The duke saw him looking at the flask and lifted it. "There's a little left," he said.
"My father is dead," said Blaise. He hadn't expected to say that. "Thierry's archers."
Bertran's expressive face grew still. "There isn't enough seguignac for that, Blaise. Not nearly enough for the needs of this day, but sit down, sit with me."
Blaise walked across the grass and sat down beside the duke in the doorway. He took the offered flask and drank. The clean fire ran through him. He drank again, feeling the warmth, and handed back the flask.
"It is over?" Bertran asked.
Blaise nodded. "They will all have surrendered by now."
Bertran looked at him, his blue eyes ringed by dark circles. "You were trying to stop me there at the end, weren't you. I heard you calling my name."
Blaise nodded again.
"I don't think I would have stopped. I don't think I could have, if Thierry hadn't blown the horns."
"I know. I understand."
"I'm not very proud of that." Bertran took another short pull at the flask.
"This isn't a time to be judging yourself. Women were burned. And the two troubadours…»
Bertran closed his eyes and Blaise fell silent. The duke looked up again after a moment and handed back the flask. Blaise cradled it, not drinking. The seguignac was already making him light-headed.
"I have a question for you," said Bertran de Talair.
"Yes?"
"Do you have any great objection if I ask your brother's wife to marry me? If Rosala will have me, I would like to raise Cadar as my own, as heir to Talair."
A remarkable sensation of warmth began to spread through Blaise, and he knew it wasn't coming from the seguignac this time. He looked over at Bertran and smiled for what was surely the first time in that long day. "I have no say at all in what Rosala does, but nothing I can imagine would please me more."
"Really? Do you think she will accept?" Bertran's tone was suddenly diffident.
Blaise laughed aloud. It was a strange sound in that space at the edge of the woods. "You are asking me for guidance on a woman's thoughts?"
For a moment Bertran was still, and then he too laughed, more softly. After that there was silence again for a time.
"My father," said Blaise finally, needing to say it, "my father told me that Ademar was only his tool for destroying Rian in Arbonne. That his other goal all these years had been to place me on the throne of Gorhaut."
Bertran was still again, in that manner he had of careful, focused gravity. "That does not surprise me," he said.
Blaise sighed and looked down at the flask in his hands. "I would rather not accept it as true."
"I can see that. Don't tell anyone else then. This need only be ours."
"Which doesn't make it less true, that he was shaping even this."
Bertran shrugged. "Partly, not entirely. He couldn't have guessed what would happen to you in Arbonne."
"He admitted that, actually."
"You see? Blaise, we are shaped by so many different things it frightens me sometimes." Bertran hesitated. "This was the cabin where I used to meet Aelis. Where my son was conceived."
It was Blaise's turn to grow still. He understood, and was deeply moved by the awareness, that Bertran was offering this to him as a truth of the heart in exchange for his own.
"I'm sorry," Blaise said. "I didn't set out to follow you, I just saw your tracks. Shall I go?"
Bertran shook his head. "You might give me that, though, if you aren't drinking." Blaise handed over the flask. Bertran lifted it, the metal glinting in the light, and finished the last of the seguignac. "I don't think," he said, "that I can possibly deal with anything more today than I already have."
A moment later they heard the sound of another horse approaching and looked up to see Ariane riding alone towards them through the winter grass.
She came up to where they were sitting together in the doorway of the cabin. She did not move to dismount. They could see that she had been weeping though she was not doing so now. She took a ragged breath and let it slowly out.
"I swore an oath to my cousin Aelis the night she died," she said without greeting, without preamble. Blaise saw that she was controlling herself only with a great effort; he felt Bertran grow rigid at his side. "An oath from which I have been released by Urté's death today."
She was looking at the duke, Blaise saw, and so he made to rise and said again, "I should leave. This is not something I have a right to—"
"No," said Ariane, her voice bloodless, her exquisite features nearly white. "This does concern you, as it happens." Even as she was speaking, Bertran laid a hand on Blaise's knee to keep him from standing. "Stay with me," said the duke.
And so he stayed, he sat in a charcoal-burner's cabin doorway at the cold end of a day of death with wind blowing past them, pushing Ariane's black hair back from her face, stirring the tall grass behind her, and he heard her say, in that voice from which all resonance seemed to have bled away, leaving only the flat assertion of the words: "There is something I can now tell you about the night Aelis died. There was a reason why she came early to her time, Bertran." Another breath, the vivid evidence of a struggle for self-control. Ariane said, "When Urté took your son from her arms and left the room with the priestess following him, trying to reclaim the boy, I was left alone in the birthing room with Aelis. And a few moments later we… realized she was carrying a second child." Beside Blaise, Bertan make a convulsive gesture with his hands. The flask fell on the grass. Bertran tried awkwardly to stand. His strength seemed to have left him though; he remained sitting in the doorway looking up at the woman on the horse.
Ariane said, "I delivered your daughter into the world, Bertran. And then… then Aelis made me swear an oath to her, and we both knew she was dying." She was weeping again now, tears bright as crystal on her cheeks.
"Tell me," said Bertran. "Ariane, tell me what happened."
She had been weeping then, too, amid the terrors of that room. She had been thirteen years old, and had heard Aelis, dying, tell her husband that the boy child she was holding was Bertran de Talair's. Ariane had cowered in a corner of the room watching Urté's face grow blood-dark with a rage such as she had never ever seen in her life. She saw him seize the baby from its mother's arms where the priestess had gently laid it. Outside the walls of Miraval a winter storm had been howling, rain lashing the castle, thunder like an angry spirit overhead.
The duke and the priestess had rushed from the room; where, Ariane did not know. She was certain he was about to kill the child, though. Aelis had been sure of the same thing.
"Oh, my dear," her cousin had said, lying amid blood on her bed, "what is it I have done?" Ariane, distraught with fear and grief, had clutched her hand, unable to think of a single thing to say. Wanting only to be far away from that room, from that terrible castle.
And then, a moment later, Aelis had said something else, in a different tone. "Oh, Rian," she had said. And, "Cousin, in the goddess's name, I think there is another child in me."
There had been. A small babe, though larger than the first it seemed to Ariane. And this one was a girl, with her mother's dark hair and long limbs, and a strong voice when she raised her first cry amid the storms of the world she had entered.
It was Ariane who took her from Aelis's womb. Ariane who bit through the cord and wrapped the infant in the warm cloths that had been readied by the fire. Ariane who gave her, with trembling hands, to her mother. No one else had been in the room. No one else had heard that second cry.