time. He motioned for her to dismount. Slowly she did. With an elaborately graceful gesture—almost a parody given where they were—he indicated the entrance to the cottage.
Aelis looked around. They were quite alone, a long way from where anyone might chance to pass. The man Valery, masked in fur like a grey wolf, was already turning away to find Garnoth, whoever that was—probably the charcoal-burner. Her arrow was still in his shoulder.
She walked forward and entered the hut. The outlaw leader followed and closed the door behind him. It shut with a loud click of the latch. There were windows on either side, open so that the breeze could enter. Aelis walked to the centre of the small, sparsely furnished room, noting that it had been recently swept clean. She turned around.
Bertran de Talair, the younger son, the troubadour, removed the falcon mask he wore.
‘By all the holy names of Rian,’ he said, ‘I have never known a woman like you in my life. Aelis, you were magnificent.’
With some difficulty she kept her expression stern, despite what seeing his face again, the flash of his quick, remembered smile, was suddenly doing to her. She forced herself to gaze coolly into the unnerving clarity of his blue eyes. She was not a kitchen girl, not a tavern wench in Tavernel, to swoon into his arms.
‘Your man is badly wounded,’ she said sharply. ‘I might have killed him. I sent specific word with Brette that I was going to shoot an arrow when you stopped us. That you should tell your men to wear chain mail under their clothing.’
‘And I told them,’ said Bertran de Talair with an easy shrug. He moved towards the table, discarding his mask, and Aelis saw belatedly that there was wine waiting for them. It was becoming more difficult by the moment, but she continued to fight the impulse to smile back at him, or even to laugh aloud.
‘I did tell them, truly,’ Bertran repeated, attending to the wine bottle. ‘Valery chose not to. He doesn’t like armour. Says it impedes his movement. He’ll never make a proper coran, my cousin Valery.’ He shook his head in mock sorrow and then glanced over his shoulder at her again. ‘Green becomes you, as the leaves the trees. I cannot believe you are here with me.’
She seemed to be smiling, after all. She struggled to keep control of the subject though; there was a real issue here. She could easily have killed the man, Valery. ‘But you chose not to tell him why he ought to protect himself, correct? You didn’t tell him I planned to shoot. Even though you knew he would be the one standing beside you.’
Smoothly he opened the bottle. He grinned at her. ‘Correct and correct. Why are all the de Barbentain so unfairly clever? It makes it terribly difficult for the rest of us, you know. I thought it might be a lesson for him—Valery should know by now that he ought to listen when I make a suggestion, and not ask for reasons.’
‘I might have killed him,’ Aelis said again.
Bertran was pouring the wine into two goblets. Silver and machial, she saw, not remotely belonging in a cabin such as this. She wondered what the charcoal-burner was being paid. The goblets were each worth more than the man would earn in his whole life.
Bertran came towards her, offering wine. ‘I trusted your aim,’ he said simply. The simple brown jacket and leggings became him, accenting his burnished outdoor colour and the bronze of his hair. The eyes were genuinely extraordinary; most of the lineage of Talair had those eyes. In the women, that shade of blue had broken hearts in Arbonne and beyond for generations. In the men too, Aelis supposed.
She made no motion towards the extended goblet. Not yet. She was the daughter of Guibor de Barbentain, count of Arbonne, ruler of this land.
‘You trusted your cousin’s life to my aim?’ she asked. ‘Your own? An irrational trust, surely? I might have wounded you as easily as he.’
His expression changed. ‘You did wound me, Aelis. At the midwinter feast. I fear it is a wound that will be with me all my life.’ There was a gravity to his tone, sharply at odds with what had gone before. ‘Are you truly displeased with me? Do you not know the power you have in this room?’ The blue eyes were guileless, clear as a child’s, resting on her own. The words and the voice were balm and music to her parched soul.
She took the wine. Their fingers touched as she did. He made no other movement towards her though. She sipped and he did the same, not speaking. It was Talair wine, of course, from his family’s vineyards on the eastern shores of the lake.
She smiled finally, releasing him from interrogation for the moment. She sank down onto the one bench the cottage offered. He took a small wooden stool, leaning forward towards her, his long, musician’s fingers holding the goblet in two hands. There was a bed by the far wall; she had been acutely aware of that from the moment she’d walked in, and equally aware that the charcoal-burner was unlikely to have had a proper bed for himself in this cottage.
Urté de Miraval would be a long way west by now in his favourite woods, lathering his horses and dogs in pursuit of a boar or a stag. The sunlight fell slantwise through the eastern window, laying a benison of light across the bed. She saw Bertran’s glance follow hers in that direction. She saw him look away.
And realized in that instant, with a surge of unexpected discovery, that he was not nearly so assured as he seemed. That it might actually be true what he’d just said, what was so often spun in the troubadours’ songs: that hers, as the high-born woman, the long-desired, was the true mastery in this room. Even the birds above the lake …
‘What will they do with Ariane and the corans?’ she asked, aware that unmixed wine and excitement were doing dangerous things to her. His hair was tousled from the confining mask and his smooth-shaven face looked clever and young and a little bit reckless. Whatever the rules of the courtly game, this would not be a man easily or always controlled. She had known that from the first.
As if to bear witness to that, he arched his brows, composed and poised again. ‘They will be continuing on their way to Talair soon enough. My men will have removed their masks by now and declared themselves. We brought wine and food for a meal on the grass. Ramir was there, did you recognize him? He has his harp, and I wrote a ballad last week about a play-acting escapade by the arch. My parents will disapprove, and your husband I rather imagine, but no one has been hurt, except Valery by you, and no one will really be able to imagine or suggest I would do you any harm or dishonour. We will give Arbonne a story to be shocked about for a month or so, no more than that. This was fairly carefully thought out,’ he said. She could hear the note of pride.
‘Evidently,’ she murmured. A month or so, no more than that? Not so swiftly, my lord. She was trying to guess how her mother would have handled this. ‘How did you arrange for Brette in Miraval to help you?’ she temporized.
He smiled. ‘Brette de Vaux and I were fostered together.’
‘We have had various … adventures with each other. I thought he could be trusted to help me with …’
‘With another adventure, my lord?’ She had her opening now. She stood. It seemed she didn’t need to think of her mother after all. She knew exactly what to do. What she had dreamt of doing through the long nights of the winter just past. ‘With the easy matter of another tavern song?’
He rose as well, awkwardly, spilling some of his wine. He laid the goblet down on the table, and she could see that his hand was trembling.
‘Aelis,’ he said, his voice low and fierce, ‘what I wrote last winter was true. You
