A Song for Arbonne

‘You don’t really have a great deal of choice, do you?’ the man before her said, taking a few steps forward. He was of middling height, clad in brown, with a midwinter carnival mask, unsettlingly incongruous in such a place as this, covering most of his face.

‘Do you know what my husband will do to you?’ Aelis said grimly. ‘And my father in Barbentain? Have you any idea?’

‘I do, actually,’ the masked man said. Beside him, the one she had wounded was still clutching his shoulder; there was blood on his hand. ‘And it has rather a lot to do with money, my lady. Rather a lot of money, actually.’

‘You are a very great fool!’ Aelis snapped. They had surrounded her horse now, but no one, as yet, had reached for the reins. There seemed to be about fifteen of them—an extraordinary number for an outlaw band, so near the two castles. ‘Do you expect to live to spend anything they give you? Don’t you know how you will be pursued?’

‘These are indeed worrisome matters,’ the man in front of her said, not sounding greatly worried. ‘I don’t expect you to have given them much thought. I have.’ His voice sharpened. ‘I do expect you to co-operate, though, or people will start being hurt, and I’m afraid that might include the girl. I don’t have unlimited time, Lady Aelis, or patience. Drop the bow!’

There was a crack of command in the last sentence that actually made Aelis jump. She looked over at Ariane; the girl was big-eyed, trembling with fear. Riquier lay face down on the grass. He seemed to be unconscious, but there was no blade wound she could see.

‘The others will not be hurt?’ she said.

‘I said that. I don’t like repeating myself.’ The voice was muffled by the festive mask, but the arrogance came through clearly.

Aelis dropped her bow. Without another word the leader turned and nodded his head. From behind the arch, having been hidden by its massive shape, another man stepped out leading two horses. The leader swung himself up on a big grey, and beside him the wounded man awkwardly mounted a black mare. No one else moved. The others were clearly going to stay and deal with the corans.

‘What will you do with the girl?’ Aelis called out.

The outlaw turned back. ‘I am done with questions,’ he said bluntly. ‘Will you come, or will you need to be trussed and carried like a heifer?’

With deliberate slowness, Aelis moved her horse forward. When she was beside Ariane she stopped and said, very clearly, ‘Be gallant, bright one, they will not, they dare not do you any harm. With Rian’s grace I shall see you very soon.’

She moved on, still slowly, sitting her horse with head high and shoulders straight as befitted her father’s daughter. The leader paid her no attention, he had already wheeled his mount and had begun to ride, not even glancing back. The wounded man fell in behind Aelis. The three of them went forward in a soft jingling of harness, passing under the Arch of the Ancients, through the cold shadow of it, and then out into sunlight again on the other side.

THEY RODE THROUGH the young grasses, travelling almost due north. Behind them the shoreline of Lake Dierne fell away, curving to the east. On their left Urté’s vineyards stretched into the distance. Ahead of them was the forest. Aelis kept her silence and neither of the masked men spoke. As they approached the outlying pines and balsams of the wood Aelis saw a charcoal-burner’s cottage lying just off the lightly worn path. The door was open. There was no one in sight, nor were there any sounds in the morning light save their horses and the calling of birds.

The leader stopped. He had not even looked at her since they had begun to ride, nor did he now. ‘Valery,’ he said, scanning the edges of the forest to either side, ‘keep watch for the next while, but find Garnoth first—he won’t be far away—and have him clean and bind your shoulder. There’s water in the stream.’

‘There is usually water in a stream,’ the wounded man said in a deep voice, his tone unexpectedly tart. The leader laughed; the sound carried in the stillness.

‘You have no one to blame for that wound but yourself,’ he said, ‘don’t take your grievances out on me.’ He swung down from his horse, and then he looked at Aelis for the first time. He motioned for her to dismount. Slowly she did. With an elaborately graceful gesture—almost a parody given where they were—he indicated the entrance to the cottage.

Aelis looked around. They were quite alone, a long way from where anyone might chance to pass. The man Valery, masked in fur like a grey wolf, was already turning away to find Garnoth, whoever that was—probably the charcoal-burner. Her arrow was still in his shoulder.

She walked forward and entered the hut. The outlaw leader followed and closed the door behind him. It shut with a loud click of the latch. There were windows on either side, open so that the breeze could enter. Aelis walked to the centre of the small, sparsely furnished room, noting that it had been recently swept clean. She turned around.

Bertran de Talair, the younger son, the troubadour, removed the falcon mask he wore.

‘By all the holy names of Rian,’ he said, ‘I have never known a woman like you in my life. Aelis, you were magnificent.’

