"Together at Carnival? I am aggrieved and affronted that the nights are etched on my heart while you can't even remember. Four, now, my dear. Does that make us a tradition?"

"Would you like to be one?" she asked. His hand had moved upwards, stroking the nape of her neck. He had a gentle touch; he was a gentle man.

"I would like to know you and be your friend for the rest of my life," said Aurelian quietly. His dark head came down and they kissed.

Feeling a physical sense of release, and a genuine comfort on a night when she needed exactly that, Lisseut slid slowly back down on the bed and laced her fingers through his black, thick hair, pulling him down to her. They made love as they had before, three years running on this night… with tenderness and some laughter, and an awareness of shaping a still place together amid the wildness outside and the music below and the wheeling of the summer stars about the axis of the year.

Some time later, her head on his chest, his arm around her again, the two of them listened to a voice singing one of the oldest tunes, Anselme of Cauvas's most tender song. In The Liensenne someone always came back to it on Midsummer Eve:

Softly, not entirely certain why she was asking, Lisseut said, "Aurelian, what do you know about Lucianna Delonghi?"

"Enough to avoid her. It's Lucianna d'Andoria now, actually, since she's remarried, but no one but her husband's family will ever call her that. I would not place any sizable wager on Borsiard d'Andoria's long life or domestic happiness."

"Then why did he marry her? He's a powerful man, isn't he? Why would he invite the Delonghi into Andoria?"

Aurelian laughed quietly. "Why do men and women ever do anything less than rational? Why do the teachings of the metaphysicians of the university not guide us all in our actions? Shall we call it the influence of Rian on hearts and souls? The reason we love music more than rhetoric?"

This wasn't what she wanted to know.

"Is she beautiful, Aurelian?"

"I only saw her once, at a distance."

"And?"

"Remy could describe her better."

"Remy is out bedding someone or getting drunk. You tell me."

There was a short pause. The music of Anselme's sweet song drifted up to them.

"She is as beautiful as obsidian in new snow," said Aurelian slowly. "She glitters like a diamond by candlelight. There is fire in her like a ruby or an emerald. What other jewellery shall I give her? She offers the promise of danger and dark oblivion, the same challenge that war or mountains do, and she is as cruel, I think, as all of these things."

Lisseut swallowed with some difficulty. "You sound like Remy when he's had too much wine," she said finally, trying to manage a tone of irony. She had never heard Aurelian speak like that before. "And all this from a distance?"

"From the far end of a table in Faenna," he agreed calmly. "I would never have dared go nearer, but that was near enough. She is not for having, that one. Were it not an impiety I would say that the dark side of the goddess is in her. She destroys what she is claimed by."

"But still she is claimed."

"There is darkness in all of us, and desires we might prefer to deny by day." He hesitated. "I dream of her sometimes."

Lisseut was silent, unsettled again, sorry now that she had asked. Her confusion of before seemed to have come back in all its jangling discord. They lay together, listening to the music from below, and eventually it was the music that calmed her, as it almost always did. Before it ended they were both asleep. She dreamt, lying in Aurelian's arms, of arrows, though, and heard, in her dream, Rudel Correze's laughter in a garden.

In the morning she would waken with sunlight in the window to find Aurelian gone. Sprawled across the other bed, snoring and sodden, still in his boots and clothes, would be Remy of Orreze. Lisseut would hesitate only a moment, then, offering devout and genuinely grateful thanks to Rian and Corannos both, she would take the basin of water Aurelian had thoughtfully filled for her before he left, and empty it over the sleeping, fair-haired troubadour who'd been her first lover. Then she would flee through the door and down the stairs, leaving his shrieks of outrage behind to awaken all those who yet slumbered in The Liensenne on a bright Midsummer's Day. She would feel much, much better after that.

Every second or third year, in the absence of war or plague, it had been the custom of Guibor IV, count of Arbonne, to spend Midsummer Night in Tavernel at the Carnival, in homage to the goddess and to affirm for his people in the south that he was ever mindful of his duties to them and of the importance of the sea to Arbonne. Once, when young, he had even essayed the Boats and Rings on the river, plucking three garlands before missing the fourth and dousing himself in the river, to emerge with the booming good-natured laughter that was a part of why his country loved him.

On those nights, Signe de Barbentain reflected, lying in a room in the temple of Rian with a small fire to take away the chill that afflicted her now, even in summer, she'd had no concerns about the ancient saying in Tavernel that it was unlucky to lie alone on Midsummer Eve. She had lain with her husband, and the wild sounds outside had seemed part of a fabric of enchantment in the dark.

Tonight, though, she was alone and feeling afraid. Not for herself; her own summons to Rian would come when it came, and was unlikely to lie far off. She had long since come to terms with that. Her fear was for the land, for the dangerous rush of events that seemed to be gathering speed all around them.

New parts to the pattern had been discovered tonight and, starkly awake, looking at the flickering shapes that fire and guttering candle cast on the walls of her room, the countess of Arbonne tried again to deal with these new things. Gorhaut was coming south. There could be no honest denial of that truth any longer. Roban, the chancellor, had flatly predicted it the very same day word of the Treaty of Iersen Bridge had come to Barbentain. And now there was this purposeful, extravagant payment made for the death of Bertran de Talair. He might indeed have died tonight, Signe thought, suppressing a shiver. Had the clouds not come when they did, or had Beatritz not been in Tavernel and the bearded coran, Blaise, not known the arrow and the assassin, and so guessed the presence of syvaren on the head, Bertran could so easily have died, leaving Talair without a proper heir and Arbonne without a man it needed desperately.

And that same Gorhaut coran, Blaise, was a matter unto himself. For the fiftieth time, or the hundredth, Signe tried to weigh risks and gains in this gamble that Beatritz and Bertran had jointly undertaken in trying to bind Galbert de Garsenc's younger son to their cause. Roban had wanted nothing to do with it, had stalked grimly about the perimeter of the council room when the matter was first raised. She couldn't really blame him; Beatritz and Bertran, so unlike each other in most ways, yet shared a confidence in their own judgment and a penchant for taking risks that could be quite unnerving at times.

Blaise de Garsenc wasn't the kind of man she'd been led to expect, either. Rumour had told of a hardened mercenary, with a reputation won in the tournaments and the wars of the six countries over many years. According to Roban, she herself had presented the man with a laurel at the Autumn Fair in Lussan six years past; she didn't remember. It was hard to remember all the young men now. They seemed to remain as young as ever while she grew older all the time.

This man wasn't the grim northern warrior she'd anticipated. He had anger in him, yes, and easy enough to see, but he was clever, and more bitter than anything else, she judged. He had clearly been hurt in Portezza before he came here; there were rumours about that as well. They were probably true. Well, he would not be the first young man whose heart had been left lying on the carpet outside Lucianna Delonghi's bedchamber door, and he was not going to be the last.