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

CHAPTER 19

Blaise was unaware for the first part of his ride that he was following the same path Bertran had taken leaving the field. Heading west towards the reddening disc of the sun, he came to the avenue of elms that led to the arch. He stopped and looked back then at the fires dotting the battlefield. He felt very strange. It came to him, almost as an incidental fact, that he was alone in the world now.

It was then, glancing down, that he saw the fresh tracks of a single horse and realized that Bertran had come this way before him. The duke would be alone now, too, he thought, in a different way and yet the same. Ariane had said something about that a long time ago: Bertran had lost, with Urté's death, the passion of hatred that had ordered and shaped his life for more than twenty years. Hatred, Blaise thought, could be as powerful as love, though the singers might try to tell you otherwise.

He twitched the reins of his horse and started forward again. He passed under the dwarfing curve of the arch, briefly chilled, even with his cloak, as he entered its shade, then he came out on the other side again into the fading light of the sun. Overhead another flock of birds was flying south on the wind. His father was dead. His brother was dead. He was likely to be crowned king of Gorhaut very soon. Cadar Ranald de Savaric was probably his son. He had been struggling with that thought since autumn. It was not a thing to be told. He knew Rosala well enough to know she never would.

And that, predictably, carried his thoughts to Aelis de Miraval who had died so long ago, and for love of whom two strong men had twisted and ruined their lives. He rode on through the silence, following the survivor of those two men through the bare winter vineyards with the autumn grapes long harvested and the first buds a long way off. The vines gave way to grass eventually and a forest rose up before him as he rode and in time Blaise came to a small charcoal-burner's cabin at the edge of that wood and saw a horse he knew tethered outside.

Sitting in the doorway, where a woman might sit at needle and thread at day's ending to catch the last of the good light, was Bertran de Talair.

The duke looked up as Blaise dismounted. His expression registered surprise but was not unwelcoming. Blaise had not been sure about that. He saw the flask of seguignac clasped in Bertran's hands. Memory came with that, too, clear as a temple bell. A stairway in Castle Baude. The moons passing from the narrow window. That flask passing back and forth between the two of them. Blaise brooding upon Lucianna Delonghi in bitterness, Bertran speaking of a woman dead more than twenty years and not of the one whose bed he had just left.

The duke saw him looking at the flask and lifted it. "There's a little left," he said.

"My father is dead," said Blaise. He hadn't expected to say that. "Thierry's archers."

Bertran's expressive face grew still. "There isn't enough seguignac for that, Blaise. Not nearly enough for the needs of this day, but sit down, sit with me."

Blaise walked across the grass and sat down beside the duke in the doorway. He took the offered flask and drank. The clean fire ran through him. He drank again, feeling the warmth, and handed back the flask.

"It is over?" Bertran asked.

Blaise nodded. "They will all have surrendered by now."

Bertran looked at him, his blue eyes ringed by dark circles. "You were trying to stop me there at the end, weren't you. I heard you calling my name."

Blaise nodded again.

"I don't think I would have stopped. I don't think I could have, if Thierry hadn't blown the horns."

"I know. I understand."

"I'm not very proud of that." Bertran took another short pull at the flask.

"This isn't a time to be judging yourself. Women were burned. And the two troubadours…»

Bertran closed his eyes and Blaise fell silent. The duke looked up again after a moment and handed back the flask. Blaise cradled it, not drinking. The seguignac was already making him light-headed.

"I have a question for you," said Bertran de Talair.

"Yes?"

"Do you have any great objection if I ask your brother's wife to marry me? If Rosala will have me, I would like to raise Cadar as my own, as heir to Talair."

A remarkable sensation of warmth began to spread through Blaise, and he knew it wasn't coming from the seguignac this time. He looked over at Bertran and smiled for what was surely the first time in that long day. "I have no say at all in what Rosala does, but nothing I can imagine would please me more."

"Really? Do you think she will accept?" Bertran's tone was suddenly diffident.

Blaise laughed aloud. It was a strange sound in that space at the edge of the woods. "You are asking me for guidance on a woman's thoughts?"

For a moment Bertran was still, and then he too laughed, more softly. After that there was silence again for a time.

"My father," said Blaise finally, needing to say it, "my father told me that Ademar was only his tool for destroying Rian in Arbonne. That his other goal all these years had been to place me on the throne of Gorhaut."

Bertran was still again, in that manner he had of careful, focused gravity. "That does not surprise me," he said.

Blaise sighed and looked down at the flask in his hands. "I would rather not accept it as true."

"I can see that. Don't tell anyone else then. This need only be ours."

"Which doesn't make it less true, that he was shaping even this."

Bertran shrugged. "Partly, not entirely. He couldn't have guessed what would happen to you in Arbonne."

"He admitted that, actually."

"You see? Blaise, we are shaped by so many different things it frightens me sometimes." Bertran hesitated. "This was the cabin where I used to meet Aelis. Where my son was conceived."

