Guy Kay - A Song for Arbonne

She gazed at them for a moment, then turned back to look again at the far, shimmering turrets of the castle, where Guibor TV's widow ruled now. Marry the bitch, her husband had advised Ademar of Gorhaut not so long ago. Rosala's father had said once that the countess of Arbonne was the fairest woman in the world in her day. One thing, at least, in which he appeared to agree with Othon the animal-trainer.

Rosala didn't need her to be beautiful. Only kind, and with a certain kind of courage that she knew her presence would put greatly to the test. She was too versed in the nature of things not to know what her arrival in Barbentain would mean, carrying a possible heir to Garsenc—or a successor to the High Elder of the god in Gorhaut. She honestly didn't see what choice she'd had, though, unless it was to surrender the child, and that was no choice at all.

Later in the day, with the sun high in a bright, clear autumn sky, she began feeling the first pains. She hid them as best she could, but eventually even Othon noticed and his endless flow of words slowly dried up. He sent for the women and they comforted her as best they could, but they had a long way to go yet to Lussan. It was, in fact, well past nightfall by the time they set her down at the temple of Rian.

It was a healthy, well-made baby boy, Signe thought, surprised at the pleasure she felt holding him. Under all the circumstances, she should have been feeling nothing but the deepest concern for her own people. This child and his mother represented danger in its purest form, they could easily be Gorhaut's excuse for war. In the room outside, Roban was pacing like a father desperate for an heir, but Signe knew the source of his disquiet was entirely otherwise. He was almost certainly hoping Rosala de Garsenc's child would be a girl. For a girl, the corans of Gorhaut were far less likely to be unleashed upon them.

No such luck, it seemed. Rian and Corannos both appeared to have a hand in the events unfolding here, and when the god and the goddess worked together, the old saying went, men and women could only kneel and bow their heads. Signe, bowing her head, smiled down upon the child, swaddled in aristocratic blue, and carried him to his mother. Rosala de Garsenc was almost bone-white in the candlelight, and her blue eyes were enormous in her drawn face, but the expression in those eyes was as resolute and unafraid now as it had been all night. Signe admired her greatly. She had heard the story in the dark of night, told in bursts through the birthing pains: the reason for this flight, the plea for sanctuary.

It was not a request she was capable of refusing; even Roban, to his credit, had brought the woman across to Barbentain. He would probably deny it in the morning, but Signe was almost certain her chancellor, too, had been moved by Rosala's story. It was more than pragmatism that had caused him to bring the woman to the castle. She was, she realized, proud of him.

She was also aware that this sympathy, this yielding to the human impulse, might well destroy them all. Rosala, quite evidently, knew this too. Through the long night of labour, talking almost incoherently through her pain, the woman had nonetheless revealed a formidable intelligence. Her courage, too, was obvious. One would need courage and something more to stand up to Galbert de Garsenc in the way this woman had.

"Your child is here, my lady," Signe said softly by the bed, the formal words. "Will it please his mother to give him his name?"

"Cadar," said Rosala, lifting her voice to let the first speaking ring clearly in the world he had entered. "His name is Cadar de Savaric." She lifted her arms and Signe gave her the child.

There was more defiance here, the countess knew, to the point of provocation. She was glad Roban had not heard this; the chancellor had had enough stress for one day. She felt old and tired herself, weighted with the night and the years of her living. The time of music and laughter here in Barbentain seemed infinitely long ago, a dream, a troubadour's fantasy, not really part of her own history.

"He has a father," she felt obliged to say. "You are choosing to cut him off from that? What if his father wants to accept him, despite everything, to offer his protection? Will this name not be a bar to that?"

The woman was very tired, it was unfair to be taxing her in this way, but it was necessary, before the name went forth from this room. Rosala looked up with those clear blue northern eyes and said, "If his father chooses to come for him and shelter him I will think on this again." There was an intonation there, a stress on one word that stirred within Signe a new disquiet, like a note of music almost but not quite audible, sensed if not really heard.

Rosala said, "He will need a man and a woman to stand for him before the god—and the goddess, too, if you have such a ritual in Arbonne."

"We do. The Guardians of Rian and Corannos. We honour both here, I think you know that."

"I do know that. Will you honour my child and myself by standing up for Cadar? Is this too much to ask?"

It was, in many ways. It redoubled all the dangers this child represented for Arbonne to have the countess herself so identified with him. Roban would have turned pink with the vigour of his reaction.

"I will," said Signe de Barbentain, genuinely moved, looking down at the child. She had never seen her own grandson, born and lost on a winter's night so many years ago. Lost or dead, no one alive knew but Urté dc Miraval, and he was not going to tell. He was not ever going to tell. Time and memory and loss seemed tangled and twisted tonight, with avenues to sorrow everywhere. She was looking down on this fair-haired woman and thinking of Aelis. "The honour will be mine," she said. Rosala shifted the coverlet away and placed the infant against her breast. Blindly, with the most primal response of all, he began to suck. Signe was aware that she was dangerously close to tears. It was the sleepless night, she told herself sternly, but knew this was not so.

"And for the second Guardian?" she said. "Is there anyone you know here you would want to ask?"

There is a next stage to the story of every man, every woman, every child, a point at which the new thing that happens shapes what follows irrevocably. Such a moment it was when Rosala looked up from her pillow, her pale hair matted and damp about her head, her son at the breast, and said to the countess of Arbonne: "There is one, though it may be another presumption. My father said that whatever else was true of him, he was a brave and an honest man and, forgive me, I know he is an enemy of Galbert de Garsenc. That may not be the purest reason for naming a Guardian in the eyes of Corannos and Rian, but that is why my child needs guarding now. Is the duke of Talair in Lussan? Will he do this for us, do you think?"

Signe did weep then, and, moments later, frightening herself a little, she began to laugh, helplessly, through her tears. "He is here. And if I ask him I think he will," she said. There were already so many layers of interwoven memory here, so many echoes, and now one more, as Bertran, too, came into it.

She looked out the window; the first hint of gray was in the eastern sky. Something occurred to her then, far too late, one more thread in this dark, time-spun weaving: "You do know that your husband's brother is with the duke of Talair?"

And saw then, having been carefully observant all her life, two things. First that the woman had not in fact known this; and secondly, that it mattered to her, very much. Signe's earlier disquiet, like a dissonance of almost-heard music, came back to her. She had a question suddenly, she had several questions, but it was not time for them, and it might never be time. She suddenly missed Beatritz very much, wished her daughter had elected to come north for the fair this year instead of remaining on Rian's Island.