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of Senzio or Ferraut that the bigger traders never bother with. She’s also quick enough to make it worth my while running south past the mountains to Quileia. It isn’t sanctioned, of course, with the trade embargo down there, but if you have contacts in a remote enough place and you don’t dawdle about your business it isn’t too risky and there’s a profit to be made. I can take Barbadian spices from the market here, or silk from the north, and get them to places in Quileia that would never otherwise see such things. I bring back carpets, or Quileian wood carvings, slippers, jewelled daggers, sometimes casks of buinath to sell to the taverns—whatever’s going at a good price. I can’t do volume so I have to watch my margins, but there’s a living in it as long as insurance stays down and Adaon of the Waves keeps me afloat. I go from here to the god’s temple before heading home.’
    ‘But here first.’ Devin smiled.
    ‘Here first.’ They touched glasses and drained them. Devin refilled both.
    ‘What’s news in Quileia?’ he asked.
    ‘As a matter of fact, I was just there,’ Rovigo said. ‘Tregea was a stop on the way back. There are tidings, actually. Marius won his combat in the Grove of Oaks again this summer.’
    ‘I did hear about that,’ Devin said, shaking his head in rueful admiration. ‘A crippled man, and he must be fiftyyears old by now. What does that make it—six times in a row?’
    ‘Seven,’ Rovigo said soberly. He paused, as if expecting a reaction.
    ‘I’m sorry,’ Devin said. ‘Is there a meaning to that?’
    ‘Marius decided there was. He’s just announced that there will be no more challenges in the Oak Grove. Seven is sacred, he’s proclaimed. By allowing him this latest triumph the Mother Goddess has made known her will. Marius has just declared himself King in Quileia, no longer only the consort of the High Priestess.’
    ‘What?’ Devin exclaimed, loudly enough to cause some heads to turn. He lowered his voice. ‘ He’s declared … a man … I thought they had a matriarchy there.’
    ‘So,’ said Rovigo, ‘did the late High Priestess.’
    Travelling across the Peninsula of the Palm, from mountain village to remote castle or manor, to the cities that were the centres of affairs, musicians could not help but hear news and gossip of great events. Always, in Devin’s brief experience, the talk had been only that: a way to ease the passing of a cold winter’s night around an inn fire in Certando, or to try to impress a traveller in a tavern in Cone with a murmured confiding that a pro-Barbadior party was rumoured to be forming in that Ygrathen province.
    It was only talk, Devin had long since concluded. The two ruling sorcerers from east and west across the seas had sliced the Palm neatly in half between them, with only hapless, decadent Senzio not formally occupied by either, looking nervously across the water both ways. Its Governor remained paralytically unable to decide which wolf to be devoured by, while the two wolves still warily circled each other after almost twenty years, each unwilling to expose itself by moving first.
    The balance of power in the peninsula seemed to Devin to have been etched in stone from the time of his first awareness.Until one of the sorcerers died—and sorcerers were rumoured to live a very long time—nothing much would or could come of khav room or great hall chatter.
    Quileia, though, was another matter. One far beyond Devin’s limited experience to sort out or define. He couldn’t even guess what might be the implications of what Marius had now done in that strange country south of the mountains. What might flow from Quileia’s having a more than transitory King, one who did not have to go into the Oak Grove every two years and there, naked, ritually maimed, and unarmed, meet the sword-wielding foe who had been chosen to slay him and take his place. Marius had not been slain, though. Seven times he had not been slain.
    And