A Song for Arbonne (35 page)

Roban nodded. This made sense; he liked it when she gave him commands that made sense.

"Rudel Correze is travelling with the Delonghi," Valery said casually, almost as an afterthought. "They were all in a party with the Andoria."

"Wonderful," the countess said tartly. It pleased Roban to see her angry with someone else, even though Bertran's cousin was hardly the appropriate target. "Do I ban him, too? Do we spend this week antagonizing
every
important family in Portezza?" Signe de Barbentain seldom lost her temper, but Roban sensed it might be happening now. It gratified him that she understood and shared his concerns. He smoothed his doublet again.

Valery was shaking his head. "Blaise de Garsenc says that the man will do nothing here. That the Correze are too prudent to risk the economic hazards of violating a truce. He thinks Rudel has probably withdrawn from his contract in any case."

"Why would he think that?" Roban asked testily. "No one in that family turns their back on two hundred and fifty thousand in gold."

Valery looked apologetic. "I thought the same thing, my lord chancellor. Blaise tells me he knows Rudel Correze extremely well, though. He sees no danger from him now."

"We are relying on that coran from Gorhaut rather a great deal, aren't we?"

"Enough, Roban!" He realized his mistake the moment she spoke—the anger building in her had abruptly turned on him. It always seemed to happen that way, as if he was the safe target, the one she knew she could snap at without risk. Which was true, he thought ruefully. It had been true for decades. Once, he'd wondered if his wife knew how he felt about the countess, and if she cared. He hadn't thought about such things for a long time.

"We will not go down that road again," Signe was saying sternly. "The man is not simply a coran from Gorhaut. He is the son of Galbert de Garsenc, and if we have any hope of dividing Gorhaut on this issue he is that hope. It he betrays us, I will admit you were right before we all die. Is that enough, Roban? Will that content you?"

The chancellor swallowed hard, feeling the way he always felt when she lashed out at him. When he was younger he had actually wept sometimes behind the closed doors of his own quarters after she'd spoken to him in this way. He didn't do that anymore, but he sometimes felt like it. A terrible admission, the chancellor thought, for a man of his age and position. He wondered if she ever knew when his headaches were coming on, if she would have been more sympathetic, a little gentler perhaps, had he informed her.

Signe really didn't remember Roban ever being this obstinately tiresome when Guibor was alive. But then she hadn't had as much to do with him then; he was simply the efficient administrator in the background, and Guibor was not a man with whom advisers pushed their disagreements too hard. It looked as if she wasn't like that herself. Perhaps she depended on Roban too much, perhaps he felt she was weak and needed him to be stronger now. She didn't really know; it wasn't something she'd thought about very much. He was there, he had always been there, and she knew he could be trusted, that something assigned to him would be competently done if it was at all possible. He looked a little flushed today and there were circles under his eyes. It crossed her mind to wonder, as she watched him make his habitual little smoothing gesture down the front of his immaculate doublet, if Roban was overburdened—the usual fate of competent men.

She didn't, in fact, feel especially strong herself at the moment, but that wasn't for anyone to see or guess, even Roban, even Valery. "Send for Borsiard d'Andoria in Lussan," she told the chancellor. "I will give him an audience here. I will not ban him by fiat or decree. He will hear it from me in this castle."

Which is what had happened later that same afternoon. Borsiard had stormed into her audience chamber, raging in the most unpleasant manner, demanding Bertran de Talair's censure and death in redress for the slaughter of three noblemen of Andoria. He had actually had a belief that she might agree, Signe saw. He was seeing her as a woman, a woman who could be frightened by his rage, moved to do what he wanted her to do.

That realization was what had given her access to the cold anger she needed to quell the Portezzan. And he had been quelled. She had dealt with better men than he in the past. As soon as she'd begun to speak, slowly, letting her measured words fall like stones into the stillness of the room, Borsiard's bravado had seemed to leech away from him.

