A Song for Arbonne. Guy Gavriel Kay
said on that ride down the chilly slope, ‘I’ll wait till the end, which is always best. I can count on your discretion, I take it?’
For a long moment Blaise had had to struggle to control his anger. When he’d replied, it was in the best equivalent he could manage to the duke’s casual tones. ‘I would suggest you not rely on any such thing. I have accepted an offer of service from you, but that begins a fortnight from now. For the moment Mallin de Baude pays me and you would be advised to remember that.’
‘Such loyalty!’ de Talair had murmured, gazing straight ahead.
Blaise shook his head. ‘Professionalism,’ he’d replied, keeping his temper. ‘I am worth nothing in the market for fighting men if I have a reputation for duplicity.’
‘That is an irrelevance. Nothing that affects a reputation will emerge from a dark stairway with only the two of us to know.’ De Talair’s tone was quietly serious. ‘Tell me, Northerner, would you impose your own values in matters of love and night on all the men and women that you meet?’
‘Hardly. But I’m afraid I will impose them on myself.’
The duke had glanced across at him then and smiled. ‘Then we shall probably have an interesting encounter a few nights from now.’ He’d waved again at Mallin de Baude down below and spurred his horse forward to join the baron and his men for the rest of the ride back down to the castle.
And now here he was, without even a token attempt at deception or concealment. Blaise stood up and stepped from the window nook onto the stairway. He checked the hang of his sword and dagger both and then waited, his feet balanced and spread wide. From around the curve of the stairs the glow of flame gradually became brighter and then Blaise saw the candle. Following it, as if into the ambit of light, came Bertran de Talair, in burgundy and black with a white shirt open at the throat.
‘I have come,’ said the duke softly, smiling behind the flame, ‘for that interesting encounter.’
‘Not with me,’ said Blaise grimly.
‘Well, no, not really with you. I don’t think either of us suffers unduly from the Arimondan vice. I thought it might be diverting to see if I could fare better in the room at the top of these stairs than poor Evrard did some while ago.’
Blaise shook his head. ‘I meant what I told you on the hills. I will not judge you, or the baroness either. I am a sword for hire, here or elsewhere in the world. At the moment En Mallin de Baude is paying me to guard this stairway. Will it please you to turn and go down, my lord, before matters become unpleasant here?’
‘Go down?’ Bertran said, gesturing with the candle, ‘and waste an hour’s fussing with my appearance and several days of anticipating what might happen tonight? I’m too old to be excited by temptation and then meekly turn away. You’re too young to understand that, I suppose. But I daresay you do have your own lessons to learn, or perhaps to remember. Hear me, Northerner: a man can be forestalled in matters such as this, even I can be, whatever you might have heard to the contrary, but a woman of spirit will do what she wants to do, even in Gorhaut, and most especially in Arbonne.’ He lifted the candle higher as he spoke, sending an orange glow spinning out to illuminate both of them.
Blaise registered the fact of that quite effective light an instant before he heard a rustle of clothing close behind him. He was turning belatedly, and opening his mouth to cry out, when the blow cracked him on the side of the temple, hard enough to make him stagger back against the window seat, momentarily dazed. And a moment, of course, was more than enough for Bertran de Talair to spring up the three steps between them, a dagger reversed in one hand, the candle uplifted in the other.
‘It is difficult,’ said the duke close to Blaise’s ear, ‘extremely difficult, to protect those who prefer not to be protected. A lesson, Northerner.’
He was wearing a perfume of some kind, and his breath was scented with mint. Through unfocused eyes and a wave of dizziness, Blaise caught a glimpse beyond him of a woman on the stairs. Her long yellow hair was unbound, tumbling down her back. Her night robe was of silk, and by the light of the candle and of the moon in the archers’ window Blaise saw that it was white as a bride’s, an icon of innocence. That was all he managed to register; he had no chance for more, to move or cry out again, before Bertran de Talair’s dagger haft rapped, in a neat, hard, precisely judged blow, against the back of his skull and Blaise lost all consciousness of moonlight or icons or pain.
WHEN HE AWOKE, HE was lying on the stone floor of the window niche, slumped back against one of the benches. With a groan he turned to look out. Pale Vidonne, waning from full, was high in the window now, lending her silver light to the night sky. The clouds had passed, he could see faint stars around the moon.
He brought up a hand and gingerly touched his head. He would have a corfe egg of his own on the back of his skull for some days to come, and a nasty bruise above the hairline over his right ear as well. He moaned again, and in the same instant realized that he was not alone.
‘The seguignac is on the seat just above you,’ said Bertran de Talair quietly. ‘Be careful, I’ve left the flask open.’
The duke was sitting on the other side of the stairwell, leaning back against the inner wall at the same level as Blaise. The moonlight pouring in through the window fell upon his dishevelled garments and the tousled disarray of his hair. The blue eyes were as clear as ever, but Bertran looked older now. There were lines Blaise couldn’t remember seeing before at the corners of his eyes, and dark circles beneath them.
He couldn’t think of anything to say or do so he reached upwards—carefully, as advised—and found the flask. The seguignac slipped down his throat like distilled, reviving fire; Blaise imagined he could feel it reaching out to his extremities, restoring life to arms and legs, fingers and toes. His head ached ferociously, though. Stretching cautiously—it hurt to move—he reached across the stairway and handed the flask to the duke. Bertran took it without speaking and drank.
It was silent then on the stairs. Blaise, fighting off the miasma of two blows to the head, tried to make himself think clearly. He could, of course, shout now and raise an alarm. Mallin himself, from his own room down the hall from Soresina’s, would likely be the first man to reach them here.
With what consequences?
Blaise sighed and accepted the return passing of the seguignac from the duke. The flask gleamed palely in the moonlight; there were intricate designs upon it, most likely the work of Götzland master smiths. It had probably cost more than Blaise’s monthly wages here in Baude.
There really was no point in crying out now, and he knew it. Soresina de Baude had chosen to do—as Bertran had said—exactly as she wished. It was over now, and unless he, Blaise, stirred up an alarm and roused the castle it would probably be over with little consequence for anyone.
It was just the dishonesty of it all that bothered him, the image—yet another—of a woman’s duplicity and a man’s idle, avid pursuit of pleasure at another’s expense. He had somehow hoped for more of Duke Bertran de Talair than this picture of a jaded seducer putting all his energy into achieving a single night with a yellow-haired woman married to someone else.
But he wouldn’t raise the alarm. Bertran and Soresina had counted on that, he knew. It angered him, the easy assumption that his behaviour could be anticipated, but he wasn’t enough provoked to change his mind simply to spite them. People died when spite like that was indulged.
His head was hurting at back and side both, two sets of hammers vying with each other to see which could cause him more distress. The seguignac helped though; seguignac, he decided sagely, wiping at his mouth, might actually help with a great many matters of grief or loss.
He turned to the duke to say as much, but stopped, wordless, at what he saw in the other’s unguarded face. The scarred, ironic, worldly face of the troubadour lord of Talair.
‘Twenty-three years,’ Bertran de Talair said a moment later, half to himself, his eyes on the moon in the window. ‘So much longer than I thought I would live, actually.