A Song for Arbonne

by Guy Gavriel Kay

down the fetid alley, past the point where the Gorhautian had scaled the wall and, farther along, she found an overturned wooden crate. There were always crates in alleyways. Rats scattered in several directions as she stepped carefully up onto it. From there it was just possible to lift herself to the top of the wide wall. She lay flat on the stone, motionless for a long time. Then, when she was sure she’d not been seen or heard, she cautiously lifted her head and looked down. It was an intricate, formal garden, carefully tended. A plane tree grew just inside the wall and its branches offered some concealment for her, which mattered, for Riannon, the blue moon of the goddess, rode free just then of what seemed the last of the cloud cover for a time. Above, through the screen of leaves, Lisseut could see the stars, brilliant in the summer sky. A bird was singing in the branches of the tree. Below her, on a close-cropped grassy expanse, Blaise of Gorhaut stood quietly beside a small, round pool into which a sculpted fountain was splashing water. There were flowers planted around the border of the fountain and more of them laid out in patterns through the ordered space of the garden. Lisseut smelled oranges and lemons, and there was lavender near the southern wall. Behind her rats scrambled in the dank alley. On a small patio near the house a stone table had been laid with meats and cheeses and wine. There were tall white candles burning. A man slouched in a chair by that ta...

Lisseut, flat on the wall, screened by the leaves of the plane tree with a bird now silent in the branches above, heard what she should not have heard and felt her hands beginning to tremble. This was too raw, too profoundly private, and she was sorry now that she had come. She was spying on this garden exactly like one of the evil, envious audrades who spied on the lovers in all the dawnsongs, bent on ruin and malice. The steady, quiet splashing of the fountain was the only sound for a long time. There were usually fountains in the songs, too.

See, just like the songs but...not. So much better

Rudel. I am going to report you as an assassin at sunrise. You had best begin making your own plans.’ The other did not move. ‘There is one thing,’ he said slowly, as if to himself. He hesitated. ‘The factors in all of the Correze branch houses will be sent a letter from me ordering them to receive and conceal you should the need ever arise.’ ‘I will not go to them.’ It was Rudel’s turn to sound amused. ‘That much is out of my control. I can take no responsibility for your pride. But the letter will be written. I take it you are leaving your money with us?’ ‘But of course,’ said Blaise. ‘With whom else should I trust it?’ ‘Good,’ said Rudel Correze. ‘The one thing my father most hates is investors withdrawing their accounts. He would have been deeply unhappy with me.’ ‘I would regret being the cause of such unhappiness.’ Rudel smiled. ‘If I had not seen you, Blaise, I should be an extravagantly pleased man tonight, flushed with my great success. I might even go out and join the Carnival. Instead I am rendered curiously sad and forced to take a night voyage, which never agrees with my digestion. What sort of a friend are you?’ ‘One who is not an enemy, at any rate. Be careful, Rudel.’ ‘And you. That Arimondan will kill you if he can.’ ‘I know. If he can.’ There was a silence. ‘A message for Lucianna?’ ‘None at all. The god guard you, Rudel.’ Blaise took a step forward and the two men clasped hands. For a moment Lisseut thought they would embrace but they did not. She moved ...

She felt her forehead smooth as she realized the truth of what she was saying. These were her reasons; she was discovering them as she spoke. She even smiled.

Stubbornly, Blaise shook his head. ‘I am a coran for hire. Pay me enough and I will serve you in war or peace. Turn me off and I’ll seek other employment.’ ‘Stop mouthing rote words, Blaise de Garsenc. It ill becomes you to pretend you do not understand what is being said.’ Beatritz, tall and implacable, spoke in a voice of grim abjudication. ‘You are the son of the most important man in Gorhaut. The king is a tool in Galbert’s hands, and we all know it. Your family, whatever their inner turmoil, have holdings more powerful than any other in that country, the more so since all the northern lords have been dispossessed by the Treaty. Will you stand before us, before the countess of Arbonne, and claim that the only difference between you and Luth of Baude is that you are better with a sword? Have you been running from your father all these years because you will not oppose him?’ ‘Not oppose him?’ Blaise echoed, shocked into genuine fury. ‘I have spent my life opposing him, at home and then beyond our walls. I hate everything the Treaty represents. I left Gorhaut so as not to live in a country so stripped of its pride. Everyone there knows it. I have made my statement. What else would you have me do? Ride home in fell wrath and declare myself the true king of Gorhaut? And stopped, abashed and appalled by the quality of the silence that followed. By the intent, focused, deeply revealing expressions of the two women and the man by the divan. Blaise swallowed with difficulty; hi...

