seemed entirely natural, coming from the tenor who had just sung the Duke's funeral lament. Devin learned about Sandre's long rule, his feuds, his bitter exile, and his sad decline in the last few years into a blustering, drunken hunter of small game, a wraith compared to what he once had been.
In that last context, rather more specifically, Devin asked about where the Duke had liked to hunt. They told him. They told him where his favorite hunting lodge had been. He changed the subject to wine.
It was easy. He was a hero of the hour and The Paelion liked heroes, for an hour. They let him go eventually: he pleaded an artist's strained sensitivity after the morning's endeavors. With the benefit of hindsight he now attached a deal more importance than he had at the time to glimpsing Alessan di Tregea at a booth full of painters and poets. They were laughing about some wager concerning certain verses of condolence that had not yet arrived from Chiara. He and Alessan had saluted each other in an elaborately showy, performers' fashion that delighted the packed room.
Back at the inn, Devin had fended off the most ardent of the group who had walked him home and went upstairs alone. He had waited in his room, chafing, for an hour to be sure the last of them had gone. Having changed into a dark-brown tunic and breeches, he put on a cap to hide his hair and a woolen overshirt against the coming chill of evening. Then he made his way unnoticed through the now teeming crowds in the streets over to the eastern gate of the city.
And out, among several empty wagons, goods all sold, being ridden back to the distrada by sober, prudent farmers who preferred to reload and return in the morning instead of celebrating all night in town spending what they'd just earned.
Devin hitched a ride on a cart part of the way, commiserating with the driver on the taxes and the poor rates being paid that year for lamb's wool. Eventually he jumped off, feigning youthful exuberance and ran a mile or so along the road to the east.
At one point he saw, with a grin of recognition, a temple of Adaon on the right. Just past it, as promised, was the delicately rendered image of a ship on the roadside gate of a modest country house. Rovigo's home, what Devin could see of it, set well back from the road among cypress and olive trees, looked comfortable and cared for.
A day ago, a different person, he would have stopped. But something had happened to him that morning within the dusty spaces of the Sandreni Palace. He kept going.
A half mile further on he found what he was looking for. He made sure he was alone and then quickly cut to his right, south into the woods, away from the main road that led to the east coast and Ardin town on the sea.
It was quiet in the forest and cooler where the branches and the many-colored leaves dappled the sunlight. There was a path winding through the trees and Devin began to follow it, towards the hunting lodge of the Sandreni. From here on he redoubled his caution. On the road he was simply a walker in the autumn countryside; here he was a trespasser with no excuse at all for being where he was. 本 作 品 由 網 提 供 下 載 與 在 線 閱 讀
Unless pride and the strange, dreamlike events of the morning just past could be called adequate excuses. Devin rather doubted it. At the same time, it remained to be seen whether he or a certain manipulative red-headed personage was going to dictate the shape and flow of this day and those to come. If she were under the impression that he was so easy to dupe, a helpless, youthful slave to his passions, blinded and deafened to anything else by the so-gracious offer of her body, well it was for this afternoon and this evening to show how wrong an arrogant girl could be.
What else the evening might reveal, Devin didn't know; he hadn't allowed himself to slow down long enough to consider the question.
There was no one there when he came to the lodge, though he lay silently among the trees for a long time to be certain. The front door wa