d watched this thing come to pass.
The grief in that accusation clenched itself like a fist within Devin, more tightly than Baerd could ever have known. Than anyone could have known. For no one since Marra had died really knew what memory meant to Devin d'Asoli: the way in which it had come to be the touchstone of his soul.
Memory was talisman and ward for him, gateway and hearth. It was pride and love, shelter from loss: for if something could be remembered it was not wholly lost. Not dead and gone forever. Marra could live; his dour, stern father hum a cradle song to him. And because of this, because this was at the heart of what Devin was, the old vengeance of Brandin of Ygrath smashed into him that night as if it had been newly wrought, pounding through to the vulnerable center of how Devin saw and dealt with the world, and it cut him like a fresh and killing wound.
With an effort he forced himself to steadiness, willing the concentration that would allow him to remember this. All of this. Which seemed to matter more than ever now. Especially now, with the echo of Baerd's last terrible words fading in the night. Devin looked at the blond-haired man with the leather bands across his brow and about his neck, and he waited. He had been quick as a boy; he was a clever man. He understood what was coming; it had fallen into place.
Older by far than he had been only an hour ago, Devin heard Alessan murmur from behind him, "The cradle song I heard you playing was from that last province, Devin. A song of the city of towers. No one not of that place could have learned that tune in the way you told me you did. It is how I knew you as one of us. It is why I did not stop you when you followed Catriana. I left it to Morian to see what might lie beyond that doorway."
Devin nodded, absorbing this. A moment later he said, as carefully as he could, "If this is so, if I have properly understood you, then I should be one of the people who can still hear and remember the name that has been . . . otherwise taken away."
Alessan said, "It is so."
Devin discovered that his hands were shaking. He looked down at them, concentrating, but he could not make them stop.
He said, "Then this is something that has been stolen from me all my life. Will you . . . give it back to me? Will you tell me the name of the land where I was born?"
He was looking at Baerd by starlight, for Ilarion too was gone now, over west beyond the trees. Alessan had said it was Baerd's to tell. Devin didn't know why. In the darkness they heard the trialla one more time, a long, descending note, and then Baerd spoke, and for the first time in his days Devin heard someone say:
"Tigana."
Within him the bell he had been hearing, as if in a dream of unknown summer fields, fell silent. And within that abrupt, absolute inner stillness a surge of loss broke over him like an ocean wave. And after that wave came another, and then a third, the one bearing love and the other a heart-deep pride. He felt a strange light-headed dizzying sensation as of a summons rushing along the corridors of his blood.⑥⑥網⑥
Then he saw how Baerd was staring at him. Saw his face rigid and white, the fear transparent even by starlight, and something else as well: bitterest thirst, an aching, deprived hunger of the soul. And then Devin understood, and gave to the other man the release he needed.
"Thank you," Devin said. He didn't seem to be trembling anymore. Around a difficult thickness in his throat he went on, for it was his turn now, his test:
"Tigana. Tigana. I was born in the province of Tigana. My name . . . my true name is Devin di Tigana bar Garin."
Even as he spoke, something akin to glory blazed in Baerd's face. The fair-haired man squeezed his eyes tightly shut as if to hold that glory in, to keep it from escaping into the dispersing dark, to clutch it fiercely to his need. Devin heard Alessan draw an unsteady breath, and then, surprised, he felt Catriana touch his shoulder and then withdraw