A Song for Arbonne

CHAPTER 1

There was very little wind, which was a blessing. Pale moonlight fell upon the gently swelling sea around the skiff. They had chosen a moonlit night. Despite the risks, they would need to see where they were going when they came to land. Eight oars, rising and falling in as much silence as the rowers could command, propelled them out across the line of the advancing waves towards the faint lights of the island, which was nearer now and so more dangerous.

Blaise had wanted six men only, knowing from experience that missions such as this were best done relying on stealth and speed rather than numbers. But the superstitious Arbonnais who were Mallin de Baude's household corans had insisted on eight going out so that there would be, if all went well, nine coming back when they were done. Nine, it appeared, was sacred to Rian here in Arbonne, and it was to Rian's Island they were rowing now. They'd even had a lapsed priest of the goddess go through a ritual of consecration for them. Blaise, his men watching closely, had reluctantly knelt and permitted the drunken old man to lay gnarled hands on his head, muttering unintelligible words that were somehow supposed to favour their voyage.

It was ridiculous, Blaise thought, pulling hard at his oar, remembering how he'd been forced to give in on those issues. In fact this whole night journey smacked of the absurd. The problem was, it was as easy to be killed on a foolish quest in the company of fools as on an adventure of merit beside men one respected and trusted.

Still, he had been hired by En Mallin de Baude to train the man's household corans, and it had suited his own purposes for his first months in Arbonne to serve a lesser baron while he quietly sized up the shape of things here in this goddess-worshipping land and perfected his grasp of the language. Nor could it be denied—as Mallin had been quick to point out—that tonight's endeavour would help to hone the corans of Baude into a better fighting force. If they survived.

Mallin was not without ambition, nor was he entirely without merits. It was his wife, Blaise thought, who had turned out to be the problem. Soresina, and the utterly irrational customs of courtly love here in Arbonne. Blaise had no particular affection, for good and sufficient reasons, for the current way of things in his own home of Gorhaut, but nothing in the north struck him as quite so impractical as the woman-driven culture here of the troubadours and their joglars, wailing songs of love for one lord's wife or another. It wasn't even the maidens they sang of, in Corannos's name. It seemed a woman had to be wed to become the proper object of a poet's passion in Arbonne. Maffour, the most talkative of the household corans, had started to explain it once; Blaise hadn't cared enough to listen. The world was full of things one needed to know to survive; he didn't have the time to fill his brain with the useless chaff of a patently silly culture.

The island lights were nearer now across the water. From the front of the skiff Blaise heard one of the corans—Luth, of course—offer a fervent, nervous prayer under his breath. Behind his beard Blaise scowled in contempt. He would have gladly left Luth back on the mainland. The man would be next to useless here, good for nothing but guarding the skiff when they brought it ashore, if he could manage to do even that much without wetting himself in fear at owl noises or a falling star or a sudden wind in the leaves at night. It had been Luth who had begun the talk earlier, back on shore, about sea monsters guarding the approaches to Rian's Island—great, hump-backed, scaly creatures with teeth the size of a man.

The real dangers, as Blaise saw it, were rather more prosaic, though none the less acute for that: arrows and blades, wielded by the watchful priests and priestesses of Rian against falsely consecrated men come in secret in the night to the goddess's holy island with a purpose of their own.

Said purpose being in fact extremely specific: to persuade one Evrard, a troubadour, to return to Castle Baude from his self-imposed exile on Rian's Island in the depths of righteous indignation.

It was all genuinely ridiculous, Blaise thought again, pulling at the oar, feeling the salt spray in his hair and beard. He was glad that Rudel wasn't here. He could guess what his Portezzan friend would have had to say about this whole escapade. In his mind he could almost hear Rudel's laughter and his acerbic, devastating assessment of the current circumstances.

The story itself was straightforward enough—an entirely natural consequence, Blaise had been quick to declare in the hall at Baude, of the stupidity of the courtly rituals here in the south. He was already not much liked for saying such things, he knew. That didn't bother him; he hadn't been much liked in Gorhaut, either, the last while before he'd left home.

Still, what was an honest man to make of what had happened in Castle Baude last month? Evrard of Lussan, who was said to be a modestly competent troubadour—Blaise was certainly not in a position to judge one man's scribblings against another's—had elected to take up residence at Baude in the high country of the south-western hills for a season. This had rebounded, in the way of things down here, to the greater renown of En Mallin de Baude: lesser barons in remote castles seldom had troubadours, modestly competent or otherwise; living with them for any length of time. That much, at least, made sense to Blaise.

But, of course, once settled in the castle, Evrard naturally had to fall in love with Soresina and begin writing his dawn-songs and liensennes, and his cryptic trobars for her. That, also in the way of such things here, was precisely why he had come, with the less romantic incentive, Blaise had caustically observed, of a handsome monthly payment out of Mallin's wool revenues from last autumn's fair in Lussan. The troubadour used a made-up name for his Lady—another rule of the tradition—but everyone in the vicinity of the castle, and surprisingly soon everyone in Arbonne who mattered at all, seemed to know that Evrard of Lussan, the troubadour, was heart-smitten by the beauty and grace of young Soresina de Baude in her castle tucked in a fold of the high country leading to the mountain passes and Arimonda.

Mallin was enormously pleased; that too was part of the game. A lovestruck troubadour exalting the baron's wife enhanced Mallin's own ardently pursued images of power and largess.

Soresina, of course, was thrilled beyond words. She was vain, pretty and easily silly enough, in Blaise's jaundiced opinion, to have precipitated exactly the sort of crisis with which they now found themselves dealing. If it hadn't been the one incident, it would have been another, he was sure of it. There were women like Soresina at home, too, but they were rather better kept in hand in Gorhaut. For one thing, their husbands didn't invite strangers into their castles for the express purpose of wooing them. However Maffour might try to explain the strict rules of this courtly game of love, Blaise knew an attempt at seduction when he saw one.

Soresina, manifestly uninterested in the newly resident poet in any genuinely romantic way—which no doubt reassured her husband more than somewhat—nonetheless contrived to lead Evrard on in every manner possible, given the constraints imposed by the extremely crowded spaces of a small baronial castle.

Mallin's yellow-haired wife had a ripe body, an infectious laugh and a lineage substantially more distinguished than her husband's: something that always added fuel to the fires of troubadour passion Blaise had been told by the discursive Maffour. He'd had to laugh; it was all so artificial, the whole process. He could guess, too easily, what acid-tongued Rudel would have said about this.

In the meantime, the celebrated southern spring came to Arbonne, with many-coloured wildflowers appearing almost overnight in the meadows and the high slopes about Castle Baude. The snows were reported to be receding from the mountain pass to Arimonda. As the poet's verses grew in heat and passion with the quickening season, so did the throbbing voices of the joglars who had begun arriving in Baude as well, knowing a good thing when they saw one. More than one of the corans and castle servants had private cause to thank the troubadour and the singers and the erotic atmosphere they'd induced for amorous interludes in kitchen and meadow and hall.

Unfortunately for him, Evrard's own cause was not aided by the all-too-evident reality that he was short, yellow-toothed and prematurely losing what thin hair he'd once had. Still, according to the great tradition, troubadours were supposed to be loved by the high ladies of culture and grace for their art and their fierce dedication, not for their height or hair.

Trouble was, Soresina de Baude didn't seem to care much for the great tradition, or that part of it, at any rate. She liked her men to look like the warlike corans of the great days past. Indeed, she'd made a point of telling Blaise as much shortly after he'd arrived, looking artlessly up at his tall, muscled form and then glancing down and away in transparently feigned shyness. Blaise, somewhat used to this sort of thing, had been neither surprised nor tempted. He was being paid by Mallin and had shaped his own code in such matters.

What Evrard of Lussan shaped, later that spring, was something else. In brief, the little troubadour, having downed a considerable quantity of unmixed Miraval red wine with the corans one night, finally elected to translate his fiercely impassioned verses into modestly passionate action.

Inflamed by a joglar's fervid rendition of one of his own ballads earlier that evening, the troubadour had left his sleeping place late at night and stumbled along dark and silent corridors and stairways to Soresina's door, which happened, unfortunately for all concerned, to be unlocked: Mallin, young, healthy, tall enough, and rather urgently seeking heirs, had but lately left his wife for his own chamber nearby.

The intoxicated, verse-enraptured poet had entered the pitch-black chamber, felt his way over to the canopied bed and planted a lover's kiss upon the lips of the satiated, sleeping woman he was busily making famous throughout Arbonne that spring.

There were a good many schools of thought evolving, in the aftermath of the event, as to what Soresina should have done. Ariane de Carenzu, queen of the Court of Love since the countess, her aunt, had passed the title to her, had proclaimed a session to rule on the matter later in the year. In the meantime, every man and woman Blaise encountered in the castle or outside it seemed to have an opinion on what he himself regarded as an entirely predictable, utterly trivial event.

What Soresina had done—quite naturally, or very unfortunately, depending on one's perspective—was scream. Roused from post-coital dreaming, then realizing who was in her chamber, she cursed her stunned, besotted admirer, in a voice heard by half the castle, as a rude, ill-bred peasant who deserved a public whipping.

What Evrard of Lussan, wounded to the core of his all-too-sensitive soul, had done in turn was leave Baude Castle before sunrise, proceed directly to the nearest sanctuary of the goddess, receive benediction and consecration and, making his way to the coast, cross by boat to Rian's Island in a retreat from the harsh, ungrateful society of women and castles that could so abuse the unstinting generosity of his art.

Safely on the island, away from the terrible storm and strife of the world beyond, he had begun soothing and diverting himself by composing hymns to the goddess, along with some undeniably witty satires on Soresina de Baude. Not by name, of course—rules were rules—but since the name he used now was the same one he'd coined to exalt the long-limbed elegance of her form and the dark fire of her eyes, no one in Arbonne was left even slightly in ignorance of this particular point. The students in Tavernel, Blaise had been given to understand by a seriously distressed Mallin, had taken up the songs and were amplifying them, adding verses of their own.

After a number of weeks of this, En Mallin de Baude—his wife an increasing object of amusement, his castle on the verge of becoming a byword for rustic bad manners, his conciliatory letters to Evrard on the island pointedly unanswered—elected to do something drastic.

For his own part, Blaise would probably have arranged to kill the poet. Mallin de Baude was a lord, if a minor one; Evrard of Lussan was no more than a travelling parasite in Blaise's view. A feud, even a dispute between two such men, would have been unthinkable in Gorhaut. But this, of course, was woman-ruled Arbonne, where the troubadours had a power in society they could never have dreamt of anywhere else.

In the event, what Mallin did was order Blaise and his corans to cross to the goddess's Island secretly by night and bring Evrard back. The baron, of course, couldn't lead the expedition himself, though Blaise had enough respect for the man to believe he would have preferred to. Mallin would need some distance from the escapade, though, in the event that they failed. He had to be able to say his corans had conceived the scheme without his knowledge or consent, and then hasten to a temple of Rian and make appropriate gestures of contrition. It was all made particularly neat, Blaise had thought, by the fact that the leader of the corans of Baude that season just happened to be a hired mercenary from Gorhaut who didn't, of course, worship Rian at all and might be expected to perpetrate such a sacrilege. Blaise didn't mention this thought to anyone. It didn't even really bother him; this was simply the way of things at a certain level of the world's affairs, and he had more than a little familiarity with it.

Soresina, languishing and aghast at what an instinctive scream and outburst had wrought, had been energetically primed by a succession of visiting neighbouring ladies, rather more experienced in the ways of poets, as to how to deal with Evrard on his return.

If Blaise and the corans got to the island. If they found him. If he chose to return. If the sea monsters of Luth's dark dreams chose not to rise up above their skiff, towering and dreadful in the pale moonlight, and drag them all down to death in the watery blackness.

"Towards those pines," Hirnan, who was navigating, muttered from the front of the skiff. He glanced back over his broad shoulder at the looming shadow of the island. "And for the love of Corannos, keep silent now!"

"Luth," Blaise added softly, "if I hear a sound from you, any kind of sound from now until we're back on the mainland, I will slit your throat and slide you overboard."

Luth gulped, quite noisily. Blaise elected not to kill him for that. How such a man had ever been consecrated a warrior in the Order of Corannos he could not understand. The man could handle a bow well enough, and a sword and a horse, but surely, even here in Arbonne, they had to know that there was more to being a coran of the god than those skills. Were there no standards any more? No pride left in a corrupt and degenerate world?

He looked back over his shoulder again. They had rowed very close now. The pines were around towards the western side of the island, away from the sandy northern beaches and the glowing lights beyond that marked the three temples and the residences. Hirnan, who had been here before—he hadn't said why and Blaise hadn't pushed him—had said there was no chance of landing undetected on any of those northern beaches. The servants of Rian guarded their island; in the past they had had cause to fear more than a single skiff of corans searching for a poet.

They were going to have to try to get ashore in a harder place, where the forest pines gave way, not to sand, but to rocky cliffs and boulders in the sea. They had rope with them, and each of the corans, even Luth, knew how to handle himself on a rock face. Castle Baude was perched high in the wild country of the south-west. Men who served there would not be unfamiliar with cliffs or crags.

The sea was another matter. Hirnan and Blaise himself were the only ones entirely at ease on the water, and on Hirnan's shoulders now rested the burden of getting them close enough, amid sharp and shadowed rocks, to make it possible to come ashore. Privately, Blaise had told him that if the best they could find was a sheer cliff face, they didn't really have a chance. Not at night and with the need for absolute silence and with a poet to bring back down. In addition to which—

"Couch oars!" he hissed. In the same instant Maffour, beside him, snarled the same words. Eight rowers swiftly lifted their oars from the water and sat rigidly still, the skiff gliding silently towards the island. The sound came again, nearer now. Motionless, bent low for concealment, Blaise strained his eyes into the night, searching by moonlight for the boat he'd heard.

Then it was there, a single dark sail against the starry sky, skimming through the waves around the island. In the skiff eight men held their breath. They were inside the circling path of the sailboat, though, very near—dangerously near, in fact—to the rocky coast. Someone looking towards them in this faint light would almost certainly see nothing against the dark bulk of the island; and the guards, Blaise knew, would probably be looking outward in any case. He relaxed his fingers on his oar as the small boat continued past them, cutting across the wind, a beautiful thing in the moonlight.

"The goddess be praised!" Luth murmured with reflexive piety from up front beside Hirnan.

Cursing himself for not having sat the man next to him, Blaise flung a furious look over his shoulder in time to see Hirnan's hand shoot out and grip his benchmate fiercely on the arm in a belated effort to silence him.

"Ouch!" Luth said. Not quietly. At sea. In a very calm night.

Blaise closed his eyes. There was a moment of straining silence, then:

"Who is there! In Rian's name, declare yourselves!" A grim male voice rang out from the sailboat.

His brain racing furiously, Blaise looked over and saw the other boat already beginning to swing about. They had two choices now. They could retreat, rowing frantically, and hope to lose the guards in the darkness of the sea. No one knew who they were; they might not be seen or identified. But the mainland was a long way off, and eight men rowing had little chance of outracing sails if they were pursued. And this one sailboat could have others with it very soon, Blaise knew.

He hated retreating anyhow.

"Only fisherfolk, your grace," he called out in a wavering, high-pitched voice. "Only my brothers and myself trawling for lampfish. We're terrible sorry to have wandered out so far."

He lowered his voice to a snarled whisper. "Get three of the ropes over the side, quickly! Hold them as if you were fishing. Hirnan, you and I are going into the water." Even as he spoke he was removing his boots and sword. Hirnan, without a question asked, began doing the same.

"It is interdicted to come so near the goddess's Island without leave. You are subject to Rian's curse for what you have done." The deep voice across the water was hostile and assured. The boat was still turning; it would begin bearing down upon them in a moment.

"We are not to kill," Maffour whispered anxiously from beside Blaise.

"I know that," Blaise hissed back. "Do what I told you. Offer them a tithe. Hirnan, let's go."

With the last words he swung his feet across the low railing and slipped silently over the side of the skiff. On the other side, balancing his motion exactly, Hirnan did the same. The water was shockingly cold. It was night, and early yet in the spring.

"Truly, your graces, as my brother says, we had no intention to transgress." Maffour's apologetic voice carried across the darkness. "We will gladly offer a tithe of our catch for the holy servants of blessed Rian."

There was a silence from the other boat, very much as if someone were weighing a sudden temptation. That, Blaise had not expected. To his right he spotted Hirnan's dark head bobbing towards him. He motioned, and the two of them began swimming quietly towards the other boat.

"Are you fools?" The second voice from the sailboat was a woman's, and cold as the ocean waters. "Do you think you can make redress for trespass in the waters of the goddess by offering a load of fish?"

Blaise grimaced. The priestesses of the goddess were always harsher than the priests; even a short time in Arbonne had taught him that much. He heard the sound of flint being struck, and a moment later, cursing silently, saw a lamp lit in the sailboat. A glow of orange light fell upon the water but offered only slight illumination. Praying that the six corans in the skiff would have the sense to keep their heads down and faces hidden, he gestured for Hirnan to move closer. Then, treading silently in the sea, he put his mouth to the other man's ear and told him what they had to try to do.

Holding the lamp high while Maritte guided their craft, Roche the priest peered ahead into the night. Even with the flame, even by the light of the waxing pale moon, it was difficult to see clearly. Certainly the skiff they were approaching was one such as the fisherfolk of the shore used, and he could make out the lines of the trawling nets over the side, but there was still something odd about this encounter. For one thing, there seemed to be too many men in the skiff. He counted at least five. Where were they going to put their catch with so many men on board? Roche had grown up by the sea; he knew more than a little about trawling for lampfish. He also loved—more than a little—the taste of the succulent, hard-to-find delicacy, which is why he'd been shamefully tempted by the offered tithe. Maritte, mountain-born, had no such weaknesses to tempt her. Sometimes he wondered if Maritte had any weaknesses at all. He would not be particularly unhappy when their shared tour of duties ended next week, though he couldn't claim to regret the three obligatory nights in bed together. He wondered if she had conceived by him, what a child born of the two of them would be like. It really did seem to be a fishing boat. Manned by too many men, most likely because they were afraid, venturing so near the island. It happened more often than it should, Roche knew. The deep waters around Rian's Island were a known ground for lampfish. A pity, he sometimes thought-aware that this was perilously near to heresy—that all fish and fauna on or about the island were sacred to the goddess in her incarnation as Huntress, and so not to be pursued in any way by mortal man or woman.

One really couldn't entirely blame the fisherfolk of Arbonne for occasionally yielding to the lure of that rare and delicate taste and once in a while venturing perhaps a little nearer the island than they ought. He wondered if he dared turn to Maritte and offer that thought, in the spirit of compassionate Rian. He forebore to do so. He could guess what she would say, mountain-born, hard as mountain rock. Though not so much so in the dark, mind you, surprisingly softened by passion and its aftermath. The three nights had been worth it, he decided, whatever she'd have said now to his suggestion.

