On the far side of the temple dome, where the High Priestess and the Inner Circle had their chambers and meeting rooms, Roche was admitted by a stone-faced woman from Cauvas. He had never liked people from Cauvas—or anywhere inland, he suddenly thought. It took folk raised by the sea to understand the rhythms of life on the water. He wondered if he could say that to the High Priestess. She was from Barbentain, though; he didn't think it would be a prudent notion to present her with this particular proposition.
He waited in gloomy silence, alone in the antechamber, dabbing futilely at intervals at the tell-tale streaks on his robe. He sniffed his hands suddenly and grimaced. He ought to have had a wash, he realized. He was carrying the evidence of his sin right into Rian's temple. And this was the third time in a year. He was going to be sent north, Roche decided with real despair. He deserved to be sent to the mountains, far from his beloved ocean waters and their seductive bounty. He had no self-control at all, he reproached himself, no proper respect for the traditions of holy Rian which he had vowed to uphold for life, no true sense of his own solemn responsibility to set an example for—
The door opened. Another grim-faced servant nodded coldly to him. The lay-folk always loved it when a priest or priestess was in trouble. Roche wiped his hands on his robe one last time and walked in, with what dignity he could command while smelling of lampfish and charcoal, to be told his fate by the High Priestess of Rian in Arbonne.
He came out of the room shortly afterwards seriously unsettled. The High Priestess had barely even bothered to take note of his transgression. She had reprimanded him briefly, never even turning to him or taking her blind gaze from the fire on the hearth. She had pardoned him almost absently, with a ritually phrased injunction to pray in the temple for the strength to resist his weaknesses. That had been all. For the third offense in a year. He'd been dismissed. Not even her white owl had seemed to care enough to look over at him.
Roche couldn't understand it. His had been a fairly serious malfeasance, a terrible example for the lay workers. How could the High Priestess take an indifferent view of such a thing, he wondered? How could the customs of the goddess be properly preserved if the great ones of the temple paid so little attention to them? He felt almost indignant at his casual reprieve. Why, he deserved a temporary exile at the very least! Though he would have felt miserable at such a punishment, he had certainly deserved it. But what was this—an absent-minded lecture and a quick dismissal?
Something, Roche decided, was seriously wrong. He was only a lowly priest, but he couldn't help wondering if the upper hierarchies of Rian's clergy were serving her properly these days. He shook his head. What was the world coming to?
On the way out, though, he couldn't forebear grinning broadly at the dour-faced woman at the door, and as he walked back past the bakehouse through the crisp afternoon sunshine he offered the woodsman a positively cheerful wave. Not, perhaps, the most judicious thing to do, but some temptations, Roche had learned, he was ill-equipped to resist.
When he finished his tour of duty in the sanctuary that evening, he washed himself carefully, hands and face and body, in the growing chill of evening after the sun had gone down, and he donned clean raiment before going back to pray in the temple for two full watches of the evening. As he had been admonished to do, Roche humbly asked the goddess to vouchsafe him the strength to resist his inappropriate desires, and then, as an afterthought, he prayed for Rian to lend her holy wisdom and eternal presence to the High Priestess, who seemed troubled of late by burdens beyond his own poor understanding.
He felt better when he finally rose, though his knees and back creaked stiffly in the cold. He left the temple to return to the dormitory and his bed under the winter stars and both moons.
On the way out from the dome he saw a cluster of his fellow priests and priestesses standing together in the atrium around the one small fire there. It was very late; this was unusual. He went over to join them, and as they made room for him in their midst it was Maritte, very near now to delivering the child he and she had conceived last spring, who told Roche that word had just arrived that the army of Gorhaut had been seen two days ago in the High Road Pass through the mountains coming south into Arbonne with the engines of war.
It had always been likely, more than that, even.
