or she would never have been allowed to spend a night in Brandins bed while he slept.

    A triumph of deception, she thought, with an irony whose teeth were all directed inward against herself.

    DEymon made an eical cirg motion with his head and theed the gesture for Solores. It was what they had expected: they were to mingle and verse. her of them was to take the chair set beside the Island Throhey did sometimes—and so had the beautiful, ued Chloese before her surprising, untimely death—but Brandin was quite punctilious whes from Ygrath were among them. At such times the seat beside him stood pointedly empty. For Dorotea, his Queen.

    Brandin had not yet e<samp>藏书网</samp>he room of course, but Dianora saw Rhun, the slack-limbed balding Fool shamble towards one of the servers carrying wine. Rhun, clumsy, grievously retarded, was clad sumptuously in gold and white, and so Dianora khat Brandin would be as well. It was an integral part of the plex relationship of the Sorcerer Kings of Ygrath and their chosen Fools.

    For turies in Ygrath the Fool had served as shadoroje for the King. He was dressed like his monarch, ate o him at publis, was there when honors were ferred or judgment passed. And every Kings chosen Fool was someone visibly, sometimes painfully afflicted or malformed.

    Rhuns walk was sluggish, his features twisted and deformed, his hands da awkward angles in repose, his speech was badly slurred. He reized people in the court, but not invariably, and not always in the manner one might expect—whietimes carried a message. A message from the King.

    That part, Dianora didirely prehend, and doubted she ever would. She khat Rhuns dim, limited mind was mostly under his own trol but she also khat that was not pletely so.

    There was sorcery at work in this: the subtle magic of Ygrath.

    This much she uood: that in addition t—very graphically—to remind their King of his mortality and his own limitations, the Fools of Ygrath, dressed exactly like their lord, could sometimes also serve as a voice, aernal duit, for the thoughts aions of the King.

    Which meant that one could not always be sure whether Rhuns words and as—slurred or awkward as they might be—were his own, or an important revelation of Brandins mood. And that could be treacherous ground for the unwary.

    Right now Rhun seemed smiling and tent, bobbing and bowing jerkily at every sed person he entered, his golden cap slipping off every time. He would laugh though, as he bent to pick it up a again on his thinning hair. Every so often an overanxious courtier, seeking to curry favor in any way he could, would hastily stoop to pick up the fallen cap and present it to the Fool. Rhun would laugh at that too.

    Dianora had to admit that he made her uneasy, though she tried to hide that beh the real pity she felt for his afflis and his increasingly evident years. But the core truth for her was that Rhun was intimately tied to Brandins magic, he was aension of it, a tool, and Brandins magic was the source of all her loss and fear. And her guilt.

    So over the years she had bee adroit at avoiding situations where she might find herself aloh the Fool; his guileless eyes— unnervingly similar to Brandins—gave her gerouble. They seemed, if she looked into them for too long, to have h, to be only a surface, refleg her image back to her in a fashion very different from that of the gold-plated mirrors, and at such times she did not like what she was made to see.

    From the doorway, with the polished grace of long experience, Solores drifted tht as Dianora moved left, smiling at people she knew. Nesaia and Chylmoene, chestnut- and amber-tressed, crossed the flether, creating a palpable stir where they passed.

    Dianora saw the poet Doarde standing with his wife and daughter. The girl, about seventeen, was obviously excited. Her first formal reception, Dianuessed. Doarde smiled unctuously across the room at her, and bowed elaborately. Even at a distahough, she could read the disfiture in his eyes: a

    reception on this scale for a musi from Ygrath had to be bitter gall for the most senior poet in the y. All winter he had preened with pride over his verses that Brandin had se as a goad for the Barbadian when word had e in the fall of the death of Sandre dAstibar. Doarde had been insufferable for months. Today though, Dianora could sympathize with him a little, even though he was a moal fraud in her view.

    Shed told Brandin as muce, only to learn that he found the poets pompousness amusing. Fe, hed murmured, he looked elsewhere.

    And you destroyed it, shed wao say.

    Wanted so much to say. Remembering with an almost physical pain the broken head and suorso of her fathers last Adaon oeps of the Palace by the Sea. The one for which her brother, finally old enough, had served as model for the young god. She remembered looking dry-eyed at the wreckage of that sculpted form, wanting to weep and not knowing where her tears were anymore.

    She glanced back at Doardes daughter, at her young, scarcely tained exhilaratioeen.

    Just after her oweenth naming day she had stolen half of the silver from her fathers hidden strongbox, begging pardon of his spirit and her mothers blessing in her heart, and asking the passion of Eanna who saw all beh the shining of her lights.

    Shed gohout saying good-bye, though she had looked in a last time by carried dlelight, upohin, worn figure of her mother, uneasily asleep in the wideness of her bed. Dianora was hardened, as for battle; she did not weep.

    Four days later shed crossed the border into Certando, having forded the river at a lonely plaorth of Avalle. Shed had to be careful getting there—Ygrathen soldiers were still ranging the tryside and in Avalle itself they were hammering at the towers, bringing them down. Some yet stood, she could see them from her crossing-place, but most were rubble by then, and what she saw of Avalle was through a s of smoke.

    It wasnt even Avalle by theher. The spell had been laid down. Brandins magic. The city where the pall of smoke and summer dust hung so heavily was now called Stevanien. Dianora could remember not being able to uand how a man could he ugly wreckage of a place so fair after a child he had loved. Later that would bee clearer to her: the name had nothing to do with Brandins memory of Stevan. It was solely for those living there, and elsewhere in what had been Tigana: a stant, inescapable reminder of whose death had meant their ruin. The Tiganese now lived in a provinamed Lower Corte—and Corte had been their bitterest foe for turies. The city of Tigana was the city of Lower Corte now.

    And Avalle of the Towers was Stevahe vengeance of the King of Ygrath went deeper than occupation and burning and rubble ah. It enpassed names and memory, the fabric of identity; it was a subtle thing, and merciless.