"Take your people and your goods and go," she had said, speaking from the ancient throne of the counts of Arbonne. "You will not be allowed trade or profit at a fair whose laws you have so vilely broken. The men who were killed were properly executed by the duke of Talair, who is our agent in this, as are all the nobility of Arbonne. Whatever your quarrel with Blaise de Garsenc of Gorhaut—a quarrel in which we have no interest whatever—the roads leading to the Lussan Fair were not the place to pursue it. In that, we have a great interest indeed. You will not be troubled as you leave Arbonne. Indeed, we will assign a company of our men to escort you safely to the Portezzan border… unless there is somewhere else you might wish to go?"

Guibor had taught her that; raise the issue yourself, take the initiative from the other person. And as if on cue, Borsiard d'Andoria's dark, handsome face had twisted with a spasm of malice. "Indeed there is," he had said. "There are matters I should like to pursue in Gorhaut. I will travel north from here."

"We have no doubt you will be welcome at the court of King Ademar," Signe had said calmly. This was not a man to unsettle her, however much he might be worth, whatever Roban might fear. He was far too predictable. She wondered how long his marriage would last. She allowed herself to smile; she knew how to make her smile a weapon if need be. "We only hope your lady wife does not find it cold in Cortil and dull there as winter comes to the north," she murmured. "If she prefers to go home we will be happy to offer her an escort. Indeed—" a thought born of the moment " — we will be most pleased to have her stay on at our court should you wish to go north without her. We imagine we could find ways to keep her amused. It would be unjust to deny a lady the pleasures of a fair because of her husband's transgressions. We do not behave that way in Arbonne."

She wondered, lying in bed that same night, if she might have cause to regret the loss of temper that had led to that last invitation. It could prove awkward in many ways to have Lucianna Delonghi—it was almost impossible to think of her by any other name, despite her marriages—in Barbentain and Lussan this month. On the other hand, had the woman wanted to stay for the fair, she could simply have joined her father's contingent in any case. The invitation lent a sanction of control to what could hardly have been prevented. Signe hoped it might be seen that way, at any rate. She was also, privately, somewhat curious to meet the woman again. The last time Lucianna Delonghi had been in Barbentain was six or seven years ago, before the first of her marriages. Her father had presented her to the count and countess. She'd been clever, as all her family were, beautiful already, watchful, very young. A great deal had evidently happened to her in the intervening years.

It might be interesting to see exactly what. Later, though, Signe thought. She didn't want to see anyone at the moment. She had retired early, leaving to Roban and the Keepers of the Fair the task of carrying out her orders regarding the Andoria. She doubted there would be difficulties; Borsiard had few corans with him this far from home, and was unlikely to embarrass himself by forcing a public removal from Lussan. He was, however, quite likely to go north to Gorhaut—as Roban had gloomily predicted. The chancellor was usually right about such things. What Borsiard would do there was harder to guess. But the implications could not be lost on anyone: Andoria was one less source of funding for Arbonne, one less ally if war did come, and possibly one more contingent of arms in the field if Gorhaut asked for them.

Signe sighed in the darkness of her room. She knew Bertran had acted properly in what he'd done, that he'd made it easier for her by taking the burden upon himself. She only wished… she only wished he didn't seem to always find himself in situations where doing the proper thing meant so much trouble for all of them.

At the moment all she wanted to do was rest. There was sometimes a curious easing of care for her in the nighttime, in the embrace of sleep. It didn't always come to her easily, but when it did her dreams were almost always benign, comforting. She would be walking in the castle gardens, or with Guibor, young again, in that meadow she had loved beneath the Ancients' aqueduct near Carenzu, and sometimes the four children would be with them: clever Beatritz with her shining hair, the boys—Guibor eager and adventuresome, Piers watchful, a little apart—and then Aelis trailing behind them through the green, green grass. Aelis, in her mother's dreams, always seemed older than the others, though she was the youngest child. She would appear in the dreams as she had looked, coming into the flourish of her own late, fierce beauty, in the year before she died.

