He stepped under the canopy. Brandin was ahead of him near the edge of the hill. He had never struck a man from behind in all his days. He moved to one side, stumbling a little, and came up on the King’s right hand. No one looked at him. He was Rhun.
He was not.
‘You should have killed me by the river,’ he said, very clearly. Slowly, Brandin turned his head, as if just now remembering something. Valentin waited until their eyes met and held before he drove his sword into the Ygrathen’s heart, the way a Prince killed his enemies, however many years it might take, however much might have to be endured before such an ending was allowed.
DIANORA COULD NOT EVEN scream she was so stunned, so unprepared. She saw Brandin stagger backwards, a blade in his chest. Then Rhun—Rhun!—jerked it clumsily free and so much blood followed. Brandin’s eyes were wide with astonishment and pain, but they were clear, so luminously clear. And so was his voice as she heard him say:
‘Both of us?’ He swayed, still on his feet. ‘Father and son, both? What a harvest, Prince of Tigana.’
Dianora heard the name as a white burst of sound in her brain. Time seemed to change, to slow unbearably. She saw Brandin sinking to his knees; it seemed to take forever for him to fall. She tried to move towards him; her body would not respond. She heard an elongated, weirdly distorted sound of anguish, and saw stark agony in d’Eymon’s face as the Chancellor’s blade ripped into and through Rhun’s side.
Not Rhun. Not Rhun. Valentin the Prince.
Brandin’s Fool. All those years. The thing that had been done to him! And she beside him, beside that suffering. All those years. She wanted to scream. She could not make a sound, could scarcely breathe.
She saw him falling too, the maimed, broken form crumpling to the ground beside Brandin. Who was still on his knees, a red wound in his chest. And who was looking at her now, only at her. A sound finally escaped her lips as she sank down beside him. He reached out, so slowly, with such a colossal effort of will, with all the control he had, and he took her hand.
‘Oh, love,’ she heard him say. ‘It is as I told you. We should have met in Finavir.’
She tried again to speak, to answer him, but tears were streaming down her face and closing her throat. She gripped his hand as tightly as she could, trying to will life from herself over into him. He slumped sideways against her shoulder, and so she lowered him to her lap and wrapped her arms around him, the way she had last night, only last night when he slept. She saw the brilliantly clear grey eyes slowly grow cloudy, and then dark. She was holding him like that when he died.
She lifted her head. The Prince of Tigana, on the ground beside them, was looking at her with so much compassion in his newly clear eyes. Which was a thing she could not possibly endure. Not from him: not with what he had suffered and what she was, what she herself had done. If he only knew, what words would he have for her, what look would there be in those eyes? She could not bear it. She saw him open his mouth as if to speak, then his eyes flicked quickly to one side.
A shadow crossed the sun. She looked up and saw d’Eymon’s sword lifted high. Valentin raised a hand, pleading, to ward it.
‘Wait!’ she gasped, forcing the one word out.
And d’Eymon, almost mad with his own grief yet stayed for her voice. Held back his sword. Valentin lowered his hand. She saw him draw breath against the massive final reality of his own wound, and then, closing his eyes to the pain and the fierce light, she heard him speak. Not a cry, only the one word spoken in a clear voice. The one word which was—oh, what else could it have ever been?—the name of his home, offered as a shining thing for the world again to know.
And Dianora saw then that d’Eymon of Ygrath did know it. That he did hear the name. Which meant that all men now could, that the spell was broken. Valentin opened his eyes and looked up at the Chancellor, reading the truth of that knowledge in d’Eymon’s face, and Dianora saw that the Prince of Tigana was smiling as the Chancellor’s sword came down from its great height and drove into his heart.
Even in death the smile remained on the terribly afflicted face. And the echo of his last word, the single name, seemed to Dianora to be hanging yet and spreading outward in ripples through the air around the hill, above the valley where the Barbadians were all dying now.
She looked down at the dead man in her arms, cradling his head and the greying hair, and she could not stop her tears. In Finavir, he had said. Last words. Another named place, farther away than dream. And had been right, as so many many times he had been right. They ought to have met, if the gods had any kindness, any pity at all for them, in another world than this. Not here. For love was what it was, but it was not enough. Not here.
She heard a sound from under the canopy and turned in time to see d’Eymon slump forward
