A Song for Arbonne (45 page)

The Arimondan was a brave man. "My fate alone?" he said. "You see how the woman had the northerner trussed up for me like a hog for slaughter? You know her husband tried to kill him on the road. Will you let her play this double game and laugh at all of us?" Blaise glanced over at Lucianna; she had moved towards the windows, and had put on a heavier robe. She didn't bother looking back at Quzman, or at any of them.

"I do not see anyone laughing," said the chancellor. "And if her game was doubled, it was only against yourself. She informed me of your proposal last night, immediately after it was first made."

A good attempt at deflecting and controlling the damage, Blaise thought, but it was unlikely to succeed. Not with the other man who had entered the room standing there, listening attentively. He knew a fair bit about Massena Delonghi, actually. He had lived in his palaces two summers ago, sleeping with his daughter. He and Rudel Correze had killed a prince for him.

But it seemed, the way events were unfolding, that Lucianna had not intended to have Blaise murdered tonight after all, though the manner in which she had had him bound and what she had done and said still needed an answer. Or, he reflected, perhaps they did not.
I don't like it when men leave me, Blaise. Did I never tell you that?
Perhaps he had his answer. Perhaps she had said nothing more or less than truth. How novel that would be, he thought wryly.

As he had expected, the chancellor's effort at diversion did not succeed. "There is another person involved in this, though," said Massena Delonghi, the sleek, suave man who was said to be seeking to dominate Portezza, and to be using his daughter's marriages in steady pursuit of that goal. "This Arimondan, I am informed, is employed by the duke of Miraval. I understand from my dear daughter that it was the corans of Duke Urté who assaulted this young friend of ours, and our well-beloved cousin as well."

"Thank you," Rudel said brightly. "I am so pleased someone remembered that."

Roban did not look pleased at all. "We will, of course, seek to hear what En Urté has to say about all of this in the morning. For the moment, there is only this man, caught by your daughter's… devices… in the act of attempting murder."

"For which he will be branded and hanged, I trust?" Lucianna's brows were arched as she finally turned to look at them. Her voice and manner were a cool, glittering mirror of her father's. Blaise remembered this side of her too. She gazed at the chancellor: "Precisely as that poor cousin of my dear husband was branded and hanged by the duke of Talair.
Precisely
in the same way, I dare suggest. Or indeed we will have sad cause to question the impartiality of the countess of Arbonne in her justice towards strangers and towards those who serve her own high lords." The celebrated eyebrows remained pointedly high.

"And," Massena Delonghi now added, in a tone more of sorrow than reproach, "there must indeed be the morning's determination of Duke Urté's own responsibility for this most flagrant breach of the truce of the fair. A lamentable duty for the countess, I am sure, but if Portezzan nobleman are to be executed like common thieves, she surely cannot turn a blind eye to the transgressions of her own people, however lofty their rank."

Lucianna's father was enjoying every moment of this, Blaise realized. It was exactly the sort of multi-faceted intrigue the Delonghi most loved. Massena would have little or nothing actually vested in Urté's downfall or the countess's embarrassment, but would take pleasure and—Blaise had no doubt—in the end find some gain in being the figure at the heart of both eventualities. If Arbonne had hoped to keep her internal feuds close to her breast, that hope was almost certainly ended now. Blaise wondered, cynically, if Massena Delonghi would be writing to Galbert de Garsenc soon in Gorhaut, or sending his factor in Cortil on an informal visit to King Ademar's court, to suggest some quiet transaction by way of compensation to the Delonghi for the discomfiture of Arbonne.

Rudel, proving belatedly useful, if not efficiently so, had finally finished with Blaise's ankle bonds. He'd also found, discarded in a corner of the room, the removed clothing and boots. Moving as well as his pounding head would allow, Blaise dressed himself. He saw that Rosala had taken a seat on a low bench by the door, sitting alone at some distance from everyone else. She was watching his every movement, though, with a curiously strained expression. It occurred to him, with something of a jolt, that he had also been unclothed the last time they'd seen each other. So, for that matter, had she.

