Guy Kay - A Song for Arbonne

It seemed to have grown quiet in the valley. Some clouds appeared in the northwest. He watched them move across the sun and then away. It was colder now, late in the day, and in the aftermath of so much exertion. It seemed to be over though; the clash of weapons had stopped. Men were moaning, crying out in pain from many parts of the field. That would go on a long time, Blaise knew. He shivered.

"I have a cloak for you." It was Hirnan. Blaise turned to look at the Arbonnais coran who had been guarding him all afternoon. They had gone to Rian's Island in the sea once, in springtime, to fetch a poet back. It had begun there; for Blaise it seemed to have begun there with the High Priestess in the wood, the dark hollows of her eyes, the white owl on her shoulder.

After a moment he nodded his head and Hirnan draped a heavy cloak of a dark purple hue over Blaise's shoulders. Blaise wondered where he'd got it; purple was the colour of kings. He had a suspicion though, a guess as to whence that cloak had come. And that thought made him turn for a moment, away from his father in the ring of swords, to look briefly at Thierry, and then away from him and all the others, back towards the isle in the lake where the women were.

It was just possible, now that the fighting had stopped, to make out individual figures in the valley across the water. Standing with others on the northern shore of the isle, Ariane could see her husband; from the way he sat his horse it seemed he was all right. Not far from Thierry she watched Hirnan of Baude lay the purple cloak she had entrusted to him over Blaise de Garsenc's shoulders, and she began to cry.

There was a great deal of weeping taking place now; they did not yet know how many had died, or who. The countess was not with them here on the strand; she had joined the priestesses and the priests in the temple for a service of thanksgiving. Ariane knew she ought to be with them, but her thoughts just now, since the blowing of the horns, were entirely of this world.

The small boats were crossing continuously back and forth across the choppy water; they had been doing so all through the battle. The last messenger had told them that the king of Gorhaut was dead, of a crimson arrow in the eye. No one knew who had shot that arrow, the priest said, kneeling on the sands of the goddess. The feathers, he said, had been those of an owl. The arrow had dropped straight down from the sky.

He had also told them that Urté de Miraval, who had saved them in the end, despite everything, was dying, if he was not already dead. And these last tiding, for Ariane, meant more than they did to anyone else on the isle or, indeed, anyone else alive.

They meant that the term of an oath she had kept since the end of her childhood was over, a secret she had sworn, to keep was hers to offer to the world. And it was because of this that she was weeping on that shore, looking north to the valley, at the figure of her husband in his red surcoat and the tall man cloaked in purple beside him, and at the third, smaller man with the two of them, the one who had, so many years ago, surprised a travelling party among the elm trees she could see even now beside the arch to the west.

She moved away from the others on the strand, withdrawing into memory. There was another boat coming with even newer tidings now; the other women moved anxiously towards it. Ariane walked a distance west instead and stood alone, gazing at the other shore, the one nearest Miraval.

It had been winter then, too, she remembered, that night twenty-three years ago, with a rain wind lashing the trees and lake when she came to that shore in the dark of night. Twenty-three years, and oh, it was as yesterday if she let her mind go back. It was as fierce and hard and terrible as if she were standing there now, thirteen years old, an oath newly sworn, sobbing wildly with grief and terror as she stood on that strand in the shelter of the signal hut.

She had been a child when that night had begun. A quick, curious, overly indulged young girl. She had not been young any longer when that long night was done and she watched the pale sun finally come up across the lake and listened to water dripping mournfully from the trees all around.

She had kept her promise. All these years she had kept the promise sworn to her cousin Aelis, whom she had loved. She could see herself so clearly even now: the thin, shivering girl riding in a wild storm, white face and black hair lost in the darkness except when the lightning flashed. And she had been crying, crying in the cruel lashing of the rain. She was crying again now, all these long years after, weeping for innocence lost, for the dead of that night and the awful burden she had been given then and had carried all these years.

After a long time Ariane wiped her eyes and squared her shoulders and turned away from that western shore and its weight of memory. She was the duchess of Carenzu, queen of the Court of Love in Arbonne, a woman of power in the world, and there was a great deal to be done. Starting with the ending of a silence. Aelis, she thought, whispered it to herself actually; only the name, nothing more than that, realizing as she did so that it was a kind of letting go. That almost brought her tears again, but she held them back this time.

She went along the curving path to the temple and waited there for the slow, beautifully chanted service to come to an end. Then, after it was done, in the privacy of a small room beside the dome, with a necessary economy of words but as much gentleness as she could command amid the fevered emotions of that day, she told the first person who needed to know.

Afterwards, going back to the strand alone, she had herself rowed across the water into the wind, wrapping herself in her crimson cloak against the chill at the end of day, and once ashore she went looking for the second person who had to be told before the whole world knew.

He had left the valley by then, they told her, and so, with time only for a brief embrace of her husband and a whispered word, she took horse to go after him. On the way, as she realized where it was he had gone, where she was following, she began to cry again, unable to help herself, the tears cold on her cheeks as the sun sank lower in the west, red as a fire.

Blaise had gone with Bertran and Thierry to where Urté de Miraval lay dying on the ground, a folded cloak under his head and another one, heavy and lined with fur, covering his body. Urté was very pale, and Blaise saw at a glance that the cloths they had used to try to stanch his bleeding were soaked through. He had seen this before; it would not be long.

Urté was still conscious, though, and there was a hard glint of triumph in his eyes. Thierry hesitated beside him and then stepped carefully back and away so that Bertran de Talair could stand alone next to Urté. The silence that followed was taut as a drawn bowstring.

Another hesitation—nothing was being done easily here, Blaise knew—and then Bertran knelt beside the older man.

"We have won," he said calmly. "Your decision to join us after all was what turned the battle."

Urté de Miraval laughed then, a terrible sound, and the movement started another flowing of blood. In obvious pain he shook his head. " After all? You don't understand, do you? There was no decision to make. We staged that scene in Barbentain when I walked out."

Blaise felt his mouth fall open. He closed it with a snap. He heard Thierry de Carenzu make a small sound.

"We?" said Bertran.

"The countess and I. I advised her the night before to name you leader of the army. We agreed that I would storm from the room and contact Ademar the next day."

"Oh, sweet Rian, I don't believe it." It was Thierry, the words like a prayer.

"Why not?" said the dying man, prosaically. "We were going to be outnumbered, we had to devise some trap for them. It seems that it took two of the older generation to do it. The younger ones didn't have any ideas at all, did you?" He did not smile.