te and smoke grey. Beside them, vivid by contrast, sat a priestess of Adaon in crimson, with her hair cropped very short.
It was autumn of course, and the Ember Days were coming on: Devin wasn't surprised by her hair. He was surprised to see the clergy there for the audition. They made him uncomfortable, another legacy of his father, but this wasn't a situation where he could allow that to affect him, and so he dismissed them from his thoughts.
He focused on the Duke's elegant son, the only one who really mattered now. He waited, reaching as Menico had taught him for a still point inside himself.
Menico cued Nieri and Aldine, the two thin dancers in their grey-blue, almost translucent, chemises of mourning and their black gloves. A moment later, after their first linked pass across the floor, he looked at Devin.
And Devin gave him, gave them all, the lament for Adaon's autumnal dying among the mountain cypresses, as he never had before.
Alessan di Tregea was with him all the way with the high, heart-piercing grief of the shepherd pipes and together the two of them seemed to lift and carry Nieri and Aldine beyond the surface steps of their dance across the recently swept floor and into the laconic, precise articulation of ritual that the "Lament" demanded and was so rarely granted.
When they finished, Devin, traveling slowly back to the Sandreni Palace from the cedar and cypress slopes of Tregea where the god had died, and where he died again each and every autumn, saw that Sandre d'Astibar's son was weeping. The tracks of his tears had smudged the carefully achieved shadowing around his eyes, which meant, Devin realized abruptly, that he hadn't wept for any of the three companies before them.
Marra, young and intolerantly professional would have been scornful of those tears, he knew: "Why hire a mongrel and bark yourself?" she would say when their mourning rituals were interrupted or marked by displays from their patrons.
Devin had been less stern back then. And was even less so now since she'd died and he had found himself rather desperately fighting back a shameful public grief when Burnet di Corte had led his company through her mourning rites in Certando as a gesture of courtesy to Menico.
Devin also knew, by the smoldering look the Sandreni scion gave him from within the smeared dark rings around his eyes, and the scarcely less transparent glance from Morian's fat-fingered priest, why in the name of the Triad were the Triad so ill-served!, that though they might have just won the Sandreni contract he was going to have to be careful in this palace tomorrow. He made a mental note to bring his knife.
They had won the contract. The second number hardly mattered, which is why cunning Menico had begun with the "Lament." Afterwards Menico carefully introduced Devin as his partner when Sandre's son asked to meet him. He turned out to be the middle son of three, named Tomasso. The only one, he explained huskily, holding one of Devin's hands tightly between both his own, with an ear for music and an eye for dance adequate to choosing performers equal to so august an occasion as his father's funeral rites.♀本♀作♀品♀由♀♀網♀提♀供♀下♀載♀與♀在♀線♀閱♀讀♀
Devin, used to this, politely retrieved his fingers, grateful for Menico's experienced tact: presented as a partner he had some slight immunity from overly aggressive wooers, even among the nobility. He was introduced to the clergy next, and promptly knelt before Adaon's priestess in red.
"Your sanction, sister-of-the-god, for what I sang, and for what I am asked to do tomorrow."
Out of the corner of his eye he saw the priest of Morian clench his chubby, ringed fingers at his sides. He accepted the blessing and protection of Adaon, the priestess's index finger tracing the god's symbol on his brow, in the knowledge that he had successfully defused one priest's burgeoning desire. When he rose and turned, it was to catch a wink, dangerous in that room and among that company, from Alessan di Tregea, at the back with the o