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If he lost, he lost everythingwell that depended...
| If he lost, he lost everythingwell that depended on the costIf too many of his men died here, what kind of an army would he have to lead home?
And too many men dying was a vivid prospect nowEver since what had happened in the harbor of ChiaraMost of the Ygrathen army had indeed sailed home, exactly as anticipated, leaving Brandin crippled and exposedWhich is why Alberico had moved, why the three companies were here and he with themThe flow and shape of events had seemed to be on their side, in the clearest possible way
Then the Certandan woman had fished a ring from the water for Brandin
She haunted his dreams, that never-seen womanThree times now she'd surfaced like a nightmare in his lifeBack when Brandin had first claimed her for his saishan she had nearly drawn him into an insane warSiferval had wanted to fight, Alberico rememberedThe Third Company captain had proposed storming across the border into Lower Corte and sacking Stevanien itselfAlberico shuddered even now, cheap louis vuitton long years after, at the thought of such a war far to the west against the Ygrathens in all their powerHe had swallowed his bile and absorbed all the mocking gibes Brandin sent eastEven then, long ago, he had preserved his discipline, kept his eyes on the real prize back home
But he might have had the Peninsula of the Palm without effort this spring, a pure gift fallen from the sky, if that same Dianora di Certando had not saved the Ygrathen's life two months agoIt had been there for him, gently floating down: with Brandin assassinated the Ygrathens would have all sailed home and the western provinces would have lain open before him like so much ripe fruit
Quileia's crippled King would have hobbled across the mountains to abase himself before Alberico, begging for the trade he neededNo elaborate letters then about fearing the mighty power of YgrathIt would have all been so easy, so
But it was not so, because of the womanThe woman from one of his own provincesThe irony was kelly hermes coruscating, it was like acid in his soulCertando was his and Dianora di Certando was the only reason Brandin was alive
And now, her third time in his life, she was the only reason there was an army from the west, a flotilla anchored in the Bay of Farsaro, waiting for Alberico to make the slightest move
"They are fewer than us," his spies reported daily"And not as well armed
Fewer, the three captains echoed each other in mindless litanyNot as well armed, they gibberedWe must move, they chorused, their imbecilic faces looming in his dreams, set close together, hanging like lurid moons too near the earth
Anghiar, his emissary in the Governor's Castle at Senzio, sent word that Casalia still favored them; that the Governor realized that Brandin was not as strong as theyThat he had been persuaded to see the virtue of tilting even further towards the BarbadiorThe emissary from the Western Palm, one of the few Ygrathens who had decided to stay with Brandin, was having a more difficult rolex day date time each passing day gaining audience with the Governor, but Anghiar dined with plump, sybaritic Casalia almost every night
So now even Anghiar, who had grown lazy and self-indulgent, morally corrupt as any Senzian during his years there, was saying the same thing as all the others: Senzio is a vineyard ripe for harvestingCome!
Ripe for harvesting? Didn't they understand? Didn't any of them realize that there was sorcery to reckon with?
He knew how strong Brandin was; he had probed and backed quickly away from the Ygrathen's power in the year they had both come here, and that had been when he himself was in his primeNot hollow and weakened, with a bad foot and a drooping eye after almost being killed in that cursed Sandreni lodge last yearHe was not the same anymore; he knew it, if none of the others didIf he went to war it had to be a decision made in the light of thatHis military edge had to be enough to offset the Ygrathen's sorceryHe needed to be certainSurely any man prada handbags replica not a fool could see that that had nothing to do with cowardice! Only with a careful measuring of gains and losses, risks and opportunities
In his dreams in his tent on the border he thrust the vacuous moon faces of his captains back up into the sky, and under five moons, not two, he slowly dismembered and defiled the staked-out body of the woman from Certando
Then the mornings would comeDigesting messages like rancid food, he would begin to wrestle again, endlessly, with the other thing that was nagging him this season like an infected wound
Something felt wrongThere was an aspect about this whole chain of events, from the autumn onwards, that jarred within him like a jangling, dissonant chord
Here on the border with his army all around him he was supposed to feel as if he were calling the measure of the danceForcing Brandin and the entire Palm to respond to his tuneSeizing control again after a winter of being impacted upon in all those trivial, disconcerting, cumulative pasha de cartier 32 mm steel wa |
Posted: 10:12 PM, Monday, May 3, 2010 |
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