The door to the room was still open beside her. Through it now, arresting that particular line of thought, came Lucianna's servant. Blaise remembered Imera well. Her knowing features had accompanied him on a great many silent night walks through one palace or another to her mistress's rooms. Imera stopped in the doorway, took in the scene and allowed herself the briefest smile imaginable as she observed the Arimondan ringed with swords.

It seemed to Blaise, looking at her, as if he were actually being made to journey backwards through the course of this night—first in that inn outside the walls with Rudel and King Daufridi, now here in Lucianna's room—through the layers of his own past. All that was needed now—

"The countess of Arbonne has come," said Imera.
Of course,
thought Blaise, tenderly probing the blood-encrusted lump on the back of his skull, preparing to kneel.

He was not really surprised; he was even beginning to find the oddest element of humour in all of this. The small, elegant figure of Signe de Barbentain came briskly into the room, dressed in pale blue trimmed with pearls. She was followed—and this
was
a shock—by the bulky, grim-faced figure of Duke Urté de Miraval.

"My lady!" exclaimed Roban as they all sank down and then rose from their obeisances. "I thought you to be asleep. I did not want to—"

"Asleep?" said the countess of Arbonne. "With such beautiful music below and treachery above stairs in our palace? I have only the duke of Miraval to thank for bringing me here in time to deal with this. You and I, Roban, will have to have a talk in the morning."

"But countess," began the chancellor, a little too earnestly, "it is the duke of Miraval himself who—"

"Who was informed by an Arimondan in his employ of a plot by the wife of the banned Borsiard d'Andoria, a second attempt against the life of our dear friend from Gorhaut." Signe's voice and manner were chillingly austere.

"Quzman, I am sorry to say, has his own grievance against the northerner," Urté added smoothly. "So deep a hatred that he was willing to breach the truce of the fair to aid the lady of Andoria in her corrupt designs. I chose to allow the affair to proceed a certain distance, trusting it could be halted—and thereby exposing the Portezzan evil at its source. I am pleased to see that this has happened." He was staring coldly at Lucianna.

Blaise looked over at Rudel and saw his friend smiling crookedly back at him, still holding a cloth to the side of his head. They turned, simultaneously, to the chancellor of Arbonne. Roban's surprise was just a little too extreme again.
This is a clever man,
thought Blaise.
He may get away with it, after all.
Massena Delonghi, he noted, had paled a little beneath the dark tan, but he too was smiling slightly, showing a master's appreciation for the neatness of what was happening.

As if on cue to Blaise's thought, Roban said, "But countess, there
was
no Portezzan plot. The gracious lady Lucianna Delonghi d'Andoria was acting only to expose this selfsame Arimondan. She personally informed me of his designs last night. She only pretended to accede to his scheme to prevent a more summary murder of the Gorhaut coran. It seems to be her understanding that, ah… the duke of Miraval was actively involved in his underling's designs."

"Evidently a faulty understanding on my part," Lucianna murmured silkily into the silence that followed this. "One for which I must surely make amends to the duke when more private opportunity allows." She smiled at Urté, her most dazzling smile.

"My dear daughter has such an impulsive nature," Massena Delonghi added, playing out the game, "and she was naturally so anxious to make redress for her… equally impulsive husband's earlier transgression." He shrugged, and spread his hands. "It seems we have
all
been acting in good faith here."

"Except for one man," said Signe de Barbentain icily. She was looking at the Arimondan.

Blaise had seen it before, and now he registered it again: Quzman of Arimonda was neither a coward nor a fool. The man was smiling, ringed about with steel and hostile glances.

"Ever the way of things, is it not?" he asked quietly, looking directly at his employer. Duke Urté, stone-faced, made no reply. "I am the sacrifice after all, not the man who murdered my brother. I do wonder, though," he said, turning with bold eyes and no deference at all to the countess of Arbonne, "how I am presumed to have used ten of my lord of Miraval's corans tonight without his knowledge."

The weak link,
Blaise thought, racing through possibilities.
He's going to take Urté down with him.
But he'd underestimated the Arbonnais again.

