She took another chance. A large chance. "We?" she asked.
He was silent for a few strides. "You are," he said finally, "a clever woman, and obviously a brave one." She thought of sketching a mock bow in the roadway but refrained. "I suggest you try hard not to become too sentimental about this. I'm a professional coran, at the moment under contract to Duke Bertran, who is not dead though a man I had come to like is. In my profession one gets used to the deaths of people one likes, or one finds another profession. I could as easily be in Aulensburg serving Jorg of Gotzland by this autumn, and if he decides to join Gorhaut and if there is a war… I'll be back here and fighting for him against you. You must understand that. For now, I try to serve, as best I can, the needs of the man who pays me."
"Payment is all? Wouldn't you fight for Gorhaut because it is your country? Only for that reason, money aside?" She found that she was breathing hard again.
He fell silent as they walked, looking over and down at her. Their eyes met for a moment, then he glanced away. "No," he said finally. "Once I would have. Once I did. Not any more." He drew a slow breath. "Not since Iersen Bridge. I am a professional coran. Payment is all."
"And you can change sides that easily? There are no attachments that matter? No people, no principles?"
"You started the evening attacking me," he murmured. "Is it becoming a habit?"
Lisseut felt herself blushing.
"If you are fair," he went on, "you will acknowledge that there are principles behind what I do. Attachments are dangerous in my profession. So is sentiment."
"You've used that word at least four times tonight," she said, more tartly than she'd intended. "Is that your only word for human affection?"
He laughed again, surprising her. "If I concede you the point will you leave it?" he asked.
He stopped in the street. They were back among the crowds now. Someone jostled her going past. Blaise laid a hand on her shoulder as she turned to look at him. "I don't think I'm up to debating with you in the street tonight. I think I'd lose." He gazed down at her soberly, a professional again, assessing a situation. "You asked me earlier what you should do. I intend to speak to En Bertran in the morning. He should not be taxed with this tonight, I think that is obvious, quite aside from what I promised Rudel Correze. I will tell him everything that happened, including my decision to let Rudel have a chance to leave. I expect he'll agree with that, eventually, if not immediately. I'll also tell him who paid for that arrow. I promise you these things. If you don't trust me to do this, you can be there when we meet in the morning."
It was more than she could have expected, rather a great deal more. She said, however, being what her mother had always said she was, "You'll tell him everything? Including who you are?"
His expression did not change; he'd been expecting the question, she realized. He had already begun taking her measure; it was a curious thing to realize.
"If you insist that I do so, I will. I cannot stop you from telling, in any event. I don't go about killing women who learn too much. I can only ask you to let me be the judge as to when and whether to reveal that, as events unfold." He hesitated again. "I mean no harm to anyone you care about."
She thought of Remy, with a sword wound in his shoulder. She said, hardily, trying to sound cool and experienced. "Fine. I can give you that. But then I had better not be there when you speak to Bertran or he'll summon me after, alone, and ask me what else I heard—and I'm not very good at lying." She was conscious of his hand still on her shoulder.
He smiled. "Thank you. You are generous."
Lisseut shrugged. "Don't be sentimental," she said.
He laughed aloud, throwing his head back. An artisan with a noisemaker ran past them just then, producing a terrifying blast of sound. Blaise winced.
"Where shall I leave you?" he asked. "At the tavern?"
He had taken his hand from her shoulder. It was Midsummer Eve, in Tavernel. She said, "You don't have to leave me… actually. It is Carnival and the night has some time yet to run. We could share a bottle of wine, if you like, and… and, well if you are staying in Arbonne for a while longer you should know some of our customs." She looked away, despite herself, along the crowded street. "It is said to be… unlucky to spend tonight alone in this city."
Her mother had always said she would end up disgracing the family. She could blame her uncle for taking her out into the wide world as a singer. She could blame Remy of Orreze. She could blame the holy rites of Rian in Tavernel on Midsummer Eve.