What Maritte did in fact say in that moment, her voice suddenly harsh, was: "Roche, these are not fisherfolk. Those are only ropes, not nets! We must—"

That was all, lamentably, that Roche heard. Even as he leaned quickly forward to peer more closely at the skiff, Roche of the Island felt himself pulled bodily out of their small boat, the lantern flying from his hand to douse itself hissing in the sea.

He tried to cry out, but he hit the water with a smack that knocked the wind from his lungs. Then, as he desperately sucked for air, he went under an advancing wave, swallowed a mouthful of salt sea water and began retching and coughing. There was a hand holding him from behind in a grip like a blacksmith's. Roche coughed and gasped and coughed, and finally cleared his lungs of water.

He drew one normal breath and then, as if that had been a patiently awaited signal, received a blow from the haft of a knife on the side of his head that rendered him oblivious to the icy chill of the water or the beauty of moonlight on the sea. He did have an instant to realize, just before all went black, that he hadn't heard a sound from Maritte.

Blaise was briefly afraid, as he manoeuvred the unconscious priest back into the sailboat with Hirnan's help, that the other man, anxious not to err, might have killed the woman with his blow. After he had clambered with some difficulty into the boat he reassured himself. She would have a lump like a corfe egg on her temple for a few days, but Hirnan had done well. He spared a moment to grip the other man briefly on the shoulder in approbation; such things mattered to the men one led. He had some experience of that, too—on both sides of the equation.

The sailboat was neat and trim and well equipped, which meant plenty of rope. There were also blankets against the night chill and an amount of food that might have been surprising had the priest not been so plump. He stripped the unconscious man of his sodden shirt, then swaddled him in one of the blankets. They bound and gagged both the man and the woman, though not so tightly as to cripple them, and then steered the boat towards their own skiff.

"Maffour," he said, keeping his voice low, "take charge there. Follow us in. We're going up to find a landing place. Luth, if you prefer, you can kill yourself now before I get to you. It might be more pleasant." With some satisfaction he heard Luth moan in distress. The man believed him. Beside Blaise in the sailboat Hirnan grunted with a sour, chilled amusement. With a degree of surprise Blaise recognized within himself the once-familiar sensation of sharing competence and respect with another man on a task of some danger.

Danger, yes, rather more evidently now, given what they had just done to two of Rian's anointed. But tonight's was still a quest of sheerest stupidity—as to that Blaise's opinion was not about to change simply because they had dealt neatly with their first obstacle. Shivering and wet, rubbing his arms in an effort to generate necessary warmth, he realized, though, almost against his will, that he had enjoyed the moments just past.

And, as so often seemed to happen, the surmounting of a crisis seemed to incline chance or fate or Corannos the god—one or all of them—to show favour in the next stage of a difficult enterprise. Hirnan grunted again a few minutes later, this time with a note of satisfaction, and a second afterwards Blaise saw why. Gliding westward, as close to shore as he dared, Hirnan had brought them abreast of a small inlet among the rocks. Blaise saw trees above, their tops silvered by the high moon, and a gently sloping plateau beneath them giving way to a short cliff down to the sea. An almost perfect place for a landing, given that the beaches were barred to them. The inlet would offer shelter and concealment for the two boats and the climb to the plateau was unlikely to be difficult for men used to the steepness of the goat runs above the olive trees near Baude.

Hirnan guided the two craft carefully into the cove. In the boat he quickly lowered sail and set about dropping anchor. In the skiff, Maffour, without a word spoken, looped one of the ropes about his shoulders and, leaping to the nearest of the rocks, adroitly scrambled up the short face of the cliff to the plateau. He tied the rope to one of the pines above and dropped it over for the rest of them. Two good men here, Blaise thought, realizing that he really hadn't given much thought at all, in the time he'd been here, to taking the measure of the corans of Mallin de Baude. He acknowledged inwardly that Mallin had been right in at least one thing: the truest test of a man's mettle was a task where the danger was real.

Hirnan finished with the anchor and turned to Blaise with an arched eyebrow of inquiry. Blaise glanced down at the two tied-up clerics in the boat. Both were unconscious and would likely be so for awhile. "We'll leave them here," he said. "They'll be all right."

The men in the skiff were already proceeding up Maffour's rope towards the plateau. They watched the last one climb, then Hirnan stepped carefully from the boat to one slippery boulder and then another before reaching the rope and smoothly pulling himself up the rock face. Behind him, Blaise did the same. The salt of the wet rope stung his palms.

On the plateau he set his feet squarely on solid ground for the first time since leaving the mainland. The sensation was odd, as if there were a tremor in the earth beneath him. They were standing on Rian's Island, and illicitly consecrated, Blaise thought unexpectedly. None of the others seemed to have reacted, though, and a moment later he grinned with wry amusement at himself: he was from Gorhaut, in the god's name—they didn't even worship Rian in the north. This was hardly a useful time to be yielding to the superstitions that had afflicted Luth all night.

Young Giresse, without a word, handed him his boots and sword, and Thiers did the same for Hirnan. Blaise leaned against a tree to pull on the boots and buckled his sword belt again, thinking quickly. When he looked up he saw seven tense men looking at him, waiting for orders. Deliberately he smiled.

"Luth, I have decided to let you live to trouble the world a little longer yet," he said softly. "You'll guard the two boats here with Vanne. If those two down below show signs of rousing I want them rendered unconscious again. But conceal your faces if you have to go down to do it. If we are very lucky none of us will have been recognized when this is over. Do you understand?"

They seemed to. Luth looked almost comically relieved at the assignment. Vanne's expression by moonlight showed a struggle to conceal disappointment—a good sign actually, if he was sorry to be missing the next stage of their journey. But Blaise was not about to leave Luth alone now with any task, however simple. He turned away from them.

"Hirnan, I take it you can find the guest quarters once we reach the temple complex?" The red-headed coran nodded briefly. "You lead then," Blaise said. "I'm behind you, Maffour's rear guard. We go in single file. No words unless vital. Touch each other for warnings rather than speak. Understood?»

"One question: how do we find Evrard when we get there?" Maffour asked quietly. "There must be a great many dwellings in the complex."

"There are," Hirnan murmured.

Blaise had been privately worrying about the same thing. He shrugged though; his men weren't to know what was concerning him. "I'm assuming he'll have one of the larger ones. We'll head for those." He grinned suddenly. "Then Maffour can walk in and wake him with a kiss." There was a ripple of laughter. Behind him, Luth giggled loudly but controlled himself before Blaise could turn.

Blaise let the tension-easing amusement subside. He looked at Hirnan. Without another word spoken the coran turned and stepped into the forest of the holy Island of the goddess. Blaise followed and heard the others fall into line behind. He didn't look back.

It was very dark in the woods. There were sounds all around them: wind in the leaves, the chitter of small animals, the quick, unsettling flap of wings alighting from a branch above. The pines and the oak trees blocked the moon except in the occasional place where a slant of pale silver fell across their path, strangely beautiful, intensifying the blackness as soon as they had moved on. Blaise checked his blade in its scabbard. It would be close and awkward ground here if anything large chose to attack. He wondered if any of the big hunting cats made their home on Rian's Island; he had a feeling they did, which was not reassuring.

Hirnan, threading his way around roots and under branches, finally struck a rough east-west track in the wood and Blaise drew a calmer breath again. He was surprisingly conscious of where they were. Not that he had any real superstition in him, but there was something about this forest that, even more than the thought of tawncat or boar, would make him very happy when they left. In fact, that same truth applied to all of this island, he realized: the sooner they left the more pleased he would be. Just then a bird of some sort—owl or corfe almost certainly—landed with a slight, rushing sound of wings in air in the tree directly above him. Luth, Blaise thought, would have soiled his clothing. Refusing to look up, he moved on, following Hirnan's shadowy form eastward towards the temples of the goddess worshipped here in the south as a huntress and a mother, as a lover and a bride, and as a dark and final gatherer and layer-out, by moonlight, of the dead. If we're luckier than we deserve, Blaise of Gorhaut thought grimly, more unsettled than he really wanted to acknowledge, even to himself, maybe he'll be outside singing at the moon.

Which, as it happened, was exactly what Evrard of Lussan was doing. Troubadours seldom in fact sang their own songs; musical performance was seen as a lesser art than composing. It was the joglars who did the actual singing, to the music of varied instruments. But here on Rian's Island there were no joglars now, and Evrard had always found it a help when writing to hear his own words and evolving tune, even in his own thin voice. And he liked to compose at night.

They heard him as they approached the sanctuary grounds, emerging from the blackness of the forest into moonlight and a sight of distant lanterns. Drawing a breath, Blaise registered the fact that there were no walls around the guest quarters south of the temple complex, though a high wooden palisade surrounded the inner buildings where the priests and priestesses would be sleeping. There didn't appear to be any guards manning the ramparts behind those walls, or none that could be seen. Silver light fell on the temples, lending a soft white shimmer to the three domes. They didn't have to go that way. On the extreme southern edge of the goddess's compound, not far from where they stood, there was a garden. Palm trees swayed in the gentle breeze, and the scent of roses and anemones and early lavender drifted towards them. So did a voice.

There was a brief, meditative pause. Then:

Another ruminating silence, then again Evrard's voice:

Blaise saw Hirnan glancing at him, an ironic look on his expressive face. Blaise shrugged. "Mallin wants him back," he murmured. "Don't look at me." Hirnan grinned.

Blaise stepped past the other man and, keeping to the shadowy cover at the edge of the wood, began working his way around towards the garden, where the thin voice was still essaying variants of the same sentiment. Blaise wondered if the clergy and the other guests of Rian minded having their sleep disturbed by this late-night warbling. He wondered if it happened every night. He had a suspicion, knowing Evrard of Lussan, that it might.

They reached the southern end of the wood. Only grass, silvered by moonlight, open to view from the walls, lay between them and the hedges and palms of the garden now. Blaise dropped down, remembering with an eerie, unexpected vividness as he did the last time he'd performed this kind of manoeuvre, in Portezza with Rudel, when they had killed Engarro di Faenna.

And now here he was, fetching a sulky, petulant poet for a minor baron of Arbonne so the baron's wife could kiss the man on his balding brow—and the god knew where else—and say how extremely sorry she was for chancing to scream when he assaulted her in bed.

A long way from Portezza, From Gorhaut. From the sort of doings in which a man should properly find himself engaged. The fact that Blaise loathed almost everything about Gorhaut, which was his home, and trusted at most half a dozen of the Portezzan nobility he'd met was, frankly, not relevant to this particular truth.

"Thiers and Giresse—wait here," he whispered over his shoulder to the youngest two. "We won't need six men for this. Whistle like a corfe if there's trouble coming. We'll hear you. Maffour, you've been told what speech to give. Better you than me, frankly. When we get to the garden and I give you the sign go in and try, for what it's worth. We won't be far."

He didn't wait for acknowledgements. At this point, any halfway decent men would know as well as he did what had to be done, and if there were any legitimate point to this mission in Blaise's eyes, it was that he might begin to get a sense of what these seven Arbonnais corans he was training were like.

Without looking back he began moving on elbows and knees across the damp cool grass towards the hedgebreak that marked the entrance to the garden. Evrard was still carrying on inside; something about stars now, and white-capped waves.

In his irritation with the man, with himself, with the very nature of this errand, he almost crawled, quite unprofessionally, squarely into the backside of the priestess who was standing, half-hidden, beside the closest palm to the entranceway. Blaise didn't know if she was there as a guard for the poet or as a devotee of his art. There really wasn't time to explore such nuances. A sound from the woman could kill them all.

Fortunately, she was raptly intent on the figure of the chanting poet not far away. Blaise could see Evrard sitting on a stone bench at the near end of a pool in the garden, facing away from them, communing with himself, or the still waters, or whatever poets did their communing with.

Disdaining finesse, Blaise surged to his feet, grabbed the woman from behind and covered her mouth with one hand. She sucked air to scream and he tightened his grip about her mouth and throat. They were not to kill. He disliked unnecessary death in any event. In the silence he had been trained to by the assassins of Portezza, Blaise held the struggling woman, depriving her of air until he felt her slump heavily back against him. Carefully—for this was an old trick—he relaxed his grip. There was no deception here though; the priestess lay slack in his arms. She was a large woman with an unexpectedly young face. Looking at her, Blaise doubted this one would have been a guard. He wondered how she'd got out from the compound; it was the sort of thing that might someday be useful to know. Not that he planned on coming back here in a hurry, if ever.

Laying the priestess carefully down beneath the palm tree, he motioned Maffour with a jerk of his head to go into the garden. Hirnan and Thulier came silently up and began binding the woman in the shadows.

Yours the glory, bright Rian, while we mortal men

Walk humbly in the umbra of your great light,

Seeking sweet solace in the—

"Who is there?" Evrard of Lussan called without turning, more peeved than alarmed. "You all know I must not be disturbed when I work."

"We do know that, your grace," Maffour said smoothly, coming up beside the man.

Edging closer, hidden by the bushes, Blaise winced at the unctuous flattery of the title. Evrard had no more claim to it than Maffour did, but Mallin had been explicit in his instructions to the most articulate of his corans.

"Who are you?" Evrard asked sharply, turning quickly to look at Maffour in the moonlight. Blaise moved nearer, low to the ground, trying to slip around to the other side of the bench. He had his own views on what was about to happen.

"Maffour of Baude, your grace, with a message from En Mallin himself."

"I thought I recognized you," Evrard said haughtily. "How dare you come in this fashion, disturbing my thoughts and my art?" Nothing about impiety or trespass or the affront to the goddess he was currently lauding, Blaise thought sardonically, pausing next to a small statue.

"I have nothing to say to your baron or his ill-mannered wife, and am in no mood to listen to whatever tritely phrased message they have cobbled together for me." Evrard's tone was lordly.

"I have come a long way in some peril," Maffour said placatingly, "and Mallin de Baude's message is deeply sincere and not long. Will you not honour me by hearing it, your grace?"

"Honour?" Evrard of Lussan said, his voice rising querulously. "What claim has anyone in that castle to honour of any kind? I bestowed upon them a grace they never deserved. I gave to Mallin whatever dignity he claimed—through my presence there, through my art." His words grew dangerously loud. "Whatever he was becoming in the gaze of Arbonne, of the world, he owed to me. And in return, in return for that—"

"In return for that, for no reason I can understand, he seeks your company again," Blaise said, stepping quickly forward, having heard quite a bit more than enough.

As Evrard glanced back at him wide-eyed, attempting to rise, Blaise used the haft of his dagger for the second time that night, bringing it down with carefully judged force on the balding pate of the troubadour. Maffour moved quickly to catch the man as he fell.

"I cannot begin to tell you," Blaise said fervently as Hirnan and Thulier joined them, "how much I enjoyed doing that."

Hirnan grunted. "We can guess. What took you so long?"

Blaise grinned at the three of them. "What? And interfere with Maffour's great moment? I really wanted to hear that speech."

"I'lll recite it for you on the way back then," Maffour said sourly. "With all the 'your grace's' too."

"Spare us," said Hirnan briefly. He bent and effortlessly shouldered the body of the small troubadour.

Still grinning, Blaise led the way this time, without a word, down towards the south end of the garden, away from the sanctuary lights and the walls and the temple domes, and then, circling carefully, back towards the shelter of the wood. If these were the corans of a lesser baron, he was thinking to himself, and they turned out to be this coolly competent—with one vivid exception—he was going to have to do some serious reassessing, when they got back to land, of the men of this country of Arbonne, even with its troubadours and joglars and a woman ruling them.

The one vivid exception was having, without the least shadow of any possible doubt, the worst night of his life.

In the first place, there were the noises. Even at the edge of the woods, the sounds of the night forest kept making their way to Luth's pricked ears, triggering waves of panic that succeeded each other in a seemingly endless progression.

Secondly there was Vanne. Or, not exactly Vanne, but his absence, for the other coran assigned to guard duty kept wilfully abandoning Luth, his designated partner, and making his own way down the rope to check on the two clerics in the sailboat, then going off into the forest itself to listen for the return of their fellows, or for other less happy possibilities. Either of these forays would leave Luth alone for long moments at a time to cope with sounds and ambiguous shiftings in the shadows of the plateau or at the edges of the trees, with no one to turn to for reassurance.

The truth was, Luth said to himself—and he would have sworn to it as an oath in any temple of the goddess—that he really wasn't a coward, though he knew every man here would think him one from tonight onward. He wasn't though: put him on a crag above Castle Baude in a thunderstorm, with thieves on the slopes making off with the baron's sheep, and Luth would be fierce in pursuit of them, sure-footed and deft among the rocks, and not at all bad with his bow or blade when he caught up with the bandits. He'd done that, he'd done it last summer, with Giresse and Hirnan. He'd killed a man that night with a bowshot in darkness, and it was he who had led the other two back down the treacherous slopes to safety with the flock.

Not that they were likely to remember that, or bother to remind the others of it, after tonight. If any of them lived through tonight. If they ever left this island. If they—

What was that?

Luth wheeled, his heart lurching like a small boat hit by a crossing wave, in time to see Vanne making his way back onto the plateau from yet another survey of the woods. The other coran gave him a curious glance in the shadows but said nothing. They were not to speak, Luth knew. He found their own enforced silence almost as stressful as the noises of the night forest.

Because they weren't just noises, and this wasn't just night-time. These were the sounds of Rian's Island, which was holy, and the eight of them were here without proper consecration, without any claim of right—only a drunken ex-priest's mangling of the words of ritual—and they had laid violent hands on two of the goddess's truly anointed before they'd even landed.

Luth's problem, very simply, was that he was a believer in the powers of the goddess, profoundly so. If that could really be called a problem. He'd had a religious, superstitious grandmother who'd worshipped both Rian and Corannos along with a variety of hearth spirits and seasonal ones, and who'd known just enough about magic and folk spells to leave the grandson she'd reared helplessly prey to the terrors of precisely the sort of place where they were now. Had he not been so anxious not to lose face among the other corans and his baron and the big, capable, grimly sardonic northern mercenary Mallin had brought to lead and train them, Luth would certainly have found a way to back out of the mission when he was named for it.

He should have, he thought dismally. Whatever status that withdrawal would have cost him was as nothing compared to how he'd be diminished and mocked because of what had happened tonight. Who would ever have thought that simple piety, a prayer of thanks to holy Rian herself, could get a person into so much trouble? How should a high country man know how bizarrely far sound—a murmured prayer! — could carry at sea? And Hirnan had hurt him with that pincer-like grip of his. The oldest coran was a big man, almost as big as the bearded northerner, and his fingers had been like claws of iron. Hirnan should have known better, Luth thought, trying to summon some sense of outrage at how unfair all of this was turning out to be.

He jumped sideways again, stumbled, and almost fell. He was grappling for his sword when he realized that it was Vanne who had come up to him. He tried, with minimal success, to turn the motion into one of alertly prudent caution. Vanne, his face blandly expressionless, gestured and Luth bent his head towards him.

"I'm going down to check on them again," the other coran said, as Luth had despairingly known he would. "Remember, a corfe whistle if you need me. I'll do the same." Mutely, trying to keep his own expression from shaping a forelorn plea, Luth nodded.

