Tigana. Guy Gavriel Kay

since the company was formed, had another partnership share. Everyone else was an apprentice or a journeyman on short-term contract. Especially now, when the aftermath of a plague spring in the south had every troupe in the Palm short of bodies and scrambling to fill with temporary musicians, dancers, or singers.

      A haunting thread of sound, barely audible, plucked Devin’s attention away from his syrenya. He looked over and smiled. Alessan, one of the three new people, was lightly tracing the melody of the cradle song Devin had been playing. On the shepherd pipes of Tregea it sounded unearthly and strange.

      Alessan, black-haired, though greying at the temples, winked at him over the busyness of his fingers on the pipes. They finished the piece together, pipes and syrenya, and humming tenor voice.

      ‘I wish I knew the words,’ Devin said regretfully as they ended. ‘My father taught me that tune as a child, but he could never remember how the words went.’

      Alessan’s lean, mobile face was reflective. Devin knew little about the Tregean after two weeks of rehearsal other than that the man was extraordinarily good on the pipes and quite reliable. As Menico’s partner, that was all that should matter to him. Alessan was seldom around the inn outside of practice-time, but he was always there and punctual for the rehearsals slated.

      ‘I might be able to dredge them up for you if I thought about it,’ he said, pushing a hand through his hair in a characteristic gesture. ‘It’s been a long time but I knew the words once.’ He smiled.

      ‘Don’t worry about it,’ Devin said. ‘I’ve survived this long without them. It’s just an old song, a memento of my father. If you stay with us we can make it a winter project to try to track them down.’

      Menico would approve of that last bit, he knew. The troupe-leader had declared Alessan di Tregea to be a find, and cheap at the wages he’d asked.

      The other man’s expressive mouth crooked sideways, a little wryly. ‘Old songs and memories of fathers are important,’ he said. ‘Is yours dead then?’

      Devin made the warding sign with his hand out and two fingers curled down.

      ‘Not last I heard, though I’ve not seen him in almost six years. Menico spoke to him when he went through the north of Asoli last time, took him some chiaros for me. I don’t go back to the farm.’

      Alessan considered that. ‘Dour Asolini stock?’ he guessed. ‘No place for a boy with ambition and a voice like yours?’ His tone was shrewd.

      ‘Almost exactly,’ Devin admitted ruefully. ‘Though I wouldn’t have called myself ambitious. Restless, more. And we weren’t originally from Asoli in fact. Came there from Lower Corte when I was a small child.’

      Alessan nodded. ‘Even so,’ he said.

      The man had a bit of a know-it-all manner, Devin decided, but he could play the Tregean pipes. The way they might even have sounded on Adaon’s own mountain in the south.

      In any case, they had no time to pursue the matter.

      ‘We’re on!’ Menico said, hastily re-entering the room where they were waiting amid the dust and covered furniture of the long-unused Sandreni Palace.

      ‘We do the “Lament for Adaon” first,’ he announced, telling them something they’d all known for hours. He wiped his palms on the sides of his doublet. ‘Devin, that one’s yours—make me proud, lad.’ His standard exhortation. ‘Then all of us are together on the “Circling of Years”. Catriana my love, you are sure you can go high enough, or should we pitch down?’

      ‘I’ll go high enough,’ Catriana replied tersely.

      Devin thought her tone spoke to simple nervousness, but when her gaze met his for a second he recognized that earlier look again: the one that reached somewhere beyond desire towards a shore he didn’t know.

      ‘I’d very much like to get this contract,’ Alessan di Tregea said just then, mildly enough.

      ‘How extremely surprising!’ Devin snapped, discovering as he spoke that he too was nervous after all. Alessan laughed though, and so did old Eghano walking through the door with them: Eghano who had seen far too much in too many years of touring to ever be made edgy by a mere audition. Without saying a word, he had, as he always had, an immediately calming effect on Devin.

      ‘I’ll do the best I can,’ Devin said after a moment and for the second time that afternoon, not really certain to whom he was saying it, or why.

      IN THE END, whether because of the Triad or in spite of them—as his father used to say—his best was enough.

      The principal auditor was a delicately scented, extravagantly dressed scion of the Sandreni, a man—in his late thirties, Devin guessed—who made it manifest, in his limp posture and the artificially exaggerated shadows that ringed his eyes, why Alberico the Tyrant didn’t appear to be much worried about the descendants of Sandre d’Astibar.

      Ranged behind this diverting personage were the priests of Eanna and Morian in white and smoke grey. Beside them, vivid by contrast, sat a priestess of Adaon, in crimson, with her hair cropped very short.

      It was autumn of course, and the Ember Days were coming on: Devin wasn’t surprised by her hair. He was surprised to see the clergy there for the audition. They made him uncomfortable—another legacy of his father— but this wasn’t a situation where he could allow that to affect him, and so he dismissed them from his thoughts.

      He focused on the Duke’s elegant son, the only one who really mattered now. He waited, reaching as Menico had taught him for a still point inside himself.

      Menico cued Nieri and Aldine, the two thin dancers in their grey-blue, almost translucent, chemises of mourning and their black gloves. A moment later, after their first linked pass across the floor, he looked at Devin.

      And Devin gave him, gave them all, the lament for Adaon’s autumnal dying among the mountain cypresses, as he never had before.

      Alessan di Tregea was with him all the way with the high, heart-piercing grief of the shepherd pipes and together the two of them seemed to lift and carry Nieri and Aldine beyond the surface steps of their dance across the recently swept floor and into the laconic, precise articulation of ritual that the ‘Lament’ demanded and was so rarely granted.

      When they finished, Devin, travelling slowly back to the Sandreni Palace from the cedar and cypress slopes of Tregea where the god had died—and where he died again each and every autumn—saw that Sandre d’Astibar’s son was weeping. The tracks of his tears had smudged the carefully achieved shadowing around his eyes—which meant, Devin realized abruptly, that he hadn’t wept for any of the three companies before them.

      Marra, young and intolerantly professional, would have been scornful of those tears, he knew: ‘Why hire a mongrel and bark yourself?’ she would say when their mourning rituals were interrupted or marked by displays from their patrons.

      Devin had been less stern back then. And was even less so now since she’d died and he had found himself rather desperately fighting back a shameful public grief when Burnet di Corte had led his company through her mourning rites in Certando as a gesture of courtesy to Menico.

      Devin also knew, by the smouldering look the Sandreni scion gave him from within the smeared dark rings around his eyes, and the scarcely less transparent glance from Morian’s fat-fingered priest—why in the name of the Triad were the Triad so ill-served!—that though they might have just won the Sandreni contract he was going to have to be careful in this palace tomorrow. He made a mental note to bring his knife.

      They had won the contract. The second number hardly mattered, which is why cunning Menico had begun with the ‘Lament’. Afterwards Menico carefully introduced Devin as his partner when Sandre’s son asked to meet him. He turned out to be the middle son of three, named Tomasso. The only one, he explained huskily, holding one of Devin’s hands tightly between both his own, with an ear for music and an eye for dance adequate to choosing performers equal to so august