A Song for Arbonne

CHAPTER 15

On the night appointed there was fog at Garsenc Castle. Rolling in from the east with the darkness at day's end it swallowed up the donjon and the outer watch-towers of the castle like some mist-dragon out of the old tales of the days before Corannos moved the sun.

Alone on the ramparts above the drawbridge Thaune of Garsenc shivered, despite the woolen overshirt and the fur vest he wore in winter. He was thinking about an oath he had sworn three months ago, a vow of fealty that had turned him from a coran of humble birth and modest future into a conspirator with a substantial prospect of dying before this night was over.

He watched his breath make puffs of smoke in the grey cold, adding to the fog; he couldn't see any further than that. The moons were invisible, of course, and the stars. They had chosen a time when both moons should have been bright and high, lending light for the crossing of the pass, but men could not control what the god sent in the way of weather, and more than one campaign of the past—including the not-so-distant past—had been undone by the elements. He remembered the savage cold at Iersen Bridge. He would always remember that. He placed both hands on the stone and peered out into the swirling grey darkness. Nothing. There could have been a hundred men below him outside the walls, and if they were quiet enough not he nor anyone else in Garsenc would have known they were there.

From the small guardhouse beside the portcullis he heard the murmur of voices. There were four men posted at night. They would be playing at dice by firelight. He couldn't even see the light down there through the fog. It didn't matter. He could hear the voices, muffled in the grey ness, and three of them were with him. The fourth would be dealt with, as necessary.

Not killed though. His instructions had been clear. Blaise de Garsenc wanted a minimum of killing in these first days. He seemed to have known exactly what he wanted, even back in the autumn, in the days after his first declaration. He had sent Thaune north among the other corans of Gorhaut to carry word freely of what had been done and said before that challenge at the fair. All the Gorhautians attending the fair had been assembled in an enormous room in Barbentain, Thaune remembered, and after the countess of Arbonne had ordered them out of the country and confiscated their goods Blaise had spoken to them with a cool precision that had been genuinely impressive. Because of the Treaty of Iersen Bridge, he'd said—a treaty that was a betrayal in itself—King Ademar was about to embroil Gorhaut in another war here in Arbonne. It was a war they did not need, brought on by a treaty that should never have been signed. He invited those assembled to think about his words, and he promised they would be allowed passage north through the mountains unharmed.

They had even contrived a pretended assassination attempt, an arrow landing carefully short of Blaise as he walked out from the castle the next morning. The tournament melee had been cancelled, in the wake of the events at Aubry and in the watch-tower south of the pass: they had found the three maimed guards by then. The court of Signe de Barbentain had collectively attended mourning services in the Temple of Rian, and in their midst—walking beside the countess, in fact—had been Blaise de Garsenc.

Thaune was instructed to claim responsibility for that attempted killing of the pretender, both on the road north through the pass and again when he arrived home at the castle—a Garsenc coran would need such a story, Blaise had told him. Thaune, remembering the fears that had led him to kill the animal-trainer, had acceded gratefully. It was strange, actually, to be working for a leader who thought of so many details concerning his men. Thaune had even, after hesitating, told Blaise about that killing in the alley. He didn't want hidden things between him and this man.

Blaise had looked regretful, but not judgmental. "You were afraid," he'd said, "and doing your duty out of fear. That is how things have always been at Garsenc. I hope you will do what you see as your duty now, but without the fear."

Thaune remembered that. He had done what he could, which, as it turned out, was quite a bit. He'd more of a knack than he would have guessed for such intrigues. There had been only a dozen soldiers in his party on the ride north—Gorhaut corans seldom went south to tournaments in Arbonne, they hadn't done so for years.

There were no rules about such things, but corans of reputation usually waited another month and went east to Aulensburg for the tourney there. Gotzland was seen as better than Arbonne; it was acceptable to fight there. Only the younger ones, and a handful of spies sometimes, went south to Lussan in the autumn with the merchants and entertainers. There were no spies in this small party, though, Thaune was certain of it. The young men listened, a little awed, to his snarling tale of wind pushing a long bowshot short.

They were probably wishing they had tried the same thing, he had mused that first night in the roadside inn among the falling leaves of autumn. Probably even dreaming of having done so, and having succeeded, and riding back to King Ademar in triumph unimaginable. Young men had such dreams.

Two of the corans on that ride, he'd decided, might be thinking, or dreaming, along somewhat different lines. He'd taken a chance and spoken to one of them before they parted ways. Turned out he had judged rightly; taking careful chances was what he'd been sent back to do. Before their roads divided, his to Garsenc, the other coran's towards the palace in Cortil, Thaune had won his first recruit to the cause of Blaise de Garsenc's rebellion. The accent had been what decided him. You could almost always trust a north-land man to be unhappy with King Ademar.

On the ramparts of Garsenc he leaned forward, suddenly tense, peering blindly into the fog. It was thick as the mist was said to be above the river to the land of the dead. He could see nothing, but he thought he'd heard a sound from the grassy space beyond the outer wall and the dry moat.

The sky above another castle, beyond the mountains to the south, was brilliantly clear that same night, the stars like diamonds, the two moons bright enough to lend shadows to the trees bending in the path of the sirnal—the north wind that swept down the Arbonne Valley with the bitter force of winter behind it.

Fires were burning on all the hearths of Barbentain, and Signe had dressed herself in layers of fine-spun wool with fur trim at the collar and sleeves and a fur-lined hat covering her head, even indoors. She hated the winter, she always had, especially when the sirnal blew, making her eyes stream and her fingers ache. Usually she and Guibor had been south by this time, in Carenzo with Ariane and Thierry, or in the winter palace in Tavernel for their sojourn there. It was always milder in the south, the depredations of the sirnal less harrowing, tempered by the shape of the land and the influence of the sea.

This year was different. She needed to be in Barbentain because this winter would not be the customary time of sheltering behind castle and village walls while the wind whipped down the valleys and empty roads. Events were taking place this season that were going to define the future for all of them, one way or another. In fact, they were taking place tonight, beneath the brightness of these two moons beyond the mountains, in Gorhaut. She wondered what Vidonne and blue Riannon were seeing there as they looked down.

Almost unbearably anxious, unable to keep still, she paced back and forth from one fire to another in her sitting room. She was disturbing her waiting-women she knew, and almost certainly doing the same to Rosala, who sat calmly nonetheless, hands busy at needlework in her chair drawn close to one fire. She wondered how the woman could be so placid, knowing—as indeed she did know—what was at stake tonight in the north.

It had come down to Blaise de Garsenc, as Beatritz had said it might almost a year ago when they'd first become aware that the new coran in Baude Castle was rather more than he seemed. Rather more. A very great deal more, in fact. The countess wished, again, that Beatritz was with her now, instead of on the island so far to the south in the sea. Images of the past year had been with her all evening, dancing in the flicker of the fires. It sometimes seemed to her that she spent half her life now walking with images of the past. But she wasn't thinking of Guibor now. She was remembering Bertran at the challenge ground as the northerner stood before the Portezzan pavilion offering a red rose:

We may have all found more than we bargained for in this man, Bertran had said.

Another image rose up then, a memory from within this castle, in autumn as well, when they had summoned all the merchants and corans of Gorhaut the morning after Aubry and told them they were confiscating their trade goods and sending them home from the fair.

Urté de Miraval had wanted to execute them all, and Signe, a hard rage running through her, had had to resist the same desire. There were even precedents for such a thing. Every citizen of a country was personally responsible for the truce-breaking of their lords. It had been Blaise who had requested, insisted actually, that the merchants be let go, and had given cause why this should be so.

"I have nothing at all to offer in Gorhaut just yet," he'd said, speaking earnestly in this very room before they had all gone down to deal with those assembled. "They must go home knowing I've saved their lives—lives put in hazard by Ademar's truce-breaking. They must go home and talk about that. Will you give me that much?" He'd paused. "Or are we no better than what we are trying to fight?"

She'd been genuinely angry with him then, a Gorhautian speaking so to her on the morning after so many of her people had been slain. But she was a countess of a land in peril, and she had always been able to master her emotions when it was time to advise Guibor on his decisions, or to make them herself. Blaise was speaking truth, she finally decided, and she gave him what he asked.

In the room below when she came before the merchants one of them had protested loudly at the announced seizure of their goods, astonishingly oblivious to how close all of them had been to being executed that same morning: no more innocent than the villagers and priestesses of Aubry. The man complained furiously a second time, and then a third, speaking with choler and no respect, interjecting while she was still addressing them. In an odd, unsettling way, she had actually been glad of it. She had nodded at Urté, who had been looking at her expectantly, only waiting for a signal. The duke of Miraval had calmly declared the merchant's life to be forfeit. The man had begun shouting then, and the palace corans had moved in quickly to take him from the room.

Blaise had looked as if he wanted to object even to that, but had held himself in check as the struggling merchant was dragged away by the guards. There was another message that had to be sent here, and Signe knew it; she had been governing a nation for some time, after all, with Guibor and now alone. Images of power mattered: in Gorhaut they could not be allowed to think they were so weak and soft here in woman-ruled Arbonne. They already had that impression, Signe knew. They could not be allowed to indulge in it. She had looked at Blaise, her expression forbidding, and had waited for him to nod his head.

"I cannot save a fool," he'd said to the merchants and corans of Gorhaut. The right thing to say; it would be remembered by the others. He was learning quickly. Later that morning they executed the man, though cleanly, without branding or breaking him; he was a symbol, not a truce-breaker himself. Here in Arbonne they were not the same as those they were now to fight. She would defend that assertion to the last of her days.

That had all been back in the autumn, with the grape harvest in and the leaves turning. Now, in the cold, clear glitter of a winter's night, she listened to the sirnal rattle the windows like a spirit of the dead and sipped at her mulled, spiced wine, holding the goblet in both hands, its warmth comforting her as much as the scent and taste of the wine. The two girls were sitting on their benches near the door, their hands cupped around hollow silver balls with burning coals inside them. Bertran had brought that idea back, years ago she remembered, from a journey into the wild places east of Gotzland. He had done a great deal of such dangerous travelling in the years after Aelis died. "He is blaming himself," Guibor had said patiently. "There is nothing we can do about it."

Looking more closely at the two girls, Signe saw that Perrette, the younger one, was shivering. Impatiently, she shook her head. "In Rian's name, come nearer the fire, both of you," she said, sounding more irritated than she meant to. "You'll be no use to me at all if you catch a chill and die."

This was wrong, of course, she shouldn't be taking out anxieties on those around her. But what was there for her to do, otherwise? She was an old woman in a cold castle in winter. She could only sit or stand by a fireside now and wait to see if the goddess and the god would allow them to throw successfully at dice with so many lives and two nations' destinies.

Nervously, the girls hastened to obey her. Rosala glanced up from her work and smiled.

"How are you so calm?" Signe demanded abruptly. "How can you sit there so easily?"

The smile faded. Mutely Rosala held up her work, and the countess saw, for the first time, the raddled, spoiled stitching and the visibly trembling hands that were lifting it for her to see.

The fog made things horrendously difficult. Thaune still couldn't see a thing down below, though he kept straining his eyes into the thick, grey gloom. There was to have been a single torch lit briefly at the edge of the woods and then doused. He couldn't have seen a torch from these ramparts tonight if it was directly below where he stood.

Even sounds were muffled, but not so much that—just there! — he could not make out, finally, the jingle of a horse's harness and then the same sound a second time, not far away. They had come. It was time. With an awareness of all that might turn on this in the next moments, and with the fear that came—that had to come—hand-in-glove with that, Thaune went quickly along the rampart walk to the stairwell and started down to the guardhouse, one hand on the wall for balance in the murk.

When he appeared in the doorway all four guards jumped up from the table. He nodded his head briefly.

"It is time," he said.

"Time for what?" said Erthon, just before Girart brought the hilt of his knife smartly down on the back of his fellow guard's head. Erthon, whom Thaune hadn't been able to decide whether or not to trust, slumped forward, and Thaune had to be quick to catch him before he knocked over the table and sent the dice rattling.

"My luck," said Girart. "I was about to win for the first time all night." Thaune was able to smile; the other two guards, younger, visibly nervous, were not.

"We're in a bigger game now," Thaune said. "Say your prayers and open the gate and the bridge." He went out to stand behind the iron portcullis as it began rolling up. There was a noise, of course, as the chains turned, but for once the fog was useful and Thaune doubted anyone would hear the muffled sound from across the courtyard inside the castle.

When the bars were high enough he stepped forward, ducking to pass under the lowest spikes, and waited again, staring out into the cold mist of the night. No torches yet, nothing at all to be seen, only the sound of horses again, faintly, through the low, drifting fog. Then another noise behind him as the portcullis slotted with a clang into its niche at the top of the gate and the guards began quickly winding down the drawbridge over the dry moat.

When the bridge was down, Garsenc Castle lay open to those waiting in the fog, and the first part of what Thaune had come home to do was accomplished. The easy part.

He stepped out onto the wooden bridge and felt more than he heard the simultaneous tread of someone approaching from the other end. He still could not see. The mist redoubled his anxiety, inducing primitive, irrational feelings of dread. He couldn't even make out the planks of the bridge beneath his boots. He stopped walking. "Light your torch," he said, his tone as calm as he could make it. The sound of his voice went out feebly into the enveloping darkness and was swallowed up.

There was silence as the approaching footsteps also came to a halt. Thaune felt as if he were wrapped in a grey shroud, ready for burial. He shuddered at the thought.

"Light your torch," he said again to the silent figures on the bridge with him.

Finally he heard the scraping sound of flint being struck, and a moment later the resinous scent of a torch catching came to him. In the fog the light spun out only a little way, a small circle, a tenuous island of illumination on the bridge.

Bright enough to reveal Galbert de Garsenc, the High Elder of Gorhaut, huge and unmistakable, standing directly in front of him with two corans on either hand.

"I am most happy to oblige you," said the High Elder in his unforgettable voice. "To illuminate the first of the traitors we will now be pleased to burn. I will light your own pyre with the torch you requested."

Thaune felt as if the world had dropped away beneath his feet, as if the final darkness at the end of time had come.

His breath was snatched away in horror. He couldn't move. He was actually afraid he was going to fall down.

"Do not even think about fleeing," Galbert added, the deep tones conveying infinite contempt. "There are four archers behind me with their bows trained on you, and this light is more than good enough for them."

Another tread resounded on the far side of the bridge, approaching from behind the Elder, just beyond the spill of light. "It would be good enough, I agree," said a lighter, cooler voice. "If they were still conscious and therefore still holding their bows. It is all right, Thaune," said Blaise de Garsenc, "we have this under control."

There came another sound, twice in quick succession, and the corans beside Galbert grunted and slid to the planks, their swords rattling on the wood. The torch was dropped but then seized by an invisible hand before it could go out.

"Do tell me, father," said Blaise, coming forward into the light, "what is it that makes you so anxious to burn people alive?" His words were flippant but Thaune could hear the stiff tension running beneath them. He wondered when father and son had last seen each other. Galbert said nothing at all; the rage in his eyes was genuinely frightening in the torchlight.

"Blaise," came a Portezzan accent from the murk beyond, "it seems your brother is here too."

"How splendid! A reunion!" said Blaise, again with that forced gaiety. "Bring him, Rudel, let me see those dear, kind features again."

Galbert still had not spoken. Thaune was unable to look at the High Elder's face. He heard footsteps again, and two men brought forward a third between them.

"We have dealt with all the others," said a voice Thaune remembered from Arbonne, "About fifteen of them, as you guessed." They were lighting more torches now; by their light Thaune recognized Bertran de Talair.

"Nicely done, Thaune," Blaise said, not taking his eyes from his father and the handsome figure of Ranald de Garsenc beside him. "We had to make the assumption that there would be an informer though, that you would need to trust too many people for them all to be reliable. We were here two days earlier than I told you, and I had men watching the roads east to see who might be coming. I thought my father might want to do the honours himself. After all," he added, with sudden, corrosive irony, "it has been months since he had anyone burned, and that hardly counts because he wasn't able to be at Aubry himself. Tell me, dear brother, did you enjoy it there? Was it a fine hunt? Did the women scream amusingly?" Ranald de Garsenc shifted his feet but made no reply.

Men were walking up now, passing Thaune on either side, entering the castle. The big Arbonnais coran named Valery stopped beside him. "Well done," he said quietly. "Now tell me the numbers inside. Do we have a fight on our hands?"

"How many of you are there?"

"Only fifty. Trained mercenaries, though, from Portezza and Gotzland. This isn't an invasion of Gorhaut from Arbonne. This is a rising from within. We hope."

Thaune cleared his throat. "I think about half the castle will be with us." He reached for his belt and unhooked a large key ring. "This unlocks the weapons room—to the right across the courtyard, the double doors with the arch. Girart, who is just behind me, will show you. You may trust him with anything. There might be a hundred, perhaps more, who resist, but they will not be well armed." He cleared his throat again. "I think if En Blaise lets them know he is here there may be fewer who fight."

Blaise heard that. "Let them know?" he echoed in mock indignation. "Of course I'll let them know. I'm the wayward son come home to his father's open arms. There ought to be music, a feast, wine and burning women for my delight. Perhaps that is why you came, father? To surprise me with the warmth of your welcome?" His tone was brittle, febrile. Beside Thaune, Valery of Talair made a small sound but said nothing.

Thaune became aware that the High Elder had now begun murmuring softly, but not to any of them. Somehow the quality of the man's voice, his inward, intense manner, shaped a silence on the bridge in the mist, and gradually, with a growing horror that bit deeper than the cold, Thaune became aware that the High Elder was intoning the denunciation of the god.

"… to the infinite cold that was before the world was or the moons were spoken, before the sun was moved and the stars allowed their light. O, most holy Corannos of ice and all the sacred tongues of fire, unworthy as I surely am in your sight, I beseech thee, in the name of your own ancient gifts to us, that there shall be for this man torments without number to the ending of time. Maggots beneath the skin and worms in his heart, the rotting sickness and the black blood that cannot be stanched. I pray that you send down upon this man who is my son no longer—"

"That is enough." A second voice, cold with distaste. Bertran de Talair. Blaise himself was silent, immobile in the face of what his rather was doing.

"— foul madness and a twisting agony in his bowels, blindness, boils, the stinking corruption of his flesh—"

"I said that is enough!"

"— all of these and more, I most holy Corannos. I pray that he be stricken also with the pestilence that—"

Bertran came around in front of Galbert and, in the midst of this pronunciation of the blackest curse known to the Elders of Corannos, struck him full in the face with an open palm, the way one might slap a servant. Galbert stopped, out of genuine shock as much as anything else. Blaise still hadn't moved. He opened his mouth to speak, and then closed it wordlessly. Ranald de Garsenc looked pale and unsteady beside his father.

"You will be silent," Bertran said savagely. "Ten more words and an archer will shoot. Your son may be unwilling to give such an order, for reasons that escape me, but he assured that I am not. Do not put this, I beg you, to the test."

"Who are you?" Galbert snarled, through gritted teeth.

En Bertran laughed aloud then, as strange a sound in the fog as Thaune had heard all night. "That is three words," he said. "Seven left. Hoard your store. I am sorely offended, though, I would have thought you would surely know the appearance of a man you paid so much to kill last summer."

"Bertran de Talair," said Ranald de Garsenc, his first words. "I remember you from the tournaments."

Galbert's eyes narrowed to slits, but he kept silent, his body rigid with anger. His gloved hands, Thaune saw, were ceaselessly working, opening and closing at his sides, as if longing for someone's throat.

Ranald turned from the duke of Talair to stare at his brother. "What have you done? Turned traitor entirely? Invaded with Arbonne?"

"Hardly," said Blaise, beginning to regain his composure but carefully not looking at his father. "Bertran is here as a friend. My men are mercenaries recruited by Rudel Correze for me, you'll very likely know a number of them—mostly from Gotzland. This is a seizing of Garsenc Castle from you, brother. I am sorry, but it seems a necessary first step, since you yourself are doing nothing at all. Worse than nothing, actually. I intend to take Gorhaut from Ademar with my own countrymen, and without burning women, either."

"I had no choice about that," Ranald said fiercely.

"Not so." It was, surprisingly, Valery of Talair, behind Thaune by the portcullis. He was invisible in the fog, his disembodied voice flat and final as that of some judge at the iron gates of the afterworld. "We can say no and die. It is a choice, my lord of Garsenc. In the face of some things asked of us it is the only choice."

No one spoke in reply. There was silence on the bridge, heavy as the fog. Thaune heard only quick footsteps and saw cloaked and hurrying shapes as Blaise's mercenaries went by him into the forecourt. There had been no alarm raised within Garsenc; the world was wrapped in mist like a creation of dream.

And it was in that stillness, as if it were a part of such a dreaming, that Thaune then heard the rumble of hoof beats to the east. A great many, as if the horsemen of the Night Ride were come down among them from the sky, from the train of the god, to ride over the fog-shrouded earth and destroy.

"What is that?" Valery took two steps forward and stopped.

"Get the men inside!" said Blaise sharply. "We have to control the castle. They did send an army! Thaune, have the portcullis lowered, quickly!"

Thaune was already moving, shouting a command to his two guardsmen. From beyond, in the fog, the drum roll of unseen hooves grew louder. There were torches visible now, and shadowy horses, and from the distance between the first and the last of those carried flames, Thaune realized that an army had indeed come.

It had always been likely they would fail. He had not made his choice last autumn because of any measured assessment of the chances of success. He did not want to die on a pyre, though. His only prayer in that moment was that so much mercy might be allowed. He wondered if, when he crossed to the god, he would be allowed to walk with his father again, in the wide meadows of Corannos, in the gentle light.

"I shall set the torch to your burning myself," said Galbert de Garsenc, speaking to his son, as if giving voice to Thaune's own terror. He was smiling again now, a glittering triumph in his eyes, reflecting the torches' glow.

"That," said Bertran de Talair, "is two words too many."

"Bertran!" said Blaise quickly.

"Valery," said the duke of Talair in the same moment. And simultaneous with the two names spoken something sang past Thaune in the fog and he heard the High Elder of Corannos cry out as an arrow embedded itself in his shoulder through the links of the mail he wore.

"Ten more," said Bertran de Talair calmly, "and we will twin that in your other arm. Tell me—in less than ten words, mind you—do you think these horsemen will attack us at risk of your life, my lord High Elder? Why don't we wait for them here and consider the question at leisure?"

He was, thought Thaune, unbelievably calm.

The hoofbeats had been a rolling as of thunder but gradually stopped now beyond the end of the bridge in the wide, clear space before the woods. There were a great many torches; Thaune could see the outline of horses and riders, bulky figures heavily armed.

"We have the High Elder here, and the duke of Garsenc," Blaise called out, his voice knifing into the fog. "Have a care for their lives. Will you declare yourselves?"

His father, clutching at his left arm, laughed then. A harsh, ugly sound, at odds with the effortless beauty of his voice. "Who do you think it is?" he snarled.

"Six words," said Bertran quietly.

From amid the mist and the weaving torches a voice called back, cold and austere, "There is no hostage you could name who will stay my hand or those of my men if we are minded to strike. Is it Blaise de Garsenc to whom I speak?"

"Careful!" said Rudel Correze sharply, under his breath.

"No point denying it," Thaune heard Blaise reply softly. "Our only hope is the hostages, whatever he says. He might be bluffing. He must be bluffing."

There was a sound of horses approaching the far end of the bridge, and then the creak of an armoured rider dismounting. From behind, Thaune finally heard the rattle and the clang of the portcullis as the guards finished lowering it. Valery of Talair was beside him, another arrow to his bow. Thaune drew his sword.

"I am Blaise de Garsenc," said the tall coran Thaune had sworn an oath to serve and to have for his king.

"I thought it might be so," said the unseen man in a voice crisp with resolution. "I had hoped my information was correct, that I would find you here tonight."

And into the torchlight, heavily cloaked against the cold, strode Fulk de Savaric, to kneel on the planks of the bridge before Blaise.

He looked up, and the hovering torchlight fell upon the square, fair-haired, intelligent features he shared with all his family. Thaune, catching his breath, taking an involuntary step forward, saw that the duke of Savaric was not smiling. "My lord, will you accept my sworn homage and the hand of a friend? Can you make use of a thousand men from Savaric and the lands of the north who share your feelings about the Treaty of Iersen Bridge and the men who rule us now?"

Long afterwards, Thaune remembered looking up then, almost expecting to see the moons appear like beacons in the fog, as if the heavens and the dark earth around them must somehow mirror the glow that seemed to be emanating from this bridge. It was still thick as river mud overhead, though, the sky lost to sight in the fog and only the nearest torches lending their light to the tableau before him as he looked back down to see En Blaise take Fulk de Savaric's offered hands formally between his own.

It was in his heart, not in the sky, Thaune realized, that the moons were beginning to shine again. The cold of the long night seemed lessened by the warmth of that inner light. He wondered, after, if the others on the bridge had had such an illusion, if they had all looked up to see if the sky had truly changed.

That might have been an explanation, though not, by any means, an excuse for what happened.

What happened was that Galbert de Garsenc, in the very moment his younger son was formally accepting the homage of the most powerful lord of the northern marches of Gor-haut, rammed one burly shoulder into the coran on his right, hammered a muscled forearm into the face of his other guard and leaped off the bridge, an arrow still quivering in his left

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arm, to disappear into the shrouded darkness of the dry moat.

After a frozen moment there was a babble of sound on the bridge. Valery of Talair and Rudel Correze hurtled into the moat after him. Thaune heard a snarled Portezzan obscenity as the latter landed badly on the uneven, rock-strewn surface below.

"He won't get far," said Fulk de Savaric as Blaise helped him to his feet. Over his shoulder, de Savaric snapped commands in the darkness. A moment later Thaune heard horses galloping and saw torches moving again in the mist.

Of all of them it was Blaise who seemed least surprised. "If he makes the woods," he said, almost musingly, "I doubt we'll find him."

"He has to get out of the moat first," said Bertran de Talair, "and he's got a wounded arm."

"Not badly wounded," Blaise said, shaking his head, still with that detached air about him, as if he had almost anticipated this. "He wears heavy mail, double-linked. I doubt the arrow went deep. Ring the moat, though," he said to Fulk de Savaric. "There's at least a chance your men might see him climbing out."

There came the sound of laughter then, laced with mockery, with something else in it that Thaune could not quite identify. "He won't be climbing out," said Ranald, duke of Garsenc, to his brother. "He's under the castle already, and will be out from it and gone before morning. There's a tunnel in from the moat that no one knows about, and another from the dungeon level that leads away. A long distance away. You won't find him, brother." In silence the two men looked at each other.

"Blaise, quickly, do you know where it leads? We can get to the exit before him." It was Bertran, speaking with urgency for the first time. Galbert de Garsenc, Thaune abruptly remembered, had offered two hundred and fifty thousand in gold last summer for the death of de Talair.

Blaise was shaking his head though, looking at his brother. "This was done after I left." His mouth twisted slightly. "Ranald wouldn't have mentioned it otherwise."

"We could make you tell us where the tunnels are," said En Bertran to Ranald de Garsenc very quietly. There was something frightening in his voice now. Thaune wondered how he could ever have arrived at the notion that the Arbonnais men were soft.

The duke of Garsenc was still a handsome man, tall and well built, the image of what a lord should be. He looked down upon the slight, unprepossessing figure of the duke of Talair and said contemptuously, "Really, my lord? What will you do? Set me on fire?"

Blaise said something then that Thaune could not hear. His brother did hear it though, and turned quickly back to him, his arrogance fading.

"Go ahead," Blaise said, more loudly. "I mean it. If you want to go with him you will not be stopped or followed." Ranald's expression had become confused, hesitant. He looked like a man who wanted a drink, thought Thaune. A cruel thought, he knew, but it was there. He had lived in this castle long enough. He knew the duke.

