in our time if we are worthy, they shall learn their folly, their endless, eternal folly, and holy Corannos shall not be mocked in the lands of the Arbonne River ever again.’
He does not end on a rousing note; it is not yet time. This is a first proclamation only, a beginning, a muted instrument sounded amid smoking fires and a late, cold spring, with slanting rain outside and mist on the moors.
‘We will withdraw,’ the king of Gorhaut says at length in his high voice, breaking the stillness. ‘We will take private counsel with our Elder of the god.’ He rises from the throne, a tall, handsome, physically commanding man, and his court sinks low in genuflection like stalks of corn before the wind.
It is so clear, Rosala is thinking as she rises to her feet again, so clear what is to come.
‘Do tell me, my dear,’ Adelh de Sauvan murmurs, materializing at her elbow, ‘have you any late tidings of your much-travelled brother-in-law?’
Rosala stiffens. A mistake, and she knows it immediately. She forces herself to smile blandly, but Adelh is a master at catching one unawares.
‘Nothing recent, I fear,’ she answers calmly. ‘He was still in Portezza, the last we heard, but that was some months ago. He doesn’t communicate very much. If he does, I shall be most certain to convey your anxious interest.’
A weak shaft, that one, and Adelh only smiles, her dark eyes lustrous. ‘Please do,’ she replies. ‘I would think any woman would be interested in that one. Such an accomplished man, Blaise, an equal, a rival even to his great father I sometimes think.’ She pauses, precisely long enough. ‘Though hardly to your dear husband, of course.’ She says it with the sweetest expression imaginable on her face.
Two other women come up just then, blessedly freeing Rosala from the need to frame a reply. She waits long enough for courtesy to be served and then moves away from the window. She is cold suddenly, and wants very much to leave. She cannot do so without Ranald, though, and she sees, with a brief inward yielding to despair, that he has refilled his flagon, and his dice and purse are on the table in front of him now.
She moves towards the nearest of the fires and stands with her back to the blaze. In her mind she goes back over that short, unsettling exchange with Adelh. She cannot stop herself from wondering what, if anything, the woman could possibly know. It is only malice, she finally decides, only the unthinking, effortless malice that defined Adelh de Sauvan even before her husband died with King Duergar by Iersen Bridge. An instinct for blood, something predatory.
Rosala has a sudden recollection, involuntary and frightening, of the starving cats and the torn, dying hound. She shivers. Unconsciously her hands come up to rest upon her belly, as if to cradle and shelter from the waiting world the life taking shape within her.
The light was the extraordinary thing, the way in which the sun in a deep blue sky seemed to particularize everything, to render each tree, bird on the wing, darting fox, blade of grass, something vividly bright and immediate. Everything seemed to somehow be more of whatever it was here, sharper, more brilliantly defined. The late-afternoon breeze from the west took the edge off the heat of the day; even the sound of it in the leaves was refreshing. Though that, on reflection, was ridiculous: the sound of the wind in the trees was exactly the same in Gorhaut or Götzland as it was here in Arbonne; there just seemed to be something about this country that steered the mind towards such imaginings.
A troubadour, Blaise thought, riding through afternoon sunshine, would probably be singing by now, or composing, or shaping some quite unintelligible thought based on the symbolic language of flowers. There were certainly enough flowers. A troubadour would know the names of all of them, of course. Blaise didn’t, partly because there were varieties of extravagantly coloured wildflowers here in Arbonne that he’d never seen before, even among the celebrated, rolling countryside between the cities of Portezza.
The land here was beautiful, he conceded, without grudging the thought this time. He wasn’t in a grudging mood this afternoon; the light was too benevolent, the country through which he rode too genuinely resplendent at the beginning of summer. There were vineyards to the west and the dense trees of a forest beyond them. The only sounds were the wind and the chatter of birds and the steady jingle of harness on his horse and the pack pony behind. In the distance ahead Blaise could see at intervals the blue sparkle of water on a lake. If the directions he’d been given at last night’s inn were correct, the lake would be Dierne and Castle Talair would be visible soon, nestled against the northern shore. He should be able to make it by day’s end at a comfortable pace.
It was hard not to be in a good humour today, whatever one’s thoughts might be about country and family and the slowly darkening tenor of events in the world. For one thing, Blaise’s leave-taking at Baude four days ago had been a genuinely cordial parting. He’d worried for a time about how Mallin would receive his defection to the ranks of the corans of Bertran de Talair, but the young lord of Castle Baude seemed to have almost expected Blaise’s announcement when it came, two days after En Bertran rode off, and even—or so it seemed to Blaise—to almost welcome it.
There might, in fact, have been pragmatic reasons for that. Mallin was a comfortable but not a wealthy man, and the expenses of aspiring towards a place of honour on the higher ramparts of the world might have begun to give him pause. After a fortnight’s extravagant entertainment of the troubadour lord of Talair, it was possible that Mallin de Baude was not averse to some measures of economizing, and seasoned mercenary captains such as Blaise of Gorhaut were not inexpensive.
On the morning of Blaise’s departure, Mallin had wished him the blessing of the god and of Rian the goddess as well; this was Arbonne, after all. Blaise accepted the one with gratitude and the other with good grace. He’d surprised himself with the degree of regret he felt bidding farewell to the baron and to the corans he’d trained: Hirnan, Maffour and the others. He hadn’t expected to miss these men; it seemed as if he was going to, for a little while at least.
Soresina, in the last days before he went, was a different, more unsettling sort of surprise. The simple truth was, however much Blaise might want to deny it, that the lady of Castle Baude, always an attractive woman and aware of it, seemed to have grown in both dignity and grace in a very short period. Specifically, the short period since Bertran de Talair’s visit to the highlands. Was it possible that a single furtive night with the duke could have effected such a change? Blaise hated the very notion, but could not deny the poised courtesy of Soresina’s subsequent treatment of him, or the elegance of her appearance at her husband’s side in the days that passed between Bertran’s departure and Blaise’s own. There was not even the shadow of a hint in her expression or manner of what had taken place on the stairway below her chambers so little time ago. She did seem pensive at times, almost grave, as if inwardly coming to terms with some shift in her relations with the world.
Soresina was with Mallin when the baron and his corans rode part of the way with Blaise on the morning he took leave of the western highlands. She’d offered him her cheek to kiss, not merely her hand. After the briefest hesitation Blaise had leaned sideways in his saddle and complied.
Soresina had glanced up at him as he straightened. He remembered a glance she’d offered him shortly after he’d arrived, when she’d told him how she liked men after the older fashion, warlike and hard. There was an echo of that now, she was still the same woman after all, but there was also something else that was new.
‘I hope some woman elsewhere in your travels through Arbonne persuades you to remove that beard,’ she said. ‘It scratches, Blaise. Grow it back, if you must, when you return to Gorhaut.’
She was smiling at him as she spoke, entirely at ease, and Mallin de Baude, visibly proud of her, laughed and gripped Blaise’s arm a last time in farewell.
There had been a number of farewells in his life during the past few years, Blaise thought now, three days after that morning departure, riding amid the scent and colours of wildflowers, past the green and purple beginnings of grapes on the vines, with blue water in the distance beckoning him with flashes of mirrored sunlight. Too many goodbyes, perhaps, but they were a part of the life he’d chosen for himself, or had had chosen for