Guy Kay - A Song for Arbonne

He felt an intruder, a cause of the distress the other man was trying to assuage. He ought to have been comforting her himself, he thought. He owed her that much. He owed her at least that much. Blaise looked back up the corridor and saw Hirnan waiting discreetly at the farther end. Feeling his wounds again and weary still, but with a suddenly urgent need to at least finish what he had begun with the white rose this morning, he knocked on the door and said, quietly, so as not to startle them too greatly, "For what it is worth, I have an oath of my own from this morning to repeat."

They both looked up; Bertran calmly, Rosala wiping quickly at her eyes. She shifted a little then and the duke rose, allowing her to stand and then walk forward. A little too late Blaise realized what she was about to do. Quickly, trying to forestall her, he moved into the room so that, in the end, they ended up on their knees, both of them, facing each other before the fire. He wouldn't have blamed Bertran for laughing, but the duke was silent and watchful.

The lost children of Gorhaut, Lucianna had said two nights ago. Truth to that, Blaise thought. Through her tears he saw Rosala offer the glimmer of a smile.

"Will you not accept my homage, my lord?"

He shook his head.

"You will have to become accustomed to this," she murmured. "Kings can't go about kneeling to women."

"I am not a king yet," he said, "and to some women I think they can. I understand the duke of Talair has vowed that he will not let them take you while he lives." He looked at Bertran, whose expression remained devoid of irony. "Hear me, then. In the name of the most holy god, I swear I will keep faith with you, Rosala. My claim to the throne is as nothing if we surrender you and Cadar." He heard the roughness in his own voice at the end.

It was the first time he had actually spoken the child's name. It sounded strange to him as an infant's name. Cadar was a name of power for Blaise, for an entire generation in Gorhaut, given their vivid images of Rosala's father. It was a name of pride, of hope… if the child lived long enough.

Rosala shook her head. "We should not matter so much, he and I," she murmured. "There is too much at stake here."

Behind her, Bertran said quietly, "Sometimes people end up mattering more than one might expect. My lady, the two of you are what is at stake. They will use you to begin the war. They already have."

"Then send us back," she whispered. She was looking at Blaise, not at Bertran.

"It would make no difference," the duke answered quietly. "Not now. They would kill you and keep him and still find a reason to come down on us. They have all the dispossessed of their northlands hungry to be assuaged. This isn't like the old romances: Elienna carried off to Royaunce and an army going after her. This is pure politics now, the hard game of nations. My lady Rosala, Arbonne is the last clause, if you will, of the Treaty of Iersen Bridge."

Blaise, closely watching her, saw the handsome, intelligent features accept the truth of Bertran's words. She knew as much about these things as Ariane or Lucianna, or indeed, he and Bertran. She always had. There were tears still on her cheeks, revealed by the firelight; awkwardly, regretting how difficult such gestures seemed to be for him, he brought up a hand and brushed them away. He wished he were more graceful, more at ease with himself. He said, "You owe no homage to me, Rosala."

She looked again as if she would protest, but in the end said only, "I may thank you for the flower?"

Blaise found that he could smile. "I would expect you to."

Bertran laughed quietly. Rosala, a second later, returned the smile tremulously, but then she lowered her face into her hands.

"How can we speak thus?" she cried. "They burned women tonight. Because of me. They never even knew who I was and they were taken from their beds and raped by Ademar's corans and—say nothing, I know they were! — and then they were burned alive. With all that the two of you know, will you tell me how I am to live with that? I can hear them screaming now."

Blaise opened his mouth and closed it. He looked past her at Bertran, whose eyes were shadowed and dark with the fire behind him. The duke said nothing either. With all that the two of you know. He knew nothing, in the face of this. There were no words he could think of to say.

So he spoke her name. What was it about the speaking of a name? Slowly he brought up his arms again and gently took her head between his hands and, leaning forward, he kissed her on the brow. He wished there were more he could do, but there didn't seem to be. Women had been burned tonight, on a pyre of his father's long dreaming. Men had been slain and mutilated. He, too, could hear the screaming.

"In the morning… " he said roughly. "We will all be stronger in the morning." Lame words, an empty truth. It was this night that needed dealing with. He looked over at the duke again for a moment and then rose and left the room. Bertran would be better at this, he thought, than he himself would be. There was less history here for the duke, he knew women so much better. There was an ache inside Blaise, though, walking from her chamber.

Oh, Ranald, he thought; said it aloud, actually, softly in the empty corridor. She might even have made a man of you, this one, if she had been allowed. His brother had been at Aubry tonight. Blaise was nearly certain that Ranald wouldn't have wanted to be, but that didn't matter, did it? He had been there.

Heavy with burdens, of past and future both, Blaise suddenly stopped and stood very still. A child had cried out in a room behind him. He listened but there was no other sound. A cry in a dream that must have been. Cadar's.

Did new-born infants dream? Blaise didn't know. He only knew that he could not turn back, could not now, if ever, ask Rosala the question in his heart. It doesn't matter, he told himself. It makes no difference at all to anything.

A lie, of course, but the sort of lie that lets one carry on.

By the time she reached the top of the stairway and saw the guards outside the door, Lisseut was already regretting she had come. She had no business here, no claim to this man's attention, especially so late at night after he had been seriously wounded in combat. She didn't even know exactly what she wanted to do, or say, if he should happen to be still awake, and should happen to receive her. Someday, she thought despairingly, she really was going to have to absorb her mother's so-often-repeated lesson and accept that one did not always have to follow the path lit by impulse and first reactions.

More than anything else, she knew, it had been the news from Aubry that had drawn her here. It hadn't taken long for the tidings to sweep downstairs through Barbentain and race along the great hall, where those joglars and troubadours honoured with places in the morning's pavilion were offering their performances after dinner.

The music had stopped, of course. One did not sing liensennes of courtly, unrequited love or ribaldries of enthusiastically answered passion in the forests of Arbonne when news came of a village destroyed and women burned alive by the king of Gorhaut. Love had no place in the scheme of things in the wake of such horror.

But if that were the case, what, in truth, was she doing here, hesitantly approaching a doorway on this upper level of Barbentain? Alain had agreed to wait a little while for her downstairs. She didn't much want to walk back to the inn alone. An old man had been murdered in an alley a few nights ago. There were too many unknown people from too many countries wandering in the darkness of Lussan during the fair. She hadn't had the courage to ask Aurelian to wait-he knew too much, after this morning. It was the first time Lisseut could remember that she'd wanted to hold something back from him. Alain was easier; they had their understandings after two seasons together now. He wouldn't even speculate.