"If you want to, though, you can stay," Blaise added. "I will trust you among us if you give me your oath. I have never known you to lie, Ranald. I will not assume you would do so now. If you can see anything clearly tonight you must surely realize that this is the chance of your life. Probably the last chance, brother. Do you want to free yourself from him or not? He is gone, down that tunnel, away from both of us, back to Ademar. You don't have to follow him, Ranald, and I will not make you stay. You have the first free choice you've had in a long time."

"If I kneel and swear fealty to a younger brother who ought to have been a cleric of Corannos? Is that my choice?"

"Is it so evil a course? Does it matter what he was supposed to become all those years ago?" It was Fulk de Savaric who spoke, as Blaise remained silent looking at his brother by the wan light of the torches in the mist.

Beyond the bridge, Thaune could hear men shouting and the galloping horses as corans raced to surround the moat. He shared Ranald's certainty: they were not going to find Galbert de Garsenc, not in the mists of this night, not in the morning, even if the sun returned. At the back of his mind, behind his awareness of the miracle of their triumph and Fulk de Savaric's sworn allegiance, he felt a flicker of fear, like a tongue of flame.

Blaise cleared his throat, oddly tentative with his brother, as he had been with the father. "I do not request that you kneel before me, only that you follow my lead, Ranald." He hesitated. "I think you know, if the roles were reversed I would have been proud to swear homage to you." He stopped again, visibly struggling for words, as if wrestling with something difficult. "I also think you know there was a time I would have followed you to the end of the earth had you asked me to."

"But why," said Duke Ranald de Garsenc, after a silence, "would I ever have wanted to go to such a place? Or to have you there with me?"

Blaise said nothing at all to that. He lowered his head.

"You are a greater fool than I even guessed," said Bertran de Talair, but softly now, almost with regret. "Bring my lord Ranald his horse," he called out to the invisible corans beyond the end of the bridge. "The most puissant duke of Garsenc is leaving our poor company for the pleasure of his father's and the high grace of Ademar's court."

Blaise was still silent. Thaune, behind him, could not see his face. In a way he was glad of that. Even after years in this castle he found that what lay between the three men of Garsenc—like a thicket of spear shafts in the earth, iron heads angled to kill—was too much for him sometimes. Tonight, suddenly, had become one of those times, as if the destiny of nations was bound up in the darkness of this castle, a darkness that went far deeper than the mist and fog of a winter's night. They heard a horse being led up onto the bridge.

"Someone help the duke to mount," Bertran said, with the same grim courtesy.

"No need," said Ranald shortly, and he mounted in one smooth motion. He curvetted his horse and looked down upon his brother. "Are you expecting me to thank you now?" he asked. Again there was that note in his voice, the one Thaune could not quite identify.

Blaise looked up. He shook his head. "I thought you might ask about your son though." A cruel question, though perhaps not cruelly meant. Thaune wasn't sure; he didn't understand the younger son either. He saw Ranald's jaw tighten. Blaise added, in a flat voice, "I am proposing to name him my heir in Gorhaut, with Fulk as regent, should I die in this war. Does that interest you at all?"

He had to be quick, Thaune thought, he had to be very fast to have thought of this already. He turned to look at Fulk de Savaric, but there was nothing to be read there at all, nor in the features of Bertran de Talair beside Fulk. These were men used to the play of power, and to hiding their responses to it.

Ranald de Garsenc was less able to mask his feelings. "How touching," he shot back, as if firing a crossbow bolt. "How wonderful to see that everyone in my family has plans for my son. It does free me of a father's anxiety, I must say."

Blaise said, still gravely, "Given that you haven't even cared to ask of his condition or even his name, it ill behooves you to take such a tone, brother."

There was a silence. The very calmness of the words made the lash of them bite harder. Thaune felt that he and the others on the bridge had become extraneous, mere hangers-on at the edges of this long, bitter struggle within the de Garsenc family.

"Well?" said Ranald finally, as if that one word cost him a great effort. "Tell me."

From behind, Thaune saw Blaise lower his head again for a long moment, and then lift it once more. "He is well. A handsome, healthy child. He looks like a Garsenc. His name is Cadar, for his grandfather of Savaric."

Ranald laughed then, the same quick, bitter, corrosive sound as before, when his father had escaped. "Of course it is," he said. "She would do that."

"Can you blame her?"

Surprisingly, Ranald de Garsenc's laughter ended. He shook his head. He said, "You will not believe me, but I told father and the king both that I was prepared to let her go if she sent back the child. Neither would agree, not that she would have done so in any case." He paused. "I faced summary execution if I did not ride with Ademar to Aubry last autumn. Ask the duke of Savaric, your brave new ally. He was at that burning too, for the same reason."

It was Blaise's turn to be silent. "I know he was," he said at length. "I know why you were there, Ranald. But Fulk de Savaric has made his response to that tonight. He is with us now. You are about to ride back to Cortil. To the ugliness there. I don't understand. I can't understand. Ranald, will you not tell me why?" There was pain in the question. Every man on the bridge heard it.

Slowly Ranald de Garsenc shook his head again. "No," he said finally. "I do not owe you that much." He paused, seeming more composed than his younger brother on the ground now. "Nor will I thank you for not torturing me to find the location of the tunnel. I will say this much—" he turned to the duke of Talair, " — I am not going back to Cortil. Forget not, in your urge to mock and diminish your foes, who and what it is you are dealing with. I never forget it, not ever, during any day or night of my life."

He turned back to his brother. "Farewell, little Blaise, who would be king of all of us. I can recall teaching you to use that sword you carry. I wonder if you remember?"

He turned then, and was gone into night and fog, only the drumming of his horse's hooves in the mist telling them he was riding east.

"Of course I remember," said Blaise, to no one in particular.

He turned then and began walking up the bridge towards the castle, past the two dukes and all the corans, who quickly made way for him. He stood motionless before the portcullis bars until they had been rolled up again, allowing him to pass within, into his ancestral home.

Feeling buffeted by the speed of events, Thaune of Garsenc was more than a little eased to note heightened colour and hints of bemusement in the expressions of others when they gathered in the great hall.

There had been no resistance in the end. The announced arrival of Blaise de Garsenc, coupled with the even more tangible presence of nearly a thousand armed men with the duke of Savaric, induced any corans of Garsenc who might have been otherwise inclined to make their peace with the current situation.

That wasn't the problem. The problem emerged when the explanations began, while the castle servants scurried to provide wine and food and sleeping arrangements, not only for those in the hall but for the northern soldiers, and for the farmers who had also come with Fulk, carrying a variety of arms.

It was the presence of the farmers Fulk had been ordered to bring that raised the issue. It was winter, after all. Corans often followed their lord wherever he went, and it was not unusual for a duke to bring part of his household with him if he travelled to Cortil to spend the cold months drinking and brawling among the retinue of the king. It was a custom of long standing. That, they had assumed, was why Garsenc Castle was unlikely be heavily defended. But if the ordinary men of the land were being ordered by Ademar to take up arms in the dead of winter something else was afoot.

Fulk de Savaric knew that. He didn't know what was unfolding, though, because he hadn't yet reached Cortil when his instructions had been changed. His tale was simple. He had been instructed to bring as many men south as he could. Given the mood of the king since autumn, Fulk had not regarded these orders as being the sort he could comfortably ignore. They were mobilizing early for an attack in the spring, he had concluded; it had always been the most likely course of events.

Halfway to Cortil he had been met by a messenger from the High Elder, changing his orders, instructing him to turn west to Garsenc Castle, and meet Galbert there. There was a threat from the south, the messenger reported, treachery abroad in the wintry heartland of Gorhaut. Fulk knew, as most of Gorhaut had known by then, that Blaise de Garsenc had claimed the throne last autumn.

Duke Fulk was his own man, if he lacked his father's flamboyance or the confidence of the monarch that Cadar de Savaric had had. He'd turned his thousand men as ordered, riding along a valley path laced with snow, but he had stopped them by a frozen river bed two days later, a half day's ride still from Garsenc Castle. And there, under grey skies, he had made a speech.

He was not a man for speeches, nor were the men of the north greatly inclined to listen to orations, especially in the cold. What he said was as terse and clear as he could make it, and the words marked a changing of his life. He would have denied that Aubry had led him to that moment, but he wouldn't have said it had nothing to do with it, either.

He had never liked the Treaty of Iersen Bridge, he told his assembled men, shouting the words into the rising wind. He had never liked the authority the High Elder of Corannos had over an increasingly self-indulgent king. He felt contempt and real anger for the way in which a quarter of the people of Gorhaut had been dispossessed of their land and ordered to find shelter somewhere, anywhere, while the king and his High Elder plotted a conquest in the south. Fulk de Savaric did not think they could hold any lands they took south of the passes; they wouldn't be allowed to, he said, by the other countries of their world. The balance would be too greatly shifted. They would only trade a border war with Valensa for an enormous combat against all the other nations, and the Arbonnais, he said, would die before they lay quiet under a Gorhaut yoke of occupation. They would be forced out of Arbonne, he told his men, leaving ruin and ashes and legions of the dead behind them.

That, said Fulk, probably didn't even matter to the High Elder, whose war this was. The real point of what was happening now had little to do with land for the dispossessed of the north. Galbert wanted only to destroy Arbonne and its goddess, and the Treaty of Iersen Bridge had been the first devious step towards that. Fulk de Savaric didn't much care either way about Arbonne's goddess; she had never bothered him, he said by that frozen river. What did bother him, what enraged him, he said, were the uprooted people of the northlands. Their king had sold them to Valensa for silver and gold, to raise an army for burning women in Arbonne.

There were others, he told his silent company, who felt the same way as he. Blaise de Garsenc, the younger son of the High Elder was probably known to many of them. He wasn't even a northlander, but he had left Gorhaut entirely rather than live with the terms of the Treaty of Iersen Bridge. He was very likely coming home now, perhaps even tonight, leading a rising against these very wrongs Fulk was speaking of. The duke proposed to join him, for the honour of the northland and in memory of his father and King Duergar who had truly loved and served Gorhaut. He invited those of his army who thought the same thing and who trusted his judgment to come with him. Those who felt otherwise were free to leave, with his honest gratitude for their service in the past.

That was all he said. Wind blew down the valley, sliding snow into mounds on the banks of the frozen river, shaking it down from the branches of bare trees.

Eighteen men left, from a company of almost a thousand.

The men of the northland had their own hard creed, always, and the lords of Savaric had seldom played them false, whatever the kings in Cortil might have done. Duke Cadar de Savaric had died defending their lands and his own at Iersen Bridge. His son had shepherded the interests of the north with a cautious diligence in the upheavals that followed King Ademar's accession and the treaty he had signed. If the time for caution now had ended, the time for loyalty had not, and loyalty to the north was the first law of the north.

Not a man prone to the sweep of powerful emotions, Fulk de Savaric had nonetheless been moved by what had followed his words on that wintry afternoon. He was speaking treason, after all.

There was no shouting when he ended, no cries of approval or swift cheers raised in his name. That was not their way. There was only the grim, stern silence that had always defined the north, as six horsemen and twelve men on foot detached themselves from the company, to proceed east from that icy stream towards Cortil and King Ademar, who was still, when all else was said and done, the anointed of the god.

The rest had followed him here to Garsenc Castle and would follow him now, he said soberly to Blaise and Bertran and the others gathered in the great hall, wherever he asked them to go.

"That last," said Blaise, "is the real question, I fear." He seemed to have gradually recovered his composure after the encounters with his father and brother. "We had planned to take this castle, use it as a winter base, a rallying point, for any men who might join our cause, and then see what the spring brought us, in numbers and possibilities. I didn't propose to fight a war in winter."

"We did once, in the time leading up to Iersen Bridge," said Fulk de Savaric.

"I know that. I was there. That was against an invader, with no choice offered us. There's another thing: I don't want to begin attacking across the countryside myself, ruining castles or towns. If I possibly can I want this to end up as one battle against Ademar and only one. My army—if I have one—against his on a field somewhere. If I am to come home as the saviour of Gorhaut—the man who takes us back to the god and our true destiny—I can't begin by killing my own people and destroying their homes and fields. I won't do that, Fulk, for the same reason I won't invade with an army from Arbonne."

"Did they offer you one?" Fulk de Savaric asked.

Blaise turned to Bertran de Talair. The duke's expression was oddly inward, Thaune saw, as if he hadn't been closely following the last part of the conversation. And a moment later, Thaune realized that this, in fact, was so.

"Do you remember," Bertran asked Blaise softly, not answering the question, "what your brother said just before he left? His last words to me?" There was something strange in his voice, something that made the room feel cold again, despite the fires now burning on all the hearths. Thaune, by the doorway to the corridor, tried to remember what it was that Ranald de Garsenc had said.

"He said he wasn't going back to Cortil." Blaise had been standing by the largest of the fires. Now he took two steps towards the duke of Talair and stopped.

"Would he have been telling you something?" asked Rudel Correze sharply. He rose from his seat. "Because if he was…»

"If he was," Duke Bertran finished flatly, "then we know why Fulk was ordered to bring all the men he could. And why your brother wasn't going to Cortil. Ademar isn't at Cortil."

"How did you come through the mountains?" Fulk de Savaric asked abruptly. He, too, had now risen from his chair.

"Lesser Gaillard Pass to the west," said Blaise. "There were only fifty of us, no wagons or goods. We didn't want to be seen. We might have been spotted had we gone through the High Road Pass."

"Of course," said Fulk. "But if En Bertran is right about this then Ademar and his army were moving south from Cortil towards the High Road Pass even while we were coming north." Bertran de Talair had put down his wine glass. His face, Thaune saw, was very white, an old scar showing in sharp relief. "That is what has happened, I am certain of it. It fits what we know. They decided not to wait for spring, after all. This is a winter war, my friends. In Arbonne. They might even be there already."

"And what do we do here with a thousand men? Capture Cortil? Raise the country in revolt?" Rudel Correze's eyes were bright in the firelight. Blaise said nothing; his eyes were on the duke of Talair.

"There is no country to raise," said Fulk de Savaric slowly. "All of the men who can fight will be with the king. I think I see what he is thinking: he doesn't care what you do here. If he takes Arbonne quickly enough—and it will probably

408 A SONG FOR ARBONNE

be wide open to him now in winter, however many men he loses to the mountains—he can come home with an army in triumph from the sack of that land and deal with us in spring, wherever Blaise is."

"That isn't Ademar thinking, you do realize," said Blaise finally. You could hear the bitterness. "This is my father's cunning, and his dream. He has always wanted Arbonne destroyed. Always. He told me stories as a boy of how the temples of Rian had to be brought down to save the whole world from their corruption. And he knows me. He knew I would not bring an army here, that Ademar would be safe to leave Gorhaut almost undefended, and then come back, as Fulk says, to deal with whatever happens while he's gone." He turned to Bertran. "You know what he's going to do, don't you?"

The other man's expression was bleak as the winter night. Slowly he nodded his head. "He won't bother with the castles or the cities. He won't try sieges in winter. He's going to force our corans out by making war on the villages and the temples. As he did at Aubry."

"As he did at Aubry," echoed Blaise.

"Shall we ride, then?" asked Fulk de Savaric. "You wanted one battle, Blaise. It looks as if you might get it, but it will be in Arbonne."

"Of course it will," said the duke of Talair with savage irony. "It is warmer there, isn't it? The sun shines, even in winter. If you go far enough south there's no snow at all. You can even catch the scent of the sea."

"Through the smoke," said Blaise shortly. "Let's go."

They left two hundred of Fulk's men to hold Garsenc Castle and to spread word as best they could that they were there. The rest of their company set out that same night in the fog and the cold on the long road back to the mountains. At one point during the night the mist finally began to lift and they caught a glimpse through tattered windblown clouds of white Vidonne low in the west before morning came.

CHAPTER 16

Roche the priest was in disgrace on Rian's Island in the sea. Someone foraging for winter firewood had smelled burning by a cove on the southern shoreline and had gone to investigate; the risk of the forests burning, though rather less in winter, was always real. A small fire-pit had been found, dug in the cold sand, covered with a flat slab of stone. Lifting the stone with a long branch revealed half a dozen lampfish grilling underneath.

Roche would have even tried to deny being the culprit, had he not been discovered moments later by the same interfering woodsman in a small shelter not far away, dozing in happy anticipation with a fishing line beside him and the smell of fish on his hands.

Awakened by an insolent prod of the woodsman's branch, he had stammered an offer to share his morning's secret catch under the mild winter sun while they looked out from the beach at the gentle swells of the sea. The woodsman was not moved, either by the idyllic setting nor even the succulent promise of lampfish. He was one of those depressingly pious fellows who left their homes after some night vision or other to come and serve the goddess on her island, labouring for the priests and priestesses, often becoming more sturdily attached to the doctrines and codes of conduct than the clergy were themselves.

It was fixed law, the woodsman pronounced with obdurate, finger-wagging satisfaction, that all fish and fowl around the shores of the island were interdicted to mortal men and women, sacred, he intoned virtuously, to holy Rian in her incarnation as protectress of the beasts.

Roche tried, without real hope, to explain that this applied only to fishermen or hunters from the mainland. As he'd expected, the woodsman knew better than that. Such an impiety, the man declared self-righteously, would have to be taken directly to the High Priestess herself. He shouldered his bundle of wood, took the reins of his equally burdened donkey and started briskly back north towards the temple compound. They always wanted to go straight to the High Priestess, Roche thought miserably, watching him go. As if she had nothing better to do than listen to reports of minor transgressions by her priests and priestesses.

This was, however, his third such minor transgression—for the same offence—in a year. Despairingly, he wondered if he would be sent away, demoted to service in some temple in the grainlands or the mountains. He didn't want to leave Rian's Island. He didn't want to leave the sea. He'd grown up by the ocean; it was what he knew and loved—as he loved the gracious harvests Rian in her generosity allowed them from the waves. Especially lampfish; most especially lampfish.

Morosely depressed, cursing his own weakness and the fact that he'd been stupid enough to fall asleep so near the fire-pit, he considered catching up to the woodsman, trying to forestall him, or concocting some tale that would serve his cause before they both got back to the compound. There was, he decided glumly, no point. Roche felt so miserable he almost lost his appetite.

The fish were ready, he could tell from the wafting aroma. With a heavy sigh, Roche went back to the fire-pit and looked sadly down on his six treasures sizzling invitingly beneath their carefully assembled and sprinkled herbs. As he did so he was somewhat surprised, given the extreme gravity of his plight, to discover that his hunger seemed to be returning after all.

He wandered back to the compound somewhat later, though in plenty of time for his tour of duty in the temple. He was a good priest, Roche told himself, he just liked fish.

As he'd anticipated, he was ordered to attend upon the High Priestess forthwith. He saw the woodsman with his donkey by the bakehouse door. The man looked smugly virtuous as Roche walked past. Wiping his mouth and rubbing at the stains on his robe, Roche ignored him as best he could.

On the far side of the temple dome, where the High Priestess and the Inner Circle had their chambers and meeting rooms, Roche was admitted by a stone-faced woman from Cauvas. He had never liked people from Cauvas—or anywhere inland, he suddenly thought. It took folk raised by the sea to understand the rhythms of life on the water. He wondered if he could say that to the High Priestess. She was from Barbentain, though; he didn't think it would be a prudent notion to present her with this particular proposition.

He waited in gloomy silence, alone in the antechamber, dabbing futilely at intervals at the tell-tale streaks on his robe. He sniffed his hands suddenly and grimaced. He ought to have had a wash, he realized. He was carrying the evidence of his sin right into Rian's temple. And this was the third time in a year. He was going to be sent north, Roche decided with real despair. He deserved to be sent to the mountains, far from his beloved ocean waters and their seductive bounty. He had no self-control at all, he reproached himself, no proper respect for the traditions of holy Rian which he had vowed to uphold for life, no true sense of his own solemn responsibility to set an example for—

The door opened. Another grim-faced servant nodded coldly to him. The lay-folk always loved it when a priest or priestess was in trouble. Roche wiped his hands on his robe one last time and walked in, with what dignity he could command while smelling of lampfish and charcoal, to be told his fate by the High Priestess of Rian in Arbonne.

He came out of the room shortly afterwards seriously unsettled. The High Priestess had barely even bothered to take note of his transgression. She had reprimanded him briefly, never even turning to him or taking her blind gaze from the fire on the hearth. She had pardoned him almost absently, with a ritually phrased injunction to pray in the temple for the strength to resist his weaknesses. That had been all. For the third offense in a year. He'd been dismissed. Not even her white owl had seemed to care enough to look over at him.

Roche couldn't understand it. His had been a fairly serious malfeasance, a terrible example for the lay workers. How could the High Priestess take an indifferent view of such a thing, he wondered? How could the customs of the goddess be properly preserved if the great ones of the temple paid so little attention to them? He felt almost indignant at his casual reprieve. Why, he deserved a temporary exile at the very least! Though he would have felt miserable at such a punishment, he had certainly deserved it. But what was this—an absent-minded lecture and a quick dismissal?

Something, Roche decided, was seriously wrong. He was only a lowly priest, but he couldn't help wondering if the upper hierarchies of Rian's clergy were serving her properly these days. He shook his head. What was the world coming to?

On the way out, though, he couldn't forebear grinning broadly at the dour-faced woman at the door, and as he walked back past the bakehouse through the crisp afternoon sunshine he offered the woodsman a positively cheerful wave. Not, perhaps, the most judicious thing to do, but some temptations, Roche had learned, he was ill-equipped to resist.

When he finished his tour of duty in the sanctuary that evening, he washed himself carefully, hands and face and body, in the growing chill of evening after the sun had gone down, and he donned clean raiment before going back to pray in the temple for two full watches of the evening. As he had been admonished to do, Roche humbly asked the goddess to vouchsafe him the strength to resist his inappropriate desires, and then, as an afterthought, he prayed for Rian to lend her holy wisdom and eternal presence to the High Priestess, who seemed troubled of late by burdens beyond his own poor understanding.

He felt better when he finally rose, though his knees and back creaked stiffly in the cold. He left the temple to return to the dormitory and his bed under the winter stars and both moons.

On the way out from the dome he saw a cluster of his fellow priests and priestesses standing together in the atrium around the one small fire there. It was very late; this was unusual. He went over to join them, and as they made room for him in their midst it was Maritte, very near now to delivering the child he and she had conceived last spring, who told Roche that word had just arrived that the army of Gorhaut had been seen two days ago in the High Road Pass through the mountains coming south into Arbonne with the engines of war.

It had always been likely, more than that, even.

From the moment the Treaty of Iersen Bridge had been signed, Beatritz had been certain Gorhaut would be coming to them. Until the sun falls and the moons die, Gorhaut and Arbonne shall not lie easily beside each other. That was the ancient saying—in both countries. The sun had not fallen and both moons were in the winter sky tonight she knew, aware of them as presences though she could not see their light.

Deep in her cushioned chair she was also aware of the fire on the hearth, as a warmth certainly, and a welcome one, but also as something else, not sound or heat, certainly not light—a source of danger and knowledge, both. It was such a complex world she had walked into on the night she had given up her eyes for this other sight of Rian. She saw so differently now, better in the darkness, best on the island, not at all without Brissel on her shoulder. She reached up and stroked the owl; she could feel his disquiet, or rather, she could feel him reacting to her own. She tried to send calming thoughts, to go with the gentling hand, but it was hard. It was hard tonight.

Aubry had been a blow to her heart, heavy as a descending hammer, and it had only been an opening move, no more than a small number of Gorhaut corans writing a first message in fire last autumn. There was an army now, and it seemed Galbert de Garsenc's long dream of burnings in Arbonne was about to be fulfilled.

And there was next to nothing she could do about it. She had already done what she could, keeping her lines of knowledge flung far, leaving the island more than she ought to have done, neglecting the localized but vital needs of her priests and priestesses to meet with her mother and Roban and the most important of the nobility—Bertran, Thierry and Ariane, Urté. It had been Beatritz, feeling the rare pulse of the goddess within her, who had counselled that a careful approach be made to Blaise de Garsenc, who was known to have left Gorhaut in anger. She remembered the first reactions to that: he was the son of the High Elder, their purest enemy. An ignorant, unpleasant mercenary soldier, Roban the chancellor had named him derisively.

He is more than that, Beatritz had told them, trusting her intuition and the silence of her owl. Bertran was the one who had agreed with her, though almost in spirit of amusement, and also because—as they only afterwards understood—her proposal coincided neatly with a seduction he was then pursuing. It was that way with Bertran, sometimes. You took him for what he was, which was not inconsiderable, and tried to keep private the inward lament for how much more he might have been.

She had known she was right about Blaise de Garsenc when Rian, in holy intercession, had acted to bring the man to the island even before Bertran went to Castle Baude. Beatritz had done what she could here, too, trying to frighten him out of the grim complacency that was obvious and reach past his barriers to touch the shielded thing she sensed within. Brissel had let her know that he, too, felt something there, and long ago she had learned to listen when the owl told her such things.

She remembered Brissel flying from her shoulder on Midsummer Night in Tavernel when Blaise had first spoken of the crown of Gorhaut. She had not expected that, either the man's words or the white owl's sudden flight to him. She was truly blind when Brissel was not with her, but her mother had reached up to take her hand and had told her quietly where the bird had gone, and Beatritz had felt the presence of Rian in that moment.

If only it were a presence she could invoke more often. If only she had a tenth of the magic and the mental powers the superstitious attributed to her. But magic in Arbonne was a tenuous, very nearly non-existent thing—whatever it might be in those uncharted countries storm-blown mariners had told her lay beyond the deserts to the south. Magic here was wholly confined to small things, the coinage of hearth and heart. Control of conception, foreknowledge of a child's sex—and that last not always with certainty. Knowledge of sorrows, some access to easing them. A skill with the gifts of the earth: herbs, flowers, fruits, trees. A certain awareness Beatritz herself had—though only here on the island or the isle in Lake Dierne, and only since her blinding—of inward life, in matters of love and hate. Some powers of healing, though these as much a matter of herbal and other lore handed down as anything else.

That was the sum of their magic; that was their dangerous power. It had been useful to have others think there was more; a fear of the clergy of Rian and their night gatherings could be a kind of defence.

Until that fear became so deep and cold a terror that it became the very reason for their peril. Galbert de Garsenc seemed to have crossed over that line one day or night in his own past. His fear of the women of Arbonne, his hatred of Rian and all the goddess meant, was the reason there was an army in the mountains in the midst of winter, whipped into a killing frenzy by the High Elder of Corannos. They would be out of the mountains by now, Beatritz corrected herself, her heart aching, a slow, cold dread moving through her like a poison in the blood.

She didn't know what to do. That was the worst of it. She could pray, gather everyone on the island under the temple dome to offer hymns and incantations all day and night, seeking some access to the goddess, invoking her intercession. Rian could not be compelled, though. That was the oldest, deepest law; she was capricious and inviolate, and death was a part of her dominion—it was, in fact, one of her incarnations. She was mother, she was bride, but she was also gatherer of the dead.

It might even be that Rian herself had ordained this scourge as a punishment, a cleansing of the evils of their time. Beatritz didn't know what their great acts of evil might be, but she was only a servant of the goddess, not privy to divine awareness. She would have thought—she would have said—that there was no darkness or evil in Arbonne deserving of what had happened to the corans in that watch-tower below the High Pass last autumn, or to the priestesses of the temple of Aubry that same night.

She would have said as much to holy Rian herself. As if it would matter. The owl ruffled his feathers, bringing her mind back. She'd been considering options, responses. She remembered how her father used to do that, crisply running through possibilities aloud before decisively choosing his path. It was still difficult for her sometimes to accept that he was dead, that the burdens were her mother's now and her own, with such aid as could be invoked from the bitterly divided nobility of Arbonne.

