"Like this you are powerful. Learn what it is to command the attention of a god." ( ... brandin @ dia ??!?!?!?! )
In other worlds than these, her name might have fettered her to fate like a riselka's ring would in this one. Dia, through, nora, honour. Was she through with honour or did honour move through her? Who decreed what honour was?
Perhaps somewhere, her name would simply mean Goddess.
What, then, did that make Brandin of Ygrath? Tripartite vessel of love, power and vengeance – she would taste them all from his lips ere it was over.
Over, like an end to a middle that was a begining: Here, then, in the bed of the tyrant that razed the name, the memory, the blood of her home to the ground.
Only in her mind did now the towers of Avalle still sing.
Only in her mind did the name Tigana still ring.
She had danced for him. On this island that was birth-place of Morian of the Portals, she had walked over that all-important threshold and come one step closer to killing a living God. She remembered it well because she lived it over and over and over, that night she failed to see it through:
Let him think her powerful because she had danced. From the River Deisa to the Highlands of Certando, men whose names would not be remembered by history had seen her dance and wept for thrill and for joy. No tears from Brandin; and somehow, that made it worse, the quiet assurance she wanted so very much to misread as a king's pride in his own selection. Young as she was, she wished she would move him in ways she could read.
It was her first time misreading him: thinking he granted her power. This was not a thing to grant but to take, to earn, to carve out a place for by bloodying one's hands and then holding on for dear life. To never let go.
Did she ever let go of her hatred and her secret, the twin snakes coiled around her heart, when she suddenly found herself with Brandin of Ygrath's affections cupped squarely in her palm?
In the blue-and-silver of the circling moons, Dianora looked at her palm twelve years later and remembered how Brandin's hands had felt that first time they had held onto her hips, swayed her to a different kind of dance in his bed, after.
Like this you are powerful.
Oh, how her ears had flamed for a good, long while after – not because of what he'd said, the gentle mocking of it – but of how she'd responded. The girl who would be a courtesan-turned-assassin had ridden the Tyrant of the Palm thinking she would do this once, twice, perhaps a dozen times. Then no more.
A dozen years. A dozen years and a myriad times of pleasures shared, taken, given, received. Of a mind touched. A palm can be many things: current, weapon, home. And she had learned: how to command, but more importantly to hold, the attention of a God.
Please. Please. She'd said please.
Twelve years later and older and no more the wiser, Dianora who was of Tigana turned to her side to watch the gentle rise and fall of the king's breast, and in her palm there was no knife to cut him with. Even in sleep, he commanded her.
She had made him laugh tonight – loud and boisterous and rich, the way she prided herself in. Damn her pride and damn her weakness in the face of it. The truth of it, she thought, and would take that thought to her grave if need be, is yes.
She'd never answered his second question, after all: about attraction and power and the absence of it. Reminiscing now in the aftermath of their love-making, Dianora wished fervently that she could tell him the truth caught between her twin snakes: that in so many ways, her life and her love would be easier if he had no power indeed.
