"We do know that, your grace," Maffour said smoothly, coming up beside the man.
Edging closer, hidden by the bushes, Blaise winced at the unctuous flattery of the title. Evrard had no more claim to it than Maffour did, but Mallin had been explicit in his instructions to the most articulate of his corans.
"Who are you?" Evrard asked sharply, turning quickly to look at Maffour in the moonlight. Blaise moved nearer, low to the ground, trying to slip around to the other side of the bench. He had his own views on what was about to happen.
"Maffour of Baude, your grace, with a message from En Mallin himself."
"I thought I recognized you," Evrard said haughtily. "How dare you come in this fashion, disturbing my thoughts and my art?" Nothing about impiety or trespass or the affront to the goddess he was currently lauding, Blaise thought sardonically, pausing next to a small statue.
"I have nothing to say to your baron or his ill-mannered wife, and am in no mood to listen to whatever tritely phrased message they have cobbled together for me." Evrard's tone was lordly.
"I have come a long way in some peril," Maffour said placatingly, "and Mallin de Baude's message is deeply sincere and not long. Will you not honour me by hearing it, your grace?"
"Honour?" Evrard of Lussan said, his voice rising querulously. "What claim has anyone in that castle to honour of any kind? I bestowed upon them a grace they never deserved. I gave to Mallin whatever dignity he claimed—through my presence there, through my art." His words grew dangerously loud. "Whatever he was becoming in the gaze of Arbonne, of the world, he owed to me. And in return, in return for that—"
"In return for that, for no reason I can understand, he seeks your company again," Blaise said, stepping quickly forward, having heard quite a bit more than enough.
As Evrard glanced back at him wide-eyed, attempting to rise, Blaise used the haft of his dagger for the second time that night, bringing it down with carefully judged force on the balding pate of the troubadour. Maffour moved quickly to catch the man as he fell.
"I cannot begin to tell you," Blaise said fervently as Hirnan and Thulier joined them, "how much I enjoyed doing that."
Hirnan grunted. "We can guess. What took you so long?"
Blaise grinned at the three of them. "What? And interfere with Maffour's great moment? I really wanted to hear that speech."
"I'lll recite it for you on the way back then," Maffour said sourly. "With all the 'your grace's' too."
"Spare us," said Hirnan briefly. He bent and effortlessly shouldered the body of the small troubadour.
Still grinning, Blaise led the way this time, without a word, down towards the south end of the garden, away from the sanctuary lights and the walls and the temple domes, and then, circling carefully, back towards the shelter of the wood. If these were the corans of a lesser baron, he was thinking to himself, and they turned out to be this coolly competent—with one vivid exception—he was going to have to do some serious reassessing, when they got back to land, of the men of this country of Arbonne, even with its troubadours and joglars and a woman ruling them.
The one vivid exception was having, without the least shadow of any possible doubt, the worst night of his life.
In the first place, there were the noises. Even at the edge of the woods, the sounds of the night forest kept making their way to Luth's pricked ears, triggering waves of panic that succeeded each other in a seemingly endless progression.
Secondly there was Vanne. Or, not exactly Vanne, but his absence, for the other coran assigned to guard duty kept wilfully abandoning Luth, his designated partner, and making his own way down the rope to check on the two clerics in the sailboat, then going off into the forest itself to listen for the return of their fellows, or for other less happy possibilities. Either of these forays would leave Luth alone for long moments at a time to cope with sounds and ambiguous shiftings in the shadows of the plateau or at the edges of the trees, with no one to turn to for reassurance.
The truth was, Luth said to himself—and he would have sworn to it as an oath in any temple of the goddess—that he really wasn't a coward, though he knew every man here would think him one from tonight onward. He wasn't though: put him on a crag above Castle Baude in a thunderstorm, with thieves on the slopes making off with the baron's sheep, and Luth would be fierce in pursuit of them, sure-footed and deft among the rocks, and not at all bad with his bow or blade when he caught up with the bandits. He'd done that, he'd done it last summer, with Giresse and Hirnan. He'd killed a man that night with a bowshot in darkness, and it was he who had led the other two back down the treacherous slopes to safety with the flock.
