Which, as it happened, was nearer to the bone than was at all comfortable. Blaise thought suddenly of the High Priestess of Rian on her island in the sea. He looked down at his hands, remembering Rudel, a moonless night in Portezzan Faenna, the garden of a palace in that dangerous city, fireflies, the scent of oranges, a dagger in his hand.
He shook his head slowly, bringing his mind back to Arbonne, to this high plateau and the disturbingly perceptive man looking steadily at him now with those vivid blue eyes. "I'm no more a sworn man of Ademar's than I will be of yours," Blaise said carefully to Bertran de Talair. He hesitated. "Do you really think he might come south?"
"Might?" In Rian's holy name, why else did he make that peace with Valensa I'm trying so hard to undermine with my songs? You said it yourself: woman-ruled Arbonne. Our count dead, an ageing woman in Barbentain, no obvious heir in sight, wine fields and grainlands and a glorious port. Men who do nothing but write songs all day and yearn like callow boys for a woman's cool hand on their brow at night… of course Ademar's going to come down on us."
Blaise felt his mood changing, the pleasant fatigue of a day's hard labour chased away by the words as clouds were blown by the mountain winds. "Why are you hiring me, then?" he asked. "Why take that chance?"
"I like taking chances," Bertran de Talair said, almost regretfully. "It is a vice, I'm afraid." The High Priestess, Blaise remembered, had said something much the same.
Bertran shifted position again, sitting up now, and took a last pull of the seguignac before capping the flask. "Maybe you'll end up liking us more than you think. Maybe we'll find you a wife down here. Maybe we'll even teach you to sing. Truth is, I had a man killed this spring, and good men are hard to come by, as I suspect you know. Leading a successful raid on Rian's Island so soon after you got here was no mean achievement."
"How do you know about that?"
Bertran grinned again, but without mockery this time; Blaise had the odd sensation of being able to guess what that smile might do to a woman the duke wanted to charm. "Anyone can kill a corfe on a hunt," de Talair went on, as if Blaise hadn't spoken at all. "I need someone who knows when not to kill one. Even if he won't tell me how he learned that or who he is." He hesitated for the first time, looking away from Blaise, west towards the mountains and Arimonda beyond. "Besides which, for some reason you've made me think of my son the last few days. Don't ask me why. He died as an infant."
Abruptly he stood. Blaise did the same, seriously confused now. "I didn't think you had ever married," he said.
"I didn't," Bertran said carelessly. "Why, do you think it is time?" The sardonic, distancing smile was back. "A wife to warm my old bones at night, children to gladden the heart in my declining years? What an intriguing thought. Shall we discuss it on the way down?"
He had begun walking towards his horse as he spoke, and so Blaise, perforce, did the same. It had grown colder now on this windy height, the sun hidden behind a grey mass of swiftly driven clouds. As an afterthought Blaise looked back and saw that the lamb was following. They mounted up and began to ride. From the crest of the ridge they could see Mallin and the rest of their party gathered east of them and below. Bertran waved briefly and they started down. Far in the distance, beyond meadow and wood and the other men, the castle could be seen, with the lavender fields in shadow beyond.
On the way down, in the interval before they reached the others, the matter Bertran de Talair chose to raise had nothing at all to do with marital bliss, belated or otherwise, or with the soothing accoutrements of a quiescent old age.
And now, remarkably or predictably, depending on how one chose to consider things, there came the unabashed glow of a candle from the curve of the stairway below the window niche where Blaise was keeping watch. Not even an attempt at stealth, he thought grimly. He heard the quiet sound of footsteps steadily ascending. As promised, though Blaise hadn't really believed it on the hillside.
"I imagine you'll be posted on watch outside the baroness's rooms on my last night. I wouldn't go up until then in any case… too many complications otherwise, and it isn't really decent. No," Bertran de Talair had said on that ride down the chilly slope, "I'll wait till the end, which is always best. I can count on your discretion, I take it?"
