Although that, Roban thought grimly, was a great deal to have said. The countess had made the point already when she rose to salute the Gorhautian at the first running up of his banners, but this was signalling it again, and quite unmistakably. The chancellor looked over his shoulder. The physician and the priestess had arrived; they were coming swiftly over, almost running. But there was one more thing to be done, Roban knew, before Blaise de Garsenc could be released from the public gaze into their care. This was theatre, and he was on the stage.
As the countess took her seat again it was Ariane who rose, beautiful in autumn hues of russet and pale gold. Sunrise and sunset, the chancellor thought, looking at the two women, or, since Ariane was not really young any more, perhaps noontide and twilight would better suit as images. The beauty of the lady of Carenzu was almost dazzling in the clear light. His own love, though, was for the older woman, for the grace of the ending day, and it would be until he died.
There was a rose to be given now. Mildly curious, in fact, as to what the Gorhautian would do, Roban heard Ariane's formal words spoken to invoke the symbolic rituals of the Court of Love. He was not a troubadour, not a coran, not a dancer or a wit or the sort of man who set styles of fashion at court among ladies. Even so, Roban the chancellor loved his country with his own enduring passion, with an inward, private flame, and he knew that these rituals, frivolous as they might seem, were what defined Arbonne and set it apart from the rest of the world. And he too, prosaic and dry and sober as he might be in the castle corridors of day, had had his own dreams of winning this rose and offering it—of course—to the countess before cheering multitudes. Not for some time had he had that dream, but it was not so very long ago, either.
"We have our traditions here in Arbonne," Ariane was saying. "Here, where Rian the goddess is so much more than merely Corinna, maiden daughter of the god. She has many incarnations, our goddess, and both death and life are contained in her. Which is why," she said, her clear, strong voice now the only sound among the pavilions, "which is why, at the end of a death challenge, there is a ceremony to honour Rian and the mortal women who are all her daughters. We ask the victor, the chosen of the goddess and the god, to give a rose." She paused. "Sometimes, as a higher recognition of his worth, we invite him to offer three."
She opened the coffer they had given her, and Roban saw that she had indeed chosen to invoke the full ceremony this morning. It was seldom done, but it was obvious that Signe and Ariane were marking this moment and this man as indelibly as they could. He wondered if the Gorhaut coran could possibly be aware of how much he had taken upon himself today. He wondered how long the man would live-but that, of course, was bound up in how long any of them could expect to live with a war coming, certain as winter and the spring to follow.
"White is for fidelity," Ariane said, holding the coffer up to be seen. There was a murmuring all along the pavilions, of anticipation and speculation. The morning was offering more than anyone could have imagined. "Yellow is for love, and red is for desire." She smiled. "You may bestow them as you choose, my lord de Garsenc. We will all be honoured by your doing so." Blaise of Gorhaut, grass-stained and bloody, bowed to Ariane and took the coffer from her long fingers. It was purest ceremony, Roban knew, a spectacle intended entirely for those in the other pavilions and the commons' standing grounds, and for the words and music of the troubadours and joglars who would carry it to castles and villages far beyond this field when the fair was over. Knowing this, having seen it so many times before, he was nonetheless moved. Gravely the man handed the open coffer to Vitalle Correze's son and took from it the white rose. He looked upon it in silence for a moment, before turning back to the queen. "Fidelity I offer where it is most richly deserved, if I might be allowed to name a woman who is not with us at this field. May I ask you to guard this for her and have it laid at her feet in my name when the time allows?"
Gravely Ariane nodded. "You may and I shall. Where should I carry it?"
"To my sister," said Blaise, and Roban was almost certain the emotion in his voice was not feigned. "To Rosala de Savaric de Garsenc, who kept faith with her child and her own vision of Gorhaut. And say to her, if you will, that I shall never break faith with her while I live."
The woman was still in the castle, Roban knew. This open ground was no place for someone only days past childbirth. The herald was declaiming her name now that all might hear it. There had been rumours, but this would be the first formal confirmation of who the mysterious woman in Barbentain was. They were going be talking about this morning in all six countries for a long time, Roban thought, shaking his head.
