Tigana

by Guy Gavriel Kay

Quietly flowing, the Deisa

Valentin walked

Corsin and Loredan have

Avalle.”

Brandin’s magic

“But they will remember. The one thing we know with certainty is that they will remember us. Here in the peninsula, and in Ygrath, and Quileia, even west over the sea, in Barbadior and its Empire.

Ducal court in Astibar.

Alberico of Barbadior had come with an army from that Empire overseas and exiled Sandre into the distrada eighteen years before.

Alberico, who held four of the nine provinces in an iron grip and was vying with Brandin of Ygrath for the ninth,

The Paelion,

the living Sandreni not such a feckless lot.

Island of Chiara

He grinned, to take some of the sting from the last words. “Far better for the Tyrant to be gracious,” he went on. “To lay his old enemy ceremoniously to rest once and for all, and then offer thanks to whatever gods his Emperor overseas is ordering the Barbadians to worship these days. Thanks and offerings, for he can be certain that the geldings Sandre’s left behind will be pleasingly swift to abandon the unfashionable pursuit of freedom that Sandre stood for in ungelded Astibar.”

Adreano’s own.

Brandin took Chiara and the western provinces,

However subtle Alberico may be, the fact is that he won this province and Tregea and Ferraut and Certando because of his army and his sorcery, and he holds the Eastern Palm only through those things. Sandre d’Astibar ruled this city and its province for twenty-five years through half a dozen rebellions and assassination attempts that I’ve heard of. He did it with only a handful of sometimes loyal troops, with his family, and with a guile that was legendary even then.

Last year’s plague caused havoc among the traveling musicians—that’s how I got my reprieve from the goats.”

the farm in Asoli where Garin of Lower Corte

Lower Corte. But he’d been less than two years old when she’d died amongst the fighting down there, and only a month older when Garin had taken his three sons north.

What, Devin d’Asoli asked himself grimly, did a person have to do to get a drink in Astibar?

It was the doing, he learned quickly enough—in the first inn that refused to serve him his requested flask of Senzio green wine—of the pinch-buttocked, joy-killing priests of Eanna. The goddess, Devin thought fervently, deserved better of her servants.

It appeared that a year ago, in the midst of their interminable jockeying for ascendancy with the clergy of Morian and Adaon, Eanna’s priests had convinced the Tyrant’s token council that there was too much licentiousness among the young of Astibar

Eanna’s dust-dry priests celebrated—in whatever ascetic fashion such men celebrated—their petty triumph over the priests of Morian and the elegant priestesses of the god: both of which deities were associated with darker passions and, inevitably, wine.

“Marius decided there was. He’s just announced that there will be no more challenges in the Oak Grove. Seven is sacred, he’s proclaimed. By allowing him this latest triumph the Mother Goddess has made known her will. Marius has just declared himself King in Quileia, no longer only the consort of the High Priestess.”

the Oak Grove every two years and there, naked, ritually maimed, and unarmed, meet the sword-wielding foe who had been chosen to slay him and take his place. Marius had not been slain, though. Seven times he had not been slain. And now the High Priestess was dead. Nor was it possible to miss the meaning in the way Rovigo had said that.

Alessan, black-haired, though greying at the temples, winked at him over the busyness of his fingers on the pipes.

Alessan’s lean, mobile face was reflective. Devin knew little about the Tregean after two weeks of rehearsal other than that the man was extraordinarily good on the pipes and quite reliable.

Alessan di Tregea

He saw Adaon on the mountainside in Tregea, naked and magnificent. He saw him torn apart in frenzy and in flowing blood by his priestesses—suborned by their womanhood for this one autumn morning of every turning year to the deeper service of their sex. Shredding the flesh of the dying god in the service of the two goddesses who loved him and who shared him as mother, daughter, sister, bride, all through the year and through all the years since Eanna named the stars. Shared him and loved him except on this one morning in the falling season. This morning that was shaped to become the harbinger, the promise of spring to come, of winter’s end. This one single morning on the mountain when the god who was a man had to be slain. Torn and slain, to be put into his place which was the earth. To become the soil, which would be nurtured in turn by the rain of Eanna’s tears and the moist sorrowings of Morian’s endless underground streams twisting in

their need. Slain to be reborn and so loved anew, more and more with each passing year, with each and every time of dying on these cypress-clad heights. Slain to be lamented and then to rise as a god rises, as a man does, as the wheat of summer fields. To rise and then lie down with the goddesses, with his mother and his bride, his sister and his daughter, with Eanna and Morian under sun and stars and the circling moons, the blue one and the silver.

And at the end, at the very last, Devin saw that when the women came upon the god and caught him and closed about him at that high chasm over Casadel, his face when he turned to his rending was that of Alessan.

He gestured at the food on the tables and said, gravely, a quiet observation of fact and not a challenge or accusation, “This is not a room for privacy,

Catriana. Won’t you tell me why you are here?” He braced for her rage to flare again, but once more she surprised him. Silent for a long moment, she said at length, “You have not shared enough with me to be owed an answer to that. Truly it will be better if you go. For both of us.”

“Taeri,

Gianno,

Outside he could hear that voice he almost knew beginning a terse explanation of something involving pall-bearers and a hunting lodge,

“There will be six of us,” Devin heard from the room outside. “By second moonrise I want you to be . . .”

“Even so,” said the first. “Remember then, you two come your own ways from town—not together!—to join us tonight. Whatever you do be sure you

are not followed or we are dead.”

“At last!” fluted Tomasso d’Astibar bar Sandre.

High walls he intended to pass beyond that night—beyond, and then following a trail he would find, into a wood where lay a hunting lodge. A lodge where pall-bearers were to carry the body of the Duke, and where a number of men—six, the clear voice of his memory reminded him—were to gather in a meeting that Catriana d’Astibar had just done the very best she could short of murder to prevent him learning about.

he was going to be the judge of what was better, not she.

And so too, that morning, did a part of Devin’s life. For when a portal of Morian’s has been crossed there is, as everyone knows, never a turning back.

Barbadian mercenaries

Festival of Vines

bare wood save for the Ducal crest above—of Tomasso’s father. On either side of them the two vigil-keepers rode in grim silence. Which was not surprising, given the nature of their errand and the complex, many-generationed hatreds that twisted between those two men.

Tomasso, two years past his fortieth naming day

those three days he knew he could date his own particular taste for the whip in love-making. It was one of what he liked to call his felicities.

In fact, it was only the coming of Alberico from the Empire of Barbadior, with his will-sapping sorcery and the brutal efficiency of his conquering mercenaries, that brought Tomasso and Sandre to a certain very late-night talk

during the Duke’s second year of exile. It was Alberico’s invasion and one further thing: the monumental, irredeemable, inescapable stupidity of Gianno d’Astibar bar Sandre, titular heir to the shattered fortunes of their family.