    There were a number ees in the summer Dianora we, but none had anythiely resembling her own fixed purpose and so most of them went much further away: to the far side of the Certandan grainlands, to Ferraut, Tregea, Astibar itself. Willing, anxious even, to live uhe spreading tyranny of the Barbadian lord in order to put as much distance as they could between themselves and their images of what Brandin of Ygrath had doo their home.

    But Dianora was ging to those images, she was nursing them within her breast, feeding them with hate, shaping hatred with memory. Twin snakes inside her.

    She only went a handful of miles across the border into Certando. The late-summer fields of  had been yellow and tall, she remembered, but all the men were gone, away to the north a where Alberico of Barbadior, having carefully solidated his quests of Ferraut and Astibar, was now moving south.

    He was master of Certando by the end of the fall, and had taken Borifort in Tregea—the last major

    stronghold to stand against him— by the following spring after a winter siege.

    Long before then Dianora had found what she was looking for, in the western highlands of Certando.

    A hamlet—twenty houses and a tavern—south of Sinave and Forese, the two great forts that watched each other oher side of the border that divided Certando from what she learo call Lower Corte.

    The land so he southern mountains was not nearly as good as it was farther north. The growing season was shorter. Cold winds swept down from the Braccio and Sfares early in fall bringing snow soon after and a long white winter. Wolves would howl in the wintry nights and sometimes in the m strange footmarks could be found in the deep snow—marks that came down from the mountains and theurned.

    Once, long ago, the village had beeo one of the roads f northeast from the main highway down from the Sfaroni Pass —in the days when there was still overland trade with Quileia to the south. That was why the aavern was se in a village now so small, why it had four rooms upstairs for the travelers who had not e freat many years.

    Dianora hid her fathers silver south of the village on a thickly wooded slope away from the goatherd runs, and she went to work as a serving girl iavern. There was no moo pay her of course. She worked for her room and the sty board available that first summer and fall, and she labored in the fields with the other women and the young boys t home what they could of the harvest.

    She told them she was from the north, near Ferraut. That her mother was dead and her father and brother had goo war. She said her uncle had begun to abuse her and so she had run away. She was good with ats and she had the northern speech right enough for them to believe her. Or at least to ask no questions. There were many tras in the Palm in those days, questions were seldom pushed too far. She ate little and worked as hard as any in the fields. There was actually little enough to do in the inn, with the men away to war. She slept in one of the rooms upstairs, she even had it to herself. They were kind enough to her after their fashion, and giveure of things in that time.

    When the light and the place were right—m usually, and iain of the higher fields—she could look away to the west across the border towards the river ahe remaining towers and the smoke above what had been Avalle. One m, late in the year, she realized that she couldnt see anything anymore. That she hadnt, in fact, seen anything for some time. The last tower was gone.

    Around that time the men had begun to e home, beaten and weary. There was wain i and waiting on tables or behind the ter of the bar. She was also expected—and had been preparing herself for this as best she could all through the fall—to take a man up to her room if he offered the going rate.

    Every village seemed to need one suan, and she was the obvious didate here. She tried to make herself not mind, but this was the most difficult thi. She had a mission though, a reason for being here, a vengeao enact, and this, even this, she would tell herself, going up the stairs with someone, art of it. She hardened herself, but not always, and not quite enough.

    Perhaps that showed through. Several men asked her to marry them. One day she caught herself thinking about one of them as she wiped dowables after lunch. He was quiet and kind, shy wheook her upstairs, and his eyes would follow her movements iavern with a fierce tration whenever he was there.

    That day was when she k was time for her to leave.

    She was a little surprised to realize that almost three years had gone by. It ring.

    She slipped away one night, again without a farewell, remembering her arrival even as she went.

    Meadow flowers were blooming beside the path into the hills. The air was  and mild. By the mingled light of the two moons she found her buried silver and walked away without looking back, taking the road north towards the fort at Sinave. She was een years old.

    een, and sometime in the past two years she had growiful. Her angular boniness had

    softened, even as her face lost its last traces of girlhood. It was oval, wide at the cheekbones, almost austere. It ged when she laughed though—and for some reasoill knew how to laugh— being warm and animated, the ued dan her dark eyes seeming to promise things that went deeper than amusement. Men who had seen her laughing or who had caused her to smile at them would enter that look again in their dreams, or in the memories that lay on the border of sleep and dream, years after Dianora had gone away.

    At Sihe Barbadians disturbed her, with their oppressive size and careless, casual brutality. She forced herself to be calm and to lihere. Two weeks would be enough she judged. She had to leave an impression and a memory.

    A carefully structed memory of an ambitious, pretty try girl from some hamlet he mountains. A girl usually silent during the tavern talk at night but who, when she did speak, told vivid, memorable tales of her home village to the south. Told them with the distinctively laic di and round vowels that would have marked her anywhere in the Palm as being from the highlands of Certando.

    The tales were usually sad—most stories were in those years—but on a while Dianora would offer a wonderfully droll imitation of some highland rustic voig his sidered opinion o affairs in the wider world, and those at the table where she was sitting would laugh for a long time.

    She appeared to them to have some money, earned very likely in the way that pretty girls usually came to have some money. But she shared a room with another woman at the better of the two hostelries within the walls of the fort, aher of them was ever seen to invite a man upstairs. Or to accept an invitation to go elsewhere. The Barbadian soldiers might have been a problem—ihey had beehe winter—but orders had e from Astibar, and the meraries were under a tighter rein that spring.

    What she wao do, Dianora fided one night to the loosely knit group of young men and women she had joined, was to work in a tavern or dining-place that saw a better class of person ing through its doors. Shed had two hands full and more, thank you, of the other sort of inn, she declared.

    Someoiohe Queen in Stevanien, across the border in Lower Corte.

    With a heartfelt, inward sigh of relief Dianora began asking questions about it.