Moving easily, Vanne negotiated the plateau, grasped the rope and slipped over the side. Luth watched the line jerk for a few moments and then go slack as Vanne reached the rocks at the bottom. He walked over to the tree that Maffour had tied the rope to and knelt to run a practised eye over the knot. It was fine, Luth judged, it would continue to hold.

He straightened and stepped back. And bumped into something.

His heart lurching, he spun around. As he did, as he saw what had come, all the flowing blood in his veins seemed to dry up and change to arid powder. He pursed his lips and tried to whistle. Like a corfe.

No sound came out. His lips were dry, as bone, as dust, as death. He opened his mouth to scream but closed it silently and quite suddenly as a curved, jewelled, inordinately long dagger was lifted and held to his throat.

The figures on the plateau were robed in silk and satin, dyed crimson and silver, as for a ceremony. They were mostly women, at least eight of them, but there were two men besides. It was a woman, though, who held the crescent-shaped blade to his throat. He could tell from the swell of her body beneath her robe, even though she was masked. They were all masked. And the masks, every one of them, were of predatory animals and birds. Wolf and hunting cat, owl and hawk, and a silver-feathered corfe with golden eyes that glittered in the moonlight.

"Come," said the priestess with the blade to Luth of Castle Baude, her voice cold and remote, the voice of a goddess at night. A goddess of the Hunt, in her violated sanctuary. She wore a wolf mask, Luth saw, and then he also realized that the ends of the gloves on her hands were shaped like the claws of a wolf. "Did you truly think you would not be found and known?" she said.

No, Luth wanted frantically to say. No, I never thought we could do this. I was sure we would be caught.

He said nothing. The capacity for speech seemed to have left him, silence lying like a weight of stones on his chest. In terror, his brain going numb, Luth felt the blade caress his throat almost lovingly. The priestess gestured with a clawed hand; in response, Luth's feet, as if of their own will, led him stumbling into the night forest of Rian. There were scented priestesses of the goddess all about him as he went, women masked like so many creatures of prey, clad in soft robes of silver and red amid the darkness of the trees, with the pale moon lost to sight, like hope.

Coming back through the forest, Blaise felt the same rippling sensation as before through the soles of his boots, as if the earth here on the island had an actual pulse, a beating heart. They went faster now, having done what they had come to do, aware that the priestess by the garden might be missed and found at any time. Blaise had dropped back to let Hirnan, carrying the unconscious poet, guide them once more, with a sense of direction seemingly unerring in the darkness of the woods.

They left the forest path and began to twist their way north again through the densely surrounding trees, small branches and leaves crackling underfoot as they went. No moonlight fell here, but they had their night vision now, and they had been this way before. Blaise recognized an ancient, contorted oak, an anomalous sight in a strand of pine and cedar.

Shortly afterwards they came out of the woods onto the plateau. The moon was high overhead, and Maffour's rope was still tied around the tree, their pathway down to the sea and escape.

But neither Vanne nor Luth was anywhere to be seen.

His pulse prickling with a first premonitory sense of disaster, Blaise strode quickly to the edge of the plateau and looked down.

The sailboat was gone, and the two bound clerics with it. Their own skiff was still there, and Vanne's body was lying in it.

Beside Blaise, Maffour swore violently and made his way swiftly down the rope. He sprang over the boulders and into the skiff, bending quickly over the man lying there.

He looked up. "He's all right. Breathing. Unconscious. I can't see any sign of a blow." There was wonder and the first edge of real apprehension in his voice.

Blaise straightened, looking around the plateau for a sign of Luth. The other corans stood in a tight cluster together, facing outwards. They had drawn their swords. There was no sound to be heard; even the forest seemed to have gone silent, Blaise realized, with a tingling sensation along his skin.

He made his decision.

"Hirnan, get him into the skiff. All of you go down there. I don't know what's happened but this is no place to linger. I'm going to take a fast look around, but if I can't see anything we'll have to go." He glanced quickly up at the moon, trying to judge the hour of night. "Get the skiff free and give me a few moments to look. If you hear me do a corfe cry start rowing hard and don't wait. Otherwise, use your judgment."

Hirnan looked briefly as if he would protest but said nothing. With Evrard of Lussan slung over his shoulder like a sack of grain, he made his way to the rope and down. The other corans began following. Blaise didn't wait to see them all descend. With the awareness of danger like a tangible presence within him, he drew his sword and stepped alone into the woods on the opposite side of the plateau from where they'd entered and returned.

Almost immediately he picked up a scent. Not of hunting cat or bear, nor of fox or badger or boar. What he smelled was the drifting fragrance of perfume. It was strongest to the west, away from where they had gone.

Blaise knelt to study the forest floor in the near-blackness. He wished Rudel were with him now, for a great many reasons, but in part because his friend was the best night tracker Blaise had ever known.

One didn't have to be expert, though, to realize that a company of people had passed here only a short time before, and that most if not all of them had been women. Blaise swore under his breath and stood up, peering into the darkness, uncertain of what to do. He hated like death to leave a man behind, but it was clear that a large number of priests and priestesses were somewhere ahead of him in the woods. A few moments, he had told Hirnan. Could he jeopardize the others in an attempt to find Luth?

Blaise drew a deep breath, aware once again now of that pulsing in the forest floor. He knew he was afraid; only a complete fool would not be afraid now. Even so, there was a core truth at the root of all of this for Blaise of Gorhaut, a very simple one: one did not leave a companion behind without an attempt at finding him. Blaise stepped forward into the darkness, following the elusive scent of perfume in the night.

"Commendable," a voice said, immediately in front of him. Blaise gasped and levelled his blade, peering into blackness. "Commendable, but extremely unwise," the voice went on with calm authority. "Go back. You will not find your fellow. Only death awaits you past this point tonight."

There was a rustling of leaves and Blaise made out the tall, shadowy form of a woman in the space in front of him. There were trees on either side of her, as if framing a place to stand. It was very dark, much too black for him to see her face, but the note of assured command in her voice told its own grim story about what had happened to Luth. She hadn't touched Blaise, though; no others had leaped forth to attack. And Vanne had been unharmed in the skiff.

"I would be shamed in my own eyes if I left and did not try to bring him out," Blaise said, still trying to make out the features of the woman in front of him.

He heard her laughter. "Shamed," she echoed, mockingly. "Do not be too much the fool, Northerner. Do you truly think you could have done any of this had we not permitted it? Will you deny feeling the awareness of this wood? Do you actually believe you moved unknown, unseen?"

Blaise swallowed with difficulty. His levelled sword suddenly seemed a hapless, even a ridiculous thing. Slowly he lowered it.

"Why?" he asked. "Why, then?"

Her laughter came again, deep and low. "Would you know my reasons, Northerner? You would understand the goddess on her own Island?"

My reasons.

"You are the High Priestess, then," he said, shifting his feet, feeling the earth's deep pulsing still. She said nothing. He swallowed again. "I would only know where my man has gone. Why you have taken him."

"One for one," she said quietly. "You were not consecrated to this place, any of you. You came here to take a man who was. We have allowed this for reasons of our own, but Rian exacts a price. Always. Learn that, Northerner. Know it as truth for so long as you are in Arbonne."

Rian exacts a price. Luth. Poor, frightened, bumbling Luth. Blaise stared into the darkness, wishing he could see this woman, struggling to find words of some kind that might save the man they'd lost.

And then, as if his very thoughts were open to her, as if she and the forest knew them intimately, the woman lifted one hand, and an instant later a torch blazed in her grasp, illuminating their small space within the woods. He had not seen or heard her striking flint.

He did hear her laugh again, and then, looking at the tall, proud form, at the fine-boned, aristocratic features before him, Blaise realized, with a shiver he could not control, that her eyes were gone. She was blind. There was a white owl, a freak of nature, resting on her shoulder, gazing at Blaise with unblinking eyes.

Not really certain why he was doing so, but suddenly aware that he had now entered a realm for which he was terribly ill equipped, Blaise sheathed his sword. Her laughter subsided; she smiled.

"Well done," Rian's High Priestess said softly. "I am pleased to see you are not a fool."

"To see?" Blaise said, and instantly regretted it.

She was undisturbed. The huge white owl did not move. "My eyes were a price for access to a great deal more. I can see you very well without them, Blaise of Gorhaut. It was you who needed light, not I. I know the scar that curves along your ribs and the colour of your hair, both now and on the winter night you were born and your mother died. I know how your heart is beating, and why you came to Arbonne, and where you were before. I know your lineage and your history, much of your pain, all your wars, your loves, the last time you made love."

It was a bluff, Blaise thought fiercely. All the clergy did this sort of thing, even Corannos's priests at home. All of them sought control with such arcane incantations.

"That last, then," he dared say, even here, his voice rough. "Tell me that last."

She did not hesitate. "Three months ago. Your brother's wife, in the ancient home of your family. Late at night, your own bed. You left before dawn on the journey that has brought you to Rian."

Blaise heard himself make a queer grunting sound as if he'd been punched. He could not help himself. He felt suddenly dizzy, blood rushing from his head as if in flight from the inexorable precision of what he had just heard.

"Shall I go on?" she asked, smiling thinly, the illuminating torch held up for him to see her. There was a new note in her voice, a kind of pitiless pleasure in her power. "You do not love her. You only hate your brother and your father. Your mother for dying. Yourself a little, perhaps. Would you hear more? Shall I tell your future for you now, like an old crone at the Autumn Fair?"

She was not old. She was tall and handsome, if no longer young, with grey in her dark hair. She knew things no one on earth should ever have known.

"No!" Blaise managed to say, forcing the word out. "Do not!"

He feared her laughter, her mocking voice, but she was silent and so was the forest around them. Even the torch was burning without sound, Blaise realized belatedly. The owl lifted its wings suddenly as if to fly, but only settled itself again on her shoulder.

"Go then," Rian's High Priestess said, not without gentleness. "We have allowed you the man for whom you came. Take him and go."

He should turn now, Blaise knew. He should do exactly as she said. There were things at work here far beyond his understanding. But he had led seven men to this place.

"Luth," he said sturdily. "What will be done to him?"

There was a strange, whistling sound; he realized it had come from the bird. The priestess said, "His heart will be cut out while he lives. It will be eaten." Her voice was flat, without intonation. "His body will be boiled in a vat of very great age and his skin peeled from his bones. His flesh will be cut into pieces and used for divination."

Blaise felt his gorge rising, his skin crawled with horror and loathing. He took an involuntary step backwards. And heard her laughter. There was genuine amusement, something young, almost girlish in the sound.

"Really," the priestess said, "I hadn't thought I was so convincing as all that." She shook her head. "How savage do you think we are? You have taken a living man, we take a living man from you. He will be consecrated as a servant of Rian and set to serve the goddess on her Island in redress for his transgression and yours. This one is more a cleric than a coran in any case, I think you know as much. It is as I told you, Northerner: you have been permitted to do this. It would have been different, I assure you, had we chosen to make it so."

Relief washing over him like a stream of water, Blaise fought a sudden, uncharacteristic impulse to kneel before this woman, this incarnated voice of a goddess his countrymen did not worship.

"Thank you," he said, his voice rough and awkward in his own ears.

"You are welcome," she said, almost casually. There was a pause, as if she were weighing something. The owl was motionless on her shoulder, unblinking, gazing at him. "Blaise, do not overvalue this power of ours. What has happened tonight."

He blinked in astonishment. "What do you mean?"

"You are standing at the very heart of our strength here on this island. We grow weaker and weaker the further we are from here, or from the other isle in the lake inland. Rian has no limits, but her mortal servants do. I do. And the goddess cannot be compelled, ever."

She had built up a veil of power and magic and mystery, and now she was lifting it for him to see behind. And she had called him by his name.

"Why?" he asked, wonderingly. "Why do you tell me this?"

She smiled, almost ruefully. "Something in my own family, I suspect. My father was a man prone to take chances with trust. I seem to have inherited that from him. We might need each other, in a time not far from tonight."

Struggling to absorb all of this, Blaise asked the only question he could think to ask. "Who was he? Your father?"

She shook her head, amused again. "Northerner, you seek to lead men in Arbonne. You will have to grow less bitter and more curious. I think, though it might be a long road for you. You should have known who was High Priestess on Rian's Island before you came. I am Beatritz de Barbentain, my father was Guibor, count of Arbonne, my mother is Signe, who rules us now. I am the last of their children yet alive."

Blaise was actually beginning to feel as if he might fall down, so buffeted did he feel by all of this. The skiff, he thought. The mainland. He urgently needed to be away from here.

"Go," she said, as if reading his thoughts again. She raised her hand very slightly and the torch instantly went out. In the suddenly enveloping darkness, Blaise heard her say in her earlier voice—the sound of a priestess, speaking with power: "One last thing, Blaise of Gorhaut. A lesson for you to learn if you can: anger and hatred have limits that are reached too soon. Rian exacts a price for everything, but love is hers as well, in one of her oldest incarnations."

Blaise turned then, stumbling over a root in the close night shadows. He left the wood, feeling moonlight as a blessing. He crossed the plateau and remembered, somehow, to untie Maffour's rope and loop it about himself. Finding handholds in the rock face, he descended the cliff to the sea. The skiff was still there, waiting some distance away from shore. They saw him by the light of the high, pale moon. He was going to swim out, almost prepared to welcome the cold shock of the water again, but then he saw them rowing back for him and he waited. They came in to the edge of the rocks and Blaise stepped into the boat helped by Maffour and Giresse. He saw that Evrard of Lussan was still unconscious, slumped at the back of the skirl. Vanne was sitting up, though, at the front. He looked a little dazed. Blaise was not surprised.

"They have kept Luth," he said briefly as they looked at him. "One man for one man. But they will do him no harm. I will tell you more on land, but in Corannos's name, let's go. I need a drink very badly, and we've a long way to row."

He stepped over to his own bench and unwrapped the rope from his body. Maffour came and sat beside him again. They took their oars, and with no other words spoken, backed quietly out of the inlet Hirnan had found and turned the skiff towards land, towards Arbonne, rowing steadily in the calm, still night.

To the east, not long afterwards, well before they reached the shore, the waning crescent of the blue moon rose out of the sea to balance the silver one setting westward now, changing the light in the sky and on the water and on the rocks and trees of the island they were leaving behind.

CHAPTER 2

Some mornings, as today, she woke feeling amazingly young, happy to be alive to see the spring return. It wasn't altogether a good thing, this brief illusion of youth and vitality, for its passage—and it always passed—made her too achingly aware that she was lying alone in the wide bed. She and Guibor had shared a room and a bed after the older fashion until the very end, a little over a year ago. Arbonne had observed the yearfast for its count and the ceremonies of remembrance scarcely a month past.

A year wasn't very long at all, really. Not nearly enough time to remember without pain private laughter or public grace, the sound of a voice, resonance of a tread, the keen engagement of a questioning mind or the well-known signs of kindled passion that could spark and court her own.

A passion that had lasted to the end, she thought, lying in bed alone, letting the morning come to her slowly. Even with all their children long since grown or dead, with an entirely new generation of courtiers arising in Barbentain, and younger dukes and barons taking power in strongholds once ruled by the friends—and enemies—of their own youth and prime. With new leaders of the city-states of Portezza, a young, reckless-sounding king in Gorhaut, and an unpredictable one as well, though not young, in Valensa far in the north. All was changing in the world, she thought: the players on the board, the shape of the board itself. Even the rules of the game she and Guibor had played together against them all for so long.

There had been mornings in the year gone by when she had awakened feeling ancient and bone cold, wondering if she had not outlived her time, if she should have died with the husband she'd loved, before the world began to change around her.

Which was weak and unworthy. She knew that, even on the mornings when those chill thoughts came, and she knew it more clearly now, with the birds outside her window singing to welcome the spring back to Arbonne. Change and transience were built into the way Corannos and Rian had made the world. She had accepted and gloried in that truth all her life; it would be shallow and demeaning to lament it now.

She rose from her bed and stood on the golden carpet. Immediately one of the two girls who slept by the door of her chamber sprang forward—they had been waiting for her—carrying her morning robe. She smiled at the young one, slipped into the robe and walked to the window, drawing back the curtains herself on the view to the east and the rising sun.

Barbentain Castle lay on an island in the river and so below her, down past the tumbling rocks and forbidding cliffs that guarded the castle, she could see the flash and sparkle of the river rushing away south in its high spring torrent, through vineyard and forest and grainland, by town and hamlet and lonely shepherd's hut, past castle and temple and tributary stream to Tavernel and the sea.

The Arbonne River in the land named for it—the warm, beloved, always coveted south, sung by its troubadours and joglars, celebrated through the known world for its fruitfulness and its culture, and for the beauty and grace of its women.

Not the least of which women, not by any means the least, had been she herself in the lost days of youth and fire. The nights of music, with a many-faceted power in her every glance and lifted eyebrow, when candlelight cast a warming glow on silver and gold and a glittering company, when the songs were always of love, and almost always about love of her.

Signe de Barbentain, countess of Arbonne, stood at her bedchamber window on a morning in spring, looking out over the sunlit river of the land she ruled, and the two other women in the room with her, preparing to attend to her needs, were far too young, both of them, to have even a hope of understanding the smile that crossed her face.

In fact, for no reason she really knew herself, Signe was thinking of her daughter. Not of Beatritz, wielding power within her own domain on Rian's Island in the sea; not of Beatritz, her last child living, but of Aelis, her young one, so long dead.

Even the birds above the lake

Are singing of my love,

And even the flowers along the shore

Are growing for her sake.

Twenty-two, no, twenty-three years now since young Bertran de Talair—and he had been very young then—had written those lines for Aelis. They were still being sung, remarkably, in spite of all the verses the troubadours had spun since those days, all the new rhyme schemes and metres and the increasingly complex harmonies and fashions of today. More than two decades after, Bertran's song for long-dead Aelis was still heard in Arbonne. Usually in springtime, Signe thought, and wondered if that had been the early-morning half-awake chain of associations that had led her to remember. The mind did strange things sometimes, and memory wounded at least as often as it healed or assuaged.

Which led her, predictably, to thoughts of Bertran himself, and what memory and loss and the unexpected shapes they had taken had done to him in twenty-odd years. What sort of man, she wondered, would he have become had the events of that long-ago year fallen out differently? Though it was hard, almost impossible really, to imagine how they could have turned out well. Guibor had said once, apropos of nothing at all, that the worst tragedy for Arbonne, if not for the people actually involved, had been the death of Girart de Talair: had Bertran's brother lived to hold the dukedom and father heirs, the younger son, the troubadour, would never have come to power in Talair, and the enmity of two proud castles by the lake might never have become the huge reality it was in Arbonne.

Might-have-beens, Signe thought. It was seductively easy to wonder—of a winter's night before a fire, or amid the drone of bees and the scent of summer herbs in the castle garden—about the dead, imagining them still living, the differences they might have made. She did it all the time: with her lost sons, with Aelis, with Guibor himself since his passing. Not a good channel of the mind, that one, though inevitable, she supposed. Memory, Anselme of Cauvas had written once, the harvest and the torment of my days.

