DEVIN WAS HAVING A BAD DAY.
At een he had almost pletely reciled himself to his lack of size and to the fair-skinned boyish face the Triad had given him to go with that. It had been a long time since hed been in the habit of hanging by his feet from trees in the woods he farm bae in Asoli, striving to stretch a little more height out of his frame.
The keenness of his memory had always been a source of pride and pleasure to him, but a number of the memories that came with it were not. He would have been quite happy to be able tet the afternoohe twins, returning home from hunting with a brace of grele, had caught him suspended from a tree upside down. Six years later it still rankled him that his brothers, normally so reliably obtuse, had immediately grasped what he was trying to do.
"Well help you, little one!" Povar had cried joyfully, and before Devin could right himself and scramble away Nico had his arms, Povar his feet, and his burly twin brothers were stretg him between them, cag with great good humor all the while. Enjoying, among other things, the ambit of Devins precociously profane vocabulary.
Well, that had been the last time he actually tried to make himself taller. Very late that same night hed sneaked into the sn twins bedroom and carefully dumped a bucket of pig slop over each of them. Sprinting like Adaon on his mountain hed been through the yard and over the farm gate almost before their r started.
Hed stayed away two nights, theuro his fathers whipping. Hed expected to have to wash the sheets himself, but Povar had dohat and both twins, stolidly good-natured, had already fotten the i.
Devin, cursed or blessed with a memory like Eanna of the Names, never did fet. The twins might be hard people to hold a grudge against—almost impossible, in fact—but that did nothing to lessen his loneliness on that farm in the lowlands. It was not long after that ihat Devin had left home, apprenticed as a sio Menico di Ferraut whose pany toured northern Asoli every sed or third spring.
Devin hadnt been back siaking a weeks leave during the panys northern swing three years ago, and again this past spring. It wasnt that hed been badly treated on the farm, it was just that he didnt fit in, and all four of them k. Farming in Asoli was serious, sometimes grim work, battling to hold land and sanity against the stant enents of the sea and the hot, hazy, grey monotony of the days.
If his mother had lived it might have been different, but the farm in Asoli where Garin of Lower Corte had taken his three sons had been a dour, womanless place—acceptable perhaps for the twins, who had each other, and for the kind of man Garin had slowly bee amid the almost featureless spaces of the flatlands, but no source of nurture or warm memories for a small, quick, imaginative you child, whose own gifts, whatever they might turn out to be, were not those of the land.
After they had learned from Menico di Ferraut that Devins voice was capable of more than try ballads it had been with a certain collective relief that they had all said their farewells early one spring m, standing in the predictable greyness and rain. His father and Nico had been turning back to check the height of the river almost before their parting words were fully spoken. Povar lihough, to awkwardly cuff his little, odd brother on the shoulder.
"If they dont treat yht enough," hed said, "you e home, Dev. Theres a place.」
Devi