It was Blaise's turn to grow still. He understood, and was deeply moved by the awareness, that Bertran was offering this to him as a truth of the heart in exchange for his own.

"I'm sorry," Blaise said. "I didn't set out to follow you, I just saw your tracks. Shall I go?"

Bertran shook his head. "You might give me that, though, if you aren't drinking." Blaise handed over the flask. Bertran lifted it, the metal glinting in the light, and finished the last of the seguignac. "I don't think," he said, "that I can possibly deal with anything more today than I already have."

A moment later they heard the sound of another horse approaching and looked up to see Ariane riding alone towards them through the winter grass.

She came up to where they were sitting together in the doorway of the cabin. She did not move to dismount. They could see that she had been weeping though she was not doing so now. She took a ragged breath and let it slowly out.

"I swore an oath to my cousin Aelis the night she died," she said without greeting, without preamble. Blaise saw that she was controlling herself only with a great effort; he felt Bertran grow rigid at his side. "An oath from which I have been released by Urté's death today."

She was looking at the duke, Blaise saw, and so he made to rise and said again, "I should leave. This is not something I have a right to—"

"No," said Ariane, her voice bloodless, her exquisite features nearly white. "This does concern you, as it happens." Even as she was speaking, Bertran laid a hand on Blaise's knee to keep him from standing. "Stay with me," said the duke.

And so he stayed, he sat in a charcoal-burner's cabin doorway at the cold end of a day of death with wind blowing past them, pushing Ariane's black hair back from her face, stirring the tall grass behind her, and he heard her say, in that voice from which all resonance seemed to have bled away, leaving only the flat assertion of the words: "There is something I can now tell you about the night Aelis died. There was a reason why she came early to her time, Bertran." Another breath, the vivid evidence of a struggle for self-control. Ariane said, "When Urté took your son from her arms and left the room with the priestess following him, trying to reclaim the boy, I was left alone in the birthing room with Aelis. And a few moments later we… realized she was carrying a second child." Beside Blaise, Bertan make a convulsive gesture with his hands. The flask fell on the grass. Bertran tried awkwardly to stand. His strength seemed to have left him though; he remained sitting in the doorway looking up at the woman on the horse.

Ariane said, "I delivered your daughter into the world, Bertran. And then… then Aelis made me swear an oath to her, and we both knew she was dying." She was weeping again now, tears bright as crystal on her cheeks.

"Tell me," said Bertran. "Ariane, tell me what happened."

She had been weeping then, too, amid the terrors of that room. She had been thirteen years old, and had heard Aelis, dying, tell her husband that the boy child she was holding was Bertran de Talair's. Ariane had cowered in a corner of the room watching Urté's face grow blood-dark with a rage such as she had never ever seen in her life. She saw him seize the baby from its mother's arms where the priestess had gently laid it. Outside the walls of Miraval a winter storm had been howling, rain lashing the castle, thunder like an angry spirit overhead.

The duke and the priestess had rushed from the room; where, Ariane did not know. She was certain he was about to kill the child, though. Aelis had been sure of the same thing.

"Oh, my dear," her cousin had said, lying amid blood on her bed, "what is it I have done?" Ariane, distraught with fear and grief, had clutched her hand, unable to think of a single thing to say. Wanting only to be far away from that room, from that terrible castle.

And then, a moment later, Aelis had said something else, in a different tone. "Oh, Rian," she had said. And, "Cousin, in the goddess's name, I think there is another child in me."

There had been. A small babe, though larger than the first it seemed to Ariane. And this one was a girl, with her mother's dark hair and long limbs, and a strong voice when she raised her first cry amid the storms of the world she had entered.

It was Ariane who took her from Aelis's womb. Ariane who bit through the cord and wrapped the infant in the warm cloths that had been readied by the fire. Ariane who gave her, with trembling hands, to her mother. No one else had been in the room. No one else had heard that second cry.

And Aelis de Miraval de Barbentain had looked upon the dark-haired daughter in her arms, knowing that her own life was passing from her, and had said to her cousin, who was thirteen years old that year, "I am binding you to something now as an oath to me on my deathbed. You must swear to do what I ask of you."

Ariane had looked at the two of them, mother and child, and she had done so: had sworn to take the baby from that room by the back stairway, wrapped in those swaddling-clothes, hidden within her own cloak, and to bear it from Miraval into the wildness of that night storm.

And she swore an oath that night to tell no living soul, not even Bertran, of the existence of a second child for so long as Urté de Miraval was alive. "After Urté dies," her cousin had said, "if you are alive and she is, I leave it to you. Judge what she has become, if you know where she is. I have no gift of foreknowledge, Ariane. Judge the needs of the time. It may even be that this child, my daughter, will be heir to Miraval or Talair, to Arbonne itself. I need you to become the sort of woman who will be able to make that judgment one day. And now kiss me cousin, and forgive me if you can, and go."