For a long moment Blaise had had to struggle to control his anger. When he'd replied, it was in the best equivalent he could manage to the duke's casual tones. "I would suggest you not rely on any such thing. I have accepted an offer of service from you, but that begins a fortnight from now. For the moment Mallin de Baude pays me and you would be advised to remember that."
"Such loyalty!" de Talair had murmured, gazing straight ahead.
Blaise shook his head. "Professionalism," he'd replied, keeping his temper. "I am worth nothing in the market for fighting men if I have a reputation for duplicity."
"That is an irrelevance. Nothing that affects a reputation will emerge from a dark stairway with only the two of us to know." De Talair's tone was quietly serious. "Tell me, Northerner, would you impose your own values in matters of love and night on all the men and women that you meet?"
"Hardly. But I'm afraid I will impose them on myself."
The duke had glanced across at him then and smiled. "Then we shall probably have an interesting encounter a few nights from now." He'd waved again at Mallin de Baude down below and spurred his horse forward to join the baron and his men for the rest of the ride back down to the castle.
And now here he was, without even a token attempt at deception or concealment. Blaise stood up and stepped from the window nook onto the stairway. He checked the hang of his sword and dagger both and then waited, his feet balanced and spread wide. From around the curve of the stairs the glow of flame gradually became brighter and then Blaise saw the candle. Following it, as if into the ambit of light, came Bertran de Talair, in burgundy and black with a white shirt open at the throat.
"I have come," said the duke softly, smiling behind the flame, "for that interesting encounter."
"Not with me," said Blaise grimly.
"Well, no, not really with you. I don't think either of us suffers unduly from the Arimondan vice. I thought it might be diverting to see if I could fare better in the room at the top of these stairs than poor Evrard did some while ago."
Blaise shook his head. "I meant what I told you on the hills. I will not judge you, or the baroness either. I am a sword for hire, here or elsewhere in the world. At the moment En Mallin de Baude is paying me to guard this stairway. Will it please you to turn and go down, my lord, before matters become unpleasant here?"
"Go down?" Bertran said, gesturing with the candle, "and waste an hour's fussing with my appearance and several days of anticipating what might happen tonight? I'm too old to be excited by temptation and then meekly turn away. You're too young to understand that, I suppose. But I daresay you do have your own lessons to learn, or perhaps to remember. Hear me, Northerner: a man can be forestalled in matters such as this, even I can be, whatever you might have heard to the contrary, but a woman of spirit will do what she wants to do, even in Gorhaut, and most especially in Arbonne." He lifted the candle higher as he spoke, sending an orange glow spinning out to illuminate both of them.
Blaise registered the fact of that quite effective light an instant before he heard a rustle of clothing close behind him. He was turning belatedly, and opening his mouth to cry out, when the blow cracked him on the side of the temple, hard enough to make him stagger back against the window seat, momentarily dazed. And a moment, of course, was more than enough for Bertran de Talair to spring up the three steps between them, a dagger reversed in one hand, the candle uplifted in the other.
"It is difficult," said the duke close to Blaise's ear, "extremely difficult, to protect those who prefer not to be protected. A lesson, Northerner." He was wearing a perfume of some kind, and his breath was scented with mint. Through unfocused eyes and a wave of dizziness, Blaise caught a glimpse beyond him of a woman on the stairs. Her lon
g yellow hair was unbound, tumbling down her back. Her night robe was of silk, and by the light of the candle and of the moon in the archers' window Blaise saw that it was white as a bride's, an icon of innocence. That was all he managed to register; he had no chance for more, to move or cry out again, before Bertran de Talair's dagger haft rapped, in a neat, hard, precisely judged blow, against the back of his skull and Blaise lost all consciousness of moonlight or icons or pain.
When he awoke, he was lying on the stone floor of the window niche, slumped back against one of the benches. With a groan he turned to look out. Pale Vidonne, waning from full, was high in the window now, lending her silver light to the night sky. The clouds had passed, he could see faint stars around the moon.
He brought up a hand and gingerly touched his head. He would have a corfe egg of his own on the back of his skull for some days to come, and a nasty bruise above the hairline over his right ear as well. He moaned again, and in the same instant realized that he was not alone.
