Guy Kay - A Song for Arbonne

She smiled then herself, for the first time. "Always," she said. "I can't remember the last time I didn't obey instructions."

He laughed, and sipped his wine. "I saw you in the troubadours' pavilion this morning," he said, surprising her again. "Ariane told me only those of the first rank are invited there. Is this new for you? Should I be offering congratulations?"

Ariane. That was the perfume. Of course, she told herself: they would have had a council here when the tidings came. But what she was remembering was five corans in crimson escorting him away on Midsummer Eve.

He had asked a question; Lisseut shook her head, pushing such thoughts away. She said, "Congratulations? Wouldn't that be absurd? After you didn't let me salute you?"

His eyes were bright in the light of the candle on the table and the beard showed quite red. "Go ahead if you really want to. Curtsey and kneel. Kiss my foot three times. You'll help me get used to it." There was a bitterness she hadn't expected in his voice. He paused a moment. "I'm not a king yet, you know. I probably never will be. I'm only someone who's made a large and foolish claim because I hate what's happened to my country."

"From what I understand of the men of Gorhaut, that's worthy of honour in itself," she murmured.

His expression changed. "I'm not sure that isn't as much an attack as a compliment."

"Can you blame me, tonight?"

There was a silence. Without speaking, he shook his head. She took a quick sip of her wine and averted her eyes. This wasn't at all how she had wanted this conversation to go. She didn't really know what she had wanted, but it wasn't this. Thinking quickly, reaching for a new direction, she said, "You did miss something… unique in the hall tonight. A canzone about your morning's triumph, written at dazzling speed, rhymed in triplets, with a refrain that was simply your name sung four times on a descending scale."

" What?"

She kept her tone blandly innocuous. "We should be fair about that last bit, though: «Garsenc» is a difficult rhyme in Arbonnais."

He looked pained. "You're not being serious?"

"I'm a serious person, hadn't you noticed? It was composed by an old companion of yours, too, Evrard of Lussan."

"An old what? " He blinked. " Evrard? He called himself that?" He looked so astonished she had to laugh. "How… how does anyone know my connection with him?"

She was smiling now, enjoying this. "From Rian's Island? He began telling us all about it immediately after the challenge this morning. No one knew before, but as of today you are a link worth exploiting. Apparently you yourself and no lesser mortal were entrusted by En Mallin de Baude with the delicate task of assuaging Evrard's wounded sensibilities last spring. Is it true, Blaise?"

He was slowly shaking his head, though in wonder, not denial. "I thought he was a pompous, offensive fool, but Mallin asked me to bring him back so I did. Unconscious, actually. My companion." He snorted. "We slung him like a sack of grain into a skiff. I wouldn't have been greatly distressed if he'd fallen overboard." He shook his head again, as if bemused by the memory. "I thought all the troubadours were like that."

"And all the joglars? Do you still think so?"

"Hardly," he said directly, not bothering to make a jest of it or a compliment, or anything at all. He met her gaze for a moment, and it was Lisseut who looked away, out the window. There was silence then for a while. She sat gazing out at the late-night stars, listening to the river. It was not a difficult stillness, she decided.

"May I ask something of you?" he said at length, quietly. She looked back at him. "I am genuinely weary, Lisseut. I 'm afraid I m too tired to entertain you properly, I'm almost too tired to sleep, and there is a great deal to be done tomorrow. I don't know if this is an imposition, something one doesn't ask of a professional, but will you sing for me, to help me rest?" A faint smile in the flickering light. "To show me again that all of you aren't like Evrard?"

"I didn't think you liked music." She was sorry the moment she'd said that. Why was she always challenging him?

He didn't take offense, or else he was being very patient with her. "If I said that I regret it. I grew up with music in Gorhaut, however different it might have been. One day I will want to try to explain to you that my country is not only… what it has been made to be tonight." He hesitated, choosing his words. "I think there are… parts of the troubadour world here, courtly love, that I find unsettling. Perhaps I needed time to understand it better. I thought once it made your men weak, your women presumptuous." He paused again. "There is no weakness I have found in the men of Arbonne."

"And the women?"

He had been waiting for that, she realized. "The women are intolerably presumptuous." She knew that tone though, by now, and he was grinning at her again, tired as he was. She found that she could smile back.

"I will be happy to sing for you," she said quietly. "It is no imposition. Not when asked of a friend." There, she had said it.

He looked surprised again, but not uncomfortably so. He opened his mouth and closed it. She silently willed him to voice whatever thought he was struggling with, but all he said after a moment was, "Thank you." He rose, with a difficulty he didn't bother to hide, and limped over to stretch out on the bed. He pulled off his boots but didn't bother with the covers or his clothing.

Nothing of any great import had been done, nothing said, but Lisseut stood up as well, feeling a warmth inside and an unexpected calm. Moving quietly about the room she began blowing out the candles. She left two burning, one on the sideboard and one on the small table by the window, and then, in the near darkness, she began to sing. Not of love or war or the goddess or the god, or anything at all of the adult world. On the night he had named himself king of Gorhaut, the night Aubry had burned, Lisseut sang for Blaise of Gorhaut lullabies of childhood, the ones her mother had sung to her so many years ago.

Only when she was certain, from the steady rise and fall of his breathing, that he was asleep did she allow herself a last song for her own heart's easing. It was another very old melody this one, so ancient no one was certain who had written it, or even what dim, half-remembered legend or tale it recounted. It had always seemed to Lisseut to be almost unbearably sad. She had never thought she would feel it applying to her own life. But in Blaise de Garsenc's room that night, while he slept, she sang it softly for herself, and when she came to the verses at the end, she realized that she was very nearly offering them as a prayer:

Thy table set with rarest wine,

Choice meats, sweet ripened fruit

And candlelight when we dine

In Fionvarre.

On we two the high stars will shine

And the holy moon lend her light.

If not here you will be mine

In Fionvarre.

Her uncle had taught her that song in Vezét, long before he had taken her from her father's house and offered her the life of the singers on the road. And the roads had been good to her, had given her friends and companions, a generous measure of success, fame almost, and they had led her here tonight, following, as ever, the quick impulses of her spirit, and now the unbidden need of her heart.

Strangely at peace now, Lisseut realized that she had come looking for an answer in this room and she had found it after all. This was not a man whose life she had a right to share. He was a friend; she knew that now, knew that he would make some place for her in the pattern of his days, however long or short they were to be. But for more than that, more than that small place, she had no right and he no proper space in what his life had now become. The banner in the wind this morning had made this so.