looked up. ‘He’s all right. Breathing. Unconscious. I can’t see any sign of a blow.’ There was wonder and the first edge of real apprehension in his voice.
Blaise straightened, looking around the plateau for a sign of Luth. The other corans stood in a tight cluster together, facing outwards. They had drawn their swords. There was no sound to be heard; even the forest seemed to have gone silent, Blaise realized, with a tingling sensation along his skin.
He made his decision.
‘Hirnan, get him into the skiff. All of you go down there. I don’t know what’s happened but this is no place to linger. I’m going to take a fast look around, but if I can’t see anything we’ll have to go.’ He glanced quickly up at the moon, trying to judge the hour of night. ‘Get the skiff free and give me a few moments to look. If you hear me do a corfe cry start rowing hard and don’t wait. Otherwise, use your judgment.’
Hirnan looked briefly as if he would protest but said nothing. With Evrard of Lussan slung over his shoulder like a sack of grain, he made his way to the rope and down. The other corans began following. Blaise didn’t wait to see them all descend. With the awareness of danger like a tangible presence within him, he drew his sword and stepped alone into the woods on the opposite side of the plateau from where they’d entered and returned.
Almost immediately he picked up a scent. Not of hunting cat or bear, nor of fox or badger or boar. What he smelled was the drifting fragrance of perfume. It was strongest to the west, away from where they had gone.
Blaise knelt to study the forest floor in the near-blackness. He wished Rudel were with him now, for a great many reasons, but in part because his friend was the best night tracker Blaise had ever known.
One didn’t have to be expert, though, to realize that a company of people had passed here only a short time before, and that most if not all of them had been women. Blaise swore under his breath and stood up, peering into the darkness, uncertain of what to do. He hated like death to leave a man behind, but it was clear that a large number of priests and priestesses were somewhere ahead of him in the woods. A few moments, he had told Hirnan. Could he jeopardize the others in an attempt to find Luth?
Blaise drew a deep breath, aware once again now of that pulsing in the forest floor. He knew he was afraid; only a complete fool would not be afraid now. Even so, there was a core truth at the root of all of this for Blaise of Gorhaut, a very simple one: one did not leave a companion behind without an attempt at finding him. Blaise stepped forward into the darkness, following the elusive scent of perfume in the night.
‘Commendable,’ a voice said, immediately in front of him. Blaise gasped and levelled his blade, peering into blackness. ‘Commendable, but extremely unwise,’ the voice went on with calm authority. ‘Go back. You will not find your fellow. Only death awaits you past this point tonight.’
There was a rustling of leaves and Blaise made out the tall, shadowy form of a woman in the space in front of him. There were trees on either side of her, as if framing a place to stand. It was very dark, much too black for him to see her face, but the note of assured command in her voice told its own grim story about what had happened to Luth. She hadn’t touched Blaise, though; no others had leaped forth to attack. And Vanne had been unharmed in the skiff.
‘I would be shamed in my own eyes if I left and did not try to bring him out,’ Blaise said, still trying to make out the features of the woman in front of him.
He heard her laughter. ‘Shamed,’ she echoed, mockingly. ‘Do not be too much the fool, Northerner. Do you truly think you could have done any of this had we not permitted it? Will you deny feeling the awareness of this wood? Do you actually believe you moved unknown, unseen?’
Blaise swallowed with difficulty. His levelled sword suddenly seemed a hapless, even a ridiculous thing. Slowly he lowered it.
‘Why?’ he asked. ‘Why, then?’
Her laughter came again, deep and low. ‘Would you know my reasons, Northerner? You would understand the goddess on her own Island?’
My reasons.
‘You are the High Priestess, then,’ he said, shifting his feet, feeling the earth’s deep pulsing still. She said nothing. He swallowed again. ‘I would only know where my man has gone. Why you have taken him.’
‘One for one,’ she said quietly. ‘You were not consecrated to this place, any of you. You came here to take a man who was. We have allowed this for reasons of our own, but Rian exacts a price. Always. Learn that, Northerner. Know it as truth for so long as you are in Arbonne.’
Rian exacts a price. Luth. Poor, frightened, bumbling Luth. Blaise stared into the darkness, wishing he could see this woman, struggling to find words of some kind that might save the man they’d lost.
And then, as if his very thoughts were open to her, as if she and the forest knew them intimately, the woman lifted one hand, and an instant later a torch blazed in her grasp, illuminating their small space within the woods. He had not seen or heard her striking flint.
He did hear her laugh again, and then, looking at the tall, proud form, at the fine-boned, aristocratic features before him, Blaise realized, with a shiver he could not control, that her eyes were gone. She was blind. There was a white owl, a freak of nature, resting on her shoulder, gazing at Blaise with unblinking eyes.
Not really certain why he was doing so, but suddenly aware that he had now entered a realm for which he was terribly ill equipped, Blaise sheathed his sword. Her laughter subsided; she smiled.
‘Well done,’ Rian’s High Priestess said softly. ‘I am pleased to see you are not a fool.’
‘To see?’ Blaise said, and instantly regretted it.
She was undisturbed. The huge white owl did not move. ‘My eyes were a price for access to a great deal more. I can see you very well without them, Blaise of Gorhaut. It was you who needed light, not I. I know the scar that curves along your ribs and the colour of your hair, both now and on the winter night you were born and your mother died. I know how your heart is beating, and why you came to Arbonne, and where you were before. I know your lineage and your history, much of your pain, all your wars, your loves, the last time you made love.’
It was a bluff, Blaise thought fiercely. All the clergy did this sort of thing, even Corannos’s priests at home. All of them sought control with such arcane incantations.
‘That last, then,’ he dared say, even here, his voice rough. ‘Tell me that last.’
She did not hesitate. ‘Three months ago. Your brother’s wife, in the ancient home of your family. Late at night, your own bed. You left before dawn on the journey that has brought you to Rian.’
Blaise heard himself make a queer grunting sound as if he’d been punched. He could not help himself. He felt suddenly dizzy, blood rushing from his head as if in flight from the inexorable precision of what he had just heard.
‘Shall I go on?’ she asked, smiling thinly, the illuminating torch held up for him to see her. There was a new note in her voice, a kind of pitiless pleasure in her power. ‘You do not love her. You only hate your brother and your father. Your mother for dying. Yourself a little, perhaps. Would you hear more? Shall I tell your future for you now, like an old crone at the Autumn Fair?’
She was not old. She was tall and handsome, if no longer young, with grey in her dark hair. She knew things no one on earth should ever have known.
‘No!’ Blaise managed to say, forcing the word out. ‘Do not!’
He feared her laughter, her mocking voice, but she was silent and so was the forest around them. Even the torch was burning without sound, Blaise realized belatedly. The owl lifted its wings suddenly as if to fly, but only settled itself again on her shoulder.
‘Go then,’ Rian’s High Priestess said, not without gentleness. ‘We have allowed you the man for whom you came. Take him and go.’
He should turn now, Blaise knew. He should