‘And Prince Valentin of that province . . . the province you know as Lower Corte, slew Stevan of Ygrath, Brandin’s beloved son, on the bank of the river at sunset after a bitter day of death.’
Devin could almost taste the keenness of old grief in the words. He saw Baerd glance over for the first time to where Alessan was standing. Neither man spoke. Devin never took his own eyes away from Baerd. He concentrated as if his life depended on his doing so, treating each word spoken as if it were a jewelled mosaic piece to be set into the memory that was his own pride.
And right about then it seemed to Devin that a distant bell began to toll in some recess of his mind. Ringing a warning. As might a village bell in a temple of Adaon, summoning farmers urgently back from the fields. A far bell heard, faint but clear, from over morning fields of waving yellow grain.
‘Brandin knew what had happened immediately through his sorcery,’ Baerd said, his voice like the rasp of a file. ‘He swept back south and west, leaving Alberico a free hand in Ferraut and Certando. He came down with the full weight of his sorcery and his army and with the rage of a father whose son has been slain, and he met the remnant of his last foes where they had waited for him by the Deisa.’
Once more Baerd looked over at Alessan. His face was bleak, ghostly in the moonlight. He said:
‘Brandin annihilated them. He smashed them to pieces without mercy or respite. Drove them helplessly before him back into their own country south of the Deisa and he burned every field and village through which he passed. He took no prisoners. He had women slain in that first march, and children, which was not a thing he’d done anywhere else. But nowhere else had his own child died. So many souls crossed over to Morian for the sake of the soul of Stevan of Ygrath. His father overran that province in blood and fire. Before the summer was out he had levelled all the glorious towers of the city in the foothills of the mountains— the one now called Stevanien. On the coast he smashed to rubble and sand the walls and the harbour barriers of the royal city by the sea. And in the battle by the river he took the Prince who had slain his son and later that year had him tortured and mutilated and killed in Chiara.’
Baerd’s voice was a dry whisper now under the starlight and the light of the single moon. And with it there was still that bell warning of sorrows yet to come, tolling in Devin’s mind, louder now. Baerd said:
‘Brandin of Ygrath did something more than all of this. He gathered his magic, the sorcerous power that he had, and he laid down a spell upon that land such as had never even been conceived before. And with that spell he . . . tore its name away. He stripped that name utterly from the minds of every man and woman who had not been born in that province. It was his deepest curse, his ultimate revenge. He made it as if we had never been. Our deeds, our history, our very name. And then he called us Lower Corte, after the bitterest of our ancient enemies among the provinces.’
Behind him now Devin heard a sound and realized that Catriana was weeping. Baerd said, ‘Brandin made it come to pass that no one living could hear and then remember the name of that land, or of its royal city by the sea or even of that high, golden place of towers on the old road from the mountains. He broke us and he ravaged us. He killed a generation, and then he stripped away our name.’
And those last words were not whispered or rasped into the autumn dark of Astibar. They were hurled forth as a denunciation, an indictment, to the trees and the night and stars—the stars that had watched this thing come to pass.
The grief in that accusation clenched itself like a fist within Devin, more tightly than Baerd could ever have known. Than anyone could have known. For no one since Marra had died really knew what memory meant to Devin d’Asoli: the way in which it had come to be the touchstone of his soul.
Memory was talisman and ward for him, gateway and hearth. It was pride and love, shelter from loss: for if something could be remembered it was not wholly lost. Not dead and gone forever. Marra could live; his dour, stern father hum a cradle song to him. And because of this, because this was at the heart of what Devin was, the old vengeance of Brandin of Ygrath smashed into him that night as if it had been newly wrought, pounding through to the vulnerable centre of how Devin saw and dealt with the world, and it cut him like a fresh and killing wound.
With an effort he forced himself to steadiness, willing the concentration that would allow him to remember this. All of this. Which seemed to matter more than ever now. Especially now, with the echo of Baerd’s last terrible words fading in the night. Devin looked at the blond-haired man with the leather bands across his brow and about his neck, and he waited. He had been quick as a boy; he was a clever man. He understood what was coming; it had fallen into place.
Older by far than he had been only an hour ago, Devin heard Alessan murmur from behind him, ‘The cradle song I heard you playing was from that last province, Devin. A song of the city of towers. No one not of that place could have learned that tune in the
