l.
He was cold, and very sad. He moved forward and ended the silence, knocking gently on Catriana's door.
She'd had a restless night, for many reasons. Alienor had disturbed her: both the unbridled sensuousness that emanated from the woman, and the obviously close, unknown past she shared with Alessan and Baerd.
Catriana hated unknown things, information hidden from her. She still didn't know what Alessan was going to do tomorrow, what this mysterious meeting in the highlands was all about, and ignorance made her uneasy and even, on a less acknowledged level, afraid.
She wished she could be more like Devin sometimes, matching his seemingly tranquil acceptance of what he could or could not know. She has seen him storing away the pieces of what he did learn and patiently waiting to receive another piece, and then putting them together like the tiles of a children's puzzle game.
Sometimes she admired that, sometimes it made her wild and contemptuous to see him so accepting of Alessan's occasional reticence or Baerd's chronic reserve. Catriana needed to know. She had been ignorant for so much of her life, shielded from her own history in that tiny fishing village in Astibar. She felt that there was so much lost time to be regained. Sometimes it made her want to weep.
That was how she'd been feeling this evening before drifting into a shallow, uneasy sleep and a dream of home. She often dreamt of home since she'd left, especially of her mother.
This time she saw herself walking through the village just after sunrise, passing the last house, Tendo's, she even saw his dog, and then rounding the familiar curve of the shore to where her father had bought a derelict cottage and repaired it and raised a family.
In her dream she saw the boat already far out, trawling among the early-morning swell of the sea. It seemed to be springtime. Her mother was in the doorway of the cottage mending nets in the good light of the sunrise. Her eyes had been going bad for years and it was hard for her to work with her needle in the evenings. Catriana had gradually taken over the night-time needlework in her last year at home.
It was a beautiful morning in the dream. The stones of the beach gleamed and the breeze was fresh and light off the water. All the other boats were out as well, taking advantage of the morning, but it was easy to tell which one was their own. Catriana walked up the path and stood by the newly mended porch, waiting for her mother to look up and see her and leap to her feet with a cry, and fold her daughter in her arms.
Her mother did glance up from her work, but only to gaze seaward, squinting toward the light, to check the position of their boat. An old habit, a nervous one, and one that had probably done much to hurt her eyes. She'd a husband and three sons in that small boat though.
She didn't see her daughter at all. Catriana realized with a queer pain that she was invisible here. Because she had gone, because she had left them and wasn't there any longer. There was more grey, she saw, in her mother's hair, and her heart ached as she stood there in mild sunlight to see how worn and hard her mother's hands were, and how tired the kind face was. She had always thought of her mother as a young woman, until Tiena, the baby, had died in the plague six years ago. Things had changed after that.┇┇網┇文┇檔┇下┇載┇與┇在┇線┇閱┇讀┇
It isn't fair, she thought, and in the dream she cried aloud and was not heard.
Her mother sat on a wooden chair on the porch in the early light, working on the nets, occasionally looking up to check the position of one small boat among so many bobbing on this alien eastern sea so far from the one she'd loved.
Catriana woke, her body twisting violently away from all the hurts embedded in that image. She opened her eyes, waiting for her heartbeat to slow, lying under several blankets in a room in Castle Borso. Alienor's castle.
Alienor, who was the same age as Catriana's worn, tired mother. It truly was not fair. Why should she be