    Questions to which shed known the answers for three days; during which time shed sat among these selfsame people every night planting subtle hints in the hope that the name might emerge spontaneously.

    Subtlety, shed finally decided, was wasted among youandans here on the border, and so shed practically had t the versatioo the subject she wanted.

    Now she listened, seemingly enraptured and wide-eyed, as two of her ret acquaintances animatedly described the , most elegant Ygrathen innovation in Lower Corte. A dining-place that boasted a master chef brought all the way from Ygrath itself by the current Governor of Stevanien and its distrada. The Governor, it emerged, was notoriously fond of wine and food, and of good music played in fortable chambers. He had helped establish the new chef in a set of rooms on the ground floor of a former banking-house, and now he basked in the reflected glory of the most elaborate, most luxurious eating-pla the Palm. He dihere himself several times a week, Dianora learned.

    For the sed time.

    Shed picked up all of this in gossip among the merts during her days cheg out the prices and styles of clothing available in Fort Sinave. She needed some things fit for the city, she knew. It might make a difference.

    From the very first time shed heard the name shed realized that The Queen would be perfect for the  stage of her plan to ge her past.

    What she learned from the merts was that no one from Lower Corte was allowed to dine here.

    Traders from Corte were cordially greeted, as were those from farther afield, in Asoli or Chiara itself. Any Ygrathen, naturally, soldier, mert or whoever he might be—e to seek his fortune in the

    y—was graciously ushered in to salute the portrait of Queen Dorotea that hung on the wall opposite the door. Even those merts crossing the lihat divided the Eastern Palm from the West were more than wele to leave some of whatever currency they carried in The Queen.

    It was only the Kings true ehe denizens of Lower Corte, of Stevaself, who were forbidden to stain or sully the ambieh their pustulent, heir-murdering presence.

    They never did, Dianora learned from a Ferraut trader bound baorth a with leather from Stevahat he expected to sell at a profit, even with that years tariff levels. What the inhabitants of Stevanien had done in respoo the ban was simply refuse to work for the ablishment. her as servers or kit help or stable hands, nor even as musis or artisans to help decorate and maintain the splendid rooms.

    The Governor, when he learned what was happening, had vowed in red-faced rage to force the ptible inhabitants to work wherever they were required by their masters of Ygrath. Force them with 藏书网dungeon and lash and a death-wheel or three if needed.

    The master chef, Arduini, had demurred.

    One did not, Arduini had said, in a much-quoted display of artistic temperament, build up and maintain aablishment of quality by using enforced, surly labor. His standards were simply too high for that. Eveable-boys at his restaurant, said Arduini of Ygrath, were to be trained and willing, and to have a certain style to them.

    There had been widespread hilarity when that was reported: stylish stable-hands, indeed. But, Dianora learhe amusement had turo respect quite soon, because Arduini, pretentious or not, did know what he was doing. The Queen, the Ferraut trader told her, was like an oasis amid the deserts of Khardhun. In dispirited, broken Steva cast a warm glow of Ygrathen civility and grace. The mert lamehough discreetly on this side of the border, the plete absence of any such traits in the Barbadians who had occupied his own province.

    But yes, he said, in respoo Dianoras apparently casual question, Arduini was still struggling with staff problems. Stevanien was a backwater, and a backwater, moreover, in the most oppressively taxed and militarily subjugated provin the Palm. It was o impossible to get people to travel there, or stay, and sinone of the trickle of adventurers from Ygrath had e so far from home to wash dishes or clear tables or tend to a stable—however stylish a stable it might be—there appeared to be a ieed for workers from elsewhere in the Palm.

    In that moment Dianora had ged every plan she had. She cast the line of her life, with a silent prayer to Adaon, in the dire of this formation. She had been intending, with some real apprehension, to go northwest to Corte. That had always been the o-last destination in her plans. She had seriously wondered, almost every night as she lay awake, whether three years iando would be enough to shake off anyone pursuing the true history of her life. Shed had no good ideas about what else she could do, though.

    Now she did.

    And so it was that a few nights latSr, in the largest of the taverns in Fort Sinave, a cheerful crowd of young people watched their new friend drink more than was good for her for the first time since shed arrived. More than one of the men saw cause for cautious optimism in that, with respect to possibilities later in the evening.

    "Youve settled it then!" Dianora cried itractive, south-try voice. She leaned for suppainst the shoulder of a bemused cartwright. "Hand to the new plow for me tomorrow. Im over the border as soon as I  to visit The Queen of Ygrath! Triad bless her days!”

    Triad shelter and hold my soul, she was thinking as she spoke, absolutely sober, cold to her bones with the sense of the words she was so glibly shouting.

    They silenced her, laughing uproariously—in part to cover her words. In Barbadiaando it was a

    long way from the path of wisdom to thus salute Ygraths Queen. Dianiggled quite endearingly but she subsided. The cartwright and another man tried to see her up to her room afterwards, but found themselves charmingly put off and drinking together amid off-duty meraries in the one all-night tavern Fort Sinave possessed.

    She was just a little too untutored, too try, to succeed in her ambitious hopes, they agreed sagely.

    They also agreed, a few drinks later, that she had the most extraordinarily appealing smile. Something about her eyes, what happeo them when she leased.

    In the m Dianora was dressed and packed and waiting very early at the main gate of the fort.

    She struck a bargain for passage to Stevanien with a pleasant-enough middle-aged mert from Senzio carrying Barbadian spices for the luxury trade. His only reason foing to dreary, flatteevanien, she learned as they started west, was because of the new restaurant, The Queen. She took that ce as a good omen, closing the fingers of her left hand over the thumb three times to make the wish e true.

    The roads were better than she remembered; certainly the merts traveling them seemed to feel safer. Rolling along in the cart, she asked the Senzian about it. He grinned sardonically.

    "The Tyrants have ed out most of the highway brigands. Just a matter of proteg their own is. They want to make sure no one else robs us before they do with their border tariffs and taxes.”

