FIVE DAYS LATER, ON THE EVE OF THE EMBER DAYS OF SPRING, they came to Castle Borso.
All that last afternoon as they moved south Devin had been watg the mountains. Any child raised iery lowlands of Asoli could not help but be awed by the t southland rahe Braccio here iando, the Parravi east towards Tregea and, though hed never seehe rumor of the snow-clad Sfaroni, highest of all, over west where Tigana once had been.
It was late in the day. Far to the north on that same afternoon Isolla of Ygrath lay dead and dismembered under a bloody sheet in the Audience Chamber of the pala Chiara.
The suing behind a thrust spur of the mountains dyed the peaks tundy and red and a somber purple hue. On the very highest summits the snow still shone and dazzled in the last of the light.
Devin could just make out the line of the Braccio Pass as it came down: one of the three fabled passes that had linked—in some seasons, and never easily—the Peninsula of the Palm with Quileia to the south.
In the old days, before the Matriarchy had taken deep root in Quileia there had been trade across the mountains, and the brooding piety of the springtime Ember Days had alsed a quiing and stir of ercial life with the promise of the passes opening again. The towns and fortress-castles here in the southern highlands had been vibrant and vital then. Well-defeoo, because where a trade caravan could cross, so could an army. But no King of Quileia had ever been secure enough on his throo lead an army north; not with the High Priestesses standing by at home to see him fail or fall. Here iando the private armies had mostly bloodied their blades and arrows against each other, in savage southland feuds that ranged eions and became the stuff of legend.
And then the Quileian Matriarchy had e to power after all, iime of Achis and Pasitheia, several hundred years ago. Quileia uhe priestesses had folded inward upon itself like a flower at dusk and the caravans ended.
The southland cities dwindled into villages, or, if flexible and eiough, they ged their character and turheir faorthward and to other things, as Avalle of the Towers had done in Tigana. Here in the Certandan highlands the mighty lords who had once held glittering court in their huge warlike castles became living anas. Their forays and battles with each other—oegral to the flow of events in the Palm—became more and more insequential, though not the less bitter or vicious for that.
To Devin, t with Menico di Ferraut, it had sometimes seemed that every sed ballad they sang was of some lord or younger son pursued by enemies among these crags; or of ill-fated southland lovers divided by the hatred of their fathers; or of the bloody deeds of those fathers, untamed as hawks in their stern high castles among these foothills of the Braccio.
And of those ballads, whether wild with battle and blood and villages set afire, or lamenting parted lovers drowning themselves in silent pools hidden in the misty hills—of all those songs, half again, it seemed to Devin, were of the Borso a in and around the massive, piled, grim splendor of Castle Borso hard under Braccio Pass.
There hadnt been any new ballads for a long time, very few in fact sihe Quileian caravans had stopped. But of fresh stories and rumors there had been many in the past two decades. A great many. In her own particular way, and in her own lifetime, Alienor of Castle Borso had already bee a legend among the me