There came a very quiet tapping at her door. Only one person she could think of would be knocking here this late at night. ‘Come in,’ she said. The fire and the single taper were still burning. By the flickering of their light she saw her last living child open and then close the door behind her, entering the room in a pale night-robe, with a sure tread that belied her blindness. The white owl lifted and flew to one of the bedposts. Signe remembered the first time she’d seen Beatritz after her daughter’s eyes had been sacrificed. It was not a memory she cared to relive. Even knowing the ancient, most holy reasons and the power gained, it was hard for a mother to see her child marred. Beatritz came to stand beside the bed. ‘Did I wake you?’ ‘No. I’m thinking too much to be able to sleep.’ ‘And I. Chasing too many thoughts on Rian’s night.’ Her daughter hesitated. ‘Is there room for me, or will I disturb you? I’m troubled and fearful.’ Signe smiled. ‘Child, there is always room for you beside me.’ She pulled the coverings back and her daughter lay down with her. Signe lifted one arm to enfold her and began to stroke the greying hair, remembering how soft it had been, how dark and shining and soft when Beatritz was a child. There had been two brothers and a sister and a father then. There are only the two of us left, Signe thought, humming a tune she’d almost forgotten. Only the two.

Oh MY! In all these years I have never spared a thought for the 2 unnamed(?) brothers of Beatriz and Aelis! Cue the fan fiction and fan theories.

Signe sighed in the darkness of her room. She knew Bertran had acted properly in what he’d done, that he’d made it easier for her by taking the burden upon himself. She only wished . . . she only wished he didn’t seem to always find himself in situations where doing the proper thing meant so much trouble for all of them. At the moment all she wanted to do was rest. There was sometimes a curious easing of care for her in the nighttime, in the embrace of sleep. It didn’t always come to her easily, but when it did her dreams were almost always benign, comforting. She would be walking in the castle gardens, or with Guibor, young again, in that meadow she had loved beneath the Ancients’ aqueduct near Carenzu, and sometimes the four children would be with them: clever Beatritz with her shining hair, the boys—Guibor eager and adventuresome, Piers watchful, a little apart—and then Aelis trailing behind them through the green, green grass. Aelis, in her mother’s dreams, always seemed older than the others, though she was the youngest child. She would appear in the dreams as she had looked, coming into the flourish of her own late, fierce beauty, in the year before she died.

Ahhh, the boys are Guibor and Piers, death by pandemic

When one’s enemies take counsel together, the proverb ran in Gorhaut, one wants the wings of a bird to fly, or the strength of lions to fight.

And it had been in the next moment, precisely then, she would afterwards remember—the Arimondan’s flung dagger slicing through Blaise’s ear as he twisted away, then the swift, bright flowering of blood—that Lisseut of Vezét realized, with a cold dawning of despair, that her heart was gone from her. It had left without her knowing, like a bird in winter, flying north to a hopelessly wrong destination where no haven or warmth or welcome could even be imagined. ‘Oh, mother,’ she whispered then, softly, to a woman far away among olive groves above a coastal town. No one paid any attention to her. Two men were trying to kill each other in front of them, and one of them had claimed a crown. This was matter for song, whatever happened; it was matter for tavern and castle talk for years to come. Lisseut, her hands gripping each other tightly in her lap, spoke a prayer then to sweet Rian, and watched, even as she felt the flight of her heart from her breast across the bright green grass.

Lisseut of Vezét realized, with a cold dawning of despair, that her heart was gone from her. It had left without her knowing, like a bird in winter, flying north to a hopelessly wrong destination where no haven or warmth or welcome could even be imagined.

On the night he had named himself king of Gorhaut, the night Aubry had burned, Lisseut sang for Blaise of Gorhaut lullabies of childhood, the ones her mother had sung to her so many years ago. Only when she was certain, from the steady rise and fall of his breathing, that he was asleep did she allow herself a last song for her own heart’s easing. It was another very old melody this one, so ancient no one was certain who had written it, or even what dim, half-remembered legend or tale it recounted. It had always seemed to Lisseut to be almost unbearably sad. She had never thought she would feel it applying to her own life. But in Blaise de Garsenc’s room that night, while he slept, she sang it softly for herself, and when she came to the verses at the end, she realized that she was very nearly offering them as a prayer: Thy table set with rarest wine, Choice meats, sweet ripened fruit And candlelight when we dine In Fionvarre. On we two the high stars will shine And the holy moon lend her light. If not here you will be mine In Fionvarre.

It was in his heart, not in the sky, Thaune realized, that the moons were beginning to shine again. The cold of the long night seemed lessened by the warmth of that inner light.