"A Song for Arbonne" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kay Guy Gavriel)

CHAPTER 16

Roche the priest was in disgrace on Rian's Island in the sea. Someone foraging for winter firewood had smelled burning by a cove on the southern shoreline and had gone to investigate; the risk of the forests burning, though rather less in winter, was always real. A small fire-pit had been found, dug in the cold sand, covered with a flat slab of stone. Lifting the stone with a long branch revealed half a dozen lampfish grilling underneath.

Roche would have even tried to deny being the culprit, had he not been discovered moments later by the same interfering woodsman in a small shelter not far away, dozing in happy anticipation with a fishing line beside him and the smell of fish on his hands.

Awakened by an insolent prod of the woodsman's branch, he had stammered an offer to share his morning's secret catch under the mild winter sun while they looked out from the beach at the gentle swells of the sea. The woodsman was not moved, either by the idyllic setting nor even the succulent promise of lampfish. He was one of those depressingly pious fellows who left their homes after some night vision or other to come and serve the goddess on her island, labouring for the priests and priestesses, often becoming more sturdily attached to the doctrines and codes of conduct than the clergy were themselves.

It was fixed law, the woodsman pronounced with obdurate, finger-wagging satisfaction, that all fish and fowl around the shores of the island were interdicted to mortal men and women, sacred, he intoned virtuously, to holy Rian in her incarnation as protectress of the beasts.

Roche tried, without real hope, to explain that this applied only to fishermen or hunters from the mainland. As he'd expected, the woodsman knew better than that. Such an impiety, the man declared self-righteously, would have to be taken directly to the High Priestess herself. He shouldered his bundle of wood, took the reins of his equally burdened donkey and started briskly back north towards the temple compound. They always wanted to go straight to the High Priestess, Roche thought miserably, watching him go. As if she had nothing better to do than listen to reports of minor transgressions by her priests and priestesses.

This was, however, his third such minor transgression—for the same offence—in a year. Despairingly, he wondered if he would be sent away, demoted to service in some temple in the grainlands or the mountains. He didn't want to leave Rian's Island. He didn't want to leave the sea. He'd grown up by the ocean; it was what he knew and loved—as he loved the gracious harvests Rian in her generosity allowed them from the waves. Especially lampfish; most especially lampfish.

Morosely depressed, cursing his own weakness and the fact that he'd been stupid enough to fall asleep so near the fire-pit, he considered catching up to the woodsman, trying to forestall him, or concocting some tale that would serve his cause before they both got back to the compound. There was, he decided glumly, no point. Roche felt so miserable he almost lost his appetite.

The fish were ready, he could tell from the wafting aroma. With a heavy sigh, Roche went back to the fire-pit and looked sadly down on his six treasures sizzling invitingly beneath their carefully assembled and sprinkled herbs. As he did so he was somewhat surprised, given the extreme gravity of his plight, to discover that his hunger seemed to be returning after all.

He wandered back to the compound somewhat later, though in plenty of time for his tour of duty in the temple. He was a good priest, Roche told himself, he just liked fish.

As he'd anticipated, he was ordered to attend upon the High Priestess forthwith. He saw the woodsman with his donkey by the bakehouse door. The man looked smugly virtuous as Roche walked past. Wiping his mouth and rubbing at the stains on his robe, Roche ignored him as best he could.

On the far side of the temple dome, where the High Priestess and the Inner Circle had their chambers and meeting rooms, Roche was admitted by a stone-faced woman from Cauvas. He had never liked people from Cauvas—or anywhere inland, he suddenly thought. It took folk raised by the sea to understand the rhythms of life on the water. He wondered if he could say that to the High Priestess. She was from Barbentain, though; he didn't think it would be a prudent notion to present her with this particular proposition.

He waited in gloomy silence, alone in the antechamber, dabbing futilely at intervals at the tell-tale streaks on his robe. He sniffed his hands suddenly and grimaced. He ought to have had a wash, he realized. He was carrying the evidence of his sin right into Rian's temple. And this was the third time in a year. He was going to be sent north, Roche decided with real despair. He deserved to be sent to the mountains, far from his beloved ocean waters and their seductive bounty. He had no self-control at all, he reproached himself, no proper respect for the traditions of holy Rian which he had vowed to uphold for life, no true sense of his own solemn responsibility to set an example for—

The door opened. Another grim-faced servant nodded coldly to him. The lay-folk always loved it when a priest or priestess was in trouble. Roche wiped his hands on his robe one last time and walked in, with what dignity he could command while smelling of lampfish and charcoal, to be told his fate by the High Priestess of Rian in Arbonne.

