A Song for Arbonne (57 page)

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 come.

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.

Men were walking up now, passing Thaune on either side, entering the castle. The big Arbonnais coran named Valery stopped beside him. "Well done," he said quietly. "Now tell me the numbers inside. Do we have a fight on our hands?"

"How many of you are there?"

"Only fifty. Trained mercenaries, though, from Portezza and Gotzland. This isn't an invasion of Gorhaut from Arbonne. This is a rising from within. We hope."

Thaune cleared his throat. "I think about half the castle will be with us." He reached for his belt and unhooked a large key ring. "This unlocks the weapons room—to the right across the courtyard, the double doors with the arch. Girart, who is just behind me, will show you. You may trust him with anything. There might be a hundred, perhaps more, who resist, but they will not be well armed." He cleared his throat again. "I think if En Blaise lets them know he is here there may be fewer who fight."

Blaise heard that. "Let them know?" he echoed in mock indignation. "Of course I'll let them know. I'm the wayward son come home to his father's open arms. There ought to be music, a feast, wine and burning women for my delight. Perhaps
that
is why you came, father? To surprise me with the warmth of your welcome?" His tone was brittle, febrile. Beside Thaune, Valery of Talair made a small sound but said nothing.

Thaune became aware that the High Elder had now begun murmuring softly, but not to any of them. Somehow the quality of the man's voice, his inward, intense manner, shaped a silence on the bridge in the mist, and gradually, with a growing horror that bit deeper than the cold, Thaune became aware that the High Elder was intoning the denunciation of the god.

"… to the infinite cold that was before the world was or the moons were spoken, before the sun was moved and the stars allowed their light. O, most holy Corannos of ice and all the sacred tongues of fire, unworthy as I surely am in your sight, I beseech thee, in the name of your own ancient gifts to us, that there shall be for this man torments without number to the ending of time. Maggots beneath the skin and worms in his heart, the rotting sickness and the black blood that cannot be stanched. I pray that you send down upon this man who is my son no longer—"

"That is enough." A second voice, cold with distaste. Bertran de Talair. Blaise himself was silent, immobile in the face of what his rather was doing.

"— foul madness and a twisting agony in his bowels, blindness, boils, the stinking corruption of his flesh—"

"
I said that is enough!
"

"— all of these and more, I most holy Corannos. I pray that he be stricken also with the pestilence that—"

Bertran came around in front of Galbert and, in the midst of this pronunciation of the blackest curse known to the Elders of Corannos, struck him full in the face with an open palm, the way one might slap a servant. Galbert stopped, out of genuine shock as much as anything else. Blaise still hadn't moved. He opened his mouth to speak, and then closed it wordlessly. Ranald de Garsenc looked pale and unsteady beside his father.

"You
will
be silent," Bertran said savagely. "Ten more words and an archer will shoot. Your son may be unwilling to give such an order, for reasons that escape me, but he assured that I am not. Do not put this, I beg you, to the test."

"Who are you?" Galbert snarled, through gritted teeth.

En Bertran laughed aloud then, as strange a sound in the fog as Thaune had heard all night. "That is three words," he said. "Seven left. Hoard your store. I am sorely offended, though, I would have thought you would surely know the appearance of a man you paid so much to kill last summer."