Sometimes, even now, it was all a little too much, a little hard to believe. The younger castrates trembled if she even glanced slantwise at them; courtiers—whether from overseas in Ygrath or here in the four western provinces of the Palm—sought her counsel and support in their petitions to Brandin; musicians wrote songs for her; poets declaimed and dedicated verses that spun into hyperbolic raptures about her beauty and her wisdom. The Ygrathens would liken her to the sisters of their god, the Chiarans to the fabled beauty of Onestra before she did the last Ring Dive for Grand Duke Cazal—though the poets always stopped that analogy well before the Dive itself and the tragedies that followed.
After one such adjective-bestrewn effort of Doarde’s she’d suggested to Brandin over a late, private supper that one of the measures of difference between men and women was that power made men attractive, but when a woman had power that merely made it attractive to praise her beauty.
He’d thought about it, leaning back and stroking his neat beard. She’d been aware of having taken a certain risk, but she’d also known him very well by then.
‘Two questions,’ Brandin, Tyrant of the Western Palm, had said, reaching for the hand she’d left on the table. ‘Do you think you have power, my Dianora?’
She’d expected that. ‘Only through you, and for the little time remaining before I grow old and you cease to grant me access to you.’ A small slash at Solores there, but discreet enough, she judged. ‘But so long as you command me to come to you I will be seen to have power in your court, and poets will say I am more lovely now than I ever was. More lovely than the diadem of stars that crowns the crescent of the girdled world . . . or whatever the line was.’
‘The curving diadem, I think he wrote.’ He smiled. She’d expected a compliment then, for he was generous with those. His grey eyes had remained sober though, and direct. He said, ‘My second question: Would I be attractive to you without the power that I wield?’
And that, she remembered, had almost caught her out. It was too unexpected a question, and far too near to the place where her twin snakes yet lived, however dormant they might be.
She’d lowered her eyelashes to where their hands were twined. Like the snakes, she thought. She backed away quickly from that thought. Looking up, with the sly, sidelong glance she knew he loved, Dianora had said, feigning surprise: ‘Do you wield power here? I hadn’t noticed.’
A second later his rich, life-giving laughter had burst forth. The guards outside would hear it, she knew. And they would talk. Everyone in Chiara talked; the Island fed itself on gossip and rumour. There would be another tale after tonight. Nothing new, only a reaffirmation in that shouted laughter of how much pleasure Brandin of Ygrath took in his dark Dianora.
He’d carried her to the bed then, still amused, making her smile and then laugh herself at his mood. He’d taken his pleasure, slowly and in the myriad of ways he’d taught her through the years, for in Ygrath they were versed in such things and he was—then and now—the King of Ygrath, over and above everything else he was.
And she? On her balcony now in the springtime morning sunlight Dianora closed her eyes on the memory of how that night, and before that night—for years and years before that night—and after, after even until now, her own rebel body and heart and mind, traitors together to her soul, had slaked so desperate and deep a need in him.
In Brandin of Ygrath. Whom she had come here to kill twelve years ago, twin snakes around the wreckage of her heart, for having done what he had done to Tigana which was her home.
Or had been her home until he had battered and levelled and burned it and killed a generation and taken away the very sound of its name. Of her own true name.
She was Dianora di Tigana bren Saevar and her father had died at Second Deisa, with an awkwardly handled sword and not a sculptor’s chisel in his hand. Her mother’s spirit had snapped like a water reed in the brutality of the occupation that followed, and her brother, whose eyes and hair were exactly like her own, whom she had loved more than her life, had been driven into exile in the wideness of the world. He’d been fifteen years old.
She had no idea where he was all these years after. If he was alive, or dead, or far from this peninsula where tyrants ruled over broken provinces that had once been so proud. Where the name of the proudest of them all was gone from the memory of men.
Because of Brandin. In whose arms she had lain so many nights through the years with such an ache of need, such an arching of desire, every time he summoned her to him. Whose voice was knowledge and wit and grace to her, water in the dryness of her days. Whose laughter when he set it free, when she could draw it forth from him, was like the healing sun slicing out of clouds. Whose grey eyes were the troubling, unreadable colour of the sea under the first cold slanting light of morning in spring or fall.
In the oldest of all the stories told in Tigana it was from the grey sea at dawn that Adaon the god had risen and come to Micaela and lain with her on the long, dark, destined curving of the sand. Dianora knew that story as well as she knew her name. Her true name.
She also knew two other things at least as well: that her brother or her father would kill her with their hands if either were alive to see what she had become. And that she would accept that ending and know it was deserved.
Her father was dead. Her heart would scald her at the very thought of her brother so, even if death might spare him a grief so final as seeing where she had come, but each and every morning she prayed to the Triad, especially to Adaon of the Waves, that he was overseas and so far away from where tidings might ever reach him of a Dianora with dark eyes like his own in the saishan of the Tyrant.
Unless, said the quiet voice of her heart, unless the morning might yet come when she could find a way to do a thing here on the Island that would still, despite all that had happened—despite the intertwining of limbs at night and the sound of her own voice crying aloud in need assuaged—bring back another sound into the world. Into the voices of men and women and children all over the Palm, and south over the mountains in Quileia, and north and west and east beyond all the seas.
The sound of the name of Tigana, gone. Gone, but not, if the goddesses and the god were kind—if there was any love left in them, or pity—not forever forgotten or forever lost.
And perhaps—and this was Dianora’s dream on the nights she slept alone, after Scelto had massaged and oiled her skin and had gone away with his candle to sleep outside her door—perhaps it would come to pass if she could indeed find a way to do this thing, that her brother, far from home, would miraculously hear the name of Tigana spoken by a stranger in a world of strangers, in some distant royal court or bazaar, and somehow he would know, in a rush of wonder and joy, in the deep core of the heart she knew so well, that it was through her doing that the name was in the world again.
She would be dead by then. She had no doubts as to that. Brandin’s hate in this one thing—in the matter of his vengeance for Stevan—was fixed and unalterable. It was the one set star in the firmament of all the lands he ruled.
She would be dead, but it would be all right, for Tigana’s name would be restored, and her brother would be alive and would know it had been her, and Brandin . . . Brandin would understand that she had found a way to do this thing while sparing his life on all the nights, the numberless nights, when she could have slain him while he slept by her side after love.
This was Dianora’s dream. She used to be driven awake, tears cold on her cheeks, by the intensity of the feelings it engendered. No one ever saw those tears but Scelto though, and Scelto she trusted more than anyone alive.
SHE