It had been some time since she'd seen Bertran, she thought, pulling her reflections forward to the present, and rather longer since Urté de Miraval had come to Barbentain. Both of them had sent messages and surrogates—Urté his seneschal, Bertran his cousin Valery—to the yearfast of Guibor's passing. There had been a killing among their corans, it seemed—not an unusual event between Miraval and Talair—and both dukes had felt unable or unwilling to leave their castles then, even to mourn their dead count.

Signe wondered, not for the first time in the month gone by, if she should have commanded them to be present. They would have come, she knew; Bertran laughing and ironic, Urté grimly obedient, standing as far apart from each other in all the ceremonies as dignity and shared high rank allowed.

She hadn't felt, somehow, like issuing that order, though Roban had urged her to. The chancellor had seen it as an opportunity to publicly assert her control over the fractious dukes and barons of Arbonne, bringing to heel the two most prominent of all. An important thing to do, Roban had said, this early in her own reign, and especially with what was happening in the north, with the peace treaty signed between Gorhaut and Valensa.

He was almost certainly right; Signe had known he was, particularly about the need to send a clear signal north to the king of Gorhaut and his counsellors. But somehow she had hated the thought of using Guibor's yearfast—not the first one, surely—in such a bluntly political way. Could she not be allowed, for the one time, to remember her husband in the company only of those who had freely come to Barbentain and Lussan to do the same? Ariane and Thierry de Carenzu; Gaufroy de Ravenc and his young bride; Arnaut and Richilde de Malmont, her sister and brother-in-law, almost the last, with Urté, of their own generation still ruling in the great castles. These had all come, and so, too, had virtually every one of the lesser dukes and barons and a deeply affecting number of the other folk of Arbonne: landless corans, artisans of the towns, brethren of the god and priests and priestesses of Rian, farmers from the grainlands, fisherfolk from the sea, shepherds from the hills by Gotzland or Arimonda, or from the slopes of the northern mountains that blocked the winds from Gorhaut, carters and smiths and wheelwrights, millers and merchants from a dozen different towns, even a number of young men from the university—though Taverael's unruly students were legendary for their aversion to authority of any kind.

And all of the troubadours had come to Barbentain.

That had been the thing that moved her most of all. If one excepted Bertran de Talair himself, every one of the troubadours of Arbonne and all the joglars had come to share in the remembering of their lord, to offer their new laments and make sweet, sad music to mark the yearfast of his dying. There had been poetry and music for three days, and much of it had been rarely crafted and from the heart.

In such a mood, with so many come willingly in a spirit of shared sorrow and memory, Signe had felt profoundly unwilling to compel the presence of anyone, even two of the most powerful—and therefore most dangerous—men in her land. How could she be blamed for wanting the spirit of the yearfast and its rituals to be unmarred by the long wrangle between Miraval and Talair?

The problem, and the reason she was still dwelling upon this, was that she knew what Guibor IV, count of Arbonne, would have done in her place. In terms admitting of no possible ambiguity her husband would have demanded their presence before him during any remotely similar event, whether of mourning or celebration, in Barbentain itself or in the temples of god or goddess in Lussan town beside the river.

On the other hand, she thought, and the smile on her still-lovely face deepened almost imperceptibly, had she herself been the one being mourned instead of Guibor, Bertran de Talair would have been with the others in Barbentain for her yearfast, come feud or river flood or fire or blight to the grapes. He would have been there. She knew. He was a troubadour as much as he was anything else, and it had been Signe de Barbentain who had begun the Court of Love and shaped with her own personality the graceful, elegant world that had let the poets and the singers flourish.

Aelis her daughter might have inspired Bertran's passion and his youthful springtime song, still sung after more than twenty years; Ariane her niece might be queen of the Court of Love now; but Signe had had a hundred verses and more written for her in fire and exaltation by a score of troubadours who mattered and at least twice as many who didn't, and every song written for every noblewoman in Arbonne was, at least in part, a song for her.

But this was unworthy, she thought wryly, shaking her head. A sign of old age, of pettiness, competing in this way—even in her own mind—with Ariane and the other ladies of Arbonne, even with her poor, long-dead daughter. Was she feeling unloved, she wondered, and knew there was truth in that. Guibor was dead. She ruled a court of the world now, not a simulated, stylized court named for love and devoted to its nuances. There were differences, great differences that had altered, and not subtly, the way the world dealt with her and she with it.

She should have ordered the two dukes to come last month; Roban, as usual, had been right. And it might even have been good for her, in the usual, strange, slightly hurtful way, to see Bertran again. It was never a wise idea in any case to let him go too long without a reminder that she was watching him and expecting things of him. No one alive could truthfully claim to have a large influence on the duke of Talair and what he chose to do, but Signe thought she had some. Not a great deal, but some, for many reasons. Most of which led back those twenty-three years or so.

He was said to be in Baude Castle now, of all places, high in the south-western hills. The situation had stabilized—for the moment—between Talair and Miraval, and Signe could guess how the story of Evrard of Lussan and Soresina de Baude would have been irresistible for Bertran in his endless, disruptive careen.

It was a delicious piece of gossip. Beatritz had already sent private word of what Mallin de Baude had done, abducting the aggrieved poet from Rian's Island. She should have been outraged at the tidings, Signe knew—and Beatritz should certainly have been—but there was something so amusing in the sequence of events, and the poet had clearly been wearing out his welcome on the island by the time the corans had come and taken him away.

Not that any of that tale would reach the ears of most of the people in Arbonne. Mallin would hardly want word of his impiety to spread—which is undoubtedly why he'd not led the mission himself—and Evrard of Lussan would scarcely be thrilled with a public image of himself knocked unconscious and carried back like so much milled grain in a sack to the castle from which he'd fled in such high dudgeon.

On the other hand, the story of Soresina's very public contrition and her open-armed, kneeling welcome of the poet was certainly going the rounds of the castles and towns. That part of the tale Evrard would encourage for all he was worth. Signe wondered if he'd bedded the woman after all. It was possible, but it didn't much matter. On the whole, and however improbably, it looked as if everyone might end up happy in this affair.

Although that optimistic thought certainly didn't factor in the moods and caprices of En Bertran de Talair, who was, for reasons of his own, currently bestowing the honour of his presence on the doubtlessly overwhelmed young couple in Castle Baude. Mallin de Baude was reported to be a man of some ambition; he wanted to rise in the world, to move among the circles and the councils of the great, not remain mewed up in his eyrie among the sheep and goats and terraced olive trees of his family estates. Well, the great of the world, or one of them at any rate, had come to him now. Mallin was probably about to discover some of the implications of his dreaming.

Signe shook her head. There was folly at work here, she had no doubt. Bertran often essayed his wilder escapades in the spring; she had come to that realization long ago. On the other hand, she supposed it was better that he pursue whatever it was that had drawn him to those high pastures near the Arimondan passes than the killing matters of earlier in the year.

In any case, she had no real leisure to spend dwelling on such affairs. Ariane ruled the Court of Love now. Signe had Gorhaut to deal with, a dangerous peace signed in the north and rather a great deal more. And she had to do it alone now, with only the memory—the harvest and the torment of my days—of Guibor's voice to guide her along the increasingly narrow paths of statesmanship.

There was a new fashion among the younger troubadours and nobles—she even thought Ariane might approve of it: they were writing and saying now that it was ill-bred, in bad taste if not actually impossible, for a wife to love her husband. That true love had to flow freely from choices made willingly, and marriage could never be a matter of such free choice for men or women in the society they knew.

The world was changing. Guibor would have laughed at that new conceit with her, and said exactly what he thought of it, and then he might have taken her in his arms and she could have laced her hands in his hair and they would have proven the young ones wrong in this, as in so many other things, within the private, enchanted, now-broken circle of their love.

She turned from the window, from the view of the river below, from memories of the past, and nodded to the two young girls. It was time to dress and go down. Roban would be waiting, with all the needs of the present, imperious in their clamour to be addressed, drowning—as in a flooding of the river—the lost, murmuring voices of yesterday.

There was, of course, no light where he had chosen to keep watch, though there were brackets for torches on the walls of the stairwell. It would have been a waste of illumination; no one had any business coming up these stairs after nightfall.

Blaise settled himself on one of the benches in the window recess nearest the second-floor landing. He could see the stairs and hear any movement on them but would be hidden from anyone coming up. Some men would have preferred to be visible, even torchlit, here on guard, to have their presence known and so function as a deterrent to anyone even contemplating an ascent. Blaise didn't think that way: it was better, to his mind, to have such designs exposed. If anyone was planning to make their way towards Soresina de Baude's chambers he wanted them to try, so he could see them and know who they were.

Though, in fact, he knew exactly who such a person would be tonight if there was to be an attempt, and so did Mallin de Baude—which is why Blaise was on guard here, and Hirnan, equally trusted, equally discreet, was outside the walls beneath the baroness's window.

Bertran de Talair had a twenty-year reputation for being exceptionally determined and resourceful in pursuit of his seductions. Also successful. Blaise had no real doubt that if the troubadour duke of Talair did manage to make his way to Soresina's bed his reception would be considerably different from what Evrard of Lussan's had been earlier in the year.

He made a sour face, thinking about that, and leaned back, putting his booted feet up on the opposite bench. He knew it was unwise on guard duty at night to make himself too comfortable, but he was used to this and didn't think he would fall asleep. He had kept night watch over a number of different things in his time, including, as it happened, the women's quarters in more than one castle. Guarding the womenfolk, virtually imprisoning them at night, was a part of the ordinary round of life in Gorhaut. No hint there, not even a trace, of this subversive Arbonnais custom of encouraging poets to woo and exalt the women of the land. The lords of Gorhaut knew how to protect what was theirs.

Blaise had even felt a carefully concealed satisfaction when Mallin de Baude, after a week of watching their very distinguished and equally notorious guest charm his wife, had asked his hired northern mercenary to quietly arrange protection for Soresina's rooms during En Bertran's last night in Castle Baude. A balding, rumpled poet like Evrard was one thing, evidently, but the most celebrated nobleman in Arbonne was another. Soresina's manner the past few days had offered proof enough of that.

Blaise had accepted the assignment and arranged to post Hirnan outside without so much as a word of comment or a flicker of expression on his face. The truth was, he liked Mallin de Baude and would have thought less of him had the baron been oblivious or indifferent to the nuances that had been shaped since de Talair's arrival in their midst, not long after Evrard had departed again.

Remarkably enough, amusingly even, everyone in Castle Baude seemed to have been happy in the aftermath of the raid on Rian's Island. In part because virtually no one knew there had been a raid. As far as the folk of the castle and the countryside around were concerned, all they knew—all they needed to know, Mallin had stressed repeatedly to Blaise and the corans—was that Evrard of Lussan had reconsidered his position and had returned to the castle, escorted, by pre-arrangement, by a group of Mallin's best men and the northern mercenary who was leading and training them that season.

Hirnan and Maffour, who apparently knew Luth's grandmother, had been given the task of conveying to her what had happened to the hapless coran. They returned with Maffour grinning wryly and Hirnan shaking his big head in bemusement: far from being distressed at her loss, the woman had been thrilled by their tidings. Her grandson serving the goddess on Rian's Island had been a prophetic dream of hers years ago, the two corans reported. Blaise had lifted his eyebrows in disbelief; he was clearly not going to be able to understand the Arbonnais for a long time yet, if ever. Still, the woman's attitude was useful; an outcry of loss from her would have proven embarrassing.

In the meantime, Soresina's public reception of the prodigal poet had been almost touching in its emotion. "There's an actress in that one," Maffour had whispered drily to Blaise as they stood to one side of the castle forecourt and watched the young baroness kneel and then rise to salute the troubadour with a kiss on each cheek and a third one on the lips.

"There is in all of them," Blaise had replied out of the side of his mouth. Nonetheless, he too had been feeling rather pleased that morning, a sensation that continued when it became clear that although Evrard was not going to linger in Baude Castle—no one really wanted him to—he seemed to have accepted his abduction with a good humour that matched Mallin's own.

The poet offered one quickly-fashioned verse with an elaborately strung-together set of images about emerging from a dark cave, drawn upwards by a glow of light that turned out to be the radiance of Soresina de Baude. He used another name for her, of course, but the same one as it had been all along. Everyone knew who the woman was. Everyone was happy.

The troubadour left Baude at the end of a week with a jingling purse, an assuaged self-esteem and a more than slightly enhanced reputation. No one in Arbonne would know exactly what had transpired in this remote castle in the highlands, but it was evident that Evrard of Lussan had somehow been wooed back by the baron and his wife, and had been handsomely rewarded for his indulgence of their earlier errors. Among other things, the power of the troubadours, both in their person and through their satires and encomiums, had been subtly augmented by the enigmatic sequence of events. That part Blaise didn't much like, but there wasn't anything he could do about it, and this wasn't his home in any case. It shouldn't matter, he told himself, what follies Arbonne strayed into, or continued with.

The corans of Baude had been making wagers amongst each other all week—wagers never likely to be settled one way or another—as to just how far Soresina's contrition had gone, or rather, how far it had allowed the poet to go. Blaise, scrutinizing the woman and the man narrowly on the morning of Evrard's departure, had been quite certain that nothing untoward had happened, but this was not the sort of thing he wagered upon or talked about, and he kept his peace. He did accept an additional purse from Mallin over and above his wages that month; the baron was so caught up in his new style of noble largess that Blaise actually spent part of a morning doing calculations and then musing on how long Mallin was going to be able to sustain this sort of thing. Rank and position in the hierarchy of nobility didn't come cheaply, in Arbonne or anywhere else. Blaise had wondered if the baron really understood all the implications that were likely to arise from his pursuit of status in the world.

And then, about ten days after Evrard's departure, one of the more immediate implications had arrived, preceded by an envoy with a message that had thrown Baude Castle into a chaos of preparation.

At the top of the dark stairway Blaise shifted his seat on the stone bench. It would be nice, he thought briefly, to have a beaker of wine up here; not that he'd ever really have allowed himself such an indulgence. He knew at least two men who had died, drunken and asleep, when they should have been on watch. He had, as it happened, killed one of the two himself.

It was silent in the castle; he felt very much alone, and a long way from home. An unusual feeling, that one: home hadn't meant much to him for a long time. People still did, though, sometimes, and there was no one here who was really a friend yet, or likely to become one in the time he was allowing himself at Castle Baude. He wondered where Rudel was tonight, what country, what part of the world. Thinking of his friend led him back to the cities of Portezza, and so, inevitably perhaps in the silence of night outside a woman's rooms, to memories of Lucianna. Blaise shook his head. Women, he thought. Was there ever one born to be trusted since the world was made?

And that thought, not a new one for him this year, would take his memories straight home if he let them, to his brother and his brother's wife, and the last time—as the High Priestess of Rian had somehow known—he had lain with a woman in love. Or, not love. The priestess had known that too, uncannily. He had felt shockingly open and exposed before her blindness in the forest that night, and not overly proud, after, of what she had seen in him. He wondered if her vision was deep enough, in whatever way she saw such things, to reach back to roots and sources and an understanding of why men—and women—did the things they did.

Blaise wondered if he himself really understood the events of that short, hopeless attempt to return home four months ago. It had been pure impulse that had led him back, or so he'd thought at the time, bidding farewell to Rudel at the Gotzland Pass to go back to Gorhaut and his family home for the first time in almost a year. What was a country, what was a home? He looked out through the narrow archer's window. The blue moon was high, almost full. Escoran they named it in Gorhaut—"daughter of the god" — but they called the blue moon Riannon here, for their goddess. There was a power to naming so, a choosing of alignments. But the moon was the same, wasn't it, whatever mortal man chose to call it, lending her strange, elusive light to the landscape east of the castle?

Pale Vidonne—which bore the same name everywhere—wouldn't rise for some time yet. If someone were actually making a foray from outside, climbing up to the window, it would be fairly soon, in the denser shadows while the blue moon rode alone. It was a mild night, which pleased Blaise for Hirnan's sake outside. It was unlikely in the extreme that any sane man would actually attempt to scale the outer wall of the castle in pursuit of a seduction, but as long as they were assigned to guard duty they might as well do it properly. Blaise had had that attitude to things as a boy, and nothing in his adult years had made him find cause to change.

He couldn't see Hirnan down below, of course, but the moonlight showed the hills in the distance, and the fields where the lavender would soon flower, and the winding road that climbed from them up to the castle. Lavender would make him think of Lucianna again if he wasn't careful. Resolutely, Blaise turned his mind to the task at hand, to where he now was, to this matter of Bertran de Talair, with all its implications.

On a bright, windy morning seven days ago, with spring fully arrived and the first wildflowers gleaming in the sun like a many-coloured carpet laid down for royalty, three horses had been seen making their way up the slow, circuitous path to the castle gates. A trumpet blew erratically from the ramparts, the portcullis was raised with a dangerous celerity, almost maiming one of the men handling the winches, and Blaise had assembled with the corans and most of the household in the forecourt. Mallin and Soresina, splendidly jewelled and attired (a great deal more expense there; Blaise happened to know exactly what fur-trimmed Portezzan samite with gold thread in the weft would have cost), rode out to honour the arriving trio.

Blaise saw a brown horse, a grey, a rather magnificent black. An elderly joglar with the by now familiar harp and lute was riding the brown; a broad-shouldered coran of middle years sat the grey with the ease of many seasons in the saddle. Between the two of them, bareheaded in the sunshine and the wind, clad in nondescript brown fustian without adornment of any kind, rode Duke Bertran de Talair, come to pay—inexplicably—a visit to the appropriately overwhelmed young baron and baroness of Castle Baude.

As the small party rode into the castle forecourt, Blaise, staring with frank curiosity, saw that de Talair was a man of slightly more than middle height with a lean, ironical face, clean-shaven in the Arbonnais fashion. He was almost forty-five years old, Blaise knew from the corans' reports, but he didn't look it. His eyes were indeed as blue as the gossip had them; even at a distance the colour was disconcerting. There was a scar on his right cheek, and he wore his hair cropped unfashionably short, revealing that the top part of his right ear was missing.

Most of the world, it seemed, knew the story of how he had come by those injuries, and what he had done in turn to the hired assassin from Portezza who had inflicted them. As it happened, Blaise knew the son of that man. They had served a season in Gotzland together two years back.

As events unfolded over the next hours and days, it swiftly became apparent to Blaise that the duke's reasons for being there were at least threefold. One, obviously, was Mallin, and a wide-ranging, many-faceted attempt to enlist the emerging, ambitious young baron to Bertran's allegiance in the long power straggle with Urté de Miraval for preeminence in the western part of Arbonne, if not the country as a whole. That much, in fact, Hirnan and Maffour had guessed well before the duke had arrived.

The second lure for Bertran, almost as evidently, had been Soresina. En Bertran de Talair, never wed, though linked to an extraordinary number of women in several countries over the years, seemed to have an almost compulsive need to personally acquaint himself with the charms of any celebrated beauty. Evrard of Lussan's verses, if they had done nothing else, had clearly piqued the curiosity of the duke.