He came out of the room shortly afterwards seriously unsettled. The High Priestess had barely even bothered to take note of his transgression. She had reprimanded him briefly, never even turning to him or taking her blind gaze from the fire on the hearth. She had pardoned him almost absently, with a ritually phrased injunction to pray in the temple for the strength to resist his weaknesses. That had been all. For the third offense in a year. He'd been dismissed. Not even her white owl had seemed to care enough to look over at him.

Roche couldn't understand it. His had been a fairly serious malfeasance, a terrible example for the lay workers. How could the High Priestess take an indifferent view of such a thing, he wondered? How could the customs of the goddess be properly preserved if the great ones of the temple paid so little attention to them? He felt almost indignant at his casual reprieve. Why, he deserved a temporary exile at the very least! Though he would have felt miserable at such a punishment, he had certainly deserved it. But what was this—an absent-minded lecture and a quick dismissal?

Something, Roche decided, was seriously wrong. He was only a lowly priest, but he couldn't help wondering if the upper hierarchies of Rian's clergy were serving her properly these days. He shook his head. What was the world coming to?

On the way out, though, he couldn't forebear grinning broadly at the dour-faced woman at the door, and as he walked back past the bakehouse through the crisp afternoon sunshine he offered the woodsman a positively cheerful wave. Not, perhaps, the most judicious thing to do, but some temptations, Roche had learned, he was ill-equipped to resist.

When he finished his tour of duty in the sanctuary that evening, he washed himself carefully, hands and face and body, in the growing chill of evening after the sun had gone down, and he donned clean raiment before going back to pray in the temple for two full watches of the evening. As he had been admonished to do, Roche humbly asked the goddess to vouchsafe him the strength to resist his inappropriate desires, and then, as an afterthought, he prayed for Rian to lend her holy wisdom and eternal presence to the High Priestess, who seemed troubled of late by burdens beyond his own poor understanding.

He felt better when he finally rose, though his knees and back creaked stiffly in the cold. He left the temple to return to the dormitory and his bed under the winter stars and both moons.

On the way out from the dome he saw a cluster of his fellow priests and priestesses standing together in the atrium around the one small fire there. It was very late; this was unusual. He went over to join them, and as they made room for him in their midst it was Maritte, very near now to delivering the child he and she had conceived last spring, who told Roche that word had just arrived that the army of Gorhaut had been seen two days ago in the High Road Pass through the mountains coming south into Arbonne with the engines of war.

It had always been likely, more than that, even.

From the moment the Treaty of Iersen Bridge had been signed, Beatritz had been certain Gorhaut would be coming to them. Until the sun falls and the moons die, Gorhaut and Arbonne shall not lie easily beside each other. That was the ancient saying—in both countries. The sun had not fallen and both moons were in the winter sky tonight she knew, aware of them as presences though she could not see their light.

Deep in her cushioned chair she was also aware of the fire on the hearth, as a warmth certainly, and a welcome one, but also as something else, not sound or heat, certainly not light—a source of danger and knowledge, both. It was such a complex world she had walked into on the night she had given up her eyes for this other sight of Rian. She saw so differently now, better in the darkness, best on the island, not at all without Brissel on her shoulder. She reached up and stroked the owl; she could feel his disquiet, or rather, she could feel him reacting to her own. She tried to send calming thoughts, to go with the gentling hand, but it was hard. It was hard tonight.

Aubry had been a blow to her heart, heavy as a descending hammer, and it had only been an opening move, no more than a small number of Gorhaut corans writing a first message in fire last autumn. There was an army now, and it seemed Galbert de Garsenc's long dream of burnings in Arbonne was about to be fulfilled.

And there was next to nothing she could do about it. She had already done what she could, keeping her lines of knowledge flung far, leaving the island more than she ought to have done, neglecting the localized but vital needs of her priests and priestesses to meet with her mother and Roban and the most important of the nobility—Bertran, Thierry and Ariane, Urté. It had been Beatritz, feeling the rare pulse of the goddess within her, who had counselled that a careful approach be made to Blaise de Garsenc, who was known to have left Gorhaut in anger. She remembered the first reactions to that: he was the son of the High Elder, their purest enemy. An ignorant, unpleasant mercenary soldier, Roban the chancellor had named him derisively.

He is more than that, Beatritz had told them, trusting her intuition and the silence of her owl. Bertran was the one who had agreed with her, though almost in spirit of amusement, and also because—as they only afterwards understood—her proposal coincided neatly with a seduction he was then pursuing. It was that way with Bertran, sometimes. You took him for what he was, which was not inconsiderable, and tried to keep private the inward lament for how much more he might have been.

