de Baude—his wife an increasing object of amusement, his castle on the verge of becoming a byword for rustic bad manners, his conciliatory letters to Evrard on the island pointedly unanswered—elected to do something drastic.
For his own part, Blaise would probably have arranged to kill the poet. Mallin de Baude was a lord, if a minor one; Evrard of Lussan was no more than a travelling parasite in Blaise’s view. A feud, even a dispute between two such men, would have been unthinkable in Gorhaut. But this, of course, was woman-ruled Arbonne, where the troubadours had a power in society they could never have dreamt of anywhere else.
In the event, what Mallin did was order Blaise and his corans to cross to the goddess’s Island secretly by night and bring Evrard back. The baron, of course, couldn’t lead the expedition himself, though Blaise had enough respect for the man to believe he would have preferred to. Mallin would need some distance from the escapade, though, in the event that they failed. He had to be able to say his corans had conceived the scheme without his knowledge or consent, and then hasten to a temple of Rian and make appropriate gestures of contrition. It was all made particularly neat, Blaise had thought, by the fact that the leader of the corans of Baude that season just happened to be a hired mercenary from Gorhaut who didn’t, of course, worship Rian at all and might be expected to perpetrate such a sacrilege. Blaise didn’t mention this thought to anyone. It didn’t even really bother him; this was simply the way of things at a certain level of the world’s affairs, and he had more than a little familiarity with it.
Soresina, languishing and aghast at what an instinctive scream and outburst had wrought, had been energetically primed by a succession of visiting neighbouring ladies, rather more experienced in the ways of poets, as to how to deal with Evrard on his return.
If Blaise and the corans got to the island. If they found him. If he chose to return. If the sea monsters of Luth’s dark dreams chose not to rise up above their skiff, towering and dreadful in the pale moonlight, and drag them all down to death in the watery blackness.
‘Towards those pines,’ Hirnan, who was navigating, muttered from the front of the skiff. He glanced back over his broad shoulder at the looming shadow of the island. ‘And for the love of Corannos, keep silent now!’
‘Luth,’ Blaise added softly, ‘if I hear a sound from you, any kind of sound from now until we’re back on the mainland, I will slit your throat and slide you overboard.’
Luth gulped, quite noisily. Blaise elected not to kill him for that. How such a man had ever been consecrated a warrior in the Order of Corannos he could not understand. The man could handle a bow well enough, and a sword and a horse, but surely, even here in Arbonne, they had to know that there was more to being a coran of the god than those skills. Were there no standards any more? No pride left in a corrupt and degenerate world?
He looked back over his shoulder again. They had rowed very close now. The pines were around towards the western side of the island, away from the sandy northern beaches and the glowing lights beyond that marked the three temples and the residences. Hirnan, who had been here before—he hadn’t said why and Blaise hadn’t pushed him—had said there was no chance of landing undetected on any of those northern beaches. The servants of Rian guarded their island; in the past they had had cause to fear more than a single skiff of corans searching for a poet.
They were going to have to try to get ashore in a harder place, where the forest pines gave way, not to sand, but to rocky cliffs and boulders in the sea. They had rope with them, and each of the corans, even Luth, knew how to handle himself on a rock face. Castle Baude was perched high in the wild country of the south-west. Men who served there would not be unfamiliar with cliffs or crags.
The sea was another matter. Hirnan and Blaise himself were the only ones entirely at ease on the water, and on Hirnan’s shoulders now rested the burden of getting them close enough, amid sharp and shadowed rocks, to make it possible to come ashore. Privately, Blaise had told him that if the best they could find was a sheer cliff face, they didn’t really have a chance. Not at night and with the need for absolute silence and with a poet to bring back down. In addition to which—
‘Couch oars!’ he hissed. In the same instant Maffour, beside him, snarled the same words. Eight rowers swiftly lifted their oars from the water and sat rigidly still, the skiff gliding silently towards the island. The sound came again, nearer now. Motionless, bent low for concealment, Blaise strained his eyes into the night, searching by moonlight for the boat he’d heard.
Then it was there, a single dark sail against the starry sky, skimming through the waves around the island. In the skiff eight men held their breath. They were inside the circling path of the sailboat, though, very near—dangerously near, in fact—to the rocky coast. Someone looking towards them in this faint light would almost certainly see nothing against the dark bulk of the island; and the guards, Blaise knew, would probably be looking outward in any case. He relaxed his fingers on his oar as the small boat continued past them, cutting across the wind, a beautiful thing in the moonlight.
‘The goddess be praised!’ Luth murmured with reflexive piety from up front beside Hirnan.
Cursing himself for not having sat the man next to him, Blaise flung a furious look over his shoulder in time to see Hirnan’s hand shoot out and grip his benchmate fiercely on the arm in a belated effort to silence him.
‘Ouch!’ Luth said. Not quietly. At sea. In a very calm night.
Blaise closed his eyes. There was a moment of straining silence, then:
‘Who is there! In Rian’s name, declare yourselves!’ A grim male voice rang out from the sailboat.
His brain racing furiously, Blaise looked over and saw the other boat already beginning to swing about. They had two choices now. They could retreat, rowing frantically, and hope to lose the guards in the darkness of the sea. No one knew who they were; they might not be seen or identified. But the mainland was a long way off, and eight men rowing had little chance of outracing sails if they were pursued. And this one sailboat could have others with it very soon, Blaise knew.
He hated retreating anyhow.
‘Only fisherfolk, your grace,’ he called out in a wavering, high-pitched voice. ‘Only my brothers and myself trawling for lampfish. We’re terrible sorry to have wandered out so far.’
He lowered his voice to a snarled whisper. ‘Get three of the ropes over the side, quickly! Hold them as if you were fishing. Hirnan, you and I are going into the water.’ Even as he spoke he was removing his boots and sword. Hirnan, without a question asked, began doing the same.
‘It is interdicted to come so near the goddess’s Island without leave. You are subject to Rian’s curse for what you have done.’ The deep voice across the water was hostile and assured. The boat was still turning; it would begin bearing down upon them in a moment.
‘We are not to kill,’ Maffour whispered anxiously from beside Blaise.
‘I know that,’ Blaise hissed back. ‘Do what I told you. Offer them a tithe. Hirnan, let’s go.’
With the last words he swung his feet across the low railing and slipped silently over the side of the skiff. On the other side, balancing his motion exactly, Hirnan did the same. The water was shockingly cold. It was night, and early yet in the spring.
‘Truly, your graces, as my brother says, we had no intention to transgress.’ Maffour’s apologetic voice carried across the darkness. ‘We will gladly offer a tithe of our catch for the holy servants of blessed Rian.’
There was a
