ed passion in him. Her heart misgave her constantly, even as they reached for their fugitive joy: too bright this forbidden flame in a land where any kind of brightness was lost or not allowed.
He came to her every night. The woman slept downstairs; their mother slept, and woke, in her own world. In the dark of Dianora's room they escaped into each other, reaching through loss and the knowledge of wrong in search of innocence.
He was still driven to go out some nights to walk the empty streets. Not as often as before, for which she gave thanks and sought a kind of justification for herself. A number of young men had been caught after curfew and killed on the wheels that spring. If what she was doing kept him alive she would face whatever judgment lay in wait for her in Morian's Halls.
She couldn't keep him every night though. Sometimes a need she could not share or truly understand would drive him forth. He tried to explain. How the city was different under the two moons or one of them or the stars. How softer light and shadow let him see it as Tigana again. How he could walk silently down towards the sea and come upon the darkened palace, and how the rubble and ruin of it could somehow be rebuilt in his mind in darkness towards what it had been before.
He had a need for that, he said. He never baited the soldiers and promised her he never would. He didn't even want to see them, he said. They crashed into the illusions he wanted. He just needed to be abroad inside his memory of the city that had gone. Sometimes, Baerd told her, he would slip through gaps he knew in the harbor walls and walk along the beach listening to the sea.
By day he labored, a thin boy at a strong man's job, helping to rebuild what they were permitted to rebuild. Rich merchants from Corte, their ancient enemies, had been allowed to settle in the city, to buy up the smashed buildings and residential palaces very inexpensively, and to set about restoring them for their own purposes.
Baerd would come home at the end of a day sometimes with gashes and fresh bruises, and once the mark of a whip across his shoulders. She knew that if one company of soldiers had ended their sport with him there were others to pick it up. It was only happening here, she'd heard. Everywhere else the soldiers restrained themselves and the King of Ygrath was governing with care, to consolidate his provinces against Barbadior.
In Lower Corte they were special, though. They had killed his son.
She would see those marks on Baerd and she had not the heart to ask him to deny himself his lost city at night when the need rose in him. Even though she lived a hundred terrors and died half a hundred deaths every time the front door closed behind him after dark, until she heard it open again and heard his loved, familiar footstep on the stairs, and then the landing, and then he came into her room to take and hold her in his arms.
It went on into summer and then it ended. It all ended, as her knowing heart had forewarned her from that first time in darkness, listening to the birds singing and the wind in the trees outside.
He came home no later than he usually did from walking abroad one night when blue Ilarion had been riding alone through a high lacework of clouds. It had been a beautiful night. She had sat up late by her window watching the moonlight falling on the rooftops. She'd been in bed when he came home though, and her heart had quickened with the familiar intermingling of relief and guilt and need. He had come into her room.▃▃網▃文▃檔▃下▃載▃與▃在▃線▃閱▃讀▃
He didn't come to bed. Instead, he sank into the chair she'd sat in by the window. With a queer, numb feeling of dread she had struck tinder and lit her candle. She sat up and looked at him. His face was very white, she could see that even by candlelight. She said nothing. She waited.
"I was on the beach," Baerd said quietly. "I saw a riselka there."
She had always known it would end. That it had to end.
She asked the instinctive question. "Did anyo