She had known she was right about Blaise de Garsenc when Rian, in holy intercession, had acted to bring the man to the island even before Bertran went to Castle Baude. Beatritz had done what she could here, too, trying to frighten him out of the grim complacency that was obvious and reach past his barriers to touch the shielded thing she sensed within. Brissel had let her know that he, too, felt something there, and long ago she had learned to listen when the owl told her such things.

She remembered Brissel flying from her shoulder on Midsummer Night in Tavernel when Blaise had first spoken of the crown of Gorhaut. She had not expected that, either the man's words or the white owl's sudden flight to him. She was truly blind when Brissel was not with her, but her mother had reached up to take her hand and had told her quietly where the bird had gone, and Beatritz had felt the presence of Rian in that moment.

If only it were a presence she could invoke more often. If only she had a tenth of the magic and the mental powers the superstitious attributed to her. But magic in Arbonne was a tenuous, very nearly non-existent thing—whatever it might be in those uncharted countries storm-blown mariners had told her lay beyond the deserts to the south. Magic here was wholly confined to small things, the coinage of hearth and heart. Control of conception, foreknowledge of a child's sex—and that last not always with certainty. Knowledge of sorrows, some access to easing them. A skill with the gifts of the earth: herbs, flowers, fruits, trees. A certain awareness Beatritz herself had—though only here on the island or the isle in Lake Dierne, and only since her blinding—of inward life, in matters of love and hate. Some powers of healing, though these as much a matter of herbal and other lore handed down as anything else.

That was the sum of their magic; that was their dangerous power. It had been useful to have others think there was more; a fear of the clergy of Rian and their night gatherings could be a kind of defence.

Until that fear became so deep and cold a terror that it became the very reason for their peril. Galbert de Garsenc seemed to have crossed over that line one day or night in his own past. His fear of the women of Arbonne, his hatred of Rian and all the goddess meant, was the reason there was an army in the mountains in the midst of winter, whipped into a killing frenzy by the High Elder of Corannos. They would be out of the mountains by now, Beatritz corrected herself, her heart aching, a slow, cold dread moving through her like a poison in the blood.

She didn't know what to do. That was the worst of it. She could pray, gather everyone on the island under the temple dome to offer hymns and incantations all day and night, seeking some access to the goddess, invoking her intercession. Rian could not be compelled, though. That was the oldest, deepest law; she was capricious and inviolate, and death was a part of her dominion—it was, in fact, one of her incarnations. She was mother, she was bride, but she was also gatherer of the dead.

It might even be that Rian herself had ordained this scourge as a punishment, a cleansing of the evils of their time. Beatritz didn't know what their great acts of evil might be, but she was only a servant of the goddess, not privy to divine awareness. She would have thought—she would have said—that there was no darkness or evil in Arbonne deserving of what had happened to the corans in that watch-tower below the High Pass last autumn, or to the priestesses of the temple of Aubry that same night.

She would have said as much to holy Rian herself. As if it would matter. The owl ruffled his feathers, bringing her mind back. She'd been considering options, responses. She remembered how her father used to do that, crisply running through possibilities aloud before decisively choosing his path. It was still difficult for her sometimes to accept that he was dead, that the burdens were her mother's now and her own, with such aid as could be invoked from the bitterly divided nobility of Arbonne.

There was no heir. That had always been a problem, and Guibor IV of Barbentain had been unable to name one in his last years for fear of tearing the country apart. He had even tried to make Beatritz leave the sanctuary of the goddess in the year after Aelis died with her child in Miraval. Guibor had anticipated this trouble in the time that followed the death of his youngest child. He had always anticipated a great deal, it was a fault of his, to try to make too many things fall right at the same time. It had been that way with Aelis's marriage to Urté de Miraval in the first place: a powerful duke, one of the mightiest in the country, a choice that could not be impeached, and a man anxious to father children, a son or even a daughter to rule Arbonne when Guibor died.

But Aelis had died first, and so too, almost certainly, had her son. No one could be absolutely sure, though everyone knew what she had told her husband on her deathbed about the fathering of the child: in doing so she had given dreadful, calamitous life to the feud that had shaped Arbonne ever since. Urté could not even be approached or spoken to on this issue. Beatritz had tried once, at the end of the year after Aelis died—and had received the most stinging rebuke of her life. They would have had to put the duke of Miraval to torture to even try to make him speak. And he wouldn't have, they all knew that: he wouldn't have said what had happened to the child even then.

Not even Guibor the count had been able to quell or control what Aelis had begun between Talair and Miraval on that night so long ago. So, searching for alternatives, he had tried to make Beatritz leave the clergy, come back to Barbentain, prepare herself to marry, to have a child of her own.

