of the island nights.
‘Because he doesn’t love me,’ Aelis said.
And held her hands out then, a curiously fragile gesture, as she stood, half-naked before him, her father’s daughter, her husband’s avenue to power, heiress to Arbonne, but trying to shape her own response today, now, in this room, to the coldness of destiny.
He took a step, the one step necessary, and gathered her in his arms, and lifted her, and then he carried her to the bed that was not the charcoal-burner’s, and laid her down where the slanting beam of sunlight fell, warm and bright and transitory.
CHAPTER I
There was very little wind, which was a blessing. Pale moonlight fell upon the gently swelling sea around the skiff. They had chosen a moonlit night. Despite the risks, they would need to see where they were going when they came to land. Eight oars, rising and falling in as much silence as the rowers could command, propelled them out across the line of the advancing waves towards the faint lights of the island, which was nearer now and so more dangerous.
Blaise had wanted six men only, knowing from experience that missions such as this were best done relying on stealth and speed rather than numbers. But the superstitious Arbonnais who were Mallin de Baude’s household corans had insisted on eight going out so that there would be, if all went well, nine coming back when they were done. Nine, it appeared, was sacred to Rian here in Arbonne, and it was to Rian’s Island they were rowing now. They’d even had a lapsed priest of the goddess go through a ritual of consecration for them. Blaise, his men watching closely, had reluctantly knelt and permitted the drunken old man to lay gnarled hands on his head, muttering unintelligible words that were somehow supposed to favour their voyage.
It was ridiculous, Blaise thought, pulling hard at his oar, remembering how he’d been forced to give in on those issues. In fact this whole night journey smacked of the absurd. The problem was, it was as easy to be killed on a foolish quest in the company of fools as on an adventure of merit beside men one respected and trusted.
Still, he had been hired by En Mallin de Baude to train the man’s household corans, and it had suited his own purposes for his first months in Arbonne to serve a lesser baron while he quietly sized up the shape of things here in this goddess-worshipping land and perfected his grasp of the language. Nor could it be denied—as Mallin had been quick to point out—that tonight’s endeavour would help to hone the corans of Baude into a better fighting force. If they survived.
Mallin was not without ambition, nor was he entirely without merits. It was his wife, Blaise thought, who had turned out to be the problem. Soresina, and the utterly irrational customs of courtly love here in Arbonne. Blaise had no particular affection, for good and sufficient reasons, for the current way of things in his own home of Gorhaut, but nothing in the north struck him as quite so impractical as the woman-driven culture here of the troubadours and their joglars, wailing songs of love for one lord’s wife or another. It wasn’t even the maidens they sang of, in Corannos’s name. It seemed a woman had to be wed to become the proper object of a poet’s passion in Arbonne. Maffour, the most talkative of the household corans, had started to explain it once; Blaise hadn’t cared enough to listen. The world was full of things one needed to know to survive; he didn’t have the time to fill his brain with the useless chaff of a patently silly culture.
The island lights were nearer now across the water. From the front of the skiff Blaise heard one of the corans—Luth, of course—offer a fervent, nervous prayer under his breath. Behind his beard Blaise scowled in contempt. He would have gladly left Luth back on the mainland. The man would be next to useless here, good for nothing but guarding the skiff when they brought it ashore, if he could manage to do even that much without wetting himself in fear at owl noises or a falling star or a sudden wind in the leaves at night. It had been Luth who had begun the talk earlier, back on shore, about sea monsters guarding the approaches to Rian’s Island—great, hump-backed, scaly creatures with teeth the size of a man.
The real dangers, as Blaise saw it, were rather more prosaic, though none the less acute for that: arrows and blades, wielded by the watchful priests and priestesses of Rian against falsely consecrated men come in secret in the night to the goddess’s holy island with a purpose of their own.
Said purpose being in fact extremely specific: to persuade one Evrard, a troubadour, to return to Castle Baude from his self-imposed exile on Rian’s Island in the depths of righteous indignation.
It was all genuinely ridiculous, Blaise thought again, pulling at the oar, feeling the salt spray in his hair and beard. He was glad that Rudel wasn’t here. He could guess what his Portezzan friend would have had to say about this whole escapade. In his mind he could almost hear Rudel’s laughter and his acerbic, devastating assessment of the current circumstances.
The story itself was straightforward enough—an entirely natural consequence, Blaise had been quick to declare in the hall at Baude, of the stupidity of the courtly rituals here in the south. He was already not much liked for saying such things, he knew. That didn’t bother him; he hadn’t been much liked in Gorhaut, either, the last while before he’d left home.
Still, what was an honest man to make of what had happened in Castle Baude last month? Evrard of Lussan, who was said to be a modestly competent troubadour—Blaise was certainly not in a position to judge one man’s scribblings against another’s—had elected to take up residence at Baude in the high country of the south-western hills for a season. This had redounded, in the way of things down here, to the greater renown of En Mallin de Baude: lesser barons in remote castles seldom had troubadours, modestly competent or otherwise, living with them for any length of time. That much, at least, made sense to Blaise.
But, of course, once settled in the castle, Evrard naturally had to fall in love with Soresina and begin writing his dawnsongs and liensennes, and his cryptic trobars for her. That, also in the way of such things here, was precisely why he had come, with the less romantic incentive, Blaise had caustically observed, of a handsome monthly payment out of Mallin’s wool revenues from last autumn’s fair in Lussan. The troubadour used a made-up name for his Lady—another rule of the tradition—but everyone in the vicinity of the castle, and surprisingly soon everyone in Arbonne who mattered at all, seemed to know that Evrard of Lussan, the troubadour, was heart-smitten by the beauty and grace of young Soresina de Baude in her castle tucked in a fold of the high country leading to the mountain passes and Arimonda.
Mallin was enormously pleased; that too was part of the game. A lovestruck troubadour exalting the baron’s wife enhanced Mallin’s own ardently pursued images of power and largesse.
Soresina, of course, was thrilled beyond words. She was vain, pretty and easily silly enough, in Blaise’s jaundiced opinion, to have precipitated exactly the sort of crisis with which they now found themselves dealing. If it hadn’t been the one incident, it would have been another, he was sure of it. There were women like Soresina at home, too, but they were rather better kept in hand in Gorhaut. For one thing, their husbands didn’t invite strangers into their castles for the express purpose of wooing them. However Maffour might try to explain the strict rules of this courtly game of love, Blaise knew an attempt at seduction when he saw one.
Soresina, manifestly uninterested in the newly resident poet in any genuinely romantic way—which no doubt reassured her husband more than somewhat—nonetheless contrived to lead Evrard on in every manner possible, given the constraints imposed by the extremely crowded spaces of a small baronial castle.
Mallin’s yellow-haired wife had a ripe body, an infectious laugh and a lineage substantially more distinguished than her husband’s: something that always added fuel to the fires of troubadour passion Blaise had been told by the discursive Maffour. He’d had to laugh; it was all so artificial, the whole process. He could guess, too easily, what acid-tongued Rudel would have said about this.
In the meantime, the celebrated southern spring came to Arbonne, with many-coloured wildflowers appearing almost overnight in the meadows and the high slopes about Castle Baude. The snows were reported to be receding from the mountain pass to Arimonda. As the poet’s verses