And Ariane had bent and kissed the dying woman upon the mouth and had fled, alone down the twisting back stairway, wrapped in a dark cloak with a baby next to her heart. And she met no one at all on the stairs or in the corridor or passing out of the castle into the rain by the postern gate. At the stables the ostlers were nowhere to be seen in the storm, and so Ariane had taken her mare from its stall herself and had mounted up awkwardly from astride a bale of hay, and she had ridden bareback from the yard with only her cloak and hood to shield her and the child from the cold and the driving rain.

She never forgot that ride for the rest of her days or nights. It would come back to her in dreams, or with any sudden crack of thunder or flash of lightning in a storm. She would be back in the vineyards of Miraval then, riding east towards the lake, the twisted shapes of vines showing around her when lightning shredded earth and sky. The child had cried and cried at the beginning but had fallen silent after that, and Ariane had been terrified the baby was dead and had been afraid to open her cloak in the rain to see. And she had been weeping all through that ride.

She never knew how she managed to find the hut by the lake where they kept the wood and kindling dry for signalling the isle. She remembered dismounting there and tethering the horse and hurrying inside, to stand in the doorway, dripping wet, unable to stop crying. A vivid sheet of lightning had lit the whole of the sky then, and for a moment in its dazzling flash she had seen the Arch of the Ancients looming nearby, huge and black in the night, and she had screamed in fear. But then, as if in answer to her own cry, she had felt, oh, she had felt a stirring of the child next to her heart, and had heard her begin to wail again, a precarious, determined assertion of presence amid the terrors of the world.

Ariane had held her close, rocking back and forth, crooning wordlessly, watching as lightning flashed again and again and finally moved on, as the peals of thunder gradually grew fainter to the south, as, after what seemed a span of time without measure or end, the blue moon named for Rian showed briefly once and then appeared again through the swift racing of the clouds, and the rain stopped.

She had laid the baby down then, wrapping it as best she could on the blessedly dry floor of the cabin, and she took wood and kindling and flint for flame and lit a flare on the mound outside to summon the priestesses to come, and they came.

She saw a white sail running up on the near shore of the isle and watched as one small boat slipped across the now calm waters of the lake towards her, ineffably beautiful and strange in the blue moonlight, something graceful and delicate in a world from which those things had seemed to her forever gone.

Her robe was soaked and stained and torn. In the night they would not know it for a garment of wealth or privilege. She kept her hood up about her face. When the boat had almost reached the shore she unwrapped the baby, grieving, from the rich clothes of the castle and brought it out to them in a scrap of rag she found in the cabin.

Then she gave Aelis's child to the priestess who stood, tall and grave beside the prow of the boat on the strand. She made her voice quiver and stammer with accents of the farmyard and told them it was her own child and her father would not let her keep her and, oh, would the good servants of sweet Rian shelter and guard her baby all her days? She had been crying then, too, Ariane remembered.

It was not a rare thing, her request. It was one of the ways Rian's Isle and the goddess's Island in the sea received their necessary complement of servants and priests and priestesses through the turning of seasons and years. The two women asked no questions other than of her own health. She had reached out, Ariane remembered, and had taken the child in her thin, tired arms for a last time and had kissed her farewell full upon the mouth, as she had the mother. She told the two priestesses she would be all right.

She had told herself the same thing as she watched the boat going back across the stilled waters of the lake under the one moon and the thin, high, drifting clouds and the emerging glitter of the stars, carrying Aelis's daughter and Bertran's.

Aelis had said nothing to her about a name. Ariane, on that stony shore, had looked up at the blue crescent of the moon and had told the priestesses that the child was to be named, if they found her worthy, for that moon and so for the goddess.

"She lived," Ariane de Carenzu said, twenty-three years after, astride another horse before the cabin where that child and her dead brother had been conceived. The tears had dried on her cheeks during the telling of the tale. "I have kept watch over her all these years, whenever I could, as best I could. She remained on the isle, of course; they usually do. She is beautiful and clever and brave, Bertran. She looks very like her mother, I think. Her name is Rinette. She was to become High Priestess of Rian's Isle one day soon."

"Was?" Bertran's voice was so low, the one word was almost inaudible. His hands were clasped together before him. They had been through the length of the tale. Blaise could see that they were trembling.

"I spoke to her before coming to you. I thought that was proper. I told her who she was and how she had come to Rian's Isle, and I explained some other things as well. I said… that because of who she was she might be more dearly needed now away from the isle, in the world of men and women, but that it was her own choice to make and… that I would ensure that that was so."

"And?" Bertran looked older now, Blaise realized. He wanted to put an arm around the other man, but held back.

"She said that if what I had told her was true, it was obvious that she was indeed more important to Arbonne among the castles than among the sanctuaries. Those were her own words. She is very strong, Bertran. She is… really quite wonderful." Her voice broke a little on the last words.

