They had encountered her husband when they first entered the house, then Duke Thierry had gracefully excused himself when Bertran made it clear they were calling upon his wife in her formal capacity. The duke of Carenzu was a slender, well-built man, whose sexual tastes and appetites were in no way visible in his manner. He was also, Valery had said earlier, an exceptionally competent leader.
His wife, Blaise was thinking, was even more than that. He felt oddly unsettled now, meeting her lucid gaze, remembering, with unexpected clarity on this bright autumn morning, the summer night they had spent together, her words and manner as much as the act of love. It came to him that if they had been alone she might have been saying different things just now. For that matter, he might have been doing the same. This was a woman he trusted, Blaise suddenly realized, and he felt a momentary surprise.
They had told her about the meeting with King Daufridi. Bertran had discussed it with the countess and Roban as well; he had been in the palace early, before they came here this morning. Events were beginning to move with speed. With Rosala de Garsenc and a male child in Barbentain it was clear—it had to be clear to everyone, Blaise thought—that any number of dangerous things were likely to happen quickly. His head ached dully. He was beginning to regret the last part of the night almost as much as the first.
Looking at Ariane, drinking in her cool beauty like a reviving draught, he said, "This whole exercise is about how we are seen in the eyes of the world. I lose too much if I am thought to be afraid of him, or to be arranging the affair to my obvious advantage. I am grateful for your concern, but there is no point to this challenge if we manipulate it."
"And there is a point to this? We are entitled to assume that?" The same question the countess had asked.
He ignored the sharp tone and gave her the same answer. "I hope so. I hope there is."
In truth, he wasn't certain. He was certain of nothing just now. He felt like one of those legendary dancers from Arimonda's distant past who were said to have leaped over the horns of bulls for the pleasure of their kings. He was in the middle of such a leap right now, grimly conscious of the gleaming, killing horns. It had seemed to Blaise, late last night—a thought shaped half of piety and half of simple fear—that Corannos had actually guided him here to Arbonne. That his journey south had not been fortuitous, not simply an escape from burdens and sorrows at home or in Portezza. It had been a movement towards destiny, the one chance the world might offer him to make good the vow he'd sworn when he left Garsenc Castle. He hadn't known he would say what he had said to Daufridi of Valensa. He hadn't prepared his challenge to Quzman in advance. He was a dancer with the bulls, moving with their movements, in flight now over the horns of his fate.
Drawing a breath to gather and hold his thoughts, he told Ariane then how he wanted certain things to be done on the morrow. Her features grew still and focused as she listened.
Bertran came closer, resting a hand on the back of her divan. He added a suggestion when Blaise was done. Valery said nothing at all. He looked grimly unhappy. Blaise couldn't tell how Rudel looked; his friend was still slumped in his deep chair, only the fair, tousled hair visible from behind. He thought Rudel might even have fallen asleep, but discovered, when he was finished, that this was not so.
"My father was right," said the heir to the Correze fortune in a musing tone. "I will very probably go forth to repent this allegiance of mine more than all the other errors of my life. I ought surely to have known better than to leave the banking business and take up with madmen from Gorhaut."
There were a number of replies that could be made to that, from the cutting, to the witty, to the soberly judicious. No one said anything, though.
"He will want to cut downwards on the angle and then back across low for your knees," Valery said. Rudel was tightening the drawstrings on the leather armour to be worn by the two men fighting.
"I know," said Blaise. "It's the usual attack with a curved sword." He wasn't really concentrating though, either on the words of advice or the increasing level of sound he could hear from the pavilions. When he and Quzman were ready to emerge from their tents the sounds would rise to a crescendo and then fall for the ceremony of introduction before beginning again, on a different note, when the killing began. It was the same all over the world. Blaise had seen a number of challenges to the death. He had fought in a foolish one, years before, when a Valensan coran had insulted the king of Gorhaut in the presence of one of that king's newest, youngest corans. Blaise had been lucky to survive and he knew it; the Valensan had taken his youthful opponent too casually and paid the price. Blaise had worn the dead man's armour for years.