It was then that she'd had herself blinded, in that small temple in the Gotzland mountains, taking the step no priestess had taken for years upon years, aligning herself irrevocably with Rian. She had become High Priestess two years later and had come to the island.

Her father had never truly forgiven her. That had always hurt, for she had loved him. Not as her mother did, with an undying passion of the soul, and not even as her sister Aelis had, with something complex and yearning at its core. Beatritz had known her father's weaknesses and his flaws too well, had seen him too clearly for either of those kinds of love: she understood his pride, how he wished to control and shape far too much in too many different ways, his own guiding hands on the reins of everyone and everything. Of course she understood such a thing: it was her own besetting vice. She was Guibor's child. Her call to Rian had been real, though, the truest thing in her life, and she had known it young.

Her mother had understood, surprisingly. Signe, beautiful and glittering like an ornamental jewel under torchlight in Barbentain, seemed nonetheless to have understood a great deal, always. Beatritz ached for her tonight, picturing her in the wintry castle with these brutal tidings newly come and the terrible, crushing knowledge that she might be the ruler of Arbonne in the time it died forever.

The owl grew restive again, a motion of admonition. Options. She had been considering her options. She could start north herself, leaving the island and the seat of any power or foreknowledge she might be given, to lend her purely mortal strength, what wisdom she had, to her mother and those who would be with the countess now.

They didn't need her, she realized with a gnawing helplessness. She had counsels to offer in times of peace or preparation, of smaller and larger intrigues, the tidings her own network of informants might gather, but what did she know about waging war?

It was, she told herself with bitterness, time for the men now. The irony was coruscating. Arbonne was to be destroyed because of its women, because of the goddess who shared in their love and devotion with Corannos in the sky, because it was ruled by a woman now, because of the symbols and the music of the Court of Love and the examples of grace set by figures like Signe and Ariane. And yet now that ruin had come to them with sword and axe and carried brand, now that images of rape and fire would dance behind the closed eyelids of every woman in Arbonne, it was the men who would have to save them after all.

And despite more than twenty years of her father's striving before he died, and then her mother's afterwards, despite patience and wiles and even Guibor's attempts at absolute commands, the two most powerful men in Arbonne still hated each other with a ferocity, with a savage, time-locked obsession that had never let them go, and would never do so, never let them act together, even to save themselves and their land.

Beatritz knew this. She knew it with a despair that almost overwhelmed her. This had always been the weakness at the heart of Arbonne in their time, the thing that left them wide open to destruction. Not the fact of a woman ruling them. Not the rumoured softness of their corans; that was false and manifestly so. Not the corrupting influence of the troubadours and their music; there was no corruption in the flourish of that art. Their danger, their crippling wound, was Talair and Miraval.

Her sister Aelis, Beatritz thought, with an old, unrelenting bitterness, had much to answer for.

It was an unfair thought, she supposed. Her mother had told her as much, over and again through the years. Unfair or not, it was there, she was thinking it, she would think it until she died, and she would die remembering Aelis, dark and slender, far too proud, with her will like forged iron and that unwillingness, ever, to forgive.

Like Bertran, that last quality, Beatritz thought. Like Urté. And then a newer thought, as she reached up again to gentle her restive owl: Like me.

"Oh, Aelis," she murmured aloud. "Oh, sister, did we all begin to die the night you died, with or without the child?"

It was possible, she thought. There were ripples to events, and they went a long way sometimes across the dark pools of time and the world.

Brissel shifted on her shoulder again and then suddenly flexed his sharp talons in a way she knew. It was always like this: without any warning at all the presence of the goddess might come to her. Catching her breath, feeling the familiar speeding up of her pulse, Beatritz waited, and was answered, assuaged, with images in her darkness, images swirling to take shape as out of some primal fog before the world was made.

She saw two castles and recognized them immediately. Miraval and Talair—she had known those proud, twinned assertions all her life. Another image quickly: an arch, immeasurably old, massive, humbling, carvings of war and conquest stamped upon it like foreshadowing from long ago. And then, as she released her breath in a spasm of love and pain she could not quite hold in, the High Priestess of Rian saw a lake in her mind, a small, delicate isle in the midst of it, three plumes of smoke rising straight as swords into the windless winter sky. The last thing she saw was a tree. Then the images were gone and she was left with only darkness again, and Brissel on her shoulder.

