He watched his breath make puffs of smoke in the grey cold, adding to the fog; he couldn't see any further than that. The moons were invisible, of course, and the stars. They had chosen a time when both moons should have been bright and high, lending light for the crossing of the pass, but men could not control what the god sent in the way of weather, and more than one campaign of the past—including the not-so-distant past—had been undone by the elements. He remembered the savage cold at Iersen Bridge. He would always remember that. He placed both hands on the stone and peered out into the swirling grey darkness. Nothing. There could have been a hundred men below him outside the walls, and if they were quiet enough not he nor anyone else in Garsenc would have known they were there.
From the small guardhouse beside the portcullis he heard the murmur of voices. There were four men posted at night. They would be playing at dice by firelight. He couldn't even see the light down there through the fog. It didn't matter. He could hear the voices, muffled in the grey ness, and three of them were with him. The fourth would be dealt with, as necessary.
Not killed though. His instructions had been clear. Blaise de Garsenc wanted a minimum of killing in these first days. He seemed to have known exactly what he wanted, even back in the autumn, in the days after his first declaration. He had sent Thaune north among the other corans of Gorhaut to carry word freely of what had been done and said before that challenge at the fair. All the Gorhautians attending the fair had been assembled in an enormous room in Barbentain, Thaune remembered, and after the countess of Arbonne had ordered them out of the country and confiscated their goods Blaise had spoken to them with a cool precision that had been genuinely impressive. Because of the Treaty of Iersen Bridge, he'd said—a treaty that was a betrayal in itself—King Ademar was about to embroil Gorhaut in another war here in Arbonne. It was a war they did not need, brought on by a treaty that should never have been signed. He invited those assembled to think about his words, and he promised they would be allowed passage north through the mountains unharmed.
They had even contrived a pretended assassination attempt, an arrow landing carefully short of Blaise as he walked out from the castle the next morning. The tournament melee had been cancelled, in the wake of the events at Aubry and in the watch-tower south of the pass: they had found the three maimed guards by then. The court of Signe de Barbentain had collectively attended mourning services in the Temple of Rian, and in their midst—walking beside the countess, in fact—had been Blaise de Garsenc.
Thaune was instructed to claim responsibility for that attempted killing of the pretender, both on the road north through the pass and again when he arrived home at the castle—a Garsenc coran would need such a story, Blaise had told him. Thaune, remembering the fears that had led him to kill the animal-trainer, had acceded gratefully. It was strange, actually, to be working for a leader who thought of so many details concerning his men. Thaune had even, after hesitating, told Blaise about that killing in the alley. He didn't want hidden things between him and this man.
Blaise had looked regretful, but not judgmental. "You were afraid," he'd said, "and doing your duty out of fear. That is how things have always been at Garsenc. I hope you will do what you see as your duty now, but without the fear."
Thaune remembered that. He had done what he could, which, as it turned out, was quite a bit. He'd more of a knack than he would have guessed for such intrigues. There had been only a dozen soldiers in his party on the ride north—Gorhaut corans seldom went south to tournaments in Arbonne, they hadn't done so for years.
There were no rules about such things, but corans of reputation usually waited another month and went east to Aulensburg for the tourney there. Gotzland was seen as better than Arbonne; it was acceptable to fight there. Only the younger ones, and a handful of spies sometimes, went south to Lussan in the autumn with the merchants and entertainers. There were no spies in this small party, though, Thaune was certain of it. The young men listened, a little awed, to his snarling tale of wind pushing a long bowshot short.
They were probably wishing they had tried the same thing, he had mused that first night in the roadside inn among the falling leaves of autumn. Probably even dreaming of having done so, and having succeeded, and riding back to King Ademar in triumph unimaginable. Young men had such dreams.
Two of the corans on that ride, he'd decided, might be thinking, or dreaming, along somewhat different lines. He'd taken a chance and spoken to one of them before they parted ways. Turned out he had judged rightly; taking careful chances was what he'd been sent back to do. Before their roads divided, his to Garsenc, the other coran's towards the palace in Cortil, Thaune had won his first recruit to the cause of Blaise de Garsenc's rebellion. The accent had been what decided him. You could almost always trust a north-land man to be unhappy with King Ademar.