Not that they were likely to remember that, or bother to remind the others of it, after tonight. If any of them lived through tonight. If they ever left this island. If they—
What was that?
Luth wheeled, his heart lurching like a small boat hit by a crossing wave, in time to see Vanne making his way back onto the plateau from yet another survey of the woods. The other coran gave him a curious glance in the shadows but said nothing. They were not to speak, Luth knew. He found their own enforced silence almost as stressful as the noises of the night forest.
Because they weren't just noises, and this wasn't just night-time. These were the sounds of Rian's Island, which was holy, and the eight of them were here without proper consecration, without any claim of right—only a drunken ex-priest's mangling of the words of ritual—and they had laid violent hands on two of the goddess's truly anointed before they'd even landed.
Luth's problem, very simply, was that he was a believer in the powers of the goddess, profoundly so. If that could really be called a problem. He'd had a religious, superstitious grandmother who'd worshipped both Rian and Corannos along with a variety of hearth spirits and seasonal ones, and who'd known just enough about magic and folk spells to leave the grandson she'd reared helplessly prey to the terrors of precisely the sort of place where they were now. Had he not been so anxious not to lose face among the other corans and his baron and the big, capable, grimly sardonic northern mercenary Mallin had brought to lead and train them, Luth would certainly have found a way to back out of the mission when he was named for it.
He should have, he thought dismally. Whatever status that withdrawal would have cost him was as nothing compared to how he'd be diminished and mocked because of what had happened tonight. Who would ever have thought that simple piety, a prayer of thanks to holy Rian herself, could get a person into so much trouble? How should a high country man know how bizarrely far sound—a murmured prayer! — could carry at sea? And Hirnan had hurt him with that pincer-like grip of his. The oldest coran was a big man, almost as big as the bearded northerner, and his fingers had been like claws of iron. Hirnan should have known better, Luth thought, trying to summon some sense of outrage at how unfair all of this was turning out to be.
He jumped sideways again, stumbled, and almost fell. He was grappling for his sword when he realized that it was Vanne who had come up to him. He tried, with minimal success, to turn the motion into one of alertly prudent caution. Vanne, his face blandly expressionless, gestured and Luth bent his head towards him.
"I'm going down to check on them again," the other coran said, as Luth had despairingly known he would. "Remember, a corfe whistle if you need me. I'll do the same." Mutely, trying to keep his own expression from shaping a forelorn plea, Luth nodded.
Moving easily, Vanne negotiated the plateau, grasped the rope and slipped over the side. Luth watched the line jerk for a few moments and then go slack as Vanne reached the rocks at the bottom. He walked over to the tree that Maffour had tied the rope to and knelt to run a practised eye over the knot. It was fine, Luth judged, it would continue to hold.
He straightened and stepped back. And bumped into something.
His heart lurching, he spun around. As he did, as he saw what had come, all the flowing blood in his veins seemed to dry up and change to arid powder. He pursed his lips and trie
d to whistle. Like a corfe.
No sound came out. His lips were dry, as bone, as dust, as death. He opened his mouth to scream but closed it silently and quite suddenly as a curved, jewelled, inordinately long dagger was lifted and held to his throat.
The figures on the plateau were robed in silk and satin, dyed crimson and silver, as for a ceremony. They were mostly women, at least eight of them, but there were two men besides. It was a woman, though, who held the crescent-shaped blade to his throat. He could tell from the swell of her body beneath her robe, even though she was masked. They were all masked. And the masks, every one of them, were of predatory animals and birds. Wolf and hunting cat, owl and hawk, and a silver-feathered corfe with golden eyes that glittered in the moonlight.
