The twins might be hard people to hold a grudge... 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 lowlandsIt was not long after that incident that Devin had left home, apprenticed as a singer to Menico di Ferraut whose company toured northern Asoli every second or third spring
Devin hadn't been back since, taking a week's leave during the company's northern swing three years ago, and again this past springIt wasn't that he'd been badly treated on the farm, it was just that he didn't fit in, and all four of them knew itFarming in Asoli was serious, sometimes grim work, battling to hold land and sanity against the constant encroachments 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 become amid the almost featureless spaces of the flatlands, but no source of nurture or warm memories for a small, quick, imaginative youngest 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 Devin's voice was capable of more than country ballads it had been with a certain collective relief that they had all said their farewells early one spring morning, standing in the predictable greyness and rainHis father and Nico had been turning back to check the height of the river almost before
chanel quilted replica their parting words were fully spokenPovar lingered though, to awkwardly cuff his little, odd brother on the shoulder
"If they don't treat you right enough," he'd said, "you can come home, Dev
Devin remembered both things: the gentle blow which had been forced to carry more of a burden of meaning down the years than such a gesture should, and the rough, quick words that had followedThe truth was, he really did remember almost everything, except for his mother and their days in Lower CorteBut he'd been less than two years old when she'd died amongst the fighting down there, and only a month older when Garin had taken his three sons north
Since then, almost everything was held in his mind
And if he'd been a wagering man, which he wasn't, having that much of careful Asoli in his soul, he'd have been willing to put a chiaro or an astin down on the fact that he couldn't recall feeling this frustrated in yearsSince, if truth were told, the days when it looked as if he would never grow at all
What, Devin d'Asoli asked himself grimly, did a person have to do to get a drink in Astibar? And on the eve of the Festival, no less!
The problem would have been positively laughable were it not so infuriatingIt was the doing, he learned quickly enough, in the first inn that refused to serve him his requested flask of Senzio green wine, of the pinch-buttocked, joy-killing priests of EannaThe goddess, Devin thought fervently, deserved better of her servants
It appeared that a year ago, in the midst of their interminable jockeying for ascendancy with the clergy of Morian and Adaon,
chanel tote Eanna's priests had convinced the Tyrant's token council that there was too much licentiousness among the young of Astibar and that, more to the point of course, such license bred unrestAnd since it was obvious that the taverns and khav rooms bred license
It had taken less than two weeks for Alberico to promulgate and begin enforcing a law that no youth of less than seventeen years could buy a drink in Astibar
Eanna's dust-dry priests celebrated, in whatever ascetic fashion such men celebrated, their petty triumph over the priests of Morian and the elegant priestesses of the god: both of which deities were associated with darker passions and, inevitably, wine
Tavern-keepers were quietly unhappy (it didn't do to be loudly unhappy in Astibar) though not so much for the loss of trade as for the insidious manner in which the law was enforcedThe promulgated law had simply placed the burden of establishing a patron's age on the owner of each inn, tavern, or khav roomAt the same time, if any of the ubiquitous Barbadian mercenaries should happen to drop by, and should happen, arbitrarily, to decide that a given patron looked too young well, that was one tavern closed for a month and one tavern-keeper locked up for the same length of time
All of which left the sixteen-year-olds in Astibar truly out of luckAlong with, it gradually became evident through the course of a morning, one small, boyish-looking nineteen-year-old singer from Asoli
After three summary ejections along the west side of the Street of the Temples, Devin was briefly tempted to go across the road to the Shrine of
chanel reporter bag Morian, fake an ecstasy, and hope they favored Senzian green here as a means of succoring the overly ecstaticAs another, even less rational, option he contemplated breaking a window in Eanna's domed shrine and testing if any of the ball-less imbeciles inside could catch him in a sprint
He forebore to do so, as much out of genuine devotion to Eanna of the Names as to an oppressive awareness of how many very large and heavily armed Barbadian mercenaries patrolled the streets of AstibarThe Barbadians were everywhere in the Eastern Palm of course, but nowhere was their presence so disturbingly evident as it was in Astibar where Alberico had based himself
In the end, Devin wished a serious head-cold on himself and headed west towards the harbor and then, following his unfortunately still-functioning sense of smell, towards Tannery LaneAnd there, made almost ill by the effluence of the tanner's craft, which quite overwhelmed the salt of the sea, he was given an open bottle of green, no questions asked, in a tavern called The Bird, by a shambling, loose-limbed innkeeper whose eyes were probably inadequate to the dark shadows of his windowless, one-room establishment
Even this nondescript, evil-smelling hole was completely fullAstibar was crammed to overflowing for tomorrow's start of the Festival of VinesThe harvest had been a good one everywhere but in Certando, Devin knew, and there were plenty of people with astins or chiaros to spend, and in a mood to spend them too
There were certainly no free tables to be had in The BirdDevin wedged himself into a corner where the
dior logo dark, pitted wood of the bar met the back wall, took a judicious sip of his wine, watered but not unusually so, he decided, and composed his mind and soul towards a meditation upon the perfidy and unreasonableness of women
As embodied, specifically, by Catriana d'Astibar these past two weeks
He calculated that he had enough time before the late-afternoon rehearsal, the last before their opening engagement at the city home of a small wine-estate owner tomorrow, to muse his way through most of a bottle and still show up soberHe was the experienced trouper anyhow, he thought indignantlyHe knew the performance routines like a hand knew a gloveThe extra rehearsals had been laid on by Menico for the benefit of the three new people in the troupe
Including impossible CatrianaWho happened to be the reason he had stormed out of the morning rehearsal a short while before he knew that Menico planned to call the session to a haltHow, in the name of Adaon, was he supposed to react when an inexperienced new female who thought she could sing, and to whom he'd been genuinely friendly since she'd joined them a fortnight ago, said what she'd said in front of everyone that morning?
Cursed with memory, Devin saw the nine of them rehearsing again in the rented back room on the ground floor of their innFour musicians, the two dancers, Menico, Catriana, and himself singing up frontThey were doing Rauder's "Song of Love," a piece rather predictably requested by the wine-merchant's wife, a piece Devin had been singing for nearly six years, a song he could manage in a stupor, a coma, sound
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