"He'll have a knife in his belt and one behind his left calf," Rudel murmured. "And he won't hesitate to throw. He's known for that, and accurate with both hands. Keep your shield up."
Blaise nodded again. They meant him a world of good, he knew; it was their anxieties that were producing this outpouring of instruction. He remembered being exactly the same way when serving as squire to friends in their challenges, including Rudel, three times if he remembered rightly.
He really wasn't paying close attention though. This had happened to him before: his mind wandered before battle, drifting along unexpected pathways. It kept him calm, until the moment the fighting began, when the sensation was akin to a muffling curtain pulled swiftly aside, and Blaise would feel all his senses converge like arrows upon the battleground.
Just now he was remembering Rudel's last comment in Ariane's chambers that morning. He thought about Vitalle Correze, who wanted his much-loved son to be a banker not a coran, and then about his relationship with his own father. He wasn't sure why his thoughts were turning that way. Perhaps as he grew older, saw more of the world and its interactions, he was corning to understand the degree to which the Garsenc men had poisoned each other. He suddenly wondered, for the first time, how Ranald would be feeling about Rosala's flight. He realized that he had no idea, absolutely none; he didn't know his brother very well.
Valery tapped him briskly on the shoulder and Blaise obediently sat down on the stool and straightened his legs in front of him. His friends knelt and began lacing and tying the supple Portezzan leather about his thighs and calves. Through a gap in the tent flap behind their bent heads Blaise could glimpse the dazzling colours of the pavilions in the morning sunlight, and the green grass where he would be fighting soon.
They hadn't raised the banner above his tent yet, following his instructions of yesterday. For most of the people in the pavilions or in the commoners' standing ground on the other side he was simply a Gorhautian coran enmeshed in some quarrel with an Arimondan. A quarrel that was about to offer them the most exciting entertainment there was. A handful of people knew more, and there would be rumours of course; there were usually rumours at a time like this.
He felt very calm. He was always calm before fighting now, though it hadn't been that way in the beginning, years ago. He had prayed last night, kneeling on the cold stone floor in the surprisingly handsome chapel of Corannos in Lussan. He had not asked for victory, a coran never did.
Before the two tall candles above the frieze he had offered the ancient prayers for sunrise and sunset and for the strength of the god's life-giving golden light. The frieze itself had been masterfully done, a rendering of Corannos bestowing fire upon the first men, that the nights might hold less terror than before.
Perhaps he shouldn't have been so surprised by the serene grace of the god's houses here. They worshipped Corannos in Arbonne. He had always known that, there were corans here, after all, with the same rituals of initiation and invocation that he had passed through in Gorhaut, the same ones used in all six countries. It had been difficult, though, when he first arrived, in those early days at Castle Baude in the highlands, to overcome a lifetime of prejudice and vicious innuendo, much of it coming, of course, from his father. It was odd how often he was thinking about his father of late. Or perhaps not so odd after all, given what he
was about to do. They said the mind reached backwards when one's life was in extreme peril.
Galbert de Garsenc had stipulated that his younger son follow him into the clergy of Corannos. It was not a matter for discussion; what the High Elder wanted, he was accustomed to receive. Blaise's repeated flights as a boy from the chapel school near Cortil, his silent endurance of the whippings he was given, both at home by Galbert's heavy hand and again when he returned to the Elders, and then his obdurate, absolute refusal to speak the vows of consecration when he turned sixteen had represented a colossal thwarting of the High Elder's carefully laid plans.
They had tried to starve him into submitting to the vows—on his father's orders. Blaise had never forgotten those weeks. He woke sometimes in the night remembering them. Even today pangs of hunger made him panic irrationally, and he could not lash a man.