On the ramparts of Garsenc he leaned forward, suddenly tense, peering blindly into the fog. It was thick as the mist was said to be above the river to the land of the dead. He could see nothing, but he thought he'd heard a sound from the grassy space beyond the outer wall and the dry moat.
The sky above another castle, beyond the mountains to the south, was brilliantly clear that same night, the stars like diamonds, the two moons bright enough to lend shadows to the trees bending in the path of the sirnal—the north wind that swept down the Arbonne Valley with the bitter force of winter behind it.
Fires were burning on all the hearths of Barbentain, and Signe had dressed herself in layers of fine-spun wool with fur trim at the collar and sleeves and a fur-lined hat covering her head, even indoors. She hated the winter, she always had, especially when the sirnal blew, making her eyes stream and her fingers ache. Usually she and Guibor had been south by this time, in Carenzo with Ariane and Thierry, or in the winter palace in Tavernel for their sojourn there. It was always milder in the south, the depredations of the sirnal less harrowing, tempered by the shape of the land and the influence of the sea.
This year was different. She needed to be in Barbentain because this winter would not be the customary time of sheltering behind castle and village walls while the wind whipped down the valleys and empty roads. Events were taking place this season that were going to define the future for all of them, one way or another. In fact, they were taking place tonight, beneath the brightness of these two moons beyond the mountains, in Gorhaut. She wondered what Vidonne and blue Riannon were seeing there as they looked down.
Almost unbearably anxious, unable to keep still, she paced back and forth from one fire to another in her sitting room. She was disturbing her waiting-women she knew, and almost certainly doing the same to Rosala, who sat calmly nonetheless, hands busy at needlework in her chair drawn close to one fire. She wondered how the woman could be so placid, knowing—as indeed she did know—what was at stake tonight in the north.
It had come down to Blaise de Garsenc, as Beatritz had said it might almost a year ago when they'd first become aware that the new coran in Baude Castle was rather more than he seemed. Rather more. A very great deal more, in fact. The countess wished, again, that Beatritz was with her now, instead of on the island so far to the south in the sea. Images of the past year had been with her all evening, dancing in the flicker of the fires. It sometimes seemed to her that she spent half her life now walking with images of the past. But she wasn't thinking of Guibor now. She was remembering Bertran at the challenge ground as the northerner stood before the Portezzan pavilion offering a red rose:
We may have all found more than we bargained for in this man, Bertran had said.
Another image rose up then, a memory from within this castle, in autumn as well, when they had summoned all the merchants and corans of Gorhaut the morning after Aubry and told them they were confiscating their trade goods and sending them home from the fair.
Urté de Miraval had wanted to execute them all, and Signe, a hard rage running through her, had had to resist the same desire. There were even precedents for such a thing. Every ci
tizen of a country was personally responsible for the truce-breaking of their lords. It had been Blaise who had requested, insisted actually, that the merchants be let go, and had given cause why this should be so.
"I have nothing at all to offer in Gorhaut just yet," he'd said, speaking earnestly in this very room before they had all gone down to deal with those assembled. "They must go home knowing I've saved their lives—lives put in hazard by Ademar's truce-breaking. They must go home and talk about that. Will you give me that much?" He'd paused. "Or are we no better than what we are trying to fight?"
She'd been genuinely angry with him then, a Gorhautian speaking so to her on the morning after so many of her people had been slain. But she was a countess of a land in peril, and she had always been able to master her emotions when it was time to advise Guibor on his decisions, or to make them herself. Blaise was speaking truth, she finally decided, and she gave him what he asked.
In the room below when she came before the merchants one of them had protested loudly at the announced seizure of their goods, astonishingly oblivious to how close all of them had been to being executed that same morning: no more innocent than the villagers and priestesses of Aubry. The man complained furiously a second time, and then a third, speaking with choler and no respect, interjecting while she was still addressing them. In an odd, unsettling way, she had actually been glad of it. She had nodded at Urté, who had been looking at her expectantly, only waiting for a signal. The duke of Miraval had calmly declared the merchant's life to be forfeit. The man had begun shouting then, and the palace corans had moved in quickly to take him from the room.
