her hand.
Baerd was lost in a place beyond speech. It was Alessan who said, "That is one of the two names taken away, and the deepest. Tigana was our province and the name of the royal city by the sea. The fairest city under Eanna's lights you would have heard it named. Or perhaps, perhaps only the second most fair."
A thread of something that seemed to genuinely long to become laughter was in his voice. Laughter and love together. For the first time Devin turned to look up at him.
Alessan said, "If you were to have spoken with those from inland and south, in the city where the River Sperion, descending from the mountain, begins its run westward to find the sea, you would have heard it said that second way. For we were always proud, and there was always rivalry between the two cities."
In the end, hard as he tried, his voice could only carry loss.
"You were born in that inland city, Devin, and so was I. We are children of that high valley and of the silver running of that mountain river. We were born in Avalle. In Avalle of the Towers."
There was music in Devin's mind again, with that name, but this time it was different from the bells he'd heard before. This time it was a music that took him back a long way, all the way to his father and his childhood.
He said, "You do know the words then, don't you?"
"Of course I do," said Alessan gently.
"Please?" Devin asked.
But it was Catriana who answered him, in the voice a young mother might have used, rocking her child to sleep on an evening long ago:
Springtime morning in Avalle And I don't care what the priests say: I'm going down to the river today On a springtime morning in Avalle.
When I'm all grown up, come what may, I'll build a boat to carry me away And the river will take it to Tigana Bay And the sea even further from Avalle.
But wherever I wander, by night or by day, Where water runs swiftly or high trees sway, My heart will carry me back and away To a dream of the towers of Avalle.
A dream of my home in Avalle.
The sweet sad words to the tune he'd always known drifted down to Devin, and with them came something else. A sense of loss so deep it almost drowned the light grace of Catriana's song. No breaking waves now, or trumpets along the blood: only the waters of longing. A longing for something taken away from him before he'd even known it was his, taken so completely, so comprehensively he might have lived his whole life through without ever knowing it was gone.
And so Devin wept as Catriana sang. Small boys, young-looking for their age, learned very early in northern Asoli how risky it was to cry where someone might see. But something too large for Devin to deal with had overtaken him in the forest tonight.==
If he understood properly what Alessan had just said, this song was one his mother would have sung to him.
His mother whose life had been ripped away by Brandin of Ygrath. He bowed his head, though not to shield the tears, and listened as Catriana finished that bitter-sweet cradle song: a song of a child defying orders and authority, even when young, who was self-reliant enough to want to build a ship alone and brave enough to want to sail it into the wideness of the world, never turning back. Nor ever losing or forgetting the place where it all began.
A child very much as Devin saw himself.
Which was one of the reasons he wept. For he had been made to lose and forget those towers, he'd been robbed of any dream he himself might ever have had of Avalle. Or Tigana on its bay.
So his tears followed one another downward in darkness as he mourned his mother and his home. And in the shadows of that wood not far from Astibar those two griefs fused to each other in Devin and became welded in the forge of his heart with what memory meant to him and the loss of memory: and out of that blazing something took shape in Devin that was to change the running of his life line from that night.
He dried his eyes on his sleeve and looked up. No one spoke. He saw t