"I have seen her then," the duke said, his tone holding wonder like a chalice. "I must have seen her so many times and I never saw the resemblance."

"Why should you have? There was nothing you were looking to find."

Bertran shook his head. "It must have been so hard for her, learning of this so suddenly. It must have been terrible."

"It may become so. Not yet, I think," said Ariane. "I suspect, with everything, she is only half understanding what all of it will mean. She does know… " Ariane hesitated, and turned, inexplicably, to Blaise, "she does know, because I told her, that she may possibly be expected to wed one day soon."

And now he understood why she had wanted him to stay. He looked up in the waning of that clear light and met Ariane's dark-eyed gaze. He was remembering many different things suddenly, but one conversation most of all, from a summer night in Tavernel.

It was, in the end, Bertran who looked from one to the other of them and rose first from that cabin doorway at the edge of the forest. "I think," said the duke, "that I am going to ride back now."

"Shall I come?" asked Blaise.

Bertran shook his head. He smiled crookedly, a ghost of his most habitual expression. "I know the way," he said. "That much hasn't changed."

Everything else seemed to have, though, as Blaise stood and watched the duke ride off. Ariane turned in the saddle to watch him as well. Only when Bertran had passed from sight, an unprepossessing figure in the torn and bloodstained garb of a fighting man, did she turn back to Blaise. She still made no movement to dismount.

He said bluntly, "There was a woman who shared her bed with me on Midsummer Eve in Tavernel. She told me she would live her life to change the rules of the marriage game among men and women in our day." He wasn't certain why, but he almost meant the words as a blow.

She took them that way, he saw, and realizing that, all anger and resentment passed from him as if swept by the wind. Ariane said, very quietly, "I can control nothing here, nor do I want to try. I can see, even now, something that might happen. So can you, Blaise. You must know how difficult this is for me. Surely you must. Even with everything else that has happened."

He did know, actually. He seemed to be a wiser man than he had been a year ago. He knew what truth of the heart she was holding out to him as an offering, and he felt, not for the first time, a humbling awareness of her honesty. This was the woman, he thought suddenly, who had freed him from Lucianna and the bitterness he had carried from Portezza.

"Ariane," he said roughly, "you are the reason Arbonne must never be allowed to die."

"There are a world of reasons," she said, but something flashed briefly in the darkness of her eyes.

"And you are the symbol and the heart of them. You are the queen of the Court of Love."

"I thought you regarded that as folly."

"I thought many things here to be folly that have turned out to be more true than anything I knew before." He stopped, and then, because it absolutely needed to be said, added steadily, "Ariane, your husband is the reason we were able to win this battle, whatever we might say about Urté and Bertran and Fulk de Savaric. And Thierry is also the reason we were able to prevent a slaughter of surrendering men."

"I think I know this," she said gravely.

"I cannot tell you how much respect I have for him."

"And I," she murmured. "I told you as much in Tavernel. What are you saying, Blaise?"

He forced himself to meet her level gaze. Her eyes were so dark, deep enough for a man to lose his way in them. "That I am still enough of a man of Gorhaut, and I think I always will be, to have a world of trouble speaking words of love to the wife of such a man."

He saw her lower her head for a moment. "I know this too," she said, looking up at him again. "I also know, to my sorrow, that we are what we are, and so are the times into which we have been born, and those words I spoke at Midsummer to you about freedom of choice are, truly, the only real folly either of us has ever offered to the other. You are about to be king of Gorhaut, Blaise, in the midst of a world turned upside-down. The heiress of Arbonne will be waiting at Talair, even now."

"And you think I must take her? To begin the righting of the world?"

For the first time Ariane showed a flash of her old authority. "I told you that I have no control over anything here. It is too soon, in any case. I do think—since you ask—that any man who shares his life with that one will be blessed beyond deserving all his days. Even you, Blaise."

He had seen her, of course, twice. Rinette. Had exchanged hard, haughty words by the lake in spring after he'd killed six corans of Miraval. We have been waiting for you, she'd said to him, self-possessed beyond her years, and he had feared those words. Perhaps, he thought now, perhaps they had meant something other than what either of them had understood or guessed that spring day. Perhaps the goddess truly did work in ways men and women could not comprehend. He thought suddenly of the red arrow that had killed Ademar. He still had no idea—and was trying not to dwell upon the thought—how that arrow had come straight down from a clear sky.

He said, looking up at Ariane, "I will see you? You will not leave my life?"

She smiled then. Said formally, "The king of Gorhaut will always be welcome in Carenzu."

She was guiding them back together to solid ground. Her gifts had always been generous, and this not the least of them. He tried to match her tone. "And Carenzu's lord and lady, wherever I am."

There was a short silence. She bit her lip. "There were other words that were part of that Midsummer Night. A song sung in the tavern where we met. I wonder if you remember the ending of it?"

