IT HAPPEHE LONG PATH OF THAT DAY AND NIGHT DID not lead back to the inn after all.
The three of them returhrough the forest to the main road from Astibar to Ardin town. They walked in silence along the road uhe arch of the autumn stars, cicadas loud in the woods oher side. Devin was glad of his woolen overshirt; it was chilly now, there might be a frost tonight.
It was strao be abroad in the darkness so late. When they were traveling Menico was always careful to have his pany quartered aled by the dinner hour. Even with the stern measures both Tyrants had taken against thieves and brigands, the paths of the Palm were not often traveled by det folk at night.
Folk such as he himself had been, only this m. He had been secure in his niche and his calling, had even had—improbably enough —a triumph. Hed been poised on the edge of a genuine success. And now he was walking a road in darkness having abandoned any such prospects or security, and having sworn an oath that marked him for a death-wheel, in Chiara if not here. Both places actually, if Tomasso bar Saalked.
It was an odd, lonely feeling. He trusted the men he had joined— he even trusted the girl, if it came to that—but he didnt know them very well. Not like he knew Menichano after so many years.
It occurred to him that the same dilemma applied to the cause he had just sworn to make his own: he didnt know Tigaher, which was the whole point of what Brandin of Ygrath had doh his sorcery. Devin was in the process of ging his life for a story told uhe moon, for a childhood song, an evocation of his mother, something almost purely an abstra for him. A name.
He was ho enough to wonder if he was doing this as much for the adventure of it—for the glamor that Alessan and Baerd and the old Duke represented—as for the depth of old pain and grief hed learned about in the forest tonight. He didnt know the answer. He didnt know how much Catriana fitted into his reasons, how much his father did, or pride, or the sound of Baerds voice speaking his loss to the night.
The truth was that if Sandre dAstibar could stop his son from talking, as he had promised to do, then there was nothing to prevent Devin from carrying oly as he had for the past six years. From having the triumph and the rewards that seemed to lie before him. He shook his head. It was astonishing in a way, but that course, with Meni the road, perf across the Palm—the life hed woken to this m—seemed almost inceivable to him now, as if hed already crossed to the other side of some tremendous divide. Devin wondered how often men did what they did, made the choices of their lives, for reasons that were and unplicated and easily uood as they were happening.
He was jolted from his reverie by Alessan abruptly raising a hand in warning. Without a word spokehree of them slipped into the trees again beside the road. After a moment there was a flicker of torchlight to the west and Devin heard the sound of a cart approag. There were voices, male and female both. Revelers returning home late, he guessed. There was a Festival going on. In some ways it had begun to seem another irrelevahey waited for the cart to go by.
It did not. The horse ulled up, with a soft slap and jingle of reins just in front of where they were hiding. Someone jumped down, then they heard him unlog a on a gate.
"I really am hopelessly overindulgent," they heard him plain. "Every siime I look at this excuse for a cre