t a word spoken the three of them slipped into the trees again beside the road. After a moment there was a flicker of torchlight to the west and Devin heard the sound of a cart approaching. There were voices, male and female both. Revelers returning home late, he guessed. There was a Festival going on. In some ways it had begun to seem another irrelevance. They waited for the cart to go by.
It did not. The horse was pulled up, with a soft slap and jingle of reins just in front of where they were hiding. Someone jumped down, then they heard him unlocking a chain on a gate.
"I really am hopelessly overindulgent," they heard him complain. "Every single time I look at this excuse for a crest I am reminded that I should have had an artisan design it. There are limits, or there ought to be, to what a father allows!"
Devin recognized the place and the voice in the same moment. An impulse, a striving back toward the ordinary and familiar after what had happened in the night, made him rise.
"Trust me," he whispered as Alessan threw him a glance. "This is a friend."
Then he stepped out into the road.
"I thought it was a handsome design," he said clearly. "Better than most artisans I know. And, to tell the truth, Rovigo, I remember you saying the same thing to me yesterday afternoon in The Bird."
"I know that voice," Rovigo replied instantly. "I know that voice and I am exceedingly glad to hear it, even though you have just unmasked me before a shrewish wife and a daughter who has long been the bane of her father's unfortunate existence. Devin d'Asoli, if I am not mistaken!"
He strode forward from the gate, seizing the cart lantern from its bracket. Devin heard relieved laughter from the two women in the cart. Behind him, Alessan and then Catriana stepped into the road.
"You are not mistaken," Devin said. "May I introduce two of my company members: Catriana d'Astibar and Alessan di Tregea. This is Rovigo, a merchant with whom I was sharing a bottle in elegant surroundings when Catriana arranged to have me assaulted and ejected yesterday."
"Ah!" Rovigo exclaimed, holding the lantern higher. "The sister!"
Catriana, lit by the widened cast of the flame, smiled demurely. "I needed to talk to him," she said by way of explanation. "I didn't much want to go inside that place."
"A wise and a providential woman," Rovigo approved, grinning. "Would that my clutch of daughters were half so intelligent. No one," he added, "should much want to go inside The Bird unless they have a head-cold so virulent that it defeats all sense of smell."
Alessan burst out laughing. "Well-met on a dark road, Master Rovigo, the more so if you are the owner of a vessel called the Sea Maid."
Devin blinked in astonishment.
"I have indeed the great misfortune to own and sail that un-seaworthy excuse for a vessel," Rovigo admitted cheerfully. "How do you come to know it, friend?"＠＠文＠檔＠共＠享＠與＠在＠線＠閱＠讀＠
Alessan seemed highly amused. "Because I was asked to seek you out if I could. I have tidings for you from Ferraut town. From a somewhat portly, red-faced personage named Taccio."
"My esteemed factor in Ferraut!" Rovigo exclaimed. "Well met, indeed! By the god, where did you encounter him?"
"In another tavern, I am sorry to have to say. A tavern where I had been playing music and he was . . . well, escaping retribution was his own phrase. We two were, as it happened, the last patrons of the night. He wasn't in any great hurry to return home, for what seemed to me prudent reasons, and we fell to talking."
"It is never hard to fall to talking with Taccio," Rovigo assented.
Devin heard a giggle from the cart. It didn’t sound like the amusement of a ponderous, unmarriageable daughter. He was beginning to take the measure of Rovigo's attitude to his women. In the darkness he found himself grinning.
Alessan said, "The worthy Taccio explained his dilemma to me, and when I came to mention that I had just joined the company of Menico di Ferraut and was bound this way for the Festival he