"No, no, no, not necessarily." He chuckles now, all benign good humour for the watching eyes of those inside the forecourt. "Though we need another Elder in our family at least as much as we need an heir in this castle. Ranald's brother" — he never speaks Blaise's name—"was to have followed me to the god. A great deal of our future depended upon that. His refusal has marred my planning, put me in a difficult position, but if you present me with a boy matters may yet be remedied. I will, of course, delay final consecration for a time, to judge how best to make use of the child—here at Garsenc or in the god's house. There will be many matters to be considered, but I daresay you will help me by having other children, dear daughter-in-law. And if you do not—seeing as it did take some time to conceive this one—why then I imagine Ranald could find a second wife who will. I am not greatly concerned on that score. And I must confess, I am looking forward to attending to a grandson's education and upbringing personally. I pray you, do not disappoint me, lady Rosala. Bear a strong boy child for me to take back to Corannos."
She can say nothing at all. She seems to have lost the power of speech. She can scarcely stand. She feels suddenly exposed, naked in this place to the indifferent or mildly curious scrutiny of her household corans and the serfs of the estate.
"You really ought to go in now," says Galbert kindly. "You do not look well at all. You ought to be in your bed, my child. I would escort you there myself but I am afraid I have no time to linger for such domestic intimacies. The press of affairs demands my attention back at court. I do trust you have taken my meaning, though, and I will not have to come again?"
He turns, not waiting for any reply, lifting one hand to her that the corans might note his salute; it is the hand that holds his whip, though. That will not be an accident; nothing with this man is an accident. She sees that he is smiling as he rides away.
Inside the castle a short time later, alone in her suite of rooms, white-knuckled hands gripping each other, Rosala de Garsenc realizes, without knowing the actual moment of making her decision, that she is going to leave.
Galbert made a mistake, she thinks. He never meant to tell her about these plans, he must have known how she would feel about them; she had angered him though, revealed an awareness of his thoughts, and he replied rashly, to frighten and wound her, to have the final word.
She doesn't know how she is going to do it, she only knows she will not stay and surrender her child to that man. I am at war now, she thinks, realizing that her only possible advantage is that she knows it and Galbert might not. Inside her, as if in response, the baby kicks hard against her ribs for the first time that morning.
"Hush," she whispers. "Hush, my love. It will not happen. Fear no harm, for none shall find you. Wherever in the world your father is, whether he ever comes to shelter you or no, I will guard you, little one. I swear it upon my life, and yours."
Blaise was thinking of the child as the men of Talair rode north through the cool breezes of autumn in Arbonne: of Aelis de Miraval's son, and Bertran's. Since Ariane had told him the tale that Midsummer night three months ago, he had thought about it more often than he would have expected to, unable not to gaze curiously at such times at the man his own father had paid a quarter of a million in gold to have killed.
A tragedy had unfolded here some twenty-three years ago, and the effects of it were still rippling through Arbonne today. He remembered Ariane's quiet, measured voice telling him the tale as dawn broke over the littered streets and alleys of Tavernel.
"As I told you just now," she had said, "discretion is everything in love. My cousin Aelis had none, though she was very young, and that might be considered an excuse. There was something uncontrolled in her, something too fierce. Hatred and love drove her hard, and she was not a woman to accept her fate, or work within walls built to house her."
"Neither are you," Blaise remembered saying. "What was the difference?"
She had smiled at that, a little sadly, and had not answered for a time.
"The difference, I suppose, is that I saw what she did, and what followed upon it. Aelis is the difference in my own life. She told her husband, you see. She hoarded the truth for a last, bitter swordstroke—with its own slow, killing poison, if you will. When the priestess who had come to her said she was not going to live they brought Urté to her confinement bed. He was sorrowful, I think. I have always thought he was genuinely in sorrow, though perhaps more for the loss of the power she offered him than anything else. Aelis had no softness in her though, she was all pride and recklessness, even on her deathbed. She pushed herself up in the bed and she told Urté the child was Bertran de Talair's."
"How do you know this?"
"I was there," Ariane had said. "As I say, that moment altered my own life, shaped what I think I have become. Those words she spoke to Urté changed our world, you know. We would live in a differently ordered country had Aelis not taken her vengeance."
"Vengeance for what?" Blaise had asked, though he was beginning, slowly, to understand.
"For not being loved," Ariane had said simply. "For being valued at too much less than she was. For being exiled to the dank, grim fastness of Miraval from the lights and laughter of her father's court."
He had thought it might be that. Once he would have scorned such a thing as beneath contempt, another woman's vanity marring the unfolding of the world. It had surprised him a little that he didn't still see it that way; at least that night in Tavernel, with Ariane de Carenzu in his arms he didn't. It had occurred to him then, with a shock he had tried to mask, that this new pattern of thought might be his own deepest rebellion against his father.
"I can guess what you are thinking," Ariane had said.
"No, I don't think you can," he had replied without elaborating. "What did Urté do?" he'd asked, pushing his own family affairs towards the back of his mind. There had been a sadness in Blaise that night, hearing the old tale. The question was a formality. He was sure he knew what En Urté de Miraval had done.
Ariane's answer had surprised him, though. "No one knows for certain. And that is the heart of Bertran's tragedy, Blaise. There was a son born before Aelis died. I watched the priestess bring him into the world. I heard him cry. Then Urté, who had been waiting, took him away, and not Aelis nor the priestess, and certainly not I at thirteen years of age, had the power to stop him within his own walls. I remember how his face changed when she told him who the father was; that I will never forget. And I remember him bending down over her, as she lay there, torn and dying, and whispering something into her ear that I could not hear. Then he left the room with Bertran's child crying in his arms."
"And killed it."
She shook her head. "As I say, no one knows. It is likely, probable, knowing Urté, knowing how such a child would have been heir to so much… to Barbentain, and so to Arbonne itself, as Aelis's child. It is likely, but we do not know. Bertran doesn't know. Not with certainty. If the child lived, if it lives now, only Urté de Miraval knows where it is."
Blaise had seen it clearly then, the harsh, ugly shape of Bertran's pain. "And so Urté could not be killed all these years—cannot be killed now—because any possibility of finding the truth or the child will die with him."
Ariane had looked up at him in the muted grey light of the room and nodded her head in silence. Blaise had tried to imagine what it would have been like to be thirteen years old and to have lived through such a night, to have it lying, like a weight of stones, in your own past.