Even Blaise, who didn't like her, had to admit that Soresina had been looking quite magnificent of late, as if Evrard's proclamation of her charms had somehow caused her fair-haired beauty to ripen, her dark, flashing eyes to become even more alluring, that she might come to equal in reality the elaborate fancies of his verse. Whatever the cause, there was something almost breathtaking about the young baroness of Castle Baude that week, and even men who had lived in her presence for some time would find themselves turning distractedly towards the sound of her lifted voice and laughter in a distant room, forgetting the path of their own thoughts.

Blaise would have spent more time wondering how Bertran de Talair sought to reconcile an attempt to cultivate the friendship of Mallin de Baude with an equally fervent if slightly more discreet pursuit of the baron's enticing young wife had it not emerged very quickly that the third reason for the duke's presence among them was Blaise himself.

On the very first evening, after the most elaborate and expensive repast Baude Castle had ever seen—there were even spoons for the soup, instead of the usual chunks of bread—Bertran de Talair lounged at his ease beside his hostess and host and listened as Ramir, his joglar for more than two decades, sang the duke's own compositions for the best part of an hour, Even Blaise, jaundiced as ever on this subject, was forced to concede privately that—whether it was the elderly joglar's art or Bertran's—what they were listening to that night was of an entirely different order from the music of Evrard of Lussan that had been his own first introduction to the troubadours of Arbonne.

Even so, he found this writing of verses a silly, almost a ludicrous pastime for a nobleman. For Evrard and those like him, perhaps it could be understood if one were in a tolerant mood: poetry and music seemed to offer a unique channel here in Arbonne for men, or even women, who might never otherwise have any avenue to fame or modest wealth or the society of the great. But Bertran de Talair was something else entirely: what possible use were these verses and the time wasted in shaping them for a lord known to be one of the foremost fighting men in six countries?

The question was still vexing Blaise, despite the fact that he'd allowed himself an extra cup of wine, when he saw de Talair lean across, setting down his own wine goblet, and whisper something in Soresina's ear that made her flush to the cleavage of her pale green gown. Bertran rose then, and Ramir the joglar, who had evidently been waiting for such a movement, stood up neatly from the stool he'd been sitting upon while he played and held forth his harp as de Talair stepped down from the dais. The duke had been drinking steadily all night; it didn't seem to show in any way.

"He's going to play for us himself," Maffour whispered excitedly in Blaise's ear. "This is rare! A very high honour!" There was a buzz of anticipation in the hall as others evidently came to the same awareness. Blaise grimaced and glanced over at Maffour disdainfully: what business had a fighting coran to be growing so agitated over something this trivial? But he noted, glancing at Hirnan on Maffour's far side, that even the older coran, normally so stolid and phlegmatic, was watching the duke with undeniable anticipation. With a sigh, and a renewed sense of how hopelessly strange this country was, Blaise turned back to the high table. Bertran de Talair had settled himself on the low stool before it. Another love lyric, Blaise thought, having had a season of Evrard, and having noted the glances that had already begun to pass between hostess and noble guest during the meal. As it happened, he was wrong.

What Bertran de Talair gave them instead, in a highland hall at the very beginning of that summer, amid candles and jewels and silk and gold, with early lavender for fragrance in bowls along the tables, was war.

War and death in the ice of winter, axes and swords and maces clanging on iron, horses screaming, and the cries of men, eddies of snow beginning to fall, breath-smoke in the bitterly cold northern air, a wan red sun setting and the chill pale light of Vidonne rising in the east over a field of death.

And Blaise knew that field.

He had fought there, and very nearly died. Far to the south, here in woman-ruled, woman-shaped Arbonne, Bertran de Talair was singing to them of the Battle of Iersen Bridge, when the army of King Duergar of Gorhaut had beaten back the invaders from Valensa in the last battle of that year's fighting.

The last battle of a long war, actually, for Duergar's son, Ademar, and King Daufridi of Valensa had signed their treaty of peace at the end of the winter that followed, and so ended a war that had lasted as long as Blaise had lived. Leaning forward now, his hand tightening around his goblet, Blaise of Gorhaut listened to the resonant chords Bertran drew from his harp in waves like the waves of battle, and to the clear, deep, chanting voice as it came, inexorably indicting, to the end of the song:

A last chord, stern and echoing, and Bertran de Talair was done. There was absolute silence in the hall, an entirely different order of response from the grateful laughter and applause that had greeted the joglar's earlier offerings of love and springtime.

In that stillness Blaise of Gorhaut grew painfully aware of the pounding of his heart, still beating to the rhythm of the duke's harsh chords. Men he had known all his life had died on that field by Iersen Bridge. Blaise had been not twenty helpless strides away, with frozen bodies piled between, when Duergar his king had pitched from his horse, an arrow in his eye, crying the god's name in agony, his voice towering over the battlefield like the giant he had been.

Five months later Duergar's son, Ademar, now king in Gorhaut, and Galbert, his Chief Counsellor, High Elder of Corannos, had negotiated the treaty that, in exchange for hostages and gold and King Daufridi's daughter to wed when she came of age, gave Valensa all of the northlands of Gorhaut down to the line of the Iersen River. The very fields and villages Daufridi and his warriors had been unable to take with their swords in three decades of war they had won a season later with the smooth words and sly diplomacy of their hired Arimondan negotiators.

Not long after that, Blaise of Gorhaut had left home on the circuitous journey through several countries that had brought him to this hall in Arbonne, a year from the season of that treaty.

His reverie ended with the abrupt, unsettling realization that Bertran de Talair, who had done no more than nod when Blaise was first presented to him in the morning, was staring across the room at him now from the low stool where he sat, one leg gracefully extended. Blaise straightened his shoulders and returned the gaze steadily, grateful for whatever masking his beard afforded. He wouldn't have wanted his thoughts read just then.

En Bertran drew his fingers quietly across the harp. The notes hung, delicate as glass, as the table flowers, in the stillness of the hall. As quietly, though very clearly, the duke of Talair said, "What do you think, Northerner? How long will it hold, this peace of yours?"

Some things grew clear to Blaise with those words, but even as they did, other mysteries took shape. He drew a careful breath, aware that everyone in the great hall was looking at him. Bertran's gaze in the torchlight was uncannily blue; his wide mouth was quirked in an ironic smile.

"It is no peace of mine," Blaise said, keeping his tone as casual as he could.

"I thought not," said Bertran quickly, a note of satisfaction in the light voice, as if he'd heard more than Blaise had meant to say. "I didn't think you were down here for love of our music, or even our ladies, fair as they are."

As he spoke, the blue eyes and the smile—not ironic at all suddenly—had been briefly redirected towards the high table and the lone woman sitting there. His long fingers were moving once more across the strings of the harp. A moment later, the duke of Talair lifted his voice again, this time in exactly the kind of song Blaise had expected before. But something—and not merely the mood of a night—had been changed for Blaise by then, and he didn't know how to respond this time to an Arbonnais lord singing words of his own devising about the glory to be searched for in a woman's dark eyes.

The next day the corans of Baude put on a display in the fields below the castle village, charging with lances against a bobbing wooden contraption got up—as it was everywhere—to look like a racoux from the ghost tales of childhood, complete with whitened face and jet-black hair. Mallin had declared a holiday so the villagers and workers in the fields could join the castle household in cheering on the warriors. Blaise, cautiously pleased with the men he'd been training, was careful to seem competent himself but not flamboyantly so. In three of the four runs he made, he sent the racoux rocking properly backwards on its stand with a spear thrust dead on the target of its small shield. The fourth time he contrived to miss, but only by a little, so the cleverly constructed adversary didn't spin round—as it was balanced to do—and fetch him a blow with its wooden sword on the back of the head as he thundered past. It was one thing not to look ostentatious in a setting such as this, it was another to be knocked from one's horse onto the dusty ground. In Gorhaut, Blaise remembered, some of the racoux wielded actual swords, of iron not wood. Some of Blaise's fellow trainees in those days had been badly cut, which of course increased the concentration young men placed on their mastering of the skills of war. There were simply too many distractions here in Arbonne, too many other, softer things a man was expected to think about or know.

When it came time for the archery tests, though, and Bertran's cousin Valery joined them at the butts, Blaise was grimly forced to concede that he hadn't met an archer in the north, or even his friend Rudel in Portezza, who could shoot with this man, whatever distractions to training and the arts of war Arbonne might offer. Blaise was able to vie with Valery of Talair at forty paces, and Hirnan was equal with both of them. The two of them were level with their guest at sixty paces as well, to Mallin's evident pleasure, but when the marks were moved back—amid the loud shouts of the festive crowd—to eighty paces, Valery, not a young man by any means, seemed unaffected by the new distance, still finding the crimson with each soberly judged and smoothly loosed arrow. Blaise felt pleased to keep all his own flights anywhere on the distant targets, and Hirnan, scowling ferociously, couldn't even manage that. Blaise had a suspicion that Bertran's cousin would have fared as well at a hundred paces if he had chosen to, but Valery was too polite to suggest such a distance and the exhibition ended there, with applause for all three of them.

They hunted the next day. Soresina, clad in green and brown like a forest creature of legend, flew a new falcon for the first time and, to her prettily expressed delight, the bird brought down a plump hare in the high fields north of the castle. Later, beaters in the fields stirred up a loud-winged plenitude of corfe and quail for their party. Blaise, familiar with the unwritten rules of hunting in this sort of company, was careful not to shoot at anything until he was certain neither Mallin nor the duke had a line on the same prey. He waited until the two nobles had each killed several birds and then allowed himself two at the very end with a pair of swift arrows fired into the line of the sun.

On the third night there was a storm. The sort of cataclysm the mountain highlands often knew in summer. Lightning streaked the sky like the white spears of Corannos, and after the spears came the god's thunder voice and the driving rain. The wind was wild, howling like a haunted spirit about the stone walls of the castle, lashing the panes of the windows as if to force its way in. They had firelight and torches, though, in the great hall of Baude, and the walls and windows were stronger than wind or rain. Ramir the joglar sang for them again, pitching his voice over the noises outside, shaping a mood of warmth and close-gathered intimacy. Even Blaise had to concede that there were occasional times, such as this, when music and the attention to physical comforts here in the south were indeed of value. He thought about the people in the hamlets around the castle though, in their small, ramshackle wooden homes, and then about the shepherds up on the mountains with their flocks, lashed by the driving rain. Early to bed in the wild night he pulled the quilted coverlet up to his chin and gave thanks to Corannos for the small blessings of life.

The morning after the storm dawned cool and still windy, as if the onset of summer had been driven back by the violence of the night. Bertran and Valery insisted on joining with the men of Castle Baude in riding up into the hills in the thankless, wet, necessary task of helping the shepherds locate and retrieve any of the baron's sheep scattered by the storm. The sheep and their wool were the economic foundation of whatever aspirations Mallin de Baude had, and his corans were never allowed to nurture the illusion that they were above performing any labours associated with that.

It was two hours' steep ride up to the high pastures, and the better part of a day's hard, sometimes dangerous work at the task. Late in the afternoon, Blaise, swearing for what seemed to him entirely sufficient reasons, clambered awkwardly up out of a slippery defile with a wet, shivering lamb in his arms to see Bertran de Talair lounging on the grass in front of him, leaning comfortably back against the trunk of an olive tree. There was no one else in sight.

"You'd best put that little one down before she pisses all over you," the duke said cheerfully. "I've a flask of Arimondan brandy if it suits you."

"She already has," Blaise said sourly, setting the bleating lamb free on the level ground. "And thank you, but no, I work better with a clear head."

"Work's done. According to your red-headed coran—Hirnan, is it? — there's three or four sheep who somehow got up to the top of this range and then down towards the valley south of us, but the shepherds can manage them alone." He held out the flask.

With a sigh, Blaise sank down on his haunches beside the tree and accepted the drink. It was more than merely Arimondan brandy, one sip was enough to tell him as much. He licked his lips and then arched his eyebrows questioningly. "You carry seguignac in a flask to chase sheep on a hill?"

Bertran de Talair's clever, oddly youthful face relaxed in a smile. "I see that you know good brandy," he murmured with deceptive tranquillity. "The next questions are how, and why? You are trying extremely hard to seem like just another young mercenary, a competent sword and bow for hire like half the men of Gotzland. I watched you during the hunt, though. You didn't bring down anything till the very end, despite half a dozen clear opportunities for a man who can hit a target every time at eighty paces. You were too conscious of not showing up either Mallin de Baude or myself. Do you know what that says to me, Northerner?"

"I can't imagine," Blaise said.

"Yes, you can. It says that you've experience of a court. Are you going to tell me who you are, Northerner?"

Schooling his face carefully, Blaise handed back the handsome flask and settled himself more comfortably on the grass, stalling for time. Beside them the lamb was cropping contentedly, seeming to have forgotten its bleating terror of moments before. Despite insistent alarm bells of caution in his head, Blaise was intrigued and even a little amused by the directness of the duke's approach.

"I don't think so," he said frankly, "but I've been to more than one court in the past, in Gotzland and Portezza both. I am curious as to why it matters to you who I am."

"Easy enough," said de Talair. "I want to hire you, and I prefer to know the backgrounds of the men who work for me."

This was too fast in too many ways for Blaise to run with. "I've been hired already," he said. "Remember? Mallin de Baude, youngish fellow, a baron in Arbonne. Pretty wife."

Bertran laughed aloud. The lamb lilted its head and looked at them a moment, then resumed his own affairs. "Really," said the duke, "you belie your country's reputation with jests like that: everyone knows the Gorhautians have no sense of humour."

Blaise allowed himself a thin smile. "We say the same thing back home about the Gotzlanders. And Valensans smell of fish and beer, Portezzans always lie, and the men of Arimonda mostly sleep with each other."

"And what do you say back home," Bertran de Talair asked quietly, "about Arbonne?"

Blaise shook his head. "I haven't spent much time back home in a long while," he said, dodging the question.

"About four months," de Talair said. "That much I checked. Not so long. What do they say?" His hands were loosely clasped about the flask. Late-afternoon sunlight glinted in his short brown hair. He wasn't smiling any longer.

Neither was Blaise. He met the clear blue gaze as directly as he could. After a long moment he said, in the silence of that high meadow, "They say that a woman rules you. That women have always ruled you. And that Tavernel at the mouth of the Arbonne River has the finest natural harbour for shipping and trade in the world."

"And Ademar of Gorhaut, alas, has no sheltered harbour on the sea at all, hemmed in by Valensa on the north and womanish Arbonne to the south. What a sad king. Why are you here, Blaise of Gorhaut?"

"Seeking my fortune. There's less of a mystery than you might want to make out."

"Not much of a fortune to be found chasing sheep for a minor baron in these hills."

Blaise smiled. "It was a start," he said. "The first contract I was offered. A chance to learn your language better, to see what else might emerge. There are reasons why it was a good idea for me to leave the Portezzan cities for a time."

"Your own reasons? Or those of Ademar of Gorhaut? Would there by any chance be a spy behind that beard, my green-eyed young man from the north?"

It had always been possible that this might be said. Blaise was surprised at how calm he felt, now that the accusation was out in the open. He gestured, and de Talair handed him the brandy flask again. Blaise took another short pull and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand; the seguignac was really extraordinarily good.

"Indeed. Very important information to be gathered up here," he said, finding himself for some inexplicable reason in a good humour. "I'm sure Ademar will pay handsomely for a precise numbering of the sheep in these hills."

Bertran de Talair smiled again and shifted position, resting on one elbow now, his booted feet stretched out in front of him. "This could be just a start, as you say. An entry to our councils."

"And so I cleverly lured you into offering me a position by failing to shoot well on a hunt? You do me too much credit, my lord."

"Perhaps," said de Talair. "What does Mallin pay you?" Blaise named the figure. The duke shrugged indifferently. "I'll double that. When can you start?"

"I'm paid through to a fortnight from now."

"Good. I'll expect you at Talair three days after that."

Blaise held up a hand. "One thing clear from the start. The same thing I told En Mallin de Baude. I'm a mercenary, not a liegeman. No oaths."

Bertran's lazy, mocking smiled returned. "But of course. I wouldn't dream of asking you to swear to anything. I wonder, though, what will you do if Ademar comes south? Kill me in my sleep? Could you be an assassin as well as a spy?"

Which, as it happened, was nearer to the bone than was at all comfortable. Blaise thought suddenly of the High Priestess of Rian on her island in the sea. He looked down at his hands, remembering Rudel, a moonless night in Portezzan Faenna, the garden of a palace in that dangerous city, fireflies, the scent of oranges, a dagger in his hand.

He shook his head slowly, bringing his mind back to Arbonne, to this high plateau and the disturbingly perceptive man looking steadily at him now with those vivid blue eyes. "I'm no more a sworn man of Ademar's than I will be of yours," Blaise said carefully to Bertran de Talair. He hesitated. "Do you really think he might come south?"

"Might?" In Rian's holy name, why else did he make that peace with Valensa I'm trying so hard to undermine with my songs? You said it yourself: woman-ruled Arbonne. Our count dead, an ageing woman in Barbentain, no obvious heir in sight, wine fields and grainlands and a glorious port. Men who do nothing but write songs all day and yearn like callow boys for a woman's cool hand on their brow at night… of course Ademar's going to come down on us."

Blaise felt his mood changing, the pleasant fatigue of a day's hard labour chased away by the words as clouds were blown by the mountain winds. "Why are you hiring me, then?" he asked. "Why take that chance?"

"I like taking chances," Bertran de Talair said, almost regretfully. "It is a vice, I'm afraid." The High Priestess, Blaise remembered, had said something much the same.

Bertran shifted position again, sitting up now, and took a last pull of the seguignac before capping the flask. "Maybe you'll end up liking us more than you think. Maybe we'll find you a wife down here. Maybe we'll even teach you to sing. Truth is, I had a man killed this spring, and good men are hard to come by, as I suspect you know. Leading a successful raid on Rian's Island so soon after you got here was no mean achievement."

"How do you know about that?"

Bertran grinned again, but without mockery this time; Blaise had the odd sensation of being able to guess what that smile might do to a woman the duke wanted to charm. "Anyone can kill a corfe on a hunt," de Talair went on, as if Blaise hadn't spoken at all. "I need someone who knows when not to kill one. Even if he won't tell me how he learned that or who he is." He hesitated for the first time, looking away from Blaise, west towards the mountains and Arimonda beyond. "Besides which, for some reason you've made me think of my son the last few days. Don't ask me why. He died as an infant."

Abruptly he stood. Blaise did the same, seriously confused now. "I didn't think you had ever married," he said.

"I didn't," Bertran said carelessly. "Why, do you think it is time?" The sardonic, distancing smile was back. "A wife to warm my old bones at night, children to gladden the heart in my declining years? What an intriguing thought. Shall we discuss it on the way down?"

He had begun walking towards his horse as he spoke, and so Blaise, perforce, did the same. It had grown colder now on this windy height, the sun hidden behind a grey mass of swiftly driven clouds. As an afterthought Blaise looked back and saw that the lamb was following. They mounted up and began to ride. From the crest of the ridge they could see Mallin and the rest of their party gathered east of them and below. Bertran waved briefly and they started down. Far in the distance, beyond meadow and wood and the other men, the castle could be seen, with the lavender fields in shadow beyond.

