Free A Song for Arbonne by Guy Gavriel Kay Page B

with power: ‘One last thing, Blaise of Gorhaut. A lesson for you to learn if you can: anger and hatred have limits that are reached too soon. Rian exacts a price for everything, but love is hers as well, in one of her oldest incarnations.’
    Blaise turned then, stumbling over a root in the close night shadows. He left the wood, feeling moonlight as a blessing. He crossed the plateau and remembered, somehow, to untie Maffour’s rope and loop it about himself. Finding handholds in the rock face, he descended the cliff to the sea. The skiff was still there, waiting some distance away from shore. They saw him by the light of the high, pale moon. He was going to swim out, almost prepared to welcome the cold shock of the water again, but then he saw them rowing back for him and he waited. They came in to the edge of the rocks and Blaise stepped into the boat helped by Maffour and Giresse. He saw that Evrard of Lussan was still unconscious, slumped at the back of the skiff. Vanne was sitting up, though, at the front. He looked a little dazed. Blaise was not surprised.
    ‘They have kept Luth,’ he said briefly as they looked at him. ‘One man for one man. But they will do him no harm.I will tell you more on land, but in Corannos’s name, let’s go. I need a drink very badly, and we’ve a long way to row.’
    He stepped over to his own bench and unwrapped the rope from his body. Maffour came and sat beside him again. They took their oars, and with no other words spoken, backed quietly out of the inlet Hirnan had found and turned the skiff towards land, towards Arbonne, rowing steadily in the calm, still night.
    To the east, not long afterwards, well before they reached the shore, the waning crescent of the blue moon rose out of the sea to balance the silver one setting westward now, changing the light in the sky and on the water and on the rocks and trees of the island they were leaving behind.

CHAPTER II
    S ome mornings, as today, she woke feeling amazingly young, happy to be alive to see the spring return. It wasn’t altogether a good thing, this brief illusion of youth and vitality, for its passage—and it always passed—made her too achingly aware that she was lying alone in the wide bed, She and Guibor had shared a room and a bed after the older fashion until the very end, a little over a year ago. Arbonne had observed the yearfast for its count and the ceremonies of remembrance scarcely a month past.
    A year wasn’t very long at all, really. Not nearly enough time to remember without pain private laughter or public grace, the sound of a voice, resonance of a tread, the keen engagement of a questioning mind or the well-known signs of kindled passion that could spark and court her own.
    A passion that had lasted to the end, she thought, lying in bed alone, letting the morning come to her slowly. Even with all their children long since grown or dead, with an entirely new generation of courtiers arising in Barbentain, and younger dukes and barons taking power in strongholds once ruled by the friends—and enemies—of their own youth and prime. With new leaders of the city-states of Portezza, a young, reckless-sounding king in Gorhaut, and an unpredictable one as well, though not young, in Valensa far in the north. All was changing in the world, she thought: the players on the board, the shape of the board itself. Even the rules of the game she and Guibor had played together against them all for so long.
    There had been mornings in the year gone by when she had awakened feeling ancient and bone cold, wondering if she had not outlived her time, if she should have died with the husband she’d loved, before the world began to change around her.
    Which was weak and unworthy. She knew that, even on the mornings when those chill thoughts came, and she knew it more clearly now, with the birds outside her window singing to welcome the spring back to Arbonne. Change and transience were built into the way Corannos and Rian had