Guy Kay - A Song for Arbonne

After a moment she rejected the thought: too simple an argument and conclusion. Nothing was that simple in the world.

She could hear the river running below in the darkness, making a soft, continuous murmur beneath the singing of the joglar. It was cool tonight on the isle of Barbentain; Rosala wrapped the woolen robe they had given her more closely about herself. The fresh air revived her, though, and brought back with its clarity the reassuring awareness that she had, by coming here, done all she could do for Cadar. The next moves, in the larger game, were not hers to make. The scale of her own life had suddenly become much smaller, focused on a heartbeat. She felt an urge—and almost laughed at herself—to go back up the corridor to look in upon his sleep again. It was strange how swiftly, how completely, love could re-enter one's world.

The last person she had loved was her father, and he had died by Iersen Bridge almost two years ago. Her mother had gone before him, in the last plague year. Her brother Fulk elicited no real intensities of emotion, nor did she in him, Rosala knew. He would not lead the pursuit to bring her back, but neither would he speak up to stay it. He was a good steward of Savaric, though, and she respected him for that. The Savaric lands were terribly exposed now, wide open to raids from Valensa across the newly drawn border of the Iersen River. If the treaty ever ceased to hold they would be vulnerable to even more than that.

It wouldn't hold, Fulk had told her last year during one of the rare times when they were both at Cortil. Truces like this one never did, but lands lost for long enough were likely to be lost forever. He had said it quietly, for her ears alone. Not for cautious Fulk de Savaric the openly critical talk of a powerful lord, with a new king on the throne. Their father would have been loud in his denunciations, Rosala knew, whatever the consequences.

As Blaise de Garsenc had been before he left, both the first time and then again a year later, after his abortive return home.

Thoughts of Blaise were difficult. He was here in Lussan she now knew, with the duke of Talair. It would be easy to see him, to send a message as clear or cryptic as she wanted it to be. She wondered if he'd yet learned she was in the castle. The priestesses had told her the whole fair was gossiping about the high-born lady from Gorhaut who'd been brought to the temple so near to giving birth. Othon, she had thought ruefully: he would have been constitutionally incapable of not telling the tale, nor had she really any right to have expected him to withhold it.

Blaise had never been the sort to listen to gossip, though, and En Bertran de Talair had sworn an oath not to tell him until she was ready. It was even probable—a sharp, new thought—that Blaise hadn't even known she was with child. There had been no communication at all since the night he'd gone away for the second time.

Rosala remembered that night. Sitting beside an open window in Arbonne with the murmuring river below and music wafting up the stairwell, she went back in her mind's eye to that wintry darkness, the stars lost and a storm wind howling, lashing snow and ice in rattling sheets against the windows of Garsenc Castle. She had listened to the father and the sons curse each other, heard the unforgivable names spoken, the vile things said, savagely wounding, more bitter than the night. She had wept silently, utterly ignored in her seat by the fire, ashamed of her own weakness, wanting so much to be gone from the room, from the tangled, savaged hatreds of the Garsenc men, but unable to leave without Ranald's permission and unwilling to draw attention to herself by speaking. The father would turn on her she knew, viciously, the moment he remembered she was there.

Numb with cold beside the guttering fire none of them had bothered to tend, the servants having prudently absented themselves, Rosala had felt the cold tears on her cheeks and heard her brother-in-law, reaching some final apex of his fury, denounce his father and brother in a voice raw with anguish before he stormed from the room and the castle into the wild night: naming the one man as a traitor to Gorhaut, obscenely unworthy of the god, and the other as a drunkard and a coward. She had agreed with both assessments, even as she wept. He was a cold, hard, bitter man, Blaise de Garsenc, with no grace or kindness ever shown to her at all, but he was right, he was so right about the other two.

She remembered lying awake in her bed that night when they finally retired. Ranald in the connecting room had dropped into a snoring slumber she could hear through the closed door. He spoke to himself in the night sometimes, crying out in grief like a child in the darkness of his dreams. In the first months of their marriage she had tried to comfort him at such times; she didn't do that any more. Chilled and afraid, listening to the mad keening of the wind, she had waited, listening for the sound of Blaise coming back for his gear before leaving. When he did, when she heard his booted tread in the hallway, she had risen from her bed and gone to his room, her own feet bare on the bitter stones.

He had been packing a saddle-bag by candlelight when she walked in. She did not knock on the door. There was snow on his clothing, ice clumped in the tawny hair and beard. She had been clad in nothing but her sleeping-gown, her fair hair let down about her shoulders for the night. He would never have seen her hair down before. They had looked at each other for a frozen moment, silent within the midnight silence of the castle, then Rosala had said, softly, not to be heard at all outside this room, outside the small space of this single candle's glow, "Will you not love me once? Only once before you go?"

And Blaise had crossed the room and lifted her in his arms and laid her down upon his bed, with her bright yellow hair spread out upon his pillow and her gown slipping with a rustle of sound above her waist as she raised her hips to let him move it so, and he had blown out the one candle and removed his wet clothing and taken her in darkness before he left his home again; taken her in silence, in rage and bitterness, and in the endless bone-deep anguish she knew he lived with because of his own lack of power. There had been no love that she could name in the room with the two of them, none at all.

And it had not mattered.

She had known what would be the things that might bring him to touch her that night, what would drive him, and she had not cared. Whatever it takes, she had thought in her own cold bed, summoning courage to her as from a far-off place while she waited for him to return. Whatever would bring him to take her for at least the one time.

And in his room later, in that darkness, with the unholy wind raging beyond the walls, the same thought again: she would accept and welcome—her hands grappling him hard to her, feeling him beginning to thrust with urgency, hearing the quickening pace of his breathing—whatever might bring him to give her the child Ranald could not.

He spoke her name once, after. She would remember that.

She did remember it, sitting in the window seat in Barbentain. Curiously, it had come to matter. Not so much for herself—she was not a woman who nurtured such illusions—but for Cadar. Rational or not, it somehow seemed important to her now that at her child's conception that one spoken link between the two of them had been made manifest. It was an irony of sorts that it was the man who had done so; her own single-minded need had precluded such a reaching out. She wondered what the priestesses of the goddess would say about that, what their teaching would be. What happened, in their doctrine, when Corannos and Rian came together in love—if they did? She knew almost nothing about the rituals of worship here in Arbonne, only the twisted versions of them uttered with loathing in Gorhaut by the brethren of the god. She wondered if she would be here long enough to learn the truth.