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But when Aelis looked across the water to Talair she smiled, and when she looked back at the castle where she dwelled with her husband she could not suppress a shiver and a fleeting chill.
A fate no different from that of any daughter of any noble house. It had been her mother’s fate, her aunt’s in Malmont to the east across the river; it would be black-haired Ariane’s too, one day—and night—not far off.
It was very dark in the woods. There were sounds all around them: wind in the leaves, the chitter of small animals, the quick, unsettling flap of wings alighting from a branch above. The pines and the oak trees blocked the moon except in the occasional place where a slant of pale silver fell across their path, strangely beautiful, intensifying the blackness as soon as they had moved on.
To the east, not long afterwards, well before they reached the shore, the waning crescent of the blue moon rose out of the sea to balance the silver one setting westward now, changing the light in the sky and on the water and on the rocks and trees of the island they were leaving behind.
Even the birds above the lake Are singing of my love, And even the flowers along the shore Are growing for her sake.
harvest and the torment of my days.
Escoran they named it in Gorhaut—‘daughter of the god’—but they called the blue moon Riannon here, for their goddess.
when you have beaten someone, when you have conquered and occupied them, you must never let them forget the power that you have and the consequences of resistance.
So much longer than I thought I would live.
Midsummer was a time between times, a space in the round of the year where all seemed in suspension, when anything might happen or be allowed.
Until the sun dies and the moons fall, Gorhaut and Arbonne shall not lie easily beside each other.
Only those who sing what they should not,
There was a silence. ‘A message for Lucianna?’ ‘None at all. The god guard you, Rudel.’
Blaise shook his head. ‘He thinks he killed you. I did not disabuse him of the notion.’ After a moment Bertran threw back his head and laughed aloud. ‘So he will sail away to claim whatever fee it was, from whoever paid him. Oh, splendid, Blaise! The embarrassment will be with him a long time.’
‘The dead,’ said Bertran de Talair quietly, ‘can
drive you hard.’
When all the world is dark as night There is, where she dwells, a shining light
What else would you have me do? Ride home in fell wrath and declare myself the true king of Gorhaut?
She wanted the gentler warmth of memories.
Blaise wondered, for the first time, how much that difference mattered in the end.
if only he were listened to more often in this country of hot-blooded men and women with more passion for music than for orderly government.
subterfuge.
‘And am therefore resolved that I will not live through the death of my country as I endured the death of the woman I loved.’
‘We are always free for that. It is the god’s gift and his burden.’
He loved it with a heart that ached like an old man’s fingers in rain, hurting for the Gorhaut of his own vision, a land worthy of the god who had chosen it, and of the honour of men.
His own love, though, was for the older woman, for the grace of the ending day, and it would be until he died.
Their danger, their crippling wound, was Talair and Miraval.
It would be in the place of this vision, she was being told: by that small isle in Lake Dierne, by the arch, the two castles, it would end there.
I should have known. That is where it began.
Promised, that is, after the scourging is done. They are the hammers of the god, the High Elder proclaims. The temples and villages of Arbonne and the depraved, unclean women who inhabit them are the anvils upon which their most holy, cleansing blows must fall.
