and merciless.
There were a number of refugees in the summer Dianora went east, but none had anything remotely resembling her own fixed purpose and so most of them went much further away: to the far side of the Certandan grainlands, to Ferraut, Tregea, Astibar itself. Willing, anxious even, to live under the spreading tyranny of the Barbadian lord in order to put as much distance as they could between themselves and their images of what Brandin of Ygrath had done to their home.
But Dianora was clinging to those images, she was nursing them within her breast, feeding them with hate, shaping hatred with memory. Twin snakes inside her.
She only went a handful of miles across the border into Certando. The late-summer fields of corn had been yellow and tall, she remembered, but all the men were gone, away to the north and east where Alberico of Barbadior, having carefully consolidated his conquests of Ferraut and Astibar, was now moving south.
He was master of Certando by the end of the fall, and had taken Borifort in Tregea, the last major stronghold to stand against him, by the following spring after a winter siege.
Long before then Dianora had found what she was looking for, in the western highlands of Certando. A hamlet, twenty houses and a tavern, south of Sinave and Forese, the two great forts that watched each other on either side of the border that divided Certando from what she learned to call Lower Corte.
The land so near the southern mountains was not nearly as good as it was farther north. The growing season was shorter. Cold winds swept down from the Braccio and Sfaroni Ranges early in fall bringing snow soon after and a long white winter. Wolves would howl in the wintry nights and sometimes in the morning strange footmarks could be found in the deep snow, marks that came down from the mountains and then returned.
Once, long ago, the village had been near to one of the roads forking northeast from the main highway down from the Sfaroni Pass, in the days when there was still overland trade with Quileia to the south. That was why the ancient tavern was so large in a village now so small, why it had four rooms upstairs for the travelers who had not come for a great many years.
Dianora hid her father's silver south of the village on a thickly wooded slope away from the goatherd runs, and she went to work as a serving girl in the tavern. There was no money to pay her of course. She worked for her room and the scanty board available that first summer and fall, and she labored in the fields with the other women and the young boys to bring home what they could of the harvest.◇◇
She told them she was from the north, near Ferraut. That her mother was dead and her father and brother had gone to war. She said her uncle had begun to abuse her and so she had run away. She was good with accents and she had the northern speech right enough for them to believe her. Or at least to ask no questions. There were many transients in the Palm in those days, questions were seldom pushed too far. She ate little and worked as hard as any in the fields. There was actually little enough to do in the inn, with the men away to war. She slept in one of the rooms upstairs, she even had it to herself. They were kind enough to her after their fashion, and given the nature of things in that time.
When the light and the place were right, morning usually, and in certain of the higher fields, she could look away to the west across the border towards the river and see the remaining towers and the smoke above what had been Avalle. One morning, late in the year, she realized that she couldn't see anything anymore. That she hadn't, in fact, seen anything for some time. The last tower was gone.
Around that time the men had begun to come home, beaten and weary. There was work again in the kitchen and waiting on tables or behind the counter of the bar. She was also expected, and had been preparing herself for this as best she could all through the fall,