Blaise had already turned to take the red rose. He seemed to be hesitating, brow furrowed, but then Roban saw him smile slightly for the first time since he'd approached. Carrying it before him, laid across both palms, he limped a short distance down the row of pavilions and stopped before the handsomely carved and decorated chair of Lucianna Delonghi, who had bound him in ropes two nights ago, and cut him with her dagger. Extending both hands he gave her, with another low bow, the red rose of desire.
Roban, watching with frank curiosity, saw the woman go pale, even as the father, beside her, smiled—and then slowly stopped smiling as implications came home to him. Lucianna Delonghi said nothing at all; her composure seemed shaken for the first time the chancellor could remember. With a court-bred instinct Roban turned just then to look at Ariane, and saw how thin her mouth was as she watched. A new twist here, he thought. I wonder when that happened?
"I begin to think," murmured Bertran de Talair, speaking for the first time, "that we may have all found more than we bargained for in this man. I may yet learn to fear him. He has just taken his full revenge upon Bosiard d'Andoria."
It was true, Roban realized. This was a very public rose of desire offered to a married woman whose husband had been banned from the fair for trying to have Blaise killed. Everyone in the pavilions and most of the commons would now be certain they knew why. No wonder Massena Delonghi was no longer smiling. Turning back to the Portezzan pavilion, Roban was in time to see the Gorhautian speak one word to the woman, and the chancellor's line of vision was clear enough that he was very nearly certain that the word was farewell. The revenge, he considered, might not be only upon the husband.
The herald was busily crying Lucianna d'Andoria's name as Blaise came back for the yellow rose.
He took it in both hands, as he had held the other two, and turned to the countess and the queen. He looked from one to the other and then said, calmly in the stillness of the morning air, "This one, if you will allow, I shall keep for a time. In my own country of Gorhaut we speak love privately before we declare it to the world."
And then, before either woman could reply, without any dramatics at all, he fainted.
And that, thought the chancellor of Arbonne sagely as he motioned urgently for the healers, is probably the first act of this entire morning that wasn't meant for an audience.
As it happened, he was wrong.
"You might consider fainting if this goes on too long and you want to get out of here," Rudel had murmured, not moving his lips, as Blaise had taken the first rose. "Gallant victor pushed to his very limits. They'll like that. "
Towards the end, as he walked back from Lucianna's pavilion, Blaise had decided that it was, indeed, going on too long. He hadn't, actually, expected to see real pain in her eyes. Anger yes, and perhaps a scornful pride, but not that sudden pain.
Following upon everything else, it made him feel extremely strange. He didn't want to actually collapse, so he took Rudel's advice and allowed himself to seem to do so, slipping to the grass and letting his eyes fall closed. He heard voices of sharp concern about him, the countess calling for aid, Bertran's voice guiding the physician through the pavilion's seats to where he lay. Rudel and Valery quickly contrived a litter to carry him upon, and he heard Hirnan's brisk, highland accent clearing a path as they bore him away, out of the too-bright sun and the scrutiny of
so many people. Part of the way back towards the castle Blaise did, in fact, lose consciousness, but not before the thought came to him, quite unexpectedly, along the momentarily undefended pathways of his mind, that Rosala's child, Cadar, was almost certainly his own son.
Most of the troubadours were loudly, even wildly expressive in their enthusiasm for what had just happened. Even when En Blaise de Garsenc fell to the ground in a faint it did not check their exuberant spirit. Remy, it seemed, had elected to forget about his swordspoint encounter with the man at Midsummer. He would probably end up regarding it as an early bond of blood between the two of them. Jourdain and Alain were already speaking of a hurried collaboration this afternoon, to have at least one song ready for the evening's banquet in Barbentain.
"You don't look well. What is it?" Aurelian, of course, the one who always noticed, even in the midst of pandemonium.