"The seguignac is on the seat just above you," said Bertran de Talair quietly. "Be careful, I've left the flask open."
The duke was sitting on the other side of the stairwell, leaning back against the inner wall at the same level as Blaise. The moonlight pouring in through the window fell upon his disheveled garments and the tousled disarray of his hair. The blue eyes were as clear as ever, but Bertran looked older now. There were lines Blaise couldn't remember seeing before at the corners of his eyes, and dark circles beneath them.
He couldn't think of anything to say or do so he reached upwards—carefully, as advised—and found the flask. The seguignac slipped down his throat like distilled, reviving fire; Blaise imagined he could feel it reaching out to his extremities, restoring life to arms and legs, fingers and toes. His head ached ferociously, though. Stretching cautiously—it hurt to move—he reached across the stairway and handed the flask to the duke. Bertran took it without speaking and drank.
It was silent then on the stairs. Blaise, fighting off the miasma of two blows to the head, tried to make himself think clearly. He could, of course, shout now and raise an alarm. Mallin himself, from his own room down the hall from Soresina's, would likely be the first man to reach them here.
With what consequences?
Blaise sighed and accepted the return passing of the seguignac from the duke. The flask gleamed palely in the moonlight; there were intricate designs upon it, most likely the work of Gotzland master smiths. It had probably cost more than Blaise's monthly wages here in Baude.
There really was no point in crying out now, and he knew it. Soresina de Baude had chosen to do—as Bertran had said—exactly as she wished. It was over now, and unless he, Blaise, stirred up an alarm and roused the castle it would probably be over with little consequence for anyone.
It was just the dishonesty of it all that bothered him, the image—yet another—of a woman's duplicity and a man's idle, avid pursuit of pleasure at another's expense. He had somehow hoped for more of Duke Bertran de Talair than this picture of a jaded seducer putting all his energy into achieving a single night with a yellow-haired woman married to someone else.
But he wouldn't raise the alarm. Bertran and Soresina had counted on that, he knew. It angered him, the easy assumption that his behaviour could be anticipated, but he wasn't enough provoked to change his mind simply to spite them. People died when spite like that was indulged.
His head was hurting at back and side both, two sets of hammers vying with each other to see which could cause him more distress. The seguignac helped though; seguignac, he decided sagely, wiping at his mouth, might actually help with a great many matters of grief or loss.
He turned to the duke to say as much, but stopped, wordless, at what he saw in the other's unguarded face. The scarred, ironic, worldly face of the troubadour lord of Talair.
"Twenty-three years," Bertran de Talair said a moment later, half to himself, his eyes on the moon in the window. "So much longer than I thought I would live, actually. And the god knows, and sweet Rian knows I've tried, but in twenty-three years I've never yet found a woman to equal her, or take away the memory, even for a night."
Feeling hopelessly out of his element in the face of this, Blaise felt an unexpected moment of pity for Soresina de Baude, with her unbound hair and her white silk night robe in the room above them. Unable to summon any words at all, suspecting that none that he could ever think of would be remotely adequate to what he had just heard, he simply reached back across the stairway and offered the seguignac.
After a moment En Bertran's ringed hand reached out for it in the moonlight. De Talair drank deeply, then he drew the stopper from some recess of his clothing and capped the flask. He rose slowly, almost steady on his feet and, not bothering with another candle, started down the winding stairway without another word or a glance back. He was already lost to sight in the darkness before the first curve took him away. Blaise heard his quiet footsteps going down, and then those, too, were gone and there was only silence and the moon slowly passing from the narrow window, leaving behind the stars.
CHAPTER 3
Ademar, king of Gorhaut, slowly turns away from the diverting if extremely messy struggle taking place in front of the throne between the carefully maimed hound and the three cats that have been set upon it. Not even acknowledging the half-clothed woman kneeling on the stone floor in front of him with his sex in her mouth, he looks narrowly over at the man who has just spoken, interrupting this double amusement.
