Guy Gavriel Kay - A Song for Arbonne

‘I might have killed him,’ Aelis said again.

Bertran was pouring the wine into two goblets. Silver and machial, she saw, not remotely belonging in a cabin such as this. She wondered what the charcoal-burner was being paid. The goblets were each worth more than the man would earn in his whole life.

Bertran came towards her, offering wine. ‘I trusted your aim,’ he said simply. The simple brown jacket and leggings became him, accenting his burnished outdoor colour and the bronze of his hair. The eyes were genuinely extraordinary; most of the lineage of Talair had those eyes. In the women, that shade of blue had broken hearts in Arbonne and beyond for generations. In the men too, Aelis supposed.

She made no motion towards the extended goblet. Not yet. She was the daughter of Guibor de Barbentain, count of Arbonne, ruler of this land.

‘You trusted your cousin’s life to my aim?’ she asked. ‘Your own? An irrational trust, surely? I might have wounded you as easily as he.’

His expression changed. ‘You did wound me, Aelis. At the midwinter feast. I fear it is a wound that will be with me all my life.’ There was a gravity to his tone, sharply at odds with what had gone before. ‘Are you truly displeased with me? Do you not know the power you have in this room?’ The blue eyes were guileless, clear as a child’s, resting on her own. The words and the voice were balm and music to her parched soul.

She took the wine. Their fingers touched as she did. He made no other movement towards her though. She sipped and he did the same, not speaking. It was Talair wine, of course, from his family’s vineyards on the eastern shores of the lake.

She smiled finally, releasing him from interrogation for the moment. She sank down onto the one bench the cottage offered. He took a small wooden stool, leaning forward towards her, his long, musician’s fingers holding the goblet in two hands. There was a bed by the far wall; she had been acutely aware of that from the moment she’d walked in, and equally aware that the charcoal-burner was unlikely to have had a proper bed for himself in this cottage.

Urté de Miraval would be a long way west by now in his favourite woods, lathering his horses and dogs in pursuit of a boar or a stag. The sunlight fell slantwise through the eastern window, laying a benison of light across the bed. She saw Bertran’s glance follow hers in that direction. She saw him look away.

And realized in that instant, with a surge of unexpected discovery, that he was not nearly so assured as he seemed. That it might actually be true what he’d just said, what was so often spun in the troubadours’ songs: that hers, as the high-born woman, the long-desired, was the true mastery in this room. Even the birds above the lake …

‘What will they do with Ariane and the corans?’ she asked, aware that unmixed wine and excitement were doing dangerous things to her. His hair was tousled from the confining mask and his smooth-shaven face looked clever and young and a little bit reckless. Whatever the rules of the courtly game, this would not be a man easily or always controlled. She had known that from the first.

As if to bear witness to that, he arched his brows, composed and poised again. ‘They will be continuing on their way to Talair soon enough. My men will have removed their masks by now and declared themselves. We brought wine and food for a meal on the grass. Ramir was there, did you recognize him? He has his harp, and I wrote a ballad last week about a play-acting escapade by the arch. My parents will disapprove, and your husband I rather imagine, but no one has been hurt, except Valery by you, and no one will really be able to imagine or suggest I would do you any harm or dishonour. We will give Arbonne a story to be shocked about for a month or so, no more than that. This was fairly carefully thought out,’ he said. She could hear the note of pride.

‘Evidently,’ she murmured. A month or so, no more than that? Not so swiftly, my lord. She was trying to guess how her mother would have handled this. ‘How did you arrange for Brette in Miraval to help you?’ she temporized.

He smiled. ‘Brette de Vaux and I were fostered together.’

‘We have had various … adventures with each other. I thought he could be trusted to help me with …’

‘With another adventure, my lord?’ She had her opening now. She stood. It seemed she didn’t need to think of her mother after all. She knew exactly what to do. What she had dreamt of doing through the long nights of the winter just past. ‘With the easy matter of another tavern song?’

He rose as well, awkwardly, spilling some of his wine. He laid the goblet down on the table, and she could see that his hand was trembling.

‘Aelis,’ he said, his voice low and fierce, ‘what I wrote last winter was true. You need never undervalue yourself. Not with me, not with anyone alive. This is no adventure. I am afraid …’ he hesitated and then went on, ‘I am greatly afraid that this is the consummation of my heart’s desire.’

‘What is?’ she said then, forcing herself to remain calm despite what his words were doing to her. ‘Having a cup of wine with me? How delicate. How modest a desire for your heart.’

He blinked in astonishment, but then the quality of his gaze changed, kindled, and his expression made her knees suddenly weak. She tried not to let that show either. He had been quick to follow her meaning though, too quick. She suddenly felt less sure of herself. She wished she had somewhere to set down her own wine. Instead, she drained it and let the empty goblet drop among the strewn rushes on the floor. She was unused to unmixed wine, to standing in a place so entirely alone with a man such as this.

Drawing a breath against the racing of her heart, Aelis said, ‘We are not children, nor lesser people of this land, and I can drink a cup of wine with a great many different men.’ She forced herself to hold his eyes with her own dark gaze. She swallowed, and said clearly, ‘We are going to make a child today, you and I.’

And watched Bertran de Talair as all colour fled from his face. He is afraid now, she thought. Of her, of what she was, of the swiftness and the unknown depths of this.

‘Aelis,’ he began, visibly struggling for self-possession, ‘any child you bear, as duchess of Miraval, and as your father’s daughter—’

He stopped there. He stopped because she had reached up even as he began to speak and was now, with careful, deliberate motions, unbinding her hair.

Bertran fell silent, desire and wonder and the sharp awareness of implications all written in his face. It was that last she had to smooth away. He was too clever a man, for all his youth; he might hold back even now, weighing consequences. She pulled the last long ivory pin free and shook her head to let the cascade of her hair tumble down her back. The sheerest encitement to desire. So all the poets sang.

The poet before her, of a lineage nearly as proud as her own, said, with a certain desperation now, ‘A child. Are you certain? How do you know that today, now, that we …’

Aelis de Miraval, daughter of the count of Arbonne, smiled then, the ancient smile of the goddess, of women centred in their own mysteries. She said, ‘En Bertran, I spent two years on Rian’s Island in the sea. We may have only a little magic there, but if it lies not in such matters as this, where should it possibly lie?’

And then knowing—without even having to think of what her mother would have done—knowing as surely as she knew the many-faceted shape of her own need, that it was time for words to cease, Aelis brought her fingers up to the silken ties at the throat of her green gown and tugged at them so that the silk fell away to her hips. She lowered her arms and stood before him, waiting, trying to control her breathing, though that was suddenly difficult.