Free A Song for Arbonne by Guy Gavriel Kay Page A

dukedom and father heirs, the younger son, the troubadour, would never have come to power in Talair, and the enmity of two proud castles by the lake might never have become the huge reality it was in Arbonne.
    Might-have-beens, Signe thought. It was seductively easy to wonder—of a winter's night before a fire, or amid the drone of bees and the scent of summer herbs in the castle garden—about the dead, imagining them still living, the differences they might have made. She did it all the time: with her lost sons, with Aelis, with Guibor himself since his passing. Not a good channel of the mind, that one, though inevitable, she supposed. Memory, Anselme of Cauvas had written once, the harvest and the torment of my days.
    It had been some time since she'd seen Bertran, she thought, pulling her reflections forward to the present, and rather longer since Urté de Miraval had come to Barbentain. Both of them had sent messages and surrogates—Urté his seneschal, Bertran his cousin Valery—to the yearfast of Guibor's passing. There had been a killing among their corans, it seemed—not an unusual event between Miraval and Talair—and both dukes had felt unable or unwilling to leave their castles then, even to mourn their dead count.
    Signe wondered, not for the first time in the month gone by, if she should have commanded them to be present. They would have come, she knew; Bertran laughing and ironic, Urté grimly obedient, standing as far apart from each other in all the ceremonies as dignity and shared high rank allowed.
    She hadn't felt, somehow, like issuing that order, though Roban had urged her to. The chancellor had seen it as an opportunity to publicly assert her control over the fractious dukes and barons of Arbonne, bringing to heel the two most prominent of all. An important thing to do, Roban had said, this early in her own reign, and especially with what was happening in the north, with the peace treaty signed between Gorhaut and Valensa.
    He was almost certainly right; Signe had known he was, particularly about the need to send a clear signal north to the king of Gorhaut and his counsellors. But somehow she had hated the thought of using Guibor's yearfast—not the first one, surely—in such a bluntly political way. Could she not be allowed, for the one time, to remember her husband in the company only of those who had freely come to Barbentain and Lussan to do the same? Ariane and Thierry de Carenzu; Gaufroy de Ravenc and his young bride; Arnaut and Richilde de Malmont, her sister and brother-in-law, almost the last, with Urté, of their own generation still ruling in the great castles. These had all come, and so, too, had virtually every one of the lesser dukes and barons and a deeply affecting number of the other folk of Arbonne: landless corans, artisans of the towns, brethren of the god and priests and priestesses of Rian, farmers from the grainlands, fisherfolk from the sea, shepherds from the hills by Gotzland or Arimonda, or from the slopes of the northern mountains that blocked the winds from Gorhaut, carters and smiths and wheelwrights, millers and merchants from a dozen different towns, even a number of young men from the university—though Taverael's unruly students were legendary for their aversion to authority of any kind.
    And all of the troubadours had come to Barbentain.
    That had been the thing that moved her most of all. If one excepted Bertran de Talair himself, every one of the troubadours of Arbonne and all the joglars had come to share in the remembering of their lord, to offer their new laments and make sweet, sad music to mark the yearfast of his dying. There had been poetry and music for three days, and much of it had been rarely crafted and from the heart.
    In such a mood, with so many come willingly in a spirit of shared sorrow and memory, Signe had felt profoundly unwilling to compel the presence of anyone, even two of the most powerful—and therefore most dangerous—men in her