Nor was he made easier when he turned to Baerd and saw the stricken look on the face of the other man. Even by the distorting moonlight he could see how pale Baerd had become.
‘Alessan . . .’ Baerd began, his voice roughened.
‘You are dearer to me than anyone alive,’ Alessan said, calm and grave. ‘You have been more than a brother to me. I would not hurt you for the world, and especially not in this. Never in this. I would not ask unless I was sure. Test him, Baerd.’
Still Baerd hesitated, which made Devin’s own anxiety grow; he understood less and less of what was happening. Only that it seemed to matter to the others, a great deal.
For a long moment no one moved. Finally Baerd, walking carefully, as if holding tightly to control of himself, took Devin by the arm and led him a dozen steps further into the wood to a small clearing among a circle of trees.
Neatly he lowered himself to sit cross-legged on the ground. After a moment’s hesitation Devin did the same. There was nothing he could do but follow the leads he was being given; he had no idea where they were going. Not on the road I’m on, he remembered Catriana saying in the palace that morning. He linked his hands together to keep them steady; he felt cold, and it had little to do with the chill of night.
He heard Alessan and Catriana following them but he didn’t look back. For the moment what was important was the enormous thing—whatever it was—that he could see building in Baerd’s eyes. The blond-haired man had appeared so effortlessly competent until this moment and now, absurdly, he seemed to have become terribly fragile. Someone who could be shattered with unsettling ease. Abruptly, and for the second time in that long day, Devin felt as if he were crossing over into a country of dream, leaving behind the simple, defined boundaries of the daylight world.
And in this mood, under the blue light of Ilarion, he heard Baerd begin the tale, so that it came to him that first time like a spell, something woven in words out of the lost spaces of his childhood. Which is what, in the end, it was.
‘In the year Alberico took Astibar,’ said Baerd, ‘while the provinces of Tregea and Certando were each preparing to fight him alone, and before Ferraut had fallen, Brandin, King of Ygrath, came to this peninsula from the west. He sailed his fleet into the Great Harbour of Chiara and he took the Island. He took it easily, for the Grand Duke killed himself, seeing how many ships had come from Ygrath. This much I suspect that you know.’
His voice was low. Devin found himself leaning forward, straining to hear. A trialla was singing sweetly, sadly, from a branch behind him. Alessan and Catriana made no sound at all. Baerd went on.
‘In that year the Peninsula of the Palm became a battleground in an enormous balancing game between Ygrath and the Empire of Barbadior. Neither thought it could afford to give the other free rein here, halfway between the two of them. Which is one of the reasons Brandin came. The other reason, as we learned afterwards, had to do with his younger, most-beloved son, Stevan. Brandin of Ygrath sought to carve out a second realm for his child to rule. What he found was something else.’
The trialla was still singing. Baerd paused to listen, as if finding in its liquescent voice, gentler even than the nightingale’s, an echo to something in his own.
‘The Chiarans, attempting to rally a resistance in the mountains, were massacred on the slopes of Sangarios. Brandin took Asoli province soon after, and word of his power ran before him. He was very strong in his sorcery, even stronger than Alberico, and though he had fewer soldiers than the Barbadians in the east, his were more completely loyal and better trained. For where Alberico was only a wealthy, ambitious minor lord of the Empire using hired mercenaries, Brandin ruled Ygrath and his were the picked soldiers of that realm. They moved south through Corte almost effortlessly, defeating each province’s army one by one, for none of us acted together in that year. Or after, naturally.’ Baerd’s voice wasn’t quite detached enough for the irony he was trying for.
‘From Corte, Brandin himself turned east with the smaller part of his army to meet Alberico in Ferraut and pin him down there. He sent Stevan south to take the last free province in the west and then cross over to join him in Ferraut to meet the Barbadians in the battle that I think they all expected would shape the fate of the Palm.
‘It was a mistake, though he could not really have known it then, eighteen years ago. Newly landed here, ignorant of the natures of the different provinces in this peninsula. I suppose he wanted Stevan to have a taste of leadership on his own. He gave him most of the army and his best commanders, relying on his own sorcery to hold Alberico until the others joined him.’
Baerd paused for a moment, his blue eyes focused inward. When he resumed, there was a new timbre to his voice; it seemed to Devin to be carrying many different things, all of them old, and all of them sorrowful.
‘At the line of the River Deisa,’ Baerd said, ‘a little more than halfway between Certando and the sea at Corte, Stevan was met by the bitterest resistance either of the invading armies was to find in the Palm. Led by their Prince—for in their pride they had always named their ruler so—the people of that last province in
