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It is the simple truth that mortal man cannot understand why the gods shape events as they do. Why some men and women are cut off in fullest flower while others live to dwindle into shadows of themselves. Why virtue must sometimes be trampled and evil flourish amid the beauty of a country garden. Why chance, sheer random chance, plays such an overwhelming role in the running of the life lines and the fate lines of men.
Memory was talisman and ward for him, gateway and hearth. It was pride and love, shelter from loss: for if something could be remembered it was not wholly lost.
Tigana had been a single pulsebeat away from coming back into the world. The pulsebeat of Brandin that the crossbow would have ended. Home was a dream she’d had yesterday. A place where children used to play. Among towers near the mountains, by a river, on curving sweeps of white or golden sand beside a palace at the edge of the sea. Home was a longing, a desperate dream, a name in her dreams. And this afternoon she had done the one thing she could possibly have done to bar that name from the world, to lock it into a dream. Until all the dreams, too, died.
He looked at his hands by starlight, at the slim hands of the boy he had been, and then he covered his face with those hands for the second time in that Ember Night, and he wept as though his heart were breaking now and not broken long ago.
Language. The process of sharing with words seemed such a futile exercise sometimes.
Neither man was a stranger to this hour, Devin knew, to sitting thus before a castle kitchen fire among the servants in the last dark hour before dawn, easing into wakefulness and a fugitive warmth, preparing for the road again and whatever turnings it might offer in the day that had not yet begun.
Behind him, far behind him very soon, he heard the sounds of pursuit being balked by seemingly inadvertent things. He could guess what those things might be: a milk-cart with a loose wheel, a quickly gathered crowd watching two men brawl in the street, a keg of wine spilled as it was wheeled into a tavern. He knew Tregea, which meant knowing the spirit of its people too.
Baerd knows Tregea. You can feel the implied smirk as he hears the noises but doesn't turn, and continues his flight across the rooftops.
She went toward him then, walking like a queen, slender and tall and proud, clad in the colors of the dark-green sea with a crimson gem about her throat. And she knew that she loved him, and knew her land was lost if he was not driven away or slain, and she grieved with all her being for the simple truth that her mother and her father had had a daughter born to them all those years ago.
There is no passion in him, no love, no pride. Only ambition. Nothing matters but that. Nothing in the world can move him to pity or grief but his own fate. Everything is a tool, an instrument. He wants the Emperor’s Tiara, everyone knows it, but he doesn’t want it for anything. He only wants. I doubt anything in his life has ever moved him to feel anything for anyone else . . . love, loss, anything.”