xpression wounded. "That isn't fair," he protested. "It is just the music. You both know that."
Devin hadn't. Alessan was still gazing at Baerd. "You know it is only the music I'm going back for."
"Of course I know that," Baerd said softly. His expression changed. "I'm only afraid that the music will kill us both one of these days."
Intercepting the look that passed between them then, Devin learned something new and sudden and unexpected, on a night when he'd already learned more things than he could easily handle, about the nature of bonding and about love.
"Go," said Baerd with a scowl, as Alessan still hesitated. Catriana was already by the door. "We will meet you after the Festival. By the cache. Don't," he added, "expect to recognize us."
Alessan grinned suddenly, and a moment later Baerd allowed himself to smile as well. It changed his face a great deal. He didn't, Devin realized, smile very often.
He was still thinking about that as he followed Alessan and Catriana out the door and into the darkness of the wood again.

Chapter 6

IT HAPPENED, THE LONG PATH OF THAT DAY AND NIGHT DID not lead back to the inn after all.
The three of them returned through the forest to the main road from Astibar to Ardin town. They walked in silence along the road under the arch of the autumn stars, cicadas loud in the woods on either side. Devin was glad of his woolen overshirt; it was chilly now, there might be a frost tonight.
It was strange to be abroad in the darkness so late. When they were traveling Menico was always careful to have his company quartered and settled by the dinner hour. Even with the stern measures both Tyrants had taken against thieves and brigands, the paths of the Palm were not often traveled by decent folk at night.
Folk such as he himself had been, only this morning. He had been secure in his niche and his calling, had even had, improbably enough, a triumph. He'd been poised on the edge of a genuine success. And now he was walking a road in darkness having abandoned any such prospects or security, and having sworn an oath that marked him for a death-wheel, in Chiara if not here. Both places actually, if Tomasso bar Sandre talked.·本·作·品·由··網·提·供·下·載·與·在·線·閱·讀·
It was an odd, lonely feeling. He trusted the men he had joined, he even trusted the girl, if it came to that, but he didn't know them very well. Not like he knew Menico or Eghano after so many years.
It occurred to him that the same dilemma applied to the cause he had just sworn to make his own: he didn't know Tigana either, which was the whole point of what Brandin of Ygrath had done with his sorcery. Devin was in the process of changing his life for a story told under the moon, for a childhood song, an evocation of his mother, something almost purely an abstraction for him. A name.
He was honest enough to wonder if he was doing this as much for the adventure of it, for the glamor that Alessan and Baerd and the old Duke represented, as for the depth of old pain and grief he'd learned about in the forest tonight. He didn't know the answer. He didn't know how much Catriana fitted into his reasons, how much his father did, or pride, or the sound of Baerd's voice speaking his loss to the night.
The truth was that if Sandre d'Astibar could stop his son from talking, as he had promised to do, then there was nothing to prevent Devin from carrying on exactly as he had for the past six years. From having the triumph and the rewards that seemed to lie before him. He shook his head. It was astonishing in a way, but that course, with Menico on the road, performing across the Palm, the life he'd woken to this morning, seemed almost inconceivable to him now, as if he'd already crossed to the other side of some tremendous divide. Devin wondered how often men did what they did, made the choices of their lives, for reasons that were clean and uncomplicated and easily understood as they were happening.
He was jolted from his reverie by Alessan abruptly raising a hand in warning. Withou