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All that you held most dear you will put by and leave behind you; and this is the arrow the longbow of your exile first lets fly. You will come to know how bitter as salt and stone is the bread of others, how hard the way that goes up and down stairs that never are your own.
What can a flame remember? If it remembers a little less than is necessary, it goes out; if it remembers a little more than is necessary, it goes out. If only it could teach us, while it burns, to remember correctly.
BOTH MOONS WERE HIGH, DIMMING THE LIGHT OF ALL but the brightest stars. The campfires burned on either side of the river, stretching away into the night. Quietly flowing, the Deisa caught the moonlight and the orange of the nearer fires and cast them back in wavery, sinuous ripples. And all the lines of light led to his eyes, to where he was sitting on the riverbank, hands about his knees, thinking about dying and the life he’d lived.
There was a glory to the night, Saevar thought, breathing deeply of the mild summer air, smelling water and water flowers and grass, watching the reflection of blue moonlight and silver on the river, hearing the Deisa’s murmurous flow and the distant singing from around the fires.
The Prince called him a friend. It could not be said, Saevar thought, that he had lived a useless or an empty life. He’d had his art, the joy of it and the spur, and had lived to see it praised by the great ones of his province, indeed of the whole peninsula.
“The way we see it is,” Valentin said softly, his quick mind engaged by the question. “The beauty we find is shaped, at least in part, by what we know the morning will bring.”
IN THE AUTUMN SEASON OF THE WINE, WORD WENT FORTH from among the cypresses and olives and the laden vines of his country estate that Sandre, Duke of Astibar, once ruler of that city and its province, had drawn the last bitter breath of his exile and age and died.
“The Scalvaiane have submitted themselves willingly to nothing and no one in living memory or recorded history,” that vulpine lord said, the texture of velvet in his voice. “I am not readily of a mind to become the first to do so.”
We can never truly know the path we have not walked.
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. Not dead and gone forever. Marra could live; his dour, stern father hum a cradle song to him.
“Well,” said Rovigo earnestly, “all jesting aside, I could well understand if you wanted to rejoin the celebrations—they were nowhere near their peak when we left. It will go on all night, of course, but I confess I don’t like leaving the younger ones alone too late, and my unfortunate oldest, Alais, suffers from twitches and fainting spells when over-excited.” “How sad,” said Alessan with a straight face. “Father!” came a softly urgent protest from the cart. “Rovigo, stop that at once or I shall empty a basin on you in your sleep,” her mother declared, though not, Devin judged, with any
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Devin accepted a glass from Rovigo, savoring the icy-clean bouquet. He leaned back in his chair and prepared to be extremely content for the next little while.
Devin doubted if he’d ever seen a man so obviously happy to be where he was. It must have shown in the amused irony of his glance, for Rovigo, catching the look, shrugged. “Daughters,” he lamented, sorrowfully shaking his head. “‘Ponderous cartwheels,’” Devin reminded him, looking pointedly at the merchant’s wife. Rovigo winced. Alix, laughter-lines crinkling at her temples, had overheard the exchange.
Devin caught Alais looking at him from the seat she’d taken next to the fire. Reflexively he smiled at her. She didn’t smile back, but her gaze, mild and serious, did not break away. He felt a small, unsettling skip to the rhythm of his heart.
“Not as anything that matters in the scheme of things. I only spoke a prayer of my own.” Alessan’s voice was careful and very clear. “I always do. I said: Tigana, let my memory of you be like a blade in my soul.”
Perhaps that was it, Alais thought: few people she’d met could keep up with her father, in jesting or in anything else. And this man with the sharp, quizzical features appeared to be doing so effortlessly.
There are no wrong turnings. Only paths we had not known we were meant to walk.
She had enough of a sense of irony to find that amusing. He had evidently had a difficult night though, and not just in the obvious ways. She thought about waking him and sending him back to his own room. It would most certainly raise eyebrows if they were seen leaving here together in the morning. She discovered, though, that she didn’t really care. She also realized that she minded less than she’d expected that he’d figured out the one truth about her and had just learned another. About her father, but really more about herself. She wondered about that, why it didn’t bother her more.
“Could have been worse,” Sandre said prosaically. “Oh, somewhat,” Catriana said tartly. “We could all be lying dead here now.” “That would indeed have been worse,” Sandre agreed gravely. It took her a moment to realize he was teasing her. She surprised herself by laughing, a little wildly. Sandre, his darkened face sober, said something quite unexpected then. “You have no idea,” he murmured, “how dearly I wish you were of my blood. My daughter, granddaughter. Will you allow me to take pride in what you are?”
In this world, where we find ourselves, we need compassion more than anything, I think, or we are all alone.”
Bright star of Eanna, forgive me the manner of this, but you are the harbor of my soul’s journeying.”
Of trials endured and trials to come, of doubt and dark and all the deep uncertainties that defined the outer boundaries of mortal life, but with love now present at the base of it all, like light, like the first stone of a rising tower.
“I hate that man down there,” he said quietly. “I hate everything he stands for. 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.”
These are ambitious elements for what was always meant to be a romantic adventure. They intimidated me as they began to emerge; even recording them now I find myself shaking my head. But beneath them all lies the idea of using the fantasy genre in just this way: letting the universality of fantasy—of once upon a time—allow escapist fiction to be more than just that, to also bring us home. I tried to imagine myself with a stiletto not a bludgeon, slipping the themes of the story in quietly while keeping a reader turning pages well past bedtime.