Lisseut managed a shaky smile for him. "I don't much like this kind of thing, I've just discovered."
"Neither do I, and I learned that some time ago. It is over now. We can go." He hesitated, looking down at her thoughtfully. "He will be all right, you know. I saw the physician and a priestess coming over."
"I did too. I'm sure he's all right." She was aware that there was an expression of knowledge on his part in what he had just said, and an admission in her brief reply. She didn't care. He had given out the white rose to his brother's wife, and the red to Lucianna Delonghi, who was as beautiful as Aurelian had said she was. He had kept the yellow one.
Beside her, Aurelian was silent for a moment. She saw some children running about on the grass now, play-acting battles. People were beginning to leave their pavilion and all the others, joining the milling, feverish crowd. The inns were about to become extremely busy in Lussan.
"And you, my dear?" Aurelian asked finally. "Will you be all right?"
"I don't know," she answered, truthfully.
CHAPTER 14
The blue moon is full tonight, Ranald realizes belatedly, lending its strange luminosity to the trees and rocks of the mountain pass. The creatures of the otherworld are rumoured to be able to move between their own land and this one on nights when Escoran is full. The mountains, in the shepherds' tales, are the haunts of many of them: ethereal creatures the size of flowers; hairy, great-footed monsters who can seize and devour an unwary horse and rider and leave nothing but bones for the morning sun to find; or the spirits who steal babies from their cradles by the fire and take them away under barrow and hill forever.
Ranald tries, again, to decide exactly why he is so unhappy to be here. He likes hunting, and night certainly holds no terrors for him, especially not in the company of fifty of the king's best men. In a sense this is simply a larger, more wide-ranging hunt.
In another sense, a more honest one, it is no such thing at all.
He looks over to his left and stares for a long moment at the grim profile of the only man who seems even less pleased than he to be here. Fulk de Savaric had the misfortune to be paying one of his rare visits to Cortil when the message came of his sister's flight and the king decided that same evening to ride. Ademar had made it clear that the dukes of Garsenc and Savaric were not merely being given the opportunity to join his company. They were expected to do so. Loyalty, the message was explicit, was very much at issue on this ride.
For two days and a night, with a second night upon them now, they have been in the saddle, changing horses three times, eating at speed and usually at a gallop. Ranald has never seen King Ademar like this, so intense, so focused in his rage.
This, he decides, is probably what is disturbing him most. That the king is visibly so much more incensed than he himself by Rosala's flight with the child. It is almost as if she fled from Ademar and not Ranald. In some ways that might even be true. Not that he harbours illusions about the strength of his relationship with his wife, but Ranald does wonder, almost wistfully, if she would have risked so much, including the life of the unborn child, just to leave Garsenc and his own company if his father and the king had not also been part of the picture. Large parts, both of them, with Galbert threatening to take the babe, and Ademar threatening… what? A seduction of the wife of the most powerful duke in the country? A ravishing of her if she proved unwilling?
It seems, on the evidence, that she has indeed proven unwilling, has chosen the astonishing, surely terrifying option of flight alone to another country rather than trust her husband to guard and shelter her from his father and their king. And what, he wonders, whether one considers it by the light of day or the blue shining of this moon, do all these things say about the character and strength of Ranald, duke of Garsenc, who is even now riding, however unwillingly, in the wake of his king across the mountain pass towards a slaughter in Arbonne?
In the end it is precisely as easy as any experienced soldier might have predicted it would be. The three Arbonnais corans in the watch-tower on the southern slopes of the range are accustomed to traffic from the north during the month of the Lussan Fair, and utterly confident—as they have every right to be—of the truce that always accompanies a fair.
Ademar halts his full company out of sight and sends five corans down towards the tower. They are greeted with courtesy by the guards, offered shelter and food and straw for the night. The three Arbonnais are killed even as these offers are being made. On the instructions of the king, as the signal is given and the rest of the company rides up, the three guardsmen are decapitated and castrated and the wooden buildings beside the stone tower are set on fire.
