Blaise felt his hands beginning to shake. "Will you soil everything you touch in your life, even at the end? Can nothing be clean?"

"My death, or so I have been promised," said Galbert drily. His mouth quirked. "Come, Blaise, if it isn't yours I will die wondering whose it is. I did some investigating after Ranald had been married some time without an heir. I discovered that in all the years he was King's Champion, with women clawing each other in their lust for his bed, he never fathered a single child that I could trace. You will remember that my brother failed to produce an heir either. There may be a flaw in our seed, though I seem to have escaped it. Did you?"

Blaise looked down at his shaking hands. He said, "Nothing ever mattered except the goals, did it? Nothing had meaning in itself. We were all tools, every one of us, Ademar, Rosala, Ranald and I, even when we were boys."

His father made a flicking gesture of dismissal. "What did you want, Blaise? Lullabies? A pat on the back? A doting father's grip on the shoulder when you did well?"

"Yes," said Blaise then, as evenly as he could. "Yes, that is what I suppose I wanted."

For the first time Galbert seemed to hesitate. "You have managed all right without them."

"Yes," said Blaise again, taking a breath and letting it out slowly. "I managed." He looked at his father. "Had we leisure to discuss it I might tell you something of my own sense of things, but I don't think I want to." He paused. He felt very calm now. "Is there more, father?"

A silence, then slowly Galbert shook his head. For another moment they looked at each other, then Blaise turned and went from the ring. The soldiers parted to make way for him. He saw that a company of archers in the crimson colours of Carenzu had come up to join the others now. Beyond them he saw his horse, with Hirnan holding the reins. He walked over and mounted up and began riding away. He didn't look back.

Behind him he heard Rudel's voice asking a question, and Thierry responding, very clearly, then he heard an order spoken and he heard the arrows sing.

CHAPTER 19

Blaise was unaware for the first part of his ride that he was following the same path Bertran had taken leaving the field. Heading west towards the reddening disc of the sun, he came to the avenue of elms that led to the arch. He stopped and looked back then at the fires dotting the battlefield. He felt very strange. It came to him, almost as an incidental fact, that he was alone in the world now.

It was then, glancing down, that he saw the fresh tracks of a single horse and realized that Bertran had come this way before him. The duke would be alone now, too, he thought, in a different way and yet the same. Ariane had said something about that a long time ago: Bertran had lost, with Urté's death, the passion of hatred that had ordered and shaped his life for more than twenty years. Hatred, Blaise thought, could be as powerful as love, though the singers might try to tell you otherwise.

He twitched the reins of his horse and started forward again. He passed under the dwarfing curve of the arch, briefly chilled, even with his cloak, as he entered its shade, then he came out on the other side again into the fading light of the sun. Overhead another flock of birds was flying south on the wind. His father was dead. His brother was dead. He was likely to be crowned king of Gorhaut very soon. Cadar Ranald de Savaric was probably his son. He had been struggling with that thought since autumn. It was not a thing to be told. He knew Rosala well enough to know she never would.

And that, predictably, carried his thoughts to Aelis de Miraval who had died so long ago, and for love of whom two strong men had twisted and ruined their lives. He rode on through the silence, following the survivor of those two men through the bare winter vineyards with the autumn grapes long harvested and the first buds a long way off. The vines gave way to grass eventually and a forest rose up before him as he rode and in time Blaise came to a small charcoal-burner's cabin at the edge of that wood and saw a horse he knew tethered outside.

Sitting in the doorway, where a woman might sit at needle and thread at day's ending to catch the last of the good light, was Bertran de Talair.

The duke looked up as Blaise dismounted. His expression registered surprise but was not unwelcoming. Blaise had not been sure about that. He saw the flask of seguignac clasped in Bertran's hands. Memory came with that, too, clear as a temple bell. A stairway in Castle Baude. The moons passing from the narrow window. That flask passing back and forth between the two of them. Blaise brooding upon Lucianna Delonghi in bitterness, Bertran speaking of a woman dead more than twenty years and not of the one whose bed he had just left.

The duke saw him looking at the flask and lifted it. "There's a little left," he said.

"My father is dead," said Blaise. He hadn't expected to say that. "Thierry's archers."

Bertran's expressive face grew still. "There isn't enough seguignac for that, Blaise. Not nearly enough for the needs of this day, but sit down, sit with me."

Blaise walked across the grass and sat down beside the duke in the doorway. He took the offered flask and drank. The clean fire ran through him. He drank again, feeling the warmth, and handed back the flask.

"It is over?" Bertran asked.

Blaise nodded. "They will all have surrendered by now."

Bertran looked at him, his blue eyes ringed by dark circles. "You were trying to stop me there at the end, weren't you. I heard you calling my name."

Blaise nodded again.

"I don't think I would have stopped. I don't think I could have, if Thierry hadn't blown the horns."

"I know. I understand."

"I'm not very proud of that." Bertran took another short pull at the flask.

"This isn't a time to be judging yourself. Women were burned. And the two troubadours…»

Bertran closed his eyes and Blaise fell silent. The duke looked up again after a moment and handed back the flask. Blaise cradled it, not drinking. The seguignac was already making him light-headed.

"I have a question for you," said Bertran de Talair.

"Yes?"

"Do you have any great objection if I ask your brother's wife to marry me? If Rosala will have me, I would like to raise Cadar as my own, as heir to Talair."

A remarkable sensation of warmth began to spread through Blaise, and he knew it wasn't coming from the seguignac this time. He looked over at Bertran and smiled for what was surely the first time in that long day. "I have no say at all in what Rosala does, but nothing I can imagine would please me more."

"Really? Do you think she will accept?" Bertran's tone was suddenly diffident.

Blaise laughed aloud. It was a strange sound in that space at the edge of the woods. "You are asking me for guidance on a woman's thoughts?"

For a moment Bertran was still, and then he too laughed, more softly. After that there was silence again for a time.

"My father," said Blaise finally, needing to say it, "my father told me that Ademar was only his tool for destroying Rian in Arbonne. That his other goal all these years had been to place me on the throne of Gorhaut."

Bertran was still again, in that manner he had of careful, focused gravity. "That does not surprise me," he said.

Blaise sighed and looked down at the flask in his hands. "I would rather not accept it as true."

"I can see that. Don't tell anyone else then. This need only be ours."

"Which doesn't make it less true, that he was shaping even this."

Bertran shrugged. "Partly, not entirely. He couldn't have guessed what would happen to you in Arbonne."

"He admitted that, actually."

"You see? Blaise, we are shaped by so many different things it frightens me sometimes." Bertran hesitated. "This was the cabin where I used to meet Aelis. Where my son was conceived."