    He spat, discreetly, into the dust of the road. "Personally I preferred the brigands. There were ways of dealing with them.”

    Not long after that she saw evidence of what he was talking about: they passed two death-wheels beside the roadway, the bodies of would-be thieves spreadeagled upon them, spiraling lazily in the sun, severed hands rotting in their mouths. The smell was very bad.

    The Senzian stopped just across the border to do some dealing in the fort of Forese. He also paid his transit duties there scrupulously, waiting patiently in lio have his cart examined and levied. The death- wheels, he pointed out to her after, in the acerbizian manner, were not reserved fhway thieves and captured wizards.

    Thus delayed, they spent the night at a coach-house on the well-traveled road, joining a party of Ferraut traders for dinner. Dianora excused herself early ao bed. Shed paid for a room alone and took the precaution of pushing an oak dresser in front of her door. Nothing disturbed her though, except her dreams. She was ba Tigana a she wasnt, because it wasnt there. She whispered the o herself like a talisman or a prayer before falling into a restless sleep shot through with images of destru from the burning year.

    They spent the sed night at another inn beside the river, just outside the walls of Stevanien, having arrived after sundown curfew closed the city gates. They ate alohis time, and she talked to the Senzian until late. He was det and sober, belying the cliches about his det province, and it was clear that he liked her. She enjoyed his pany, and she was even attracted to his dry, witty manner. She went to bed alohough. This was not the village iando: she had no obligations.

    Or not those kinds of obligations. And as for pleasure, or the ordinary needs of human iion . . .

    she would have been holy unprehending if anyone had mentiohem to her.

    She was een years old and in Tigana that-had-been.

    In the m, just ihe city walls, she bade farewell to the Senzian, toug palm to palm only briefly. He seemed somewhat affected by the night before but she turned and walked away before he could find whatever words his eyes were reag for.

    She found a hostelry not far away, one where her family had ayed. She wasnt really worried about being reized though; she knew how much she had ged and how many girls named Dianora there were scattered across the Palm. She paid in advance for three nights lodging a her belongings there.

    Then she walked out into the streets of what had been Avalle of the Towers not very long ago.

    Avalle, on the green banks of the Sper-ion just before the river turned west to find the sea. There was an ache building in her as she went, and what hurt most of all, she found, was how much the same a place could be after everything had ged.

    She went through the leather distrid the wool district. She could remember skipping along beside her mother when they had all e inland to Avalle to see one of her fathers sculptures ceremoniously placed in some square gia. She even reized the tiny shop where shed purchased her first grey leather gloves, with s hoarded from her naming day in the summer for just such a thing.

    Grey was a color frown young women, not for little girls, the red-bearded artisan had teased. I know, six-year-old Dianora had said proudly that autumn long ago. Her mother had laughed. Once upon a time her mother had been a woman who laughed. Dianora could <var>..</var>remember.

    In the wool quarter she saw women and girls w tirelessly, carding and spinning as they had for turies in doorways open to the early-summer early-m light. Over by the river she could see and smell the dyeing sheds and yards.

    When Quileia beyond the mountains to the south had folded inward upon its matriarchy, hundreds upon hundreds of years ago, Avalle had lost a great deal. More perhaps than any other city in the Palm.

    Once poised directly on one of the two main trade routes through the mountains, it had found itself in danger of sudden insequentially. With a collective iy b on genius the city had decisively shifted its orientation and focus.

    Within a geion that city of banking and trade to north and south had bee the principal ter in all of the Palm for works iher and for sumptuously dyed wool.

    Hardly missing a beat, Avalle pursued its new prosperity and its pride. And the towers kept rising.

    With a catch to her heart Dianora finally aowledged that she had been carefully w her way around the edges of Stevahe outlying districts, the artisans quarters, looking outwards only and into doorways. Not into the ter, up towards the hill. Where the towers were gone.

    And so, realizing that, she did look, standing stock still in the middle of a wide square at the bottom of the street of the Woolguild. There was a small, very beautiful temple of Morian fronting the square, done in marble of a muted rose color. She gazed at it for a moment, then looked up and beyond.

    And in that moment Dianora had a truth brought home to her with finality: how something  seem quite unged in all the small surface details of existence where things never really ge, men and women being what they are, but how the core, the pulse, the kernel of everything  still have bee utterly unlike what it had been before.

    The wide beautiful streets seemed even wider than before. But that was because they were almost empty. There was a muted swell of noise over to her left where the riverside market still was, but the sound was not a fra, her memory told her, not a fra of what it had been in ms that were lost.

    There were too few people. Too many were gone, or dead, and the Ygrathen soldiers were all the more visible because of how empty the streets were. Dianora let her gaze travel past the temple up the line of the broad boulevard beside it towards the heart of the city.

    We  and we will build wide and straight, the people of Avalle had said; even in the very beginning, when towns everywhere else were tortuous warrens of twisty alleys and crooked lanes easy to defend. There will be no city like ours in all the world, and if need es for defense we will defend ourselves from our towers.

    Which were gohe squat ugly skyline jarred Dianora with a painful distinuity. It was as if the eye was tricked, looking ceaselessly for something it knew had to be there.

    From the earliest days of that broad, elegant city on the banks of the Sperion towers had been associated with Avalle. Assertions of Tiganese pride—sheer arrogahey called it in the provinces of

    Corte and Chiara and Astibar. They were symbols of internee rivalry as well—as eaoble family or wealthy guild of bankers or traders or artisans thrust its own tower as high as and then higher than they could truly affraceful or warlike, red stone or sandy rey, the towers of Avalle pushed up towards Eannas heaven like a forest withiy walls.

    The domestiflicts had actually bee dangerous for a time, with murder and sabotage not nearly unon enough, and the best masons and architects claiming stupefying fees. It had beehird Prince Alessan in Tigana by the sea who had put ao the insanity in the simplest possible way more than two hundred years ago.

