‘What counsels, indeed! Duke Ranald has just advised us to marry the countess of Arbonne, send her off north and inherit her sun-drenched country when she succumbs in her decrepitude to some lamentable pestilence. Would this be a thought you and your son have devised together?’
Galbert, the only clean-shaven man in the room, turns to look at his son for the first time as the king finishes speaking. Ranald de Garsenc, though very pale, meets his father’s gaze without flinching. With a contemptuous twist of his mouth, Galbert turns back to the king.
‘It would not,’ he says heavily. ‘Of course it is not, my liege. I do not devise with such as he. My son is fit for nothing but spilling ale on himself and occupying tavern sluts.’
The king of Gorhaut laughs, a curiously joyous, high-pitched sound in the dark-beamed, shadowed room. ‘Tavern sluts? In the name of our blessed god! What a way to speak of the noble lady his wife, my lord Galbert! The woman bearing your grandchild! Surely you do not think—’
The king stops, hilarity vivid in his face, as a flagon of ale hurtles across the room to strike the High Elder of Corannos full on his broad chest. Galbert stumbles heavily backwards and almost falls. At the long table Ranald rises, hastily pushing his semi-erect member back into his clothing. Two guards step belatedly forward but pause at a gesture from the king. Breathing heavily, Ranald de Garsenc points a shaking finger at his father.
‘Next time I might kill you,’ he says. His voice trembles. ‘Next time it may be a knife. Take note for your life. If you speak so of me again, anywhere where I might hear of it, it may mean your death and I will submit myself to whatever judgment of that deed Corannos makes when I leave the world.’
There is a shocked silence. Even in a court not unused to this sort of thing, especially from the de Garsenc clan, the words are sobering. Galbert’s rich blue robe is stained with dark ale. He fixes his son with a glance of icy contempt, easily a match for Ranald’s impassioned rage, before turning back to the king. ‘Will you allow such an assault upon your High Elder, my liege? An attack upon my person is an insult to the god above us all. Will you sit by and let this impiety go unpunished?’ The deep voice is still controlled, resonantly pitched, soberly aggrieved.
Ademar does not immediately reply. He leans back once more against the heavy wooden seat-back of the throne, stroking his beard with one hand. Father and son remain on their feet, rigid and intense. The hatred between them lies heavy and palpable in the room, seeming denser than the smoke of the fires.
‘Why,’ says King Ademar of Gorhaut, at length, his voice sounding even higher and more querulous after the High Elder’s deep tones, ‘is it such a foolish idea for me to wed Signe de Barbentain?’
Abruptly Duke Ranald sits again, a tiny smile of vindication playing about his lips. Impatiently he moves a knee to forestall an obedient attempt by the woman beneath the table to resume her attentions. On the far side of the room he notices that his wife has turned away again and is staring out the window with her back to the king and the court. It has begun to rain. He looks at Rosala’s profile for a moment, and a curious expression crosses his own features. After a moment he lifts his flask and drinks again.
The only thing I really don’t know, Rosala de Garsenc is thinking just then, looking out at the cold, steady, slanting rain and the mist-wrapped eastern moors, is which of them I despise most.
It is not a new thought. She has spent a remarkable amount of time trying to decide whether she more hates the erratic, usually inebriated man she’d been forced to wed by the late King Duergar, or the dangerously cunning, Corannos-obsessed High Elder of the god, her husband’s father. If she chooses, as today, to take the thoughts one small, very natural step further, it is easy to include Duergar’s son, now King Ademar of Gorhaut, in that blighted company. In part because she is uneasily, constantly aware that when the child she now carries is born she is going to have to contend with the king in a very particular way. She doesn’t know why he has singled her out, why her manner seems to have captivated him—goaded him, more likely, she sometimes thinks—but there is no denying the import of Ademar’s flat, pale gaze and the way it lingers on her, especially in that dangerous time of night here in Cortil after too much ale has been drunk around the banquet tables but before the women are permitted to leave.
One of the reasons, perhaps unfairly, that she despises her husband is for the way in which he will notice the king staring at her and indifferently turn away to his dice cup or his flagon. The duke of Garsenc ought surely, Rosala had thought, in the early months of her marriage, to have more pride in him than that. It appeared, though, that the only people who could arouse Ranald to anything resembling passion or spirit were his father and brother, and that, of course, was its own old, bleak story. It sometimes seems to Rosala that she has been part of their tale forever; it is hard to remember clearly back to a time when the lords of Garsenc have not trammelled her tightly about with their festering family griefs. It had been different at home in Savaric, but Savaric was a long time ago.
The wind is rising now, coming about to the east, sending droplets and then a gusty sheet of rain through the window to strike her face and the bodice of her gown. She doesn’t mind the cold, she even welcomes it, but there is a child to think of now. Reluctantly she turns away, back to the smoky, stale, crowded room, to hear her husband’s father begin to speak to the issue of forced marriages and conquest in the warm bright south.
‘My liege, you know the reasons as well as I, so, indeed does every man in this room, save one perhaps.’ The glance flicked sideways at Ranald is so brief as to carry its own measure of bone-deep contempt. ‘Even the women know my son’s folly when they hear it. Even the women.’ Beside Rosala, Adelh de Sauvan, who is venal and corrupt and newly widowed, smiles. Rosala sees that and looks away.
‘To wed the countess of Arbonne,’ Galbert goes on, his rich voice filling the room, ‘we would need her consent. This, she will not give. Ever. If she did, for whatever reason, maddened by woman’s desire perhaps, she would be deposed and slain by the assembled dukes of Arbonne before any wedding could take place. Think you that the lords of Carenzu or Malmont or Miraval would sit by and watch us so easily stake a claim to their land? Even a woman should be able to see the folly in such a fatuous thought. What, my liege, do you think the troubadour lord of Arbonne would do at such a time … think you that Bertran de Talair would stand by and let such a marriage take place?’
‘That name is forbidden here!’ Ademar of Gorhaut says quickly, leaning abruptly forward. Two spots of unnatural colour show in his cheeks above the beard.
‘And so it should be,’ Galbert says smoothly, as if he’d expected exactly that response. ‘I have as much reason as you my liege to hate that schemer and his godless, discordant ways.’
Rosala smiles inwardly at that, keeping her features carefully schooled. It was little over a month ago that de Talair’s latest song had reached the court of Gorhaut. She remembers the night; wind and rain then, too, a trembling, whey-faced bard obeying Ademar’s command, singing the duke of Talair’s verses in a voice like rasping iron:
Shame then in springtime for proud Gorhaut,
Betrayed by a young king and his counsellor.
And more, much more, and worse, in the creaking, barely audible mumblings of the terrified singer while a wind blew on the moors outside:
Where went the manhood of Gorhaut and Valensa
When war was abandoned and pale peace bought
By weak kings and sons long lost to their lineage?
Rosala can almost find a kind of warmth in her heart at the memory of the torchlit faces around her that night. The expressions of the king, of Galbert, the furtive glances that flitted about the hall from one newly landless lord or coran to another as the driving music brought the force of the words home, even in the timid voice of the singer. The bard, a young trovaritz from Götzland, had almost certainly owed his continued life to the presence in the great hall of Cortil that evening of the envoy from his own country and the undeniable importance of keeping peace with King Jörg of Götzland at this juncture of the world’s affairs.