SPRING CAME EARLY IN ASTIBAR TOWN. IT ALMOST ALWAYS did along that sheltered northwestern side of the province, overlooking the bay and the strung-out islands of the Archipelago. East and south the unblocked winds from the sea pushed the start of the growing season back a few weeks ahe smaller fishing boats close to shore this early in the year.
Senzio was already fl, the traders in Astibar harbor reported, the white blossoms of the sejoia trees making the air fragrant with the promise of summer to e. Chiara was still cold it was said, but that happened sometimes in early spring on the Island. It wouldnt be long before the breezes from Khardhuled the air and the seas around her.
Senzio and Chiara.
Alberico of Barbadior lay down at night thinking about them, and rose up in the m doing the same, after intense, agitated nights of little rest, shot through with lurid, disturbing dreams.
If the winter had been uling, rife with small is and rumors, the events of early spring were something else entirely. And there was nothing small, nothing only marginally provocative about them.
Everything seemed to be happening at once. ing down from his bedchamber to his offices of state, Alberico would find his mood darkening with every step in the appreheicipation of what might be reported to him.
The windows of the palace were open now to let the mild breezes sweep through. It had been some time si had been warm enough to do that and for much of the autumn and wihere had been bodies rotting oh-wheels in the square. Sandreni bodies, Nievolene, Scalvaiane. A dozes wheeled at random. Not ducive to opening windows, that. Necessary though, and lucrative, after his fiscation of the spirators lands. He liked when y and gain came together; it didnt happen often but when it did the marriage seemed to Alberico of Barbadior to represent almost the purest pleasure to be found in power.
This spring however his pleasures had been few and trivial in scope, and the burgeoning of roubles made those of the winter seem like minor, ephemeral afflis—brief flurries of snow in a night. What he was dealing with now were rivers in flood, everywhere he looked.
At the very beginning of spring a wizard was detected using his magi the southern highlands, but the Tracker and the twenty-five men Siferval had immediately sent after him had been slaughtered in a pass by outlaws, to the last man. An act and revolt almost impossible to believe.
And he couldnt even properly exact retribution: the villages and farms scattered through the highlands hated the outlaws as muore than the Barbadians did. And it had been an Ember Night, with man abroad to see who might have dohis unpreted deed. Siferval sent a hundred men from Fort Ortiz to hunt the brigands down. They found no trace. Only long dead campfires in the hills. It was as if the twenty-five men had been slain by ghosts: which, predictably, is what the people of the highlands were already saying. It had been an Ember Night after all, and everyone khe dead were abroad on suights. The dead, hungry for retribution.
"How clever of the dead to use new-fletched arrows," Sifervals writte had offered sardonically, when he sent ttains to carry the tidings north. His men had retreated quickly in whey- faced terror at the expression on Albericos face. It was, after all, the Third pany which had allowed twenty-five of its men to be killed, and had the out another hundred inpetents to