regretfully as they ended. "My father taught me that tune as a child, but he could never remember how the words went."
Alessan's lean, mobile face was reflective. Devin knew little about the Tregean after two weeks of rehearsal other than that the man was extraordinarily good on the pipes and quite reliable. As Menico's partner, that was all that should matter to him. Alessan was seldom around the inn outside of practice-time, but he was always there and punctual for the rehearsals slated.
"I might be able to dredge them up for you if I thought about it," he said, pushing a hand through his hair in a characteristic gesture. "It's been a long time but I knew the words once." He smiled.
"Don't worry about it," Devin said. "I've survived this long without them. It's just an old song, a memento of my father. If you stay with us we can make it a winter project to try to track them down."
Menico would approve of that last bit, he knew. The troupe-leader had declared Alessan di Tregea to be a find, and cheap at the wages he'd asked.
The other man's expressive mouth crooked sideways, a little wryly. "Old songs and memories of fathers are important," he said. "Is yours dead then?"
Devin made the warding sign with his hand out and two fingers curled down.
"Not last I heard, though I've not seen him in almost six years. Menico spoke to him when he went through the north of Asoli last time, took him some chiaros for me. I don't go back to the farm."
Alessan considered that. "Dour Asolini stock?" he guessed. "No place for a boy with ambition and a voice like yours?" His tone was shrewd.
"Almost exactly," Devin admitted ruefully. "Though I wouldn't have called myself ambitious. Restless, more. And we weren't originally from Asoli in fact. Came there from Lower Corte when I was a small child."
Alessan nodded. "Even so," he said. The man had a bit of a know-it-all manner, Devin decided, but he could play the Tregean pipes. The way they might even have sounded on Adaon's own mountain in the south.
In any case, they had no time to pursue the matter.
"We're on!" Menico said, hastily re-entering the room where they were waiting amid the dust and covered furniture of the long-unused Sandreni Palace.
"We do the 'Lament for Adaon' first," he announced, telling them something they'd all known for hours. He wiped his palms on the side of his doublet. "Devin that one's yours, make me proud, lad." His standard exhortation. "Then all of us are together on the 'Circling of Years.' Catriana my love you are sure you can go high enough, or should we pitch down?"
"I'll go high enough," Catriana replied tersely. Devin thought her tone spoke to simple nervousness, but when her gaze met his for a second he recognized that earlier look again: the one that reached somewhere beyond desire towards a shore he didn't know.
"I'd very much like to get this contract," Alessan di Tregea said just then, mildly enough. 本 作 品 由 網 提 供 下 載 與 在 線 閱 讀
"How extremely surprising!" Devin snapped, discovering as he spoke that he too was nervous after all. Alessan laughed though, and so did old Eghano walking through the door with them: Eghano who had seen far too much in too many years of touring to ever be made edgy by a mere audition. Without saying a word, he had, as he always had, an immediately calming effect on Devin.
"I'll do the best I can," Devin said after a moment and for the second time that afternoon, not really certain to whom he was saying it, or why.
In the end, whether because of the Triad or in spite of them, as his father used to say, his best was enough.
The principal auditor was a delicately scented, extravagantly dressed scion of the Sandreni, a man, in his late thirties, Devin guessed, who made it manifest, in his limp posture and the artificially exaggerated shadows that ringed his eyes, why Alberico the Tyrant didn't appear to be much worried about the descendants of Sandre d'Astibar.
Ranged behind this diverting personage were the priests of Eanna and Morian in whi