He said, carefully, ‘Catriana, I cannot tell you how frightened I was tonight. You must listen to me now, and try to think this through, because it is something that matters very much.’ His expression was odd, and there was something in his voice she couldn’t quite pin down.
He reached out and laid his hand over hers where it lay upon the blanket. ‘Catriana, I do not measure your worth by your father’s. None of us ever has. You must stop doing this to yourself. There was never anything for you to redeem. You are what you are, in and of yourself.’
This was difficult ground for her, the most difficult of all, and she found that her heartbeat had quickened. She watched him, blue eyes on his grey ones. His long, slender fingers were covering her own. She said:
‘We arrive with a past, a history. Families matter. He was a coward and he fled.’
Alessan shook his head; there was still something strained in his expression. ‘We have to be so careful,’ he murmured. ‘So very careful when we judge them, and what they did in those days. There are reasons why a man with a wife and an infant daughter might choose—other than fear for himself—to stay with the two of them and try to keep them alive. Oh, my dear, in all these years I have seen so many men and women who went away for their children.’
She could feel her tears starting now and she fought to blink them back. She hated talking about this. It was the hard kernel of pain at the core of all she did.
‘But it was before the Deisa,’ she whispered. ‘He left before the battles. Even the one we won.’
Again he shook his head, wincing at the sight of her distress. He lifted her hand suddenly and carried it to his lips. She could not remember his ever having done that before. There was something completely strange about all of this.
‘Parents and children,’ he said, so softly she almost missed the words. ‘It is so hard; we are so quick to judge.’ He hesitated. ‘I don’t know if Devin told you, but my mother cursed me in the hour before she died. She called me a traitor and a coward.’
She blinked, moved to sit up. Too suddenly. She was dizzy and terribly weak. Devin hadn’t told her any such thing; he had said next to nothing about that day.
‘How could she?’ she said, anger rising in her, against this woman she had never seen. ‘You? A coward? Doesn’t . . . didn’t she know anything about . . .’
‘She knew almost all of it,’ he said quietly. ‘She simply disagreed as to where my duty lay. That is what I am trying to say, Catriana: it is possible to differ on such matters, and to reach a place as terrible as that one was for both of us. I am learning so many things so late. In this world, where we find ourselves, we need compassion more than anything, I think, or we are all alone.’
She managed this time to push herself up higher in the bed. She looked at him, imagining that day, those words of his mother. She remembered what she herself had said to her father on her own last night at home, words that had driven him violently out of the house into the dark. He had still been out there somewhere, alone, when she had gone away.
She swallowed. ‘Did it . . . did it end like that with your mother? Was that how she died?’
‘She never unsaid the words, but she let me take her hand before the end. I don’t think I’ll ever know if that meant . . .’
‘Of course it did!’ she said quickly. ‘Of course it did, Alessan. We all do that. We do with our hands, our eyes, what we are afraid to say.’ She surprised herself; she hadn’t known she knew any such thing.
He smiled then, and looked down to where his fingers still covered hers. She felt herself colouring. He said, ‘There is a truth there. I am doing that now, Catriana. Perhaps I am a coward, after all.’
He had sent the others from the room. Her heart was still beating very fast. She looked at his eyes and then quickly away, afraid that after what she had just said it would look like she was probing. She felt like a child again, confused, certain that she was missing something here. She had always, always hated not understanding what was happening. But at the same time there seemed to be this very odd, extraordinary warmth growing inside her, and a queer sensation of light, brighter than the candles in the room should have allowed.
Fighting to control her breathing, needing an answer, but absurdly afraid of what it might be, she stammered, ‘I . . . would you . . . explain that to me? Please?’
She watched him closely this time, watched him smile, saw what kindled in his eyes, she even read his lips as they moved.
‘When I saw you fall,’ he murmured, his hand still holding hers, ‘I realized that I was falling with you, my dear. I finally understood, too late, what I had denied to myself for so long, how absolutely I had debarred myself from something important, even the acknowledging of its possibility, while Tigana was still gone. The heart . . . has its own laws though, Catriana, and the truth is . . . the truth is that you are the law of mine. I knew it when I saw you in that window. In the moment before you leaped I knew that I loved you. Bright star of Eanna, forgive me the manner of this, but you are the harbour of my soul’s journeying.’
Bright star of Eanna. He had always called
