Tigana, Guy Kay [uplifting novels .txt] 📗

‘Are they?’ Alienor echoed sharply. ‘You mean you haven’t established that for yourself? Dear child, what have you been doing with your nights? Of course they are! Don’t waste your youth, my dear.’

Catriana looked at her levelly. ‘I don’t think I am,’ she said. ‘But I doubt we’d have the same thoughts on that subject.’

Devin winced, but Alienor’s answer was mild. ‘Perhaps not,’ she agreed, unruffled. ‘But, in truth, I think the overlap would actually be greater than you imagine.’ She paused. ‘You may also find as you get older that ice is for deaths and endings, not for beginnings. Any kind of beginnings. On the other hand, I will ensure,’ she added, with a smile that was all kindness, ‘that you have a sufficiency of blankets to keep you warm tonight.’

Erlein groaned, dragging Devin’s attention away from the two women. He heard Catriana say, ‘I thank you for your solicitude,’ but he missed her expression. From the tone he could hazard a guess at what it would be.

He supported Erlein’s head as the wizard laboured to get his wind back. Alienor simply ignored them. She was greeting Baerd now with a friendly civility—a tone that was cheerfully matched, Devin noted instinctively, by Baerd’s own manner towards her.

‘I’m sorry,’ he whispered to Erlein. ‘I couldn’t think of anything else.’

Erlein waved a feeble, still-unhealed hand. He’d insisted on removing the bandages before they’d entered the castle. ‘I’m sorry,’ he wheezed, surprising Devin considerably. ‘I forgot about the servants.’ He wiped his lips with the back of one hand. ‘I won’t achieve much for myself if I get us all killed. Not my idea of freedom, that. Nor, frankly, is this posture my notion of middle-aged dignity. Since you knocked me down you can kindly help me up.’ For the first time Devin heard a faint note of amusement in the troubadour’s voice. A survivor, Sandre had said.

As tactfully as he could he helped the other man stand.

‘The extremely violent one,’ Alessan was saying drily, ‘is Devin d’Asoli. He also sings. If you are very good he may sing for you.’

Devin turned away from Erlein, but perhaps because he’d been distracted by what had just happened he was quite unprepared to deal with the gaze he now encountered.

There is no possible way, he found himself thinking, that this woman is forty years old. He reflexively sketched the performer’s bow Menico had taught him, to cover his confusion. She was almost forty and he knew it: Alienor had been widowed two years after she’d been wed, when Cornaro of Borso had died in the Barbadian invasion of Certando. The stories and descriptions of the beautiful widow in her southland castle had begun very shortly after that.

They didn’t come even near to catching what she was—what he saw standing before him in a long gown of a blue so deep it was nearly black. Her hair was black, worn high upon her head and held by a diadem of white gold studded with gems. A few tendrils of hair had been artlessly allowed to fall free, framing the perfect oval of her face. Her eyes were indigo, almost violet under the long lashes, and her mouth was full and red and smiling a private smile as she looked at Devin.

He forced himself to meet that look. Doing so, he felt as though all the sluice-gates in his veins had been hurled open and his blood was a river in flood, racing through a steep wild course at an ever-increasing speed. Her smile grew deeper, more private, as if she could actually see that happening inside him, and the dark eyes grew wider for an instant.

‘I suppose,’ said Alienor di Certando, before turning back to Alessan, ‘that I shall have to try to be very good then, if that will induce you to sing for me.’

Her breasts were full and high, Devin saw, could not help but see. The gown was cut very low and a diamond pendant hung against her skin, drawing the eye like a blue-white fire.

He shook his head, fighting to clear it, a little shocked at his own reaction. This was ridiculous, he told himself sternly. He had been overheated by the stories told, his imagination rendered unruly by the opulent, sensuous furnishings in the room. He looked upwards for distraction and then wished he hadn’t.

On the ceiling someone not a stranger to the act of love had painted Adaon’s primal coupling with Eanna. The face of the goddess was very clearly that of Alienor and the painting showed—just as clearly—that she was in the very moment of rapture when the stars had streamed into being from her ecstasy.

There were indeed stars streaming all across the background of the ceiling fresco. It was, however, difficult to look at the background of the fresco. Devin forced his eyes down. What helped him reclaim his composure was meeting Catriana’s glance just then: a mingled look of caustic irony and a second thing he couldn’t quite recognize. For all her own splendour and the wild crimson glory of her hair, Catriana looked exceptionally young just then. Almost a child, Devin thought sagely, not yet fully realized or accomplished in her womanhood.

The Lady of Castle Borso was complete in what she was, from her sandalled feet to the band in her lustrous hair. Her nails, Devin noticed belatedly, were painted the same blue-black dangerous colour as her gown.

He swallowed, and looked away again.

‘I expected you yesterday,’ Alienor was saying to Alessan. ‘I was waiting for you and I’d made myself beautiful for you but you didn’t come.’

‘Just as well, then,’ Alessan murmured, smiling. ‘Had I seen you any more beautiful than you are now I might never have found the strength to leave.’

Her mouth curled mischievously. She turned to the others. ‘You see how the man torments me? Not a quarter of an hour in my home and he speaks of leaving. Am I well served in such a friend?’

The question