It came like this, and it went, never coerced, never subject to entreaty. The goddess remembered her children sometimes and sometimes she forgot them in the caprice of her nature. She could shower gifts like blessed rain in spring, or she could turn her back and let ice and fire have their way. She had a face of laughter and one of desire, a countenance of true compassion and a terrible visage of judgment. In the teachings of Arbonne it was Corannos the god who was kinder, more soberly caring for men and women. Rian suffered them, and loved them, but she could be cruel as nature was cruel. It was the god who held their mortal children always in mind, who did not fail to see their sufferings upon the earth. So it had been taught in Arbonne for generations.

The teachings were different elsewhere. They were very different in Gorhaut.

She was going to have to stay here, Beatritz understood. Only on the island could she have access to any such precognitions as this one. A message would have to go to Barbentain tonight. She would ask the two young troubadours who were wintering with them here. They would not deny her; these were not men to hide in the sea when death and ruin were coming down from the north. She would send them to the countess, warning her, telling them all where the culmination was to be.

It would be in the place of this vision, she was being told: by that small isle in Lake Dierne, by the arch, the two castles, it would end there.

Of course, she thought, aware of an inner stillness in the aftermath of the presence of Rian. Of course it will be there. She felt the nudge of an old sorrow. I should have known. That is where it began.

She was wise and no longer young, Beatritz de Barbentain, deeply conversant with the ways of power in the world, and long since accustomed to her darkness and the occasional gateways to knowledge it gave her. She was, in fact, more privy to the paths of Rian than she allowed herself to acknowledge, for she had always wanted more than she had. It was the nature of her family, the legacy of her blood. Still, the goddess had never yet abandoned her entirely, however long the intervals might be. She knew a great deal, having been granted, at moments such as this, clear, sharp visions through rifts in time hidden from all the other living children of Corannos and Rian.

On the other hand, there were things even the High Priestess on her island did not know and had never known, whether of future or present or the widening ripples of the shaping past. Nor would it have been proper if she had. Oaths sworn to the dying were sacrosanct in Arbonne.

When they come down at last from the snows of the pass into Arbonne, the crusading army of Gorhaut are halted by their spiritual leader, and on a high plateau they kneel in their armour, every man of them, to hear the High Elder's prayer of thanksgiving to the god.

They have come through the mountains with humbling, awe-inspiring ease, only some few hundred men and horses lost to the high cold and the icy, treacherous path and the one—amazingly, only the one—avalanche that missed the main army by less than a bowshot, taking only the rear guard down into a white death with no true burial.

It might have been—it ought to have been—so much worse, this folly of taking an army through the mountains in winter to seize the advantage of surprise. Even the High Elder himself narrowly escaped losing his life. Standing beside their tall king, he speaks to the army with an arrow held aloft in one hand and a crimson bandage on his left arm, brilliant against his blue robe and the white of the snow behind him. He had caught up to them, wounded as he was, in the midst of the pass, riding alone—which every man there knows to have been foolhardy beyond words. Foolhardy, that is, for one not perfectly trusting of Corannos, not favoured—as Galbert de Garsenc, High Elder of Gorhaut so manifestly is—by the blessing and the protection of the god. Which means that they, too, in his company, are so blessed, the chosen, the elect, the weapons of Corannos.

This, in fact, is his message to them when the prayer is over and they rise. He holds up for all to see the Arbonnais arrow—fired by a coward, and not in a time of war—that might have killed him in his own castle. The god is with us, he tells them all, we are his agents and his instrument.

It is hard not to agree, and the men of the army of Gorhaut, in the presence of their king, are not inclined to be cynical or doubting at a time like this. They have come miraculously through the mountains in winter, and before them now, bright and fair as a dream under blue skies lies the land that has been promised them.

Promised, that is, after the scourging is done. They are the hammers of the god, the High Elder proclaims. The temples and villages of Arbonne and the depraved, unclean women who inhabit them are the anvils upon which their most holy, cleansing blows must fall.

The temples are first, the castles will come after, he tells them. Everything will come to them if they but follow their great king. The men of Arbonne are cowards, they are woman-mastered, cuckolded as a matter of course by their own musicians and barnyard servants. What, Galbert de Garsenc asks, what will such soft men do when they come face to face with the assembled might of Gorhaut sweeping down upon them with the power of the god?

They will die, he tells them, answering his own question, as a sound shaped of hunger and excitement rises among the army. They will die like the craven unbelievers they are, and when all is done, when holy Corannos is worshipped properly again in this land, then shall the men of Gorhaut have shown themselves worthy of the great favour the god has always bestowed upon them. Then shall the whole world know their worth. Then shall this sunlight, these high green valleys, vineyards and castles and grainfields, the rich cities and harbours and the great sea beyond—all shall be truly given over to Gorhaut by the high, pure grace of Corannos.

