Guy Kay - A Song for Arbonne

winter

399

arm, to disappear into the shrouded darkness of the dry moat.

After a frozen moment there was a babble of sound on the bridge. Valery of Talair and Rudel Correze hurtled into the moat after him. Thaune heard a snarled Portezzan obscenity as the latter landed badly on the uneven, rock-strewn surface below.

"He won't get far," said Fulk de Savaric as Blaise helped him to his feet. Over his shoulder, de Savaric snapped commands in the darkness. A moment later Thaune heard horses galloping and saw torches moving again in the mist.

Of all of them it was Blaise who seemed least surprised. "If he makes the woods," he said, almost musingly, "I doubt we'll find him."

"He has to get out of the moat first," said Bertran de Talair, "and he's got a wounded arm."

"Not badly wounded," Blaise said, shaking his head, still with that detached air about him, as if he had almost anticipated this. "He wears heavy mail, double-linked. I doubt the arrow went deep. Ring the moat, though," he said to Fulk de Savaric. "There's at least a chance your men might see him climbing out."

There came the sound of laughter then, laced with mockery, with something else in it that Thaune could not quite identify. "He won't be climbing out," said Ranald, duke of Garsenc, to his brother. "He's under the castle already, and will be out from it and gone before morning. There's a tunnel in from the moat that no one knows about, and another from the dungeon level that leads away. A long distance away. You won't find him, brother." In silence the two men looked at each other.

"Blaise, quickly, do you know where it leads? We can get to the exit before him." It was Bertran, speaking with urgency for the first time. Galbert de Garsenc, Thaune abruptly remembered, had offered two hundred and fifty thousand in gold last summer for the death of de Talair.

Blaise was shaking his head though, looking at his brother. "This was done after I left." His mouth twisted slightly. "Ranald wouldn't have mentioned it otherwise."

"We could make you tell us where the tunnels are," said En Bertran to Ranald de Garsenc very quietly. There was something frightening in his voice now. Thaune wondered how he could ever have arrived at the notion that the Arbonnais men were soft.

The duke of Garsenc was still a handsome man, tall and well built, the image of what a lord should be. He looked down upon the slight, unprepossessing figure of the duke of Talair and said contemptuously, "Really, my lord? What will you do? Set me on fire?"

Blaise said something then that Thaune could not hear. His brother did hear it though, and turned quickly back to him, his arrogance fading.

"Go ahead," Blaise said, more loudly. "I mean it. If you want to go with him you will not be stopped or followed." Ranald's expression had become confused, hesitant. He looked like a man who wanted a drink, thought Thaune. A cruel thought, he knew, but it was there. He had lived in this castle long enough. He knew the duke.

"If you want to, though, you can stay," Blaise added. "I will trust you among us if you give me your oath. I have never known you to lie, Ranald. I will not assume you would do so now. If you can see anything clearly tonight you must surely realize that this is the chance of your life. Probably the last chance, brother. Do you want to free yourself from him or not? He is gone, down that tunnel, away from both of us, back to Ademar. You don't have to follow him, Ranald, and I will not make you stay. You have the first free choice you've had in a long time."

"If I kneel and swear fealty to a younger brother who ought to have been a cleric of Corannos? Is that my choice?"

"Is it so evil a course? Does it matter what he was supposed to become all those years ago?" It was Fulk de Savaric who spoke, as Blaise remained silent looking at his brother by the wan light of the torches in the mist.

Beyond the bridge, Thaune could hear men shouting and the galloping horses as corans raced to surround the moat. He shared Ranald's certainty: they were not going to find Galbert de Garsenc, not in the mists of this night, not in the morning, even if the sun returned. At the back of his mind, behind his awareness of the miracle of their triumph and Fulk de Savaric's sworn allegiance, he felt a flicker of fear, like a tongue of flame.

Blaise cleared his throat, oddly tentative with his brother, as he had been with the father. "I do not request that you kneel before me, only that you follow my lead, Ranald." He hesitated. "I think you know, if the roles were reversed I would have been proud to swear homage to you." He stopped again, visibly struggling for words, as if wrestling with something difficult. "I also think you know there was a time I would have followed you to the end of the earth had you asked me to."

"But why," said Duke Ranald de Garsenc, after a silence, "would I ever have wanted to go to such a place? Or to have you there with me?"

Blaise said nothing at all to that. He lowered his head.

"You are a greater fool than I even guessed," said Bertran de Talair, but softly now, almost with regret. "Bring my lord Ranald his horse," he called out to the invisible corans beyond the end of the bridge. "The most puissant duke of Garsenc is leaving our poor company for the pleasure of his father's and the high grace of Ademar's court."

Blaise was still silent. Thaune, behind him, could not see his face. In a way he was glad of that. Even after years in this castle he found that what lay between the three men of Garsenc—like a thicket of spear shafts in the earth, iron heads angled to kill—was too much for him sometimes. Tonight, suddenly, had become one of those times, as if the destiny of nations was bound up in the darkness of this castle, a darkness that went far deeper than the mist and fog of a winter's night. They heard a horse being led up onto the bridge.

"Someone help the duke to mount," Bertran said, with the same grim courtesy.

"No need," said Ranald shortly, and he mounted in one smooth motion. He curvetted his horse and looked down upon his brother. "Are you expecting me to thank you now?" he asked. Again there was that note in his voice, the one Thaune could not quite identify.

Blaise looked up. He shook his head. "I thought you might ask about your son though." A cruel question, though perhaps not cruelly meant. Thaune wasn't sure; he didn't understand the younger son either. He saw Ranald's jaw tighten. Blaise added, in a flat voice, "I am proposing to name him my heir in Gorhaut, with Fulk as regent, should I die in this war. Does that interest you at all?"

He had to be quick, Thaune thought, he had to be very fast to have thought of this already. He turned to look at Fulk de Savaric, but there was nothing to be read there at all, nor in the features of Bertran de Talair beside Fulk. These were men used to the play of power, and to hiding their responses to it.

Ranald de Garsenc was less able to mask his feelings. "How touching," he shot back, as if firing a crossbow bolt. "How wonderful to see that everyone in my family has plans for my son. It does free me of a father's anxiety, I must say."

Blaise said, still gravely, "Given that you haven't even cared to ask of his condition or even his name, it ill behooves you to take such a tone, brother."

There was a silence. The very calmness of the words made the lash of them bite harder. Thaune felt that he and the others on the bridge had become extraneous, mere hangers-on at the edges of this long, bitter struggle within the de Garsenc family.

"Well?" said Ranald finally, as if that one word cost him a great effort. "Tell me."

From behind, Thaune saw Blaise lower his head again for a long moment, and then lift it once more. "He is well. A handsome, healthy child. He looks like a Garsenc. His name is Cadar, for his grandfather of Savaric."