There was no heir. That had always been a problem, and Guibor IV of Barbentain had been unable to name one in his last years for fear of tearing the country apart. He had even tried to make Beatritz leave the sanctuary of the goddess in the year after Aelis died with her child in Miraval. Guibor had anticipated this trouble in the time that followed the death of his youngest child. He had always anticipated a great deal, it was a fault of his, to try to make too many things fall right at the same time. It had been that way with Aelis's marriage to Urté de Miraval in the first place: a powerful duke, one of the mightiest in the country, a choice that could not be impeached, and a man anxious to father children, a son or even a daughter to rule Arbonne when Guibor died.

But Aelis had died first, and so too, almost certainly, had her son. No one could be absolutely sure, though everyone knew what she had told her husband on her deathbed about the fathering of the child: in doing so she had given dreadful, calamitous life to the feud that had shaped Arbonne ever since. Urté could not even be approached or spoken to on this issue. Beatritz had tried once, at the end of the year after Aelis died—and had received the most stinging rebuke of her life. They would have had to put the duke of Miraval to torture to even try to make him speak. And he wouldn't have, they all knew that: he wouldn't have said what had happened to the child even then.

Not even Guibor the count had been able to quell or control what Aelis had begun between Talair and Miraval on that night so long ago. So, searching for alternatives, he had tried to make Beatritz leave the clergy, come back to Barbentain, prepare herself to marry, to have a child of her own.

It was then that she'd had herself blinded, in that small temple in the Gotzland mountains, taking the step no priestess had taken for years upon years, aligning herself irrevocably with Rian. She had become High Priestess two years later and had come to the island.

Her father had never truly forgiven her. That had always hurt, for she had loved him. Not as her mother did, with an undying passion of the soul, and not even as her sister Aelis had, with something complex and yearning at its core. Beatritz had known her father's weaknesses and his flaws too well, had seen him too clearly for either of those kinds of love: she understood his pride, how he wished to control and shape far too much in too many different ways, his own guiding hands on the reins of everyone and everything. Of course she understood such a thing: it was her own besetting vice. She was Guibor's child. Her call to Rian had been real, though, the truest thing in her life, and she had known it young.

Her mother had understood, surprisingly. Signe, beautiful and glittering like an ornamental jewel under torchlight in Barbentain, seemed nonetheless to have understood a great deal, always. Beatritz ached for her tonight, picturing her in the wintry castle with these brutal tidings newly come and the terrible, crushing knowledge that she might be the ruler of Arbonne in the time it died forever.

The owl grew restive again, a motion of admonition. Options. She had been considering her options. She could start north herself, leaving the island and the seat of any power or foreknowledge she might be given, to lend her purely mortal strength, what wisdom she had, to her mother and those who would be with the countess now.

They didn't need her, she realized with a gnawing helplessness. She had counsels to offer in times of peace or preparation, of smaller and larger intrigues, the tidings her own network of informants might gather, but what did she know about waging war?

It was, she told herself with bitterness, time for the men now. The irony was coruscating. Arbonne was to be destroyed because of its women, because of the goddess who shared in their love and devotion with Corannos in the sky, because it was ruled by a woman now, because of the symbols and the music of the Court of Love and the examples of grace set by figures like Signe and Ariane. And yet now that ruin had come to them with sword and axe and carried brand, now that images of rape and fire would dance behind the closed eyelids of every woman in Arbonne, it was the men who would have to save them after all.

And despite more than twenty years of her father's striving before he died, and then her mother's afterwards, despite patience and wiles and even Guibor's attempts at absolute commands, the two most powerful men in Arbonne still hated each other with a ferocity, with a savage, time-locked obsession that had never let them go, and would never do so, never let them act together, even to save themselves and their land.

Beatritz knew this. She knew it with a despair that almost overwhelmed her. This had always been the weakness at the heart of Arbonne in their time, the thing that left them wide open to destruction. Not the fact of a woman ruling them. Not the rumoured softness of their corans; that was false and manifestly so. Not the corrupting influence of the troubadours and their music; there was no corruption in the flourish of that art. Their danger, their crippling wound, was Talair and Miraval.

Her sister Aelis, Beatritz thought, with an old, unrelenting bitterness, had much to answer for.

It was an unfair thought, she supposed. Her mother had told her as much, over and again through the years. Unfair or not, it was there, she was thinking it, she would think it until she died, and she would die remembering Aelis, dark and slender, far too proud, with her will like forged iron and that unwillingness, ever, to forgive.

Like Bertran, that last quality, Beatritz thought. Like Urté. And then a newer thought, as she reached up again to gentle her restive owl: Like me.

"Oh, Aelis," she murmured aloud. "Oh, sister, did we all begin to die the night you died, with or without the child?"

It was possible, she thought. There were ripples to events, and they went a long way sometimes across the dark pools of time and the world.

Brissel shifted on her shoulder again and then suddenly flexed his sharp talons in a way she knew. It was always like this: without any warning at all the presence of the goddess might come to her. Catching her breath, feeling the familiar speeding up of her pulse, Beatritz waited, and was answered, assuaged, with images in her darkness, images swirling to take shape as out of some primal fog before the world was made.

She saw two castles and recognized them immediately. Miraval and Talair—she had known those proud, twinned assertions all her life. Another image quickly: an arch, immeasurably old, massive, humbling, carvings of war and conquest stamped upon it like foreshadowing from long ago. And then, as she released her breath in a spasm of love and pain she could not quite hold in, the High Priestess of Rian saw a lake in her mind, a small, delicate isle in the midst of it, three plumes of smoke rising straight as swords into the windless winter sky. The last thing she saw was a tree. Then the images were gone and she was left with only darkness again, and Brissel on her shoulder.

It came like this, and it went, never coerced, never subject to entreaty. The goddess remembered her children sometimes and sometimes she forgot them in the caprice of her nature. She could shower gifts like blessed rain in spring, or she could turn her back and let ice and fire have their way. She had a face of laughter and one of desire, a countenance of true compassion and a terrible visage of judgment. In the teachings of Arbonne it was Corannos the god who was kinder, more soberly caring for men and women. Rian suffered them, and loved them, but she could be cruel as nature was cruel. It was the god who held their mortal children always in mind, who did not fail to see their sufferings upon the earth. So it had been taught in Arbonne for generations.

The teachings were different elsewhere. They were very different in Gorhaut.

She was going to have to stay here, Beatritz understood. Only on the island could she have access to any such precognitions as this one. A message would have to go to Barbentain tonight. She would ask the two young troubadours who were wintering with them here. They would not deny her; these were not men to hide in the sea when death and ruin were coming down from the north. She would send them to the countess, warning her, telling them all where the culmination was to be.

It would be in the place of this vision, she was being told: by that small isle in Lake Dierne, by the arch, the two castles, it would end there.

Of course, she thought, aware of an inner stillness in the aftermath of the presence of Rian. Of course it will be there. She felt the nudge of an old sorrow. I should have known. That is where it began.

She was wise and no longer young, Beatritz de Barbentain, deeply conversant with the ways of power in the world, and long since accustomed to her darkness and the occasional gateways to knowledge it gave her. She was, in fact, more privy to the paths of Rian than she allowed herself to acknowledge, for she had always wanted more than she had. It was the nature of her family, the legacy of her blood. Still, the goddess had never yet abandoned her entirely, however long the intervals might be. She knew a great deal, having been granted, at moments such as this, clear, sharp visions through rifts in time hidden from all the other living children of Corannos and Rian.

On the other hand, there were things even the High Priestess on her island did not know and had never known, whether of future or present or the widening ripples of the shaping past. Nor would it have been proper if she had. Oaths sworn to the dying were sacrosanct in Arbonne.

When they come down at last from the snows of the pass into Arbonne, the crusading army of Gorhaut are halted by their spiritual leader, and on a high plateau they kneel in their armour, every man of them, to hear the High Elder's prayer of thanksgiving to the god.

They have come through the mountains with humbling, awe-inspiring ease, only some few hundred men and horses lost to the high cold and the icy, treacherous path and the one—amazingly, only the one—avalanche that missed the main army by less than a bowshot, taking only the rear guard down into a white death with no true burial.

It might have been—it ought to have been—so much worse, this folly of taking an army through the mountains in winter to seize the advantage of surprise. Even the High Elder himself narrowly escaped losing his life. Standing beside their tall king, he speaks to the army with an arrow held aloft in one hand and a crimson bandage on his left arm, brilliant against his blue robe and the white of the snow behind him. He had caught up to them, wounded as he was, in the midst of the pass, riding alone—which every man there knows to have been foolhardy beyond words. Foolhardy, that is, for one not perfectly trusting of Corannos, not favoured—as Galbert de Garsenc, High Elder of Gorhaut so manifestly is—by the blessing and the protection of the god. Which means that they, too, in his company, are so blessed, the chosen, the elect, the weapons of Corannos.

This, in fact, is his message to them when the prayer is over and they rise. He holds up for all to see the Arbonnais arrow—fired by a coward, and not in a time of war—that might have killed him in his own castle. The god is with us, he tells them all, we are his agents and his instrument.

It is hard not to agree, and the men of the army of Gorhaut, in the presence of their king, are not inclined to be cynical or doubting at a time like this. They have come miraculously through the mountains in winter, and before them now, bright and fair as a dream under blue skies lies the land that has been promised them.

Promised, that is, after the scourging is done. They are the hammers of the god, the High Elder proclaims. The temples and villages of Arbonne and the depraved, unclean women who inhabit them are the anvils upon which their most holy, cleansing blows must fall.

The temples are first, the castles will come after, he tells them. Everything will come to them if they but follow their great king. The men of Arbonne are cowards, they are woman-mastered, cuckolded as a matter of course by their own musicians and barnyard servants. What, Galbert de Garsenc asks, what will such soft men do when they come face to face with the assembled might of Gorhaut sweeping down upon them with the power of the god?

They will die, he tells them, answering his own question, as a sound shaped of hunger and excitement rises among the army. They will die like the craven unbelievers they are, and when all is done, when holy Corannos is worshipped properly again in this land, then shall the men of Gorhaut have shown themselves worthy of the great favour the god has always bestowed upon them. Then shall the whole world know their worth. Then shall this sunlight, these high green valleys, vineyards and castles and grainfields, the rich cities and harbours and the great sea beyond—all shall be truly given over to Gorhaut by the high, pure grace of Corannos.

Shall this not be the way of it, he cries to them, the magnificent instrument of his voice carrying the question down on the breeze to all those gathered below.

They give him his answer, fervent, exalted, with one voice of their own.

The king rides down from that high place, then, the High Elder beside him with the arrow still held aloft. They take their places together, handsome men, stern and majestic, at the forefront of an army. Near to them but a proper distance behind rides the lord Borsiard d'Andoria at the head of a company of his own men. The Portezzan's presence among them, the army has been told, is a mark of how not only the god but all the countries of the world are with them in this purging of dark unholiness.

King Ademar of Gorhaut lifts a hand and the trumpets of Gorhaut are heard in the clean, cool air under a sky where birds are wheeling and darting in the sunlight. Before them the slopes fall away southward, green with winter grass. In the middle distance the river most of them have never seen sparkles blue, then white where there are rapids, then blue again, rushing towards the distant sea. The ports on that sea will be theirs soon; they have been promised this. The god is with them.

They start south, the invading warriors of Gorhaut, in a vast glitter of spears and armour. Later that same day the vanguard rides past and above the ruined, empty village of Aubry and comes to the next hamlet beyond. And there, with sword and mace and brand, amid the screaming of the corrupt women and their heretic, unsouled children and the desperate cries of craven men—farmers, labourers, artisans, cowards all of them—the harrowing of Arbonne is begun.

The god is with his army. After the grey cold of the mountains and the miracle of their passage they can feel it in the shining grace of his holy sun above them. Everything they ride past is bright, is welcoming, gleams wondrously in the light.

They are the hammers of Corannos, the scourges of heresy, this war is blessed from the sky; every man of them knows it now, and so as they kill, they sing.

Let Arbonne learn the battle songs of Gorhaut. Let it hear them sung by brave men, true warriors of the north, amid the steady crackling of the fires.

"They are not in any great hurry," said the countess grimly in her council chamber. "They are waiting for us to come out." It was four days after the first burning of the war. The army of Gorhaut was reported to be moving slowly, methodically south, destroying as it went.

"They are taking each village, burning every temple," she went on. Rosala, sitting on one of the benches, hands clasped in her lap, marvelled at the control in her voice; she knew Signe well enough by now to know how hard-won such a dispassionate tone would be. There were some twenty men and women in the room, assembled in Barbentain by the countess's command. Signe said, "They have no interest in besieging us in the castle or cities. Not in winter, with food a problem for them."

"That is mostly true, but not entirely so, your grace. Food is not their problem I am afraid," said Urté de Miraval heavily. He was leaning against the mantel of the larger fireplace, bulky and formidable, dressed in a dark green, fur-lined robe. "I have recent information about that. They have used their monies from Valensa, the enormous price they received for the northern lands they ceded, to ensure a flow of supplies to follow them here from Gotzland. With our villagers taking refuge in the cities and castles we will be at risk of hunger before them. We might want to consider an attack against their supply line."

"That will not be necessary," said Bertran de Talair, briefly, dismissively, from the opposite wall. Rosala turned to look at him.

He had arrived only the night before, with Blaise and his mercenaries and eight hundred armed men of Gorhaut. The assembled council was still dealing with that last fact, and the presence among them this morning of Duke Fulk de Savaric. Rosala was struggling to adjust to it as well, if for different reasons. Pride and fear and disbelief swept over her whenever she looked at her brother. They had not yet had a chance to speak privately.

"I would be very interested in learning why," Urté said to Bertran, gazing inimically at the other man across the room. "Have military strategies changed so greatly in recent years?"

"Hardly at all." Bertran, dressed in nondescript brown riding clothes, turned away from de Miraval to the countess. "You will remember, your grace, that I had dealings with King Daufridi of Valensa during the Lussan Fair." He paused. There was a stir in the room at this; it was news to most of them. Bertran ignored the reaction. "These dealings have borne useful fruit, though not, I'm afraid, dramatically so. Daufridi has persuaded Jorg of Gotzland that their joint interests will not be served by a swift destruction of Arbonne. They will not go so far as to intercede for us, but the promised supplies from the east will be sadly late in arriving, I am informed. The food, when it reaches the army of Gorhaut, will be of dangerously poor quality, most of it inedible. King Jorg will be profusely apologetic to Ademar, of course. He will promise an enquiry, offer to return some of the money he has been paid. It helps," he added with a straight face, "to have up-to-date information in wartime."

"It helps," said the countess of Arbonne icily, "if the commanders serving us share their information with each other and ourself."

Bertran looked unabashed, despite the rare, admonitory use of royal language by the countess. "I only returned last night," he said mildly. "I found confirmation from Valensa waiting for me. I might have expected to receive approval from my countess and those assembled here for what I have done, rather than condemnation."

"You presumptuous peacock!" rasped Urté de Miraval. Comparing the garb of the two men, Rosala found the word almost amusing. But there was really no room for levity just then. "An army more than twice as large as any we can raise is burning its way through Arbonne," Urté snapped, glaring at Bertran, "and you seek praise like a vain child, preening yourself on small triumphs of diplomacy."

"Small perhaps, my lord—I began by saying as much myself, you will recall—but do favour us with an account of what you have achieved in the same interval." Bertran's hard blue eyes met those of Urté and this time neither man looked away. Rosala felt hatred in the room like a wintry, congealing presence.

"It would be most pleasant," Bertran went on, in a voice that was not pleasant at all, "to be able to report richer results of my efforts with Valensa, but we can hardly blame Daufridi or the Gotzlanders for being careful here, can we? We might perhaps make some comments instead about lords of Arbonne whose principal activity this past year seems to have been to sanction, if not instigate, the attempted murder of a friend and ally."

Rosala, vividly remembering that night in Lucianna Delonghi's rooms, saw Blaise step forward then. "That's enough, I think," he said quietly to Bertran. "We'll get nowhere useful retracing old paths." His tone was interesting; he had changed in the short time since going north and coming back. His father and Ranald had both been at Garsenc, she had been told by Rudel Correze just before the meeting began. The one had escaped and the other had been set free; it was hard not to wonder about what had happened there.

"Enough? Is it really?" Bertran de Talair said, turning away from Urté again. "I'm dreadfully sorry. So please forgive my lamentable penchant for excess." His voice was etched in acid but he didn't argue, Rosala noticed, or pursue the matter. Blaise looked at him a moment longer, but said nothing more.

"We forgive almost everything just now because we have little choice." It was the countess again, reclaiming control of the room. They turned back to her. Her hands clasped about one of the small metal warming balls her women favoured, Signe waited a moment, deliberately, and then added: "And also because we have desperate and perilous need of you, my lord of Talair, with all your… penchants. After taking most careful thought on this, we are resolved to appoint you herewith to lead our armies in this war. Into your hands we now entrust the sovereignty of Arbonne and the destiny of our children."

Rosala closed her eyes for a moment. Cadar was with his nurse upstairs; it occurred to her to wonder if Fulk would ask to see him. She didn't think so. She looked up. Signe had paused again, looking with her famous eyes into the equally celebrated blue ones of the duke of Talair. When she spoke again her tone was very different.

"Bertran, it may be unfair to say 'Fail me not, for I know what Ademar of Gorhaut has brought against us, but I am going to say it nonetheless, for if you do fail we are lost and from the burning that must follow there will be no rising from ashes."

"No. You cannot do this!" In the stark silence that followed the countess's words, the voice of Urté de Miraval sounded harsh and raw. There was passion in it and a real pain.

Rosala saw him step awkwardly forward from the fireside and drop heavily to his knees before the countess. "I am prostrate before you, my lady," he said fiercely. "I will not ask but beg. Do not do this thing. Do not put me in this position, I beg of you, your grace. I will not serve under him. I cannot. You know I cannot. For love of Arbonne, for the memory of your husband, for any honour at all in which you may yet hold my name, choose another leader! It need not be myself, it cannot be myself or you do the same thing to de Talair—but choose another leader, countess, lest you break me into pieces." Under the short-cropped grey hair, his still-handsome, fleshy face was vivid with stricken intensity.

Signe de Barbentain's features, by contrast, were like a mask, beautiful and implacable, as she looked down at the duke on his knees before her. "Have you ever thought," she said with frigid clarity, "how like children the both of you are?" She drew a breath then, and Rosala winced in premonitory anticipation of what was coming. Nor was she wrong.

"My daughter Aelis," said the countess of Arbonne deliberately, "was willful and proud and a child herself when she died. It was twenty-three years ago, in the name of our most holy goddess! Can neither of you realize that?" Rosala saw Urté flinch at the spoken name; Bertran turned his head away. Signe ignored both reactions, went on, her voice blunt as a hammer. "She deceived Urté with Bertran. We all know this. She bore a son that was not her husband's and told him as much. We know this too. It was a desperately foolish thing to do. The child died or did not die. My daughter died. It is an old story. Do you hear me, both of you? It is an old story! Let it rest! Let Aelis lie in her grave, with her child or without him. I will not let Arbonne lie buried in that same grave, or be trapped in the maze you two have shaped for each other from that history. It is over! It must be over. Make no mistake, I am naming as leader this morning the man who understands Gorhaut better than any other here and who has Blaise de Garsenc and Fulk de Savaric beside him. This is my firm decision. It is not subject to the tired, worn-out passions of ancient history, my lord de Miraval."

Silence then. A stillness as after a storm has passed. And into it, at length, came the quiet, careful voice of Bertran de Talair, unwontedly diffident. "Your grace, I am deeply mindful of the honour you offer me. I will say that I have no difficulty at all in stepping aside for another if it will… ease matters among us. I will be proud to serve under Duke Thierry for example, or your brother of Malmont if you would prefer."

"I would not prefer." Signe's voice was brittle. "Bertran, understand me, this is not a request, it is a command. If you refuse I will regard it as treason in wartime and act accordingly."

"My lady!" began Ariane de Carenzu, her own colour high. "Countess, this is something that—" She stopped abruptly at a swift, imperious gesture from the countess.

Signe hadn't even bothered to look at her. She was still gazing at Bertran de Talair, daring him to speak again. "You lead our armies, my lord," she said flatly. "This is a command." And then, very clearly, with an emphasis on each word: "Fail me not."

Urté de Miraval rose slowly, heavily, to his feet. Rosala, watching him, felt an oppressive burden settling upon her like a weight of stones. It wasn't even her history, her country, but she thought she knew what was coming and what it would mean. The whole room, all those gathered here in Barbentain, seemed somehow to be caught and suspended in a dark, entangling web spun long ago.

"He leads those armies then without the men of Miraval," Urté said with a grave, unnatural calm that was somehow a match for Signe's own manner. "And so on your shoulders, countess, must lie the burden of that. You might perhaps have remembered, since you chose to speak so freely of the dead, that in this room I am the nearest thing to a son that you have." And turning on his heel he strode to the door.

"My lord, wait!" called Thierry de Carenzu. Urté did not turn. He opened the door and passed through and they heard it close with a reverberant finality behind him.

Echoes, Rosala thought, swallowing hard. Echoes of a past that threatened to destroy the present. She looked about the room, registering nuances of grave apprehension. Only the countess seemed immune, only Signe showed no fear or doubt.

"How many men does this mean?" It was Fulk, her brother's first words spoken and, characteristically, addressing the most prosaic aspect of all of this.

"Fifteen hundred, somewhat more. Almost all of them trained." Thierry de Carenzu, who had been the only man to try to stay Urté's departure, gave the answer. It was a very large number and Rosala had been in Arbonne long enough to know why: two decades of clashes between Talair and Miraval had led both dukes to gather around them substantial armies of fighting men. And this morning those same bone-deep hostilities had just cost them half those men.

"I see," said Fulk quietly. Her brother was not a man prone to elaboration of his thoughts. They were not needed here; every man and woman in the room knew the implications of Urté's leaving them. "Are you going to have him arrested?" Fulk asked.

No one answered him. Bertran was staring out the window, visibly shaken. Rosala saw the chancellor, Roban. leaning against the wall, as if for desperately needed support; he was white as a bone. So were most of the others in the room, she saw. Only the countess, small, rigidly erect, seemed to have retained her composure.

Rosala cleared her throat. "Will he really stay away?" she asked. It seemed incredible to her, and yet somehow, in some terrifying way, predestined at the same time. For some reason she found herself turning to Ariane de Carenzu as she spoke.

Ariane's face was also pale. In a thin voice far removed from her customary crisp authority, she said, "I'm afraid he will. If he doesn't do even more than that."

"That is unfair!" her husband said quickly, gesturing sharply. Thierry de Carenzu shook his head. "He is not a traitor."

"No?" It was Blaise again. Still with that slight unsettling new control in his tone. "What would you call a man who does what he just did, regardless of what course he takes afterwards?"

It was a fair question, if a harsh one. It was what Fulk had been asking. The answer was easy enough: you called such a man a traitor.

Rosala looked at her brother and saw that he was gazing steadily back at her for the first time that morning. In his eyes, identical to her own, she read the same answer. Were this Gorhaut, she thought suddenly, Urté de Miraval would never have been allowed to leave this room alive.

There was something genuinely frightening about that thought. She was beginning to glimpse a part of the price Arbonne paid for its freedoms and its subtle graces.

She wondered how much of that price was yet to be paid.

And it was at that precise moment, Rosala remembered afterwards, that the knocking came at the door and the guards opened it to admit two exhausted, travel-stained troubadours, one fair-haired, one dark, with a message from Rian's Island in the sea: a message that the High Priestess had had a vision from the goddess of a battle by Lake Dierne.

CHAPTER 17

The identical message by a different messenger came to the lake isle that same morning. Lisseut, who, wisely or otherwise, had not gone home for the winter to her mother after all, heard the tidings when she came across the green towards the dining hall for breakfast.

It was not a great surprise. They had known that the army of Gorhaut was likely to be coming to them. This isle was the holiest sanctuary of Rian in the north of Arbonne and by now everyone knew that the warriors of Gorhaut were on a crusade in the name of the god. It didn't matter that Corannos was worshipped here as well. Had such things mattered, Lisseut thought bitterly, then priestesses and children and those who had tried to defend them would not now be lying charred and dead.

She moved a little distance away from the knot of anxiously talking priests and priestesses. It was not easy to find privacy within the narrow confines of the isle and, perhaps surprisingly for someone who had come to adulthood within the intensely social world of the troubadours, she seemed to be drawn to solitude of late. More precisely, since the night she'd sung Blaise de Garsenc to sleep with lullabies of childhood and then left his room to walk back with Alain to their inn. There was no fierce turmoil in her any more, however, no sharp pain. That seemed to be behind her now that winter had come. A stone makes a splash when it strikes the water, Lisseut had thought, standing by this same shore on the day she'd arrived near the end of autumn, but no sound at all as it sinks down to the lake's deep bed. That was how she felt, she had decided—or how she had been feeling, until war came with the harrowing reports of deaths and burnings and thoughts of such private matters were trivialized and driven far away.

She looked out across the choppy waters of Lake Dierne, past the honey-coloured stones of Talair on the northern shore and up beyond the grass of the valley to the winter vineyards and the forest rising in the distance. Somewhere out there an army was coming, axes and swords and brands, severed heads dancing on pikes above them. The survivors, fleeing south before the fury of Gorhaut, had brought tales of such horrors with them.

Lisseut plunged her hands into the folds of the vest she'd been given by Ariane in Carenzu. It was a cold morning, diamond-bright, the stiff wind pushing the three plumes of smoke almost due south. The air was fresh and clean and she could see a long way. To the west, when she turned, the massive stones of the Arch of the Ancients showed clearly at the end of the row of marching elms. Lisseut hated that arch. She had from the moment she'd first seen it years ago: there was too much oppressive power stamped upon it, the sculptor's undeniable art wholly given over to the brutally explicit message. The arch reminded her now, every day, of what was coming.

She would have been safer at home, she knew. Vezét couldn't be reached by an invading army for a long time yet and, if it came to that, a well-known joglar could take ship from the coast and find a ready welcome in Portezza or Arimonda.

That last thought hadn't even lingered long enough to be seriously considered. Even when it had become clear that the flattering invitation she and Alain had accepted—to winter on Rian's Isle—had brought them squarely into the path of death, Lisseut knew she would not leave.

There was a reason she could have offered if anyone had asked, but no one did ask. It had been Ramir's song though, in Lussan at the Autumn Fair that, more than any other single thing, had shaped her feelings now. If there was a role, any role at all for her to play in this appalling time it would not lie in hiding away south by the sea or fleeing across the water. The imagined presence of that stone inside her, sinking silently down as through dark, still lake waters, might have had something to do with it, too. She would have admitted that; she was usually honest with herself, and the worst part of that pain seemed to be gone now. It had been months since the Lussan Fair; she didn't even know where Blaise was. She called him by his name in her mind now. Surely that much could be allowed?

Alain had stayed on the isle as well. She had thought he would. Her affection for the little troubadour had grown with each passing day. He had even begun practising with a sword, rowing across to join the corans of Talair every afternoon. He was not very good. Lisseut had gone to watch him one day, and foreboding had lain within her like a different kind of weight.

That grim sense of premonition was with her again now as she gazed out across the whitecaps at the stones of the arch beyond the western shore, trying to deal with the tidings that had come with the messenger from the High Priestess.

"Will they build their own arch, do you think, if they destroy us all?"

She hadn't heard Rinette approaching. Not entirely happy, for she still hadn't worked out her feelings about the coolly arrogant young priestess, she turned and regarded the other woman.

