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