girl off to fetch the pipes while he set about refilling everyone's glass.
Devin caught Alais looking at him from the seat she'd taken next to the fire. Reflexively he smiled at her. She didn't smile back, but her gaze, mild and serious, did not break away. He felt a small, unsettling skip to the rhythm of his heart.
As it turned out, after the meal was over he and Catriana sang for better than an hour to Alessan's pipes. Part of the way through, as they began one of the rousing old Certandan highland ballads, Rovigo left briefly and returned with a linked pair of Senzian drums. Shyly at first, very softly, he joined in on the refrain, proving as competent at that as at everything else Devin had seen him do. Catriana favored him with a particularly dazzling smile. Rovigo needed no further encouragement to stay with them on the next song, and the next.
No man, Devin found himself thinking, should need more encouragement to do anything in the world than that look from those blue eyes. Not that Catriana had ever favored him with anything remotely resembling such a glance. He found himself feeling somewhat confused all of a sudden.
Someone, Alais evidently, had filled his glass a third time. He drank a little more quickly than was good for him, given the legendary potency of blue wine, and then he led the other three into the next number: the last one for the two younger girls, Alix ruled, over protests.
He couldn't sing of Tigana, and he was certainly not about to sing of passion or love, so he began the very old song of Eanna's making the stars and committing the name of every single one of them to her
memory, so that nothing might ever be lost or forgotten in the deeps of space or time.
It was the closest he could come to what the night had meant to him, to why, in the end, he had made the choice he had.
As he began it, he received a look from Alessan, thoughtful and knowing, and a quick, enigmatic glance from Catriana as they joined with him. Rovigo's drums fell silent this time as the merchant listened. Devin saw Alais, her black hair backlit by the fire, watching him with grave concentration. He sang one whole verse directly to her, then, in fidelity to the song, he sent his vision inward to where his purest music was always found, and he looked at no one at all as he sang to Eanna herself, a hymn to names and the naming of things.
Somewhere, part of the way through, he had a bright image in his mind of a blue-white star named Micaela aloft in a black night, and he let the keenness of that carry him, high and soaring, up toward Catriana's harmony and then back down softly to an end.
In the quiet of the mood so shaped, Selvena and the two younger girls went to bed with surprising tranquility. A few moments later Alix rose as well, and so, to Devin's disappointment, did Alais.◎◎文◎檔◎共◎享◎與◎在◎線◎閱◎讀◎
In the doorway she turned and looked at Catriana. "You must be very tired," Rovigo's daughter said. "If you like I can show you your room now. I hope you don't mind sharing with me. Selvena usually does, but she's in with the girls tonight."
Devin expected Catriana to demur, or worse, at this fairly transparent separation of the women and the men. She surprised him again though, hesitating only a second before rising. "I am tired, and I don't mind sharing at all," she said. "It will remind me of home."
Devin, who had been smiling at the irony of the situation suddenly found the expression less appropriate than he'd thought. Catriana had seen him grinning though; he wished, abruptly, that she hadn't. She was sure to misunderstand. It occurred to him, with a genuine sense of unreality, that they had made love together that morning.
For some time after the women had gone the three men sat in silence, each lost in his own thoughts. Rovigo rose at length and refilled their glasses with the last of the wine. He put another log on the fire and watched until it caught. With a sigh he sank back into his chair. Toying with his glass he looked from o