As always, it was the owl that gave her pause. Only the High Priestess at each temple, or those named and being trained as their successors, carried the birds. Rinette, no older than Lisseut herself, was very young to be marked as heir to the High Priestess of Rian's Isle. Once she'd ascended to that rank she would be second only to Beatritz de Barbentain herself among the hierarchy of the goddess in Arbonne. Lisseut had even heard talk among the priests and priestesses of the isle that Rinette intended to follow Beatritz down the paths of blindness when that day came.

Lisseut of Vezét, child of this world, finding her pleasures and griefs among men and women, had found herself unsettled by the very thought. If Rinette had been older, a dour, pious zealot, it might have been easier to deal with, but the brown-haired priestess was beautiful and drily clever, and she seemed to know and enjoy the troubadours' repertoire of songs almost as well as Lisseut and Alain did themselves. Once she had even corrected Alain on a line-reading during his recitation of one of the old speak-pieces of Count Folquet. Lisseut, genuinely shocked by the interjection, had quickly searched her own recollection and realized that the priestess was right. Not that this made her any happier to have heard an audience member interrupt a troubadour.

What, she remembered thinking, was the world coming to?

A remarkably inconsequential issue that seemed since the winter invasion and now this morning's news. She was made aware, looking at the tall, slender woman beside her, that Rinette's fate if Gorhaut conquered was even more brutally clear than her own, and the priestess, by her sworn oat to the goddess, lacked even the options of flight south or overseas. Given that, given the darkness of the time, it suddenly seemed profoundly ungracious to be carrying a grievance against the woman for correcting the misreading of a verse.

The world had greatly changed since Ademar of Gorhaut had led an army through the mountains into the green hills and valleys of Arbonne.

"A second arch?" she said quietly, addressing the question asked. "I wonder. Do they build anything, these northerners?»

"Of course they do. They are not inhuman, they are not really so different from us," Rinette replied calmly. "You know that. They are badly taught, that is all."

"There seems a great deal of difference to me," Lisseut said sharply, "if they burn women alive and cut the heads and sexual parts off dead men."

"Badly taught," Rinette repeated. "Think of how much of the mystery and the power of life they have lost by denying Rian."

"You'll forgive me, but I can't spare a great deal of time just now for pitying them that. I'm surprised you can."

Rinette gave a small, graceful shrug, looking out at the western shore and the arch beyond. "We are trained to think that way. The times are evil," she said. "Mortal men and women are what they have always been. Five hundred years from now we will all be dust and forgotten, and our fates, but Rian and Corannos will still steer the course of the world."

It was rather too much for Lisseut, this holy posturing. "I wonder," she said harshly, good intentions forgotten, "if you will take such a long view when we see the army of Gorhaut coming across the lake with torches in their hands."

And regretted the words the moment they were spoken.

Rinette turned to her, and Lisseut saw then in the clear light of morning that the other woman's eyes were not nearly so tranquil as her voice and words might have suggested. She recognized, belatedly, that what she had been hearing was an attempt to master fear.

"I do not welcome the prospect of being burned alive, if that is what you mean," Rinette of the Isle said. "If that isn't what you mean, perhaps you'll tell me what you are trying to say."

And after that of course there was nothing for Lisseut to do but apologize as best she could, and then carry on through the day, and the next two, wrapped in her vest against the wind and the coldness of her own deep fears. Alain rowed across the whitecaps of the lake to Talair each day, carrying a borrowed sword. He came back the second afternoon with a vivid red contusion on his forehead. He made a small joke about deceiving people with a show of clumsiness, but Lisseut had seen that his hands were trembling.

On the fourth day the armies came.

It was, in fact, a near thing. High on the ramparts of Talair at midday after the brutal, forced march from Barbentain and Lussan, Blaise looked down at their exhausted men in the open space below, and then north in the clear light for the first sign of those they were to fight. He was uneasily aware that besides the eerie precognition of the High Priestess, the only thing that had given them even a chance to reach Lake Dierne with an army in time had been the disciplined, prudent caution of Thierry de Carenzu.

The stupefying surprise of a winter invasion through the mountains would have caught Arbonne hopelessly unprepared—no one risked the passes in large numbers in winter—had the duke of Carenzu not issued orders at the end of the Lussan Fair in the countess's name for a gradual assembling of the armies of Arbonne under the barons and dukes. The idea was to have them armed and trained in the castles over the winter months, in preparation for the spring assault they all expected.

Blaise had never been comfortable with men who preferred their own sex in bed, and his nights with Ariane had rather complicated this particular issue, but he had to acknowledge a rapidly growing respect for the duke of Carenzu. Thierry was sober and pragmatic and conspicuously reliable. In a country where the two other most important noblemen were the dukes of Talair and Miraval these were not, Blaise concluded, inconsiderable virtues.

Because of these preparations, when word had come that Gorhaut was actually through the pass and coming down from the mountains, the men of Arbonne had been far more prepared than they otherwise would have been. They were able to move with order and some speed—though the southern roads were muddy with the winter rains—north towards Barbentain, and from there, when Beatritz's message came, here to Talair and the lake.

Bertran's own corans had been waiting for them and Blaise knew the soldiers of Miraval were not far away, but these were lost to their army now, if not worse.

For the hundredth time since that meeting in Barbentain four days ago Blaise found himself wrestling with the wisdom of the countess's decision to name Bertran to lead the armies. She had to have known that Urté would react as he had. Even Blaise, an oblivious stranger to that bitter tale only a year ago, could have guessed how Urté would bridle at submitting to Bertran's authority. Granting that de Talair was the obvious man to lead Arbonne, was that worth fifteen hundred men? Would Thierry de Carenzu have been so terrible a choice?

Or was it possible that Signe had expected Urté to rise above what lay between Talair and Miraval, with so much at stake now? With everything, really, in the balance. If so, she had been wrong, and Blaise was well-enough versed in the histories of war to know that Arbonne would not be the first country to fall to an invader because it could not set aside its own internal wars.

On Bertran's castle ramparts in the brilliant sunlight he shook his head but kept grimly silent, as he had in the council chamber and ever since. In some ways it might all be purely a matter for historians and dry philosophers to come: the men who picked over the bones of dead years like the scavengers who came out at night after a battle to despoil the slain and dying.

The stark reality today was that even with the corans of Miraval they would have needed an enormous number of mercenaries to have had any real chance of defending themselves, and the winter invasion had eliminated that possibility. They were brutally outnumbered by the army Ademar of Gorhaut had brought safely through the mountains. Ademar, and Galbert: Blaise knew, as surely as he knew anything in the world, that this winter war was his father's stratagem—cunning and long planning mingled with a sublime, unwavering certainty that the god would see him through the pass. And the frightening thing, of course, was that Corannos had. The army of Gorhaut, which was the army of the god, was in Arbonne, and Blaise, looking north from the ramparts with Bertran and Fulk de Savaric and others, felt fear like a hard object lodge against his heart.

Only fools and madmen do not know fear before a battle. His first captain had told him that, and Blaise had offered the same reassurance over the years to young men under his command. He was positive, though, that his father had no fear just now, riding here in pursuit of his life's long dream. What that meant, he really didn't know.

"We'll array ourselves at the south-east end of the valley," he heard Bertran explaining to the three men who had just joined them. Barons from the south. One of them was Mallin de Baude. He and Blaise had had time for no more than a quick greeting and an exchange of glances. There might never be time for more. "The castle and the lake," Bertran went on, "will be behind us so they can't flank around. There is a slight slope downward—if you look closely you can see it—in the valley to the west that will help. It'll give the archers a little more distance if nothing else." Bertran, Blaise thought, knew this land like a melody from his childhood. He surprised himself with the image. Perhaps, he thought, he should start being less surprised: he was among the army of Arbonne, after all.

"What about Rian's Isle?" one of the new barons asked. "Can they reach it from the western shore of the lake if we're leaving them access to that side?"

"No boats. We've brought them all to our wharf or across to the isle itself. I don't think they'll be thinking about that in any case until they're done with us." Bertran's voice was calm. Blaise was impressed, though not especially surprised: he'd had some time now to take the measure of this man. He trusted him and he liked him, and only a year ago he wouldn't have expected either to ever be true.

Bertran was bareheaded as always, and without armour, clad in his usual outdoor garb of unassuming brown hues. When Blaise had first seen him riding up to Baude Castle last spring those rough-spun clothes had seemed a perverse affectation on the part of a lord of such immense power and wealth; now, in a curious fashion, Bertran's appearance seemed entirely apt to a war-leader on the eve of a battle. It was as if, in some inexplicable manner, de Talair had always been readying himself for this. Blaise wondered if that might actually be true: he remembered—another image crowding in—the biting, sardonic verses the duke had sung in Baude Castle about Ademar and Galbert and Daufridi of Valensa. The man who had written those words might well have anticipated a response to them. The first response had been an arrow dipped in syvaren, Blaise recalled, glancing at Rudel a little further along the wall walk. The second response seemed to be war.

He looked away west. The massive Arch of the Ancients shone in the sunlight at the end of its elms. A little nearer he saw the strand beside the roadway where six corans of Miraval had killed his horse and pack pony and then died by his arrows. He remembered the young priestess from the isle coming to bear him to Talair. We have been waiting for you, she had said, assured and arrogant as they all seemed to be. He had never properly understood what they had meant. It was part of the same unsettling web of mystery that had brought them here now in response to Beatritz's warning.

Who knows what the women do when they go out in the woods at night? His father's words once, before burning another presumed witch on Garsenc lands. He preferred not to remember such things. There would be fires here, though, an almost unimaginable inferno if Galbert conquered. With some effort Blaise forced himself to push that thought away, to think back, instead, to the music that had been playing as he'd entered this castle for the first time beside Valery that day in spring. It seemed a long time ago.

Fulk de Savaric moved closer, resting his elbows on the stone in front of them. Without taking his eyes from the northern end of the valley, he murmured wryly, "Do you have anything extremely clever in mind?"

Blaise's mouth twitched. "Of course I do," he said, matching Fulk's tone. "I intend to challenge Ademar to single combat. When he foolishly accepts I'll kill him, take command of his grateful army and we'll all ride home to Gorhaut in time for spring planting."

Fulk gave a snort of amusement. "Sounds good to me," he said. "Do I get to deal with your father?"

Blaise didn't smile this time. "There are a few people who might want to do that," he said.

"Including you?" Fulk turned to look at him.

"I suppose so." He didn't meet the other man's gaze, and after a moment Fulk de Savaric turned away.

In the distance to the south-west, clearly visible from this height in the windswept winter air, Blaise could see the towers of Miraval. Even now, with all he had learned, and with the image of Duke Urté, on his knees before Signe de Barbentain, then striding from the council chamber, there was a part of him that could not quite believe that fifteen hundred fighting men would stay within those walls if battle came.

Whether that was cause for a sliver of hope or a deeper, colder dread he did not know.

What he did know was that he had spent most of his own life pursuing a dream or a vision of Gorhaut, what it should be, what it once had been, and that vision had had Corannos at the very heart of it. And now, having rashly claimed a crown for himself, he was about to go to battle amongst the men of woman-ruled Arbonne in a goddess's name against his own country and king—and father if it came to that—and against an army marching beneath the banner of the god he had vowed to serve with honour all his days.

How, Blaise thought, did one trace back the line of a life to see where the fork appeared that had led to these ramparts? He couldn't answer that. Perhaps a poet could, or a priestess, but he was a soldier and, yes, a would-be king, and the time—

"There they are," said Rudel quietly, his archer's eyes catching the first far glint of sunlight finding metal among the trees.

— and the time for such thoughts was gone now, like a leaf on the wind, a wave on the stony shore, like all the mornings of the vanished past. The army of Gorhaut had come to Lake Dierne.

Blaise saw them then, moving down the road that wound out of the woods, and their banners were the banners of his home, their voices—they could just hear them now—were lifted in a song he knew, and he could recognize, even from so far because of the clear light that was Arbonne's, the king he had named a traitor, and the father… the father whose long dream this army was. He saw Ranald ride around the curve of the road and, without real surprise, recognized the pennon of Andoria as Borsiard appeared at the head of his company of men. That is a man I will be happy to kill, he thought.

And then, as if mocking such a thought, there came into sight waving, jiggling pikes carried by foot-soldiers, and riding on the top of some of those pikes, spitted like meat for broiling were the severed heads of men.

Bertran de Talair made a sudden harsh gesture and a sound of denial that might have been a name, and a moment later Blaise registered a memorable mane of blond hair and realized that he, too, recognized the foremost of those severed heads. A sickness passed over him, forcing him to grip hard on the stones of the wall for support. A moment later it grew even worse. In the midst of the singing, gesticulating army of Gorhaut a rolling platform came into view, and on it they saw a man bound naked to a pole set in the centre of the platform. His genitals were gone; there was a blackened clotting of blood at his groin. Dead birds—owls, Blaise saw—were slung in mockery from ropes around his bowed, averted neck.

He thought this man, too, was dead, until the head was somehow lifted—in agonized response to what inner message, Blaise never knew—and even from the ramparts they could see the holes where his eyes had been gouged out.

Of course, Blaise thought with loathing, fighting sickness. It was part of the mockery: the blindness, and the birds of Rian. And then, with deepening horror, Blaise realized that he knew this maimed, dark-haired man as well. He looked over again to the head on the highest of the bobbing pikes and then turned, speechless, to Bertran de Talair. He saw that the duke had lowered his head so as not to have to see.

The landscape and the men on the ramparts grew oddly unfocused, and Blaise became aware that he was near to weeping, he who had killed so many men in war, or beside the shore of this same lake, or in the close darkness of a Portezzan night, and had seen others slain in terrible ways, and had regarded all of it as no more than the coinage of his profession. But he had never burned a helpless old woman naming her a witch, or dragged a priestess screaming from her bed, and he had never maimed or broken men in the way that these had been. This was warfare of a different kind.

He was remembering, almost against his will, Midsummer Night in Tavernel. Remy had been the fair-haired one, with more spirit and art than mature wisdom in him perhaps, and Aurelian was the darker, quieter man. They were musicians, not soldiers, both of them, and both were young. It was these two who had carried Beatritz's tidings to Barbentain from the island; they must have gone north together, Blaise realized, after delivering the High Priestess's message. He didn't know why; they might never know why.

"Look there," he heard someone say. Rudel, his voice strained in the sound of the wind.

Blaise passed a hand across his eyes and looked down again. Following where Rudel was pointing, he saw, among the army of Arbonne spread out below the walls, a dozen archers, crimson-clad, moving neatly forward from the ranks. He did not know who had given this order; perhaps no one had. Perhaps this was simply the instinctive response of some of the best-trained men in the country, those sworn to guard, and to uphold the honour of the queen of the Court of Love—to whom all the troubadours of Arbonne had sworn their life's service and devotion.

Blaise saw the Carenzu archers set themselves in a line, draw back bowstrings together and then let their arrows fly, high into the face of the wind. Among the ranks of Gorhaut a sudden volley of shouts brought the singing to a ragged halt; men flung up shields and hastily lowered their helms.

They need not have done so. The arrows were not an attack. They had been sent out like arching prayers, in grief and passion and rage, in an anguished attempt to put the ruined man on the platform out of pain. Most fell short. Three did not, and one of those arrows pierced him through the heart. The dark-haired man's head was flung sharply back so the holes of his eyes stared blankly up at the bright, lost sun. They saw his mouth open then but no sound came forth. No sound at all as Aurelian died, no last note like a swan, though all his days he had been celebrated for the pure, transcendent beauty of his voice.

"Oh, Lady," whispered Bertran de Talair. "Oh, goddess, heal and shelter them now within the infinite mercy of your arms." Blaise realized that his own hands were shaking. He gripped them together on the stone in front of him.

"You will excuse me," Thierry de Carenzu said, visibly working to maintain his composure. "I think I must go down and tell Ariane. She ought not to learn this from anyone else."

Blaise said nothing. He could think of nothing to say. There was someone else, he thought suddenly, who ought properly to hear of these two deaths from someone who cared for her, but he didn't know where Lisseut was, and he didn't think it was his place, given who had done this thing. He watched his father remove his war helm in the valley below and then his tall, handsome, anointed king did the same. Blaise's eyes were dry and his hands grew steady then as he looked down at the two of them.

In this windy green valley by Lake Dierne, Ademar of Gorhaut is a happy man. The presence of the Arbonnais army here before them is a surprise of sorts, but not an unpleasant one. The High Elder has been telling him from the beginning that this lake will see the battle that ends Arbonne. They had expected things to follow a slightly different sequence, anticipating that it would be their sacking and burning of the Isle of Rian that would bring the goddess-afflicted soldiers of this land out from their walls to battle.

They did not anticipate an army waiting for them, but Ademar turns away from the now-dead singer on the platform—one of the two fools they caught spying on their line of march—and sees his High Elder smiling as well.

"It is well," Galbert says, the deep voice rich with satisfaction. "They are ignorant as well as cowardly. Had they known about our shortage of food they would not be here. As it is, this will be over tomorrow, my liege, and the granaries of Arbonne will lie open to us with everything else. See their numbers? See our own? Look up at the god's sun over us."

"It is well," Ademar says briefly. At times he tires of Galbert's intoned pieties, and even his jaded appetites are nearly sated by now of the High Elder's passion for fire and maiming. Ademar has come to conquer a rich land and to scotch the whiff of rebellion shaped by the younger Garsenc son and Fulk de Savaric. Galbert is here for something else. The god will have his due and more, the king has promised as much. He only hopes it does not last too long, and leaves him some fields to sow and harvest and a country to rule when the last of the burning is done. The numbers are indeed very good though, Galbert speaks truth there, and there are surprises in reserve.

"If we are to fight tomorrow," says Borsiard d'Andoria, moving his splendid horse nearer, "then may I ask that the High Elder's disinherited son, the pretender, be left for me to deal with? I have reasons of my own, you understand."

Ademar doesn't like this vain, choleric man, but he has been made to accept the importance that a Portezzan company in their ranks will have for the days after the war. At times it seems to him that he accepts rather too much from the High Elder, but the king of Gorhaut is willing to be tolerant yet. A great deal had been promised him and those promises are about to bear fruit.

Another horse approaches and he hears its rider laugh sardonically. "My brother," says Duke Ranald de Garsenc to the elegantly garbed Portezzan, as the three men turn to look at him, "could slice you into pieces while attending to other business at the same time. Be not so hasty, my lord, to single him out unless you want your dear wife widowed again and free for another marriage." The words are a little slurred. Ranald does not look well. It is a fair assumption that he has already been drinking during the morning's ride. His father scowls, but Ademar is genuinely amused, not at all unhappy to observe the de Garsenc at odds again, or the Portezzan's flushed discomfiture.

"Well, if we are speaking of dear wives—" Borsiard d'Andoria begins waspishly.

"We are not speaking of them," Ademar says quickly, asserting his control. He does not want this discussed, not now, and not ever in public. He wonders if Rosala de Garsenc is in Talair Castle now or still in Barbentain. Shrewdly he guesses she has come with the army, that the countess of Arbonne, too, is within those walls by the lake. If so, it will all truly be over tomorrow, Galbert will have been right. He remembers, amused again, that it was Ranald who suggested once that he marry Signe be Barbentain in order to gain control of Arbonne. That is not going to be necessary, it seems.

"There are formalities," his High Elder is now saying, as he turns his back on his elder son. "Shall I send the herald to speak your demands, my liege?" This, too, diverts the king, the so-careful observance of protocols and rituals despite what they have been doing to unarmed men and women and to children all the way south. That, Ademar thinks sagely, is what happens when one marries a religious crusade with a war of conquest.

"Send him," he says lazily, "but let us ride with him ourselves to see who they have sent against us. Who knows, my lord High Elder, we might even have a chance to speak with your ambitious younger son. I do still wonder how he came by that dangerous trait."

"No son of mine!" Galbert says, a little too quickly, scenting danger. "I disowned him formally in the sanctuary of Corannos in the mountains. You were with me, my liege."

Ademar laughs aloud this time. He enjoys the ease with which he can set his counsellors on edge, even Galbert, who bears close watching. The king discovers just then, somewhat to his surprise, that he feels the need for a woman. Perhaps it is not so surprising after all. He has been watching his soldiers take their pleasure of the priestess since they came down from the pass. He has held himself aloof, with some self-congratulation, to preserve the dignity of the crown on this holy crusade. He looks briefly over his shoulder at Ranald de Garsenc and then back up at the ramparts of Talair. He is, in fact, quite certain that she is within those walls.

Tomorrow, he thinks, and smiles. He is not actually a man accustomed to waiting to slake his needs, but sometimes there is, in fact, a certain heightening of satisfaction if one delays a little time. Not too long, mind you, but a little. He regards this as a truth about the world he has discovered for himself. He looks back at the husband and then away again.

Lisseut saw what had been done to two of the men she had loved when she rode out with the countess of Arbonne and a number of their people to parley with the king of Gorhaut. Had they not been warned by Thierry beforehand, the sickness that passed over her when the bodies came into sight might have undone all her resolutions. It was the hardest thing she had ever had to do in her life, to ride past what was left of Remy and Aurelian and not give way to the clawing grief that rose up within her. She kept her eyes fixed on the straight-backed figure of the countess in front of her and gripped her horse's reins in hands that would not stop shaking. She kept wanting to scream. She could not let herself scream.

She had been with Ariane and the countess and Rosala de Garsenc in the music gallery of Talair when the duke of Carenzu had come down from the tower to tell them that Gorhaut had come, and that something terrible had been done to men they all knew.

She would have expected to burst into desperate tears, to faint, to feel her mind slamming shut like a door. Perhaps it was the shock, or an inward refusal to believe, but she had done none of these things, nor had any of the other women there. Ariane, to whom her husband had formally told the news about Remy and Aurelian, had risen stiffly from where she sat and walked away, to stand with her back to the room, staring into the fire. After an interval of time, though, she had turned and come back. She had been very pale, but her flawless features were carefully composed. She had sat beside the countess and reached for one of Signe's hands, holding it between both of her own.

Of all the people in that room, Alain of Rousset had been the only one who wept openly, and Lisseut had gone over to him. The little troubadour had been wearing his sword. He was still awkward with it, but he was here to join the soldiers in Talair, had rowed across the water to fight with them.

It seemed that Remy and Aurelian had been thinking in the same way, spying on the army of Gorhaut as it moved south. Lisseut would have thought the two of them might even have been good at that, but she didn't know much about warfare.

Neither had they.

She had found herself meeting the clear blue gaze of the woman named Rosala. There was pain there, and something else as hurtful, if harder to understand, but Lisseut had taken resolution and a certain comfort from that exchange of glances, and tried, as best she could, to give back the same two things.

"There should be a song for them," the countess had said, rising from her chair and turning to where Lisseut was standing beside Alain. The little troubadour had lifted his head, wiping his eyes. "I will not ask for it now, though," Signe de Barbentain went on. "This is not a time for music."

It was then that they had heard footsteps in the corridor again, and Bertran had come into the room with a number of other men. One of whom was Blaise. There was something bleak and forbidding about him, as if a part of the winter had passed into him on the ramparts. He had looked at Rosala first—his brother's wife—and nodded his head in greeting. But then he had turned to Lisseut and, after a moment, had made a small, helpless gesture with his hands. She did feel like crying then. She could remember him wounding Remy with his sword. She had come forward to challenge him for that. Midsummer, it had been. Midsummer Carnival in Tavernel. Hard to believe that there once had been a time of celebration in Arbonne.

"They have blown the horns and are coming to parley," Bertran had said to the countess. "Ademar is riding with his herald."

"Then I should be with ours," Signe had said calmly. "If you think it right."

"We are your servants, your grace. But yes, I think it right. I think you should come, and Ariane. This is a war being waged against our women, as much as anything, and I think the army, both armies, should see you here."

"And I," said Rosala de Garsenc then, rising. "I am their excuse for war." Bertran had looked quickly over at her, an odd expression in his face. He had looked as if he wanted to demur, but did not.

When Lisseut expressed the same intention to be present no one gainsaid her. She hadn't expected them to. She didn't even see herself as being presumptuous. Not with this. It seemed to her that there might even be a shared feeling now that one of the musicians should be there.

She had actually forgotten, for the moment, that Bertran de Talair was a troubadour too.

The king of Gorhaut, it soon appeared, had not. The two groups met within sight of the armies but at a careful distance removed. There were archers of skill in both ranks. The place chosen by the heralds was to the west, along the northern shore of Lake Dierne, beside a rocky strand of beach. They could see the great stone arch not far away, and in the distance, to the south-west, the towers of Miraval ended up like an illusion over the forest between.

Amid that company, beside the whitecapped lake, the voice of Signe de Barbentain rang out, colder than the waters or the wind. "I thought Gorhaut had fallen somewhat since your father's death," she said, looking straight at the broad-shouldered figure of Ademar. I had not realized until very lately how great that fall was. The man on that platform was honoured in all the countries of the world. Are you not ashamed before Corannos to have done this foul thing?"

"The god's name is profanity in your mouth," said Galbert de Garsenc quickly, before Ademar could reply. The king gave him a sharp glance.

"Cannot your king at least speak some answers for himself?" Signe asked with deceptive mildness. Lisseut saw Ademar flush. She saw him look at Rosala de Garsenc before replying.

"He was captured as a spy." The voice was unexpectedly light, but controlled. "He would have been dealt with and executed as such, and the yellow-haired one as well, but he made a mistake." Ademar turned to Bertran de Talair. "He elected, unwisely, to sing some verses of a song you wrote, my lord. The wrong verses, the wrong song. And the other man chose to laugh. You might say you are responsible for what happened to them."

For the first time he smiled. Lisseut shivered, seeing that. She saw Rosala de Garsenc turn away. But then, despite her own fear, or perhaps because of it, and because it was not clear what had happened, she dared speak, even in that company, for the sake of the two dead men she had loved. She said, to the king of Gorhaut:

"He sang for you? You didn't remotely deserve such an honour. Were these the lines by any chance?

What manner of man, with his father new-fallen,

Would destroy with a pen-stroke a long dream of glory?"

She felt an anger such as she had never known in her life. Almost snarling the words she added, "Or did he ask the other, obvious question in the same song: Where went the manhood of Gorhaut…? Where indeed. They are asking that question all through the world, about a nation that burns helpless women." She spoke the words with all the passion of her heart.

And she was met, brutally, by laughter. "I would have thought the question of lost manhood would apply to the one on the platform, actually." King Ademar's amusement faded, the small pale eyes held hers. "But since you have chosen to raise the issue, I will make a point of remembering your unremarkable face, and personally dealing with that question when we are finished doing what we have come to do tomorrow."

"Your father," said Bertran de Talair quietly, speaking for the first time, "never blustered. I remember that about him."

"Ah," said Ademar, turning quickly to him. "It comes back to fathers, does it?" He looked pointedly towards the distant towers of Miraval. "I was told it had as much to do with a bastard son and a lusting woman, legs wide for any man but her own husband. What a shame the cuckolded duke of Miraval is not here to offer you his wise counsel. And what a great shame as well," he added, turning from Bertran, whose face had gone white, "that you have had to find such frail vessels from the north to fill out your sorry ranks."

Lisseut had wondered when they would get to Blaise. In the moments that followed, she was made to realize that she had not moved past longing into acceptance after all. The image of that stone sinking silently down through dark water left her then, and never returned.

Blaise, despite Ademar's hard gaze, utterly ignored him, as if the king of Gorhaut were some minor functionary, unworthy of attention. His own eyes were locked on his father's face, and Lisseut saw the forbidding figure of Galbert de Garsenc in his blue cleric's robe looking at his younger son with an expression that actually terrified her. She had thought, naively, that her travels had led her to understand something of the world. She realized now, seeing that exchange of glances, that she knew nothing. She also understood in that moment that, in a real sense, all of this came down to the two of them.