He shook his head. Lisseut of Vezét had sung that song, he remembered, but the words were lost to him. Ariane smiled then, with tenderness and sadness, and a returning hint of the wise, worldly awareness that had always seemed to be hers. "Let me ride back alone, Blaise. If you don't mind. I don't think I'll be by myself very much in the next little while."

He nodded his head. What else could he have done? Bring her down into his arms in the fading light? Not in this world, he thought. She touched a finger to her lips, still with that same smile, and turned away. She was as beautiful as any woman he had ever known. She would have offered so much comfort, he knew. Comfort and passion and wisdom. Offered, and taken whatever he had to give in return, had he but asked. His heart full, Blaise watched her ride slowly away from him at sunset through the tall grass. He was thinking of her at thirteen, with a new-born child in her arms.

That child had grown into the woman it seemed the world and his own growing understanding of it might have him wed. Nothing would or could be done swiftly, and indeed it might never be done at all; there were so many layers of complexity to this world he had entered now. She was waiting in Talair, Ariane had said. He let his mind move forward towards such a meeting. Only his thoughts, though: Blaise remained where he was for a long time, sitting quietly in the doorway as the sun slid down in the west and the colours of sunset gradually suffused the fields and the bare vineyards and the trees, and fell gently, like a late benediction, on that small cabin by the forest.

Blaise looked back once through the open doorway before he finally left, and he saw how that muted crimson light slanted through the western window to fall upon the small, neat bed against the wall. He stood there for a moment, motionless, and then he gently closed the door, that the wind and rain might not enter in after these years.

It was dusk, the first faint stars shining in the east, when he rode back towards Talair. And because it was so nearly dark and he wasn't really thinking about his path—his thoughts ahead of him and far behind—he rode straight past the woman standing quietly beside her horse in shadow under the elms on the far side of the arch.

Lisseut had meant to call out to him, but in the moment he actually appeared and went by she found that her voice would not obey her. She could not say his name. She had seen the duke ride past earlier, and then Ariane de Carenzu, and she had remained out of sight beneath the trees, holding her thoughts close to her as the sun went down and the shadows grew deeper beneath the looming arch.

Her thoughts. No comfort there at all. The man she had followed, as she had followed him once before, was the king of Gorhaut, or would be before many days had passed. He was already wearing the cloak of royalty. She had seen it from the isle.

In the moment Blaise appeared she was thinking, actually, of her mother and father and of home, of sunrise seen through the window of her own small room, morning light filtering through the grey-green leaves of the olive trees, the air carrying the scent of the sea from below.

She had always been impetuous, always found herself pushing hardest when she thought, inwardly, that it might, in fact, be no time to push at all. Her mother had told her, endlessly, that it was a trait that could lead her greatly wrong one day.

Perhaps it was because of that memory of her mother's words, with the heart-breaking lucidity of that image of home, that Lisseut kept silent as the man went by, riding away from her, from the arch and the winter elms, back to the world that was waiting for him. She lost sight of Blaise in the darkness where the avenue of elms ended and the path curved east towards the shore of the lake.

She remained where she was; it had become curiously difficult to move just then. She clung to that image of home for a while yet, and then that too seemed to leave her. After a time in the deepening shadows, Lisseut found that her thoughts had turned elsewhere again, and then it seemed that her voice had come back to her and that, perhaps not surprisingly, there were words she needed to offer to the twilight and the empty path before her where she had watched him go:

Thy table set with rarest wine,

Choice meats, sweet ripened fruit

And candlelight when we dine In

Fionvarre.

On we two the high stars will shine.

And the holy moon lend her light.

If not here you will be mine

In Fionvarre.

She sighed. There was truly no point in lingering here, she told herself. It was time to go back. She still felt this curious reluctance to move, though. It was cold in the night now but the elms blocked the worst of the wind and in the darkness the disturbing, sculpted shapes of prisoners and slaves on the arch could not be seen. It was, in fact, unexpectedly peaceful where she stood, holding the reins of a quiet horse.

She stayed quite a long time. It was much later, in fact, when she heard a single horseman go by along the edge of the woods behind her, heading south. She became a little frightened for the first time then, alone here in the darkness. She mounted up and began the ride back to where there would be lights and shelter and friends and such comfort as any and all of these might offer.

On the way, as she came up to the shore of the lake and rode alongside the water towards the distant castle, carrying loss and love, remembering home, trying to comprehend the shape of the future opening up before them all, Lisseut found herself thinking of a song. Not an old lullaby this time, its origins long lost, not a tune by Anselme of Cauvas, the first of all the troubadours, nor of Count Folquet or Alain or En Bertran, nor even of lost Remy or Aurelian.

This tune and its words belonged to none of them. This, for the first time ever, as she passed beside the shore of Lake Dierne in the starlit, wintry dark, riding towards the castle lights, was a song of her own.

