She seemed to be crying, silently, tears welling up to slide slowly down her cheeks.
‘Oh, my dear, no,’ he said, with an awkward catch to his voice. ‘I am so sorry. I am a fool. This is far too sudden, tonight, after what you have done. Not tonight. I should never have spoken. I don’t even know if you—’
He stopped just there. But only because she had covered his mouth with her fingers to make him stop. She was still crying, but there seemed to be the most amazing brightness growing inside the room, far more than candles now, more than the moons, a light like the sun beginning to rise beyond the rim of darkness.
She slipped her fingers down from his mouth and claimed the hand he had held her with. We do with our hands what we cannot say. She still said nothing; she couldn’t speak. She was trembling. She remembered how her hands had been shaking when she walked out earlier tonight. So little time ago she had stood in a castle window and known she was about to die. Her tears fell on his hand. She lowered her head but others kept falling. She felt as though her heart were a bird, a trialla, only newly born, spreading wings, preparing to give voice to the song of its days.
He was on his knees beside the bed. She moved her free hand across and ran it through his hair, in a hopeless attempt at smoothing it. It seemed to be something she had wanted to do for a long time. How long? How long could such needs be present and yet never known, never acknowledged or allowed?
‘When I was young,’ she said finally, her voice breaking, but needing to speak, ‘I used to dream of this. Alessan, have I died and come back? Am I dreaming now?’
He smiled slowly, the deeply reassuring smile that she knew, that they all knew, as if her words had granted him release from his own fear, freed him to be himself again. To offer the look that had always meant that he was with them and so everything would be made all right.
But then, unexpectedly, he moved forward and lowered his head to rest it against the thin blanket covering her, as if seeking his own shelter, one that was hers to give to him. She understood; it seemed—oh, what goddess could have foretold this?—that she did have something to offer him. Something more than her death after all. She lifted her hands and closed them around his head, holding him to her, and it seemed to Catriana in that moment as if that newborn trialla in her soul began to sing. 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.
There had been a Barbadian Tracker in Senzio, Devin learned later that night, and he was killed, but not by them. Nor did they have to deal with the kind of search party they’d feared. It was nearly dawn by the time they pieced the story together.
It seemed that the Barbadians had gone wild.
Finding the poisoned Ygrathen knife on the floor by Anghiar’s body, hearing what the woman cried before she leaped, they had leaped themselves—to all the murderously obvious conclusions.
There were twenty of them in Senzio, an honour guard for Anghiar. They armed themselves, assembled, and made their way across to the western wing of the Governor’s Castle. They killed the six Ygrathens on guard there, broke down a door, and burst in upon Cullion of Ygrath, Brandin’s representative, as he struggled into his clothing. Then they took their time about killing him. The sound of his screams echoed through the castle.
Then they went back downstairs and through the courtyard to the front gates and hacked to death the four Senzian guards who had let the woman in without a proper search. It was during this that the captain of the Castle Guard came into the courtyard with a company of Senzians. He ordered them to lay down their arms.
The Barbadians were, according to most reports later, about to do so, having achieved their immediate purposes, when two of the Senzians, enraged at the butchery of their friends, fired arrows at them. Two men fell, one instantly dead, one mortally wounded. The dead one was Alberico’s Tracker. There ensued a bloody, to-the-death mêlée in the torchlit courtyard of the castle, soon slippery with blood. The Barbadians were slaughtered to the last man, taking some thirty or forty Senzians with them.
No one knew which man fired the arrow that killed Casalia the Governor as he came hastily down the stairs screaming hoarsely at them all to stop.
In the chaos that followed that death no one gave a thought to going down to the garden for the body of the woman who had started it all. There was an increasingly wild panic in the city as the news spread through the night. A huge, terrified crowd gathered outside the castle. Shortly after midnight two horses were seen racing away from the city walls, heading south for the Ferraut border. Not long after that the five remaining members of Brandin’s party in Senzio rode away as well, in a tight cluster under the risen moons. They went north of course, towards Farsaro where the fleet was anchored.
Catriana was asleep in the other bed, her face smooth and untroubled, almost childlike in its peace. Alais could not find rest though. There was too much noise and tumult in the streets and she knew her father was down there, amidst whatever was happening.
Even after Rovigo came
