Tigana

by Guy Gavriel Kay

The daughter whose eyes had taught him part of the meaning of life on the day she’d been born fifteen years ago.

A reminder of what it was to be mortal and so doomed to tread one road only and that one only once, until Morian called the soul away and Eanna’s lights were lost. We can never truly know the path we have not walked.

Whose voice was knowledge and wit and grace to her, water in the dryness of her days. Whose laughter when he set it free, when she could draw it forth from him, was like the healing sun slicing out of clouds. Whose grey eyes were the troubling, unreadable color of the sea under the first cold slanting light of morning in spring or fall.

Some had withdrawn so far into themselves—a madness of another kind—that only the merest spark was left within to make them eat and sleep and somehow walk through the waste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.

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.

Loss coiled to life within her, and hate followed it again, as if both of them were new-born, colder and sharper than before.

“Last time I looked, Senzio traders all had their hands jammed so deep in their pockets paying tribute money east and west that they couldn’t even get their equipment out to please their wives!”

“You may also find as you get older that ice is for deaths and endings, not for beginnings. Any kind of beginnings. On the other hand, I will ensure,” she added, with a smile that was all kindness, “that you have a sufficiency of blankets to keep you warm tonight.”

Ohhhh burned!! Haha

There are no wrong turnings. Only paths we had not known we were meant to walk.

As he spoke he laid one hand gently on Devin’s forehead and Devin, for all his questions and all his perturbation, felt himself suddenly beginning to drift, as on a wide calm sea towards the shores of sleep, far from where men were speaking, from their voices and their grief and their need. And he heard nothing more at all of what was said in the barn that night.

But if you name him a coward simply for not trying to kill Brandin of Ygrath then you are dying a vain, foolish woman. Which, to be perfectly frank, does not surprise me at all in this province!”

The lesson of her days, Dianora thought, was simply this: that love was not enough. Whatever the songs of the troubadours might say. Whatever hope it might seem to offer, love was simply not enough to bridge the chasm in her world.

Erlein waited, his hands motionless on the harp, and Devin did, leaving him a space in which to reach upwards alone, yearning towards that high note where confusion and pain and love and death and longing could all be left behind him for a very little while.

Fewer, the three captains echoed each other in mindless litany. Not as well armed, they gibbered. We must move, they chorused, their imbecilic faces looming in his dreams, set close together, hanging like lurid moons too near the earth.

She was owner and captive, both, of a bitterly divided heart.

she wanted to numb her mind, to still the voices and the memories. Obliterate the image of that clear, straight path disappearing in the darkness of the sea.

Outside, the cool wind of the highlands blew the high white clouds across the sun and away, and across it and away, and a single hunting hawk hovered on motionless wings in that passing of light and shadow over the face of the mountains.

His heart was crying. He was a grieving, torn thing, all the memories of love, of a father’s loss, flooding over him, another kind of tidal wave. Stevan. He wept, adrift in an ocean of loss, far from any shore.