It was cold here outside, but Rinette had felt awkwardly enveloped within the warm, firelit rooms of Talair Castle. She had asked them where the garden was and someone had escorted her there. Then, when she'd walked into the walled enclosure, she had asked if she could be left alone and they had done that for her as well. Everyone was being extraordinarily obliging, even beyond what could be expected by a ranking priestess of Rian.

But she was more than that, and less. She had left her owl behind, on the isle. That had been, actually, the first of the very hard things.

This is, Rinette thought, walking at twilight among bare trees and evergreens and bushes and shrubs and flowers that would be glorious come spring, my own castle. One of her castles. Barbentain itself was another, and even Miraval was part of her legacy, if one stretched a point only a little.

It was cold, but she did not mind the cold. Winter was something she could deal with. She was still wearing the robes of Rian under her grey cloak. It wasn't as if she'd had a great deal of time to change her garb. Or her sense of where she belonged in the world. When she had arisen this morning she had been a priestess of Rian on her holy Isle, the named successor to the High Priestess there, though wondering, with a fear every one of them had felt, if their lives would stretch beyond this winter. Or if their destiny was fire in the name of Gorhaut and the god it claimed to serve.

Then battle had come today, screaming horses and men, blood and chaos in the valley, and at the end, unlooked-for amid helpless terror, a victory so complete the mind and heart could scarcely absorb it. She had gone into the sanctuary, to help the High Priestess lead them through the ancient, holy ceremony of thanksgiving.

And had come out from under the dome to find the lady Ariane de Carenzu waiting for her with a story that changed her life forever.

It was hard, it was very hard, however she strove to deal with this as she had always tried to deal with everything—calmly and with as much clarity as she could command. The lady of Carenzu had ended by telling her what was obvious to any thinking person from the moment the story had begun to grow clear—that her place was almost certainly away from the isle now. That the blindness and inner sight of a High Priestess of Rian was not what Arbonne needed from her after this. Everything had changed.

Ariane had said something else, though, something unexpected: that she would defend with all her own power and honour any choice at all that Rinette made. She had been near to weeping as she said that, Rinette remembered. It was a deeply generous offer, but it actually didn't matter very much, not really. Rinette would not have been what she was had she been unable to see for herself the clear truth of what all of this meant.

She was heir to Arbonne. There was no one else. With the offer of her hand in marriage, the future of her country, of the worship of holy Rian, could be safeguarded for a time. Perhaps a very long time. It was not an awareness from which one could turn away for the familiarity of the small isle that was all the home she'd ever known. The paths of holy blindness and the inward sight it might offer were not to be hers any more.

She was not going to follow the High Priestesses after all. Neither the one here, nor Beatritz herself on the island in the sea. The High Priestess on Rian's Island, the goddess's most holy servant, Rinette thought suddenly, putting her mind around this for the first time, was her mother's older sister.

She shook her head. It was going to be very hard. She could see them lighting torches in the garden now. They were being careful of her privacy, keeping at a distance from where she walked. The light in the west had become quite beautiful, crimson and purple and a softer range of dusky hues low down where the sun was nearly gone. The garden, she could see, was nowhere near its best in this depth of winter, but Talair was far enough south that there were still hints of colour all around, and the wind was gentler here, with the walls and the trees for shelter. She heard the sound of splashing water and walking a little further down a path of small stones she came to a fountain. The servants had been here before her; there were torches burning in brackets set into the soil. She stood close to one, holding her hands out for warmth.

She was heir to Arbonne. Heir to this castle of Talair as well, for En Bertran had never married and never named anyone to succeed him. En Bertran. The duke of Talair was her father.

She had seen him, of course; growing up on the isle so near this castle she had seen him so many times across the water. She could remember how she and the other acolytes had spent countless evenings when they were supposed to be asleep breathlessly repeating tales and rumours about him, carried by the troubadours and joglars who came to Rian's Isle. She knew all about Bertran de Talair and Duke Urté and the beautiful lady who had died, Aelis de Miraval. She even knew—everyone knew—the old song Bertran had written for his beloved beside the springtime shores of this same lake. What she had never known was that the song was her father's for her mother, that she was a part of that tale. She seemed to be, in fact, the ending of the story.

There was the other man as well, the one who was soon to be made king of Gorhaut. He had fought for Arbonne today against his own people. She had seen him, too, twice. Once last spring and again this morning when they had come across the lake to take the countess from the parley. He was a tall man, that one, bearded as the northerners all were, grim-looking with that, but a message had come from Rian's Island last spring that he should be watched for, that he was coming their way and might be important to them. And only a little while ago this afternoon Ariane de Carenzu, who ought, Rinette supposed, to know about such things, had said that he was a good man, gentler than he looked, and wiser, carrying burdens with which he would need someone's help in the days and years to come.