Signe reached towards sleep that night as a woman reaching for the last gentle lover of her days. The anxieties of day would still be waiting in the morning, with newer concerns appearing to join them, new dangers from the north… tonight she sought her dreams. She was not allowed to have them. The knocking at the outer door of her suite of rooms was so soft she would not have even heard it had she actually been asleep. One of the girls in the antechamber would have, though. Already Brisseau, the older of the two, hovered, anxious and wraithlike in her white night-robe, at the entrance to Signe's chamber.

"See who it is," the countess said, though there was only one person it could be at this hour.

Roban waited in the outer room while she donned her own robe. She went out to him; she disliked receiving men or conducting affairs of state in her bedchamber. He was still in the doublet he'd worn earlier in the day. Signe understood, with something of a shock, that he had not yet even gone to bed. It was very late, and the chancellor did not look well. His face was haggard and in the light of the candles the girls were hastily lighting his eyes were deep-sunken. He looked older than his years, she thought suddenly: they had worn him down in their service, she and Guibor. She wondered if he felt the labours had been worth the price. She wondered, for the first time, what he actually thought of the two of them. Or of her, more properly. Guibor was dead; one thought nothing but good of the dead. She realized she didn't really know what her chancellor's opinion of her might be. Frivolous, she decided; he'd probably concluded she was frivolous and impetuous and needed a steady, guiding hand. That might answer her question of earlier in the day about why he had pushed his views so urgently of late.

He really didn't look well, though.

"Sit," she said. "Before you begin, sit down. Brisseau, a flask of cider for the chancellor."

She thought Roban would refuse the chair but he did not; that only served to increase her own disquiet. Forcing herself to be patient she waited, sitting opposite him, until the cider had been brought and placed on the table. She waited again until he drank.

"Tell me," she said, finally.

"My lady, a message came to me from Rian's temple in the town earlier tonight," he said, his voice curiously faint. "It purported to be from someone who could not possibly have been in Lussan, requesting audience and… and sanctuary with you."

"Yes?"

"Yes, so I went down into town myself to see if it might possibly be a true message. I am afraid it is, my lady. I fear that we have the gravest crisis upon us now, one that makes the Andoria matter seem as nothing."

"Who is it? Who is in the town?"

"Not in town any longer. I had no choice, my lady, I had to bring her up to the castle before anyone else knew she was here or what was happening." The chancellor drew an unsteady breath. "Countess, it seems that the Lady Rosala de Garsenc of Gorhaut has left the duke her husband without his knowledge. She seeks refuge with us. She is in Barbentain now, and, my lady… though I am far from expert in these matters, I believe that she may be about to give birth, even as we speak."

Cadar de Savaric, defiantly named and surnamed for his mother's father and family, entered the world in Barbentain Castle shortly before dawn that night.

Brought early to his time by the rigours of his mother's journey through the mountains to Arbonne, he was nonetheless sturdy and pink when he emerged, letting out a loud cry his exhausted mother heard as triumphant when the priestess of Rian, summoned hastily to the castle, drew him from her womb and clipped the birthing cord.

They washed him ceremoniously in milk warmed by the fire, as befitted a child of rank, and the older of the two priestesses swaddled him expertly in blue samite before handing him to the countess of Arbonne, who had remained in the room for the last long hours of Rosala's travail. Signe de Barbentain, white-haired, with the delicate blue veins showing in her pale, flawless skin, cradled the child and looked down upon it with an expression Rosala could not entirely comprehend but which she found deeply reassuring nonetheless. After a moment Signe walked over to the bed and laid the infant gently in his mother's arms.

Rosala had not expected the gentleness. She had not known what to expect. She had only realized, when Galbert de Garsenc had ridden away from her a week ago, that she was going to go south, however she possibly could. Beyond that she had not clearly thought.

The coming of the Lussan Fair had given her the chance. Garsenc lay near to the principal road that ran up into the mountain pass, and each day Rosala had seen small troupes of corans and tradesmen passing by their lands, often stopping to worship at the chapel, or do a bit of business in the castle or the village below.