    He issioned Orsaria, the most celebrated of the architects, to build for him a pala Avalle.

    And that palace was to have a tower, said Prince Alessan, that would be—and would remain, by force of law—the highest iy.

    So it had been. The spire of the Priower, slender and graceful, ed in bands of green and white to serve as a memory of the sea this far inland, put ao the petition for the summit of Avalle. And from then on also, by that Prince Alessans example which became  and then tradition, the princes and princesses of Tigana were born in Avalle, in the palace beh that spire, to mark them as belonging to both of the cities-, to Tigana of the Waves and Avalle of the Towers.

    There had been over seventy towers once, Dianora knew, ed in glory by that green and white preeminence. Once? Four years ago.

    What, Dianora thought, her vision hurting for that absence, is a person who moves through her days as she has always moved, who speaks and walks and labors, eats, makes love, sleeps, sometimes even finds access to laughter, but whose heart has been cut out from her living body? Leaving no scar at all to be seen. No wound by whiember the sliding blade.

    The rubble had all been cleared away. There was no smoke, save from over by the dyeworks, to mar the clear blue of the sky. The day was mild and bright, birds sang a wele to the ing warmth. There was nothing, nothing at all to show that there had ever been towers in this place. In this low, steadily dwindling town of Stevanien here in its remote er of the Peninsula of the Palm, in the most oppressed province of them all.

    What is such a person? Dianora thought again. That person whose heart was gone? She had no answer, how could she have an answer? Loss coiled to life within her, and hate followed it again, as if both of them were new-born, colder and sharper than before.

    She walked up that wide boulevard into the ter of Stevanien. She passed the soldiers barracks and the doors of the Governors Palaot far away she found The Queen. She was hired immediately. To start that same night. Help was badly needed. Help was hard to find. Arduini of Ygrath, who did all his own hiring, decided that this pretty creature from Certando had a certain style to her. She would have to do something though, he admonished her, about that wretchedly vulgar highland at. She promised to try.

    Within six months she eaking almost like a native of the city, he observed. By then he had her out of the kit and into the front room waiting on tables, clad in the cream and dark-brown colors around which he had designed his establishment. Colors that happeo suit her very well.

    She was quiet, deft, unassuming, and polite. She remembered names and patrons preferences. She learned quickly. Four months later, in the spring before she turwenty-one, Arduini offered her the coveted position at the front of The Queeing guests and supervising the staff ihree rooms of dining.

    She astonished him by refusing. She astonished a great many people. But Dianora khat this would be far too promi a position for her own purposes. Which had not ged. If she was to travel north into Corte soon, and clearly marked by now as being from Certando, she o have been associated with The Queen, but not so very promily. Promi people had questions asked about

    them, that much she knew.

    So she feigned an attack of try-girl ahe night Arduini made his offer. She broke two glasses and dropped a platter. Then she spilled Senzian green wine on the Governor himself.

    Tearfully she went to Arduini and begged for more time to grow sure of herself. He agreed. It helped that he was in love with her by then. He invited her, gracefully, to bee his mistress. In this, too, she demurred, pleading the iable tension that such a liaison would elicit withiaff, badly damaging The Queen. It was the right argument; his establishment was Arduinis true mistress.

    In fact, Dianora had resolved to let no man touch her now. She was in Ygratheory and she had a purpose. The rules had ged. She had tentatively decided to leave in the fall, north towards Corte.

    She had been weighing possibilities and excuses for doing so whes had overtaken her so spectacularly.

    Slowly cirg the Audience Chamber, Dianora paused to greet Doardes wife whom she liked. The poet seized the opportunity to present his daughter. The girl blushed, but dipped her head, hands pressed together, in a creditable manner. Dianora smiled at her and moved on.

    A steward caught up to her, bearing khav in a black chalice set with red gemstones. A gift, years ago, from Brandin. It was her trademark on occasions such as this: she never drank anything strohan khav at public receptions. With a guilty glaowards the doorway where she knew Scelto would be stationed against the wall, she took a grateful sip of the hot drink. Praise the Triad and the growers ea, it was dark and rid very strong.

    "My dear lady Dianora, you are looking more magnifit than ever.”

    She turned, smoothly suppressing an expression of distaste. She had reized the voieso of Ygrath, a minor nobleman from overseas who had retly arrived at Brandins court on the first ship of the season, solely in the hope of being a major nobleman in the y. He was, so far as Dianora had been able to tell, talentless and venal.

    She smiled radiantly at him and allowed him to touch her hand. "My dear Neso, how kind of you to lie so skillfully to an aging woman.”

    She rather liked saying that sort of thing: for, as Scelto had shrewdly observed once, if she was old, what did that make Solores?

    Neso hasteo offer all the emphatic, predictable denials. He praised her gown and the vairstone, noting with a courtiers eye and tongue how exquisitely the stones of her chalice echoed her colors that day. Then, l his voice towards an unearned intimacy he asked her for the eighth time at least if she happeo have heard anything further about the planned disposition of that very trivial office of Taxing Master in north Asoli.

    It was, in fact, a lucrative position. The incumbent had made his fortune, or enough for his own purposes evidently, and was returning to Ygrath in a few weeks. Dianora hated that sort of graft and she had even been bold enough to say so to Brandin once. A little amused— which had irritated her—he had prosaically pointed out how difficult it was to get men to serve in places as devoid of attra as the north of Asoli without  them a ce at modest wealth.

    His grey eyes beh the thick dark eyebrows had rested upon her as shed wrestled and then finally e to terms with the depressing truth i in this. Shed finally looked up and nodded a relut agreement. Which made him burst into laughter.

    "I am so relieved," chuckled Brandin of Ygrath, "that my clumsy reasoning and gover meet with your approval." She had goo the roots of her hair, but then, catg his mood, had laughed herself at the absurdity of her presumption. That had been several years ago.

    Now all she did was try, discreetly, to see that positions such as this one did not go to the most transparently greedy of the motley crew of petty Ygrathen courtiers from whom Brandin had to choose.

