ted.
He hadn't smiled, saying any of this, though he was a man with an easy smile.
Devin remembered how Catriana had tossed her hair then, with a knowing, almost an angry look in her blue eyes.
"It's Alienor, isn't it?" she demanded, virtually an accusation. "It's that woman at Castle Borso."
Alessan's mouth had twisted in surprise and then amusement. "Not so, my dear," he'd said. "We'll stop at Borso, but this has nothing to do with her at all. If I didn't know better, if I didn't know your heart belonged only to Devin, I'd say you sounded jealous, my darling."
The gibe had entirely the desired effect. Catriana had stormed off, and Devin, almost as embarrassed himself, had quickly changed the subject. Alessan had a way of doing that to you. Behind the deep, effortless courtesy and the genuine camaraderie, there existed a line they learned not to try to cross. If he was seldom harsh, his jests, always the first measure of control, could sting memorably. Even the Duke had discovered that it was best not to press Alessan on certain subjects. Including this one, it emerged: when asked, Sandre said he knew as little as they did about what would happen come spring.
Thinking about it, as fall gave way to winter and the rains and then the snows came, Devin was deeply aware that Alessan was the Prince of a land that was dying a little more with each passing day. Under the circumstances, he decided, the wonder wasn't that there were places they could not trespass upon but, rather, how far they could actually go before reaching the guarded regions that lay within.
One of the things Devin began to learn during that long winter was patience. He taught himself to hold his questions for the right time, or to restrain them entirely and try to work the answers for himself. If fuller knowledge had to wait for spring, then he would wait. In the meantime he threw himself, with an unleashed, even an unsuspected passion, into what they were doing.
A blade had been planted in his own soul that starry autumn night in the Sandreni Woods.
He'd had no idea what to expect when they'd set out five days later with Rovigo's horse-drawn cart and three other horses, bound for Ferraut town with a bed and a number of wooden carvings of the Triad. Taccio had written Rovigo that he could sell Astibarian religious carvings at a serious profit to merchants from the Western Palm. Especially because, as Devin learned, duty was not levied on Triad-related artifacts: part of a successful attempt by both sorcerers to keep the clergy placated and neutralized.
Devin learned a great deal about trade that fall and winter, and about certain other things as well. With his new, hard-won patience he would listen in silence as Alessan and the Duke tossed ideas back and forth on the long roads, turning the rough coals of a concept into the diamonds of polished plans. And even though his own dreams at night were of raising a surging army to liberate Tigana and storm the fabled harbor walls of Chiara, he quickly came to understand, on the cold paths of day, that theirs would have to be a wholly different approach.≡本≡作≡品≡由≡≡網≡提≡供≡下≡載≡與≡在≡線≡閱≡讀≡
Which was, in fact, why they were still in the east, not the west, and doing all they could, with the small glittering diamonds of Alessan and Sandre's plans, to unsettle things in Alberico's realm. Once Catriana confided to him, on one of the days when, for whatever reason, she deemed him worth speaking to, that Alessan was, in fact, moving much more aggressively than he had the year before when she'd first joined them. Devin suggested it might be Sandre's influence. Catriana had shaken her head. She thought that was a part of it, but that there was something else, a new urgency from a source she didn't understand.
We'll find out in the spring, Devin had shrugged. She'd glared at him, as if personally affronted by his equanimity.
It had been Catriana though who'd suggested the most aggressive thing of all as winter began: the faked suicide in Tregea. Along