From the moment the Treaty of Iersen Bridge had been signed, Beatritz had been certain Gorhaut would be coming to them. Until the sun falls and the moons die, Gorhaut and Arbonne shall not lie easily beside each other. That was the ancient saying—in both countries. The sun had not fallen and both moons were in the winter sky tonight she knew, aware of them as presences though she could not see their light.
Deep in her cushioned chair she was also aware of the fire on the hearth, as a warmth certainly, and a welcome one, but also as something else, not sound or heat, certainly not light—a source of danger and knowledge, both. It was such a complex world she had walked into on the night she had given up her eyes for this other sight of Rian. She saw so differently now, better in the darkness, best on the island, not at all without Brissel on her shoulder. She reached up and stroked the owl; she could feel his disquiet, or rather, she could feel him reacting to her own. She tried to send calming thoughts, to go with the gentling hand, but it was hard. It was hard tonight.
Aubry had been a blow to her heart, heavy as a descending hammer, and it had only been an opening move, no more than a small number of Gorhaut corans writing a first message in fire last autumn. There was an army now, and it seemed Galbert de Garsenc's long dream of burnings in Arbonne was about to be fulfilled.
And there was next to nothing she could do about it. She had already done what she could, keeping her lines of knowledge flung far, leaving the island more than she ought to have done, neglecting the localized but vital needs of her priests and priestesses to meet with her mother and Roban and the most important of the nobility—Bertran, Thierry and Ariane, Urté. It had been Beatritz, feeling the rare pulse of the goddess within her, who had counselled that a careful approach be made to Blaise de Garsenc, who was known to have left Gorhaut in anger. She remembered the first reactions to that: he was the son of the High Elder, their purest enemy. An ignorant, unpleasant mercenary soldier, Roban the chancellor had named him derisively.
He is more than that, Beatritz had told them, trusting her intuition and the silence of her owl. Bertran was the one who had agreed with her, though almost in spirit of amusement, and also because—as they only afterwards understood—her proposal coincided neatly with a seduction he was then pursuing. It was that way with Bertran, sometimes. You took him for what he was, which was not inconsiderable, and tried to keep private the inward lament for how much more he might have been.
She had known she was right about Blaise de Garsenc when Rian, in holy intercession, had acted to bring the man to the island even before Bertran went to Castle Baude. Beatritz had done what she could here, too, trying to frighten him out of the grim complacency that was obvious and reach past his barriers to touch the shielded thing she sensed within. Brissel had let her know that he, too, felt something there, and long ago she had learned to listen when the owl told her such things.
She remembered Brissel flying from her shoulder on Midsummer Night in Tavernel when Blaise had first spoken of the crown of Gorhaut. She had not expected that, either the man's words or the white owl's sudden flight to him. She was truly blind when Brissel was not with her, but her mother had reached up to take her hand and had told her quietly where the bird had gone, and Beatritz had felt the presence of Rian in that moment.
If only it were a presence she could invoke more often. If only she had a tenth of the magic and the mental powers the superstitious attributed to her. But magic in Arbonne was a tenuous, very nearly non-existent thing—whatever it might be in those uncharted countries storm-blown mariners had told her lay beyond the deserts to the south. Magic here was wholly confined to small things, the coinage of hearth and heart. Control of conceptio
n, foreknowledge of a child's sex—and that last not always with certainty. Knowledge of sorrows, some access to easing them. A skill with the gifts of the earth: herbs, flowers, fruits, trees. A certain awareness Beatritz herself had—though only here on the island or the isle in Lake Dierne, and only since her blinding—of inward life, in matters of love and hate. Some powers of healing, though these as much a matter of herbal and other lore handed down as anything else.
That was the sum of their magic; that was their dangerous power. It had been useful to have others think there was more; a fear of the clergy of Rian and their night gatherings could be a kind of defence.