    Neso, she had resolved, was not getting this posting if she could help it. The problem was that dEymon

    seemed, for inscrutable reasons of his own, to be fav Nesos appoi. Shed already asked Scelto to see if he could find out why.

    Now she let her smile fade to an early benevolent look of  as she gazed at the sleek, plump Ygrathen. L her voice but without leaning towards him she murmured, "I am doing what I . You should know that there seems to be some opposition.”

    Nesos eyes narrowed on the far side of the curl of smoke rising from her khav. With practiced subtlety they flicked past her right shoulder to where she knew dEymon would still be standing by the Kings door. Neso looked back at her, eyebrows raised very slightly.

    Dianave a small, apologetic shrug.

    "Have you a ... suggestion?" Neso asked, his brow furrowed with ay.

    "Id start by smiling a little," she said with deliberate tartness. There was no point in intriguing in such a way that the whole court knew of it.

    Neso forced an immediate laugh and then applauded stagily as if shed offered an irresistible witticism.

    "Five me," he said, smiling as ordered. "This matters a great deal to me.”

    It matters a great deal more to the people of Asoli, you greedy bloodleech, Dianora thought. She laid a hand lightly on Nesos puffed sleeve.

    "I know it does," she said kindly. "I will do what I . If circumstances . . . allow me to.”

    Neso, whatever he was, was ner to this sort of thing. Once more the false laugh greeted her e. "I hope to be able to assist the circumstances," he murmured.

    She smiled again and withdrew her hand. It was enough. Scelto was going to receive some more mohat afternoon. She hoped it would e to a det part of the vairstones cost. As for dEymon, she would probably end up talking directly to him later in the week. Or as directly as discussions ever got with that man.

    Sipping at her khav she moved on. People came up to her wherever she went. It was bad politi Brandins court not to be on good terms with Dianora di Certando. versing absently and insequentially she kept an ear pitched for the discreet raps of the Heralds staff that would be Brandins sole annou. Rhun, she noted, was making faces at himself in one of the mirrors and laughing at the effect. He was in high humor, which was a good sign. Turning the other way she suddenly noticed a face she liked. Ohat was undeniably tral to her own history.

    In could be said, in many ways, to have been the Governors own fault. So anxious was he to assuage the evident frustration of Rhamanus, captain of that years Tribute Ship, that he ordered the Certandan serving-girl—who had apologized so very charmingly after the spilled-wine i some time ago—t rather more of The Quee vihan were entirely good for any of them at the table.

    Rhamanus, young enough to still be ambitious, old enough to feel his ces slipping away, had made some pointedly acid remarks earlier in the day on board the river galley about the state of affairs in Stevanien and its environs. So much of a backwater, so desultory in its colle of duties and taxes, he murmured a little too casually, that he wasnt even sure if the galley run upriver in spring was worthwhile . . . uhe present administrative circumstances.

    The Governor, long past the point of ambition but needing a few more years here skimming his share of border tariffs and internal levies, along with the criminal justice fines and fiscations, had winced inwardly and cursed the juns of his plas. Why, wherove so hard to be det and untentious ihing he did, to leave any waters he entered as unruffled as possible, did he have so little luck?

    Short of a massive midsummer military assertion there was no way to foroney oods out of this impoverished region. If Brandin had seriously wao extract real wealth out of Stevanien he

    would have beeer advised not to have so successfully smashed the city and its distrada to its knees.

    Not that the Governor would have eve of letting such a furtive thought e anywhere near his lips. But the reality was that he was doing the best he could. If he squeezed the leather or the wool guilds any harder than he was they would simply start to fold. Stevanien, already thinly inhabited—and particularly bereft of men in their prime years—would bee a town of ghosts ay squares. And he had explicit instrus from the King to prevent that.

    If the Kings various orders and demands rammed so violently up against each other, in such patent tradi, what, in all fairness, was a middle-echelon administrator to do?

    Not that such a plaint could be used with this bristly, unhappy Rhamanus. What care would the captain have for the Governors dilemmas? The Tribute Ship captains were judged by what came home to Chiara in their holds. Their job was to put as much pressure on the local administrators as they could— even to the point, sometimes, of f them to surrender a portion of their own levies t the tents of the ship o the mark. The Governor had already resigned himself, dismally, to doing just that by the end of the week if the last hurried sweep of the distrada that hed ordered didnt produough to satisfy Rhamanus. It wouldnt, he khis was an ambitious captain he was dealing with, and there had been a tenuous harvest in Corte last fall—Rhamanuss  stop.

    His retiremee iern Ygrath, on the promontory hed already chosen in his mind, seemed farther away this evening than ever before. He signaled for another round of wine for all of them, inwardly grieving for the blue-green sea and the splendid hunting woods by the home hed probably never be able to build.

    Oher hand (as they liked to say here), it appeared that his attempt to soothe the ire of this Rhamanus had been uedly successful. The Governor had asked his wonderful Arduini—the true and only joy there was for him in this benighted place—to prepare an evening meal for them of an unfettable order.

    "All of my meals are unfettable," Arduini had bridled predictably, but had been mollified by a judiixture of flattery, gold ygras, and a quiet reminder (almost certainly not the truth, the Governor reflected uantly) that their guest that evening had ready access to the ear of the King on Chiara.

    The meal had been an asding series of revelations, the service prompt, soothing, and unobtrusive, the wines a sequence of plementary graotes to Arduinis undeniable artistry. Rhamanus, a man eared to keep his trim physique with some difficulty, had progressed from edgihrough guarded appreciation, to increasing pleasure, ending up in a volubly expansive good humor.

    Somewhere in the o-last bottle of dessert wine imported from bae in Ygrath he had also bee quite drunk.

    Which was the only explanation, the only possible explanation, for the fact that, after the dinner was over and The Queen closed for the night, hed had their evenings dark-haired waitress formally seized as Tribute for Brandin in Chiara and bundled directly onto the galley in the river.