"Come," said the priestess with the blade to Luth of Castle Baude, her voice cold and remote, the voice of a goddess at night. A goddess of the Hunt, in her violated sanctuary. She wore a wolf mask, Luth saw, and then he also realized that the ends of the gloves on her hands were shaped like the claws of a wolf. "Did you truly think you would not be found and known?" she said.
No, Luth wanted frantically to say. No, I never thought we could do this. I was sure we would be caught.
He said nothing. The capacity for speech seemed to have left him, silence lying like a weight of stones on his chest. In terror, his brain going numb, Luth felt the blade caress his throat almost lovingly. The priestess gestured with a clawed hand; in response, Luth's feet, as if of their own will, led him stumbling into the night forest of Rian. There were scented priestesses of the goddess all about him as he went, women masked like so many creatures of prey, clad in soft robes of silver and red amid the darkness of the trees, with the pale moon lost to sight, like hope.
Coming back through the forest, Blaise felt the same rippling sensation as before through the soles of his boots, as if the earth here on the island had an actual pulse, a beating heart. They went faster now, having done what they had come to do, aware that the priestess by the garden might be missed and found at any time. Blaise had dropped back to let Hirnan, carrying the unconscious poet, guide them once more, with a sense of direction seemingly unerring in the darkness of the woods.
They left the forest path and began to twist their way north again through the densely surrounding trees, small branches and leaves crackling underfoot as they went. No moonlight fell here, but they had their night vision now, and they had been this way before. Blaise recognized an ancient, contorted oak, an anomalous sight in a strand of pine and cedar.
Shortly afterwards they came out of the woods onto the plateau. The moon was high overhead, and Maffour's rope was still tied around the tree, their pathway down to the sea and escape.
But neither Vanne nor Luth was anywhere to be seen.
His pulse prickling with a first premonitory sense of disaster, Blaise strode quickly to the edge of the plateau and looked down.
The sailboat was gone, and the two bound clerics with it. Their own skiff was still there, and Vanne's body was lying in it.
Beside Blaise, Maffour swore violently and made his way swiftly down the rope. He sprang over the boulders and into the skiff, bending quickly over the man lying there.
He looked up. "He's all right. Breathing. Unconscious. I can't see any sign of a blow." There was wonder and the first edge of real apprehension in his voice.
Blaise straightened, looking around the plateau for a sign of Luth. The other corans stood in a tight cluster together, facing outwards. They had drawn their swords. There was no sound to be heard; even the forest seemed to have gone silent, Blaise realized, with a tingling sensation along his skin.
He made his decision.
"Hirnan, get him into the skiff. All of you go down there. I don't know what's happened but this is no place to linger. I'm going to take a fast look around, but if I can't see anything we'll have to go." He glanced quickly up at the moon, trying to judge the hour of night. "Get the skiff free and give me a few moments to look. If you hear me do a corfe cry start rowing hard and don't wait. Otherwise, use your judgment."
Hirnan looked briefly as if he would protest but said nothing. With Evrard of Lussan slung over his shoulder like a sack of grain, he made his way to the rope and down. The other corans began following. Blaise didn't wait to see them all descend. With the awareness of danger like a tangible presence within him, he drew his sword and stepped alone into the woods on the opposite side of the plateau from where they'd entered and returned.
Almost immediately he picked up a scent. Not of hunting cat or bear, nor of fox or badger or boar. What he smelled was the drifting fragrance of perfume. It was strongest to the west, away from where they had gone.
Blaise knelt to study the forest floor in the near-blackness. He wished Rudel were with him now, for a great many reasons, but in part because his friend was the best night tracker Blaise had ever known.
One didn't have to be expert, though, to realize that a company of people had passed here only a short time before, and that most if not all of them had been women. Blaise swore under his breath and stood up, peering into the darkness, uncertain of what to do. He hated like death to leave a man behind, but it was clear that a large number of priests and priestesses were somewhere ahead of him in the woods. A few moments, he had told Hirnan. Could he jeopardize the others in an attempt to find Luth?
