Guy Kay - A Song for Arbonne

He really didn't look well, though.

"Sit," she said. "Before you begin, sit down. Brisseau, a flask of cider for the chancellor."

She thought Roban would refuse the chair but he did not; that only served to increase her own disquiet. Forcing herself to be patient she waited, sitting opposite him, until the cider had been brought and placed on the table. She waited again until he drank.

"Tell me," she said, finally.

"My lady, a message came to me from Rian's temple in the town earlier tonight," he said, his voice curiously faint. "It purported to be from someone who could not possibly have been in Lussan, requesting audience and… and sanctuary with you."

"Yes?"

"Yes, so I went down into town myself to see if it might possibly be a true message. I am afraid it is, my lady. I fear that we have the gravest crisis upon us now, one that makes the Andoria matter seem as nothing."

"Who is it? Who is in the town?"

"Not in town any longer. I had no choice, my lady, I had to bring her up to the castle before anyone else knew she was here or what was happening." The chancellor drew an unsteady breath. "Countess, it seems that the Lady Rosala de Garsenc of Gorhaut has left the duke her husband without his knowledge. She seeks refuge with us. She is in Barbentain now, and, my lady… though I am far from expert in these matters, I believe that she may be about to give birth, even as we speak."

Cadar de Savaric, defiantly named and surnamed for his mother's father and family, entered the world in Barbentain Castle shortly before dawn that night.

Brought early to his time by the rigours of his mother's journey through the mountains to Arbonne, he was nonetheless sturdy and pink when he emerged, letting out a loud cry his exhausted mother heard as triumphant when the priestess of Rian, summoned hastily to the castle, drew him from her womb and clipped the birthing cord.

They washed him ceremoniously in milk warmed by the fire, as befitted a child of rank, and the older of the two priestesses swaddled him expertly in blue samite before handing him to the countess of Arbonne, who had remained in the room for the last long hours of Rosala's travail. Signe de Barbentain, white-haired, with the delicate blue veins showing in her pale, flawless skin, cradled the child and looked down upon it with an expression Rosala could not entirely comprehend but which she found deeply reassuring nonetheless. After a moment Signe walked over to the bed and laid the infant gently in his mother's arms.

Rosala had not expected the gentleness. She had not known what to expect. She had only realized, when Galbert de Garsenc had ridden away from her a week ago, that she was going to go south, however she possibly could. Beyond that she had not clearly thought.

The coming of the Lussan Fair had given her the chance. Garsenc lay near to the principal road that ran up into the mountain pass, and each day Rosala had seen small troupes of corans and tradesmen passing by their lands, often stopping to worship at the chapel, or do a bit of business in the castle or the village below.

Two days after her father-in-law's visit, Rosala wrote a note to her husband, saying that she was journeying north to her own family estate to await the birth of the child. She'd had a dream, she lied, a terrible nightmare of premonition. Too many infants and women had died in labour at Garsenc Castle, she wrote Ranald. It had frightened her for their child. She felt safer going home to Savaric. She hoped he would understand. She hoped he would come to her there when affairs at court allowed. She signed it with her name. She left the castle, unseen, by the postern gate that same night. Her favourite horse was kept in the coran's stables outside the walls so it could be readily exercised while she was unable to ride. There was no guard at the stables—no one would be rash enough to tempt the wrath of the Garsenc by approaching their horses. She had mounted awkwardly and ridden away, side-saddle, by the twin lights of the moons, the landscape both beautiful and frightening at night, the child large and heavy in her belly. She had only the faintest hope, dim as the stars beside bright Vidonne, of reaching her destination.

That one night was all she was capable of riding. Reluctantly, in real distress, she left the horse near a small hamlet before dawn and made her way on foot back to the road. At sunrise, walking slowly, hungry and extremely tired, she came upon the encampment of some travelling entertainers. Two women were bathing in a stream when she came up to them. They exclaimed at her condition. She used the first name that came into her head and told them she was travelling to Arbonne in search of aid in childbirth. Two infants had already died at birth, she lied, making the warding sign behind her hip. She was willing to do anything to save this one, she said. That last was true. It was entirely true.

The women made their own warding signs at the hint that she was seeking magic but generously welcomed her into their company for the journey south. Rosala rode through the mountains in a jouncing, lurching wagon with two thievish grey monkeys, a talking bird from the northern swamplands, an adder in a basket and a garrulous animal-trainer, whose teeth were bizarrely blue. Poison, he explained, from the snake before it was defanged. He fed it mice and small lizards that he caught. Every time the wagon hit a rut in the road, and there were a great many as they went through the pass, Rosala looked anxiously to the basket, to make sure the clasp still held. The bear and the mountain cat, thankfully, rode in their own wagon just behind them. She talked as little as she could, to avoid having to sustain an accent that would not give her away. It was relatively easy with Othon in the wagon: he was one of those men who would have pined away had he lost the use of his voice. He was kind to her, though, bringing soups and bread back from the communal fire at the dinner hour. She grew accustomed to the drone of his voice and the endlessly reiterated stories of past travels during the three slow days it took them to cross from Gorhaut over the summit of the pass and come down into Arbonne. It began to seem to her that she had always been with these people, riding in this wagon, that Garsenc Castle was the dream, something from another woman's life.

On the fourth morning, Rosala lifted the flap of the wagon and stepped outside just as the sun was rising over the hills east of them. She looked south over a landscape entirely strange to her and saw the river, bright blue in the morning light, flowing swiftly beside the road. In the distance, glittering, scarcely visible save for that shimmer in the sun, she saw towers.

"That'll be Barbentain," said Othon sagely from behind her. She looked over her shoulder and managed a weak smile. He scratched himself in several indelicate places, stretched and grunted. "Yon's the finest castle I've ever been to in all my days. We'll be there tonight, I reckon. There was a count there, not long ago—mayhap you heard of him—Guibor Third, or Fourth he may have been. Huge man, tall as a tree, fierce in war… and in love, as they all are down here." He chuckled lewdly, showing the blue teeth. "Any-hap, he was the finest figure of a man I ever saw in my days. His widow rules now. Don't know much about her. They say she used to be pretty but now she's old." Othon yawned and then spat into the grass. "We all get old," he pronounced and strolled away, scratching, to attend to his morning functions in the bush. One of the monkeys followed him.

Rosala placed a hand over her belly and looked along the bright, sinuous line of the river away to the south. There were cypresses on the ridges above them, and a species of pine she'd not encountered before. On the terraced slopes west of the road were the fabled olive trees of Arbonne.