Blaise had looked as if he wanted to object even to that, but had held himself in check as the struggling merchant was dragged away by the guards. There was another message that had to be sent here, and Signe knew it; she had been governing a nation for some time, after all, with Guibor and now alone. Images of power mattered: in Gorhaut they could not be allowed to think they were so weak and soft here in woman-ruled Arbonne. They already had that impression, Signe knew. They could not be allowed to indulge in it. She had looked at Blaise, her expression forbidding, and had waited for him to nod his head.
"I cannot save a fool," he'd said to the merchants and corans of Gorhaut. The right thing to say; it would be remembered by the others. He was learning quickly. Later that morning they executed the man, though cleanly, without branding or breaking him; he was a symbol, not a truce-breaker himself. Here in Arbonne they were not the same as those they were now to fight. She would defend that assertion to the last of her days.
That had all been back in the autumn, with the grape harvest in and the leaves turning. Now, in the cold, clear glitter of a winter's night, she listened to the sirnal rattle the windows like a spirit of the dead and sipped at her mulled, spiced wine, holding the goblet in both hands, its warmth comforting her as much as the scent and taste of the wine. The two girls were sitting on their benches near the door, their hands cupped around hollow silver balls with burning coals inside them. Bertran had brought that idea back, years ago she remembered, from a journey into the wild places east of Gotzland. He had done a great deal of such dangerous travelling in the years after Aelis died. "He is blaming himself," Guibor had said patiently. "There is nothing we can do about it."
Looking more closely at the two girls, Signe saw that Perrette, the younger one, was shivering. Impatiently, she shook her head. "In Rian's name, come nearer the fire, both of you," she said, sounding more irritated than she meant to. "You'll be no use to me at all if you catch a chill and die."
This was wrong, of course, she shouldn't be taking out anxieties on those around her. But what was there for her to do, otherwise? She was an old woman in a cold castle in winter. She could only sit or stand by a fireside now and wait to see if the goddess and the god would allow them to throw successfully at dice with so many lives and two nations' destinies.
Nervously, the girls hastened to obey her. Rosala glanced up from her work and smiled.
"How are you so calm?" Signe demanded abruptly. "How can you sit there so easily?"
The smile faded. Mutely Rosala held up her work, and the countess saw, for the first time, the raddled, spoiled stitching and the visibly trembling hands that were lifting it for her to see.
The fog made things horrendously difficult. Thaune still couldn't see a thing down below, though he kept straining his eyes into the thick, grey gloom. There was to have been a single torch lit briefly at the edge of the woods and then doused. He couldn't have seen a torch from these ramparts tonight if it was directly below where he stood.
Even sounds were muffled, but not so much that—just there! — he could not make out, finally, the jingle of a horse's harness and then the same sound a second time, not far away. They had come. It was time. With an awareness of all that might turn on this in the next moments, and with the fear that came—that had to come—hand-in-glove with that, Thaune went quickly along the rampart walk to the stairwell and started down to the guardhouse, one hand on the wall for balance in the murk.
When he appeared in the doorway all four guards jumped up from the table. He nodded his head briefly.
"It is time," he said.
"Time for what?" said Erthon, just before Girart brought the hilt of his knife smartly down on the back of his fellow guard's head. Erthon, whom Thaune hadn't been able to decide whether or not to trust, slumped forward, and Thaune had to be quick to catch him before he knocked over the table and sent the dice rattling.
"My luck," said Girart. "I was about to win for the first time all night." Thaune was able to smile; the other two guards, younger, visibly nervous, were not.
"We're in a bigger game now," Thaune said. "Say your prayers and open the gate and the bridge." He went out to stand behind the iron portcullis as it began rolling up. There was a noise, of course, as the chains turned, but for once the fog was useful and Thaune doubted anyone would hear the muffled sound from across the courtyard inside the castle.