Shall this not be the way of it, he cries to them, the magnificent instrument of his voice carrying the question down on the breeze to all those gathered below.

They give him his answer, fervent, exalted, with one voice of their own.

The king rides down from that high place, then, the High Elder beside him with the arrow still held aloft. They take their places together, handsome men, stern and majestic, at the forefront of an army. Near to them but a proper distance behind rides the lord Borsiard d'Andoria at the head of a company of his own men. The Portezzan's presence among them, the army has been told, is a mark of how not only the god but all the countries of the world are with them in this purging of dark unholiness.

King Ademar of Gorhaut lifts a hand and the trumpets of Gorhaut are heard in the clean, cool air under a sky where birds are wheeling and darting in the sunlight. Before them the slopes fall away southward, green with winter grass. In the middle distance the river most of them have never seen sparkles blue, then white where there are rapids, then blue again, rushing towards the distant sea. The ports on that sea will be theirs soon; they have been promised this. The god is with them.

They start south, the invading warriors of Gorhaut, in a vast glitter of spears and armour. Later that same day the vanguard rides past and above the ruined, empty village of Aubry and comes to the next hamlet beyond. And there, with sword and mace and brand, amid the screaming of the corrupt women and their heretic, unsouled children and the desperate cries of craven men—farmers, labourers, artisans, cowards all of them—the harrowing of Arbonne is begun.

The god is with his army. After the grey cold of the mountains and the miracle of their passage they can feel it in the shining grace of his holy sun above them. Everything they ride past is bright, is welcoming, gleams wondrously in the light.

They are the hammers of Corannos, the scourges of heresy, this war is blessed from the sky; every man of them knows it now, and so as they kill, they sing.

Let Arbonne learn the battle songs of Gorhaut. Let it hear them sung by brave men, true warriors of the north, amid the steady crackling of the fires.

"They are not in any great hurry," said the countess grimly in her council chamber. "They are waiting for us to come out." It was four days after the first burning of the war. The army of Gorhaut was reported to be moving slowly, methodically south, destroying as it went.

"They are taking each village, burning every temple," she went on. Rosala, sitting on one of the benches, hands clasped in her lap, marvelled at the control in her voice; she knew Signe well enough by now to know how hard-won such a dispassionate tone would be. There were some twenty men and women in the room, assembled in Barbentain by the countess's command. Signe said, "They have no interest in besieging us in the castle or cities. Not in winter, with food a problem for them."

"That is mostly true, but not entirely so, your grace. Food is not their problem I am afraid," said Urté de Miraval heavily. He was leaning against the mantel of the larger fireplace, bulky and formidable, dressed in a dark green, fur-lined robe. "I have recent information about that. They have used their monies from Valensa, the enormous price they received for the northern lands they ceded, to ensure a flow of supplies to follow them here from Gotzland. With our villagers taking refuge in the cities and castles we will be at risk of hunger before them. We might want to consider an attack against their supply line."

"That will not be necessary," said Bertran de Talair, briefly, dismissively, from the opposite wall. Rosala turned to look at him.

He had arrived only the night before, with Blaise and his mercenaries and eight hundred armed men of Gorhaut. The assembled council was still dealing with that last fact, and the presence among them this morning of Duke Fulk de Savaric. Rosala was struggling to adjust to it as well, if for different reasons. Pride and fear and disbelief swept over her whenever she looked at her brother. They had not yet had a chance to speak privately.

"I would be very interested in learning why," Urté said to Bertran, gazing inimically at the other man across the room. "Have military strategies changed so greatly in recent years?"

"Hardly at all." Bertran, dressed in nondescript brown riding clothes, turned away from de Miraval to the countess. "You will remember, your grace, that I had dealings with King Daufridi of Valensa during the Lussan Fair." He paused. There was a stir in the room at this; it was news to most of them. Bertran ignored the reaction. "These dealings have borne useful fruit, though not, I'm afraid, dramatically so. Daufridi has persuaded Jorg of Gotzland that their joint interests will not be served by a swift destruction of Arbonne. They will not go so far as to intercede for us, but the promised supplies from the east will be sadly late in arriving, I am informed. The food, when it reaches the army of Gorhaut, will be of dangerously poor quality, most of it inedible. King Jorg will be profusely apologetic to Ademar, of course. He will promise an enquiry, offer to return some of the money he has been paid. It helps," he added with a straight face, "to have up-to-date information in wartime."

"It helps," said the countess of Arbonne icily, "if the commanders serving us share their information with each other and ourself."

