n two ways only."
He held up a long finger. "One: as musicians we have an excuse to cross back and forth across the Palm, which offers advantages I need not belabor." A second finger shot up beside the first. "Two: music trains the mind, like mathematics, or logic, to precision of detail. The sort of precision, my lords, that would have precluded the carelessness that has marked tonight. If Sandre d'Astibar were alive I would discuss it with him, and I might defer to his experience and his long striving."
He paused, looking from one to another of them, then said, much more softly: "I might, but I might not. It is a vanished tune, that one, never to be sung. As matters stand I can only say again that if we are to work together I must ask you to accept my lead."
He spoke this last directly to Scalvaia who still lounged, elegant and expressionless, in his deep chair. It was Nievole who answered, though, blunt and direct.
"I am not in the habit of delaying my judgment of men. I think you mean what you say and that you are more versed in these things than we are. I accept. I will follow your lead. With a single condition."
"Which is?"
"That you tell us your name."
Devin, watching with rapacious intensity, anxious not to miss a word or a nuance, saw Alessan's eyes close for an instant, as if to hold back something that might otherwise have shown through them. The others waited through the short silence.
Then Alessan shook his head. "It is a fair condition, my lord. Under the circumstances it is entirely fair. I can only pray you will not hold me to it though. It is a grief, I cannot tell you how much of a grief it is, but I am unable to accede."
For the first time he appeared to be reaching for words, choosing them carefully. "Names are power, as you know. As the two tyrant-sorcerers from overseas most certainly know. And as I have been made to know in the bitterest ways there are. My lord, you will learn my name in the moment of our triumph if it comes, and not before. I will say that this is imposed upon me; it is not a choice freely made. You may call me Alessan, which is common enough here in the Palm and happens to be truly the name my mother gave me. Will you be gracious enough to let that suffice you, my lord, or must we now part ways?"
The last question was asked in a tone bereft of the arrogance that had infused the man's bearing and speech from the moment of his arrival.
Just as Devin's earlier fear had given way to excitement, so now did excitement surrender to something else, something he could not yet identify. He stared at Alessan. The man seemed younger than before, somehow, unable to prevent this almost naked showing of his need.
Nievole cleared his throat loudly, as if to dispel an aura, a resonance of something that seemed to have entered the room like the mingled light of the two moons outside. Another owl hooted from the clearing. Nievole opened his mouth to reply to Alessan.▲▲文▲檔▲共▲享▲與▲在▲線▲閱▲讀▲
They never knew what he would have said, or Scalvaia.
Afterwards, on nights when sleep eluded him and he watched one or both moons sweep the sky or counted the stars in Eanna's Diadem in a moonless dark, Devin would let his clear memory of that moment carry him back, trying, for reasons he would have found difficult to explain, to imagine what the two lords would have done or said had all their briefly tangled fate lines run differently from that lodge.
He could guess, analyze, play out scenarios in his mind, but he would never know. It was a night-time truth that became a queer, private sorrow for him amid all that came after. A symbol, a displacement of regret. A reminder of what it was to be mortal and so doomed to tread one road only and that one only once, until Morian called the soul away and Eanna's lights were lost. We can never truly know the path we have not walked.
The paths that each of the men in that lodge were to walk, through their own private portals to endings near or far were laid down by the owl that cried