Until that fear became so deep and cold a terror that it became the very reason for their peril. Galbert de Garsenc seemed to have crossed over that line one day or night in his own past. His fear of the women of Arbonne, his hatred of Rian and all the goddess meant, was the reason there was an army in the mountains in the midst of winter, whipped into a killing frenzy by the High Elder of Corannos. They would be out of the mountains by now, Beatritz corrected herself, her heart aching, a slow, cold dread moving through her like a poison in the blood.
She didn't know what to do. That was the worst of it. She could pray, gather everyone on the island under the temple dome to offer hymns and incantations all day and night, seeking some access to the goddess, invoking her intercession. Rian could not be compelled, though. That was the oldest, deepest law; she was capricious and inviolate, and death was a part of her dominion—it was, in fact, one of her incarnations. She was mother, she was bride, but she was also gatherer of the dead.
It might even be that Rian herself had ordained this scourge as a punishment, a cleansing of the evils of their time. Beatritz didn't know what their great acts of evil might be, but she was only a servant of the goddess, not privy to divine awareness. She would have thought—she would have said—that there was no darkness or evil in Arbonne deserving of what had happened to the corans in that watch-tower below the High Pass last autumn, or to the priestesses of the temple of Aubry that same night.
She would have said as much to holy Rian herself. As if it would matter. The owl ruffled his feathers, bringing her mind back. She'd been considering options, responses. She remembered how her father used to do that, crisply running through possibilities aloud before decisively choosing his path. It was still difficult for her sometimes to accept that he was dead, that the burdens were her mother's now and her own, with such aid as could be invoked from the bitterly divided nobility of Arbonne.
There was no heir. That had always been a problem, and Guibor IV of Barbentain had been unable to name one in his last years for fear of tearing the country apart. He had even tried to make Beatritz leave the sanctuary of the goddess in the year after Aelis died with her child in Miraval. Guibor had anticipated this trouble in the time that followed the death of his youngest child. He had always anticipated a great deal, it was a fault of his, to try to make too many things fall right at the same time. It had been that way with Aelis's marriage to Urté de Miraval in the first place: a powerful duke, one of the mightiest in the country, a choice that could not be impeached, and a man anxious to father children, a son or even a daughter to rule Arbonne when Guibor died.
But Aelis had died first, and so too, almost certainly, had her son. No one could be absolutely sure, though everyone knew what she had told her husband on her deathbed about the fathering of the child: in doing so she had given dreadful, calamitous life to the feud that had shaped Arbonne ever since. Urté could not even be approached or spoken to on this issue. Beatritz had tried once, at the end of the year after Aelis died—and had received the most stinging rebuke of her life. They would have had to put the duke of Miraval to torture to even try to make him speak. And he wouldn't have, they all knew that: he wouldn't have said what had happened to the child even then.
Not even Guibor the count had been able to quell or control what Aelis had begun between Talair and Miraval on that night so long ago. So, searching for alternatives, he had tried to make Beatritz leave the clergy, come back to Barbentain, prepare herself to marry, to have a child of her own.
It was then that she'd had herself blinded, in that small temple in the Gotzland mountains, taking the step no priestess had taken for years upon years, aligning herself irrevocably with Rian. She had become High Priestess two years later and had come to the island.
Her father had never truly forgiven her. That had always hurt, for she had loved him. Not as her mother did, with an undying passion of the soul, and not even as her sister Aelis had, with something complex and yearning at its core. Beatritz had known her father's weaknesses and his flaws too well, had seen him too clearly for either of those kinds of love: she understood his pride, how he wished to control and shape far too much in too many different ways, his own guiding hands on the reins of everyone and everything. Of course she understood such a thing: it was her own besetting vice. She was Guibor's child. Her call to Rian had been real, though, the truest thing in her life, and she had known it young.
Her mother had understood, surprisingly. Signe, beautiful and glittering like an ornamental jewel under torchlight in Barbentain, seemed nonetheless to have understood a great deal, always. Beatritz ached for her tonight, picturing her in the wintry castle with these brutal tidings newly come and the terrible, crushing knowledge that she might be the ruler of Arbonne in the time it died forever.