"In the Books of Othair," said Blaise softly, "which are the holiest writings of Corannos, it is told that the land of Gorhaut carries the god's burden of bringing justice into the world. It teaches that Corannos has bestowed upon us the holy task of guarding the helpless and the persecuted in all lands we pass through, in return for his great favour and the promise of his eternal shelter when we die." He was silent, and in the silence was an indictment.

"You dare speak to me of the teachings of the god?" Galbert said, his rich voice rising, genuinely incredulous. Behind him Lisseut saw a man who, from his appearance, had to be the other son. He was sitting astride a handsome horse among the small number of men who had come with the High Elder and the king. His expression was strained, oddly suspended between bitter amusement and pain. Impulsively, she glanced over at Rosala. She was gazing steadily at her husband, her face unreadable. There were, Lisseut thought, layers and layers of grief here.

Blaise seemed to ignore his father's interjection. He went on, as if no one had spoken. "You are, in the light of these teachings, as much a betrayer of Corannos as this falsely anointed king is a traitor to his people. Because you are my father and the god teaches us to respect our parents in their dotage you will not be executed, but you will be stripped of your office when we return to Gorhaut."

"You are mad," said King Ademar flatly, dismissively.

Only then did Blaise turn to him. "I am enraged," he said, a ferocity in his voice for the first time, a first blaze of heat. "I am revolted. I loathe how you have allowed yourself and your country to be used. What king permits a counselor's vile obsession to lead him so far down paths of unholiness and betrayal?"

"A false king," said Fulk de Savaric, his sudden voice clear as a bell. "One unworthy of his crown."

"Or his life," said Bertran de Talair quietly.

"Or of any remembrance at all in the world after the death that Rian is even now making ready for him," added the countess of Arbonne, and of all those there it was her voice that was grimmest of all, as if she were truly speaking for some power beyond the world.

For the first time the king of Gorhaut, turning from one of them to the other, looked shaken. And so smoothly, predictably, his adviser moved to fill the silence that followed.

"These," Galbert said in the deep, commanding voice, "are the last strident posturings of the doomed. Shall we quail before this mumbling? Rather, you should all be on your knees even now, begging the mercy of a gentle death."

"You would like that, wouldn't you?" said Ariane de Carenzu, moving her horse forward a little. She was smiling, but not with her eyes. "You would like the women of Arbonne kneeling before you, I see. I do see it now, actually. No wonder your son's wife fled from you. What does Corannos say about such desires, Galbert de Garsenc?"

"They are abominations," said Blaise quietly. "For which atonement must be made." He himself was pale now.

"This," said the king of Gorhaut, regaining his composure, "has grown tedious. I am here only because the protocols of war compel this meeting of heralds. Hear me then: we have come south because the countess of Arbonne has given shelter and succour to a woman of Gorhaut and has refused to return her to us. All else, as the High Elder says, is posturing. I have patience for no more of it. Prepare yourselves to die on the morrow."

"What if I do return?" said Rosala suddenly. "If I come back north, will you take your army home?"

Galbert de Garsenc laughed thickly. He opened his mouth to reply but was forestalled by the king's lifted hand. "This comes," said Ademar softly, "very much too late. There is a lesson now to be taught to those who have denied our most proper demands. I am pleased to see you eager to return, but it makes no matter at this point. There is no power here, or anywhere in the world, Rosala, that can stop me now from bringing you back to Cortil."

"With the child," said Galbert quickly.

He was ignored.

"To Cortil, my lord?" Rosala asked, lifting her voice. "Are you so open about this now? Do you not mean: back to Garsenc and my lord husband?"

In the stillness that followed this, Lisseut realized that the king of Gorhaut had just made, in some fashion she did not entirely understand, a mistake.

A long way south, on the Island of Rian in the sea, where the wind was not blowing on this day and the waters lay calm and blue under the pale winter sun, Beatritz de Barbentain, High Priestess of Rian, rose suddenly from before a fire into which she had been gazing sightlessly for most of the day.

"Something has just happened," she said aloud, though there was no one in her room with her save the white owl on her shoulder. "Something that might matter. Oh, sweet Rian remember us, have mercy upon your children."

She was silent then, waiting, reaching out in her darkness for the elusive, un-coercible vision of the goddess that might let her know at least a part of what was now happening so far away in the place of the wind.

And in that precise moment, by the lake, among that gathering of enemies, a voice was heard for the first time.

"I am afraid," said Ranald, duke of Garsenc, moving his horse into the open space between the two companies, "that this is rather too openly said for my taste and for the honour of my family." He was staring at the king of Gorhaut. He had not used a title.

No one responded. No one else moved. It seemed to Lisseut, afterwards, that the duke's words had virtually frozen them all with astonishment. Ranald de Garsenc, the only moving figure in a still world, turned to his wife. He looked remarkably at ease now, as if this action or decision, this movement, had somehow granted him release from something. He said, "Forgive me, my lady, but I must ask this, and I will accept the truth of what you say: has the king of Gorhaut been your lover?"

Lisseut realized she was holding her breath. Out of the side of her vision she saw that Blaise had gone bone-white. Sitting her horse easily, Rosala de Garsenc seemed almost as composed as her husband though. She said, as clearly as before, "He has not, my lord, though he has sought to be that for some time now. He was only delaying while I was with child. Your father, I am sorry to say, has been urging the thought upon him for purposes of his own. I will swear to you though, upon the life of my child, that I have not lain with Ademar, and that I will die before I willingly do so."

"This is why you left?" A different note in Ranald's voice, almost too exposed; it made Lisseut wish, suddenly, that she was not here. None of us has a right to be listening to this, she thought.

But Rosala said, her handsome, strong head held high, "It is indeed why I left, my lord. I feared you could not, or would not, guard us against your father and your king, for the one had claimed the child I was carrying, as you know, and the other wanted me."

Ranald was nodding slowly, as if the words were striking echoes within himself.

"Ranald, in the god's name, do not shame me," Galbert de Garsenc began, the beautiful voice becoming harsh, "by allowing this depraved, contemptible woman to give voice to such—"

"You be silent," said the duke of Garsenc bluntly. "I will consider how to deal with you after." The tone was so curt it was shocking.

"After what?" asked Ademar of Gorhaut. His own head was lifted, his carriage in the saddle magnificent. There was a glitter to his gaze. He knows, Lisseut thought. He knows the answer to that.

"After I have publicly dealt with you for the dishonour you have willed upon my house. No king of Gorhaut has ever been free to wreak what havoc he will among the high lords of our land. I am not about to let you be the first. The wife of the duke of Garsenc is not a trinket to be played for, however blind the duke might be." He paused for a moment, then: "This is a formal challenge, Ademar. Will you fight me yourself, or name a champion to shelter behind?"

"Are you mad?" Galbert de Garsenc cried out.

"That," said Ranald gravely, "is the second time that question has been asked of one of your sons. In fact, I think it is true of neither of us." He turned to Rosala. "Other accusations may fairly be made against me. I will hope to have a chance to address them after."

She met his glance but said nothing, stern and proud, Lisseut thought, as some yellow-haired goddess of the north. But that, she realized immediately after, was idle fantasy: they didn't allow goddesses in the north.

Ranald turned back to Ademar. They all turned back to Ademar. The king of Gorhaut, past the first surprise of this, was smiling; only with his lips though, his eyes were hard as stone.

"We are in a foreign county and at war," he said. "You are a commander of my army. You are now proposing that we fight each other because your wife, whose flight from your home is the cause of our being here, alleges that I expressed a desire for her. Is this what I understand from you, my lord of Garsenc?"

It sounded absurd, mad indeed, when put that way, but Ranald de Garsenc did not quail. He, too, was smiling now, a smaller man than the king but as easy in the saddle. "You might not remember it," he said, "but I was in that room in Cortil with my father last autumn when you came in and demanded that Rosala be brought back. Back to you, you said." They saw the king's expression change. His eyes flicked away from Ranald's, and then returned.

The duke went on. "I should have made this challenge then, Ademar. You have been using Rosala's flight from me as your excuse for war—my father's idea, of course. You aren't nearly clever enough. She didn't fly from me, Ademar, I think I dare say that. She left her husband and put our child at terrible risk because of you and my father. I think I am seeing things clearly for the first time in a great many years. If you have any honour or courage left in you, draw your sword."

"I will have you arrested and then gelded before burning," Galbert de Garsenc snarled, pointing a gauntleted finger at his older son.

Ranald actually laughed. "More burning? Do what you will," he said. "The king might well be grateful for that protection. I will not, however," he added, still with that unnatural calm, "speak further to procurers." He had not even bothered to look away from Ademar. To the king he said: "There have been allegations of treason thrown about freely here. At my brother, by my brother at my father, at you. I find it all a game of words. I prefer to name you what you are, Ademar: a dupe, and a coward hiding behind his counsellor, unwilling to use his own sword in a matter of honour."

"Ranald," said Ademar, almost gently, "Ranald, Ranald, you know I can kill you. You have done nothing but drink for ten years—that is why your wife fled south. I doubt you have given her a night's satisfaction in years. Do not deceive yourself before you go to the god."

"This means, I take it, that you will fight."

"He will do no such thing!" Galbert snapped.

"Yes, I will fight," said Ademar in the same moment. "The sons of my High Elder have finally grown too tiresome to endure. I would be done with them."

And the king of Gorhaut drew his sword. There came a sound from among the armies north of them, for the light was brilliantly clear and all men there could see that blade drawn. Then the sound changed, grew high-pitched with surprise, as Ranald de Garsenc drew his own blade in reply, and moved his horse apart from the others by the lake. Ademar followed him. As he lowered the visor of his helmet, they saw that the king was smiling. To the west, not far away, the stones of the Arch of the Ancients gleamed, honey-coloured in the light.

"Well?" Lisseut heard Bertran murmur under his breath.

"Ten years ago," said Fulk de Savaric softly, "it might have been a match. Not now, I am sorry to say."

Blaise said nothing, though he had to have heard that. He was watching his brother with something hurtful in his eyes. Rosala was watching too, but there was nothing to be read in her expression at all. Ranald, Lisseut noted, had not bothered to lower his helm.

"It will make no difference, you know that," said Galbert de Garsenc heavily, speaking to the Arbonne party. "Even if Ademar dies we will destroy you tomorrow. And he will not die. Ranald has been drinking all day. He would never have done this otherwise. Look at his face. He is about to meet the judgment of the god, sodden and disgraced."

"Redeemed, I should have said." Blaise's voice was hollow. He did not take his eyes from the two men circling each other now on the roadway by the strand.

And what they saw then, as the long, bright swords touched for the first time, delicately, and then again with a sharp, wrist-grinding clash, was indeed redemption of a kind. There is a grace here, thought Lisseut suddenly, resisting the thought. She had never seen Ranald de Garsenc before and so she had never seen him fight. He had been King's Champion of Gorhaut once, for Ademar's father, someone had told her. That had been a long time ago.

For a moment it seemed not to have been, as he pivoted his war horse using knees and hips and rang a hard, quick downward blow against Ademar's side. The curved armour caught the blade and deflected it, but the king of Gorhaut swayed in his saddle, and there came a rumble again from the armies. Lisseut looked over at Blaise, she couldn't help herself, but then she turned away from what she saw in his face, back to the two men fighting in the road.

Blaise didn't even see Ranald's first blow land. He had actually closed his eyes when the combat began. He heard the clang of sword on armour, though, and looked up in time to see Ademar rock in his saddle before righting himself to deliver a slashing backhand of his own. Ranald blunted that with a twist of his sword-arm and sidled his horse away from Ademar's attempt at a cut back the other way.

It was that horseman's movement, the instinctive, almost unconscious product of a lifetime in the saddle with blade in hand, that took Blaise back, in a blur and rush of time, to his childhood and those first clandestine lessons his brother had given him, at a time when Galbert had forbidden Blaise to touch a sword. Both boys had been whipped when the deception was uncovered, though Blaise hadn't actually known about Ranald's punishment until long after, and then only because one of the corans had spoken of it. Ranald had never said a word. There had been no more lessons though. Galbert had had his way. He almost always did.

Blaise looked over at his father then, at the smooth-cheeked, commanding features. The furrow of concern on Galbert's brow had gone; he was actually smiling now, a smug, thin-mouthed expression Blaise knew well. And why should he not smile? Ranald was ten years past his fighting days, and Ademar was very possibly the strongest warrior in Gorhaut. The result of this had been assured from the moment the challenge was made, and Galbert, Blaise understood in that moment, cared nothing at all for the life of his son. Ranald's death would even simplify matters. He had become almost irrelevant to the High Elder, except, as here, when he became a nuisance and a distraction, or even a threat to Galbert's power over the king.

In fact, if Rosala's story was true—and of course it would be true—the honour or dignity of Garsenc had ceased to be important to Galbert in any way that signified. All that seemed to matter to the High Elder was his control of Ademar and this great burning in Arbonne that was allowing him. Ripened fruit of his long dream. That was what mattered, and one thing more: Cadar. His grandson was also a part of Galbert's cold stalking of power in Gorhaut and Arbonne's obliteration.

He must not have him, Blaise thought.

He wondered—the terrible thought intruding like a spear—if Rosala had given orders to have the baby killed if they lost the battle here. It was probable, he realized, in fact it was almost certain.

Grief, from all directions it seemed, closed in upon him as he turned from his father to look at his brother again, seeing Ranald strangely now, as if from a distance, as if he were fading already into the past, into mist, on a day in Arbonne brilliant with light.

Ranald de Garsenc is also thinking of the past as he lets his body respond intuitively to the demands of combat. For the moment, as the overwhelming familiar first steps of the dance begin, he is all right, he is even, in some unexpected fashion, nearly happy. He knows, absorbing a sequence of blows on shield and sword, slashing in response, that this cannot be sustained. He is not that much older than the king but he is far past his best years, while Ademar, strong as a tree, is as close to his peak as he will ever be.

As if to make explicit what both of them know, the sheer strength of the king drives his blade through a tardy attempt at warding and the sword hammers into the light armour Ranald wears. He has always preferred to be lighter in the saddle, relying on quickness. Now, wincing at a hard lance of pain in his ribs, pulling his horse back out of range, he realizes that most of that quickness is gone.

Ten years ago, Ranald thinks, though without bitterness, I would have had him on the ground by now. There is no false pride in the thought either: ten years ago he had been named by King Duergar as his court champion, and for two full years, fighting in the king's name, he did not lose a single combat in any tournament from Gotzland to southern Portezza to the Arimondan court. Then, on a night in the dead of winter, Ereibert de Garsenc had died and Ranald became duke after the obligatory candlelit vigil in the chapel of Corannos. The tournaments and banquets and the celebrations of his prowess among women and men gave way to estate administration at Garsenc and an inexorable, trammelling immersion into his father's designs. Not as a confidant of course: Galbert trusted in Ranald no more than his son shared thoughts with him. Ranald, as duke of Garsenc, became a tool for Galbert's schemes, no more, and at times rather less. It was all a long time ago. Those were the days when ale and wine first became his comforts, avenues to oblivion.

But his thoughts do not linger among those memories. Even as he parries another barrage of blows, feeling the weight of the king's assault jarring his arm and shoulder almost numb, he finds his mind going even further back, much further actually.

Unlike Blaise, who never saw her, Ranald has a memory of his mother.

Two or three images, in fact, though when he first spoke of them as a child he was sternly told by his tutor that these were false recollections, unworthy fantasies for a warrior-to-be. Ranald was two years old when his mother died. Boys that age could not remember things, the tutor decreed. When Ranald tried, not long after, to ask his father about the recurring image he had of a red-haired woman singing to him by candlelight, Galbert flatly forbade him, on pain of a whipping, to mention it again. Ranald was six years old. It was the last time he'd attempted to confide something of importance to his father. Or, he realizes abruptly now, to anyone else.

The memory of the red-haired woman has stayed with him all these years, though he has never again spoken of it. It occurs to him, for the first time, that he might have mentioned it to Rosala. It might have been something to share with her. He guides his horse with a quick pressure of his left knee and, ducking with a grunt under a wide side-sweeping blow, delivers a backhand slash of his own, ringing it hard off Ademar's armour. The king is prone to such flat, sidelong blows he notes, a part of his mind still registering such things, as if there is anything he is going to be able to do about it. I should have told her, he is thinking. Rosala might have wanted to hear of such a memory; in the beginning, at any rate. In the later part of their time together he was less certain of her interest but that, truly, was his own fault.

Just as it is his own fault that he is short of breath already. He is feeling the effects of this morning's ale as a thick heaviness in his limbs, in the extra pulse of time between his awareness of a threat or an opportunity and his body's slow response. It is going to get worse, he knows. Ademar is not even breathing hard but Ranald is grimly aware that his own shield and armour are dented already by the king's blows. He is afraid he may have broken ribs on his left side; it has become difficult to do much more than parry.

Ademar seems to be aware of this. Through his lowered black visor the king of Gorhaut speaks, contemptuously giving Ranald a respite. Softly, so that none of the others will hear, he says, "I could almost pity you, were you not such a fool. She will be mine tomorrow, I want you to think of that. I hope you are thinking of it in the moment I kill you. Tomorrow night, when her hair is down and she wraps her mouth around my sex in the way that I shall teach her do you think she will mourn the poor, sad, drunken man she once had to lie beside?"

Ranald would reply, but he lacks the breath to spare for taunting, and there is nothing, actually, he can think of to say. His ribs are extraordinarily painful now; each breath drawn seems to slide a knife into his side. He suspects the king is wrong, though; he believes Rosala told no less than truth when she said she would die before lying with Ademar. This thought makes him abruptly aware of something: if the king kills him he is almost certainly killing Rosala as well. And—a second new thought like a lash of the cold wind—even more surely killing the child. The son he has never seen.

I am everything he says of me, Ranald de Garsenc thinks, and now there is bitterness. I have wasted my life.

He remembers—and with this memory as well there is sorrow now—his brother Blaise on the fogbound drawbridge of Garsenc only a little time ago: You don't have to follow him, Ranald. You have the first free choice you've had in a long time. He answered harshly, he remembers, almost choking in confused fury. Corannos knew, there had been so much anger in him that night. Wrongly directed though; he seems to have turned in wrong directions all his life.

There was a time when I would have followed you to the end of the earth, Blaise also said that night. I never knew that, Ranald thinks, his eyes warily on the king of Gorhaut. Blaise is here too, watching him, has claimed a crown, defied their father—even named Corannos to witness his doing so. He is walking a path of honour, one that might make a man proud, even a brother.

Ademar lifts his sword and points it forward like an executioner. He is playing to the armies now, Ranald knows. He can hear them to the north, a constant murmur of sound broken by sharp sudden cries. It is about to begin again. And end, Ranald de Garsenc thinks. He looks up for a moment at the bright sun shining above the fields and the forests of this land of Arbonne.

He is genuinely not afraid, only sorrowful and full of regrets, but it really is too late, he thinks. There would never have been enough time to make amends for so many errors and weaknesses. He thinks of the red-haired woman singing him a lullaby. He wonders if she is waiting for him, if the god might allow a grace like that to such a man as he has been. He thinks of his brother again, and then, lastly, of his wife and the child he has let slip away. Cadar. A strong name, one of honour in the world. Far better than the memory of his own name will be, he thinks, and it is this, at the end, that hurts most of all. And spurs him to a last gesture, an attempt at redress.

Ignoring the pain in his side Ranald thrusts his own sword above his head, theatrical and arresting. Ademar hesitates.

Ranald sucks precious air and cries out then, as loudly as he can through the open visor of his helm, hoping the armies can hear: "Before our most holy god I name you a false king, Ademar, and I set my sword against you in the name of Gorhaut." He hears a new sound rising to the north and knows his words have carried. He stops, sucks air, speaks again, to a coran in their party now, one of his own, a rasped command: "Bergen, ride back to the army. These are my orders, you are charged with them: the corans of Garsenc are not to fight for this man." He pauses, then says it: "Follow my brother now."

It is done, spoken, and not actually so hard as he would have expected it to be. He takes his eyes from the king long enough to meet those of the leader of his corans. He sees Bergen hesitate, then nod, a movement jerky with surprise and fear. He sees him twitch his horse's reins to obey. He turns back then, because he must, to deal with the onrush of the suddenly enraged king.

Ranald de Garsenc offers his soul then, in genuine diffidence, to Corannos, and decides, on impulse, to do one last thing, more for the bittersweet irony of it than anything else. Something from childhood to leave them with. He wonders if anyone will actually realize or recognize what it is he is doing. Blaise might, he thinks wistfully, and then stops thinking for there is no time, Ademar's sword is swinging and the dance is nearly done.

For those watching, events happened very quickly then.

Blaise had turned from the fight when Ranald, sword flamboyantly raised, shouted to the armies and then spoke his astonishing instructions to Bergen, the long-time captain of the Garsenc corans. His heart jumped as he realized what his brother was doing, and he saw Bergen, dead loyal all his life, acknowledge and move to obey.

Bergen of Garsenc was felled by a swordstroke from behind before he had even fully turned his horse. Borsiard d'Andoria, elegant, unsmiling, slid his long blade carelessly free of the coran's body and they saw Bergen fall to the ground. The Portezzan looked deliberately over at Blaise, and then he did smile.

There came a shout of anger and unease from among the army of Gorhaut. They had heard Ranald's cry and had now seen the Portezzan slay one of their own. Some men from each army began moving closer, which was dangerous.

Blaise had no time to deal with that, or with Borsiard just then, for even as he was registering these things in a stray, random memory was being jogged from far back in childhood, from the days when he used to watch his brother train with the corans in the courtyard. There had been something about that elaborately showy, sword-upraised gesture of Ranald's, a deliberate echo of something, a game, a frivolity.

And then memory sprang clear, and with a sound that he only realized afterwards had been his brother's name, Blaise wheeled back to watch what was going to be the ending, one way or the other.

He had only ever seen this done as a jest among friends, and that had been twenty years ago. The uplifted sword was the invitation, almost too transparent, luring one's opponent to venture a backhanded side-stroke at the exposed right side. What used to follow, when this was tried in the tiltyard at Garsenc, was a silly, undignified manoeuvre that had usually left both combatants rolling in the dust, swearing and laughing.

There was no laughter by the shore of Lake Dierne. Blaise watched the king of Gorhaut succumb completely to the ruse, driven by his fury at Ranald's orders to his men. Ademar launched a wild stroke of such force it would have half-severed Ranald's torso through the links of his armour had it landed.

It didn't land. Ranald de Garsenc flattened himself on his horse's neck and let fall his sword as Ademar's blade whistled over his head biting nothing but air. The king's motion carried him lurching sideways in his saddle and partly turned his horse. By the time he began, cursing, to straighten, Ranald, lightly armoured as always, had hurled himself from his horse towards the back of the king's saddle. Very much like a boy, Blaise was thinking, like the boy for whom all of this had been discovery and exhilaration, with pain and sorrow and ageing quite inconceivable concepts.

Ranald actually made it. Landed, almost neatly, behind Ademar, swinging a leg across the horse's rump. He was already grappling at his waist for the knife that would kill the king when the crossbow dart caught him above the collarbone and buried itself in his throat.

The half-drawn dagger fell from splayed ringers and a moment later Ranald de Garsenc slid slowly to the ground to lie beside it in the winter grass. Blood was pulsing from his neck, bright red in the sunlight.

Above him, controlling his horse with an effort, Ademar of Gorhaut looked down upon him, and then at the man who had fired that small, hidden crossbow.

"You interfered in a challenge," said the king of Gorhaut. His voice was thin, disbelieving. He was visibly shaken.

"Would you prefer to be dead right now?" asked Galbert de Garsenc, High Elder of Gorhaut. He didn't even look at the body of his son. Ademar made no reply. There was no growing tumult now to the north of them.

"Watch him," Blaise said to no one in particular, and slid from his horse. Ignoring Ademar completely, he knelt beside his brother. He heard footsteps behind him but did not turn. Ranald's eyes were closed; he was still alive, but only just. With all the care in the world Blaise shifted him a little, so he could lay his brother's head in his lap. Blood from the wound had already soaked the ground; now it began to seep into his clothing.

From above and behind he heard his father say to the king of Gorhaut, "I have not come this close to be balked by a drunkard's folly or your own carelessness."

Ranald opened his eyes then, and Blaise saw that his brother was aware of him. A faint, genuine smile, crossed Ranald's face.

"It would have worked," he whispered. "I only tried it as a jest."

"Spare your strength," Blaise murmured.

Ranald shook his head slightly. "No point," he managed to say. "I can feel poison. There is syvaren on the dart."

Of course. Of course there was. This time it was Blaise who closed his eyes, feeling grief and a terrible, ancient rage threatening to overwhelm him. He fought desperately for control, and when he opened his eyes again saw that Ranald's gaze had moved away now, to someone beyond Blaise.

"I have no right to ask for anything," he heard his brother whisper. Blaise looked over his shoulder then and saw Rosala standing there, tall and grave.

"I know you do not," she agreed quietly, adhering, even at the last, to her own inner laws. "But I have the right to grant what I wish." She hesitated, and Blaise thought she would kneel but she did not. She said, very calmly, "It was bravely done at the end, Ranald."

There was a silence. Far off, Blaise heard noises that sounded like men fighting. He ought to turn, he knew, this mattered so much, but he could not.

Ranald said, "Guard him if you can. Cadar, I mean." And then, so softly it was difficult to hear, "It is a fine name." It was in that moment that Blaise thought he felt his heart beginning to break, hearing the unspoken thing, the lost lifetime of sorrow beneath those words.

And Rosala seemed to hear it too, for she did kneel then, neatly, in the blood-soaked grass beside her husband. She did not reach out to touch him, but Blaise heard her say, in that same grave, calm voice, "Cadar Ranald de Garsenc now. You have earned as much. If it pleases you, my lord."

Through a blurring of tears Blaise saw his older brother smile then for the last time and heard him say, no more than a breath now, "It pleases me, my lady."

He seemed to be gripping both of Ranald's hands—he couldn't actually remember taking them—and he was almost certain he felt a pressure then, the strong fingers squeezing his for a moment, before they went slack.

Blaise looked down at his dead brother, feeling the cold wind passing over the two of them. He slipped one hand free after a time and closed Ranald's eyes. He had seen a great many dead men. Sometimes their faces seemed to become calm and peaceful when life passed out of them and they began their second journey to the god. Ranald looked as he always had, though; perhaps when it was someone you knew well the comforting illusions of grace were harder to find.

He hadn't actually said farewell, he realized. He hadn't said anything. Spare your strength, had been his only words. Fatuous, really, to a man with a dart in his neck and syvaren running cold through him. Perhaps the touching, their hands holding each other, perhaps that would have been enough. It would have to be; there was never going to be more.

He made himself look up. Ademar, still visibly shaken by what had happened, was on his horse above them. Blaise said nothing to him at all. He looked over his shoulder and saw that his father was still holding the tiny, lethal crossbow he had brought hidden to this place. The ancient rules of such things, the rituals and laws of parleys or challenges, would mean nothing to Galbert. Blaise had always known that. Ademar hadn't, it seemed.

The king of Gorhaut would be wondering how he was going to hold up his head among the nations now—even before his own people—after being so shamefully rescued in the midst of a formal challenge. It would probably make sense to taunt him, to unsettle him further, but Blaise had no heart for that at all. In fact, at another time, another place in the world, he might even have been able to feel sorry for Ademar, who would only now perhaps be discovering the degree to which even he was simply another instrument of Galbert de Garsenc's designs.

He seemed to be looking down at his brother again, as if trying to memorize Ranald's features, so like and yet unlike his own. "You had best get up," he heard Rosala say, as if from a distance. She herself had risen again. He looked up at her. She had never appeared to him to so much resemble one of the spear-maidens of Corannos, straight-backed and proud, a figure from a chapel frieze, her face seeming as if sculptured in stone. Her level gaze met his. "He died as a man with mourning," said Rosala de Savaric de Garsenc, "but it seems that this battle has begun."

