A Song for Arbonne (56 page)

He didn't take offense, or else he was being very patient with her. "If I said that I regret it. I grew up with music in Gorhaut, however different it might have been. One day I will want to try to explain to you that my country is not only… what it has been made to be tonight." He hesitated, choosing his words. "I think there are… parts of the troubadour world here, courtly love, that I find unsettling. Perhaps I needed time to understand it better. I thought once it made your men weak, your women presumptuous." He paused again. "There is no weakness I have found in the men of Arbonne."

"And the women?"

He had been waiting for that, she realized. "The women are intolerably presumptuous." She knew that tone though, by now, and he was grinning at her again, tired as he was. She found that she could smile back.

"I will be happy to sing for you," she said quietly. "It is no imposition. Not when asked of a friend." There, she had said it.

He looked surprised again, but not uncomfortably so. He opened his mouth and closed it. She silently willed him to voice whatever thought he was struggling with, but all he said after a moment was, "Thank you." He rose, with a difficulty he didn't bother to hide, and limped over to stretch out on the bed. He pulled off his boots but didn't bother with the covers or his clothing.

Nothing of any great import had been done, nothing said, but Lisseut stood up as well, feeling a warmth inside and an unexpected calm. Moving quietly about the room she began blowing out the candles. She left two burning, one on the sideboard and one on the small table by the window, and then, in the near darkness, she began to sing. Not of love or war or the goddess or the god, or anything at all of the adult world. On the night he had named himself king of Gorhaut, the night Aubry had burned, Lisseut sang for Blaise of Gorhaut lullabies of childhood, the ones her mother had sung to her so many years ago.

Only when she was certain, from the steady rise and fall of his breathing, that he was asleep did she allow herself a last song for her own heart's easing. It was another very old melody this one, so ancient no one was certain who had written it, or even what dim, half-remembered legend or tale it recounted. It had always seemed to Lisseut to be almost unbearably sad. She had never thought she would feel it applying to her own life. But in Blaise de Garsenc's room that night, while he slept, she sang it softly for herself, and when she came to the verses at the end, she realized that she was very nearly offering them as a prayer:

Her uncle had taught her that song in Vezét, long before he had taken her from her father's house and offered her the life of the singers on the road. And the roads had been good to her, had given her friends and companions, a generous measure of success, fame almost, and they had led her here tonight, following, as ever, the quick impulses of her spirit, and now the unbidden need of her heart.

Strangely at peace now, Lisseut realized that she had come looking for an answer in this room and she had found it after all. This was not a man whose life she had a right to share. He was a friend; she knew that now, knew that he would make some place for her in the pattern of his days, however long or short they were to be. But for more than that, more than that small place, she had no right and he no proper space in what his life had now become. The banner in the wind this morning had made this so.

And it would be all right, Lisseut thought, as she ended the song. She was no longer a child. Life did not always or even normally grant one the wishes of the heart. Sometimes it came near, sometimes not very near at all. She would accept, with gratitude, what seemed to have been allowed her tonight—with a hope, a prayer to Rian, that there might be more such moments graciously allowed, before the goddess called either or both of them back to her.

She left him sleeping, with the last two candles burning down and the moons long set and the river murmuring its own infinitely older, endless song far below the window.

On the night appointed there was fog at Garsenc Castle. Rolling in from the east with the darkness at day's end it swallowed up the donjon and the outer watch-towers of the castle like some mist-dragon out of the old tales of the days before Corannos moved the sun.

Alone on the ramparts above the drawbridge Thaune of Garsenc shivered, despite the woolen overshirt and the fur vest he wore in winter. He was thinking about an oath he had sworn three months ago, a vow of fealty that had turned him from a coran of humble birth and modest future into a conspirator with a substantial prospect of dying before this night was over.

He watched his breath make puffs of smoke in the grey cold, adding to the fog; he couldn't see any further than that. The moons were invisible, of course, and the stars. They had chosen a time when both moons should have been bright and high, lending light for the crossing of the pass, but men could not control what the god sent in the way of weather, and more than one campaign of the past—including the not-so-distant past—had been undone by the elements. He remembered the savage cold at Iersen Bridge. He would always remember that. He placed both hands on the stone and peered out into the swirling grey darkness. Nothing. There could have been a hundred men below him outside the walls, and if they were quiet enough not he nor anyone else in Garsenc would have known they were there.

From the small guardhouse beside the portcullis he heard the murmur of voices. There were four men posted at night. They would be playing at dice by firelight. He couldn't even see the light down there through the fog. It didn't matter. He could hear the voices, muffled in the grey ness, and three of them were with him. The fourth would be dealt with, as necessary.

Not killed though. His instructions had been clear. Blaise de Garsenc wanted a minimum of killing in these first days. He seemed to have known exactly what he wanted, even back in the autumn, in the days after his first declaration. He had sent Thaune north among the other corans of Gorhaut to carry word freely of what had been done and said before that challenge at the fair. All the Gorhautians attending the fair had been assembled in an enormous room in Barbentain, Thaune remembered, and after the countess of Arbonne had ordered them out of the country and confiscated their goods Blaise had spoken to them with a cool precision that had been genuinely impressive. Because of the Treaty of Iersen Bridge, he'd said—a treaty that was a betrayal in itself—King Ademar was about to embroil Gorhaut in another war here in Arbonne. It was a war they did not need, brought on by a treaty that should never have been signed. He invited those assembled to think about his words, and he promised they would be allowed passage north through the mountains unharmed.