Bertran looked unabashed, despite the rare, admonitory use of royal language by the countess. "I only returned last night," he said mildly. "I found confirmation from Valensa waiting for me. I might have expected to receive approval from my countess and those assembled here for what I have done, rather than condemnation."

"You presumptuous peacock!" rasped Urté de Miraval. Comparing the garb of the two men, Rosala found the word almost amusing. But there was really no room for levity just then. "An army more than twice as large as any we can raise is burning its way through Arbonne," Urté snapped, glaring at Bertran, "and you seek praise like a vain child, preening yourself on small triumphs of diplomacy."

"Small perhaps, my lord—I began by saying as much myself, you will recall—but do favour us with an account of what you have achieved in the same interval." Bertran's hard blue eyes met those of Urté and this time neither man looked away. Rosala felt hatred in the room like a wintry, congealing presence.

"It would be most pleasant," Bertran went on, in a voice that was not pleasant at all, "to be able to report richer results of my efforts with Valensa, but we can hardly blame Daufridi or the Gotzlanders for being careful here, can we? We might perhaps make some comments instead about lords of Arbonne whose principal activity this past year seems to have been to sanction, if not instigate, the attempted murder of a friend and ally."

Rosala, vividly remembering that night in Lucianna Delonghi's rooms, saw Blaise step forward then. "That's enough, I think," he said quietly to Bertran. "We'll get nowhere useful retracing old paths." His tone was interesting; he had changed in the short time since going north and coming back. His father and Ranald had both been at Garsenc, she had been told by Rudel Correze just before the meeting began. The one had escaped and the other had been set free; it was hard not to wonder about what had happened there.

"Enough? Is it really?" Bertran de Talair said, turning away from Urté again. "I'm dreadfully sorry. So please forgive my lamentable penchant for excess." His voice was etched in acid but he didn't argue, Rosala noticed, or pursue the matter. Blaise looked at him a moment longer, but said nothing more.

"We forgive almost everything just now because we have little choice." It was the countess again, reclaiming control of the room. They turned back to her. Her hands clasped about one of the small metal warming balls her women favoured, Signe waited a moment, deliberately, and then added: "And also because we have desperate and perilous need of you, my lord of Talair, with all your… penchants. After taking most careful thought on this, we are resolved to appoint you herewith to lead our armies in this war. Into your hands we now entrust the sovereignty of Arbonne and the destiny of our children."

Rosala closed her eyes for a moment. Cadar was with his nurse upstairs; it occurred to her to wonder if Fulk would ask to see him. She didn't think so. She looked up. Signe had paused again, looking with her famous eyes into the equally celebrated blue ones of the duke of Talair. When she spoke again her tone was very different.

"Bertran, it may be unfair to say 'Fail me not, for I know what Ademar of Gorhaut has brought against us, but I am going to say it nonetheless, for if you do fail we are lost and from the burning that must follow there will be no rising from ashes."

"No. You cannot do this!" In the stark silence that followed the countess's words, the voice of Urté de Miraval sounded harsh and raw. There was passion in it and a real pain.

Rosala saw him step awkwardly forward from the fireside and drop heavily to his knees before the countess. "I am prostrate before you, my lady," he said fiercely. "I will not ask but beg. Do not do this thing. Do not put me in this position, I beg of you, your grace. I will not serve under him. I cannot. You know I cannot. For love of Arbonne, for the memory of your husband, for any honour at all in which you may yet hold my name, choose another leader! It need not be myself, it cannot be myself or you do the same thing to de Talair—but choose another leader, countess, lest you break me into pieces." Under the short-cropped grey hair, his still-handsome, fleshy face was vivid with stricken intensity.

Signe de Barbentain's features, by contrast, were like a mask, beautiful and implacable, as she looked down at the duke on his knees before her. "Have you ever thought," she said with frigid clarity, "how like children the both of you are?" She drew a breath then, and Rosala winced in premonitory anticipation of what was coming. Nor was she wrong.

"My daughter Aelis," said the countess of Arbonne deliberately, "was willful and proud and a child herself when she died. It was twenty-three years ago, in the name of our most holy goddess! Can neither of you realize that?" Rosala saw Urté flinch at the spoken name; Bertran turned his head away. Signe ignored both reactions, went on, her voice blunt as a hammer. "She deceived Urté with Bertran. We all know this. She bore a son that was not her husband's and told him as much. We know this too. It was a desperately foolish thing to do. The child died or did not die. My daughter died. It is an old story. Do you hear me, both of you? It is an old story! Let it rest! Let Aelis lie in her grave, with her child or without him. I will not let Arbonne lie buried in that same grave, or be trapped in the maze you two have shaped for each other from that history. It is over! It must be over. Make no mistake, I am naming as leader this morning the man who understands Gorhaut better than any other here and who has Blaise de Garsenc and Fulk de Savaric beside him. This is my firm decision. It is not subject to the tired, worn-out passions of ancient history, my lord de Miraval."

