Blaise felt his mood changing, the pleasant fatigue of a day's hard labour chased away by the words as clouds were blown by the mountain winds. "Why are you hiring me, then?" he asked. "Why take that chance?"
"I like taking chances," Bertran de Talair said, almost regretfully. "It is a vice, I'm afraid." The High Priestess, Blaise remembered, had said something much the same.
Bertran shifted position again, sitting up now, and took a last pull of the seguignac before capping the flask. "Maybe you'll end up liking us more than you think. Maybe we'll find you a wife down here. Maybe we'll even teach you to sing. Truth is, I had a man killed this spring, and good men are hard to come by, as I suspect you know. Leading a successful raid on Rian's Island so soon after you got here was no mean achievement."
"How do you know about that?"
Bertran grinned again, but without mockery this time; Blaise had the odd sensation of being able to guess what that smile might do to a woman the duke wanted to charm. "Anyone can kill a corfe on a hunt," de Talair went on, as if Blaise hadn't spoken at all. "I need someone who knows when not to kill one. Even if he won't tell me how he learned that or who he is." He hesitated for the first time, looking away from Blaise, west towards the mountains and Arimonda beyond. "Besides which, for some reason you've made me think of my son the last few days. Don't ask me why. He died as an infant."
Abruptly he stood. Blaise did the same, seriously confused now. "I didn't think you had ever married," he said.
"I didn't," Bertran said carelessly. "Why, do you think it is time?" The sardonic, distancing smile was back. "A wife to warm my old bones at night, children to gladden the heart in my declining years? What an intriguing thought. Shall we discuss it on the way down?"
He had begun walking towards his horse as he spoke, and so Blaise, perforce, did the same. It had grown colder now on this windy height, the sun hidden behind a grey mass of swiftly driven clouds. As an afterthought Blaise looked back and saw that the lamb was following. They mounted up and began to ride. From the crest of the ridge they could see Mallin and the rest of their party gathered east of them and below. Bertran waved briefly and they started down. Far in the distance, beyond meadow and wood and the other men, the castle could be seen, with the lavender fields in shadow beyond.
On the way down, in the interval before they reached the others, the matter Bertran de Talair chose to raise had nothing at all to do with marital bliss, belated or otherwise, or with the soothing accoutrements of a quiescent old age.
And now, remarkably or predictably, depending on how one chose to consider things, there came the unabashed glow of a candle from the curve of the stairway below the window niche where Blaise was keeping watch. Not even an attempt at stealth, he thought grimly. He heard the quiet sound of footsteps steadily ascending. As promised, though Blaise hadn't really believed it on the hillside.
"I imagine you'll be posted on watch outside the baroness's rooms on my last night. I wouldn't go up until then in any case… too many complications otherwise, and it isn't really decent. No," Bertran de Talair had said on that ride down the chilly slope, "I'll wait till the end, which is always best. I can count on your discretion, I take it?"
For a long moment Blaise had had to struggle to control his anger. When he'd replied, it was in the best equivalent he could manage to the duke's casual tones. "I would suggest you not rely on any such thing. I have accepted an offer of service from you, but that begins a fortnight from now. For the moment Mallin de Baude pays me and you would be advised to remember that."
"Such loyalty!" de Talair had murmured, gazing straight ahead.
Blaise shook his head. "Professionalism," he'd replied, keeping his temper. "I am worth nothing in the market for fighting men if I have a reputation for duplicity."
"That is an irrelevance. Nothing that affects a reputation will emerge from a dark stairway with only the two of us to know." De Talair's tone was quietly serious. "Tell me, Northerner, would you impose your own values in matters of love and night on all the men and women that you meet?"
"Hardly. But I'm afraid I will impose them on myself."
The duke had glanced across at him then and smiled. "Then we shall probably have an interesting encounter a few nights from now." He'd waved again at Mallin de Baude down below and spurred his horse forward to join the baron and his men for the rest of the ride back down to the castle.
And now here he was, without even a token attempt at deception or concealment. Blaise stood up and stepped from the window nook onto the stairway. He checked the hang of his sword and dagger both and then waited, his feet balanced and spread wide. From around the curve of the stairs the glow of flame gradually became brighter and then Blaise saw the candle. Following it, as if into the ambit of light, came Bertran de Talair, in burgundy and black with a white shirt open at the throat.
"I have come," said the duke softly, smiling behind the flame, "for that interesting encounter."
"Not with me," said Blaise grimly.
"Well, no, not really with you. I don't think either of us suffers unduly from the Arimondan vice. I thought it might be diverting to see if I could fare better in the room at the top of these stairs than poor Evrard did some while ago."
Blaise shook his head. "I meant what I told you on the hills. I will not judge you, or the baroness either. I am a sword for hire, here or elsewhere in the world. At the moment En Mallin de Baude is paying me to guard this stairway. Will it please you to turn and go down, my lord, before matters become unpleasant here?"
"Go down?" Bertran said, gesturing with the candle, "and waste an hour's fussing with my appearance and several days of anticipating what might happen tonight? I'm too old to be excited by temptation and then meekly turn away. You're too young to understand that, I suppose. But I daresay you do have your own lessons to learn, or perhaps to remember. Hear me, Northerner: a man can be forestalled in matters such as this, even I can be, whatever you might have heard to the contrary, but a woman of spirit will do what she wants to do, even in Gorhaut, and most especially in Arbonne." He lifted the candle higher as he spoke, sending an orange glow spinning out to illuminate both of them.
Blaise registered the fact of that quite effective light an instant before he heard a rustle of clothing close behind him. He was turning belatedly, and opening his mouth to cry out, when the blow cracked him on the side of the temple, hard enough to make him stagger back against the window seat, momentarily dazed. And a moment, of course, was more than enough for Bertran de Talair to spring up the three steps between them, a dagger reversed in one hand, the candle uplifted in the other.
"It is difficult," said the duke close to Blaise's ear, "extremely difficult, to protect those who prefer not to be protected. A lesson, Northerner." He was wearing a perfume of some kind, and his breath was scented with mint. Through unfocused eyes and a wave of dizziness, Blaise caught a glimpse beyond him of a woman on the stairs. Her long yellow hair was unbound, tumbling down her back. Her night robe was of silk, and by the light of the candle and of the moon in the archers' window Blaise saw that it was white as a bride's, an icon of innocence. That was all he managed to register; he had no chance for more, to move or cry out again, before Bertran de Talair's dagger haft rapped, in a neat, hard, precisely judged blow, against the back of his skull and Blaise lost all consciousness of moonlight or icons or pain.
When he awoke, he was lying on the stone floor of the window niche, slumped back against one of the benches. With a groan he turned to look out. Pale Vidonne, waning from full, was high in the window now, lending her silver light to the night sky. The clouds had passed, he could see faint stars around the moon.