She could wait, biting her lip, for the man with her to say, with devastating politeness, "Thank you. To both things. But I am not of Arbonne, truly, and if it brings me ill luck or no, a coran I admired has died tonight and my own customs require that I keep vigil for him in a house of the god."
"All night?" She looked back up at him. It took some courage.
He hesitated, reaching for words. Lisseut said then, knowing it was ill advised, "I don't know what happened in Portezza, obviously, but I am not like that. I mean, I don't normally—"
He put a hand over her mouth. She felt his fingers against her lips. "Don't say it," he murmured. "Leave me that much as my own."
He was an uncivilized northerner, she thought. He had stabbed Remy in the arm. Until the sun falls and the moons die, her grandfather and her father used to say, Gorhaut and Arbonne shall not lie easily beside each other. His fingers withdrew, he withdrew back into himself, behind his own mask. It was only the dangerous associations of Midsummer Eve, she told herself, and the disturbing intimacy of what she'd heard in that garden. There were other men to be with, men she knew and trusted, men of talent and wit and courtesy. They would be back at The Liensenne, in the downstairs room or upstairs with Marotte's wine and cheeses and their own harps and lutes and songs, celebrating Rian through the remaining hours of the goddess's most holy night. It was not likely she would have to lie alone.
Unless, in the end, she wanted to. With an unexpected sadness within her, Lisseut looked away beyond the man she was standing with, struggling to regain the diamond-bright mood of exhilaration that seemed to have slipped away from her somewhere in this strange night among the crowds and the music and the noisemakers and the one arching arrow and the words she'd heard spoken beside the plashing of a fountain.
And so it was, looking away along the crowded street, that she saw before he did the six men in crimson livery who now came up and surrounded them carrying torches, bearing swords.
MIDSUMMER
177
Their leader bowed gracefully to Blaise of Gorhaut. "It would be a great courtesy," he said, with perfect, grave formality, "if you would come with us."
Blaise looked quickly around; she could see him trying to take the measure of this new situation. He looked back at Lisseut, seeking a clue or explanation in her eyes; she had known he was going to do that. He didn't know the livery, of course. She did. She knew it well. And didn't much feel, just then, like helping him. How, she thought, surprised by her own swift anger, was a bedraggled joglar from Vezét's olive groves to compete with this sort of thing on a night of Rian?
"I don't think," she said, "that you are going to have your vigil with the god after all. I wish you joy of the night and the year." And took a shallow, fleeting satisfaction in the incomprehension that showed in his eyes before they took him away.
One of the men in crimson escorted her back to The Liensenne. Of course. They were flawlessly versed in such niceties. They had to be, she thought sourly, they were meant to be an example to all the world.
CHAPTER 7
Even when he saw the peacocks in the extravagantly lit inner courtyard of the house where they brought him, Blaise wasn't sure where he had come. He had no sense of immediate danger from the five men escorting him, but, equally, he was under no illusion that he could have refused their courteously phrased request.
He was surprisingly weary. He'd been more honest with the singer, the straggle-haired girl named Lisseut, than he
would have expected to be, especially after what she'd done. But if he'd been entirely truthful he would have added, at the end, that his desire for a vigil in a house of the god was at least as much for the cool silence such a solitude would afford as it was to mourn and honour Valery of Talair's passing to Corannos that night.
He had rather a great deal to think about and try to deal with just now, and wine and whatever might follow on a decadent night in Tavernel with a singer—however spirited and clever she might be—was not going to ease his heart or his mind tonight. Things seemed to have suddenly become difficult again.
His father had paid a quarter of a million in gold to Rudel Correze to kill the duke of Talair.
A clear message meant for all the world, and another, hidden, for his younger son alone: See what I have to work with, my errant child. See what I deny you for refusing me. How I strip away even your friendship. Learn the cost of your folly. How could you ever have dreamt of gainsaying me?