It seemed that it had.

He slipped his hands under Ranald's head and lifted it so he could slide himself free, then he laid his brother down again on the grass. Rising, he looked at Ademar and said formally, over the growing clamour to the north, "As his brother I lay claim to this body. Do you challenge me for it?"

Ademar shook his head. "Believe me, I do not want it."

Blaise nodded. "Very well." He felt very calm now, almost eerily so. A kind of numbness was setting in. "I will look for you at sunset if we are both alive."

Ademar's eyes flicked over to where Ranald lay but then came back to meet Blaise's. He had never been a coward, whatever else might be said of him. "I shall not be hard to find," he said, and wheeled his horse north towards the battlefield.

Only then did Blaise turn to his father.

Galbert, watching the others leave, seemed to have been waiting for him. The large, smooth features were a little flushed perhaps, but otherwise unruffled. Blaise said, choosing his words with care, "I will not be the man that kills you, for I would not want a father-slaying marked against my soul, but there is a journey to the god that awaits you, whether it comes today or soon or late and Corannos will know how to judge you for this deed." He paused. "And so will Rian, for a parley and a challenge breached, for a son's murder here."

Galbert gave a bark of laughter and opened his mouth to reply.

"Be gone from this place," said Bertran de Talair before the High Elder could speak. "I have never slain a man in the presence of heralds in my life, but I could do so now."

"What?" said Galbert mockingly. "And face the same judgment as me?" And saying so he turned his horse and began riding away. The nearest companies of the armies were now engaging each other, banners whipped by the wind, in that valley north of Talair.

Blaise looked over his dead brother on the ground, and then back to his father riding north, a huge, bulky man, yet easy and even graceful in the saddle. There was something deeply unreal about the two images for him, as if his mind were somehow refusing to accept this conjunction. But there were men battling now and he reached out towards that single hard truth, the urgency of it, as a pathway out of the numbness that seemed to be trying to claim him.

He heard a grating sound behind him and turned to see two boats being pulled up on the stony strand. The women began boarding them. In one of the boats he recognized, without surprise, the tall, slender young priestess he had met beside this lake when he first came here. There had been dead men on the ground then, too, he remembered. She looked at him, but only briefly and without expression, then she reached out a hand to the countess and helped her into the boat.

The other women were quickly on board and the boats were pushed back out into the choppy water. Sails were run up that the north wind might take them away. As he watched, hesitating beside that stony strand, Blaise saw Ariane turn back to look for him, her dark hair blown out behind her by the wind. Their glances held for a beat of time before she turned away. A moment later, in the other boat, Blaise saw that Lisseut of Vezét who had also lost men she loved this day, had turned to look back as well. She began, awkwardly, to lift one hand, but then let it fall to her side. He could see that she was crying.

Rosala did not turn around at all, and so he did not see her face at the end. He only saw her from behind, sitting straight-backed beside the small, delicate figure of the countess of Arbonne as the two boats swept back across Lake Dierne towards the isle, leaving behind the grassy space by the stones of the northern shore where her husband's body lay.

Blaise drew a slow breath, and then another. He turned away from the women in the boats. Bertran de Talair came up to him.

"Are you all right?" the duke asked quietly. Blaise saw Fulk de Savaric behind Bertran, the same question in his eyes.

There was a third boat being pulled up even now on the strand, grating on the stones. They had come for Ranald, he realized. He would have to let them deal with him, and trust the clergy of Rian to do his brother honour. He had no choice in this, no time. Time was what had been taken away. His task was elsewhere now, among the living, and those he meant to kill.

"It doesn't matter how I am," he said to the duke of Talair, a little frightened by the sound of his own voice. "It really doesn't matter. Let's go."

CHAPTER 18

The battle that ended Gorhaut and Arbonne as the world had known them started a day too soon. In the tumultuous wake of the aborted parley by the lake the nearest companies of the two armies engaged, and once that happened there was nothing, short of an actual manifestation of a goddess or a god in the sky above, that could have separated them. Whatever advantages of tactics and knowledge of the terrain that Bertran de Talair might have been able to call into play, given time to prepare, were swept away in the tumult of spontaneously begun fighting that turned, almost immediately, into headlong, screaming chaos.

In such a battle, Blaise knew, enmeshed in the fighting nearest the lake, sheer numbers would almost always tell. The smaller army could only have a chance if the larger one was cowardly, or poorly led, or composed of mercenaries who might be prone to cut their losses early.

None of these things were true in the valley by Lake Dierne. He had learned, in most of a year here south of the mountain passes, that the men of Arbonne were never to be lightly dismissed—and they were fighting now for their country and on their own land. Even so, the warriors of Gorhaut had been raised and trained in a single-minded purity that exalted Corannos of Battles as the highest incarnation of the god, squarely in the tradition of the Ancients who had come to conquer, and whose arch loomed west of this valley like a brooding presence.

It had always been that way in the nations of the north, in Gorhaut, Valensa, Gotzland. The southern countries had no such fixed, warlike obsession in their make-up, and Arbonne worshipped a goddess above the god. All of these things involved nuances and subtleties to which he would have been oblivious a year ago, Blaise knew—but the primal inferno of a battlefield was no place for subtleties. They didn't matter here. Weapons mattered, and training, and the will of the men who wielded them. And, in the end, the numbers on either side.

It would take a miracle, he thought, immersing himself in battle that winter afternoon like a man with a bitter thirst to slake. Blaise had always given Corannos his faith and he was coming, amazingly, to have some sense of the very different power of Rian, but he still didn't believe in miracles. The men and women he knew—and he included himself in this—were simply not deserving of such holy intercession. He hewed and slashed with his sword, a mortal man dealing in death, knowing that he was killing men he'd fought beside at Iersen Bridge and many times before. It was only with an effort of will that he was able to keep the meaning of that from breaking through to undo him entirely.

Square on in that windswept valley the armies of two countries crashed into each other in the clear light of midwinter in Arbonne and Blaise knew that the weight of numbers was going to push them back. Back to the lake, to the edge of the castle moat, to the ending of their lives. Courage and skill and the rightness of a cause were sometimes not enough. They were seldom enough, he thought, tasting that truth like poison in his mouth: Corannos and Rian had shaped a world in which this was so. He was aware of death hovering in the blue brightness of the sky, preparing to descend, to cloak the world in darkness.

He had a sudden, searing image in his mind of night fires on Rian's Isle when their army was destroyed. He saw Signe de Barbentain, small, elegant, proud, bound and burning on one of his father's pyres, her mouth open in a soundless scream, her white hair in flames. A rage rose up in him then, a fury of denial, and the numbness that had fallen upon him like a blanket of fog when Ranald died was finally pushed away.

Blaise looked around, as if seeing the field clearly for the first time and in doing so he pushed past his inward griefs and accepted the role that lay waiting for him, the burden that had been his from the moment he'd claimed a crown.

He was commanding the left flank; with him were Rudel and Fulk and the barons and corans of southern Arbonne, including Mallin de Baude. Bertran and Valery held the centre, mostly with the men of Talair, and Thierry de Carenzu, with the corans of the east, was on the right. As best he could tell—eyes narrowed in the sunlight—they were still holding ground on all fronts. He could see Ademar in the forefront of the Gorhaut army, not far from Bertran in fact, though there were hundreds of men between them. Galbert was beside the king, a black mace in his right hand. Even as Blaise watched, his father leaned over in his saddle, huge, powerful, to hammer the mace into the skull of an Arbonnais pikeman. The man didn't even have a chance to scream as his head was crushed. He crumpled to the earth like so much spilled grain.

Men died in battle. People one had known and loved died in battles. You could not let that make you falter. They were holding ground, but they were not going to do so for much longer. Blaise, in the grip of a sudden clarity, made his decision.

And that same swift clear-headedness made him understand that this, too, was one of the things that came with the role on the world's stage that he'd claimed for himself: one gave orders in a battle such as this that could shape the destinies of nations.

It was true, it was about to be made true even now, and Blaise realized that he would have to accept that weight because his only other alternative was to withdraw into the shadows and die, betraying all those who believed in him. He made his choice then, and prepared himself to answer for it before the god when his hour came.

Drawing back sharply from the crush at the front of the lines he wheeled his horse over towards Fulk de Savaric, gesturing urgently. Fulk saw him coming and drew back as well.

"We can't do this much longer!" Rosala's brother shouted over the roar of combat. A man beside them fell, dropping his sword, clutching with both hands at an arrow in his throat.

"I know! Listen to me! Pull your men back and try to flank around. We'll hold as best we can. Get in behind Ademar if you can! Drive towards Bertran."

"You can't hold here without us!" Fulk screamed. There was blood on his face, dripping into his yellow beard. Blaise couldn't tell if it was Fulk's own blood or someone else's.

"Have to try!" he shouted. "Nothing else is going to break this up, and we can't keep fighting twice our numbers face to face."

He had another thought then and looked away from Fulk towards the front again. He saw that Rudel was looking back at him, waiting. They had fought beside each other often enough; it wasn't really a great surprise. He saw his friend arch his eyebrows in silent enquiry, and Blaise nodded his head.

"Do it!" he cried, and knew that Rudel understood. His friend turned to a mercenary beside him and spoke a one word command.

A moment later there came a fierce, ragged shout from Fulk's men of Savaric as over their heads, gripped by that coran beside Rudel, the banner of the kings of Gorhaut rose up to fly beside the standard of Arbonne. Two of us under the same banner, Blaise thought. Will it matter?

A moment later he realized, with a quickening of his heart, that it might.

"Look!" Fulk shouted, pointing.

Blaise had already seen.

"To me!" he roared, pulling at his horse's reins, driving towards the standard Rudel had raised. "In the name of Gorhaut, to me, men of Garsenc!"

And as he screamed it at the top of his voice, he saw that there were indeed corans of his family estate, from the company behind his father and Ademar, pulling back from the fight in the centre and making their way, swords uplifted in salute, towards him.

Ranald's last shouted words had been heard, Blaise realized. And these men would have watched one of their own, Bergen of Garsenc, felled by a Portezzan as he prepared to ride back to them. And sure, surely, there would be those among the corans he had grown up among who had not been filled with joy at the prospect of burning women and mutilating helpless men.

He saw his father turn, alerted by a change in the sounds behind him. Galbert visibly checked at what he saw, then his own magnificent, stentorian voice rang out over the battlefield like the voice of doom, of a god, "Stop those men!" he trumpeted. "There are traitors among us!"

Confusion reigned. Some corans turned obediently in the Gorhaut ranks and began slashing at others who, moments before, had been fighting beside them. In front of Blaise the warriors of Gorhaut turned towards the centre to see what was happening, and in the respite shaped by that brief hesitation the men of Arbonne pushed forward beside Rudel's hard-bitten mercenaries, fighting now beneath the incongruous banner of the kings of Gorhaut. Blaise saw Mallin de Baude drive forward, first man into the gap.

"Go quickly now!" he cried over his shoulder to Fulk. "We have a chance!"

With no more words spoken, Fulk de Savaric barked orders to his captains and moments later—more swiftly than Blaise could have hoped—the men of Savaric had peeled back and begun swinging south towards the lake in a desperate attempt at flanking around.

It was going to have to be swift, Blaise realized grimly, as nearly half the men in their sector melted away. Rudel looked back at him, grasped what was happening and, improbably, grinned.

"It this some sort of vengeance upon me?" he cried, leaning over in his saddle towards Blaise. "For youthful sins I have long forgotten?"

"What else could possibly be guiding me now?" Blaise shouted back, moving his horse up beside his friend. Rudel laughed aloud. Then he stopped laughing, for the warriors of Gorhaut, seeing empty space open up before them and the numbers of their foes suddenly diminished, returned, with a collective cry and a new urgency, to their own assault.

After that there was little chance to do so much as look up, let alone assert leadership on any grand scale. Battles were always like this at their peak, breaking down into islands of desperately close combat, the screams and the sweaty press of men and horses, the living and dying and dead, preventing any chance at grasping an overall picture. Blaise lost sight of Mallin. He knew Bertran must be holding in the centre, or they would by now have been under hopeless pressure from that side. He knew this had to be true, but he couldn't spare a moment to look up and see.

The world shrank to the smallest, bloodiest dimensions, to a sword lifting and falling, the scream of a dying horse, the jarring impact of his blade on armour or the different sucking feel as it bit into flesh, an awareness of Rudel on his left side and another man, a mercenary he didn't know beside him on the right. When that man fell, moments later, another coran pushed forward to take his place. It was Hirnan of Baude, and Blaise belatedly understood that they were guarding him. That he was no longer just one of the captains here. He was the man in whose name the banner above them was flying.

That was the moment, really, when Blaise was made aware of what being a king might entail. The knowledge came to him on that desperate battlefield as a weight and an exaltation, both. The rash folly he had begun in Tavernel last summer and then continued in the fall—claiming a crown at the Lussan Fair—became, in that valley north of Talair, something tangible and fully incarnate for him.

A man with an axe appeared in front of him on a dark grey horse; Rudel Correze, with an elegant, almost casual movement in the saddle, slid his sword into the man's throat between armour and helm and Blaise watched him fall. Hirnan immediately drove his horse forward to cut off the space in front of Blaise.

They were guarding him, he understood, at risk of their own lives.

In that instant, utterly calm in the midst of wild battle, with a dead man trampled into the ground at his feet, Blaise de Garsenc came into his true awareness of power. On a field of death, fighting his countrymen on the day his father had killed his brother, Blaise realized that he really did know what he wanted for Gorhaut, and that he thought he could achieve it if given but half a chance.

He did not expect, pushing forward between Rudel and Hirnan, feeling his horse's hooves unavoidably trample the body below, to live long enough to do anything about it.

Later he would remember how that last bleak thought had come to him even before he heard Rudel, his companion on so many battlefields, speak a malediction of bitter ferocity, and Blaise, looking over to the west, saw what his friend had seen and felt something colder than winter enter his heart with the awareness of treachery and of the final, inexorable revenge of the past.

On the forested ridge of land west of the valleys a company of men could be seen at the edge of the trees. A very large company, arrayed in precise rows, well armed and armoured. Above their heads were flying not one but two banners. One was a green device Blaise had come to know well in Arbonne. The other was that of the kings of Gorhaut.

Urté de Miraval had come to war, and their worst nightmares were made real as those grim, meticulous ranks began to move down the slope. Fulk de Savaric, Blaise saw, had somehow managed to fight his way around by the shore of the lake. He and his men had turned north and were even now poised to turn and strike at Ademar's centre from behind.

It didn't matter any more. They were going to be annihilated, their backs completely exposed to the men of Miraval, who were gathering speed now as they swept into the valley. If Fulk turned to face Urté they would be equally helpless before Ademar's corans. Blaise had sent those men to the worst sort of death.

With their own soon to follow. Blaise looked a long way over then—there seemed to be a respite here on their flank as men in both armies turned to see what was happening—and he picked out the fiercely battling figure of Bertran de Talair. Once he had thought the man no more than a lord who debased his rank by consorting with singers and frivolously pursuing any woman who came under his blue gaze. These things were true, there was no gainsaying them, but there was nothing in the man he saw just then that could have been called less than lordly as Bertran fought for his land in the face of betrayal and what would have to be the knowledge, bitter as poison, that Urté de Miraval was the source of their undoing.

With a horrified fascination—the way one watches a coiled snake before it strikes—Blaise saw the corans of Miraval, fifteen hundred of them, sweep down from their ridge behind the majestic figure of the duke. He saw them come up beside the first of Fulk's wheeling, scrambling men, swords and spears and axes uplifted and levelled and poised.

And he saw them go straight past those desperate men, no horse or man of Urté's company so much as breaking stride, to crash, with a sound and an impact that seemed to shake the earth, full into the rear of the army of Gorhaut.

In the instant before that impact, just as he realized, with a wild surging in his heart, exactly what was happening, Blaise heard his father's voice rise up again—to tower like a presence over the valley, crying the name of the god in his need. There was no answer though, no reply from Corannos in the cold blue sky. Only the huge thunder of hooves on hard earth and the screams of terrified men as the racing corans of Miraval smashed into the rear of Ademar's men, with the warriors of Savaric turning swiftly to join them and Bertran's men coming forward from the other side, roaring in exultation, to pincer them mercilessly.

"He fooled them!" Rudel screamed in Blaise's ear. "He fooled them completely!" It was true, Blaise saw: the disruption in the Gorhaut ranks caused by the first Garsenc defections earlier had turned into utter chaos. Corans of Garsenc Castle, men he had known all his life, were joining with Fulk de Savaric now, closing in upon Ademar's own guards even as he watched.

"Come on!" Blaise cried. In front of them the men on their flank were falling back in panic, fearing to be cut off. Blaise drove his horse recklessly forward into the gap between the armies. It seemed to him as if something oppressive had been lifted from his shoulders, a weight from the darkness of the past. He felt light, invulnerable, and he wanted Ademar. He didn't even look back to see if anyone was following him. He knew now that they would be; he was their leader, and a chance, a hope, a promise like a lantern's glow seen from afar in a night forest, had appeared for them where none could ever have been foreseen.

He was driving in to the centre, straight towards Ademar, and so was actually quite close when he saw Duke Urté de Miraval meet the king of Gorhaut in the midst of the roiling tumult.

Ademar feels as if he might actually choke in the heat of his fury. It is hard to breathe. Even with the chill of the winter afternoon he is sweltering in his armour and helm. He knows it is rage that is doing this to him. He is almost dizzied by wrath. First the Garsenc betrayals: it has always been the de Garsenc who have balked him, he thinks, slashing savagely at a Miraval foot-soldier, almost severing the man's head with the blow. Swearing, he drags his sword free. He cannot believe, he cannot believe, that with victory so easy, so assured, those Garsenc corans have been mad enough to turn upon their own ranks. Surely any sane man with a sense of self-preservation would have known better than to rally to that doomed pretender's pennon!

That was before he realized that Fulk de Savaric—another traitor, another man who ought to have been by his side! — had somehow managed to bring his company around behind him. There had been some real danger there, and Ademar was snapping urgent commands when one of his captains pointed triumphantly upwards to the west, and the king of Gorhaut, looking there, had felt his choler recede, eased and cooled by something near to joy. He had never been afraid, he was not a man inclined to fears, but with the sight of the Miraval corans on that ridge beneath the banner of Gorhaut, Ademar laughed aloud, tasting the sweetness to come.

He had a few moments to think that way, to watch the well-trained men of Duke Urté start smoothly down the slope, gaining speed, bringing the end of this war with them and the final exaltation of Gorhaut.

Then it all went wrong; wildly, desperately wrong.

There was one moment, when Urté de Miraval whipped his warhorse straight past the corans of Savaric, when Ademar did know fear—just for an instant. Then he felt the impact of those thundering Miraval horsemen as they smashed into the rear of his ranks, driving men back before them like so many helpless children.

Now, buffeted in the midst of a nightmare chaos, rage is foaming like a river in flood through the king of Gorhaut. Ademar hears his High Elder trumpet his call to the god and he curses in his heart the very name of Galbert de Garsenc who has brought him to this, who persuaded him that the duke of Miraval, whose overtures to them in the past few days were direct and explicit, was a necessary man to enlist in their cause, to act as first regent of Arbonne after their conquest.

It was a trap. It is clear now that everything Urté did was a trap, and they are in the jaws of it, between the corans of Talair and Miraval, with Fulk de Savaric and the renegades of Garsenc coming hard against them. Ademar lashes his horse westward, screaming in fury, and as men fall back before him he comes swiftly up to the man he needs to kill now, right now, immediately, before this battle turns hopelessly against them. He is aware, vaguely, that his own corans have also fallen back, that a ring of men has formed around the two of them, as if even in the midst of war there is a sense that this combat must take place. And so Ademar of Gorhaut begins his second single-challenge of this day.

Wordlessly, for he is beyond words now and none could be heard in any case, he swings his sword in a huge, sweeping arc towards the helmeted head of the duke of Miraval. He misses, as Urté, unexpectedly quick for a man of his size and past sixty years of age, ducks beneath the blade. A second later Ademar rocks wildly in the saddle as he absorbs a colossal blow on his own helm. He feels the world go momentarily black. His helmet has been knocked askew; he cannot see. There is a sticky, warm running of blood down the side of his face.

Roaring like a man beset by furies, Ademar hurls away his shield and rips his helm off with both hands, feeling a tearing and then a fierce pain at his left ear. He throws the helmet at de Miraval's face and then the king of Gorhaut follows that up with the hardest blow with a sword he has ever delivered in all his days.

The descending blade catches the armour of the duke just where it shields neck and shoulder and it drives straight down through the mesh, biting deeply into flesh. Ademar sees, through the blurring and darkening of his own vision, how the duke of Miraval lurches heavily over to one side in his saddle, and knowing the cursed, deceiving old man is falling, is as good as dead already, he rips free his blade, nonetheless, to blot him out of life.

The king of Gorhaut never does see the arrow that kills him.

The arrow that comes down out of the empty heavens above to take him in the eye—exactly as his own father was killed two years ago among the ice and the piled bodies by Iersen Bridge.

The king of Gorhaut, dead instantly, never does see that the shaft of that arrow is a deep crimson hue, like blood. Nor does he ever realize, as others do soon after, coming up to where the dead king lies on the ground beside the mortally wounded figure of Urté de Miraval, that the feathers with which that arrow has been fletched are—a thing without known precedent—the feathers of an owl, crimson-hued as well.

Men see these things and cannot understand them, nor can they comprehend whence that terrifying, death-dealing arrow might have been loosed, to have fallen, as it truly seems, straight down upon the king from the sky. Corans in both armies can be seen to be making the warding sign against darkness and the unknown.

The king of Gorhaut is dead of a crimson arrow fallen from the heavens, fletched with the feathers of an owl. Even the warriors of Gorhaut know what bird is sacred to Rian. The tale of an immortal goddess's vengeance for her servants defiled and slain begins to sweep immediately across the valley. It will not stop there. The story has a long way to travel. Such tales, of the deaths of kings, always do.

After that it became easy, in fact. Easier than it ought to have been, Blaise thought. At Iersen Bridge, King Duergar had died yet Gorhaut had still prevailed on a bitter field. The death of a king need not mean utter disarray among the ranks of his army.

That afternoon, though, it did. Blaise could have offered many reasons why, and any and all of those reasons might have been a part of it, but the truth—brilliantly clear in the afternoon light—was that the army of Gorhaut was undone from the time Urté de Miraval appeared against them and that red arrow came down to kill their king.

Blaise, battling in towards Bertran, began to recognize individual men in both armies nearer to the centre of the fighting. Sunset, he had said to Ademar. He had been denied that battle after all. Looking around, he remembered that there was someone else on this field he wanted for his own. Then he saw that man, some distance away, and realized that this, too, was going to be denied him.

Bertran de Talair came up to the Portezzan, Borsiard d'Andoria, on a tummock of grass in the midst of the sideslipping centre of the battle. It was clear that words were exchanged, but Blaise was too far away to hear them. Then he watched Bertran, who had set out on the road of a fighter more than twenty years ago after Aelis de Miraval had died in her husband's castle, dispatch the lord of Andoria with a precision that almost made a mockery of the notion of single combat. Two blows on the forehand, a feint, and then, slipping past the parry, a straight-ahead thrust that took Borsiard in the throat. It was more an execution than a duel, and when it was over Blaise's first thought was that Lucianna had just been widowed again.

His second thought, as he saw the Andorians begin, predictably, to throw down their weapons and hastily submit themselves as prisoners to the nearest of Bertran's men, was that he had something to do now that was going to be harder than any combat had been. He looked quickly around for Rudel and realized that his friend was no longer by his side. He had no time to wonder about that. Even as he watched, the battle of Lake Dierne was becoming a slaughter.

And he had to stop it. Stop it, even though the men of Arbonne could see the severed heads spitted on pikes at the back of the Gorhaut ranks, could still see what a hideous ruin had been made of the singer named Aurelian, and would all be carrying within them anguished images of women burning through the north of their land. They would not be inclined to clemency and moderation in this moment when certain defeat had turned into victory. Every man in the army of Arbonne would know what his fate and that of his family would have been had Gorhaut triumphed here.

Bertran was going to be no help to him now, Blaise saw. The duke had turned from his ruthless dispatching of Borsiard and, moving straight past the surrendering Portezzans, was cutting a deadly swath through the nearest men of Gorhaut. Valery, beside him, was doing exactly the same thing.

Urging his horse after them, Blaise lifted his voice over the screams of the dying and the fierce, wild shouts of the corans of Arbonne: "Enough!" he cried. "Bertran, it is enough!"

Valery slowed, and turned. The duke did not hear him or, if he did, paid no heed at all. Over to his left, behind the Gorhaut centre, Blaise saw Fulk de Savaric lift his head to his cry, raise a hand in response, and then turn to relay urgent orders to his men. The corans of Miraval were still attacking, driving in to meet Bertran, with panic-stricken soldiers of Gorhaut spinning and wheeling between them, implacable foes on all sides now, and men from their own ranks gone over to their enemies.

Blaise came up to the nearest of the Garsenc corans, the ones who had rallied to him when Rudel first raised the banner. "No more killing!" he ordered the nearest of them. "Make them throw down their weapons! They won't be killed if they do!" He was almost certain that was true, but not entirely so. There was a mood in the army of Arbonne that was near to being out of control.

He moved on, churning in the wake of the duke of Talair. He understood very well what had happened to Bertran, how battle-fury could overmaster the most clear-sighted of men—and he also knew that Bertran de Talair had more reason than a man should ever need to be killing men of Gorhaut just now.

In the end it was Thierry de Carenzu, over on the right flank, nearest the severed heads and the maimed, dead troubadour, who had the horns sounded to put a halt to the slaughter of men.

It was Thierry who did it, Blaise would always remember that; he himself was of Gorhaut, he could not have halted the army of Arbonne that day.

Even Bertran pulled up his horse when he heard the high clear sweet notes of those horns rising above the valley. It was music of a sort, among the dying and the dead. Blaise, forcing his way forward, was finally able to catch up with him.

"Bertran stop, you must stop. These are only soldiers now. Farmers and villagers. Ademar is dead, it is over!" The duke of Talair turned then to look at him and Blaise was sobered and chilled by what he saw in the other man's eyes.

"But I did not kill him," Bertran said slowly, as if in a trance. There was something terrible in the words.

Drawing a deep breath, Blaise said carefully, "Nor did I, with as much cause, perhaps. It must not be allowed to matter, Bertran, for either of us. We have won. And look, the men of Garsenc are forcing the others to surrender."

It was true. The soldiers of Gorhaut, the crusading army of the god, could be seen throwing down their weapons even as they spoke. Blaise saw Thierry riding towards them. He shouted as he approached: "We must not kill unarmed men, Bertran."

"Will you tell me why? I seem to have forgotten." Bertran's eyes were still wild, lost.

"No you haven't," said Valery from behind his cousin. They turned to him; his own features were calm again, though Blaise could see that that control was costing Valery a great deal. "You haven't forgotten at all. You just want to forget. So do I. Oh, Bertran, so do I, but if we do that we become what we have just defeated."

Blaise had said the same thing once, in the serenity of a council chamber. This was a battlefield, and there was a kind of madness in the blue eyes of the man Valery was addressing. Bertran stared coldly for a long moment at his cousin. Then Blaise saw him shake his head several times, as if trying to slip free of something. He understood; he understood better than Bertran could have known, how hard it was to move past battle-rage to anything else at all.

But when Bertran turned back to him and to Thierry beside him, Blaise saw that his expression was one he knew.

"Very well," said the duke of Talair, "we will accept their surrender. There is a last thing that is still to be done, though it might grieve you, Blaise, I don't know." He paused only briefly. "Where is the High Elder of Gorhaut?"