With some difficulty she kept her expression stern, despite what seeing his face again, the flash of his quick, remembered smile, was suddenly doing to her. She forced herself to gaze coolly into the unnerving clarity of his blue eyes. She was not a kitchen girl, not a tavern wench in Tavernel, to swoon into his arms.

‘Your man is badly wounded,’ she said sharply. ‘I might have killed him. I sent specific word with Brette that I was going to shoot an arrow when you stopped us. That you should tell your men to wear chain mail under their clothing.’

‘And I told them,’ said Bertran de Talair with an easy shrug. He moved towards the table, discarding his mask, and Aelis saw belatedly that there was wine waiting for them. It was becoming more difficult by the moment, but she continued to fight the impulse to smile back at him, or even to laugh aloud.

‘I did tell them, truly,’ Bertran repeated, attending to the wine bottle. ‘Valery chose not to. He doesn’t like armour. Says it impedes his movement. He’ll never make a proper coran, my cousin Valery.’ He shook his head in mock sorrow and then glanced over his shoulder at her again. ‘Green becomes you, as the leaves the trees. I cannot believe you are here with me.’

She seemed to be smiling, after all. She struggled to keep control of the subject though; there was a real issue here. She could easily have killed the man, Valery. ‘But you chose not to tell him why he ought to protect himself, correct? You didn’t tell him I planned to shoot. Even though you knew he would be the one standing beside you.’

Smoothly he opened the bottle. He grinned at her. ‘Correct and correct. Why are all the de Barbentain so unfairly clever? It makes it terribly difficult for the rest of us, you know. I thought it might be a lesson for him—Valery should know by now that he ought to listen when I make a suggestion, and not ask for reasons.’

‘I might have killed him,’ Aelis said again.

Bertran was pouring the wine into two goblets. Silver and machial, she saw, not remotely belonging in a cabin such as this. She wondered what the charcoal-burner was being paid. The goblets were each worth more than the man would earn in his whole life.

Bertran came towards her, offering wine. ‘I trusted your aim,’ he said simply. The simple brown jacket and leggings became him, accenting his burnished outdoor colour and the bronze of his hair. The eyes were genuinely extraordinary; most of the lineage of Talair had those eyes. In the women, that shade of blue had broken hearts in Arbonne and beyond for generations. In the men too, Aelis supposed.

She made no motion towards the extended goblet. Not yet. She was the daughter of Guibor de Barbentain, count of Arbonne, ruler of this land.

‘You trusted your cousin’s life to my aim?’ she asked. ‘Your own? An irrational trust, surely? I might have wounded you as easily as he.’

His expression changed. ‘You did wound me, Aelis. At the midwinter feast. I fear it is a wound that will be with me all my life.’ There was a gravity to his tone, sharply at odds with what had gone before. ‘Are you truly displeased with me? Do you not know the power you have in this room?’ The blue eyes were guileless, clear as a child’s, resting on her own. The words and the voice were balm and music to her parched soul.

She took the wine. Their fingers touched as she did. He made no other movement towards her though. She sipped and he did the same, not speaking. It was Talair wine, of course, from his family’s vineyards on the eastern shores of the lake.

She smiled finally, releasing him from interrogation for the moment. She sank down onto the one bench the cottage offered. He took a small wooden stool, leaning forward towards her, his long, musician’s fingers holding the goblet in two hands. There was a bed by the far wall; she had been acutely aware of that from the moment she’d walked in, and equally aware that the charcoal-burner was unlikely to have had a proper bed for himself in this cottage.

Urté de Miraval would be a long way west by now in his favourite woods, lathering his horses and dogs in pursuit of a boar or a stag. The sunlight fell slantwise through the eastern window, laying a benison of light across the bed. She saw Bertran’s glance follow hers in that direction. She saw him look away.

And realized in that instant, with a surge of unexpected discovery, that he was not nearly so assured as he seemed. That it might actually be true what he’d just said, what was so often spun in the troubadours’ songs: that hers, as the high-born woman, the long-desired, was the true mastery in this room. Even the birds above the lake …

‘What will they do with Ariane and the corans?’ she asked, aware that unmixed wine and excitement were doing dangerous things to her. His hair was tousled from the confining mask and his smooth-shaven face looked clever and young and a little bit reckless. Whatever the rules of the courtly game, this would not be a man easily or always controlled. She had known that from the first.

