A Song for Arbonne (3 page)

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

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

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

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

"I might have killed him," Aelis said again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He smiled. "Brette de Vaux and I were fostered together. We have had various… adventures with each other. I thought he could be trusted to help me with…»

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Because he doesn't love me," Aelis said.

And held her hands out then, a curiously fragile gesture, as she stood, half-naked before him, her father's daughter, her husband's avenue to power, heiress to Arbonne, but trying to shape her own response today, now, in this room, to the coldness of destiny.

He took a step, the one step necessary, and gathered her in his arms, and lifted her, and then he carried her to the bed that was not the charcoal-burner's, and laid her down where the slanting beam of sunlight fell, warm and bright and transitory.

There was very little wind, which was a blessing. Pale moonlight fell upon the gently swelling sea around the skiff. They had chosen a moonlit night. Despite the risks, they would need to see where they were going when they came to land. Eight oars, rising and falling in as much silence as the rowers could command, propelled them out across the line of the advancing waves towards the faint lights of the island, which was nearer now and so more dangerous.

Blaise had wanted six men only, knowing from experience that missions such as this were best done relying on stealth and speed rather than numbers. But the superstitious Arbonnais who were Mallin de Baude's household corans had insisted on eight going out so that there would be, if all went well, nine coming back when they were done. Nine, it appeared, was sacred to Rian here in Arbonne, and it was to Rian's Island they were rowing now. They'd even had a lapsed priest of the goddess go through a ritual of consecration for them. Blaise, his men watching closely, had reluctantly knelt and permitted the drunken old man to lay gnarled hands on his head, muttering unintelligible words that were somehow supposed to favour their voyage.

It was ridiculous, Blaise thought, pulling hard at his oar, remembering how he'd been forced to give in on those issues. In fact this whole night journey smacked of the absurd. The problem was, it was as easy to be killed on a foolish quest in the company of fools as on an adventure of merit beside men one respected and trusted.

Still, he had been hired by En Mallin de Baude to train the man's household corans, and it had suited his own purposes for his first months in Arbonne to serve a lesser baron while he quietly sized up the shape of things here in this goddess-worshipping land and perfected his grasp of the language. Nor could it be denied—as Mallin had been quick to point out—that tonight's endeavour would help to hone the corans of Baude into a better fighting force. If they survived.

Mallin was not without ambition, nor was he entirely without merits. It was his wife, Blaise thought, who had turned out to be the problem. Soresina, and the utterly irrational customs of courtly love here in Arbonne. Blaise had no particular affection, for good and sufficient reasons, for the current way of things in his own home of Gorhaut, but nothing in the north struck him as quite so impractical as the woman-driven culture here of the troubadours and their joglars, wailing songs of love for one lord's wife or another. It wasn't even the maidens they sang of, in Corannos's name. It seemed a woman had to be wed to become the proper object of a poet's passion in Arbonne. Maffour, the most talkative of the household corans, had started to explain it once; Blaise hadn't cared enough to listen. The world was full of things one needed to know to survive; he didn't have the time to fill his brain with the useless chaff of a patently silly culture.

The island lights were nearer now across the water. From the front of the skiff Blaise heard one of the corans—Luth, of course—offer a fervent, nervous prayer under his breath. Behind his beard Blaise scowled in contempt. He would have gladly left Luth back on the mainland. The man would be next to useless here, good for nothing but guarding the skiff when they brought it ashore, if he could manage to do even that much without wetting himself in fear at owl noises or a falling star or a sudden wind in the leaves at night. It had been Luth who had begun the talk earlier, back on shore, about sea monsters guarding the approaches to Rian's Island—great, hump-backed, scaly creatures with teeth the size of a man.

The real dangers, as Blaise saw it, were rather more prosaic, though none the less acute for that: arrows and blades, wielded by the watchful priests and priestesses of Rian against falsely consecrated men come in secret in the night to the goddess's holy island with a purpose of their own.