lowly back towards Tregea. They didn't need three carts. They were partners in a modest commercial venture. They made what slight profit they could, given the taxes and duties that trammeled them. They talked about those taxes and duties a great deal, often in public. Sometimes more frankly than their listeners were accustomed to hearing.
Alessan quarreled with the sardonic Khardhu warrior in a dozen different inns and taverns on the road, and hired him a dozen different times. Sometimes Devin played a role, sometimes Baerd did. They were careful not to repeat the performance anywhere. Catriana kept a precise log of where they had been and what they had said and done there. Devin had assured her they could rely on his memory, but she kept her notes nonetheless.
In public the Duke now called himself "Tomaz." "Sandre" was an uncommon-enough name in the Palm, and for a mercenary from Khardhun it would be sufficiently odd to be a risk. Devin remembered growing thoughtful when the Duke had told them his new name back in the fall. He'd wondered what it was like to have had to kill his son. Even to outlive his sons. To know that the bodies of everyone even distantly related to himself were being spreadeagled alive on the death-wheels of Barbadior. He tried to imagine how all of that would feel.
Life, the processes of living and what it did to you, seemed to Devin to grow more painfully complex all through that fall and winter. Often he thought of Marra, arbitrarily cut off on the way to her maturity, to whatever she had been about to become. He missed her with a dull ache that could grow into something heavy and difficult at times. She would have been someone to talk to about such things. The others had their own concerns and he didn't want to burden them. He wondered about Alais bren Rovigo, if she would have understood these things he was wrestling with. He didn't think so; she had lived too sheltered, too secluded a life for such thoughts to trouble her. He dreamt of her one night though, an unexpectedly intense series of images. The next morning he rode beside Catriana in the lead cart, unwontedly quiet, stirred and unsettled by the nearness of her, the crimson fall of her hair in the pale winter landscape.
Sometimes he thought about the soldier in the Nievolene barn, who had lost a roll of dice and carried a jug of wine to a lonely place away from the singing, and had had his throat slit there while he slept. Had that soldier been born into the world only to become a rite of passage for Devin di Tigana?
That was a terrible thought. Eventually, mulling it over through the long, cold winter rides, Devin worked his way through to deciding it was untrue. The man had interacted with other people through his days. Had caused pleasure and sorrow, doubtless, and had surely known both things. The moment of his ending was not what denned his journey under Eanna's lights, or however that journey was named in the Empire of Barbadior.
It was difficult to sort out though. Had Stevan of Ygrath lived and died so that his father's grief might work the destruction of a small province and its people and their memories? Had Prince Valentin di Tigana been born only to swing the killing blade that caused this to happen? And what about his youngest son then?
And what about the youngest son of the Asolini farmer who had fled from Avalle when it became Stevanien? Truly, it was hard to puzzle through.◇◇網◇
In Senzio one morning, with the first elusive hints of spring softening the northern air, Baerd had come back from the celebrated weapons market with a bright, beautifully balanced sword for Devin. There was a black jewel in the hilt. He offered no explanation, but Devin knew it had to do with what had happened in the Nievolene barn. The gift did nothing to answer any of his new questions, but it helped him nonetheless. Baerd began giving him lessons during their midday breaks on the road.
Devin worried about Baerd, in part because he knew that Ale