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Blaise had accepted the assignment and arranged to post Hirnan outside without so much as a word of comment or a flicker of expression on his face. The truth was, he liked Mallin de Baude and would have thought less of him had the baron been oblivious or indifferent to the nuances that had been shaped since de Talair's arrival in their midst, not long after Evrard had departed again.
Remarkably enough, amusingly even, everyone in Castle Baude seemed to have been happy in the aftermath of the raid on Rian's Island. In part because virtually no one knew there had been a raid. As far as the folk of the castle and the countryside around were concerned, all they knew—all they needed to know, Mallin had stressed repeatedly to Blaise and the corans—was that Evrard of Lussan had reconsidered his position and had returned to the castle, escorted, by pre-arrangement, by a group of Mallin's best men and the northern mercenary who was leading and training them that season.
Hirnan and Maffour, who apparently knew Luth's grandmother, had been given the task of conveying to her what had happened to the hapless coran. They returned with Maffour gri
In the meantime, Soresina's public reception of the prodigal poet had been almost touching in its emotion. "There's an actress in that one," Maffour had whispered drily to Blaise as they stood to one side of the castle forecourt and watched the young baroness kneel and then rise to salute the troubadour with a kiss on each cheek and a third one on the lips.
"There is in all of them," Blaise had replied out of the side of his mouth. Nonetheless, he too had been feeling rather pleased that morning, a sensation that continued when it became clear that although Evrard was not going to linger in Baude Castle—no one really wanted him to—he seemed to have accepted his abduction with a good humour that matched Mallin's own.
The poet offered one quickly-fashioned verse with an elaborately strung-together set of images about emerging from a dark cave, drawn upwards by a glow of light that turned out to be the radiance of Soresina de Baude. He used another name for her, of course, but the same one as it had been all along. Everyone knew who the woman was. Everyone was happy.
The troubadour left Baude at the end of a week with a jingling purse, an assuaged self-esteem and a more than slightly enhanced reputation. No one in Arbo
The corans of Baude had been making wagers amongst each other all week—wagers never likely to be settled one way or another—as to just how far Soresina's contrition had gone, or rather, how far it had allowed the poet to go. Blaise, scrutinizing the woman and the man narrowly on the morning of Evrard's departure, had been quite certain that nothing untoward had happened, but this was not the sort of thing he wagered upon or talked about, and he kept his peace. He did accept an additional purse from Mallin over and above his wages that month; the baron was so caught up in his new style of noble largess that Blaise actually spent part of a morning doing calculations and then musing on how long Mallin was going to be able to sustain this sort of thing. Rank and position in the hierarchy of nobility didn't come cheaply, in Arbo
And then, about ten days after Evrard's departure, one of the more immediate implications had arrived, preceded by an envoy with a message that had thrown Baude Castle into a chaos of preparation.
At the top of the dark stairway Blaise shifted his seat on the stone bench. It would be nice, he thought briefly, to have a beaker of wine up here; not that he'd ever really have allowed himself such an indulgence. He knew at least two men who had died, drunken and asleep, when they should have been on watch. He had, as it happened, killed one of the two himself.
It was silent in the castle; he felt very much alone, and a long way from home. An unusual feeling, that one: home hadn't meant much to him for a long time. People still did, though, sometimes, and there was no one here who was really a friend yet, or likely to become one in the time he was allowing himself at Castle Baude. He wondered where Rudel was tonight, what country, what part of the world. Thinking of his friend led him back to the cities of Portezza, and so, inevitably perhaps in the silence of night outside a woman's rooms, to memories of Lucia
And that thought, not a new one for him this year, would take his memories straight home if he let them, to his brother and his brother's wife, and the last time—as the High Priestess of Rian had somehow known—he had lain with a woman in love. Or, not love. The priestess had known that too, unca
Blaise wondered if he himself really understood the events of that short, hopeless attempt to return home four months ago. It had been pure impulse that had led him back, or so he'd thought at the time, bidding farewell to Rudel at the Gotzland Pass to go back to Gorhaut and his family home for the first time in almost a year. What was a country, what was a home? He looked out through the narrow archer's window. The blue moon was high, almost full. Escoran they named it in Gorhaut—"daughter of the god" — but they called the blue moon Ria
Pale Vido
He couldn't see Hirnan down below, of course, but the moonlight showed the hills in the distance, and the fields where the lavender would soon flower, and the winding road that climbed from them up to the castle. Lavender would make him think of Lucia