She had risen and dressed and helped him pack a...
She had risen and dressed and helped him pack a very few thingsHe had flatly refused any of the silverShe assembled a small satchel of food for his first sunrise on the long road aloneAt the doorway, in the darkness of the summer night, they had held each other close, clinging without wordsNeither wept, as if both knew the time for tears had passed
"If the goddesses love us, and the god," Baerd said, "we will surely meet againI will think of you each and every day of my life
"And I you," she'd said to him"I think you know how muchEanna light your path and bring you home That was all she'd saidAll she could think to say
After he'd gone she had sat in the front room wrapped in an old shawl of her mother's, gazing sightlessly at the ashes of last night's fire until the sun came up:
By then the hard kernel of her own plan had been formed
The plan that had brought her here, all these years after, to this other lonely bed on an Ember Night of ghosts when she should not have had to be aloneAlone with all her memories, with the reawakening they carried, and the awareness of what she had allowed to happen to her here on the IslandHere in Brandin's court
And so it was that two things came to Dianora that Ember Night in the saishan
The memories of her brother had been the first, sweeping over her in waves, image after image until they ended with the ashes of that dead fire
The second, following inexorably, born of that same long-ago year, born of memory, of guilt, of the whirlwind cartier must 21 hurts that came with lying here alone and so terribly exposed on this night of all nights the second thing, spun forth from all these interwoven things, was, finally, the shaping of a resolutionA decision, after so many yearsA course of action she now knew she was going to takeHad to take, whatever might follow
She lay there, chilled, hopelessly awake, and she was aware that the cold she felt came far more from within than withoutSomewhere in the palace, she knew, the torturers would be attending to Camena di Chiara who had tried to kill a Tyrant and free his homeWho had done so knowing he would die and how he would die
Even now they would be with him, administering their precise measures of painWith a professional pride in their skill they would be breaking his fingers one by one, his wrists and his armsHis toes and ankles and legsThey would be doing it carefully, even tenderly, solicitously guarding the beat of his heart, so that after they had broken his back, which was always the last, they could strap him alive on a wheel and take him out to the harbor square to die in the sight of his people
She would never have dreamt Camena had such courage or so much passion in his heartShe had derided him as a poseur, a wearer of three-layered cloaks, a minor, trivial artist angling for ascension at courtYesterday afternoon had compelled a new shape to her image of himNow that he had done what he had done, now that his body had been given to the torturers and then the wheel there yacht master rolex was a question that could no more be buried than could her memories of BaerdNot unsheltered as she was and so awake
What, the thought came knifing home like a winter wind in the soul, did Camena's act make her?
What did it make of that long-ago quest a sixteen-year-old girl had so proudly set herself the night her brother went away? The night he'd seen a riselka under moonlight by the sea and gone in search of his Prince
She knew the answersShe knew the names that belonged to herThe names she had earned here on the IslandThey burned like sour wine in a woundAnd burning inside, even as she shivered, Dianora strove one more time to school her heart to begin the deathly hard, never yet successful, journey back to her own dominion from that room on the far wing of the palace where lay the King of Ygrath
That night was different thoughSomething had changed that night, because of what had happened, because of the finality, the absoluteness of what she herself had done in the Audience ChamberAcknowledging that, trying to deal with it, Dianora began to sense, as if from a very great distance, her heart's slow, painful retreat from the fires of loveA returning, and then a turning back, to the memory of other fires at homeFields burning, a city burning, a palace set aflame
No comfort there of courseNo comfort anywhere at allOnly an absolute reminder of who she was and why she was here
And lying very still in darkness on an Ember Night when country doors and windows were all closed chloe bags paddington against the dead and the magic in the fields, Dianora told over softly to herself the whole of the old foretelling verse:
One man sees a riselka
his life forks there
Two men see a riselka
one of them shall die
Three men see a riselka
one is blessed, one forks, one shall die

One woman sees a riselka
her path comes clear to her
Two women see a riselka
one of them shall bear a child
Three women see a riselka
one is blessed, one is clear, one shall bear a child

In the morning, she said to herself amid cold and fire and all the myriad confusions of the heartIn the morning it will begin as it should have begun and ended long ago
The Triad knew how bitter, how impossible all choices had seemed to herHow faint and elusive had been her dream within these walls of making it all come right for all of themBut of one truth she was now, finally, certain: she had needed something to be made clear along the twisting paths to betrayal that seemed to have become her life, and from Brandin's own lips she had learned how that clear path might be offered her
In the morning she would begin
Until then she could lie here, achingly awake and alone, as on another night at home so many years ago, and she could remember


PART THREE - EMBER TO EMBER

Chapter 9

IT WAS COLD IN THE GULLY BY THE SIDE OF THE ROADTHERE was a thin, sheltering line of birch trees between them and the gates of the Nievolene estate, but even so the wind was a knife whenever it picked up
There had been snow dior women last night, a rare thing this far north, even in midwinterIt had made for a white, chilled second night of riding from Ferraut town where they had started, but Alessan had refused to slow their paceHe had said increasingly little as the night wore on, and Baerd said little at the best of timesDevin had swallowed his questions and concentrated on keeping up
They had crossed the Astibar border in darkness and arrived at the Nievolene lands just after dawnThe horses were tethered in a grove about a half mile to the southwest, and the three men had made their way to this gully on footDevin dozed off at intervals through the morningThe snow made the landscape strange and crisp and lovely when the sun was out, but around mid-afternoon the grey clouds had gathered heavily overhead and it was only cold now, not beautiful at allIt had snowed again, briefly, about an hour before
When Devin heard the jingle of horses approaching through the greyness, he realized that the Triad, for once, were holding open palms toward themOr that, alternatively, the goddesses and the god had decided to give them a chance to do something fatally rashHe pressed himself as flat as he could to the wet ground of the gullyHe thought of Catriana and the Duke, warm and sheltered with Taccio in Ferraut
A company of about a dozen Barbadian mercenaries materialized out of the grey landscapeThey were laughing and singing in boisterous exuberanceTheir horses' breath and their own made white puffs of smoke in the chanel bag gold chain c