    The serving-girl. The serving-girl from Certando.

    Certando, oher side of the border, where Alberico of Barbadior held sway, not, alas, Brandin of Ygrath.

    The Governor of Stevanien had been awake dawn from a fitful, wine-fogged slumber by a terrified, apologetic Clerk of the cil. Unclothed and without so much as a whiff of his m khav he had heard—through the ominous pounding of a colossal headache—the nature of the news.

    "Stop that galley!" he roared, as the horrifying implications fought their way through tister upon his slowly emerging sciousness. He had tried to roar, anyway. What came forth itiful squeal that had been, heless, suffitly explicit to send the clerk flying, his gown flapping in his haste to obey.

    They blocked the River Sperion, stopping Rhamanus just as he was raising anchor.

    Unfortuhe Tribute captain then proceeded to reveal a stubborhat ran stupefyingly ter to the most rudimentary political good sense. He refused to surrehe girl. For one wild, halluatory moment of insanity the Governor actually plated st the galley.

    The river galley of Brandin, King of Ygrath, Lord of Burrakh in Khardhun, Tyrant of the western provinces of the Peninsula of the Palm. Said galley then flying—rather pointedly—Brandins own device as well as the royal banner of Ygrath.

    Death-wheels, the Governor reflected, were lovingly made for minor funaries who essayed such maneuvers.

    Desperately, his brain curdling in the unfair brightness of the m sunlight by the river, the Governor tried to find a way of unig reason to a Tribute captain seized by the mahroes of a midsummer madness.

    "Do you want to start a war?" he shouted from the dock. He had to shout from the dock; they would him on the galley. The wretched girl was o be seen; stowed, doubtless in the captains . The Governor wished she were dead. He wished that he himself was dead. He wished, in the most grievous inner sacrilege of all, that Arduini the master chef had never set foot in Stevanien.

    "And why," Captain Rhamanus called blandly from the middle of the river, "should my doing my precise duty by my King cause any such a thing?”

    "Has the sea salt rotted your miserable excuse for a brain?" the Governor screamed, ill-advisedly. The captains brow darkehe Governor pushed on, dripping with sweat in the sun.

    "Shes a Certandan, in the name of the seven holy sisters of the god! Do you have any idea how easy it will be to goad Alberito starting a border war over this?" He mopped at his brow with the square of red cloth a servaedly produced.

    Rhamanus, cursedly posed despite having drunk at least as much as the Governor the night before, seemed unimpressed.

    "As far as Im ed," he pronounced airily, the words drifting over the water, "shes living in Stevanien, shes w in Stevanien, and she was taken in Stevanien. By my reing that makes her perfectly suitable for the saishan, or whatever our King, in his wisdom, decides to do with her." He leveled a finger suddenly at the Governor. "Now clear the river of these boats or I will ram and sink them in the name of each of the seven sisters and the King of Ygrath. Unless," he added, leaning forward, l his hand to the railing, "you would care to farspeak Chiara and have the Kile this himself?”

    They had a saying here in the y: naked between a fist and a fist. It was a phrase for the place where that insidious, cleverly calculated, viciously unfair proposition put the man to whom it was addressed. A phrase that described in precise and graphic terms where the Governor of Stevanien abruptly felt himself to be. The red cloth swabbed repeatedly, and iually, at his forehead and neck.

    One did not farspeak the King without, it had been painstakingly impressed upon all the regional administrators in the Western Palm, very pelling reason. The power demanded of Brandin to sustain such a link with his non-sorcerous underlings was siderable.

    One most particularly did not willingly uake such a course of a in the very early m hours when the King might be asleep. Most relevant of all, perhaps, one did not hasten to bespeak the mental presence of ones monarch with a mind clogged and befuddled with the miasmic aftermath of wine, and over an issue that—in essence—might be seen to involve no more tharibute seizure of a on farm girl.

    That was one of the fists.

    The other was war on the border. With the brain-battering possibility of more than that. For who, in

    the name of the sisters and the god, knew how the devious pagan mind of Alberico of Barbadior worked?

    How he might regard—or decide tard—an i such as this? Despite Rhamanuss glib analysis, the fact that the girl worked in The Queen made it obvious that she wasnt really a Lower Cortean. In the name of the sisters, they couldnt even seize a Lower Cortean for tribute! They werent allowed to, by order of the King. To take the woman, she had to be Certandan. If Rhamanus waue she was a resident of Stevaniehat made her a Lower Cortean which meant that they couldnt take her! Which meant that ... he didnt know what that meant. The Governor held out his sopping kerchief and it was exged for a fresh one. His brai as if it was frying in the sun.

    All he had wanted out of his deing years in service was the quiet, mildly lucrative postings his familys long, if fairly minor, support of Brandins inal claim to succession in Ygrath had earhem.

    That was it. All he wanted. With a det house on that eastern promontory one day where he could watch the sun e up out of the sea and go hunting in the woods with his dogs. So very much to ask?

    Instead, a fist and a fist.

    He briefly sidered washing his hands of the whole affair—ahe cursed inhabitants of this peninsula chew on that for a phrase! —letting the imbecilic Tribute captain row his galley down the river just as he pleased. In fact, he realized, lamentably too late, if he had stayed in bed and pretended hed not received the message in time he would have beeirely blameless in this affair of a drunken captains blunder. He closed his eyes, tasting the exquisite, vanished sweetness of such a possibility.

    Too late. He was standing by the riverside in the blinding light and the heat of the sun, and half of Stevanien had heard what he and Rhamanus had just shouted bad forth across the water.

    With a small, diffident prayer to his own patron gods of food and forest, and a poignantly clear image of that seaside estate, the Governor chose his fist.

    "Let me on board then," he said as briskly as he could manage. "Im not about to farspeak the King while standing on this dock. I want a chair and some quiet and aremely strong mug of whatever passes for khav on a galley.”