She wondered if he would come to her here. If it would begin already. She wondered if her father would come. Abruptly she sat down on one of the stone benches by the fountain, ignoring the cold. Cold was easy to deal with. What had overtaken her today was not, despite the self-possession she had managed to preserve with Ariane. It had been an overwhelming day. She wished she could hide, sleep, not dream. She wanted… she didn't really know what she wanted.

She suddenly felt—and could not remember feeling this way since she'd been a small child—that she might even cry. It wasn't Ariane's fault, it wasn't anyone's fault. She was sitting in the walled garden of her father's castle, and all she knew of her father were the endlessly traded stories about a duke who wrote the finest music of his day and had fought in wars in many countries, and who had spent more than twenty years pursuing women all over the world with a flamboyance that everyone knew—everyone knew—was a lifelong attempt to deal with the death of the one lady he had ever loved. Her mother.

I am afraid, Rinette said to herself suddenly, and the admission, curiously, seemed to help her gather her self-control again. I am not going to burn alive, she admonished herself sternly. None of us are going to burn now. We have won, by grace of Rian, who has given us, again, more than we have ever deserved of her. These changes in her life, she told herself, were only that—changes in a life. Mortal men and women were not to know—they could not know—what the future held in store for them, except for the fleeting, wayward glimpses the goddess sometimes granted those who had blinded themselves in her name.

That was not to be her path. Her path began here in this garden, walking forth with whomever came to lead her into the brightness and the burdens shaped by what, it seemed, she was.

Surely it was all right to be a little afraid, though? Surely that could be allowed of someone sitting alone at dusk in a winter garden dealing with the loss of every expectation she had ever had of her life?

It was then that she heard a footfall on the walkway, from behind her, the way she had come. She looked up at the torches for a moment and then, a little blinded, beyond them until she could see the stars again. She drew a long breath and pushed her dark hair back from her face. Then Rinette rose, straight-backed, holding her head high, and turned to meet her future. There was a solitary figure standing at the end of the path that led to this foundation.

It was not the northerner who had come, nor, yet, her father, after all.

She knew who this was, of course. She sank to her knees on the cold ground.

"Oh, my dear," said Signe de Barbentain, the countess of Arbonne, "I am so desperately happy to see you, and so very sad just now. So many years we have lost, you and I. There is so much I have to tell you. About your father and your mother, and then about the grandfather you never knew, who would have loved you with all his heart."

The countess came closer then, moving almost hesitantly into the light of the torches, and Rinette saw that she was crying, tears streaming down her face in the cold. Rinette rose quickly, instinctively, a queer feeling overtaking her, a constriction of the heart and throat. She heard herself make a sound that was very like a child's cry, and she moved forward, almost running, into the haven of her grandmother's arms.

It was full dark now in the valley where the battle had been. He had waited patiently, even happily, for this. The moons would rise soon, both very bright tonight, spilling their rich, mingled light. It was time to go. There were no fears near where he was, no soldiers of either army sleeping or on watch in the cold.

He made his way down from branch to branch, surefooted in the dark. No one heard him; he made no sound for anyone to hear. Once on the ground he slipped away west, passing close by the forest, going the long way around to where he had left his horse two days before, north of the Arch of the Ancients.

The stallion was hungry, of course. He was sorry for that but there had been nothing to do about it. He had left food in a sack nearby and he fed the horse now, patting and rubbing its long neck, speaking tenderly. He felt deeply at peace, as one with the night and the murmuring trees all around him. He knelt, on impulse, and prayed.

There was so much gratitude in his heart he felt it might overflow. He had done exactly what he had come here to do. What he had been preparing for—though in ignorance, following instructions only—since the early days of autumn.

It was time to go now, to be away south before the bright moons rose. He saddled the horse and mounted and began to ride.

I want you to learn a new way of shooting, the High Priestess had told him on the island in the sea. And she had sent him to a place where no one ever went, to learn to do what she wanted done. He had always been able to handle a bow, but what she asked was odd, inexplicable. He didn't need things explained, though; he was honoured beyond words to have been chosen. He spent the whole of the autumn practising, learning to hit targets with the high, arching trajectories she had specified. Over and over, day by day as the weeks passed, he went off alone to the eastern end of the island and practised.

He learned. He told her one day that he thought he had mastered that new, strange shooting as best he ever would. She sent him back that very day to begin again, the same arching bowshots aimed at the apex of the sky, but now he was to do them while nestled in the branches of a tree. He did that, too; day after day, week after week, as winter came to Rian's Island and the first flocks of birds from the north filled their skies.

Then, one day, the High Priestess summoned him again, and alone in her chambers, with only the white owl to watch his face as he reacted to what she said, she told him what his task was to be, the thing he had been training to do.

The goddess, she told him, will sometimes intercede for us, but she always wants to see that we have tried to aid ourselves. He understood that, it made sense to him. In the natural world a deer might come to you, but only if you were out in the forest, upwind and silent, not if you stayed at home on a bench before the fire. She told him then—and her words made him begin to tremble with awe—where he was to go, and she even described the tree he would claim before the armies came to the valley by Lake Dierne.