Was there any place on the surface of the earth where he might go and not be brought back, face to face as before the polished, merciless, self-revealing surface of a mirror, with Galbert, the High Elder of Corannos in Gorhaut?
And there was more, even more than that tonight. Lucianna was married again. Another sort of mirror that, distorting and dark: guttering candles beside a ravaged bed, the god's moon passing from a window, an eastern songbird in an ornate cage singing to break the heart—images so raw the eyes of memory flinched away.
He had come in the stillness of winter through the passes to Arbonne as to a place of haven or refuge, where he had never been before, would probably not be known, might serve in quiet anonymity whatever petty lord in whatever remote mountain fastness might offer him an adequate recompense. Where he might not ever hear her name spoken, whether in admiration or desire or contempt, or be forced to deal with all the hurting, hoarded memories from Portezza: images framed in the intricate textures of carpeting and tapestries, cushions of woven silk, vases and drinking cups of marble and alabaster, and weaving through them all, like a drifting veil of smoke, the sensuous, elusive scents he had come to know perilously well in the women's wing of the Delonghi palace in many-towered Mignano a year ago.
What is my sin, Blaise? Rudel was like that. A knife in the voice and in the thought behind. Quicksilver bright, insubstantial as a moon on water sometimes, then sharp and merciless and deadly as… as an arrow dipped in syvaren. And the sharpness in his perceptions, as much as in anything else. A man from whom it was difficult to hide.
For the sin, the transgression, lay—and Rudel knew it, they both knew it—in his having given Blaise exactly what he wanted. In taking a Gorhaut coran still numb with shock and anger in the aftermath of the Treaty of Iersen Bridge and drawing him away, first to Aulensburg and the ale-sodden, hunt-obsessed court of Jorg of Gotzland, and then down south by stages in fair, flowering springtime to something else, something entirely otherwise.
To the cities of Portezza and their intrigues, the delicate pleasures of subtle, wealthy men with sidelong smiles, and the infinitely versed women of those warring, brilliant city-states. And one windswept night, with distant thunder sounding on the hills north of Mignano, there had been Lucianna Delonghi's night-black hair at the head of a banquet table, the flash of her jewellery, the equally flashing wit with unsettling traps and double meanings everywhere, the mocking laugh, and then, astonishingly, what she was afterwards, elsewhere, under the painted canopy of a bed, clad only in the dazzle of that jewellery… what happened when mockery left the laughter but the laughter remained. That was Rudel's sin. And so, being honest, Blaise was forced to say there was really no sin at all, only a doorway offered—and with a warning, as well—through which he himself had walked, scarred by wounds from a winter battle when his king had died, into the seeming warmth of a firelit, candlelit, scented sequence of rooms, from which he'd emerged a season later with wounds that went deeper by far.
The peacocks were arrogantly unafraid. One of them seemed inclined to challenge their right to cross the courtyard before it turned and strutted away, opening the glorious panoply of its tail. Under the moons and in the blaze of torches there was something extravagant and profligate about the fan of colours on display. In his memories of Lucianna, too, there was little daylight; it all seemed to have happened in darkness or by candlelight, extravagant, profligate, in one palace or another, and once, on a steaming, airless summer's night not to be forgotten, with Rudel in Faenna when they had killed her husband on a contract for her father.
As they approached the end of the courtyard a pair of doors were opened by a footman in the dark red livery. Behind him, in a wide hallway, bearing flame in a slender candlestick, a lady-in-waiting stood, in the same colours, with white at wrist and throat and binding her dark hair. The footman bowed, the woman sank low in a curtsey. The candle in her hand did not even waver. "Will you honour me by following?" she asked.
Blaise was still under no illusions. Two of the guards had remained, he noted, waiting just inside the doorway. He was almost inclined to berate them all, to demand an end to this protracted charade of courtesy, but something in the perfection, the gravity of it, made him hold his peace. Whoever it was who had sent for him very clearly placed an exaggerated value on such things; it might be a useful piece of information.