Silence then. A stillness as after a storm has passed. And into it, at length, came the quiet, careful voice of Bertran de Talair, unwontedly diffident. "Your grace, I am deeply mindful of the honour you offer me. I will say that I have no difficulty at all in stepping aside for another if it will… ease matters among us. I will be proud to serve under Duke Thierry for example, or your brother of Malmont if you would prefer."

"I would not prefer." Signe's voice was brittle. "Bertran, understand me, this is not a request, it is a command. If you refuse I will regard it as treason in wartime and act accordingly."

"My lady!" began Ariane de Carenzu, her own colour high. "Countess, this is something that—" She stopped abruptly at a swift, imperious gesture from the countess.

Signe hadn't even bothered to look at her. She was still gazing at Bertran de Talair, daring him to speak again. "You lead our armies, my lord," she said flatly. "This is a command." And then, very clearly, with an emphasis on each word: "Fail me not."

Urté de Miraval rose slowly, heavily, to his feet. Rosala, watching him, felt an oppressive burden settling upon her like a weight of stones. It wasn't even her history, her country, but she thought she knew what was coming and what it would mean. The whole room, all those gathered here in Barbentain, seemed somehow to be caught and suspended in a dark, entangling web spun long ago.

"He leads those armies then without the men of Miraval," Urté said with a grave, unnatural calm that was somehow a match for Signe's own manner. "And so on your shoulders, countess, must lie the burden of that. You might perhaps have remembered, since you chose to speak so freely of the dead, that in this room I am the nearest thing to a son that you have." And turning on his heel he strode to the door.

"My lord, wait!" called Thierry de Carenzu. Urté did not turn. He opened the door and passed through and they heard it close with a reverberant finality behind him.

Echoes, Rosala thought, swallowing hard. Echoes of a past that threatened to destroy the present. She looked about the room, registering nuances of grave apprehension. Only the countess seemed immune, only Signe showed no fear or doubt.

"How many men does this mean?" It was Fulk, her brother's first words spoken and, characteristically, addressing the most prosaic aspect of all of this.

"Fifteen hundred, somewhat more. Almost all of them trained." Thierry de Carenzu, who had been the only man to try to stay Urté's departure, gave the answer. It was a very large number and Rosala had been in Arbonne long enough to know why: two decades of clashes between Talair and Miraval had led both dukes to gather around them substantial armies of fighting men. And this morning those same bone-deep hostilities had just cost them half those men.

"I see," said Fulk quietly. Her brother was not a man prone to elaboration of his thoughts. They were not needed here; every man and woman in the room knew the implications of Urté's leaving them. "Are you going to have him arrested?" Fulk asked.

No one answered him. Bertran was staring out the window, visibly shaken. Rosala saw the chancellor, Roban. leaning against the wall, as if for desperately needed support; he was white as a bone. So were most of the others in the room, she saw. Only the countess, small, rigidly erect, seemed to have retained her composure.

Rosala cleared her throat. "Will he really stay away?" she asked. It seemed incredible to her, and yet somehow, in some terrifying way, predestined at the same time. For some reason she found herself turning to Ariane de Carenzu as she spoke.

Ariane's face was also pale. In a thin voice far removed from her customary crisp authority, she said, "I'm afraid he will. If he doesn't do even more than that."

"That is unfair!" her husband said quickly, gesturing sharply. Thierry de Carenzu shook his head. "He is not a traitor."

"No?" It was Blaise again. Still with that slight unsettling new control in his tone. "What would you call a man who does what he just did, regardless of what course he takes afterwards?"

It was a fair question, if a harsh one. It was what Fulk had been asking. The answer was easy enough: you called such a man a traitor.

Rosala looked at her brother and saw that he was gazing steadily back at her for the first time that morning. In his eyes, identical to her own, she read the same answer. Were this Gorhaut, she thought suddenly, Urté de Miraval would never have been allowed to leave this room alive.

There was something genuinely frightening about that thought. She was beginning to glimpse a part of the price Arbonne paid for its freedoms and its subtle graces.

She wondered how much of that price was yet to be paid.

And it was at that precise moment, Rosala remembered afterwards, that the knocking came at the door and the guards opened it to admit two exhausted, travel-stained troubadours, one fair-haired, one dark, with a message from Rian's Island in the sea: a message that the High Priestess had had a vision from the goddess of a battle by Lake Dierne.