She had laid the baby down then, wrapping it as best she could on the blessedly dry floor of the cabin, and she took wood and kindling and flint for flame and lit a flare on the mound outside to summon the priestesses to come, and they came.

She saw a white sail running up on the near shore of the isle and watched as one small boat slipped across the now calm waters of the lake towards her, ineffably beautiful and strange in the blue moonlight, something graceful and delicate in a world from which those things had seemed to her forever gone.

Her robe was soaked and stained and torn. In the night they would not know it for a garment of wealth or privilege. She kept her hood up about her face. When the boat had almost reached the shore she unwrapped the baby, grieving, from the rich clothes of the castle and brought it out to them in a scrap of rag she found in the cabin.

Then she gave Aelis's child to the priestess who stood, tall and grave beside the prow of the boat on the strand. She made her voice quiver and stammer with accents of the farmyard and told them it was her own child and her father would not let her keep her and, oh, would the good servants of sweet Rian shelter and guard her baby all her days? She had been crying then, too, Ariane remembered.

It was not a rare thing, her request. It was one of the ways Rian's Isle and the goddess's Island in the sea received their necessary complement of servants and priests and priestesses through the turning of seasons and years. The two women asked no questions other than of her own health. She had reached out, Ariane remembered, and had taken the child in her thin, tired arms for a last time and had kissed her farewell full upon the mouth, as she had the mother. She told the two priestesses she would be all right.

She had told herself the same thing as she watched the boat going back across the stilled waters of the lake under the one moon and the thin, high, drifting clouds and the emerging glitter of the stars, carrying Aelis's daughter and Bertran's.

Aelis had said nothing to her about a name. Ariane, on that stony shore, had looked up at the blue crescent of the moon and had told the priestesses that the child was to be named, if they found her worthy, for that moon and so for the goddess.

"She lived," Ariane de Carenzu said, twenty-three years after, astride another horse before the cabin where that child and her dead brother had been conceived. The tears had dried on her cheeks during the telling of the tale. "I have kept watch over her all these years, whenever I could, as best I could. She remained on the isle, of course; they usually do. She is beautiful and clever and brave, Bertran. She looks very like her mother, I think. Her name is Rinette. She was to become High Priestess of Rian's Isle one day soon."

"Was?" Bertran's voice was so low, the one word was almost inaudible. His hands were clasped together before him. They had been through the length of the tale. Blaise could see that they were trembling.

"I spoke to her before coming to you. I thought that was proper. I told her who she was and how she had come to Rian's Isle, and I explained some other things as well. I said… that because of who she was she might be more dearly needed now away from the isle, in the world of men and women, but that it was her own choice to make and… that I would ensure that that was so."

"And?" Bertran looked older now, Blaise realized. He wanted to put an arm around the other man, but held back.

"She said that if what I had told her was true, it was obvious that she was indeed more important to Arbonne among the castles than among the sanctuaries. Those were her own words. She is very strong, Bertran. She is… really quite wonderful." Her voice broke a little on the last words.

"I have seen her then," the duke said, his tone holding wonder like a chalice. "I must have seen her so many times and I never saw the resemblance."

"Why should you have? There was nothing you were looking to find."

Bertran shook his head. "It must have been so hard for her, learning of this so suddenly. It must have been terrible."

"It may become so. Not yet, I think," said Ariane. "I suspect, with everything, she is only half understanding what all of it will mean. She does know… " Ariane hesitated, and turned, inexplicably, to Blaise, "she does know, because I told her, that she may possibly be expected to wed one day soon."

And now he understood why she had wanted him to stay. He looked up in the waning of that clear light and met Ariane's dark-eyed gaze. He was remembering many different things suddenly, but one conversation most of all, from a summer night in Tavernel.

It was, in the end, Bertran who looked from one to the other of them and rose first from that cabin doorway at the edge of the forest. "I think," said the duke, "that I am going to ride back now."

"Shall I come?" asked Blaise.

Bertran shook his head. He smiled crookedly, a ghost of his most habitual expression. "I know the way," he said. "That much hasn't changed."

Everything else seemed to have, though, as Blaise stood and watched the duke ride off. Ariane turned in the saddle to watch him as well. Only when Bertran had passed from sight, an unprepossessing figure in the torn and bloodstained garb of a fighting man, did she turn back to Blaise. She still made no movement to dismount.

He said bluntly, "There was a woman who shared her bed with me on Midsummer Eve in Tavernel. She told me she would live her life to change the rules of the marriage game among men and women in our day." He wasn't certain why, but he almost meant the words as a blow.

She took them that way, he saw, and realizing that, all anger and resentment passed from him as if swept by the wind. Ariane said, very quietly, "I can control nothing here, nor do I want to try. I can see, even now, something that might happen. So can you, Blaise. You must know how difficult this is for me. Surely you must. Even with everything else that has happened."

He did know, actually. He seemed to be a wiser man than he had been a year ago. He knew what truth of the heart she was holding out to him as an offering, and he felt, not for the first time, a humbling awareness of her honesty. This was the woman, he thought suddenly, who had freed him from Lucianna and the bitterness he had carried from Portezza.

"Ariane," he said roughly, "you are the reason Arbonne must never be allowed to die."

"There are a world of reasons," she said, but something flashed briefly in the darkness of her eyes.

"And you are the symbol and the heart of them. You are the queen of the Court of Love."

"I thought you regarded that as folly."

"I thought many things here to be folly that have turned out to be more true than anything I knew before." He stopped, and then, because it absolutely needed to be said, added steadily, "Ariane, your husband is the reason we were able to win this battle, whatever we might say about Urté and Bertran and Fulk de Savaric. And Thierry is also the reason we were able to prevent a slaughter of surrendering men."

"I think I know this," she said gravely.

"I cannot tell you how much respect I have for him."

"And I," she murmured. "I told you as much in Tavernel. What are you saying, Blaise?"

He forced himself to meet her level gaze. Her eyes were so dark, deep enough for a man to lose his way in them. "That I am still enough of a man of Gorhaut, and I think I always will be, to have a world of trouble speaking words of love to the wife of such a man."

He saw her lower her head for a moment. "I know this too," she said, looking up at him again. "I also know, to my sorrow, that we are what we are, and so are the times into which we have been born, and those words I spoke at Midsummer to you about freedom of choice are, truly, the only real folly either of us has ever offered to the other. You are about to be king of Gorhaut, Blaise, in the midst of a world turned upside-down. The heiress of Arbonne will be waiting at Talair, even now."