Guy Kay - A Song for Arbonne

She shook her head. It was going to be very hard. She could see them lighting torches in the garden now. They were being careful of her privacy, keeping at a distance from where she walked. The light in the west had become quite beautiful, crimson and purple and a softer range of dusky hues low down where the sun was nearly gone. The garden, she could see, was nowhere near its best in this depth of winter, but Talair was far enough south that there were still hints of colour all around, and the wind was gentler here, with the walls and the trees for shelter. She heard the sound of splashing water and walking a little further down a path of small stones she came to a fountain. The servants had been here before her; there were torches burning in brackets set into the soil. She stood close to one, holding her hands out for warmth.

She was heir to Arbonne. Heir to this castle of Talair as well, for En Bertran had never married and never named anyone to succeed him. En Bertran. The duke of Talair was her father.

She had seen him, of course; growing up on the isle so near this castle she had seen him so many times across the water. She could remember how she and the other acolytes had spent countless evenings when they were supposed to be asleep breathlessly repeating tales and rumours about him, carried by the troubadours and joglars who came to Rian's Isle. She knew all about Bertran de Talair and Duke Urté and the beautiful lady who had died, Aelis de Miraval. She even knew—everyone knew—the old song Bertran had written for his beloved beside the springtime shores of this same lake. What she had never known was that the song was her father's for her mother, that she was a part of that tale. She seemed to be, in fact, the ending of the story.

There was the other man as well, the one who was soon to be made king of Gorhaut. He had fought for Arbonne today against his own people. She had seen him, too, twice. Once last spring and again this morning when they had come across the lake to take the countess from the parley. He was a tall man, that one, bearded as the northerners all were, grim-looking with that, but a message had come from Rian's Island last spring that he should be watched for, that he was coming their way and might be important to them. And only a little while ago this afternoon Ariane de Carenzu, who ought, Rinette supposed, to know about such things, had said that he was a good man, gentler than he looked, and wiser, carrying burdens with which he would need someone's help in the days and years to come.

She wondered if he would come to her here. If it would begin already. She wondered if her father would come. Abruptly she sat down on one of the stone benches by the fountain, ignoring the cold. Cold was easy to deal with. What had overtaken her today was not, despite the self-possession she had managed to preserve with Ariane. It had been an overwhelming day. She wished she could hide, sleep, not dream. She wanted… she didn't really know what she wanted.

She suddenly felt—and could not remember feeling this way since she'd been a small child—that she might even cry. It wasn't Ariane's fault, it wasn't anyone's fault. She was sitting in the walled garden of her father's castle, and all she knew of her father were the endlessly traded stories about a duke who wrote the finest music of his day and had fought in wars in many countries, and who had spent more than twenty years pursuing women all over the world with a flamboyance that everyone knew— everyone knew—was a lifelong attempt to deal with the death of the one lady he had ever loved. Her mother.

I am afraid, Rinette said to herself suddenly, and the admission, curiously, seemed to help her gather her self-control again. I am not going to burn alive, she admonished herself sternly. None of us are going to burn now. We have won, by grace of Rian, who has given us, again, more than we have ever deserved of her. These changes in her life, she told herself, were only that—changes in a life. Mortal men and women were not to know—they could not know—what the future held in store for them, except for the fleeting, wayward glimpses the goddess sometimes granted those who had blinded themselves in her name.

That was not to be her path. Her path began here in this garden, walking forth with whomever came to lead her into the brightness and the burdens shaped by what, it seemed, she was.

Surely it was all right to be a little afraid, though? Surely that could be allowed of someone sitting alone at dusk in a winter garden dealing with the loss of every expectation she had ever had of her life?

It was then that she heard a footfall on the walkway, from behind her, the way she had come. She looked up at the torches for a moment and then, a little blinded, beyond them until she could see the stars again. She drew a long breath and pushed her dark hair back from her face. Then Rinette rose, straight-backed, holding her head high, and turned to meet her future. There was a solitary figure standing at the end of the path that led to this foundation.

It was not the northerner who had come, nor, yet, her father, after all.

She knew who this was, of course. She sank to her knees on the cold ground.

"Oh, my dear," said Signe de Barbentain, the countess of Arbonne, "I am so desperately happy to see you, and so very sad just now. So many years we have lost, you and I. There is so much I have to tell you. About your father and your mother, and then about the grandfather you never knew, who would have loved you with all his heart."

The countess came closer then, moving almost hesitantly into the light of the torches, and Rinette saw that she was crying, tears streaming down her face in the cold. Rinette rose quickly, instinctively, a queer feeling overtaking her, a constriction of the heart and throat. She heard herself make a sound that was very like a child's cry, and she moved forward, almost running, into the haven of her grandmother's arms.

It was full dark now in the valley where the battle had been. He had waited patiently, even happily, for this. The moons would rise soon, both very bright tonight, spilling their rich, mingled light. It was time to go. There were no fears near where he was, no soldiers of either army sleeping or on watch in the cold.

He made his way down from branch to branch, surefooted in the dark. No one heard him; he made no sound for anyone to hear. Once on the ground he slipped away west, passing close by the forest, going the long way around to where he had left his horse two days before, north of the Arch of the Ancients.

The stallion was hungry, of course. He was sorry for that but there had been nothing to do about it. He had left food in a sack nearby and he fed the horse now, patting and rubbing its long neck, speaking tenderly. He felt deeply at peace, as one with the night and the murmuring trees all around him. He knelt, on impulse, and prayed.

There was so much gratitude in his heart he felt it might overflow. He had done exactly what he had come here to do. What he had been preparing for—though in ignorance, following instructions only—since the early days of autumn.

It was time to go now, to be away south before the bright moons rose. He saddled the horse and mounted and began to ride.

I want you to learn a new way of shooting, the High Priestess had told him on the island in the sea. And she had sent him to a place where no one ever went, to learn to do what she wanted done. He had always been able to handle a bow, but what she asked was odd, inexplicable. He didn't need things explained, though; he was honoured beyond words to have been chosen. He spent the whole of the autumn practising, learning to hit targets with the high, arching trajectories she had specified. Over and over, day by day as the weeks passed, he went off alone to the eastern end of the island and practised.