Devin winced and carefully avoided meeting Alais’s eye. She was right beside him, wrapping a roll of linen around his torso to bind the wound. He looked at Ducas instead, whose own cut above his eye had been closed by Rinaldo in the same way. Arkin, who had also survived the skirmish down below, was bandaging it. Ducas, his red beard matted and sticky with blood, looked like some fearful creature out of childhood night terrors.
‘Is that too tight?’ Alais asked softly.
Devin drew a testing breath and shook his head. The wound hurt, but he seemed to be all right.
‘You saved my life,’ he murmured to her. She was behind him now, tying up the ends of his bandage. Her hands stopped for a moment and then resumed.
‘No I didn’t,’ she said in a muffled voice. ‘He was down. He couldn’t have hurt you. All I did was kill a man.’ Catriana, standing near them, glanced over. ‘I . . . I wish I hadn’t,’ Alais said. And began to cry.
Devin swallowed and tried to turn, to offer comfort, but Catriana was quicker than he, and had already gathered Alais in her arms. He looked at them, wondering bitterly what real comfort there could be to offer on this bare ridge in the midst of war.
‘Erlein! Now! Brandin is standing!’ Alessan’s cry knifed through all other sounds. His heart suddenly thumping again, Devin went quickly towards the Prince and the wizards.
‘It is upon us then,’ said Erlein, in a hard, flat voice to the other two. ‘I will have to pull out now, to track him. Wait for my signal, but move when I give it!’
‘We will,’ Sertino gasped. ‘Triad save us all.’ Sweat was pouring down the pudgy wizard’s face. His hands were shaking with strain.
‘Erlein,’ Alessan began urgently. ‘He must use it all. You know what you—’
‘Hush! I know exactly what I must do. Alessan, you have set this in motion, you brought us all here to Senzio, every single person, the living and the dead. Now it is up to us. Be still, unless you want to pray.’
Devin looked north to Brandin’s hill. He saw the King step forward from under his canopy.
‘Oh, Triad,’ he heard Alessan whisper then in a queerly high voice. ‘Adaon, remember us. Remember your children now!’ The Prince sank to his knees. ‘Please,’ he whispered again. ‘Please, let me have been right!’
On his hill to the north of them Brandin of Ygrath stretched forth one hand and then the other under the burning sun.
Dianora saw him move forward to the very edge of the hill, out from the canopy into the white blaze of the light. Scelto scrambled away. Beneath them the armies of the Western Palm were being hammered back now, centre and left and right. The cries of the Barbadians had taken on a quality of triumphant malice that fell like blows upon the heart.
Brandin lifted his right hand and levelled it ahead. Then he brought up his left beside it so that the palms were touching each other, the ten fingers pointing together. Pointing straight to where Alberico of Barbadior was, at the rear of his army.
And Brandin of the Western Palm, who had been the King of Ygrath when he first came to this peninsula, cried aloud then, in a voice that seemed to flay and shred the very air:
‘Oh, my son! Stevan, forgive me what I do!’
Dianora stopped breathing. She thought she was going to fall. She reached out a hand for support and didn’t even realize it was d’Eymon who braced her.
Then Brandin spoke again, in a voice colder than she had ever heard him use, words none of them could understand. Only the sorcerer down in the valley would know, only he could grasp the enormity of what was happening.
She saw Brandin spread his legs, as if to brace himself. Then she saw what followed.
‘Now!’ Erlein di Senzio screamed. ‘Both of you! Get the others out! Cut free now!’
‘They’re loose!’ Sertino cried. ‘I’m out!’ He collapsed in a heap to the ground as if he might never rise again.
Something was happening on the other hill. In the middle of day, under the brilliant sun, the sky seemed to be changing, to be darkening where Brandin stood. Something—not smoke, not light, some kind of change in the very nature of the air—seemed to be pouring from his hands, boiling east and down, disorienting to the eye, blurred, unnatural, like a rushing doom.
Erlein suddenly turned his head, his eyes widening with horror.
‘Sandre, what are you doing?’ he shrieked, grabbing wildly at the Duke. ‘Get out, you fool! In Eanna’s name, get out!’
‘Not . . . yet,’ said Sandre d’Astibar, in a voice that carried its own full measure of doom.
There had been more of them. Four more coming to his aid. Not wizards now, a different kind of magic of the Palm, one he hadn’t even known about, didn’t understand. But it didn’t matter. They were here and on his side, if screened from his mind, and with them, with all of them bending their power to his defence, he had even been able to reach out, and forward, to assert his own strength against the enemy.
Who were falling back! There was glory after all under the sun, and hope, more than hope, a glittering vista of triumph spreading in the valley before him, a pathway made smooth with the blood of his foes, leading straight from here back across the sea and home to the Tiara.
He would bless these wizards, honour them! Make them lords of unimagined power, here in this colony or in Barbadior. Wherever they wanted, whatever they chose. And thinking so, Alberico had felt his own magic