Amazingly, Blaise had managed to push his father from his mind; or perhaps, given all that had now broken into fragments in the world, it wasn't so amazing after all. He turned towards the knot of men west of them, and standing in their midst—unhorsed but towering above even the tallest man there—he saw his father.

Galbert had removed his helm, or had had it taken from him. He stood bareheaded in the light of late afternoon. There was blood on his face and on his blue robe. A space had been cleared around him and, looking, Blaise realized belatedly where Rudel had gone. His friend was standing with Galbert inside that space, sword drawn, calmly levelling it at the man who, a little more than half a year ago, had offered him a quarter of a million in gold to kill Bertran de Talair.

This was, Blaise understood finally, one more score being settled, as the sun moved west in the winter sky. He wondered why his father had not killed himself rather than be given over in this fashion to his enemies. It was only a brief thought though, that one. Galbert was not a man to take such a way out, and it was, in any event, an action forbidden by the god.

It seemed to have grown quiet in the valley. Some clouds appeared in the northwest. He watched them move across the sun and then away. It was colder now, late in the day, and in the aftermath of so much exertion. It seemed to be over though; the clash of weapons had stopped. Men were moaning, crying out in pain from many parts of the field. That would go on a long time, Blaise knew. He shivered.

"I have a cloak for you." It was Hirnan. Blaise turned to look at the Arbonnais coran who had been guarding him all afternoon. They had gone to Rian's Island in the sea once, in springtime, to fetch a poet back. It had begun there; for Blaise it seemed to have begun there with the High Priestess in the wood, the dark hollows of her eyes, the white owl on her shoulder.

After a moment he nodded his head and Hirnan draped a heavy cloak of a dark purple hue over Blaise's shoulders. Blaise wondered where he'd got it; purple was the colour of kings. He had a suspicion though, a guess as to whence that cloak had come. And that thought made him turn for a moment, away from his father in the ring of swords, to look briefly at Thierry, and then away from him and all the others, back towards the isle in the lake where the women were.

It was just possible, now that the fighting had stopped, to make out individual figures in the valley across the water. Standing with others on the northern shore of the isle, Ariane could see her husband; from the way he sat his horse it seemed he was all right. Not far from Thierry she watched Hirnan of Baude lay the purple cloak she had entrusted to him over Blaise de Garsenc's shoulders, and she began to cry.

There was a great deal of weeping taking place now; they did not yet know how many had died, or who. The countess was not with them here on the strand; she had joined the priestesses and the priests in the temple for a service of thanksgiving. Ariane knew she ought to be with them, but her thoughts just now, since the blowing of the horns, were entirely of this world.

The small boats were crossing continuously back and forth across the choppy water; they had been doing so all through the battle. The last messenger had told them that the king of Gorhaut was dead, of a crimson arrow in the eye. No one knew who had shot that arrow, the priest said, kneeling on the sands of the goddess. The feathers, he said, had been those of an owl. The arrow had dropped straight down from the sky.

He had also told them that Urté de Miraval, who had saved them in the end, despite everything, was dying, if he was not already dead. And these last tiding, for Ariane, meant more than they did to anyone else on the isle or, indeed, anyone else alive.

They meant that the term of an oath she had kept since the end of her childhood was over, a secret she had sworn, to keep was hers to offer to the world. And it was because of this that she was weeping on that shore, looking north to the valley, at the figure of her husband in his red surcoat and the tall man cloaked in purple beside him, and at the third, smaller man with the two of them, the one who had, so many years ago, surprised a travelling party among the elm trees she could see even now beside the arch to the west.

She moved away from the others on the strand, withdrawing into memory. There was another boat coming with even newer tidings now; the other women moved anxiously towards it. Ariane walked a distance west instead and stood alone, gazing at the other shore, the one nearest Miraval.

It had been winter then, too, she remembered, that night twenty-three years ago, with a rain wind lashing the trees and lake when she came to that shore in the dark of night. Twenty-three years, and oh, it was as yesterday if she let her mind go back. It was as fierce and hard and terrible as if she were standing there now, thirteen years old, an oath newly sworn, sobbing wildly with grief and terror as she stood on that strand in the shelter of the signal hut.

She had been a child when that night had begun. A quick, curious, overly indulged young girl. She had not been young any longer when that long night was done and she watched the pale sun finally come up across the lake and listened to water dripping mournfully from the trees all around.

She had kept her promise. All these years she had kept the promise sworn to her cousin Aelis, whom she had loved. She could see herself so clearly even now: the thin, shivering girl riding in a wild storm, white face and black hair lost in the darkness except when the lightning flashed. And she had been crying, crying in the cruel lashing of the rain. She was crying again now, all these long years after, weeping for innocence lost, for the dead of that night and the awful burden she had been given then and had carried all these years.

After a long time Ariane wiped her eyes and squared her shoulders and turned away from that western shore and its weight of memory. She was the duchess of Carenzu, queen of the Court of Love in Arbonne, a woman of power in the world, and there was a great deal to be done. Starting with the ending of a silence. Aelis, she thought, whispered it to herself actually; only the name, nothing more than that, realizing as she did so that it was a kind of letting go. That almost brought her tears again, but she held them back this time.

She went along the curving path to the temple and waited there for the slow, beautifully chanted service to come to an end. Then, after it was done, in the privacy of a small room beside the dome, with a necessary economy of words but as much gentleness as she could command amid the fevered emotions of that day, she told the first person who needed to know.

Afterwards, going back to the strand alone, she had herself rowed across the water into the wind, wrapping herself in her crimson cloak against the chill at the end of day, and once ashore she went looking for the second person who had to be told before the whole world knew.

He had left the valley by then, they told her, and so, with time only for a brief embrace of her husband and a whispered word, she took horse to go after him. On the way, as she realized where it was he had gone, where she was following, she began to cry again, unable to help herself, the tears cold on her cheeks as the sun sank lower in the west, red as a fire.

Blaise had gone with Bertran and Thierry to where Urté de Miraval lay dying on the ground, a folded cloak under his head and another one, heavy and lined with fur, covering his body. Urté was very pale, and Blaise saw at a glance that the cloths they had used to try to stanch his bleeding were soaked through. He had seen this before; it would not be long.

Urté was still conscious, though, and there was a hard glint of triumph in his eyes. Thierry hesitated beside him and then stepped carefully back and away so that Bertran de Talair could stand alone next to Urté. The silence that followed was taut as a drawn bowstring.

Another hesitation—nothing was being done easily here, Blaise knew—and then Bertran knelt beside the older man.

"We have won," he said calmly. "Your decision to join us after all was what turned the battle."

Urté de Miraval laughed then, a terrible sound, and the movement started another flowing of blood. In obvious pain he shook his head. "After all? You don't understand, do you? There was no decision to make. We staged that scene in Barbentain when I walked out."

Blaise felt his mouth fall open. He closed it with a snap. He heard Thierry de Carenzu make a small sound.

"We?" said Bertran.

"The countess and I. I advised her the night before to name you leader of the army. We agreed that I would storm from the room and contact Ademar the next day."

"Oh, sweet Rian, I don't believe it." It was Thierry, the words like a prayer.

"Why not?" said the dying man, prosaically. "We were going to be outnumbered, we had to devise some trap for them. It seems that it took two of the older generation to do it. The younger ones didn't have any ideas at all, did you?" He did not smile.

There was another silence.

"None at all," said Bertran at length. "I am astonished the countess didn't tell me."

"I asked her not to," Urté said. "I told her you might alter your strategy, knowing what was coming. Make a move that might have alerted them that something was amiss. That was the reason I gave her."

"It wasn't really the reason, was it?"

Urté de Miraval did smile then. "Of course it wasn't," he said.

Bertran slowly shook his head. "As it happens, I had no strategies today. The battle started too soon."

"I know. That is why we were late."

Silence again. The westering sun sent a reddened light along the valley. Urté made a sudden, wry face that Blaise knew was that of a strong man wrestling with great pain.

"What shall I say to you?" asked Bertran de Talair.

A gasp that might have been laughter again. "Spare me," Urté whispered. But a moment later Blaise saw him turn his head a little so he was looking directly at Bertran. Urté opened his mouth and then closed it, as if wrestling with something inwardly, but then, very clearly, he said, "I did not kill her. Or the child."

Bertran became absolutely still, his face white as the dying man's.

"I took the child from her," Urté said, his eyes holding Bertran's, "after she told me… what she told me. I took it downstairs to the kitchen where there was a fire. It was very cold, there was a storm that night. You weren't here, you will not remember. I had the priestess thrown out of the castle. I left the child with the women in the kitchen. I didn't want Aelis to have him… after what she'd said, and I wasn't going to rear him as my own. I might have decided to kill him, I might have sent him away where he'd never be known or found. I was not thinking clearly and I knew it; I needed time. That child, if he had been mine, was heir to Miraval and Barbentain both, he would have ruled Arbonne."

"But instead?" Bertran's voice was so low it could barely be heard. Blaise saw that he had laced his fingers tightly together.

"But instead Aelis was dead when I went back to her room. I was going up to tell her she would never see her child, that no one would ever know who he was, even if I chose to let him love. I wanted to… hurt her so much for what she had done. She cheated me, though. She was already dead when I returned. When I went back down again, after, I had them give me the child. I took him alone into the great hall and sat by the fire, holding him. I could see he was not strong. It wasn't very long before he died. They rarely live, born so soon. He was two months early."

"I know. That's why I wasn't here." Silence again. Blaise could hear the wind whistling down the valley and the cries of wounded and dying men. Overhead, very high, a flock of birds cut across the sun, heading south, late in the year. He could see that some of the priests and priestesses had crossed from the isle to tend to the injured, fires were being lit on the battlefield. He shivered again, in his heavy cloak.

"You might have told me this," Bertran said, finally.

"Why?" Urté" said. "To ease your mind? Why would I have wanted to do that? I was happy to have you wondering if he was alive—that meant you could never kill me, didn't it?"

That thin smile again. But after a moment his expression altered and he added, "You wouldn't have believed me in any case. You know that."

Slowly Bertran shook his head. "No. I wouldn't have. I was almost certain you had killed them both."

"I know. Almost certain, not quite. I enjoyed your thinking that. I hope it was in you like poison all these years."

"It was. Like poison. All these years."

"She was my wife," said Urté de Miraval. "What did you think I would do when I found out?"

Bertran was very still, his head lowered. When he spoke, it was in a voice scraped raw. "I loved her. I have never stopped loving her. You never did, my lord. For you this has been about nothing but pride all these years."

With a tremendous effort Urté managed to lift himself on one elbow. "That would have been enough," he said. "More than enough. But you are wrong again. You have always been wrong about that, you and everyone else." He paused to draw a difficult, gasping breath; blood was seeping from his wound. "It was Aelis who didn't love me, not the other way around. I could never write songs, you see. I am glad we have won. Rian shelter this land of Arbonne forever in her arms."

Slowly then, with a soldier's grace and considerable courage in the face of mortal pain, he lowered himself to the cold ground, and his eyes closed as he died.

Bertran remained on his knees beside the body for a long time. No one else moved or spoke. When Bertran finally rose, he turned to Thierry de Carenzu.

"May I leave what remains with you?" he asked, with toneless formality.

"Of course," said the other man.

They watched as the duke of Talair walked back to where his horse was being held by a coran. Bertran mounted up without assistance and rode slowly from the valley, west, towards the avenue of trees that led to the arch.

Valery made an awkward movement, as if minded to follow but then checked himself. Blaise, looking over at him, saw a huge, vivid grief stamped on the coran's normally calm features. He walked over to stand close by Valery, not touching him, but wanting to be near. Then, a moment later, he realized that Thierry was looking at him with unexpected compassion and he realized what was left to come. Blaise closed his eyes, and it was Valery who reached out and touched his shoulder briefly.

Blaise looked at Thierry de Carenzu. "Have I the right to ask that it be done cleanly?" he said quietly.

"It will be," said Ariane's husband. "For you, and for ourselves, because of what we are, what we refuse to become."

Blaise nodded his head. Thierry turned and Blaise followed him across the darkening field to where his father was still standing, ringed by men with swords.

"I am holding this man," said Rudel Correze, speaking clearly and with unwonted gravity as they approached, "for the judgment of Arbonne."

"Final judgment," said Thierry, "belongs to Rian and Corannos, not to us, but punishment is, indeed, our duty now. Not for acts of war. Ransom and release could be granted if it were only those. For what has been done to the priestesses, though, this man must surely die."

No one spoke. Only the cries of the wounded and the sound of the wind marred the stillness. There were fires all over the valley now, more for warmth than anything else; the light was still clear though the day was waning.

"Will you deny that the burning of women was by your command?" Thierry asked of the man in the ring.

"Hardly," said Galbert de Garsenc.

No more than that. The High Elder stood, blood on his smooth, handsome face and on his blue robes, surrounded by mortal foes at the end of his life, and it seemed to his younger son as if he had, even now, nothing but contempt for any man here.

"Out of respect for your son, we will grant you a death by arrows," Thierry said stolidly. Not far away, on his wheeled platform, Aurelian the singer had been unbound. Someone had covered his body with a cloak.

"I would like," said Galbert de Garsenc, "a few moments with my son before I die." Blaise felt his mouth go dry. There was a silence. "This is a last request," added the High Elder of Gorhaut.

Thierry turned to Blaise, so did Rudel, concern in the eyes of both, a desire to shelter him from this. Blaise shook his head. He cleared his throat. "I believe it is a fair request. One that we can honour." He looked carefully at Thierry. "If that is acceptable to you?"

Thierry nodded slowly. Rudel still looked as if he would protest, and Blaise heard Valery behind him murmur something fierce under his breath, but the duke of Carenzu, with a wave of his arm, motioned the circle of guards to draw back.

When they had done so Blaise walked forward. The ring of men parted to let him through.

"It seems," said his father calmly as he came up, "that I misjudged Urté de Miraval." He might have been discussing the wrong track a hunt had taken, or some mistaken crop rotation on the Garsenc lands.

"He was hardly likely to join you after women were burned."

Galbert shrugged. "Was that it, do you think? Did he change his mind, or was it planned?"

"Planned," said Blaise. "By him and the countess. No one else knew."

"Clever, then," said his father. He sighed. "Ah, well, at least I have lived long enough to know my son will rule in Gorhaut."

Blaise laughed bitterly. "With so much aid and nurture from you."

"Well, of course," said Galbert. "I have been working towards this for years."

Blaise stopped laughing. "That," he said harshly, "is a lie." Something hard and awkward seemed suddenly to have lodged itself in his chest. He swallowed with difficulty.

"Is it?" said Galbert placidly. "You are supposed to be the clever one. Think, Blaise."

He couldn't remember the last time his father had called him by name.

"What is there to think about?" he snapped. "You showed your devotion to your family with Rosala and now here with Ranald. You killed your son."

"I gave him life and I took it away," said Galbert, still mildly, "though I was sorry to have to do it. He was worthless as a man until the end, but he was about to undo my one chance to cleanse this land."

"Of course. That is what you have been working towards all these years."

"Among other things. I would hardly have been worth much myself if I had only one purpose in life. I wanted Arbonne scourged if it could be done, I wanted a son of mine on the throne of Gorhaut if it could be done. I never expected to have both, but I did see reason to hope for one or the other."

"You are lying," Blaise said again, hearing the note of desperation in his voice and fighting to control it. "Why are you doing this? We know what you wanted: you intended me to follow you into the service of the god."

"But naturally. You were the younger son, where else should I place you? Ranald was to become king." Galbert shook his head, as if Blaise were being unexpectedly obtuse. "Then you balked me, not for the first time or the last, and a little later it became clear that Ranald was… what he was."

"You made him that."

Again Galbert shrugged. "If he could not deal with me he could not have dealt with kingship. You seemed to have found a way to do both. After I managed to drive you away with the Treaty of Iersen Bridge."

Blaise felt himself losing colour. "You are now going to tell me—"

"That I had a number of reasons for that treaty. Yes, I am. I did. Think, Blaise. Money for this war and a dagger at Ademar's back among the dispossessed of the north. And I finally made you leave Gorhaut, to go where you could become a focus for those who might oppose Ademar. And me," he added as an afterthought.

"Incidentally," Galbert went on, still in that same flat, calm manner, "you are going to need a great deal of money to retake the northern marches, especially after our losses today. Fortunately Lucianna d'Andoria is a widow again. I was planning to have Borsiard killed here if no one in your army managed to do it. I saw her as a possible bride for Ranald if events fell out that way. You'll have to marry her now, which I know will make you almost as happy as it makes her father. With his daughter a queen he might even forego bringing her home to his own bed at intervals." Galbert smiled; Blaise felt slightly faint. "Watch him though, watch Massena Delonghi closely. Between the Correze and Delonghi banks, however, you should be able to deal with Valensa withholding the rest of the payments they owe by the terms of the treaty."

Blaise felt his head beginning to ache, as if he were absorbing blows.

"You are lying, aren't you? Tell me why? What does it gain you now, at this point, to try to make me believe you planned all of this?"

"I didn't plan it all, Blaise, don't be a fool. I am a mortal servant of Corannos, not a god. After you left home for Gotzland and Portezza I thought Fulk de Savaric and some of the other northern barons would send men after you with an offer of kingship. I didn't expect you to step forward yourself the way you did. I didn't know you had so much… rashness in you. I did consider that you might end up in Arbonne at some point, if only because you knew I would be coming here, but I didn't know how much… influence they would have on you. That, I will admit, has been a surprise."

"Ademar," said Blaise, still struggling. "You did everything for him. You even tried to give him Rosala."

His father's expression was contemptuous. "I did nothing for Ademar but offer him rope for his hanging. He was never worth more than that. He was an instrument that would let me take Arbonne for the god. That is all." He shrugged again. "We seem to have failed in that. It is my grief as I die. I really thought we could not lose. In which case I expected the Correze boy would take you away from here-back to Portezza, and in time I might yet achieve both halves of my dream. Ademar would never have been able to hold Arbonne—not after what I intended to do here." His beautiful voice, thought Blaise, was so seductively lucid. "As for Rosala, really Blaise—that was to goad the barons further against him—and you, if you needed a further spur, and it was only to be after she'd borne her Garsenc child. Tell me, the boy, Cadar, he is yours isn't he?"

Blaise felt his hands beginning to shake. "Will you soil everything you touch in your life, even at the end? Can nothing be clean?"

"My death, or so I have been promised," said Galbert drily. His mouth quirked. "Come, Blaise, if it isn't yours I will die wondering whose it is. I did some investigating after Ranald had been married some time without an heir. I discovered that in all the years he was King's Champion, with women clawing each other in their lust for his bed, he never fathered a single child that I could trace. You will remember that my brother failed to produce an heir either. There may be a flaw in our seed, though I seem to have escaped it. Did you?"

Blaise looked down at his shaking hands. He said, "Nothing ever mattered except the goals, did it? Nothing had meaning in itself. We were all tools, every one of us, Ademar, Rosala, Ranald and I, even when we were boys."

His father made a flicking gesture of dismissal. "What did you want, Blaise? Lullabies? A pat on the back? A doting father's grip on the shoulder when you did well?"

"Yes," said Blaise then, as evenly as he could. "Yes, that is what I suppose I wanted."

For the first time Galbert seemed to hesitate. "You have managed all right without them."

"Yes," said Blaise again, taking a breath and letting it out slowly. "I managed." He looked at his father. "Had we leisure to discuss it I might tell you something of my own sense of things, but I don't think I want to." He paused. He felt very calm now. "Is there more, father?"

A silence, then slowly Galbert shook his head. For another moment they looked at each other, then Blaise turned and went from the ring. The soldiers parted to make way for him. He saw that a company of archers in the crimson colours of Carenzu had come up to join the others now. Beyond them he saw his horse, with Hirnan holding the reins. He walked over and mounted up and began riding away. He didn't look back.

Behind him he heard Rudel's voice asking a question, and Thierry responding, very clearly, then he heard an order spoken and he heard the arrows sing.

CHAPTER 19

Blaise was unaware for the first part of his ride that he was following the same path Bertran had taken leaving the field. Heading west towards the reddening disc of the sun, he came to the avenue of elms that led to the arch. He stopped and looked back then at the fires dotting the battlefield. He felt very strange. It came to him, almost as an incidental fact, that he was alone in the world now.

It was then, glancing down, that he saw the fresh tracks of a single horse and realized that Bertran had come this way before him. The duke would be alone now, too, he thought, in a different way and yet the same. Ariane had said something about that a long time ago: Bertran had lost, with Urté's death, the passion of hatred that had ordered and shaped his life for more than twenty years. Hatred, Blaise thought, could be as powerful as love, though the singers might try to tell you otherwise.

He twitched the reins of his horse and started forward again. He passed under the dwarfing curve of the arch, briefly chilled, even with his cloak, as he entered its shade, then he came out on the other side again into the fading light of the sun. Overhead another flock of birds was flying south on the wind. His father was dead. His brother was dead. He was likely to be crowned king of Gorhaut very soon. Cadar Ranald de Savaric was probably his son. He had been struggling with that thought since autumn. It was not a thing to be told. He knew Rosala well enough to know she never would.

And that, predictably, carried his thoughts to Aelis de Miraval who had died so long ago, and for love of whom two strong men had twisted and ruined their lives. He rode on through the silence, following the survivor of those two men through the bare winter vineyards with the autumn grapes long harvested and the first buds a long way off. The vines gave way to grass eventually and a forest rose up before him as he rode and in time Blaise came to a small charcoal-burner's cabin at the edge of that wood and saw a horse he knew tethered outside.

Sitting in the doorway, where a woman might sit at needle and thread at day's ending to catch the last of the good light, was Bertran de Talair.

The duke looked up as Blaise dismounted. His expression registered surprise but was not unwelcoming. Blaise had not been sure about that. He saw the flask of seguignac clasped in Bertran's hands. Memory came with that, too, clear as a temple bell. A stairway in Castle Baude. The moons passing from the narrow window. That flask passing back and forth between the two of them. Blaise brooding upon Lucianna Delonghi in bitterness, Bertran speaking of a woman dead more than twenty years and not of the one whose bed he had just left.

The duke saw him looking at the flask and lifted it. "There's a little left," he said.

"My father is dead," said Blaise. He hadn't expected to say that. "Thierry's archers."

Bertran's expressive face grew still. "There isn't enough seguignac for that, Blaise. Not nearly enough for the needs of this day, but sit down, sit with me."

Blaise walked across the grass and sat down beside the duke in the doorway. He took the offered flask and drank. The clean fire ran through him. He drank again, feeling the warmth, and handed back the flask.

"It is over?" Bertran asked.

Blaise nodded. "They will all have surrendered by now."

Bertran looked at him, his blue eyes ringed by dark circles. "You were trying to stop me there at the end, weren't you. I heard you calling my name."

Blaise nodded again.

"I don't think I would have stopped. I don't think I could have, if Thierry hadn't blown the horns."

"I know. I understand."

"I'm not very proud of that." Bertran took another short pull at the flask.

"This isn't a time to be judging yourself. Women were burned. And the two troubadours…»

Bertran closed his eyes and Blaise fell silent. The duke looked up again after a moment and handed back the flask. Blaise cradled it, not drinking. The seguignac was already making him light-headed.

"I have a question for you," said Bertran de Talair.

"Yes?"

"Do you have any great objection if I ask your brother's wife to marry me? If Rosala will have me, I would like to raise Cadar as my own, as heir to Talair."

A remarkable sensation of warmth began to spread through Blaise, and he knew it wasn't coming from the seguignac this time. He looked over at Bertran and smiled for what was surely the first time in that long day. "I have no say at all in what Rosala does, but nothing I can imagine would please me more."

"Really? Do you think she will accept?" Bertran's tone was suddenly diffident.

Blaise laughed aloud. It was a strange sound in that space at the edge of the woods. "You are asking me for guidance on a woman's thoughts?"

For a moment Bertran was still, and then he too laughed, more softly. After that there was silence again for a time.

"My father," said Blaise finally, needing to say it, "my father told me that Ademar was only his tool for destroying Rian in Arbonne. That his other goal all these years had been to place me on the throne of Gorhaut."

Bertran was still again, in that manner he had of careful, focused gravity. "That does not surprise me," he said.

Blaise sighed and looked down at the flask in his hands. "I would rather not accept it as true."

"I can see that. Don't tell anyone else then. This need only be ours."

"Which doesn't make it less true, that he was shaping even this."

Bertran shrugged. "Partly, not entirely. He couldn't have guessed what would happen to you in Arbonne."

"He admitted that, actually."

"You see? Blaise, we are shaped by so many different things it frightens me sometimes." Bertran hesitated. "This was the cabin where I used to meet Aelis. Where my son was conceived."

It was Blaise's turn to grow still. He understood, and was deeply moved by the awareness, that Bertran was offering this to him as a truth of the heart in exchange for his own.

"I'm sorry," Blaise said. "I didn't set out to follow you, I just saw your tracks. Shall I go?"

Bertran shook his head. "You might give me that, though, if you aren't drinking." Blaise handed over the flask. Bertran lifted it, the metal glinting in the light, and finished the last of the seguignac. "I don't think," he said, "that I can possibly deal with anything more today than I already have."

A moment later they heard the sound of another horse approaching and looked up to see Ariane riding alone towards them through the winter grass.

She came up to where they were sitting together in the doorway of the cabin. She did not move to dismount. They could see that she had been weeping though she was not doing so now. She took a ragged breath and let it slowly out.

"I swore an oath to my cousin Aelis the night she died," she said without greeting, without preamble. Blaise saw that she was controlling herself only with a great effort; he felt Bertran grow rigid at his side. "An oath from which I have been released by Urté's death today."

She was looking at the duke, Blaise saw, and so he made to rise and said again, "I should leave. This is not something I have a right to—"

"No," said Ariane, her voice bloodless, her exquisite features nearly white. "This does concern you, as it happens." Even as she was speaking, Bertran laid a hand on Blaise's knee to keep him from standing. "Stay with me," said the duke.

And so he stayed, he sat in a charcoal-burner's cabin doorway at the cold end of a day of death with wind blowing past them, pushing Ariane's black hair back from her face, stirring the tall grass behind her, and he heard her say, in that voice from which all resonance seemed to have bled away, leaving only the flat assertion of the words: "There is something I can now tell you about the night Aelis died. There was a reason why she came early to her time, Bertran." Another breath, the vivid evidence of a struggle for self-control. Ariane said, "When Urté took your son from her arms and left the room with the priestess following him, trying to reclaim the boy, I was left alone in the birthing room with Aelis. And a few moments later we… realized she was carrying a second child." Beside Blaise, Bertan make a convulsive gesture with his hands. The flask fell on the grass. Bertran tried awkwardly to stand. His strength seemed to have left him though; he remained sitting in the doorway looking up at the woman on the horse.

Ariane said, "I delivered your daughter into the world, Bertran. And then… then Aelis made me swear an oath to her, and we both knew she was dying." She was weeping again now, tears bright as crystal on her cheeks.

"Tell me," said Bertran. "Ariane, tell me what happened."

She had been weeping then, too, amid the terrors of that room. She had been thirteen years old, and had heard Aelis, dying, tell her husband that the boy child she was holding was Bertran de Talair's. Ariane had cowered in a corner of the room watching Urté's face grow blood-dark with a rage such as she had never ever seen in her life. She saw him seize the baby from its mother's arms where the priestess had gently laid it. Outside the walls of Miraval a winter storm had been howling, rain lashing the castle, thunder like an angry spirit overhead.

The duke and the priestess had rushed from the room; where, Ariane did not know. She was certain he was about to kill the child, though. Aelis had been sure of the same thing.

"Oh, my dear," her cousin had said, lying amid blood on her bed, "what is it I have done?" Ariane, distraught with fear and grief, had clutched her hand, unable to think of a single thing to say. Wanting only to be far away from that room, from that terrible castle.

