IUMN SEASON OF THE WINE, WORD WENT FORTH from among the cypresses and olives and the laden vines of his try estate that Sandre, Duke of Astibar, once ruler of that city and its province, had drawn the last bitter breath of his exile and age and died.
No servants of the Triad were by his side to speak their rituals at his end. Not the white-robed priests of Eanna, nor those of dark Morian of Portals, nor the priestesses of Adaon, the god.
There was no particular surprise in Astibar towhese tidings came with the word of the Dukes passing. Exiled Sandres rage at the Triad and its clergy through the last eighteen years of his life was far from being a secret. And impiety had never been a thing from which Sandre dAstibar, even in the days of his power, had shied away.
The city was overflowing with people from the outlying distrada and far beyond on the eve of the Festival of Vines. In the crowded taverns and khav rooms truths and lies about the Duke were traded bad forth like wool and spice by folk who had never seen his fad who would have once paled with justifiable terror at a summons to the Ducal court in Astibar.
All his days Duke Sandre had occasioalk and speculation through the whole of the peninsula men called the Palm—and there was nothing to alter that fact at the time of his dying, for all that Alberico of Barbadior had e with an army from that Empire overseas and exiled Sao the distrada eighteen years before. When power is gohe memory of power lingers.
Perhaps because of this, aainly because he teo be cautious and circumspe all his ways, Alberico, who held four of the nine provinces in an iron grip and was vying with Brandin of Ygrath for the ninth, acted with a precise regard for protocol.
By noon of the day the Duke died, a messenger from Alberico was seen to have ridden out by the eastern gate of the city. A messenger bearing the blue-silver banner of m and carrying, no one doubted, carefully chosen words of doleo Sandres children and grandchildren now gathered at their broad estate seven miles beyond the walls.
In The Paelion, the khav room where the wittier sort were gathering that season, it was ically observed that the Tyrant would have been more likely to send a pany of his own Barbadian meraries—not just a single message-bearer—were the living Sandreni not such a feckless lot. Before the appreciative, eye-to-who-might-be-lis-tening, ripple of amusement at that had quite died away, oi musi—there were scores of them in Astibar that week—had offered to wager all he might earn ihree days to e, that from the Island of Chiara would arrive dolences in verse before the Festival was over.
"Too ri opportunity," the rash newer explained, cradling a steaming mug of khav laced with one of the dozen or so liqueurs that lihe shelves behind the bar of The Paelion. "Brandin will be incapable of letting slip a ce like this to remind Alberico— and the rest of us—that though the two of them have divided our peninsula the share of art and learning is quite tilted west towards Chiara. Mark my words—and wager who will—well have a knottily rhymed verse from stout Doarde or some silly acrostic thing of as to puzzle out, with Sandre spelled six ways and backwards, before the music stops in Astibar three days from now.」
There was laughter, though again it was guarded, even on the eve of the Festival, when a long tradition that Alberico of Barbadior had circumspectly indulged allowed more lis