On the way down, in the interval before they reached the others, the matter Bertran de Talair chose to raise had nothing at all to do with marital bliss, belated or otherwise, or with the soothing accoutrements of a quiescent old age.

And now, remarkably or predictably, depending on how one chose to consider things, there came the unabashed glow of a candle from the curve of the stairway below the window niche where Blaise was keeping watch. Not even an attempt at stealth, he thought grimly. He heard the quiet sound of footsteps steadily ascending. As promised, though Blaise hadn't really believed it on the hillside.

"I imagine you'll be posted on watch outside the baroness's rooms on my last night. I wouldn't go up until then in any case… too many complications otherwise, and it isn't really decent. No," Bertran de Talair had said on that ride down the chilly slope, "I'll wait till the end, which is always best. I can count on your discretion, I take it?"

For a long moment Blaise had had to struggle to control his anger. When he'd replied, it was in the best equivalent he could manage to the duke's casual tones. "I would suggest you not rely on any such thing. I have accepted an offer of service from you, but that begins a fortnight from now. For the moment Mallin de Baude pays me and you would be advised to remember that."

"Such loyalty!" de Talair had murmured, gazing straight ahead.

Blaise shook his head. "Professionalism," he'd replied, keeping his temper. "I am worth nothing in the market for fighting men if I have a reputation for duplicity."

"That is an irrelevance. Nothing that affects a reputation will emerge from a dark stairway with only the two of us to know." De Talair's tone was quietly serious. "Tell me, Northerner, would you impose your own values in matters of love and night on all the men and women that you meet?"

"Hardly. But I'm afraid I will impose them on myself."

The duke had glanced across at him then and smiled. "Then we shall probably have an interesting encounter a few nights from now." He'd waved again at Mallin de Baude down below and spurred his horse forward to join the baron and his men for the rest of the ride back down to the castle.

And now here he was, without even a token attempt at deception or concealment. Blaise stood up and stepped from the window nook onto the stairway. He checked the hang of his sword and dagger both and then waited, his feet balanced and spread wide. From around the curve of the stairs the glow of flame gradually became brighter and then Blaise saw the candle. Following it, as if into the ambit of light, came Bertran de Talair, in burgundy and black with a white shirt open at the throat.

"I have come," said the duke softly, smiling behind the flame, "for that interesting encounter."

"Not with me," said Blaise grimly.

"Well, no, not really with you. I don't think either of us suffers unduly from the Arimondan vice. I thought it might be diverting to see if I could fare better in the room at the top of these stairs than poor Evrard did some while ago."

Blaise shook his head. "I meant what I told you on the hills. I will not judge you, or the baroness either. I am a sword for hire, here or elsewhere in the world. At the moment En Mallin de Baude is paying me to guard this stairway. Will it please you to turn and go down, my lord, before matters become unpleasant here?"

"Go down?" Bertran said, gesturing with the candle, "and waste an hour's fussing with my appearance and several days of anticipating what might happen tonight? I'm too old to be excited by temptation and then meekly turn away. You're too young to understand that, I suppose. But I daresay you do have your own lessons to learn, or perhaps to remember. Hear me, Northerner: a man can be forestalled in matters such as this, even I can be, whatever you might have heard to the contrary, but a woman of spirit will do what she wants to do, even in Gorhaut, and most especially in Arbonne." He lifted the candle higher as he spoke, sending an orange glow spinning out to illuminate both of them.

Blaise registered the fact of that quite effective light an instant before he heard a rustle of clothing close behind him. He was turning belatedly, and opening his mouth to cry out, when the blow cracked him on the side of the temple, hard enough to make him stagger back against the window seat, momentarily dazed. And a moment, of course, was more than enough for Bertran de Talair to spring up the three steps between them, a dagger reversed in one hand, the candle uplifted in the other.

"It is difficult," said the duke close to Blaise's ear, "extremely difficult, to protect those who prefer not to be protected. A lesson, Northerner." He was wearing a perfume of some kind, and his breath was scented with mint. Through unfocused eyes and a wave of dizziness, Blaise caught a glimpse beyond him of a woman on the stairs. Her long yellow hair was unbound, tumbling down her back. Her night robe was of silk, and by the light of the candle and of the moon in the archers' window Blaise saw that it was white as a bride's, an icon of innocence. That was all he managed to register; he had no chance for more, to move or cry out again, before Bertran de Talair's dagger haft rapped, in a neat, hard, precisely judged blow, against the back of his skull and Blaise lost all consciousness of moonlight or icons or pain.

When he awoke, he was lying on the stone floor of the window niche, slumped back against one of the benches. With a groan he turned to look out. Pale Vidonne, waning from full, was high in the window now, lending her silver light to the night sky. The clouds had passed, he could see faint stars around the moon.

He brought up a hand and gingerly touched his head. He would have a corfe egg of his own on the back of his skull for some days to come, and a nasty bruise above the hairline over his right ear as well. He moaned again, and in the same instant realized that he was not alone.

"The seguignac is on the seat just above you," said Bertran de Talair quietly. "Be careful, I've left the flask open."

The duke was sitting on the other side of the stairwell, leaning back against the inner wall at the same level as Blaise. The moonlight pouring in through the window fell upon his disheveled garments and the tousled disarray of his hair. The blue eyes were as clear as ever, but Bertran looked older now. There were lines Blaise couldn't remember seeing before at the corners of his eyes, and dark circles beneath them.

He couldn't think of anything to say or do so he reached upwards—carefully, as advised—and found the flask. The seguignac slipped down his throat like distilled, reviving fire; Blaise imagined he could feel it reaching out to his extremities, restoring life to arms and legs, fingers and toes. His head ached ferociously, though. Stretching cautiously—it hurt to move—he reached across the stairway and handed the flask to the duke. Bertran took it without speaking and drank.

It was silent then on the stairs. Blaise, fighting off the miasma of two blows to the head, tried to make himself think clearly. He could, of course, shout now and raise an alarm. Mallin himself, from his own room down the hall from Soresina's, would likely be the first man to reach them here.

With what consequences?

Blaise sighed and accepted the return passing of the seguignac from the duke. The flask gleamed palely in the moonlight; there were intricate designs upon it, most likely the work of Gotzland master smiths. It had probably cost more than Blaise's monthly wages here in Baude.

There really was no point in crying out now, and he knew it. Soresina de Baude had chosen to do—as Bertran had said—exactly as she wished. It was over now, and unless he, Blaise, stirred up an alarm and roused the castle it would probably be over with little consequence for anyone.

It was just the dishonesty of it all that bothered him, the image—yet another—of a woman's duplicity and a man's idle, avid pursuit of pleasure at another's expense. He had somehow hoped for more of Duke Bertran de Talair than this picture of a jaded seducer putting all his energy into achieving a single night with a yellow-haired woman married to someone else.

But he wouldn't raise the alarm. Bertran and Soresina had counted on that, he knew. It angered him, the easy assumption that his behaviour could be anticipated, but he wasn't enough provoked to change his mind simply to spite them. People died when spite like that was indulged.

His head was hurting at back and side both, two sets of hammers vying with each other to see which could cause him more distress. The seguignac helped though; seguignac, he decided sagely, wiping at his mouth, might actually help with a great many matters of grief or loss.

He turned to the duke to say as much, but stopped, wordless, at what he saw in the other's unguarded face. The scarred, ironic, worldly face of the troubadour lord of Talair.

"Twenty-three years," Bertran de Talair said a moment later, half to himself, his eyes on the moon in the window. "So much longer than I thought I would live, actually. And the god knows, and sweet Rian knows I've tried, but in twenty-three years I've never yet found a woman to equal her, or take away the memory, even for a night."

Feeling hopelessly out of his element in the face of this, Blaise felt an unexpected moment of pity for Soresina de Baude, with her unbound hair and her white silk night robe in the room above them. Unable to summon any words at all, suspecting that none that he could ever think of would be remotely adequate to what he had just heard, he simply reached back across the stairway and offered the seguignac.

After a moment En Bertran's ringed hand reached out for it in the moonlight. De Talair drank deeply, then he drew the stopper from some recess of his clothing and capped the flask. He rose slowly, almost steady on his feet and, not bothering with another candle, started down the winding stairway without another word or a glance back. He was already lost to sight in the darkness before the first curve took him away. Blaise heard his quiet footsteps going down, and then those, too, were gone and there was only silence and the moon slowly passing from the narrow window, leaving behind the stars.

CHAPTER 3

Ademar, king of Gorhaut, slowly turns away from the diverting if extremely messy struggle taking place in front of the throne between the carefully maimed hound and the three cats that have been set upon it. Not even acknowledging the half-clothed woman kneeling on the stone floor in front of him with his sex in her mouth, he looks narrowly over at the man who has just spoken, interrupting this double amusement.

"We are not certain we heard you correctly," the king says in his unexpectedly high voice. The tone however is one his court has come to know well in little over a year. Not a few of the fifty or so men assembled in the audience chamber in the king's palace at Cortil offer silent thanks to Corannos that they are not the recipients of that gaze or that tone. The handful of women present might have different thoughts, but the women do not matter in Gorhaut.

With an elaborate casualness that fools no one, Duke Ranald de Garsenc reaches for his ale and drinks deeply before answering. To his credit, the more attentive eyes among the court note, de Garsenc's hand is steady as he sets the heavy flagon down again. Looking across the wooden trestle table at the king, he lifts his voice. "I understand you were talking about Arbonne this morning. I simply said, why don't you marry the bitch? She's a widow, she's heirless, what could be simpler?"

The king's extremely large, ringless hands descend absently to first loop themselves in the long black hair and then to briefly encircle the ceaselessly working throat of the girl on her knees in front of him. He never actually looks down at her though. Beyond her, the old hound has now fallen; it is lying on one side panting raggedly, blood streaming from a great many wounds. The cats, starved for five days, are avidly beginning to feed. Ademar smiles thinly for a moment, watching, and then makes a sudden moue of distaste as the dog's entrails begin to spill onto the floor. He gestures, and the handlers spring forward to seize the four animals and bear them from the room. The cats, ravenous and deranged, make high-pitched shrieking sounds that can be heard even after the doors at the far end have closed behind them. The smell of blood and wet fur lingers, mixed with stinging smoke from the fires and spilled beer on the tables where the high lords of Gorhaut are permitted by ancient custom to sit and drink in the presence of their liege.

Their liege closes his eyes at just that moment. His large, well-knit body stiffens and an expression of pleased surprise crosses his fair-skinned, full-bearded features. There is an awkward silence in the room as courtiers see reason to scrutinize their fingernails or the dark beams of the ceiling. With a sigh, Ademar slumps back on the throne. When he opens his eyes again it is to look, as he always does when this particular amusement reaches its climax, at the women of his court, gathered near the windows to the left of the throne. The more discreet among them are looking assiduously down and away. One or two are visibly discomfited. One or two others are equally flushed, but for what seem to be different reasons, and these are the ones whose eyes gaze boldly back at Ademar's. Screening the king's lower body with her own, the kneeling woman attends to the points and drawstrings of his garments and carefully smoothes his breeches and hose before tilting her head up for permission to withdraw.

Slouching back in his throne, Ademar of Gorhaut looks down at her for the first time. With an indolent finger he traces the contours of her lips. He smiles, the same thin smile as before. "Attend to the duke of Garsenc," he says. "My father's former champion seems a man sorely in need of the ministrations of a proper woman." The girl, expressionless, rises and paces gracefully across the floor towards the man who had interrupted the king's pleasure for a moment before. There is a ripple of coarse laughter in the room; Ademar grins, acknowledging it. Beside the window one woman turns away suddenly to look out over the misty grey of the landscape. Ademar of Gorhaut notices that. He notices a great deal, his court has come to realize in the short period of his reign.

"My lady Rosala," the king says, "turn not away from us. We covet the sunshine of your countenance on a day so dreary as this. And it may be your husband will be well pleased to have you learn a new skill as you watch."

The woman called Rosala, tall, yellow-haired and visibly with child, delays a long moment before obeying the command and turning back to the room. She nods her head formally in response to the king's words but does not speak. The other girl has by now slipped under the long table and can be seen settling herself in front of Duke Ranald de Garsenc. The duke's colour is suddenly high. He avoids looking towards the side of the room where his wife stands among the women. A few of the lesser courtiers, bright-eyed with amusement and malice, have strolled over to stand by his shoulder, glancing downwards with an intense simulation of interest at what is now taking place beneath the table. Ranald stares straight ahead, looking at no one. This amusement of the king's has taken place before, but never with a lord of so high a rank. It is a measure of Ademar's power, or the fear he elicits, that he can do this to a man who was once King's Champion in Gorhaut, however many years ago that was.

"Marry the bitch," the king repeats slowly, as if tasting the syllables on his tongue. "Marry the countess of Arbonne. How old is Signe de Barbentain now, sixty-five, seventy? An astonishing suggestion… how is she with her mouth, does anyone know?"

Several of the men and one of the women by the window titter with laughter again. None of the foreign envoys is in the room at the moment; given the current subject matter, an extremely good thing. Rosala de Garsenc is pale, but her square, handsome features betray no expression at all.

On the other side of the room her husband abruptly reaches for his flagon again. This time he spills some ale as he brings it to his lips. He wipes his moustache with a sleeve and says, "Does it matter? Would anyone imagine I speak of more than a marriage of acquisition?" He pauses and glances, almost involuntarily, downward for an instant, and then resumes. "You marry the crone, pack her off to a castle in the north and inherit Arbonne when she dies of fever or ague or whatever else the god sees fit to send her. Then you follow through with your marriage to Daufridi of Valensa's daughter. She may even be old enough to bed by then."

Ademar has turned in his seat to look fully at him, his pale eyes unreadable above the yellow beard. He says nothing, chewing meditatively on one end of his long moustache. There is a stir at the far end of the room, made louder by the silence around the throne. The great doors swing open and the guards let someone through. A very large man in a dark blue robe enters, striding purposefully forward. Seeing him, Ademar's face lights up. He grins like a mischievous child and glances quickly back at Ranald de Garsenc, who has also taken note of the man entering, though with a very different expression on his face.

"My dear High Elder," the king says, his tone brightly malicious now, "you are narrowly in time to observe how we value our cousin, your son, and his wise counsels. Our well-beloved Mistress Belote is even now assuaging him with his lady wife's full approval. Will you come make this a family affair?"

Galbert de Garsenc, High Elder of Corannos in Gorhaut, Chief Counsellor to the King, disdains to even glance at his son, nor does he appear to acknowledge the amusement in the room that takes its cue from the king's brittle tone. He stops not far from the throne, a bulky, formidable presence, and inclines his large, smooth face towards Ademar. saying merely, "What counsels, my liege?" His voice is deep and resonant; though he speaks quietly it fills the large chamber. "What counsels, indeed! Duke Ranald has just advised us to marry the countess of Arbonne, send her off north and inherit her sun-drenched country when she succumbs in her decrepitude to some lamentable pestilence. Would this be a thought you and your son have devised together?"

Galbert, the only clean-shaven man in the room, turns to look at his son for the first time as the king finishes speaking. Ranald de Garsenc, though very pale, meets his father's gaze without flinching. With a contemptuous twist of his mouth, Galbert turns back to the king.

"It would not," he says heavily. "Of course it is not, my liege. I do not devise with such as he. My son is fit for nothing but spilling ale on himself and occupying tavern sluts."

The king of Gorhaut laughs, a curiously joyous, high-pitched sound in the dark-beamed, shadowed room. "Tavern sluts? In the name of our blessed god! What a way to speak of the noble lady his wife, my lord Galbert! The woman bearing your grandchild! Surely you do not think—"

The king stops, hilarity vivid in his face, as a flagon of ale hurtles across the room to strike the High Elder of Corannos full on his broad chest. Galbert stumbles heavily backwards and almost falls. At the long table Ranald rises, hastily pushing his semi-erect member back into his clothing. Two guards step belatedly forward but pause at a gesture from the king. Breathing heavily, Ranald de Garsenc points a shaking finger at his father.

"Next time I might kill you," he says. His voice trembles. "Next time it may be a knife. Take note for your life. If you speak so of me again, anywhere where I might hear of it, it may mean your death and I will submit myself to whatever judgment of that deed Corannos makes when I leave the world."

There is a shocked silence. Even in a court not unused to this sort of thing, especially from the de Garsenc clan, the words are sobering. Galbert's rich blue robe is stained with dark ale. He fixes his son with a glance of icy contempt, easily a match for Ranald's impassioned rage, before turning back to the king. "Will you allow such an assault upon your High Elder, my liege? An attack upon my person is an insult to the god above us all. Will you sit by and let this impiety go unpunished?" The deep voice is still controlled, resonantly pitched, soberly aggrieved.

Ademar does not immediately reply. He leans back once more against the heavy wooden seat-back of the throne, stroking his beard with one hand. Father and son remain on their feet, rigid and intense. The hatred between them lies heavy and palpable in the room, seeming denser than the smoke of the fires.

"Why," says King Ademar of Gorhaut, at length, his voice sounding even higher and more querulous after the High Elder's deep tones, "is it such a foolish idea for me to wed Signe de Barbentain?"

Abruptly Duke Ranald sits again, a tiny smile of vindication playing about his lips. Impatiently he moves a knee to forestall an obedient attempt by the woman beneath the table to resume her intentions. On the far side of the room he notices that his wife has turned away again and is staring out the windows with her back to the king and the court. It has begun to rain. He looks at Rosala's profile for a moment, and a curious expression crosses his own features. After a moment he lifts his flask and drinks again.

The only thing I really don't know, Rosala de Garsenc is thinking just then, looking out at the cold, steady, slating rain and the mist-wrapped eastern moors, is which of them I despise most.

It is not a new thought. She has spent a remarkable amount of time trying to decide whether she more hates the erratic, usually inebriated man she'd been forced to wed by the late King Duergar, or the dangerously cunning, Corannos-obsessed High Elder of the god, her husband's father. If she chooses, as today, to take the thoughts one small, very natural step further, it is easy to include Duergar's son, now King Ademar of Gorhaut, in that blighted company. In part because she is uneasily, constantly aware that when the child she now carries is born she is going to have to contend with the king in a very particular way. She doesn't know why he has singled her out, why her manner seems to have captivated him—goaded him, more likely, she sometimes thinks—but there is no denying the import of Ademar's flat, pale gaze and the way it lingers on her, especially in that dangerous time of night here in Cortil after too much ale has been drunk around the banquet tables but before the women are permitted to leave.

One of the reasons, perhaps unfairly, that she despises her husband is for the way in which he will notice the king staring at her and indifferently turn away to his dice cup or his flagon. The duke of Garsenc ought surely, Rosala had thought, in the early months of her marriage, to have more pride in him than that. It appeared, though, that the only people who could arouse Ranald to anything resembling passion or spirit were his father and brother, and that, of course, was its own old, bleak story. It sometimes seems to Rosala that she has been part of their tale forever; it is hard to remember clearly back to a time when the lords of Garsenc have not trammelled her tightly about with their festering family griefs. It had been different at home in Savaric, but Savaric was a long time ago.