And then, a moment later, Aelis had said something else, in a different tone. "Oh, Rian," she had said. And, "Cousin, in the goddess's name, I think there is another child in me."

There had been. A small babe, though larger than the first it seemed to Ariane. And this one was a girl, with her mother's dark hair and long limbs, and a strong voice when she raised her first cry amid the storms of the world she had entered.

It was Ariane who took her from Aelis's womb. Ariane who bit through the cord and wrapped the infant in the warm cloths that had been readied by the fire. Ariane who gave her, with trembling hands, to her mother. No one else had been in the room. No one else had heard that second cry.

And Aelis de Miraval de Barbentain had looked upon the dark-haired daughter in her arms, knowing that her own life was passing from her, and had said to her cousin, who was thirteen years old that year, "I am binding you to something now as an oath to me on my deathbed. You must swear to do what I ask of you."

Ariane had looked at the two of them, mother and child, and she had done so: had sworn to take the baby from that room by the back stairway, wrapped in those swaddling-clothes, hidden within her own cloak, and to bear it from Miraval into the wildness of that night storm.

And she swore an oath that night to tell no living soul, not even Bertran, of the existence of a second child for so long as Urté de Miraval was alive. "After Urté dies," her cousin had said, "if you are alive and she is, I leave it to you. Judge what she has become, if you know where she is. I have no gift of foreknowledge, Ariane. Judge the needs of the time. It may even be that this child, my daughter, will be heir to Miraval or Talair, to Arbonne itself. I need you to become the sort of woman who will be able to make that judgment one day. And now kiss me cousin, and forgive me if you can, and go."

And Ariane had bent and kissed the dying woman upon the mouth and had fled, alone down the twisting back stairway, wrapped in a dark cloak with a baby next to her heart. And she met no one at all on the stairs or in the corridor or passing out of the castle into the rain by the postern gate. At the stables the ostlers were nowhere to be seen in the storm, and so Ariane had taken her mare from its stall herself and had mounted up awkwardly from astride a bale of hay, and she had ridden bareback from the yard with only her cloak and hood to shield her and the child from the cold and the driving rain.

She never forgot that ride for the rest of her days or nights. It would come back to her in dreams, or with any sudden crack of thunder or flash of lightning in a storm. She would be back in the vineyards of Miraval then, riding east towards the lake, the twisted shapes of vines showing around her when lightning shredded earth and sky. The child had cried and cried at the beginning but had fallen silent after that, and Ariane had been terrified the baby was dead and had been afraid to open her cloak in the rain to see. And she had been weeping all through that ride.

She never knew how she managed to find the hut by the lake where they kept the wood and kindling dry for signalling the isle. She remembered dismounting there and tethering the horse and hurrying inside, to stand in the doorway, dripping wet, unable to stop crying. A vivid sheet of lightning had lit the whole of the sky then, and for a moment in its dazzling flash she had seen the Arch of the Ancients looming nearby, huge and black in the night, and she had screamed in fear. But then, as if in answer to her own cry, she had felt, oh, she had felt a stirring of the child next to her heart, and had heard her begin to wail again, a precarious, determined assertion of presence amid the terrors of the world.

Ariane had held her close, rocking back and forth, crooning wordlessly, watching as lightning flashed again and again and finally moved on, as the peals of thunder gradually grew fainter to the south, as, after what seemed a span of time without measure or end, the blue moon named for Rian showed briefly once and then appeared again through the swift racing of the clouds, and the rain stopped.

She had laid the baby down then, wrapping it as best she could on the blessedly dry floor of the cabin, and she took wood and kindling and flint for flame and lit a flare on the mound outside to summon the priestesses to come, and they came.

She saw a white sail running up on the near shore of the isle and watched as one small boat slipped across the now calm waters of the lake towards her, ineffably beautiful and strange in the blue moonlight, something graceful and delicate in a world from which those things had seemed to her forever gone.

Her robe was soaked and stained and torn. In the night they would not know it for a garment of wealth or privilege. She kept her hood up about her face. When the boat had almost reached the shore she unwrapped the baby, grieving, from the rich clothes of the castle and brought it out to them in a scrap of rag she found in the cabin.

Then she gave Aelis's child to the priestess who stood, tall and grave beside the prow of the boat on the strand. She made her voice quiver and stammer with accents of the farmyard and told them it was her own child and her father would not let her keep her and, oh, would the good servants of sweet Rian shelter and guard her baby all her days? She had been crying then, too, Ariane remembered.

It was not a rare thing, her request. It was one of the ways Rian's Isle and the goddess's Island in the sea received their necessary complement of servants and priests and priestesses through the turning of seasons and years. The two women asked no questions other than of her own health. She had reached out, Ariane remembered, and had taken the child in her thin, tired arms for a last time and had kissed her farewell full upon the mouth, as she had the mother. She told the two priestesses she would be all right.

She had told herself the same thing as she watched the boat going back across the stilled waters of the lake under the one moon and the thin, high, drifting clouds and the emerging glitter of the stars, carrying Aelis's daughter and Bertran's.

Aelis had said nothing to her about a name. Ariane, on that stony shore, had looked up at the blue crescent of the moon and had told the priestesses that the child was to be named, if they found her worthy, for that moon and so for the goddess.

"She lived," Ariane de Carenzu said, twenty-three years after, astride another horse before the cabin where that child and her dead brother had been conceived. The tears had dried on her cheeks during the telling of the tale. "I have kept watch over her all these years, whenever I could, as best I could. She remained on the isle, of course; they usually do. She is beautiful and clever and brave, Bertran. She looks very like her mother, I think. Her name is Rinette. She was to become High Priestess of Rian's Isle one day soon."

"Was?" Bertran's voice was so low, the one word was almost inaudible. His hands were clasped together before him. They had been through the length of the tale. Blaise could see that they were trembling.

"I spoke to her before coming to you. I thought that was proper. I told her who she was and how she had come to Rian's Isle, and I explained some other things as well. I said… that because of who she was she might be more dearly needed now away from the isle, in the world of men and women, but that it was her own choice to make and… that I would ensure that that was so."

"And?" Bertran looked older now, Blaise realized. He wanted to put an arm around the other man, but held back.

"She said that if what I had told her was true, it was obvious that she was indeed more important to Arbonne among the castles than among the sanctuaries. Those were her own words. She is very strong, Bertran. She is… really quite wonderful." Her voice broke a little on the last words.

"I have seen her then," the duke said, his tone holding wonder like a chalice. "I must have seen her so many times and I never saw the resemblance."

"Why should you have? There was nothing you were looking to find."

Bertran shook his head. "It must have been so hard for her, learning of this so suddenly. It must have been terrible."

"It may become so. Not yet, I think," said Ariane. "I suspect, with everything, she is only half understanding what all of it will mean. She does know… " Ariane hesitated, and turned, inexplicably, to Blaise, "she does know, because I told her, that she may possibly be expected to wed one day soon."

And now he understood why she had wanted him to stay. He looked up in the waning of that clear light and met Ariane's dark-eyed gaze. He was remembering many different things suddenly, but one conversation most of all, from a summer night in Tavernel.

It was, in the end, Bertran who looked from one to the other of them and rose first from that cabin doorway at the edge of the forest. "I think," said the duke, "that I am going to ride back now."

"Shall I come?" asked Blaise.

Bertran shook his head. He smiled crookedly, a ghost of his most habitual expression. "I know the way," he said. "That much hasn't changed."

Everything else seemed to have, though, as Blaise stood and watched the duke ride off. Ariane turned in the saddle to watch him as well. Only when Bertran had passed from sight, an unprepossessing figure in the torn and bloodstained garb of a fighting man, did she turn back to Blaise. She still made no movement to dismount.

He said bluntly, "There was a woman who shared her bed with me on Midsummer Eve in Tavernel. She told me she would live her life to change the rules of the marriage game among men and women in our day." He wasn't certain why, but he almost meant the words as a blow.

She took them that way, he saw, and realizing that, all anger and resentment passed from him as if swept by the wind. Ariane said, very quietly, "I can control nothing here, nor do I want to try. I can see, even now, something that might happen. So can you, Blaise. You must know how difficult this is for me. Surely you must. Even with everything else that has happened."

He did know, actually. He seemed to be a wiser man than he had been a year ago. He knew what truth of the heart she was holding out to him as an offering, and he felt, not for the first time, a humbling awareness of her honesty. This was the woman, he thought suddenly, who had freed him from Lucianna and the bitterness he had carried from Portezza.

"Ariane," he said roughly, "you are the reason Arbonne must never be allowed to die."

"There are a world of reasons," she said, but something flashed briefly in the darkness of her eyes.

"And you are the symbol and the heart of them. You are the queen of the Court of Love."

"I thought you regarded that as folly."

"I thought many things here to be folly that have turned out to be more true than anything I knew before." He stopped, and then, because it absolutely needed to be said, added steadily, "Ariane, your husband is the reason we were able to win this battle, whatever we might say about Urté and Bertran and Fulk de Savaric. And Thierry is also the reason we were able to prevent a slaughter of surrendering men."

"I think I know this," she said gravely.

"I cannot tell you how much respect I have for him."

"And I," she murmured. "I told you as much in Tavernel. What are you saying, Blaise?"

He forced himself to meet her level gaze. Her eyes were so dark, deep enough for a man to lose his way in them. "That I am still enough of a man of Gorhaut, and I think I always will be, to have a world of trouble speaking words of love to the wife of such a man."

He saw her lower her head for a moment. "I know this too," she said, looking up at him again. "I also know, to my sorrow, that we are what we are, and so are the times into which we have been born, and those words I spoke at Midsummer to you about freedom of choice are, truly, the only real folly either of us has ever offered to the other. You are about to be king of Gorhaut, Blaise, in the midst of a world turned upside-down. The heiress of Arbonne will be waiting at Talair, even now."

"And you think I must take her? To begin the righting of the world?"

For the first time Ariane showed a flash of her old authority. "I told you that I have no control over anything here. It is too soon, in any case. I do think—since you ask—that any man who shares his life with that one will be blessed beyond deserving all his days. Even you, Blaise."

He had seen her, of course, twice. Rinette. Had exchanged hard, haughty words by the lake in spring after he'd killed six corans of Miraval. We have been waiting for you, she'd said to him, self-possessed beyond her years, and he had feared those words. Perhaps, he thought now, perhaps they had meant something other than what either of them had understood or guessed that spring day. Perhaps the goddess truly did work in ways men and women could not comprehend. He thought suddenly of the red arrow that had killed Ademar. He still had no idea—and was trying not to dwell upon the thought—how that arrow had come straight down from a clear sky.

He said, looking up at Ariane, "I will see you? You will not leave my life?"

She smiled then. Said formally, "The king of Gorhaut will always be welcome in Carenzu."

She was guiding them back together to solid ground. Her gifts had always been generous, and this not the least of them. He tried to match her tone. "And Carenzu's lord and lady, wherever I am."

There was a short silence. She bit her lip. "There were other words that were part of that Midsummer Night. A song sung in the tavern where we met. I wonder if you remember the ending of it?"

He shook his head. Lisseut of Vezét had sung that song, he remembered, but the words were lost to him. Ariane smiled then, with tenderness and sadness, and a returning hint of the wise, worldly awareness that had always seemed to be hers. "Let me ride back alone, Blaise. If you don't mind. I don't think I'll be by myself very much in the next little while."

He nodded his head. What else could he have done? Bring her down into his arms in the fading light? Not in this world, he thought. She touched a finger to her lips, still with that same smile, and turned away. She was as beautiful as any woman he had ever known. She would have offered so much comfort, he knew. Comfort and passion and wisdom. Offered, and taken whatever he had to give in return, had he but asked. His heart full, Blaise watched her ride slowly away from him at sunset through the tall grass. He was thinking of her at thirteen, with a new-born child in her arms.

That child had grown into the woman it seemed the world and his own growing understanding of it might have him wed. Nothing would or could be done swiftly, and indeed it might never be done at all; there were so many layers of complexity to this world he had entered now. She was waiting in Talair, Ariane had said. He let his mind move forward towards such a meeting. Only his thoughts, though: Blaise remained where he was for a long time, sitting quietly in the doorway as the sun slid down in the west and the colours of sunset gradually suffused the fields and the bare vineyards and the trees, and fell gently, like a late benediction, on that small cabin by the forest.

Blaise looked back once through the open doorway before he finally left, and he saw how that muted crimson light slanted through the western window to fall upon the small, neat bed against the wall. He stood there for a moment, motionless, and then he gently closed the door, that the wind and rain might not enter in after these years.

It was dusk, the first faint stars shining in the east, when he rode back towards Talair. And because it was so nearly dark and he wasn't really thinking about his path—his thoughts ahead of him and far behind—he rode straight past the woman standing quietly beside her horse in shadow under the elms on the far side of the arch.

Lisseut had meant to call out to him, but in the moment he actually appeared and went by she found that her voice would not obey her. She could not say his name. She had seen the duke ride past earlier, and then Ariane de Carenzu, and she had remained out of sight beneath the trees, holding her thoughts close to her as the sun went down and the shadows grew deeper beneath the looming arch.

Her thoughts. No comfort there at all. The man she had followed, as she had followed him once before, was the king of Gorhaut, or would be before many days had passed. He was already wearing the cloak of royalty. She had seen it from the isle.

In the moment Blaise appeared she was thinking, actually, of her mother and father and of home, of sunrise seen through the window of her own small room, morning light filtering through the grey-green leaves of the olive trees, the air carrying the scent of the sea from below.

She had always been impetuous, always found herself pushing hardest when she thought, inwardly, that it might, in fact, be no time to push at all. Her mother had told her, endlessly, that it was a trait that could lead her greatly wrong one day.

Perhaps it was because of that memory of her mother's words, with the heart-breaking lucidity of that image of home, that Lisseut kept silent as the man went by, riding away from her, from the arch and the winter elms, back to the world that was waiting for him. She lost sight of Blaise in the darkness where the avenue of elms ended and the path curved east towards the shore of the lake.

She remained where she was; it had become curiously difficult to move just then. She clung to that image of home for a while yet, and then that too seemed to leave her. After a time in the deepening shadows, Lisseut found that her thoughts had turned elsewhere again, and then it seemed that her voice had come back to her and that, perhaps not surprisingly, there were words she needed to offer to the twilight and the empty path before her where she had watched him go:

Thy table set with rarest wine,

Choice meats, sweet ripened fruit

And candlelight when we dine In

Fionvarre.

On we two the high stars will shine.

And the holy moon lend her light.

If not here you will be mine

In Fionvarre.

She sighed. There was truly no point in lingering here, she told herself. It was time to go back. She still felt this curious reluctance to move, though. It was cold in the night now but the elms blocked the worst of the wind and in the darkness the disturbing, sculpted shapes of prisoners and slaves on the arch could not be seen. It was, in fact, unexpectedly peaceful where she stood, holding the reins of a quiet horse.

She stayed quite a long time. It was much later, in fact, when she heard a single horseman go by along the edge of the woods behind her, heading south. She became a little frightened for the first time then, alone here in the darkness. She mounted up and began the ride back to where there would be lights and shelter and friends and such comfort as any and all of these might offer.

On the way, as she came up to the shore of the lake and rode alongside the water towards the distant castle, carrying loss and love, remembering home, trying to comprehend the shape of the future opening up before them all, Lisseut found herself thinking of a song. Not an old lullaby this time, its origins long lost, not a tune by Anselme of Cauvas, the first of all the troubadours, nor of Count Folquet or Alain or En Bertran, nor even of lost Remy or Aurelian.

This tune and its words belonged to none of them. This, for the first time ever, as she passed beside the shore of Lake Dierne in the starlit, wintry dark, riding towards the castle lights, was a song of her own.

It was cold here outside, but Rinette had felt awkwardly enveloped within the warm, firelit rooms of Talair Castle. She had asked them where the garden was and someone had escorted her there. Then, when she'd walked into the walled enclosure, she had asked if she could be left alone and they had done that for her as well. Everyone was being extraordinarily obliging, even beyond what could be expected by a ranking priestess of Rian.

But she was more than that, and less. She had left her owl behind, on the isle. That had been, actually, the first of the very hard things.

This is, Rinette thought, walking at twilight among bare trees and evergreens and bushes and shrubs and flowers that would be glorious come spring, my own castle. One of her castles. Barbentain itself was another, and even Miraval was part of her legacy, if one stretched a point only a little.

It was cold, but she did not mind the cold. Winter was something she could deal with. She was still wearing the robes of Rian under her grey cloak. It wasn't as if she'd had a great deal of time to change her garb. Or her sense of where she belonged in the world. When she had arisen this morning she had been a priestess of Rian on her holy Isle, the named successor to the High Priestess there, though wondering, with a fear every one of them had felt, if their lives would stretch beyond this winter. Or if their destiny was fire in the name of Gorhaut and the god it claimed to serve.

Then battle had come today, screaming horses and men, blood and chaos in the valley, and at the end, unlooked-for amid helpless terror, a victory so complete the mind and heart could scarcely absorb it. She had gone into the sanctuary, to help the High Priestess lead them through the ancient, holy ceremony of thanksgiving.

And had come out from under the dome to find the lady Ariane de Carenzu waiting for her with a story that changed her life forever.

It was hard, it was very hard, however she strove to deal with this as she had always tried to deal with everything—calmly and with as much clarity as she could command. The lady of Carenzu had ended by telling her what was obvious to any thinking person from the moment the story had begun to grow clear—that her place was almost certainly away from the isle now. That the blindness and inner sight of a High Priestess of Rian was not what Arbonne needed from her after this. Everything had changed.

Ariane had said something else, though, something unexpected: that she would defend with all her own power and honour any choice at all that Rinette made. She had been near to weeping as she said that, Rinette remembered. It was a deeply generous offer, but it actually didn't matter very much, not really. Rinette would not have been what she was had she been unable to see for herself the clear truth of what all of this meant.

She was heir to Arbonne. There was no one else. With the offer of her hand in marriage, the future of her country, of the worship of holy Rian, could be safeguarded for a time. Perhaps a very long time. It was not an awareness from which one could turn away for the familiarity of the small isle that was all the home she'd ever known. The paths of holy blindness and the inward sight it might offer were not to be hers any more.

She was not going to follow the High Priestesses after all. Neither the one here, nor Beatritz herself on the island in the sea. The High Priestess on Rian's Island, the goddess's most holy servant, Rinette thought suddenly, putting her mind around this for the first time, was her mother's older sister.

She shook her head. It was going to be very hard. She could see them lighting torches in the garden now. They were being careful of her privacy, keeping at a distance from where she walked. The light in the west had become quite beautiful, crimson and purple and a softer range of dusky hues low down where the sun was nearly gone. The garden, she could see, was nowhere near its best in this depth of winter, but Talair was far enough south that there were still hints of colour all around, and the wind was gentler here, with the walls and the trees for shelter. She heard the sound of splashing water and walking a little further down a path of small stones she came to a fountain. The servants had been here before her; there were torches burning in brackets set into the soil. She stood close to one, holding her hands out for warmth.

She was heir to Arbonne. Heir to this castle of Talair as well, for En Bertran had never married and never named anyone to succeed him. En Bertran. The duke of Talair was her father.

She had seen him, of course; growing up on the isle so near this castle she had seen him so many times across the water. She could remember how she and the other acolytes had spent countless evenings when they were supposed to be asleep breathlessly repeating tales and rumours about him, carried by the troubadours and joglars who came to Rian's Isle. She knew all about Bertran de Talair and Duke Urté and the beautiful lady who had died, Aelis de Miraval. She even knew—everyone knew—the old song Bertran had written for his beloved beside the springtime shores of this same lake. What she had never known was that the song was her father's for her mother, that she was a part of that tale. She seemed to be, in fact, the ending of the story.

There was the other man as well, the one who was soon to be made king of Gorhaut. He had fought for Arbonne today against his own people. She had seen him, too, twice. Once last spring and again this morning when they had come across the lake to take the countess from the parley. He was a tall man, that one, bearded as the northerners all were, grim-looking with that, but a message had come from Rian's Island last spring that he should be watched for, that he was coming their way and might be important to them. And only a little while ago this afternoon Ariane de Carenzu, who ought, Rinette supposed, to know about such things, had said that he was a good man, gentler than he looked, and wiser, carrying burdens with which he would need someone's help in the days and years to come.

She wondered if he would come to her here. If it would begin already. She wondered if her father would come. Abruptly she sat down on one of the stone benches by the fountain, ignoring the cold. Cold was easy to deal with. What had overtaken her today was not, despite the self-possession she had managed to preserve with Ariane. It had been an overwhelming day. She wished she could hide, sleep, not dream. She wanted… she didn't really know what she wanted.

She suddenly felt—and could not remember feeling this way since she'd been a small child—that she might even cry. It wasn't Ariane's fault, it wasn't anyone's fault. She was sitting in the walled garden of her father's castle, and all she knew of her father were the endlessly traded stories about a duke who wrote the finest music of his day and had fought in wars in many countries, and who had spent more than twenty years pursuing women all over the world with a flamboyance that everyone knew—everyone knew—was a lifelong attempt to deal with the death of the one lady he had ever loved. Her mother.

I am afraid, Rinette said to herself suddenly, and the admission, curiously, seemed to help her gather her self-control again. I am not going to burn alive, she admonished herself sternly. None of us are going to burn now. We have won, by grace of Rian, who has given us, again, more than we have ever deserved of her. These changes in her life, she told herself, were only that—changes in a life. Mortal men and women were not to know—they could not know—what the future held in store for them, except for the fleeting, wayward glimpses the goddess sometimes granted those who had blinded themselves in her name.

That was not to be her path. Her path began here in this garden, walking forth with whomever came to lead her into the brightness and the burdens shaped by what, it seemed, she was.

Surely it was all right to be a little afraid, though? Surely that could be allowed of someone sitting alone at dusk in a winter garden dealing with the loss of every expectation she had ever had of her life?

It was then that she heard a footfall on the walkway, from behind her, the way she had come. She looked up at the torches for a moment and then, a little blinded, beyond them until she could see the stars again. She drew a long breath and pushed her dark hair back from her face. Then Rinette rose, straight-backed, holding her head high, and turned to meet her future. There was a solitary figure standing at the end of the path that led to this foundation.

It was not the northerner who had come, nor, yet, her father, after all.

She knew who this was, of course. She sank to her knees on the cold ground.

"Oh, my dear," said Signe de Barbentain, the countess of Arbonne, "I am so desperately happy to see you, and so very sad just now. So many years we have lost, you and I. There is so much I have to tell you. About your father and your mother, and then about the grandfather you never knew, who would have loved you with all his heart."

The countess came closer then, moving almost hesitantly into the light of the torches, and Rinette saw that she was crying, tears streaming down her face in the cold. Rinette rose quickly, instinctively, a queer feeling overtaking her, a constriction of the heart and throat. She heard herself make a sound that was very like a child's cry, and she moved forward, almost running, into the haven of her grandmother's arms.

It was full dark now in the valley where the battle had been. He had waited patiently, even happily, for this. The moons would rise soon, both very bright tonight, spilling their rich, mingled light. It was time to go. There were no fears near where he was, no soldiers of either army sleeping or on watch in the cold.

He made his way down from branch to branch, surefooted in the dark. No one heard him; he made no sound for anyone to hear. Once on the ground he slipped away west, passing close by the forest, going the long way around to where he had left his horse two days before, north of the Arch of the Ancients.

The stallion was hungry, of course. He was sorry for that but there had been nothing to do about it. He had left food in a sack nearby and he fed the horse now, patting and rubbing its long neck, speaking tenderly. He felt deeply at peace, as one with the night and the murmuring trees all around him. He knelt, on impulse, and prayed.

There was so much gratitude in his heart he felt it might overflow. He had done exactly what he had come here to do. What he had been preparing for—though in ignorance, following instructions only—since the early days of autumn.

It was time to go now, to be away south before the bright moons rose. He saddled the horse and mounted and began to ride.

I want you to learn a new way of shooting, the High Priestess had told him on the island in the sea. And she had sent him to a place where no one ever went, to learn to do what she wanted done. He had always been able to handle a bow, but what she asked was odd, inexplicable. He didn't need things explained, though; he was honoured beyond words to have been chosen. He spent the whole of the autumn practising, learning to hit targets with the high, arching trajectories she had specified. Over and over, day by day as the weeks passed, he went off alone to the eastern end of the island and practised.

He learned. He told her one day that he thought he had mastered that new, strange shooting as best he ever would. She sent him back that very day to begin again, the same arching bowshots aimed at the apex of the sky, but now he was to do them while nestled in the branches of a tree. He did that, too; day after day, week after week, as winter came to Rian's Island and the first flocks of birds from the north filled their skies.

Then, one day, the High Priestess summoned him again, and alone in her chambers, with only the white owl to watch his face as he reacted to what she said, she told him what his task was to be, the thing he had been training to do.

The goddess, she told him, will sometimes intercede for us, but she always wants to see that we have tried to aid ourselves. He understood that, it made sense to him. In the natural world a deer might come to you, but only if you were out in the forest, upwind and silent, not if you stayed at home on a bench before the fire. She told him then—and her words made him begin to tremble with awe—where he was to go, and she even described the tree he would claim before the armies came to the valley by Lake Dierne.

He was to wait in that tree, the High Priestess told him, her hands clasped together in her lap, for a moment that might come if Rian offered them her grace—a moment when he might kill the king of Gorhaut. No man or woman, she told him, not even any priest or priestess, knew what he was being sent to do. No one was ever to know. He had knelt before her then and sworn the holiest oath he knew. He had felt her strong fingers on his head as she granted him her blessing.

Then she had given him his arrows, crimson dyed, fletched with crimson owl feathers, and he'd concealed them in a covered quiver and had himself taken by boat to land. He bought a good horse with money she had given him and rode, travelling swiftly by day and night, until he came to the valley of which she had told him. Arriving at twilight, before either of the armies had come, he saw the tree she had so clearly described to him, and he climbed it in the darkness and settled in to wait.

The soldiers had come the next day. Battle began that afternoon. Late in the day, when En Urté de Miraval had brought his corans sweeping down the ridge from the west, the king of Gorhaut had battled Duke Urté and had swept off his dented helmet and hurled it away after taking a blow in that combat.

It was exactly as he had been told it might be. He offered his heart's most fervent prayer, speaking the words aloud, though softly, and he lifted his bow from where he sat among the branches of that tree above the valley, and he sent a crimson arrow almost straight up into the bright sky along the high pathway of Rian, the soaring arch he had mastered through those solitary weeks and months on the island.

He was not greatly surprised, only humbled and full of gratitude, beyond any words he could ever have encompassed, when he saw that arrow strike the king of Gorhaut in the eye and end his life.

After that it had been a matter of waiting silently, hidden in the branches of his tree, for darkfall, and then slipping away unseen.

In time, as he rode, he left the lake behind. Not long after, white Vidonne rose in the eastern sky lighting the road that stretched away before him to the south. There was no one else in sight. He was not weary at all. He felt exalted, blessed. I could die now, he thought.

The wind had lessened with the rising of the moon. It wasn't even cold any more, and he was heading south with a full heart to where it was never truly cold, where there were flowers throughout the year by the sweet grace of Rian. When the blue moon also rose, following the white one up the sky, he could restrain himself no longer. Luth of Baude, who was Luth of Rian's Island since being taken in exchange for a poet last spring, and who thought he might even be found worthy now to be consecrated a priest of the goddess in her sanctuary, began to sing.

He was not a musician, not a very good singer at all; he knew that. But songs were not only for those who could perform them with artistry. He knew that, too. And so Luth lifted his voice without shame, feeling a deep richness, a glory in the night, as he galloped his horse down the winding, empty road to the south, past farm and castle, village and field and forest, under the risen moons and the stars above Arbonne.