The women made their own warding signs at the hint that she was seeking magic but generously welcomed her into their company for the journey south. Rosala rode through the mountains in a jouncing, lurching wagon with two thievish grey monkeys, a talking bird from the northern swamplands, an adder in a basket and a garrulous animal-trainer, whose teeth were bizarrely blue. Poison, he explained, from the snake before it was defanged. He fed it mice and small lizards that he caught. Every time the wagon hit a rut in the road, and there were a great many as they went through the pass, Rosala looked anxiously to the basket, to make sure the clasp still held. The bear and the mountain cat, thankfully, rode in their own wagon just behind them. She talked as little as she could, to avoid having to sustain an accent that would not give her away. It was relatively easy with Othon in the wagon: he was one of those men who would have pined away had he lost the use of his voice. He was kind to her, though, bringing soups and bread back from the communal fire at the dinner hour. She grew accustomed to the drone of his voice and the endlessly reiterated stories of past travels during the three slow days it took them to cross from Gorhaut over the summit of the pass and come down into Arbonne. It began to seem to her that she had always been with these people, riding in this wagon, that Garsenc Castle was the dream, something from another woman's life.
On the fourth morning, Rosala lifted the flap of the wagon and stepped outside just as the sun was rising over the hills east of them. She looked south over a landscape entirely strange to her and saw the river, bright blue in the morning light, flowing swiftly beside the road. In the distance, glittering, scarcely visible save for that shimmer in the sun, she saw towers.
"That'll be Barbentain," said Othon sagely from behind her. She looked over her shoulder and managed a weak smile. He scratched himself in several indelicate places, stretched and grunted. "Yon's the finest castle I've ever been to in all my days. We'll be there tonight, I reckon. There was a count there, not long ago—mayhap you heard of him—Guibor Third, or Fourth he may have been. Huge man, tall as a tree, fierce in war… and in love, as they all are down here." He chuckled lewdly, showing the blue teeth. "Any-hap, he was the finest figure of a man I ever saw in my days. His widow rules now. Don't know much about her. They say she used to be pretty but now she's old." Othon yawned and then spat into the grass. "We all get old," he pronounced and strolled away, scratching, to attend to his morning functions in the bush. One of the monkeys followed him.
Rosala placed a hand over her belly and looked along the bright, sinuous line of the river away to the south. There were cypresses on the ridges above them, and a species of pine she'd not encountered before. On the terraced slopes west of the road were the fabled olive trees of Arbonne.
She gazed at them for a moment, then turned back to look again at the far, shimmering turrets of the castle, where Guibor TV's widow ruled now. Marry the bitch, her husband had advised Ademar of Gorhaut not so long ago. Rosala's father had said once that the countess of Arbonne was the fairest woman in the world in her day. One thing, at least, in which he appeared to agree with Othon the animal-trainer.
Rosala didn't need her to be beautiful. Only kind, and with a certain kind of courage that she knew her presence would put greatly to the test. She was too versed in the nature of things not to know what her arrival in Barbentain would mean, carrying a possible heir to Garsenc—or a successor to the High Elder of the god in Gorhaut. She honestly didn't see what choice she'd had, though, unless it was to surrender the child, and that was no choice at all.
Later in the day, with the sun high in a bright, clear autumn sky, she began feeling the first pains. She hid them as best she could, but eventually even Othon noticed and his endless flow of words slowly dried up. He sent for the women and they comforted her as best they could, but they had a long way to go yet to Lussan. It was, in fact, well past nightfall by the time they set her down at the temple of Rian.
It was a healthy, well-made baby boy, Signe thought, surprised at the pleasure she felt holding him. Under all the circumstances, she should have been feeling nothing but the deepest concern for her own people. This child and his mother represented danger in its purest form, they could easily be Gorhaut's excuse for war. In the room outside, Roban was pacing like a father desperate for an heir, but Signe knew the source of his disquiet was entirely otherwise. He was almost certainly hoping Rosala de Garsenc's child would be a girl. For a girl, the corans of Gorhaut were far less likely to be unleashed upon them.
No such luck, it seemed. Rian and Corannos both appeared to have a hand in the events unfolding here, and when the god and the goddess worked together, the old saying went, men and women could only kneel and bow their heads. Signe, bowing her head, smiled down upon the child, swaddled in aristocratic blue, and carried him to his mother. Rosala de Garsenc was almost bone-white in the candlelight, and her blue eyes were enormous in her drawn face, but the expression in those eyes was as resolute and unafraid now as it had been all night. Signe admired her greatly. She had heard the story in the dark of night, told in bursts through the birthing pains: the reason for this flight, the plea for sanctuary.
It was not a request she was capable of refusing; even Roban, to his credit, had brought the woman across to Barbentain. He would probably deny it in the morning, but Signe was almost certain her chancellor, too, had been moved by Rosala's story. It was more than pragmatism that had caused him to bring the woman to the castle. She was, she realized, proud of him.
She was also aware that this sympathy, this yielding to the human impulse, might well destroy them all. Rosala, quite evidently, knew this too. Through the long night of labour, talking almost incoherently through her pain, the woman had nonetheless revealed a formidable intelligence. Her courage, too, was obvious. One would need courage and something more to stand up to Galbert de Garsenc in the way this woman had.
"Your child is here, my lady," Signe said softly by the bed, the formal words. "Will it please his mother to give him his name?"
"Cadar," said Rosala, lifting her voice to let the first speaking ring clearly in the world he had entered. "His name is Cadar de Savaric." She lifted her arms and Signe gave her the child.
There was more defiance here, the countess knew, to the point of provocation. She was glad Roban had not heard this; the chancellor had had enough stress for one day. She felt old and tired herself, weighted with the night and the years of her living. The time of music and laughter here in Barbentain seemed infinitely long ago, a dream, a troubadour's fantasy, not really part of her own history.
"He has a father," she felt obliged to say. "You are choosing to cut him off from that? What if his father wants to accept him, despite everything, to offer his protection? Will this name not be a bar to that?"
The woman was very tired, it was unfair to be taxing her in this way, but it was necessary, before the name went forth from this room. Rosala looked up with those clear blue northern eyes and said, "If his father chooses to come for him and shelter him I will think on this again." There was an intonation there, a stress on one word that stirred within Signe a new disquiet, like a note of music almost but not quite audible, sensed if not really heard.
Rosala said, "He will need a man and a woman to stand for him before the god—and the goddess, too, if you have such a ritual in Arbonne."