Would your mother have made a difference? Signe de Barbentain had asked the first night he met her. He didn't know. He would never know. No man, with only the one life to live, could answer such a question. He remembered learning, when still a small boy, not to cry because there was no one in the world who would come with comfort if he did. The brethren in the chapel school were terrified of his father; none dared offer succour to the unworthy, ingrate son. Not ever. Once, in Garsenc, Ranald had slipped into Blaise's room at night with a salve for his brother's lacerated back. In the morning, when Galbert saw the healing ointment he had whipped Ranald and then Blaise a second time. Ranald never tried to intervene in his punishments after that. Blaise could have stopped running away. He could have taken the vows they demanded of him. Neither possibility ever occurred to him, not even as options to be considered. When it became clear that Blaise would die of starvation before he broke in this, Galbert calmly proposed to have him publicly executed for his disobedience. It was King Duergar himself, becoming aware of this savage family drama playing itself out, who had forbidden that execution, who had insisted on food and drink being brought for the starving boy, and it was Duergar who accepted the sworn fealty of a gaunt, silent, hollow-eyed sixteen-year-old one month later, and named him a coran of Gorhaut.
Duke Ereibert de Garsenc, doughty and hoar, had died childless when his two nephews were twenty-one and nineteen, his stern mastery in war allowing him to outface lifelong rumours about his lack of heirs. Ranald inherited. He withdrew, of necessity, from his position as King's Champion and became duke of Garsenc instead, lord of the richest, most powerful estates in Gorhaut. Blaise should by then have been, by his father's careful designs, firmly placed in the hierarchy of the god's brotherhood, ready for a smooth ascent all the way to the ultimate station Galbert held, as High Elder of Corannos, with kings and princes subject to his fiat. The Garsenc family should have been poised for generations of power in Gorhaut—the country held as if between the paws of the rampant bear that was on their escutcheon—whomever might nominally have been sitting on the throne.
Ranald would have sons to succeed him at Garsenc and to follow Blaise into the clergy; there would be daughters to bind other families with the hoops of marriage vows. And eventually, perhaps not so far in the future, there might be even more than all of this—there might be the throne itself. A Garsenc ruling in Cortil, and the borders of Gorhaut itself stretching all the time, though first—first of all things, of course—reaching across the mountain passes to the south, to Arbonne, where they were godless and heretical, ruled by women and womanish men steeped in their blood-soaked rites.
Blaise had known almost all of this from very early in his life. He had been the one Galbert talked to when the boys were young. There had been a brief time when he hadn't understood why that was so, and then a longer period when he'd felt sorry for Ranald. It had all been long ago.
"Boots," said Rudel.
Blaise lifted first his left leg and then his right.
"All right," said Valery. Blaise stood up, and Rudel reached around his waist and buckled on the long, Aulensburg-forged sword in its plain soldier's scabbard. From the table he hefted the light helmet. Blaise took it from him and set it on his head. Valery was waiting with the round, unornamented shield. Blaise took that too.
"Where do you want your knives?" Valery asked.
"One for the belt. I have the other." Valery asked no further questions, neither did Rudel. They, too, had both been through this before. Rudel, his face and manner sober, lifted a sleek black knife from the trunk beside the tent flap and handed it to Blaise.
Blaise smiled briefly at him. "Do you remember? You gave me this one?"
Rudel made a quick, warding sign. "I did no such thing. I found it for you. You paid me a copper piece for it. We don't give knives as gifts, you ignorant northerner."
Blaise laughed. "Forgive me. I forgot that you are a superstitious Portezzan farmer at heart. However did you get permission to leave your hoe in the vineyards to travel among men of rank?"
A frivolous gibe, not worthy of a response and receiving none, for the trumpets sounded then.
Valery and Rudel moved to stand on either side of the tent flaps. The tradition was for the squires to say nothing at this time; farewells of any sort were thought to be invitations to fate. Blaise knew this. He looked at each of them and smiled. He was still calm, but there was a slight telltale acceleration to his pulsebeat now, as silence settled like a bird to a branch outside.
He nodded, and Valery and Rudel each drew back a flap of the tent. He stepped past the two of them, ducking his head, and he came out into sunshine and the green grass of the battleground.
