ssan did.
His first impression in the cabin had been mostly wrong: a big, blond man, intimidatingly cool and competent. But Baerd was dark-haired and not actually large at all and, though his competence ran to such an astonishing number of things that it could still be intimidating after six months, he wasn't really cool. Only guarded, careful. Closed tightly around the kernel of the hurt he had lived with for a long time.
In some ways, Devin realized, Alessan had it easier than Baerd. The Prince could find a temporary release in talk, in laughter, and most of all, and almost always, in music. Baerd seemed to have no release at all; he walked through a world shaped and reshaped every single moment around the knowledge that Tigana was gone.
It would drive him out at night sometimes, away from sleep, or from a fire they'd built up by a road. He would rise without warning, neatly, quietly, and go out into the darkness alone.
Devin would watch Alessan watching Baerd as he went away.
"I knew a man like him once," Sandre said gravely one night after Baerd had left a warm room in a tavern for a fog-shrouded winter night in the Tregean hills near Borifort. "He used to have to go away by himself to fight off a need to kill."
"That would be a part of it," Alessan had said.
Thoughts of winter, mood of a winter's night.
But it was spring now, and as the sap of the earth rose green-gold to the warming light so did Devin feel his own mood lifting to the stir and quickening of the world through which they rode.
Wait for springtime, Alessan had said amid the browns and reds of autumn trees and the bare, harvested vines. And spring was upon them now, with the Ember Days approaching fast and at last, at long last, they were on the road for Certando and whatever answers lay there. Devin could not quell and did not want to quell the sense rising within him like sap in the green woods that whatever was going to happen was going to begin to happen soon.
In the second cart beside Baerd he felt gloriously, importantly alive. Ahead of them the glint of afternoon sunlight in Catriana's hair was doing something strange and wonderful to his blood. He was aware of Baerd giving him a curious scrutiny, and caught a half-smile playing across the other's face. He didn't care. He was even glad. Baerd was his friend.
Devin began a song. A very old ballad of the road, "The Song of the Wayfarer":
I'm a long way from the house where I was born And this is just another winding trail, But when the sun goes down both of the moons will rise And Eanna's stars will hear me tell my tale . . .
Alessan, whatever his mood might be, was almost always ready to join in a song and, sure enough, Devin had the Tregean pipes with him by the second verse. He looked over and caught a wink from the Prince riding beside them.
Catriana glanced back at them reprovingly. Devin grinned at her and shrugged, and Alessan's pipes suddenly spun into a wilder dance of invitation. Catriana tried and failed to suppress a smile. She joined them on the third verse and then led them into the next song.\本\作\品\由\\網\提\供\下\載\與\在\線\閱\讀\
Later, in the summer, Devin would revive that image of the five of them in the first hour of the long ride south and the memory would make him feel very old.
He was young that day. In a way they all were, briefly, even Sandre, joining in on the choruses he knew in a passable baritone voice, reborn into his new identity, with a new hope to his long, unfading dream.
Devin took the third song back from Catriana, and sent his high clear voice along the road before them to lead the way down the sunlit, winding trail to Certando, to the Lady of Castle Borso, whoever she might be, and to whatever it was that Alessan had to find in the highlands.
First though, nearing sundown, they overtook a traveler on the road.
In itself that wasn't unusual. They were still in Ferraut, in the populated country north of Fort Ciorone where busy highways from Tregea and Corte met the north-south road they w