Free A Song for Arbonne by Guy Gavriel Kay

could have done any of this had we not permitted it? Will you deny feeling the awareness of this wood? Do you actually believe you moved unknown, unseen?’
    Blaise swallowed with difficulty. His levelled sword suddenly seemed a hapless, even a ridiculous thing. Slowly he lowered it.
    ‘Why?’ he asked. ‘Why, then?’
    Her laughter came again, deep and low. ‘Would you know my reasons, Northerner? You would understand the goddess on her own Island?’
    My reasons
.
    ‘You are the High Priestess, then,’ he said, shifting his feet, feeling the earth’s deep pulsing still. She said nothing. He swallowed again. ‘I would only know where my man has gone. Why you have taken him.’
    ‘One for one,’ she said quietly. ‘You were not consecrated to this place, any of you. You came here to take a man who was. We have allowed this for reasons of our own, but Rian exacts a price. Always. Learn that, Northerner. Know it as truth for so long as you are in Arbonne.’
    Rian exacts a price
. Luth. Poor, frightened, bumbling Luth. Blaise stared into the darkness, wishing he could see this woman, struggling to find words of some kind that might save the man they’d lost.
    And then, as if his very thoughts were open to her, as if she and the forest knew them intimately, the woman lifted one hand, and an instant later a torch blazed in her grasp, illuminating their small space within the woods. He had not seen or heard her striking flint.
    He did hear her laugh again, and then, looking at the tall, proud form, at the fine-boned, aristocratic features before him, Blaise realized, with a shiver he could not control, that her eyes were gone. She was blind. There was a white owl, a freak of nature, resting on her shoulder, gazing at Blaise with unblinking eyes.
    Not really certain why he was doing so, but suddenly aware that he had now entered a realm for which he was terribly ill equipped, Blaise sheathed his sword. Her laughter subsided; she smiled.
    ‘Well done,’ Rian’s High Priestess said softly. ‘I am pleased to see you are not a fool.’
    ‘To see?’ Blaise said, and instantly regretted it.
    She was undisturbed. The huge white owl did not move. ‘My eyes were a price for access to a great deal more. I can see you very well without them, Blaise of Gorhaut. It was you who needed light, not I. I know the scar that curves along your ribs and the colour of your hair, both now and on the winter night you were born and your mother died. I know how your heart is beating, and why you came to Arbonne, and where you were before. I know your lineage and your history, much of your pain, all your wars, your loves, the last time you made love.’
    It was a bluff, Blaise thought fiercely.
All
the clergy did this sort of thing, even Corannos’s priests at home. All of them sought control with such arcane incantations.
    ‘That last, then,’ he dared say, even here, his voice rough. ‘Tell me that last.’
    She did not hesitate. ‘Three months ago. Your brother’s wife, in the ancient home of your family. Late at night, your own bed. You left before dawn on the journey that has brought you to Rian.’
    Blaise heard himself make a queer grunting sound as if he’d been punched. He could not help himself. He felt suddenly dizzy, blood rushing from his head as if in flight from the inexorable precision of what he had just heard.
    ‘Shall I go on?’ she asked, smiling thinly, the illuminating torch held up for him to see her. There was a new note in her voice, a kind of pitiless pleasure in her power. ‘You do not love her. You only hate your brother and your father. Your mother for dying. Yourself a little, perhaps. Would you hear more? Shall I tell your future for you now, like an old crone at the Autumn Fair?’
    She was not old. She was tall and handsome, if no longer young, with grey in her dark hair. She knew things no one on earth should ever have known.
    ‘No!’ Blaise managed to say, forcing the word out. ‘Do not!’
    He