As if to bear witness to that, he arched his brows, composed and poised again. ‘They will be continuing on their way to Talair soon enough. My men will have removed their masks by now and declared themselves. We brought wine and food for a meal on the grass. Ramir was there, did you recognize him? He has his harp, and I wrote a ballad last week about a play-acting escapade by the arch. My parents will disapprove, and your husband I rather imagine, but no one has been hurt, except Valery by you, and no one will really be able to imagine or suggest I would do you any harm or dishonour. We will give Arbonne a story to be shocked about for a month or so, no more than that. This was fairly carefully thought out,’ he said. She could hear the note of pride.

‘Evidently,’ she murmured. A month or so, no more than that? Not so swiftly, my lord. She was trying to guess how her mother would have handled this. ‘How did you arrange for Brette in Miraval to help you?’ she temporized.

He smiled. ‘Brette de Vaux and I were fostered together.’

‘We have had various … adventures with each other. I thought he could be trusted to help me with …’

‘With another adventure, my lord?’ She had her opening now. She stood. It seemed she didn’t need to think of her mother after all. She knew exactly what to do. What she had dreamt of doing through the long nights of the winter just past. ‘With the easy matter of another tavern song?’

He rose as well, awkwardly, spilling some of his wine. He laid the goblet down on the table, and she could see that his hand was trembling.

‘Aelis,’ he said, his voice low and fierce, ‘what I wrote last winter was true. You need never undervalue yourself. Not with me, not with anyone alive. This is no adventure. I am afraid …’ he hesitated and then went on, ‘I am greatly afraid that this is the consummation of my heart’s desire.’

‘What is?’ she said then, forcing herself to remain calm despite what his words were doing to her. ‘Having a cup of wine with me? How delicate. How modest a desire for your heart.’

He blinked in astonishment, but then the quality of his gaze changed, kindled, and his expression made her knees suddenly weak. She tried not to let that show either. He had been quick to follow her meaning though, too quick. She suddenly felt less sure of herself. She wished she had somewhere to set down her own wine. Instead, she drained it and let the empty goblet drop among the strewn rushes on the floor. She was unused to unmixed wine, to standing in a place so entirely alone with a man such as this.

Drawing a breath against the racing of her heart, Aelis said, ‘We are not children, nor lesser people of this land, and I can drink a cup of wine with a great many different men.’ She forced herself to hold his eyes with her own dark gaze. She swallowed, and said clearly, ‘We are going to make a child today, you and I.’

And watched Bertran de Talair as all colour fled from his face. He is afraid now, she thought. Of her, of what she was, of the swiftness and the unknown depths of this.

‘Aelis,’ he began, visibly struggling for self-possession, ‘any child you bear, as duchess of Miraval, and as your father’s daughter—’

He stopped there. He stopped because she had reached up even as he began to speak and was now, with careful, deliberate motions, unbinding her hair.

Bertran fell silent, desire and wonder and the sharp awareness of implications all written in his face. It was that last she had to smooth away. He was too clever a man, for all his youth; he might hold back even now, weighing consequences. She pulled the last long ivory pin free and shook her head to let the cascade of her hair tumble down her back. The sheerest encitement to desire. So all the poets sang.

The poet before her, of a lineage nearly as proud as her own, said, with a certain desperation now, ‘A child. Are you certain? How do you know that today, now, that we …’

Aelis de Miraval, daughter of the count of Arbonne, smiled then, the ancient smile of the goddess, of women centred in their own mysteries. She said, ‘En Bertran, I spent two years on Rian’s Island in the sea. We may have only a little magic there, but if it lies not in such matters as this, where should it possibly lie?’

And then knowing—without even having to think of what her mother would have done—knowing as surely as she knew the many-faceted shape of her own need, that it was time for words to cease, Aelis brought her fingers up to the silken ties at the throat of her green gown and tugged at them so that the silk fell away to her hips. She lowered her arms and stood before him, waiting, trying to control her breathing, though that was suddenly difficult.

There was hunger, a kind of awe and a fully kindled desire in his eyes. They devoured what she offered to his sight. He still did not move, though. Even now, with wine and desire racing through her blood, she understood: just as she was no tavern girl, he in turn was no drunken coran in a furtive corner of some baron’s midnight hall. He too was proud, and intimately versed in power, and it seemed he still had too keen a sense of how far the reverberations of this moment might go.

‘Why do you hate him so much?’ Bertran de Talair asked softly, his eyes never leaving her pale, smooth skin, the curve of her breasts. ‘Why do you hate your husband so?’

She knew the answer to that. Knew it like a charm or spell of Rian’s priestesses chanted over and over in the starry, sea-swept darkness 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.

PART ONE

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.