It was Blaise's turn to grow still. He understood, and was deeply moved by the awareness, that Bertran was offering this to him as a truth of the heart in exchange for his own.

"I'm sorry," Blaise said. "I didn't set out to follow you, I just saw your tracks. Shall I go?"

Bertran shook his head. "You might give me that, though, if you aren't drinking." Blaise handed over the flask. Bertran lifted it, the metal glinting in the light, and finished the last of the seguignac. "I don't think," he said, "that I can possibly deal with anything more today than I already have."

A moment later they heard the sound of another horse approaching and looked up to see Ariane riding alone towards them through the winter grass.

She came up to where they were sitting together in the doorway of the cabin. She did not move to dismount. They could see that she had been weeping though she was not doing so now. She took a ragged breath and let it slowly out.

"I swore an oath to my cousin Aelis the night she died," she said without greeting, without preamble. Blaise saw that she was controlling herself only with a great effort; he felt Bertran grow rigid at his side. "An oath from which I have been released by Urté's death today."

She was looking at the duke, Blaise saw, and so he made to rise and said again, "I should leave. This is not something I have a right to—"

"No," said Ariane, her voice bloodless, her exquisite features nearly white. "This does concern you, as it happens." Even as she was speaking, Bertran laid a hand on Blaise's knee to keep him from standing. "Stay with me," said the duke.

And so he stayed, he sat in a charcoal-burner's cabin doorway at the cold end of a day of death with wind blowing past them, pushing Ariane's black hair back from her face, stirring the tall grass behind her, and he heard her say, in that voice from which all resonance seemed to have bled away, leaving only the flat assertion of the words: "There is something I can now tell you about the night Aelis died. There was a reason why she came early to her time, Bertran." Another breath, the vivid evidence of a struggle for self-control. Ariane said, "When Urté took your son from her arms and left the room with the priestess following him, trying to reclaim the boy, I was left alone in the birthing room with Aelis. And a few moments later we… realized she was carrying a second child." Beside Blaise, Bertan make a convulsive gesture with his hands. The flask fell on the grass. Bertran tried awkwardly to stand. His strength seemed to have left him though; he remained sitting in the doorway looking up at the woman on the horse.

Ariane said, "I delivered your daughter into the world, Bertran. And then… then Aelis made me swear an oath to her, and we both knew she was dying." She was weeping again now, tears bright as crystal on her cheeks.

"Tell me," said Bertran. "Ariane, tell me what happened."

She had been weeping then, too, amid the terrors of that room. She had been thirteen years old, and had heard Aelis, dying, tell her husband that the boy child she was holding was Bertran de Talair's. Ariane had cowered in a corner of the room watching Urté's face grow blood-dark with a rage such as she had never ever seen in her life. She saw him seize the baby from its mother's arms where the priestess had gently laid it. Outside the walls of Miraval a winter storm had been howling, rain lashing the castle, thunder like an angry spirit overhead.

The duke and the priestess had rushed from the room; where, Ariane did not know. She was certain he was about to kill the child, though. Aelis had been sure of the same thing.

"Oh, my dear," her cousin had said, lying amid blood on her bed, "what is it I have done?" Ariane, distraught with fear and grief, had clutched her hand, unable to think of a single thing to say. Wanting only to be far away from that room, from that terrible castle.

And then, a moment later, Aelis had said something else, in a different tone. "Oh, Rian," she had said. And, "Cousin, in the goddess's name, I think there is another child in me."

There had been. A small babe, though larger than the first it seemed to Ariane. And this one was a girl, with her mother's dark hair and long limbs, and a strong voice when she raised her first cry amid the storms of the world she had entered.

It was Ariane who took her from Aelis's womb. Ariane who bit through the cord and wrapped the infant in the warm cloths that had been readied by the fire. Ariane who gave her, with trembling hands, to her mother. No one else had been in the room. No one else had heard that second cry.

And Aelis de Miraval de Barbentain had looked upon the dark-haired daughter in her arms, knowing that her own life was passing from her, and had said to her cousin, who was thirteen years old that year, "I am binding you to something now as an oath to me on my deathbed. You must swear to do what I ask of you."

Ariane had looked at the two of them, mother and child, and she had done so: had sworn to take the baby from that room by the back stairway, wrapped in those swaddling-clothes, hidden within her own cloak, and to bear it from Miraval into the wildness of that night storm.

And she swore an oath that night to tell no living soul, not even Bertran, of the existence of a second child for so long as Urté de Miraval was alive. "After Urté dies," her cousin had said, "if you are alive and she is, I leave it to you. Judge what she has become, if you know where she is. I have no gift of foreknowledge, Ariane. Judge the needs of the time. It may even be that this child, my daughter, will be heir to Miraval or Talair, to Arbonne itself. I need you to become the sort of woman who will be able to make that judgment one day. And now kiss me cousin, and forgive me if you can, and go."

And Ariane had bent and kissed the dying woman upon the mouth and had fled, alone down the twisting back stairway, wrapped in a dark cloak with a baby next to her heart. And she met no one at all on the stairs or in the corridor or passing out of the castle into the rain by the postern gate. At the stables the ostlers were nowhere to be seen in the storm, and so Ariane had taken her mare from its stall herself and had mounted up awkwardly from astride a bale of hay, and she had ridden bareback from the yard with only her cloak and hood to shield her and the child from the cold and the driving rain.

She never forgot that ride for the rest of her days or nights. It would come back to her in dreams, or with any sudden crack of thunder or flash of lightning in a storm. She would be back in the vineyards of Miraval then, riding east towards the lake, the twisted shapes of vines showing around her when lightning shredded earth and sky. The child had cried and cried at the beginning but had fallen silent after that, and Ariane had been terrified the baby was dead and had been afraid to open her cloak in the rain to see. And she had been weeping all through that ride.

She never knew how she managed to find the hut by the lake where they kept the wood and kindling dry for signalling the isle. She remembered dismounting there and tethering the horse and hurrying inside, to stand in the doorway, dripping wet, unable to stop crying. A vivid sheet of lightning had lit the whole of the sky then, and for a moment in its dazzling flash she had seen the Arch of the Ancients looming nearby, huge and black in the night, and she had screamed in fear. But then, as if in answer to her own cry, she had felt, oh, she had felt a stirring of the child next to her heart, and had heard her begin to wail again, a precarious, determined assertion of presence amid the terrors of the world.

Ariane had held her close, rocking back and forth, crooning wordlessly, watching as lightning flashed again and again and finally moved on, as the peals of thunder gradually grew fainter to the south, as, after what seemed a span of time without measure or end, the blue moon named for Rian showed briefly once and then appeared again through the swift racing of the clouds, and the rain stopped.