    Rhamanus was visibly nonplussed. The Governor was able to derive a certain sour pleasure from that.

    They gave him everything he asked for. The woman was taken below ded he was left alone in the captains . He took a deep breath and then several more. He drank the khav, scalding his tongue which, as much as anything else, woke him up. Then, for the first time in three years of office, he narrowed his mind down to a pinpoint image as Brandin had taught him, and he framed, question-ingly, the name of the King in his thoughts.

    With profoundly uling speed Brandins crisp, cool, always slightly mog voice was in his head. It was dizzying. The Governor fought to keep his posure. As carefully but as quickly as he could —speed mattered, they had all been taught—he outlihe situation they faced. He apologized twice, en route, but dared not risk the time required for a third, however much his lifetimes instincts bade him to. What good were a career diplomats lifetime instincts when enmeshed in sorcery? He felt sick to his stomach with the strain and the distinuity of the farspeaking.

    Then, with a surging of his spirit, with glory, with paeans of praise to twenty differeies chorusing within him, the Governor of Stevanien was given to uand that his King was not angered.

    More: that he had beely corre this farspeaking. That the political timing could not be better for such a testing of Albericos resolve. That, accly, Rhamanus should indeed be allowed to take the girl as Tribute but, and the King stressed this, very clearly identified as a Certandan. A Certandan who happeo be in Lower Corte. That fact was to be their claim of authority: no evasions about her being a resident of Stevanien or some such thing. They would see what sort of spirit this minor Barbadian sorcerer had after all.

    The Governor had done well, the King said.

    The image of the house by the sea grew almost indestly vivid in the back of the Governors

    mind even as he heard himself babbling—silently over the link Brandin made—his most abject protestations of love and obediehe King cut him short.

    "We must end now," he said, "Do go easier on the wine down there." Then he was gohe Governor sat alone in the captains  for a long time, trying to reassure himself that Brandins last tone had been amused, not reproving. He was fairly certain it was. He was almost sure.

    A very tense period had ehe galley was allowed to leave that same m. In the fht that followed the King had far-spoken him twice. Oo order the barrison at Forese quietly increased but not by so much as to amount to further provocation in itself. The Governor spent an anguished sleepless night trying to calculate what number of soldiers would suit that and.

    Reinforts from the city of Lower Corte arrived up the river to supplement his own forces in Stevanien. Later he was instructed by the King to watch for a possible Barbadian envoy from Certando, and to greet such a oh utmost cordiality, referring all questions to Chiara for resolution. He was also waro be on full alert for a retaliatory border raid from Sinave—and to annihilate any and all Barbadian troops that might veo Lower Corte. The Governor had very little personal experie annihilation but he swore to obey.

    Merts, he was told, were to be advised to delay their plans to travel east for a little while; no orders, nothing official, merely a piece of advice a prudent businessman might wish to heed. Most did.

    In the end nothing happened.

    Alberico chose to entirely ighe affair. Short of a willio have things escalate a long way there was nothing else he could do without losing face. For a while there eculation he might punish some mert or iti musi from the Western Palm who happeo be in his provinces, but there was no sign of this either. The Barbadians simply treated the girl as having been aablished resident of Lower Corte—exactly as Rhamanus had so blithely opihe m hed seized her.

    In the Ygrathen provihough, the girl was deliberately described as Certandan from the start— the woman from Barbadiaory that Brandin had seized, mog Alberico all the while. She was said to be beautiful as well.

    Rhamanus made his slression home through the rest of that summer and into the early fall.

    The galley took them downriver and all the collected inland tributes were transferred to the great Tribute Ship itself with its broad, filling sails. Slowly it made its  the coast, colleg taxes and tariffs at the designated places in Corte and Asoli.

    The harvest had indeed been bad in Corte, they had tle to meet the quotas there. Twice they rested at anchor for long periods while the captain led a pany to an inland post. And all the while Rhamanus searched for women who might be useful as more than hostages or symbols of Ygraths ma dominance. Women who might credit the saishan itself and so make the career of a certain Tribute captain who was just about ready for a landside posting after twenty years at sea.

    Three possibilities were found. One was of noble birth, her existence revealed by an informer. She was taken only after her fathers manor in Corte had been, somewhat regretfully, buro the ground.

    At length, iumn turning of the year, beautiful even in flat, unlovely Asoli when the rains chose to relent, the Tribute Ship slipped through the tricky passages of the Strait of Asoli aered the waters of the Chiaran Sea. A few days later, red and gold sails billowing triumphantly, it had sailed into the Great Harbor of the Island, celebrated in song for more years than could be ted.

    The Tribute Ship of Rhamanus had carried gold and gems and silver and age of various kinds. It bore leather from Stevanien and wood carvings from Corte and great huge wheels of saull cheese from the west coast of Asoli. They had spices and herbs and knives, stained glass and wool and wihere were two women from Corte and one from Asoli, and besides these three there was another woman and this one was different. This one was the dark-haired, brown-eyed beauty known throughout the peninsula by the time their voyage ended as the woman whod e o starting a war.

    Dianora di Certando, her name was.

    Dianora, who had inteo e to the Island from the very first, from the earliest glimmerings of her plan when she had sat alone before a dead fire one summer night in her fathers silent house. Who had hardened herself—as men in battle were said to have to do—to the thought of being captured and brought here and locked for life ihe saishan of the Tyrant. She had worked it out that far five years ago, a girl with death in her heart, with a father dead and a brone and a mone even farther away: images of all three of them rising in her dreams from the ashes of the burning in her land.

    Ah was still there, still with her on that ship. She still had those dreams, but with them now, as fabled Chiara drew nearer uhe brightness of the sky was something else: a bemused, an almost numbed incredulity at how the line of her life had run. How things had fallen out so pletely wrong, a so precisely as she had planned from the first.

    She had tried to see that as an omen, closing her left hand three times over her thumb to make her wish e true, as she ehat new world.

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