In Ferraut town that winter for the third time, after the leap in Tregea, they had all been wonderfully fed by Ingonida, still in raptures over the bed they'd brought her. Taccio's wife continued to display a particularly solicitous affection for the Duke in his dark disguise, a detail which Alessan took some pleasure in teasing Sandre about when they were alone. In the meantime, the rotund, red-faced Taccio copiously wined them all.

There had been another mail packet waiting from Rovigo in Astibar. Which, when opened, proved to contain two letters this time, one of which gave off, even after its time in transit, an extraordinary effusion of scent.

Alessan, his eyebrows elaborately arched, presented this pale-blue emanation to Devin with infinite suggestiveness. Ingonida crowed and clasped her hands together in a gesture doubtless meant to signify romantic rapture. Taccio, beaming, poured Devin another drink.

The perfume, unmistakably, was Selvena's. Devin's expression, as he took cautious possession of the envelope, must have been revealing because he heard Catriana giggle suddenly. He was careful not to look at her.

Selvena's missive was a single headlong sentence, much like the girl herself. She did, however, make one vivid suggestion that induced him to decline when the others asked innocently if they might peruse his communication.

In fact, though, Devin was forced to admit that his interest was rather more caught by the five neat lines Alais had attached to her father's letter. In a small, businesslike hand she simply reported that she'd found and copied another variant of the "Lament for Adaon" at one of the god's temples in Astibar and that she looked forward to sharing it with all of them when they next came east. She signed it with her initial only.

In the body of the letter Rovigo reported that Astibar was very quiet since the twelve poets had been executed among the families of the conspirators in the Grand Square. That the price of grain was still going up, that he could usefully receive as much green Senzian wine as they could obtain at current prices, that Alberico was widely expected to announce, very soon, a beneficiary among his commanders for the greater part of the confiscated Nievolene lands, and that his best information was that Senzian linens were still underpriced in Astibar but might be due to rise.

It was the news about the Nievolene lands that triggered the next stage of spark-to-spark discussion between Alessan and the Duke.

And those sparks had led to the blaze.

The five of them did a fast run along the well-maintained highway north to Senzio with more of the religious artifacts. They bought green wine with their profit on the statuettes, bargained successfully for a quantity of linens, Baerd, somewhat surprisingly had emerged as their best negotiator in such matters, and doubled quickly back to Taccio, paying the huge new duties at both the provincial border forts and the city-walls.

There had been another letter waiting. Among the various masking pieces of business news, Rovigo reported that an announcement on the Nievolene lands was expected by the end of the week. His source was reliable, he added. The letter had been written five days before.

That night Alessan, Baerd, and Devin had borrowed a third horse from Taccio, who was deeply happy to be told nothing on their intentions, and had set out on the long ride to the Astibar border and then across to a gully by the road that led to the Nievolene gates.

They were back seven days later with a new cart and a load of unspun country wool for Taccio to sell. Word of the fire had preceded them. Word of the fire was everywhere, Sandre reported. There had already been a number of tavern brawls in Ferraut town between men of the First and Second Companies.

They left the new cart with Taccio and departed, heading slowly back towards Tregea. They didn't need three carts. They were partners in a modest commercial venture. They made what slight profit they could, given the taxes and duties that trammeled them. They talked about those taxes and duties a great deal, often in public. Sometimes more frankly than their listeners were accustomed to hearing.

Alessan quarreled with the sardonic Khardhu warrior in a dozen different inns and taverns on the road, and hired him a dozen different times. Sometimes Devin played a role, sometimes Baerd did. They were careful not to repeat the performance anywhere. Catriana kept a precise log of where they had been and what they had said and done there. Devin had assured her they could rely on his memory, but she kept her notes nonetheless.

In public the Duke now called himself "Tomaz." «Sandre» was an uncommon-enough name in the Palm, and for a mercenary from Khardhun it would be sufficiently odd to be a risk. Devin remembered growing thoughtful when the Duke had told them his new name back in the fall. He'd wondered what it was like to have had to kill his son. Even to outlive his sons. To know that the bodies of everyone even distantly related to himself were being spreadeagled alive on the death-wheels of Barbadior. He tried to imagine how all of that would feel.

Life, the processes of living and what it did to you, seemed to Devin to grow more painfully complex all through that fall and winter. Often he thought of Marra, arbitrarily cut off on the way to her maturity, to whatever she had been about to become. He missed her with a dull ache that could grow into something heavy and difficult at times. She would have been someone to talk to about such things. The others had their own concerns and he didn't want to burden them. He wondered about Alais bren Rovigo, if she would have understood these things he was wrestling with. He didn't think so; she had lived too sheltered, too secluded a life for such thoughts to trouble her. He dreamt of her one night though, an unexpectedly intense series of images. The next morning he rode beside Catriana in the lead cart, unwontedly quiet, stirred and unsettled by the nearness of her, the crimson fall of her hair in the pale winter landscape.

Sometimes he thought about the soldier in the Nievolene barn, who had lost a roll of dice and carried a jug of wine to a lonely place away from the singing, and had had his throat slit there while he slept. Had that soldier been born into the world only to become a rite of passage for Devin di Tigana?

That was a terrible thought. Eventually, mulling it over through the long, cold winter rides, Devin worked his way through to deciding it was untrue. The man had interacted with other people through his days. Had caused pleasure and sorrow, doubtless, and had surely known both things. The moment of his ending was not what denned his journey under Eanna's lights, or however that journey was named in the Empire of Barbadior.

It was difficult to sort out though. Had Stevan of Ygrath lived and died so that his father's grief might work the destruction of a small province and its people and their memories? Had Prince Valentin di Tigana been born only to swing the killing blade that caused this to happen? And what about his youngest son then?

And what about the youngest son of the Asolini farmer who had fled from Avalle when it became Stevanien? Truly, it was hard to puzzle through.

In Senzio one morning, with the first elusive hints of spring softening the northern air, Baerd had come back from the celebrated weapons market with a bright, beautifully balanced sword for Devin. There was a black jewel in the hilt. He offered no explanation, but Devin knew it had to do with what had happened in the Nievolene barn. The gift did nothing to answer any of his new questions, but it helped him nonetheless. Baerd began giving him lessons during their midday breaks on the road.

Devin worried about Baerd, in part because he knew that Alessan did.

His first impression in the cabin had been mostly wrong: a big, blond man, intimidatingly cool and competent. But Baerd was dark-haired and not actually large at all and, though his competence ran to such an astonishing number of things that it could still be intimidating after six months, he wasn't really cool. Only guarded, careful. Closed tightly around the kernel of the hurt he had lived with for a long time.