Guy Kay - A Song for Arbonne

Lisseut of Vezét, child of this world, finding her pleasures and griefs among men and women, had found herself unsettled by the very thought. If Rinette had been older, a dour, pious zealot, it might have been easier to deal with, but the brown-haired priestess was beautiful and drily clever, and she seemed to know and enjoy the troubadours' repertoire of songs almost as well as Lisseut and Alain did themselves. Once she had even corrected Alain on a line-reading during his recitation of one of the old speak-pieces of Count Folquet. Lisseut, genuinely shocked by the interjection, had quickly searched her own recollection and realized that the priestess was right. Not that this made her any happier to have heard an audience member interrupt a troubadour.

What, she remembered thinking, was the world coming to?

A remarkably inconsequential issue that seemed since the winter invasion and now this morning's news. She was made aware, looking at the tall, slender woman beside her, that Rinette's fate if Gorhaut conquered was even more brutally clear than her own, and the priestess, by her sworn oat to the goddess, lacked even the options of flight south or overseas. Given that, given the darkness of the time, it suddenly seemed profoundly ungracious to be carrying a grievance against the woman for correcting the misreading of a verse.

The world had greatly changed since Ademar of Gorhaut had led an army through the mountains into the green hills and valleys of Arbonne.

"A second arch?" she said quietly, addressing the question asked. "I wonder. Do they build anything, these northerners?»

"Of course they do. They are not inhuman, they are not really so different from us," Rinette replied calmly. "You know that. They are badly taught, that is all."

"There seems a great deal of difference to me," Lisseut said sharply, "if they burn women alive and cut the heads and sexual parts off dead men."

"Badly taught," Rinette repeated. "Think of how much of the mystery and the power of life they have lost by denying Rian."

"You'll forgive me, but I can't spare a great deal of time just now for pitying them that. I'm surprised you can."

Rinette gave a small, graceful shrug, looking out at the western shore and the arch beyond. "We are trained to think that way. The times are evil," she said. "Mortal men and women are what they have always been. Five hundred years from now we will all be dust and forgotten, and our fates, but Rian and Corannos will still steer the course of the world."

It was rather too much for Lisseut, this holy posturing. "I wonder," she said harshly, good intentions forgotten, "if you will take such a long view when we see the army of Gorhaut coming across the lake with torches in their hands."

And regretted the words the moment they were spoken.

Rinette turned to her, and Lisseut saw then in the clear light of morning that the other woman's eyes were not nearly so tranquil as her voice and words might have suggested. She recognized, belatedly, that what she had been hearing was an attempt to master fear.

"I do not welcome the prospect of being burned alive, if that is what you mean," Rinette of the Isle said. "If that isn't what you mean, perhaps you'll tell me what you are trying to say."

And after that of course there was nothing for Lisseut to do but apologize as best she could, and then carry on through the day, and the next two, wrapped in her vest against the wind and the coldness of her own deep fears. Alain rowed across the whitecaps of the lake to Talair each day, carrying a borrowed sword. He came back the second afternoon with a vivid red contusion on his forehead. He made a small joke about deceiving people with a show of clumsiness, but Lisseut had seen that his hands were trembling.

On the fourth day the armies came.

It was, in fact, a near thing. High on the ramparts of Talair at midday after the brutal, forced march from Barbentain and Lussan, Blaise looked down at their exhausted men in the open space below, and then north in the clear light for the first sign of those they were to fight. He was uneasily aware that besides the eerie precognition of the High Priestess, the only thing that had given them even a chance to reach Lake Dierne with an army in time had been the disciplined, prudent caution of Thierry de Carenzu.

The stupefying surprise of a winter invasion through the mountains would have caught Arbonne hopelessly unprepared—no one risked the passes in large numbers in winter—had the duke of Carenzu not issued orders at the end of the Lussan Fair in the countess's name for a gradual assembling of the armies of Arbonne under the barons and dukes. The idea was to have them armed and trained in the castles over the winter months, in preparation for the spring assault they all expected.

Blaise had never been comfortable with men who preferred their own sex in bed, and his nights with Ariane had rather complicated this particular issue, but he had to acknowledge a rapidly growing respect for the duke of Carenzu. Thierry was sober and pragmatic and conspicuously reliable. In a country where the two other most important noblemen were the dukes of Talair and Miraval these were not, Blaise concluded, inconsiderable virtues.

Because of these preparations, when word had come that Gorhaut was actually through the pass and coming down from the mountains, the men of Arbonne had been far more prepared than they otherwise would have been. They were able to move with order and some speed—though the southern roads were muddy with the winter rains—north towards Barbentain, and from there, when Beatritz's message came, here to Talair and the lake.

Bertran's own corans had been waiting for them and Blaise knew the soldiers of Miraval were not far away, but these were lost to their army now, if not worse.

For the hundredth time since that meeting in Barbentain four days ago Blaise found himself wrestling with the wisdom of the countess's decision to name Bertran to lead the armies. She had to have known that Urté would react as he had. Even Blaise, an oblivious stranger to that bitter tale only a year ago, could have guessed how Urté would bridle at submitting to Bertran's authority. Granting that de Talair was the obvious man to lead Arbonne, was that worth fifteen hundred men? Would Thierry de Carenzu have been so terrible a choice?

Or was it possible that Signe had expected Urté to rise above what lay between Talair and Miraval, with so much at stake now? With everything, really, in the balance. If so, she had been wrong, and Blaise was well-enough versed in the histories of war to know that Arbonne would not be the first country to fall to an invader because it could not set aside its own internal wars.

On Bertran's castle ramparts in the brilliant sunlight he shook his head but kept grimly silent, as he had in the council chamber and ever since. In some ways it might all be purely a matter for historians and dry philosophers to come: the men who picked over the bones of dead years like the scavengers who came out at night after a battle to despoil the slain and dying.

The stark reality today was that even with the corans of Miraval they would have needed an enormous number of mercenaries to have had any real chance of defending themselves, and the winter invasion had eliminated that possibility. They were brutally outnumbered by the army Ademar of Gorhaut had brought safely through the mountains. Ademar, and Galbert: Blaise knew, as surely as he knew anything in the world, that this winter war was his father's stratagem—cunning and long planning mingled with a sublime, unwavering certainty that the god would see him through the pass. And the frightening thing, of course, was that Corannos had. The army of Gorhaut, which was the army of the god, was in Arbonne, and Blaise, looking north from the ramparts with Bertran and Fulk de Savaric and others, felt fear like a hard object lodge against his heart.