"That is a matter of some grief to me," En Urté de Miraval said, his deep voice conveying dimensions of regret. "I chose to test the loyalty and prudence of my corans, electing not to caution them about Quzman's designs or undermine his plot. I am sorry to say that ten of them did, indeed, succumb to his undeniable persuasiveness. They have their own hatred of this Gorhautian coran, arising from the deaths of five of their fellows half a year ago in a most unfortunate incident. They agreed to assist in this terrible deed."

"Then these men too must surely be punished," said Massena Delonghi to the countess, shaking his head at this latest revelation of the world's depredations, the evils that seemed to flourish so brazenly in the midst of good and honest men.

Quzman of Arimonda was still smiling, Blaise saw—a terrible expression now, of complete understanding.

"They have been punished," said Urté briefly. "They are dead."

And so the chancellor had indeed won, after all, Blaise realized. Given that his sole purpose here would have been to control the reverberations of this, to keep the countess from having to deal with the bitter feud between Miraval and Talair at this most sensitive juncture in Arbonne's affairs, he had almost certainly managed to do so. He turned to Rudel again and saw wry admiration in his friend's eyes as he looked towards the unassuming chancellor of Arbonne.

Impulsively, Blaise turned back towards the door, to the bench were Rosala was sitting, and read, without real surprise, an identically cynical understanding in her expression. She had always been that quick. It had been too easy to see her only as a woman at the beginning, the selected wife of his older brother—to fail to realize how clever she really was. But there had been moments, even in the few, brief intervals when he had been home, when Blaise had been forced to remind himself whose daughter Rosala was, and to remember that any child of Cadar de Savaric would know more than a thing or two about the world's affairs. Thinking so, he took a few steps towards her. Rosala was the last, in a real sense the largest, mystery of this night.

It was with a renewed surprise that he saw Signe de Barbentain turn as well, to smile at Rosala and then take a seat beside her on the bench. The countess of Arbonne took his sister-in-law's hands between her own. "You thought you were saving a life, didn't you?" she asked. Her voice was low, but Blaise, moving nearer, was concentrating now on the two of them and he heard. Behind him the chancellor was ordering the binding of the Arimondan.

"I did think that," he heard Rosala say. "I didn't know who it was."

"Which makes it a braver act, my dear. How is Cadar?"

Blaise blinked, and suddenly stopped where he was.

Rosala said, "Sleeping down the hall, with his nurse." She looked up at Blaise as she spoke those words, her clear blue eyes on his from across the room.

"Then why don't we leave these untidy affairs and go look in on your baby?" Blaise heard the countess say.

"I would like that," his brother's wife murmured, rising. Blaise realized that his heart was pounding. "You haven't seen him since the morning, have you?"

Signe stood up as well, smiling. "But I have been thinking of him all day. Shall we go?"

Blaise wasn't quite certain how, but he seemed to have crossed the room towards the two of them. The countess looked at him, her elegant features composed. He was staring at Rosala though. He bent, carefully, and saluted her on both cheeks.

"My lady, this is a great surprise," he said awkwardly, feeling himself flush. He had never been easy with her. "Am I understanding correctly? Have you had a child? Have you had a child
here!?"

Her head was high, her handsome, intelligent features betrayed no distress at all, but up close now he could see marks of weariness and strain. She had burst into this room, even so, at the very real risk of her own life, following a man with a blade to save whoever it might have been who was in danger here.

She said gravely, "I am sorry you are discovering it in this fashion. I was told you were here, but there seemed to be no easy way to inform you, given that I have left Garsenc without Ranald's knowledge and am not going back." She paused for a moment, to let him begin dealing with that. "I did give birth two days ago, by grace of Corannos, and Rian. My son is asleep down the hall. His name is Cadar. Cadar de Savaric." She stopped a second time. Blaise was feeling as if he had been struck again, a second blow to the head, in the same place the staff had hit before. "You may see him if you like," his sister-in-law concluded.

"How sweet this is, how truly touching," came an amused voice just behind him. "The lost children of Gorhaut. Surely I was right, there will
have
to be a ballad about this. Why don't we
all
go dote upon the child?" He hadn't heard Lucianna coming up; once, his whole being would have been focused on knowing exactly where she was in any room. In the strangest way, Blaise felt an obscure sadness in this change.