The wind is rising now, coming about to the east, sending droplets and then a gusty sheet of rain through the window to strike her face and the bodice of her gown. She doesn't mind the cold, she even welcomes it, but there is a child to think of now. Reluctantly she turns away, back to the smoky, stale, crowded room, to hear her husband's father begin to speak to the issue of forced marriages and conquest in the warm bright south.

"My liege, you know the reasons as well as I, so, indeed does every man in this room, save one perhaps." The glance flicked sideways at Ranald is so brief as to carry its own measure of bone-deep contempt. "Even the women know my son's folly when they hear it. Even the women." Beside Rosala, Adelh de Sauvan, who is venal and corrupt and newly widowed, smiles. Rosala sees that and looks away.

"To wed the countess of Arbonne," Galbert goes on, his rich voice filling the room, "we would need her consent. This, she will not give. Ever. If she did, for whatever reason, maddened by woman's desire perhaps, she would be deposed and slain by the assembled dukes of Arbonne before any wedding could take place. Think you that the lords of Carenzu or Malmount or Miraval would sit by and watch us so easily stake a claim to their land? Even a woman should be able to see the folly in such a fatuous thought. What, my liege, do you think the troubadour lord of Arbonne would do at such a time… think you that Bertran de Talair would stand by and let such a marriage take place?"

"That name is forbidden here!" Ademar of Gorhaut says quickly, leaning abruptly forward. Two spots of unnatural colour show in his cheeks above the beard.

"And so it should be," Galbert says smoothly, as if he'd expected exactly that response. "I have as much reason as you my liege to hate that schemer and his godless, discordant ways."

Rosala smiles inwardly at that, keeping her features carefully schooled. It was little over a month ago that de Talair's latest song had reached the court of Gorhaut. She remembers the night; wind and rain then, too, a trembling, whey-faced bard obeying Ademar's command, singing the duke of Talair's verses in a voice like rasping iron:

Shame then in springtime for proud Gorhaut,

Betrayed by a young king and his counsellor.

And more, much more, and worse, in the creaking, barely audible mumblings of the terrified singer while a wind blew on the moors outside:

Where went the manhood of Gorhaut and Valensa

When war was abandoned and pale peace bought

By weak kings and sons long lost to their lineage?

Rosala can almost find a kind of warmth in her heart at the memory of the torchlit faces around her that night. The expressions of the king, of Galbert, the furtive glances that flitted about the hall from one newly landless lord or coran to another as the driving music brought the force of the words home, even in the timid voice of the singer. The bard, a young trovaritz from Gotzland, had almost certainly owed his continued life to the presence in the great hall of Cortil that evening of the envoy from his own country and the undeniable importance of keeping peace with King Jorg of Gotzland at this juncture of the world's affairs. Rosala had no doubt what Ademar would have liked to do when the music ended.

Now he leans urgently forward again, almost rising from the throne, the two bright spots vivid in his cheeks and says, "No man has as much reason as we do, Galbert. Do not exalt yourself."

The High Elder gently shakes his head. Again the rich voice encompasses the room, so warm, so caring, it can so easily deceive one into thinking the man is profoundly other than he is. Rosala knows about that; she knows almost everything about that by now.

"It is not in my own name that I take umbrage, my liege," says Galbert. "I am as nothing, nothing at all in myself. But I stand before you and before the eyes of all those in the six countries as the voice of the god in Gorhaut. And Gorhaut is the Heartland, the place where Corannos of the Ancients was born in the days before man walked and woman fell into her ruin. An insult to me is a blow delivered to the most high god and must not be tolerated. Nor will it be, for all the world knows your mettle and your mind in this, my liege."

It is fascinating, Rosala thinks, how smoothly, how effortlessly, Galbert has shifted the matter at hand. Ademar is nodding his head slowly; so are a number of the men in the hall. Her husband is drinking, but that is to be expected. Briefly, Rosala feels sorry for him.

"We would have thought," the king says slowly, "that Daufridi of Valensa would share our attitude to this provocation. Perhaps when we next receive his envoy we ought to discuss the matter of Bertran de Talair."

Daufridi has all our land north of Iersen now, Rosala finds herself thinking bitterly, and knows that others will be framing the same thought. He can afford to tolerate insults from Arbonne. Her family's ancient estates along the Iersen River are right on the newly defined northern border of Gorhaut now; Savaric had not been so exposed ever before. And there are men in this room whose lands and castles have been given away; they are part of Valensa now, ceded by treaty, surrendered in the peace after being saved in the war. King Ademar is surrounded by hungry, ambitious, angry men, who will need to be assuaged, and soon, however much they might fear him for the moment.

It is all so terribly clear, Rosala thinks, her face a mask, blank and unrevealing.

"By all means," Galbert the High Elder is saying, "raise the matter with the Valensan envoy. I think we can deal with a shabby rhymester by ourselves, but it would indeed be well to have certain other matters understood and arranged before another year has come and gone."

Rosala sees her husband lift his head at that, looking not at his father but at the king.

"What matters?" Duke Ranald says, loudly, in the silence. "What needs to be understood?" It is only with an effort sometimes that Rosala is able to remember that her husband was once the most celebrated fighting man in Gorhaut, champion to Ademar's father. A long time ago, that was, and the years have not sat kindly on the shoulders of Ranald de Garsenc.

Ademar says nothing, chewing on his moustache. It is Ranald's father who replies, the faintest hint of triumph in the magnificent voice. "Do you now know?" he asks, eyebrows elaborately arched. "Surely one so free with idle counsels can riddle this puzzle through."

Ranald scowls blackly but refuses to put the question again. Rosala knows he doesn't understand; again she feels an unexpected impulse of sympathy for him during this latest skirmish in his lifelong battle with what his father is. She doubts Ranald is the only man here bemused by the cryptic byplay between the High Elder and the king. It happens, though, that her own father, in his day, had been a master of diplomacy, high in the counsels of King Duergar, and Rosala and one brother were the only two of his children to survive into adulthood. She had learned a great deal, more than women tended to in Gorhaut. Which, she knows, is a large part of her own private grief right now, trapped among the de Garsenc and their hates.

But she does understand things, she can see them, almost too clearly. If he is sober enough, Ranald will probably want her thoughts tonight when they are alone. She knows the heavy, hectoring tone he will use, the scorn with which he will quickly dismiss her replies if she chooses to offer any, and she also knows how he will go away from her after and muse upon what she tells him. It is a power of sorts, she is aware of that; one that many women have used to put their own stamp, as a seal upon a letter, upon the events of their day.

But such women have two things Rosala lacks. A desire, a passion even, to move and manipulate amid the fever and flare of court events, and a stronger, worthier vessel in which to pour their wisdom and in their spirit than Ranald de Garsenc is ever going to be.

She doesn't know what she will tell her husband if he asks for her thoughts that evening. She suspects he will. And she is almost certain she does know what his father's designs are and, even more, that the king is going to move with them. Ademar is being guided, as a capricious stallion by a master horsebreaker, towards a destination Galbert has likely wanted to reach for more years than anyone knows. King Duergar of Gorhaut had not been a man susceptible to the persuasion of anyone in his court, including his clergy—perhaps especially his clergy—and so the High Elder's access to real power dates back only to the precise moment when a Valensan arrow, arching through a wintry twilight, found Duergar's eye in that grim, cold battle by Iersen Bridge a year and a half ago.

And now Duergar is dead and burned on his pyre, and his handsome son rules in Cortil, and there is a peace signed in the north disinheriting a quarter of the people of Gorhaut, whether of high estate or low. Which means—surely anyone could see it if they only stopped to look—one thing that will have to follow. Instinctively, a motion of withdrawal as much a reflex as a forest creature's retreat from a tongue of flame, Rosala turns back to the window. It is springtime in Gorhaut, but the grey rains show no signs of ending and the damp chill can ache in one's very bones.

It will be warmer, she knows, warmer and softer and with a far more benevolent light in the sky, in Arbonne. In woman-ruled Arbonne, with its Court of Love, its wide, rich, sun-blessed lands, its sheltered, welcoming harbours on the southern sea and its heresy of Rian the goddess ruling alongside the god, not crouched in maidenly subservience beneath his iron hand.

"We will have much to speak of yet," Galbert de Garsenc is saying, "before summer draws fully upon us, and to you my liege will rightly fall all decisions that must be made and the great burden of them." He raises his voice; Rosala does not turn back from the window. She knows what he is about to say, where he is taking the king, taking all of them. "But as High Elder of Corannos in this most ancient, holy land where the god was born, I will say this to you, my liege, and to all those gathered here. Thanks to your great wisdom, Gorhaut is at peace in the north for the first time in the lifetime of most of those here. We need not draw axe and sword to guard our borders and our fields from Valensa. The pride and the might of this country under King Ademar is as great as it has ever been in our long history, and ours is still and ever the holy stewardship through the six countries of the power of the god. In these halls walk the descendants of the first corans—the earliest brothers of the god—who ever bestrode the hills and valleys of the known world. And it may be—if you, my liege, should decide to make it so—that to us will fall a scourging task worthy of our great fathers. Worthy of the greatest bards ever to lift voice in celebration of the mighty of their day."

Oh, clever, Rosala thinks. Oh, very neatly done, my lord. Her eyes are fixed on what lies beyond the window, on the mist rolling in over the moors. She wants to be out there alone on a horse, even in rain, even with the child quickening in her womb, far from this smoky hall, these voices and rancours and sour desires, far from the honey-smooth manipulations of the High Elder behind her.

"Beyond the mountains south of us they mock Corannos," Galbert says, passion now infusing his voice. "They live under the god's own bright sun, which is his most gracious gift to man, and they mock his sovereignty. They demean him with temples to a woman, a foul goddess of midnight and magics and the blood-stained rites of women. They cripple and wound our beloved Corannos with this heresy. They unman him, or they think they do." His voice sinks again, towards intimacy, the nuanced notes of a different kind of power. The whole room is with him now as in the foils of a spell, Rosala can sense it; even the women beside her are leaning forward slightly, lips parted, waiting.

"They think they do," Galbert de Garsenc repeats softly. "In time, in our time if we are worthy, they shall learn their folly, their endless, eternal folly, and holy Corannos shall not be mocked in the lanes of the Arbonne River ever again."

He does not end on a rousing note; it is not yet time. This is a first proclamation only, a beginning, a muted instrument sounded amid smoking fires and a late, cold spring, with slanting rains outside and mist on the moors.

"We will withdraw," the king of Gorhaut says at length in his high voice, breaking the stillness. "We will take private counsel with our Elder of the god." He rises from the throne, a tall, handsome, physically commanding man, and his court sinks low in genuflection like stalks of corn before the wind.

It is so clear, Rosala is thinking as she rises to her feet again, so clear what is to come.

"Do tell me, my dear," Adelh de Sauvan murmurs, materializing at her elbow, "have you any late tidings of your much-travelled brother-in-law?"

Rosala stiffens. A mistake, and she knows it immediately. She forces herself to smile blandly, but Adelh is a master at catching one unawares.

"Nothing recent, I fear," she answers calmly. "He was still in Portezza, the last we heard, but that was some months ago. He doesn't communicate very much. If he does, I shall be most certain to convey your anxious interest."

A weak shaft, that one, and Adelh only smiles, her dark eyes lustrous. "Please do," she replies. "I would think any woman would be interested in that one. Such an accomplished man, Blaise, an equal, a rival even to his great father I sometimes think." She pauses, precisely long enough. "Though hardly to your dear husband, of course." She says it with the sweetest expression imaginable on her face.

Two other women come up just then, blessedly freeing Rosala from the need to frame a reply. She waits long enough for courtesy to be served and then moves away from the window. She is cold suddenly, and wants very much to leave. She cannot do so without Ranald, though, and she sees, with a brief inward yielding to despair, that he has refilled his flagon, and his dice and purse are on the table in front of him now.

She moves towards the nearest of the fires and stands with her back to the blaze. In her mind she goes back over that short, unsettling exchange with Adelh. She cannot stop herself from wondering what, if anything, the woman could possibly know. It is only malice, she finally decides, only the unthinking, effortless malice that defined Adelh de Sauvan even before her husband died with King Duergar by Iersen Bridge. An instinct for blood, something predatory.

Rosala has a sudden recollection, involuntary and frightening, of the starving cats and the torn, dying hound. She shivers. Unconsciously her hands come up to rest upon her belly, as if to cradle and shelter from the waiting world the life taking shape within her.

The light was the extraordinary thing, the way in which the sun in a deep blue sky seemed to particularize everything, to render each tree, bird on the wing, darting fox, blade of grass, something vividly bright and immediate. Everything seemed to somehow be more of whatever it was here, sharper, more brilliantly defined. The late-afternoon breeze from the west took the edge off the heat of the day; even the sound of it in the leaves was refreshing. Though that, on reflection, was ridiculous: the sound of the wind in the trees was exactly the same in Gorhaut or Gotzland as it was here in Arbonne; there just seemed to be something about this country that steered the mind towards such imaginings.

A troubadour, Blaise thought, riding through afternoon sunshine, would probably be singing by now, or composing, or shaping some quite unintelligible thought based on the symbolic language of flowers. There were certainly enough flowers. A troubadour would know the names of all of them, of course. Blaise didn't, partly because there were varieties of extravagantly coloured wildflowers here in Arbonne that he'd never seen before, even among the celebrated, rolling countryside between the cities of Portezza.

The land here was beautiful, he conceded, without grudging the thought this time. He wasn't in a grudging mood this afternoon; the light was too benevolent, the country through which he rode too genuinely resplendent at the beginning of summer. There were vineyards to the west and the dense trees of a forest beyond them. The only sounds were the wind and the chatter of birds and the steady jingle of harness on his horse and the pack pony behind. In the distance ahead Blaise could see at intervals the blue sparkle of water on a lake. If the directions he'd been given at last night's inn were correct, the lake would be Dierne and Castle Talair would be visible soon, nestled against the northern shore. He should be able to make it by day's end at a comfortable pace.

It was hard not to be in a good humour today, whatever one's thoughts might be about country and family and the slowly darkening tenor of events in the world. For one thing, Blaise's leave-taking at Baude four days ago had been a genuinely cordial parting. He'd worried for a time about how Mallin would receive his defection to the ranks of the corans of Bertran de Talair, but the young lord of Castle Baude seemed to have almost expected Blaise's announcement when it came, two days after En Bertran rode off, and even—or so it seemed to Blaise—to almost welcome it.

There might, in fact, have been pragmatic reasons for that. Mallin was a comfortable but not a wealthy man, and the expenses of aspiring towards a place of honour on the higher ramparts of the world might have begun to give him pause. After a fortnight's extravagant entertainment of the troubadour lord of Talair, it was possible that Mallin de Baude was not averse to some measures of economizing, and seasoned mercenary captains such as Blaise of Gorhaut were not inexpensive.

On the morning of Blaise's departure, Mallin had wished him the blessing of the god and of Rian the goddess as well; this was Arbonne, after all. Blaise accepted the one with gratitude and the other with good grace. He'd surprised himself with the degree of regret he felt bidding farewell to the baron and to the corans he'd trained: Hirnan, Maffour and the others. He hadn't expected to miss these men; it seemed as if he was going to, for a little while at least.

Soresina, in the last days before he went, was a different, more unsettling sort of surprise. The simple truth was, however much Blaise might want to deny it, that the lady of Castle Baude, always an attractive woman and aware of it, seemed to have grown in both dignity and grace in a very short period. Specifically, the short period since Bertran de Talair's visit to the highlands. Was it possible that a single furtive night with the duke could have effected such a change? Blaise hated the very notion, but could not deny the poised courtesy of Soresina's subsequent treatment of him, or the elegance of her appearance at her husband's side in the days that passed between Bertran's departure and Blaise's own. There was not even the shadow of a hint in her expression or manner of what had taken place on the stairway below her chambers so little time ago. She did seem pensive at times, almost grave, as if inwardly coming to terms with some shift in her relations with the world.

Soresina was with Mallin when the baron and his corans rode part of the way with Blaise on the morning he took leave of the western highlands. She'd offered him her cheek to kiss, not merely her hand. After the briefest hesitation Blaise had leaned sideways in his saddle and complied.

Soresina had glanced up at him as he straightened. He remembered a glance she'd offered him shortly after he'd arrived, when she'd told him how she liked men after the older fashion, warlike and hard. There was an echo of that now, she was still the same woman after all, but there was also something else that was new.

"I hope some woman elsewhere in your travels through Arbonne persuades you to remove that beard," she said. "It scratches, Blaise. Grow it back, if you must, when you return to Gorhaut."

She was smiling at him as she spoke, entirely at ease, and Mallin de Baude, visibly proud of her, laughed and gripped Blaise's arm a last time in farewell.

There had been a number of farewells in his life during the past few years, Blaise thought now, three days after that morning departure, riding amid the scent and colours of wildflowers, past the green and purple beginnings of grapes on the vines, with blue water in the distance beckoning him with flashes of mirrored sunlight. Too many goodbyes, perhaps, but they were a part of the life he'd chosen for himself, or had had chosen for him by his birth and his family's rank, and the laws, written or unwritten, that guided the country of Gorhaut through the shoals of a rocky world.

There had been regret, anger at twists of fate, real pain in Portezza the last time he was there, but it seemed that in the end he truly was most content as he was now, on his own, answerable to no man—and certainly no woman—save for service honourably owed by contract freely entered into. There was little that was greatly unusual about any of the patterns of his life. It was a well-enough trodden path in the lives of younger sons of noble families in the world as they knew it. The eldest son married, fathered other children, inherited all: the lands—fiercely guarded, scrupulously undivided—the family goods, and whatever titles had been earned and not lost as one monarch succeeded another in Gorhaut. The daughters of such houses were expensively dowried pawns, though often vital ones, married off to consolidate alliances, expand holdings, lay claim or siege to even higher rank for the family.

Which left little enough for the other sons. Younger sons were a problem, and had been so for a long time, ever since the dwindling sizes of partitioned estates had changed the system of inheritance. All but barred from a useful marriage by virtue of their lack of land or chattels, forced to leave the family dwellings by friction or pride or sheerest self-protection, many entered the clergy of Corannos or attached themselves to the household corans of another high lord. Some followed a third, less predictable course, going out into the world beyond the country of their birth, alone on the always dangerous roads or more often in smaller or larger groupings to seek their fortune. In a season of war they would be found at the battlefields; in the rarer times of tranquility they would be stirring up strife themselves with a restless champing at the bit of peace, or maiming and hammering each other in the tournament melees that moved with the trade fairs from town to town through the known lands of the world.

Nor was this pattern only true in Gorhaut. Bertran de Talair, until his older brother died childless and he became the duke, had been among this roving number in his own day, one of the most celebrated, bringing a sword and a harp, both, and later a joglar expensively outfitted in his livery, to battlefield and tournament in Gotzland and Portezza and watery Valensa in the north.

Blaise of Gorhaut, years later, and for a variety of reasons, had become another such man, ever since he'd been anointed as a coran by King Duergar himself.