They ride more swiftly then, to be ahead of any message in the flames. A short time later they sweep down upon the nearby hamlet of Aubry like a wild hunt out of the shepherds' night terrors: fifty howling men on horses, swords out, torches in their free hands, burning and slaying without warning, without reason offered, without respite. This raid in a time of truce is a message, and the message is to be made as unambiguous as it can be.
Ranald, aware that he is being watched by the king and by the Elder who is here as his father's representative, makes a point, slightly sickened, of seeking out those few villagers who have some sort of weapon in their hands as they stumble from the huts amid the screaming of animals and small children. He is a very good fighter, once a celebrated one, though his brother latterly might have had the reputation, travelling the world in search of tournaments and wars. But it was Ranald who first taught Blaise anything about swordsmanship, and it was Ranald de Garsenc who, the year he turned nineteen, was named King's Champion in Gorhaut by Ademar's father, Duergar.
That had been, he has often thought, easily the best time of his life. Honoured by the king and the court for his prowess, excited by the attention of women of high rank and low, continually gratified by his own smooth, effortless skills, immersed in the oblivious, expansive confidence of youth, and free—more than anything else, free of his father for a little while.
Then his uncle, Ereibert de Garsenc, had died and Ranald had become duke, with all the defining burdens and powers of rank, and the specific implications of being near to an often-disputed throne. A new champion had been named ceremoniously, even as Ranald, returned to Garsenc Castle in the south, and his father, again, began to tell him what to do. More than ten years ago, that was. For all those years he has mostly been doing what Galbert tells him. He wonders what he could point to, if he tried, that has given him real pleasure in that time.
Certainly not this slaughter, or the meaning of it, in a time of truce. Ranald de Garsenc is hardly a sentimental man, and he has no trouble with warfare, or even the idea of conquest here in Arbonne. This isn't a war though, not yet. This is something ugly and vengeful. It is supposed to be his own revenge, he knows. He has not been consulted on the issue; he has only ridden, as required by his king, to deliver a message in blood and fire.
There is a small temple to the goddess Rian not far from the village, the northernmost temple in Arbonne, the nearest to Gorhaut. That is why they are here. The thirty or
forty inhabitants of Aubry, awakened in the middle of the night, are killed, down to the last child. Like the guardsmen in the burning tower, the men—mostly shepherds and farmers—are decapitated and their genitals are hacked off. Ademar of Gorhaut knows exactly how to say what he thinks of the men in woman-ruled Arbonne. Then they ride on to the temple.
Under the light of Escoran at its full and the just-risen crescent of Vidonne, the eight priestesses of Rian in that small sanctuary are taken from their beds and are burned alive. The soldiers are made free of them first, by order of the king. Ademar moves his big horse restlessly back and forth, watching first one cluster of corans with a woman and then another. There is a great deal of screaming and a growing roar from the swiftly gathered bonfire of dry autumn wood. At one point, his pale yellow hair reddened in the firelight, Ademar looks over at Ranald and laughs.
"Do you not want a woman, my lord of Garsenc? A gift from your king, solace for your great loss?" He shouts it so others can hear.
Ranald, his sword still in his hand, though unnecessarily now, says, "Not before you, my liege. I will follow in this, as in all things."
Ademar throws his head back and laughs again. For a moment, Ranald is afraid the king will indeed dismount and join his corans among the pinioned women, but Ademar only slashes his horse again and moves nearer to where the Elder that Galbert has sent is watching the pyre. Ranald watches the king go, a bleakness in his heart. He knows what he should do. He knows he will not do it. In the mingling of firelight and the moons his eyes briefly meet those of Fulk de Savaric. Both men look away without speaking. He has seen burnings before, has ordered a number of them himself on the Garsenc lands, following his father's regime of having one such spectacle every year or so to keep the serfs and villagers properly subdued. He has watched impassively, time after time, setting an example. He has never seen eight women burned at once, though. The numbers shouldn't matter, but, when it finally begins, it appears that they do make a difference.
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