"We are not certain we heard you correctly," the king says in his unexpectedly high voice. The tone however is one his court has come to know well in little over a year. Not a few of the fifty or so men assembled in the audience chamber in the king's palace at Cortil offer silent thanks to Corannos that they are not the recipients of that gaze or that tone. The handful of women present might have different thoughts, but the women do not matter in Gorhaut.
With an elaborate casualness that fools no one, Duke Ranald de Garsenc reaches for his ale and drinks deeply before answering. To his credit, the more attentive eyes among the court note, de Garsenc's hand is steady as he sets the heavy flagon down again. Looking across the wooden trestle table at the king, he lifts his voice. "I understand you were talking about Arbonne this morning. I simply said, why don't you marry the bitch? She's a widow, she's heirless, what could be simpler?"
The king's extremely large, ringless hands descend absently to first loop themselves in the long black hair and then to briefly encircle the ceaselessly working throat of the girl on her knees in front of him. He never actually looks down at her though. Beyond her, the old hound has now fallen; it is lying on one side panting raggedly, blood streaming from a great many wounds. The cats, starved for five days, are avidly beginning to feed. Ademar smiles thinly for a moment, watching, and then makes a sudden moue of distaste as the dog's entrails begin to spill onto the floor. He gestures, and the handlers spring forward to seize the four animals and bear them from the room. The cats, ravenous and deranged, make high-pitched shrieking sounds that can be heard even after the doors at the far end have closed behind them. The smell of blood and wet fur lingers, mixed with stinging smoke from the fires and spilled beer on the tables where the high lords of Gorhaut are permitted by ancient custom to sit and drink in the presence of their liege.
Their liege closes his eyes at just that moment. His large, well-knit body stiffens and an expression of pleased surprise crosses his fair-skinned, full-bearded features. There is an awkward silence in the room as courtiers see reason to scrutinize their fingernails or the dark beams of the ceiling. With a sigh, Ademar slumps back on the throne. When he opens his eyes again it is to look, as he always does when this particular amusement reaches its climax, at the women of his court, gathered near the windows to the left of the throne. The more discreet among them are looking assiduously down and away. One or two are visibly discomfited. One or two others are equally flushed, but for what seem to be different reasons, and thes
e are the ones whose eyes gaze boldly back at Ademar's. Screening the king's lower body with her own, the kneeling woman attends to the points and drawstrings of his garments and carefully smoothes his breeches and hose before tilting her head up for permission to withdraw.
Slouching back in his throne, Ademar of Gorhaut looks down at her for the first time. With an indolent finger he traces the contours of her lips. He smiles, the same thin smile as before. "Attend to the duke of Garsenc," he says. "My father's former champion seems a man sorely in need of the ministrations of a proper woman." The girl, expressionless, rises and paces gracefully across the floor towards the man who had interrupted the king's pleasure for a moment before. There is a ripple of coarse laughter in the room; Ademar grins, acknowledging it. Beside the window one woman turns away suddenly to look out over the misty grey of the landscape. Ademar of Gorhaut notices that. He notices a great deal, his court has come to realize in the short period of his reign.
"My lady Rosala," the king says, "turn not away from us. We covet the sunshine of your countenance on a day so dreary as this. And it may be your husband will be well pleased to have you learn a new skill as you watch."
The woman called Rosala, tall, yellow-haired and visibly with child, delays a long moment before obeying the command and turning back to the room. She nods her head formally in response to the king's words but does not speak. The other girl has by now slipped under the long table and can be seen settling herself in front of Duke Ranald de Garsenc. The duke's colour is suddenly high. He avoids looking towards the side of the room where his wife stands among the women. A few of the lesser courtiers, bright-eyed with amusement and malice, have strolled over to stand by his shoulder, glancing downwards with an intense simulation of interest at what is now taking place beneath the table. Ranald stares straight ahead, looking at no one. This amusement of the king's has taken place before, but never with a lord of so high a rank. It is a measure of Ademar's power, or the fear he elicits, that he can do this to a man who was once King's Champion in Gorhaut, however many years ago that was.