The owl grew restive again, a motion of admonition. Options. She had been considering her options. She could start north herself, leaving the island and the seat of any power or foreknowledge she might be given, to lend her purely mortal strength, what wisdom she had, to her mother and those who would be with the countess now.
They didn't need her, she realized with a gnawing helplessness. She had counsels to offer in times of peace or preparation, of smaller and larger intrigues, the tidings her own network of informants might gather, but what did she know about waging war?
It was, she told herself with bitterness, time for the men now. The irony was coruscating. Arbonne was to be destroyed because of its women, because of the goddess who shared in their love and devotion with Corannos in the sky, because it was ruled by a woman now, because of the symbols and the music of the Court of Love and the examples of grace set by figures like Signe and Ariane. And yet now that ruin had come to them with sword and axe and carried brand, now that images of rape and fire would dance behind the closed eyelids of every woman in Arbonne, it was the men who would have to save them after all.
And despite more than twenty years of her father's striving before he died, and then her mother's afterwards, despite patience and wiles and even Guibor's attempts at absolute commands, the two most powerful men in Arbonne still hated each other with a ferocity, with a savage, time-locked obsession that had never let them go, and would never do so, never let them act together, even to save themselves and their land.
Beatritz knew this. She knew it with a despair that almost overwhelmed her. This had always been the weakness at the heart of Arbonne in their time, the thing that left them wide open to destruction. Not the fact of a woman ruling them. Not the rumoured softness of their corans; that was false and manifestly so. Not the corrupting influence of the troubadours and their music; there was no corruption in the flourish of that art. Their danger, their crippling wound, was Talair and Miraval.
Her sister Aelis, Beatritz thought, with an old, unrelenting bitterness, had much to answer for.
It was an unfair thought, she supposed. Her mother had told her as much, over and again through the years. Unfair or not, it was there, she was thinking it, she would think it until she died, and she would die remembering Aelis, dark and slender, far too proud, with her will like forged iron and that unwillingness, ever, to forgive.
Like Bertran, that last quality, Beatritz thought. Like Urté. And then a newer thought, as she reached up again to gentle her restive owl: Like me.
"Oh, Aelis," she murmured aloud. "Oh, sister,
did we all begin to die the night you died, with or without the child?"
It was possible, she thought. There were ripples to events, and they went a long way sometimes across the dark pools of time and the world.
Brissel shifted on her shoulder again and then suddenly flexed his sharp talons in a way she knew. It was always like this: without any warning at all the presence of the goddess might come to her. Catching her breath, feeling the familiar speeding up of her pulse, Beatritz waited, and was answered, assuaged, with images in her darkness, images swirling to take shape as out of some primal fog before the world was made.
She saw two castles and recognized them immediately. Miraval and Talair—she had known those proud, twinned assertions all her life. Another image quickly: an arch, immeasurably old, massive, humbling, carvings of war and conquest stamped upon it like foreshadowing from long ago. And then, as she released her breath in a spasm of love and pain she could not quite hold in, the High Priestess of Rian saw a lake in her mind, a small, delicate isle in the midst of it, three plumes of smoke rising straight as swords into the windless winter sky. The last thing she saw was a tree. Then the images were gone and she was left with only darkness again, and Brissel on her shoulder.
It came like this, and it went, never coerced, never subject to entreaty. The goddess remembered her children sometimes and sometimes she forgot them in the caprice of her nature. She could shower gifts like blessed rain in spring, or she could turn her back and let ice and fire have their way. She had a face of laughter and one of desire, a countenance of true compassion and a terrible visage of judgment. In the teachings of Arbonne it was Corannos the god who was kinder, more soberly caring for men and women. Rian suffered them, and loved them, but she could be cruel as nature was cruel. It was the god who held their mortal children always in mind, who did not fail to see their sufferings upon the earth. So it had been taught in Arbonne for generations.