When the bars were high enough he stepped forward, ducking to pass under the lowest spikes, and waited again, staring out into the cold mist of the night. No torches yet, nothing at all to be seen, only the sound of horses again, faintly, through the low, drifting fog. Then another noise behind him as the portcullis slotted with a clang into its niche at the top of the gate and the guards began quickly winding down the drawbridge over the dry moat.
When the bridge was down, Garsenc Castle lay open to those waiting in the fog, and the first part of what Thaune had come home to do was accomplished. The easy part.
He stepped out onto the wooden bridge and felt more than he heard the simultaneous tread of someone approaching from the other end. He still could not see. The mist redoubled his anxiety, inducing primitive, irrational feelings of dread. He couldn't even make out the planks of the bridge beneath his boots. He stopped walking. "Light your torch," he said, his tone as calm as he could make it. The sound of his voice went out feebly into the enveloping darkness and was swallowed up.
There was silence as the approaching footsteps also came to a halt. Thaune felt as if he were wrapped in a grey shroud, ready for burial. He shuddered at the thought.
"Light your torch," he said again to the silent figures on the bridge with him.
Finally he heard the scraping sound of flint being struck, and a moment later the resinous scent of a torch catching came to him. In the fog the light spun out only a little way, a small circle, a tenuous island of illumination on the bridge.
Bright enough to reveal Galbert de Garsenc, the High Elder of Gorhaut, huge and unmistakable, standing directly in front of him with two corans on either hand.
"I am most happy to oblige you," said the High Elder in his unforgettable voice. "To illuminate the first of the traitors we will now be pleased to burn. I will light your own pyre with the torch you requested."
Thaune felt as if the world had dropped away beneath his feet, as if the final darkness at the end of time had c
ome.
His breath was snatched away in horror. He couldn't move. He was actually afraid he was going to fall down.
"Do not even think about fleeing," Galbert added, the deep tones conveying infinite contempt. "There are four archers behind me with their bows trained on you, and this light is more than good enough for them."
Another tread resounded on the far side of the bridge, approaching from behind the Elder, just beyond the spill of light. "It would be good enough, I agree," said a lighter, cooler voice. "If they were still conscious and therefore still holding their bows. It is all right, Thaune," said Blaise de Garsenc, "we have this under control."
There came another sound, twice in quick succession, and the corans beside Galbert grunted and slid to the planks, their swords rattling on the wood. The torch was dropped but then seized by an invisible hand before it could go out.
"Do tell me, father," said Blaise, coming forward into the light, "what is it that makes you so anxious to burn people alive?" His words were flippant but Thaune could hear the stiff tension running beneath them. He wondered when father and son had last seen each other. Galbert said nothing at all; the rage in his eyes was genuinely frightening in the torchlight.
"Blaise," came a Portezzan accent from the murk beyond, "it seems your brother is here too."
"How splendid! A reunion!" said Blaise, again with that forced gaiety. "Bring him, Rudel, let me see those dear, kind features again."
Galbert still had not spoken. Thaune was unable to look at the High Elder's face. He heard footsteps again, and two men brought forward a third between them.
"We have dealt with all the others," said a voice Thaune remembered from Arbonne, "About fifteen of them, as you guessed." They were lighting more torches now; by their light Thaune recognized Bertran de Talair.
"Nicely done, Thaune," Blaise said, not taking his eyes from his father and the handsome figure of Ranald de Garsenc beside him. "We had to make the assumption that there would be an informer though, that you would need to trust too many people for them all to be reliable. We were here two days earlier than I told you, and I had men watching the roads east to see who might be coming. I thought my father might want to do the honours himself. After all," he added, with sudden, corrosive irony, "it has been months since he had anyone burned, and that hardly counts because he wasn't able to be at Aubry himself. Tell me, dear brother, did you enjoy it there? Was it a fine hunt? Did the women scream amusingly?" Ranald de Garsenc shifted his feet but made no reply.
A Song for Arbonne Page 43