He'd left home with his horse and armour and weapons and his skills with them, skills that had travelled well and not without profit—most of it banked in Portezza now with Rudel's family. It was a life that had left him, riding alone under the sun of summer in Arbonne, untied and untrammelled by the bonds that seemed to ensnare so many of the men he knew.

He would have scorned the question and the questioner both, but if asked that day, Blaise would have said that he was not an unhappy man, for all the bitterness that lay behind him at home and among the dangerous cities of Portezza. He would have said he knew the future he wanted for himself, and that for the foreseeable future it was not unlike the present through which he rode, in whatever country it might chance to fall. He wasn't particular about that, he would have said. If you kept moving there was less chance of putting down roots, forming bonds, caring for people… learning what happened when those men or women you cared for proved other than you had thought them. Though he would never have said that last aloud, however assiduously a questioner pursued.

Cresting the last of a series of ridges, Blaise saw the blue waters of Lake Dierne clearly for the first time. He could make out a small island in the lake with three plumes of white smoke rising from fires burning there. He paused a moment, taking in the vista that spread before him, and then rode on.

No one had cautioned him otherwise, or offered any warning at all, nor had he asked any questions, and so when he went forward from that ridge Blaise took what was clearly the more direct, less hilly road, riding straight north towards the lake and the beginnings of what was to be his destiny.

The well-worn path went along the western shore of Lake Dierne, with faded milestones of the Ancients along the way, some standing, some toppled into the grass, all testifying mutely to how long ago this road had been laid down. The island wasn't very far away—a good swimmer could cover the distance—and from the path Blaise could now see that the three white plumes of smoke were carefully spaced along the midline of the isle. Even he was sufficiently aware after a season in Arbonne to realize that these would be holy fires of Rian. Who else but the clergy of the goddess would burn midday fires in the heat of early summer?

He narrowed his gaze across the dazzling blue water. He could make out a handful of small boats at anchor or pulled up on the sands of the island's nearer shore. One boat with a single white sail was tacking back and forth across the lake into the breeze. Watching, Blaise's thoughts went back to the High Priestess with her owl in the blackness of night on Rian's other island, in the sea. After a moment he looked away in the bright sunshine and rode on.

He passed the small hut that held and kept dry wood and kindling for the signal fires that would summon the priestesses when those on the shore had need, whether for childbirth or healing or surrendering the dead. He resisted the impulse to make a warding sign.

A little further along the path he saw the arch. He stopped his horse again. The pack pony trudging behind with his goods and his armour bumped up against them and then placidly lowered its head to crop at the grass by the road. Blaise was staring at that arrogant, monumental assertion of stone. The soldier in him understood it at once, and admiration vied with an inward disquiet.

There were figures carved along the top of the arch, and there would be friezes along the sides as well. He didn't need to go nearer to study them; he knew what the sculptor's art had rendered there. He had seen such arches before, in northern Portezza, in Gotzland, two in Gorhaut itself near the mountain passes, which seemed to be as far north as the Ancients had established themselves.

The massive arch offered its own clear testimony as to what those who built it had been. Where the milestones by the long, straight roads told of continuity and the orderly, regulated flow of society in a world now lost, the triumphal arches such as this one spoke to nothing but domination, the brutal grinding down of whoever had been here when the Ancients came to conquer.

Blaise had been to war many times, both for his country and for his own purse as a mercenary, and had known both triumph and defeat on widely scattered battlefields. Once, by the frost-rimed Iersen Bridge, he had fought among ice and blowing snow past the bitter death of his king through to a twilit winter victory that had then been alchemized into defeat in the elegantly phrased courtiers' treaty of the spring that followed. That one had changed him, he thought. That one had changed his life forever.

The arch standing here at the end of a procession of planted trees told a hard truth that Blaise knew in his soldier's bones to be as valid now as it had been centuries ago: when you have beaten someone, when you have conquered and occupied them, you must never let them forget the power that you have and the consequences of resistance.

What happened when the arches remained but those who had so arrogantly raised them were dust and long departed was a question for milk-fed philosophers and troubadours, Blaise thought, not for a fighting man.

He turned his head away, unsettled and unexpectedly angered. And it was only when he did so, wresting his attention from the massive arch, that he became aware, belatedly, that he was no longer alone on this shore of Lake Dierne under a westering sun.

There were six of them, in dark green hose and tunics. The livery meant they were unlikely to be outlaws, which was good. Rather less encouraging was the fact that three of them had bows out and arrows to string already, levelled at him before any words of greeting or challenge had been spoken. What was even more ominous was that the obvious leader, sitting his horse a few feet ahead and to one side of the others, was rangy, dark-skinned, moustachioed Arimondan. Experience in several countries, and one sword fight he preferred not to remember except for the lesson it had taught him, had led Blaise to be exceptionally wary of the swarthy warriors of that hot, dry land beyond the western mountains. Especially when they appeared at the head of men who were aiming arrows at his chest.

Blaise held out his empty hands and lifted his voice into the wind. "I give you greetings, corans. I am a traveller on a high road of Arbonne. I mean no offence to anyone and trust I have given none." He was silent, watching, and left his hands out to be seen. He had defeated four men once at a tourney in Aulensburg, but there were six here, with arrows.

The Arimondan twitched his reins and his horse, a genuinely magnificent black, moved forward a few restive paces. "Fighting corans carrying armour sometimes give offense merely by their existence," the man said. "Who is it that you serve?" He spoke Arbonnais flawlessly, with scarcely a trace of an accent. He was clearly no stranger to this land. He was also observant. Blaise's armour was well wrapped under cloth on the pack pony; the Arimondan would have deduced what it was by shape.

But Blaise, too, was used to watching men closely, especially in a situation such as this, and out of the corner of his eye he saw one of the archers lean forward with the question, as if hanging upon the answer.

Blaise temporized. He had no real idea what was happening here. Outlaws on the roads were one thing, but these men were clearly trained and just as clearly asserting control over this part of the road. He wished he'd studied a map more closely before leaving Baude. It would have helped to know whose lands these were. He ought to have asked more questions at last night's inn.

He said, "I am traveling in peace on an open road. I mean no trespass. If such is your complaint, I will gladly pay a fair toll."

"I asked a question," the Arimondan said flatly. "Answer it."

Hearing that tone, Blaise felt his mouth go dry, even as a familiar anger began rising in him. He had his sword, and his bow was ready to hand in the saddle quiver, but if the three men behind the Arimondan knew how to shoot there was little hope in trying to fight. He considered cutting the rope that tied the pony to his grey and making a run for it, but he hated leaving his armour behind almost as much as he hated fleeing from an Arimondan.

"I am not in the custom of detailing my affairs to strangers with bows drawn," he said.

The Arimondan smiled slowly, as if the words were an unexpected gift. He gestured with his left hand, a negligent, graceful movement. All three archers loosed arrows. An instant later, with a queer, grunting sound, Blaise's pack pony collapsed behind him. Two arrows were in its neck and one was just below, near the heart. The pony was dead. The archers had already notched three more arrows.

Feeling the colour leave his face, Blaise heard the Arimondan laugh. "Tell me," the man said lazily, "Will you preserve what you call your customs when you are naked and bound face down in the dust to serve my pleasure like a boy bought for an hour?" The two other men, the ones without bows, had moved without visible instruction in opposite directions, cutting off both paths of flight for Blaise. One of them, Blaise saw, was smiling broadly.

"I asked a question," the Arimondan went on softly. The wind had dropped; his voice carried in the stillness. "The horse dies next if I am not answered. In whose service do you ride, Northerner?"

It was his beard, of course; it labelled him like a brand marked a thief or blue robes a priest of Corannos. Blaise drew a slow breath and, fighting hard to hold down his anger, sought shelter in the shade of the great—as Rudel had more than once put it.

"En Bertran de Talair has hired me for a season," he said.

They shot the horse.

But Blaise had had his clue from the one archer's straining manner the first time the question had been asked, and he had kicked his legs free of the stirrups even as he spoke. He landed on the far side of the screaming stallion and pulled his bow free and the dying horse downwards towards him in the same motion so that it offered protection when he dropped behind it. Firing from an almost prone position he killed the northernmost coran and, turning, shot the one guarding the southern path in the neck before the three archers could loose another volley. Then he dropped flat.

Two arrows hit his horse again and the third whizzed above his head. Blaise rose to one knee and fired twice, at speed. One archer died, screaming like the horse, and the second dropped in silence with an arrow in his throat. The third man hesitated, his mouth falling open with dismay. Blaise notched his fifth arrow and shot him calmly in the chest. He saw bright blood stain the dark green tunic before the man fell.

It was suddenly extremely quiet.

The Arimondan had not moved. His magnificent black thoroughbred was still as a statue, though with nostrils flared wide.

"Now you have given offense," the dark-skinned man said, his voice still silky and soft. "I see that you can shoot from hiding. Come now and we will see if you are a man among men with a sword as well. I will dismount."

Blaise stood up. "If I thought you a man I would do so," he said. His voice sounded oddly hollow to his own ears. The too-familiar pounding was in his head and his rage was still with him. "I want your horse. I will think of you with pleasure when I ride it." And with the words he loosed his sixth arrow and took the Arimondan through the heart.

The man rocked violently backwards with the impact, clinging to his last seconds of life under the brilliant sun. Blaise saw him draw a dagger then, one of the wickedly curved, bejewelled blades of his own country, and plunge it, even as he began to topple from his saddle, deep into the throat of his black stallion.

The man hit the ground as his horse surged high into the air on its hind legs, screaming in rage and fear. It came down and rose again immediately, trumpeting, lashing out with its hooves. Blaise notched a last arrow and let it fly, with passionate regret, to put the glorious creature out of pain. The stallion dropped and then rolled on one side. Its legs kicked out one more time and then were motionless.

Blaise stepped forward, moving around his own dead horse. The stillness in the clearing was eerie, broken only by the nervous whickering of the archers' mounts and the sound of the breeze picking up again. He realized that no birds were singing now.

A short while ago he had imagined that the wind of Arbonne in the leaves and vines whispered of refreshment and ease, of easy grace here in the warm south. Now there were six dead men in the grass by the side of the road. Not far away, looming in silence at the end of its avenue of elms, the massive arch looked down upon them all, keeping its secrets, bearing its own grim friezes of battle and death carved long ago.

Blaise's anger began to drain away, leaving behind the disorientation and nausea that seemed always to follow combat. Battle seldom fazed him now after so many years of it, but the aftermath left him vulnerable for a long time, trying to come to terms with what he was capable of doing when the fury of war swept over him. He looked across the grass at the Arimondan and shook his head. He had wanted, for a moment, to walk over and cut the dead man into pieces, to make things easier for the carrion dogs when they came. He swallowed and turned away.

As he did he saw a small boat with a white sail pulling up to the stony shore of the lake on the far side of the road. There was a grating sound as the craft grounded itself, and Blaise saw two men help a woman to alight. His heart thumped once, hard. The woman was tall, robed in crimson fringed with silver, and she had an owl on her shoulder.

Then he looked more closely, and with a second glance, undistorted by memory or fear, he saw that this was not the High Priestess from Rian's Island in the sea. This one was much younger and brown-haired and, manifestly, she had eyes with which to see. Nor was her bird white, as the one on the other island had been. She was a priestess, though, and the two men with her and the one other woman were also clergy of Rian. The boat was the one he'd seen tacking into the wind before. Beyond them, on the isle, the three plumes of smoke still rose into the summer sky.

"You are fortunate," the woman said, walking steadily across sand and gravel to stand before him on the grass beside the road. Her voice was mild but her eyes, appraising him, were steady and unreadable. Her hair was heavy and hung down her back, not covered or pinned. Blaise endured her scrutiny impassively, remembering the blindness of the High Priestess who had seen right through him nonetheless. He looked at the bird this one carried on her shoulder and felt an echo of the anxiety he'd felt in the forest on the island. It was almost unfair; the aftermath of combat left him susceptible to this.

"I daresay I am," he said, as calmly as he could. "I could not have expected to prevail against six. It seems the god has favoured me." That last was a challenge of sorts.

She didn't rise to the bait. "And Rian as well. We can bear witness for you that they attacked first."

"Bear witness?"

She smiled then, and that smile, too, took him back to the High Priestess in her night forest. "It would have served you better, Blaise of Gorhaut, to have been more curious about affairs in this part of the world."

He didn't like her tone, and he didn't know what she was talking about. His uneasiness increased; the women in this country were unimaginably difficult to deal with.

"How do you know my name?"

Again the secretive, superior smile, but this time he had expected it. "Did you imagine that once having been allowed to leave Rian's Island alive you were free of the goddess? We have marked you, Northerner. Thank us for it."

"Why? For following me?"

"Not following. We have been waiting for you. We knew you were coming. And as to the why… hear now what you should have learned already for yourself. A fortnight past, the countess in Barbentain had an edict proclaimed that any further killings among the corans of Talair or Miraval would result in property of the offending party being ceded to the crown. The troubadours and the clergy are carrying the tidings, and all the lords of Arbonne have been cited by name and formally bound to impose the edict by force if need be. You might have cost En Bertran a part of his land today had we not been here to give a report in your defence."

Blaise scowled, in part with relief, in part because this was indeed something he should have made a point of knowing before. "You will forgive me if I do not express dismay," he said. "I must admit I would not have valued his vineyards over my life, however much he proposes to pay me in wages."

The priestess laughed aloud. She was younger than a first impression had suggested. "Our forgiveness hardly need concern you… in this, at least. But Bertran de Talair is another matter. He might have fairly expected an experienced coran to avoid giving provocation before even arriving at his castle. There is an eastern way around the lake if you hadn't noticed, one that does not pass by the vineyards of Miraval."

The situation was, Blaise had to admit, becoming belatedly clear. And indeed, had he known these lands belonged to Urté de Miraval—or taken some pains to know—he would certainly have gone the other way. It was no secret, even to Blaise after a short time in Arbonne, that for reasons that apparently went years back into the past, the present lords of Miraval and Talair had no love for one another.

Blaise shrugged, to cover his discomfiture. "I have been riding all day, this path seemed easier. And I thought the countess of Arbonne stood surety for the safety of the roads in her land."

"Barbentain is a long way off, and local hatred will usually overmaster larger laws. A wise traveller will know where he is, particularly if he rides alone."

Which also was true, if arrogantly spoken by someone so young. He tried not to dwell on the arrogance. Clergy of all kinds seemed to have it as a collective quality. One of these days, though, he was going to have to try to sort out why he was so reluctant to pay more attention to the gossip, or even the geography and divisions of land here in Arbonne.

Behind the priestess he saw three other small boats being drawn up on the shore. Men and women in the robes of Rian disembarked and made their away over the grass to where the dead were lying. They began lifting the bodies and carrying them back to the boats.

Blaise glanced over his shoulder to where the Arimondan lay beside his slain horse. He turned back to the priestess. "Tell me, will Rian welcome such as he?"

She did not smile. "She waits for him," the priestess said calmly, "as she waits for all of us. Welcome and grace are other matters entirely." Her dark eyes held his own until Blaise looked away, beyond her, past the isle in the lake, to where a castle could be seen on the northern shore.

She turned and followed his gaze. "We will take you if you like," she said, surprising him. "Unless you want one of their horses for yourself?"

Blaise shook his head. "The only one worth having was killed by its rider." He felt a sour amusement suddenly. "I will be grateful for passage. Doesn't it seem apt… that I should arrive at Talair Castle in a craft of the goddess?"

"More apt than you know," she said, not responding to his tone all.

She gestured, and two of the priests moved to collect Blaise's armour and goods from the dead pony. Blaise himself took his saddle from his mount and, following the tall, slender form of the priestess, walked over grass and stone to her boat.

They put his gear on board as well, and then the craft was pushed free of the shore and with the west wind in the one sail and the sun low now behind them it went skimming across the waters of Lake Dierne.

As they approached the castle, Blaise registered with a practised, approving eye how well defended it was, poised on a crag above the lake with the water coming around on three sides and a deep moat carved to the north. A cluster of men had come down to the pier to wait for them. There was another boat already there, with two priests and a priestess in it; tidings would have preceded them then. As they drew near Blaise recognized Valery, Bertran's cousin, and then, surprisingly, Bertran himself stepped forward to neatly catch the rope thrown by the priest at the prow.

The duke of Talair crouched to tie their craft to an iron ring set in the wooden dock, then he straightened, looking expressionlessly at Blaise. There was no hint in his gaze of the eerie, late-night intimacy of their last conversation. Twenty-three years, Blaise remembered, suddenly. The last thing he'd heard this man say, in the dark of a stairway, speaking of a woman long ago: So much longer than I thought I would live.

"Welcome to Talair," Bertran said. The scar on his cheek was prominent in the clear light. He was dressed much as he had been when he came to Baude, in a coran's clothing made for the outdoors. His hair was uncovered, disordered by the wind. He smiled thinly, a crook of his mouth. "How does it feel to have made an enemy before you even report?"

"I have my share of enemies," Blaise said mildly. He felt calmer now; the ride across the lake and the memory of that dark stairwell in Baude had taken away the last of his battle mood. "One more or one less should not matter greatly. The god will take me when he is ready." He raised his voice slightly on that last, for someone else's benefit. "Do you really think the duke of Miraval will bother hating me for guarding my life when attacked?"

"Urté? He could," Bertran said judiciously. "Though it wasn't him I was thinking of, actually." He looked for a moment as if he would explain, but then he turned instead and began walking towards the castle. "Come," he said over his shoulder, "there is meat and drink inside and after we will help you choose a horse from the stable."

Broad-shouldered, greying Valery stepped forward and extended an arm. Blaise hesitated a moment, then grasped it, pulling himself forward onto the dock. His gear had already been lifted up by three other men. Blaise turned back to the boat. Already the line had been untied and the small craft was beginning to glide back out over the water. The young priestess had her back to him, but then, as if aware that he was looking, she turned.

She said nothing, nor did Blaise as the distance between boat and shore slowly increased. Her hair gleamed in the still warm light of the setting sun. The owl on her shoulder gazed away to the west. More apt than you know, she had said on that western shore, responding with weighty sobriety to an attempted irony. He didn't understand what she'd meant, he didn't understand it at all, and within him a spark of rekindled anger blazed. He'd meant to say goodbye and to thank her, but instead he watched for another moment and then turned away impassively.

Valery was waiting for him. Bertran's cousin had a wry expression on his face.

"Six men?" he said. "Fair to say you aren't arriving quietly."

"Five, and a catamite from Arimonda," Blaise said tersely. His anger was mostly gone though; he felt tired more than anything else. "I was riding quietly enough, and on the road. They shot my horse."

"The Arimondan," Valery murmured, looking out to sea after the withdrawing boat. "Remind me to tell you about him later."

"Why bother?" Blaise said. "He's dead."

Valery glanced curiously at him a moment, then shrugged. He turned and began walking. Blaise fell into step beside him. The two men went along the length of the pier and then up the narrow, increasingly steep path towards the castle of Talair. They came to the heavy doors, which were open, and they passed within to the sound of music playing.