And it was with that thought, following the woman's neat-footed progress down a corridor and up a wide, curving flight of stairs, with two guards in careful step behind him, that Blaise understood where he had to be, and something the singer had said, at the end, became belatedly clear to him.
They stopped before a closed door. The woman knocked twice and opened it; she stepped aside, gesturing with easy grace for Blaise to pass within. He did. They closed the door behind him, leaving him in that room without attendant or guard.
There was a fireplace, not lit. Candles in sconces on the walls and on tables placed around a richly furnished and carpeted room done in shades of dark blue and gold. Wine on one table, he saw, goblets beside a flask. Two, no, three doorways opening to inner rooms, a pair of very deep, high-backed chairs facing the fire. The windows on the outer wall were open to the breeze; Blaise could hear noises of revelry from below. There was a familiar, hard bitterness in him now, and a curiosity he could not deny, and a third thing, like the quickening hammer of a pulse, beneath both of these.
"Thank you for coming," said Ariane de Carenzu, rising from a divan on the far side of the room. Her black hair was still down about her shoulders, as it should not have been. She was dressed as before, jewellery upon her like fire and ice.
"I would accept the thanks if I had had a choice in the matter," Blaise said grimly. He remained just inside the doorway, assessing the room, trying not to stare too intently at the woman.
She laughed aloud. "Had I been certain you would elect to come I would have been happy to grant you that choice." Her smile made it clear she knew exactly what she was saying. She was very beautiful, the dark hair framing and setting off flawless white skin. Her dark eyes were wide-set and serene, the mouth was firm, and in her voice Blaise heard the note of control he had registered in the tavern when she had issued a command to the dukes of Talair and Miraval, and both had accepted without demur.
The women of Arbonne, he thought, trying to summon anger like a shield. He folded his arms across his chest. A little more than a year ago, on a spring night with the god's thunder outside on the northern hills, he had answered a different kind of summons to another black-haired woman's chambers. His life had been changed that night, and not, in the end, for the better.
There is wine by the fire, Lucianna Delonghi had said then, lying across her bed beneath the canopy of coupling figures. Shall we begin with that thirst?
There was no bed here, no lit fire, and the woman with him now poured the wine for both of them herself, and then neatly, without artifice, walked over to offer him a goblet. He took it without speaking. She did not linger beside him but turned a
nd walked back to the divan. Almost without knowing he was doing so, Blaise followed. She sat and gestured with one hand and he took the chair she indicated. She was wearing perfume, a subtle scent, and not a great deal of it. There was a lute on a table at one end of the divan.
She said, without preamble, the dark brown eyes steady on his, "There are a number of matters we might wish to consider, you and I, before this night is over, but do you want to begin by telling me what happened after you left the river?"
He was tired, and his mind and heart had been dealt double blows tonight, but he was not so far unmanned as that.
He even found himself smiling, though he could not have said why. Perhaps the pure challenge of it, the directness of what she seemed to be trying to do. "I might," he murmured. "I might possibly want to tell you, but until I know who else is listening at the door behind you I would prefer to keep my own counsel, my lady. You will forgive me."
He had expected many things, but not delight. Her laughter chimed with her two hands clapping happily together, the long fingers momentarily obscuring the rubies about her throat.
"Of course I will forgive you!" Ariane de Carenzu cried, "You have just won me a wager of twenty-five silver barbens. You really shouldn't work in the service of men who undervalue you so much."
"I object to that," said Bertran de Talair, entering the room from the door behind her. "I did not underestimate Blaise. I might possibly have judged your charms to be rather more distracting then they seem to be of late."
"I know your lute," Blaise said briefly. "I may not think much of your music, but I know the instrument." He was making an effort to keep his composure. He wasn't really looking at Bertran, either, because another woman, very tall, had walked in behind the duke. This one had grey in her dark hair and she was blind and there was a white owl on her shoulder. The last time he'd seen her was on an island in the sea when she'd told him the secrets of his own heart in the night dark of a forest.