He was to wait in that tree, the High Priestess told him, her hands clasped together in her lap, for a moment that might come if Rian offered them her grace—a moment when he might kill the king of Gorhaut. No man or woman, she told him, not even any priest or priestess, knew what he was being sent to do. No one was ever to know. He had knelt before her then and sworn the holiest oath he knew. He had felt her strong fingers on his head as she granted him her blessing.

Then she had given him his arrows, crimson dyed, fletched with crimson owl feathers, and he'd concealed them in a covered quiver and had himself taken by boat to land. He bought a good horse with money she had given him and rode, travelling swiftly by day and night, until he came to the valley of which she had told him. Arriving at twilight, before either of the armies had come, he saw the tree she had so clearly described to him, and he climbed it in the darkness and settled in to wait.

The soldiers had come the next day. Battle began that afternoon. Late in the day, when En Urté de Miraval had brought his corans sweeping down the ridge from the west, the king of Gorhaut had battled Duke Urté and had swept off his dented helmet and hurled it away after taking a blow in that combat.

It was exactly as he had been told it might be. He offered his heart's most fervent prayer, speaking the words aloud, though softly, and he lifted his bow from where he sat among the branches of that tree above the valley, and he sent a crimson arrow almost straight up into the bright sky along the high pathway of Rian, the soaring arch he had mastered through those solitary weeks and months on the island.

He was not greatly surprised, only humbled and full of gratitude, beyond any words he could ever have encompassed, when he saw that arrow strike the king of Gorhaut in the eye and end his life.

After that it had been a matter of waiting silently, hidden in the branches of his tree, for darkfall, and then slipping away unseen.

In time, as he rode, he left the lake behind. Not long after, white Vidonne rose in the eastern sky lighting the road that stretched away before him to the south. There was no one else in sight. He was not weary at all. He felt exalted, blessed. I could die now, he thought.

The wind had lessened with the rising of the moon. It wasn't even cold any more, and he was heading south with a full heart to where it was never truly cold, where there were flowers throughout the year by the sweet grace of Rian. When the blue moon also rose, following the white one up the sky, he could restrain himself no longer. Luth of Baude, who was Luth of Rian's Island since being taken in exchange for a poet last spring, and who thought he might even be found worthy now to be consecrated a priest of the goddess in her sanctuary, began to sing.

He was not a musician, not a very good singer at all; he knew that. But songs were not only for those who could perform them with artistry. He knew that, too. And so Luth lifted his voice without shame, feeling a deep richness, a glory in the night, as he galloped his horse down the winding, empty road to the south, past farm and castle, village and field and forest, under the risen moons and the stars above Arbonne.

From the vidan of the troubadour, Lisseut of Vezét…

Lisseut, who was one of the first and perhaps the greatest of the woman troubadours of Arbonne, was of reputable birth, the daughter of an olive merchant whose lands lay to the easy of the coastal town of Vezét. She was of middling height for a woman, with brown-coloured hair and pleasing features. Her disposition was said to have been forthright in youth, and this trait appears to have remained with her all her life. Her mother's brother was himself a joglar of some small repute, and it was he who first noticed in the young Lisseut a purity of voice that led him to take her under his tutelage and train her in the craft and art of the joglars. It was not long, however, before Lisseut had greatly outstripped her uncle in renown…

It was in the time after the Battle of Lake Dierne, when Arbonne was saved from the peril of invasion from the north, that Lisseut's prowess moved into the realm of the troubadours and the shaping of her own songs. Her 'Lament for sweet music gone, mourning two of her slain companions, was her first, and perhaps her most celebrated song. It became, in a short time, the anthem for all who had died in that war…

Lisseut was close in friendship all her days with the great King Blaise of Gorhaut, and also with both his first wife and his second, and many are of the view that her 'Elegy for the crown of all kings' written at the time of the death of King Blaise is her most accomplished and moving work… Lisseut of Vezét never married, though she had, as all know, one child, Aurelian, who will surely need no introduction for those reading or hearing these words. Many tales were spread during Lisseut's life and after her passage to Rian with respect to a person of the very highest renown who might have been he father of her son, but it is not our intent to repeat such idle speculations here, only those truths as may be ascertained with some certainty after all the years that have gone past since that time…

Guy Gavriel Kay is the author of the international bestseller Tigana and the acclaimed Fionavar Tapestry, comprising The Summer Tree, The Wandering Fire, and The Darkest Road. Translated into eight languages, the trilogy has won awards and accolades all over the world and was named by David Pringle in Modem Fantasy: The 100 Best Novels as one of the best fantasy sequences of all time. Previous to this, Kay was retained by the estate of J.R.R. Tolkien to work with Christopher Tolkien in the editorial construction of the posthumously published The Silmarillion.