Quzman of Arimonda was the first person he saw, standing at the entrance to his own tent on the far side of the field. A banner was flying behind him: three black bulls on a crimson field. Blaise registered the curved sword worn across the Arimondan's back in the western fashion, and he saw the polished golden shield. He glanced east to check and remember the angle of the rising sun; that shield could blind him if the Arimondan used it to catch and throw back the light. Blaise was aware, but only as background, of excited, rapacious murmurs coming from all around them. A death challenge was the keenest sport there was.
The trumpets sounded again, briefly, and Blaise turned towards the central pavilion as the herald of Arbonne stepped forward. He was aware that his heart was beating even more rapidly now, but not from anticipation of the battle, not yet. There was something still to come, before the fighting.
The herald's rich voice rolled out, sonorously naming the most illustrious of those assembled there. Blaise saw King Daufridi of Valensa sitting next to the countess, his bearded features unreadable, betraying nothing more than idle, polite interest.
"To my left," cried the herald at last, his trained voice carrying effortlessly over the grass and the densely packed pavilions, "stands Quzman di Perno of Arimonda, prepared to lay his life before Corannos and Rian in this matter of his family's honour." He paused. Blaise drew a breath. It had come. "All right," he said to the two men behind him. "Do it." He didn't look back, but as the herald of Arbonne turned towards him he heard the rustle and flap of two banners being run up to fly above his tent, and a moment later there came, truly like the roaring of sea surf in wind, a swelling of sound that nearly drowned the herald's urgently rising voice.
"To my other hand," the herald proclaimed, "equally prepared to defend the honour of his name, stands Blaise de Garsenc of Gorhaut, who here lays claim before this assembled gathering of the six nations and upon this holy field where the god and goddess are judges of honour and worth, to the crown of the Kingdom of Gorhaut, falsely now held by traitorous Ademar!"
People were on their feet; the herald was shouting now. "En Blaise has also declared that this combat, freely entered into by him against a felon so proclaimed by the countess of Arbonne, shall serve as a warrant for the worth of his claim, and he willingly lays his life at hazard before you all in this moment of asserting his right to that same crown."
The last was scarcely heard over the thunder of noise from the pavilions a
nd the standing grounds on the other side. It didn't matter whether the herald was audible or not. The banners told the story. Blaise turned slowly—it was all theatre now, all symbol, until the killing began—and he nodded his head, as an equal to his equals, to Signe de Barbentain and then to Daufridi of Valensa. And the countess of Arbonne rose, in the presence of her people and those gathered from the other countries of the world, and gestured to Blaise with an extended hand in welcome, equal to equal. There was screaming now. Blaise ignored it. He waited. One long moment, then another, and finally, the hairs rising on the back of his neck, he saw Daufridi stand. Tall and proud, the king of Valensa turned to left and right, not hurrying, a master of moments such as this, and then very slowly, facing Blaise, he laid his right hand on his left shoulder in the coran's salute.
He had done it. There had been no way of knowing if he would. It was not quite the full gesture of welcome that Signe had offered—Daufridi had far too complex a game of his own to play for that to be possible—but he had given more than they'd had any right to expect: an acknowledgement that Blaise was worthy of a king's standing up to recognize him.
Blaise closed his eyes with relief, and then opened them quickly again. He must not be seen to have doubted, though of course he had. There had been no promises from Daufridi at all—and certainly none regarding an event so unexpectedly swift to develop as this one had been. Leaving that inn outside the walls two nights ago, he had offered only the unreassuring remark that he would think on what Bertran had said. He had done so, evidently. He was with them, at least this far. Blaise was under no illusions though: if the King of Valensa ever decided that they were a greater danger than Ademar and Galbert, he would be swift in his denunciation. But for the moment, in the midst of this tumultuous maelstrom of sound, he had risen to his feet to welcome Blaise to the stage of world affairs. It was something; it was, in fact, a great deal. Keeping his expression as serene and unrevealing as he could, Blaise turned away from the pavilions to face his own tent, and so looked up for the first time at what flew above it now.