It was, in the end, Bertran who looked from one to the other of them and rose first from that cabin doorway at the edge of the forest. "I think," said the duke, "that I am going to ride back now."
"Shall I come?" asked Blaise.
Bertran shook his head. He smiled crookedly, a ghost of his most habitual expression. "I know the way," he said. "That much hasn't changed."
Everything else seemed to have, though, as Blaise stood and watched the duke ride off. Ariane turned in the saddle to watch him as well. Only when Bertran had passed from sight, an unprepossessing figure in the torn and bloodstained garb of a fighting man, did she turn back to Blaise. She still made no movement to dismount.
He said bluntly, "There was a woman who shared her bed with me on Midsummer Eve in Tavernel. She told me she would live her life to change the rules of the marriage game among men and women in our day." He wasn't certain why, but he almost meant the words as a blow.
She took them that way, he saw, and realizing that, all anger and resentment passed from him as if swept by the wind. Ariane said, very quietly, "I can control nothing here, nor do I want to try. I can see, even now, something that might happen. So can you, Blaise. You must know how difficult this is for me. Surely you must. Even with everything else that has happened."
He did know, actually. He seemed to be a wiser man than he had been a year ago. He knew what truth of the heart she was holding out to him as an offering, and he felt, not for the first time, a humbling awareness of her honesty. This was the woman, he thought suddenly, who had freed him from Lucianna and the bitterness he had carried from Portezza.
"Ariane," he said roughly, "you are the reason Arbonne must never be allowed to die."
"There are a world of reasons," she said, but something flashed briefly in the darkness of her eyes.
"And you are the symbol and the heart of them. You are the queen of the Court of Love."
"I thought you regarded that as folly."
"I thought many things here to be folly that have turned out to be more true than anything I knew before." He stopped, and then, because it absolutely needed to be said, added steadily, "Ariane, your husband is the reason we were able to win this battle, whatever we might say about Urté and Bertran and Fulk de Savaric. And Thierry is also the reason we were able to prevent a slaughter of surrendering men."
"I think I know this," she said gravely.
"I cannot tell you how much respect I have for him."
"And I," she murmured. "I told you as much in Tavernel. What are you saying, Blaise?"
He forced himself to meet her level gaze. Her eyes were so dark, deep enough for a man to lose his way in them. "That I am still enough of a man of Gorhaut, and I think I always will be, to have a world of trouble speaking words of love to the wife of such a man."
He saw her lower her head for a moment. "I know this too," she said, looking up at him again. "I also know, to my sorrow, that we are what we are, and so are the times into which we have been born, and those words I spoke at Midsummer to you about freedom of choice are, truly, the only real folly either of us has ever offered to the other. You are about to be king of Gorhaut, Blaise, in the midst of a world turned upside-down. The heiress of Arbonne will be waiting at Talair, even now."
"And you think I must take her? To begin the righting of the world?"
For the first time Ariane showed a flash of her old authority. "I told you that I have no control over anything here. It is too soon, in any case. I do think—since you ask—that any man who shares his life with that one will be blessed beyond deserving all his days. Even you, Blaise."
He had seen her, of course, twice. Rinette. Had exchanged hard, haughty words by the lake in spring after he'd killed six corans of Miraval. We have been waiting for you, she'd said to him, self-possessed beyond her years, and he had feared those words. Perhaps, he thought now, perhaps they had meant something other than what either of them had understood or guessed that spring day. Perhaps the goddess truly did work in ways men and women could not comprehend. He thought suddenly of the red arrow that had killed Ademar. He still had no idea—and was trying not to dwell upon the thought—how that arrow had come straight down from a clear sky.
He said, looking up at Ariane, "I will see you? You will not leave my life?"
She smiled then. Said formally, "The king of Gorhaut will always be welcome in Carenzu."
She was guiding them back together to solid ground. Her gifts had always been generous, and this not the least of them. He tried to match her tone. "And Carenzu's lord and lady, wherever I am."
There was a short silence. She bit her lip. "There were other words that were part of that Midsummer Night. A song sung in the tavern where we met. I wonder if you remember the ending of it?"
He shook his head. Lisseut of Vezét had sung that song, he remembered, but the words were lost to him. Ariane smiled then, with tenderness and sadness, and a returning hint of the wise, worldly awareness that had always seemed to be hers. "Let me ride back alone, Blaise. If you don't mind. I don't think I'll be by myself very much in the next little while."
He nodded his head. What else could he have done? Bring her down into his arms in the fading light? Not in this world, he thought. She touched a finger to her lips, still with that same smile, and turned away. She was as beautiful as any woman he had ever known. She would have offered so much comfort, he knew. Comfort and passion and wisdom. Offered, and taken whatever he had to give in return, had he but asked. His heart full, Blaise watched her ride slowly away from him at sunset through the tall grass. He was thinking of her at thirteen, with a new-born child in her arms.
That child had grown into the woman it seemed the world and his own growing understanding of it might have him wed. Nothing would or could be done swiftly, and indeed it might never be done at all; there were so many layers of complexity to this world he had entered now. She was waiting in Talair, Ariane had said. He let his mind move forward towards such a meeting. Only his thoughts, though: Blaise remained where he was for a long time, sitting quietly in the doorway as the sun slid down in the west and the colours of sunset gradually suffused the fields and the bare vineyards and the trees, and fell gently, like a late benediction, on that small cabin by the forest.
Blaise looked back once through the open doorway before he finally left, and he saw how that muted crimson light slanted through the western window to fall upon the small, neat bed against the wall. He stood there for a moment, motionless, and then he gently closed the door, that the wind and rain might not enter in after these years.
It was dusk, the first faint stars shining in the east, when he rode back towards Talair. And because it was so nearly dark and he wasn't really thinking about his path—his thoughts ahead of him and far behind—he rode straight past the woman standing quietly beside her horse in shadow under the elms on the far side of the arch.
Lisseut had meant to call out to him, but in the moment he actually appeared and went by she found that her voice would not obey her. She could not say his name. She had seen the duke ride past earlier, and then Ariane de Carenzu, and she had remained out of sight beneath the trees, holding her thoughts close to her as the sun went down and the shadows grew deeper beneath the looming arch.
Her thoughts. No comfort there at all. The man she had followed, as she had followed him once before, was the king of Gorhaut, or would be before many days had passed. He was already wearing the cloak of royalty. She had seen it from the isle.