Blaise drew a deep breath, aware once again now of that pulsing in the forest floor. He knew he was afraid; only a complete fool would not be afraid now. Even so, there was a core truth at the root of all of this for Blaise of Gorhaut, a very simple one: one did not leave a companion behind without an attempt at finding him. Blaise stepped forward into the darkness, following the elusive scent of perfume in the night.
"Commendable," a voice said, immediately in front of him. Blaise gasped and levelled his blade, peering into blackness. "Commendable, but extremely unwise," the voice went on with calm authority. "Go back. You will not find your fellow. Only death awaits you past this point tonight."
There was a rustling of leaves and Blaise made out the tall, shadowy form of a woman in the space in front of him. There were trees on either side of her, as if framing a place to stand. It was very dark, much too black for him to see her face, but the note of assured command in her voice told its own grim story about what had happened to Luth. She hadn't touched Blaise, though; no others had leaped forth to attack. And Vanne had been unharmed in the skiff.
"I would be shamed in my own eyes if I left and did not try to bring him out," Blaise said, still trying to make out the features of the woman in front of him.
He heard her laughter. "Shamed," she echoed, mockingly. "Do not be too much the fool, Northerner. Do you truly think you could have done any of this had we not permitted it? Will you deny feeling the awareness of this wood? Do you actually believe you moved unknown, unseen?"
Blaise swallowed with difficulty. His levelled sword suddenly seemed a hapless, even a ridiculous thing. Slowly he lowered it.
"Why?" he asked. "Why, then?"
Her laughter came again, deep and low. "Would you know my reasons, Northerner? You would understand the goddess on her own Island?"
My reasons.
"You are the High Priestess, then," he said, shifting his feet, feeling the earth's deep pulsing still. She said nothing. He swallowed again. "I would only know where my man has gone. Why you have taken him."
"One for one," she said quietly. "You were not consecrated to this place, any of you. You came here to take a man who was. We have allowed this for reasons of our own, but Rian exacts a price. Always. Learn that, Northerner. Know it as truth for so long as you are in Arbonne."
Rian exacts a price. Luth. Poor, frightened, bumbling Luth. Blaise stared into the darkness, wishing he could see this woman, struggling to find words of some kind that might save the man they'd lost.
And then, as if his very thoughts were open to her, as if she and the forest knew them intimately, the woman lifted one hand, and an in
stant later a torch blazed in her grasp, illuminating their small space within the woods. He had not seen or heard her striking flint.
He did hear her laugh again, and then, looking at the tall, proud form, at the fine-boned, aristocratic features before him, Blaise realized, with a shiver he could not control, that her eyes were gone. She was blind. There was a white owl, a freak of nature, resting on her shoulder, gazing at Blaise with unblinking eyes.
Not really certain why he was doing so, but suddenly aware that he had now entered a realm for which he was terribly ill equipped, Blaise sheathed his sword. Her laughter subsided; she smiled.
"Well done," Rian's High Priestess said softly. "I am pleased to see you are not a fool."
"To see?" Blaise said, and instantly regretted it.
She was undisturbed. The huge white owl did not move. "My eyes were a price for access to a great deal more. I can see you very well without them, Blaise of Gorhaut. It was you who needed light, not I. I know the scar that curves along your ribs and the colour of your hair, both now and on the winter night you were born and your mother died. I know how your heart is beating, and why you came to Arbonne, and where you were before. I know your lineage and your history, much of your pain, all your wars, your loves, the last time you made love."
It was a bluff, Blaise thought fiercely. All the clergy did this sort of thing, even Corannos's priests at home. All of them sought control with such arcane incantations.
"That last, then," he dared say, even here, his voice rough. "Tell me that last."
She did not hesitate. "Three months ago. Your brother's wife, in the ancient home of your family. Late at night, your own bed. You left before dawn on the journey that has brought you to Rian."
Blaise heard himself make a queer grunting sound as if he'd been punched. He could not help himself. He felt suddenly dizzy, blood rushing from his head as if in flight from the inexorable precision of what he had just heard.