They had even contrived a pretended assassination attempt, an arrow landing carefully short of Blaise as he walked out from the castle the next morning. The tournament melee had been cancelled, in the wake of the events at Aubry and in the watch-tower south of the pass: they had found the three maimed guards by then. The court of Signe de Barbentain had collectively attended mourning services in the Temple of Rian, and in their midst—walking beside the countess, in fact—had been Blaise de Garsenc.

Thaune was instructed to claim responsibility for that attempted killing of the pretender, both on the road north through the pass and again when he arrived home at the castle—a Garsenc coran would need such a story, Blaise had told him. Thaune, remembering the fears that had led him to kill the animal-trainer, had acceded gratefully. It was strange, actually, to be working for a leader who thought of so many details concerning his men. Thaune had even, after hesitating, told Blaise about that killing in the alley. He didn't want hidden things between him and this man.

Blaise had looked regretful, but not judgmental. "You were afraid," he'd said, "and doing your duty out of fear. That is how things have always been at Garsenc. I hope you will do what you see as your duty now, but without the fear."

Thaune remembered that. He had done what he could, which, as it turned out, was quite a bit. He'd more of a knack than he would have guessed for such intrigues. There had been only a dozen soldiers in his party on the ride north—Gorhaut corans seldom went south to tournaments in Arbonne, they hadn't done so for years.

There were no rules about such things, but corans of reputation usually waited another month and went east to Aulensburg for the tourney there. Gotzland was seen as better than Arbonne; it was acceptable to fight there. Only the younger ones, and a handful of spies sometimes, went south to Lussan in the autumn with the merchants and entertainers. There were no spies in this small party, though, Thaune was certain of it. The young men listened, a little awed, to his snarling tale of wind pushing a long bowshot short.

They were probably wishing they had tried the same thing, he had mused that first night in the roadside inn among the falling leaves of autumn. Probably even dreaming of having done so, and having succeeded, and riding back to King Ademar in triumph unimaginable. Young men had such dreams.

Two of the corans on that ride, he'd decided, might be thinking, or dreaming, along somewhat different lines. He'd taken a chance and spoken to one of them before they parted ways. Turned out he had judged rightly; taking careful chances was what he'd been sent back to do. Before their roads divided, his to Garsenc, the other coran's towards the palace in Cortil, Thaune had won his first recruit to the cause of Blaise de Garsenc's rebellion. The accent had been what decided him. You could almost always trust a north-land man to be unhappy with King Ademar.

On the ramparts of Garsenc he leaned forward, suddenly tense, peering blindly into the fog. It was thick as the mist was said to be above the river to the land of the dead. He could see nothing, but he thought he'd heard a sound from the grassy space beyond the outer wall and the dry moat.

The sky above another castle, beyond the mountains to the south, was brilliantly clear that same night, the stars like diamonds, the two moons bright enough to lend shadows to the trees bending in the path of the sirnal—the north wind that swept down the Arbonne Valley with the bitter force of winter behind it.

Fires were burning on all the hearths of Barbentain, and Signe had dressed herself in layers of fine-spun wool with fur trim at the collar and sleeves and a fur-lined hat covering her head, even indoors. She hated the winter, she always had, especially when the sirnal blew, making her eyes stream and her fingers ache. Usually she and Guibor had been south by this time, in Carenzo with Ariane and Thierry, or in the winter palace in Tavernel for their sojourn there. It was always milder in the south, the depredations of the sirnal less harrowing, tempered by the shape of the land and the influence of the sea.

This year was different. She needed to be in Barbentain because this winter would not be the customary time of sheltering behind castle and village walls while the wind whipped down the valleys and empty roads. Events were taking place this season that were going to define the future for all of them, one way or another. In fact, they were taking place tonight, beneath the brightness of these two moons beyond the mountains, in Gorhaut. She wondered what Vidonne and blue Riannon were seeing there as they looked down.

Almost unbearably anxious, unable to keep still, she paced back and forth from one fire to another in her sitting room. She was disturbing her waiting-women she knew, and almost certainly doing the same to Rosala, who sat calmly nonetheless, hands busy at needlework in her chair drawn close to one fire. She wondered how the woman could be so placid, knowing—as indeed she did know—what was at stake tonight in the north.

It had come down to Blaise de Garsenc, as Beatritz had said it might almost a year ago when they'd first become aware that the new coran in Baude Castle was rather more than he seemed. Rather more. A very great deal more, in fact. The countess wished, again, that Beatritz was with her now, instead of on the island so far to the south in the sea. Images of the past year had been with her all evening, dancing in the flicker of the fires. It sometimes seemed to her that she spent half her life now walking with images of the past. But she wasn't thinking of Guibor now. She was remembering Bertran at the challenge ground as the northerner stood before the Portezzan pavilion offering a red rose:

We may have all found more than we bargained for in this man,
Bertran had said.

Another image rose up then, a memory from within this castle, in autumn as well, when they had summoned all the merchants and corans of Gorhaut the morning after Aubry and told them they were confiscating their trade goods and sending them home from the fair.

Urté de Miraval had wanted to execute them all, and Signe, a hard rage running through her, had had to resist the same desire. There were even precedents for such a thing. Every citizen of a country was personally responsible for the truce-breaking of their lords. It had been Blaise who had requested, insisted actually, that the merchants be let go, and had given cause why this should be so.

"I have nothing at all to offer in Gorhaut just yet," he'd said, speaking earnestly in this very room before they had all gone down to deal with those assembled. "They must go home knowing I've saved their lives—lives put in hazard by Ademar's truce-breaking. They must go home and talk about that. Will you give me that much?" He'd paused. "Or are we no better than what we are trying to fight?"