The last question was asked in a tone bereft of the arrogance that had infused the man’s bearing and speech from the moment of his arrival.
Just as Devin’s earlier fear had given way to excitement, so now did excitement surrender to something else, something he could not yet identify. He stared at Alessan. The man seemed younger than before, somehow—unable to prevent this almost naked showing of his need.
Nievole cleared his throat loudly, as if to dispel an aura, a resonance of something that seemed to have entered the room like the mingled light of the two moons outside. Another owl hooted from the clearing. Nievole opened his mouth to reply to Alessan.
They never knew what he would have said, or Scalvaia.
Afterwards, on nights when sleep eluded him and he watched one or both moons sweep the sky or counted the stars in Eanna’s Diadem in a moonless dark, Devin would let his clear memory of that moment carry him back, trying—for reasons he would have found difficult to explain—to imagine what the two lords would have done or said had all their briefly tangled fate lines run differently from that lodge.
He could guess, analyse, play out scenarios in his mind, but he would never know. It was a night-time truth that became a queer, private sorrow for him amid all that came after. A symbol, a displacement of regret. A reminder of what it was to be mortal and so doomed to tread one road only and that one only once, until Morian called the soul away and Eanna’s lights were lost. We can never truly know the path we have not walked.
The paths that each of the men in that lodge were to walk, through their own private portals to endings near or far, were laid down by the owl that cried a second time, very clearly, just as Nievole began to speak.
Alessan flung up his hand. ‘Trouble!’ he said sharply. Then: ‘Baerd?’
The doorway banged open. Devin saw a large man, his very long, pale-yellow hair held back by a leather band across his brow. There was another leather thong about his throat. He wore a vest and leggings cut in the fashion of the southern highlands. His eyes, even by firelight, gleamed a dazzling blue. He carried a drawn sword.
Which was punishable by death this close to Astibar.
‘Let’s go!’ the man said urgently. ‘You and the boy. The others belong here—the youngest son and the grandson have easy explanations. Get rid of the extra glasses.’
‘What is it?’ Tomasso d’Astibar asked quickly, his eyes wide.
‘Twenty horsemen on the forest path. Continue your vigil and be as calm as you can—we won’t be far away. We’ll return after. Alessan, come on!’
The tone of his voice pulled Devin halfway to the door. Alessan was lingering though, his eyes for some reason locked on those of Tomasso, and that look, what was exchanged in it, became another one of the things that Devin never forgot, or fully understood.
For a long moment—a very long moment, it seemed to Devin, with twenty horsemen riding through the forest and a drawn sword in the room—no one spoke. Then:
‘It seems we will have to continue this extremely interesting discussion at a later hour,’ Tomasso bar Sandre murmured, with genuinely impressive composure. ‘Will you take a last glass before you go, in my father’s name?’
Alessan smiled then, a full, open smile. He shook his head though. ‘I hope to have a chance to do so later,’ he said. ‘I will drink to your father gladly, but I have a habit I don’t think even you can satisfy in the time we have.’
Tomasso’s mouth quirked wryly. ‘I’ve satisfied a number of habits in my day. Do tell me yours.’
The reply was quiet; Devin had to strain to hear.
‘My third glass of a night is blue,’ Alessan said. ‘The third glass I drink is always of blue wine. In memory of something lost. Lest on any single night I forget what it is I am alive to do.’
‘Not forever lost, I hope,’ said Tomasso, equally softly.
‘Not forever, I have sworn, upon my soul and my father’s soul wherever it has gone.’
‘Then there will be blue wine when next we drink after tonight,’ said Tomasso, ‘if it is at all in my power to provide it. And I will drink it with you to our fathers’ souls.’
‘Alessan!’ snapped the yellow-haired man named Baerd. ‘In Adaon’s name, I said twenty horsemen! Will you come?’
‘I will,’ said Alessan. He hurled his wineglass and Devin’s through the nearest window into the darkness. ‘Triad guard you all,’ he said to the five in the room. Then he and Devin followed Baerd into the moonlit shadows of the clearing.
With Devin in the middle they ran swiftly around to the side of the cabin farthest from the path that led to the main road. They didn’t go far. His pulse pounding furiously, Devin dropped to the ground when the other two men did so. Peering cautiously out from under a cluster of dark-green serrano bushes they could see the lodge. Firelight showed through the open windows.
A moment later Devin’s heart lurched like a ship caught by a wave across its bows, as a twig cracked just behind him.
‘Twenty-two riders,’ a voice said. The speaker dropped neatly to the ground on Baerd’s other side. ‘The one in the middle of them is hooded.’
Devin looked over. And by the mingled light of the two moons saw Catriana d’Astibar.
‘Hooded?’ Alessan repeated, on a sharply taken
