Читать книгу A Song for Arbonne - Guy Gavriel Kay - Страница 12

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Even the birds above the lake

Are singing of my love,

And even the flowers along the shore

Are growing for her sake.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And all of the troubadours had come to Barbentain.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And Blaise knew that field.

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

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

Shame then in springtime for proud Gorhaut,

Betrayed by a young king and his counsellor.

Sorrow for those whose sons were dead,

Bitter the warriors who had battled and won—

Only to see spoils claimed by their courage

Disposed and discarded like so much watered wine.

Shame in the treaty and no pride in the peace

Ademar allowed to vanquished Valensa.

Where were the true heirs of those who had died

For the glory of Gorhaut on that frozen field?

How could they sheathe their shining blades

With triumph gained and then given away?

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

Would destroy with a pen-stroke a long dream of

glory?

And what king lost to honour like craven Daufridi

Would retreat from that ice-field not to return?

Where went the manhood of Gorhaut and Valensa

When war was abandoned and pale peace bought

By weak kings and sons long lost to their lineage?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘I can’t imagine,’ Blaise said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Perhaps,’ said de Talair. ‘What does Mallin pay you?’

Blaise named the figure. The duke shrugged indifferently. ‘I’ll double that. When can you start?’

‘I’m paid through to a fortnight from now.’

‘Good. I’ll expect you at Talair three days after that.’

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

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

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

He shook his head slowly, bringing his mind back to Arbonne, to this high plateau and the disturbingly perceptive man looking steadily at him now with those vivid blue eyes.

‘I’m no more a sworn man of Ademar’s than I will be of yours,’ Blaise said carefully to Bertran de Talair. He hesitated. ‘Do you really think he might come south?’

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

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

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

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

‘How do you know about that?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Hardly. But I’m afraid I will impose them on myself.’

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

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

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

‘Not with me,’ said Blaise grimly.

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

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

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

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

‘It is difficult,’ said the duke close to Blaise’s ear, ‘extremely difficult, to protect those who prefer not to be protected. A lesson, Northerner.’

He was wearing a perfume of some kind, and his breath was scented with mint. Through unfocused eyes and a wave of dizziness, Blaise caught a glimpse beyond him of a woman on the stairs. Her long yellow hair was unbound, tumbling down her back. Her night robe was of silk, and by the light of the candle and of the moon in the archers’ window Blaise saw that it was white as a bride’s, an icon of innocence. That was all he managed to register; he had no chance for more, to move or cry out again, before Bertran de Talair’s dagger haft rapped, in a neat, hard, precisely judged blow, against the back of his skull and Blaise lost all consciousness of moonlight or icons or pain.

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

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

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

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

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

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

With what consequences?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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