A Song for Arbonne Read Online Free PDF Page A

the quality of his gaze changed, kindled, and his expression made her knees suddenly weak. She tried not to let that show either. He had been quick to follow her meaning though, too quick. She suddenly felt less sure of herself. She wished she had somewhere to set down her own wine. Instead, she drained it and let the empty goblet drop among the strewn rushes on the floor. She was unused to unmixed wine, to standing in a place so entirely alone with a man such as this.
    Drawing a breath against the racing of her heart, Aelis said, ‘We are not children, nor lesser people of this land, and I can drink a cup of wine with a great many different men.’ She forced herself to hold his eyes with her own dark gaze. She swallowed, and said clearly, ‘We are going to make a child today, you and I.’
    And watched Bertran de Talair as all colour fled from his face.
He is afraid now
, she thought. Of her, of what she was, of the swiftness and the unknown depths of this.
    ‘Aelis,’ he began, visibly struggling for self-possession, ‘any child you bear, as duchess of Miraval,
and
as your father’s daughter—’
    He stopped there. He stopped because she had reached up even as he began to speak and was now, with careful, deliberate motions, unbinding her hair.
    Bertran fell silent, desire and wonder and the sharp awareness of implications all written in his face. It was that last she had to smooth away. He was too clever a man, for all his youth; he might hold back even now, weighing consequences. She pulled the last long ivory pin free and shook her head to let the cascade of her hair tumble down her back.
The sheerest encitement to desire
. So all the poets sang.
    The poet before her, of a lineage nearly as proud as her own, said, with a certain desperation now, ‘A child. Are you certain? How do you know that today, now, that we . . .’
    Aelis de Miraval, daughter of the count of Arbonne, smiled then, the ancient smile of the goddess, of women centred in their own mysteries. She said, ‘En Bertran, I spent two years on Rian’s Island in the sea. We may have only a little magic there, but if it lies not in such matters as this, where should it possibly lie?’
    And then knowing—without even having to think of what her mother would have done—knowing assurely as she knew the many-faceted shape of her own need, that it was time for words to cease, Aelis brought her fingers up to the silken ties at the throat of her green gown and tugged at them so that the silk fell away to her hips. She lowered her arms and stood before him, waiting, trying to control her breathing, though that was suddenly difficult.
    There was hunger, a kind of awe and a fully kindled desire in his eyes. They devoured what she offered to his sight. He still did not move, though. Even now, with wine and desire racing through her blood, she understood: just as she was no tavern girl, he in turn was no drunken coran in a furtive corner of some baron’s midnight hall. He too was proud, and intimately versed in power, and it seemed he still had too keen a sense of how far the reverberations of this moment might go.
    ‘Why do you hate him so much?’ Bertran de Talair asked softly, his eyes never leaving her pale, smooth skin, the curve of her breasts. ‘Why do you hate your husband so?’
    She knew the answer to that. Knew it like a charm or spell of Rian’s priestesses chanted over and over in the starry, sea-swept darkness of the island nights.
    ‘Because he doesn’t love me,’ Aelis said.
    And held her hands out then, a curiously fragile gesture, as she stood, half-naked before him, her father’s daughter, her husband’s avenue to power, heiress to Arbonne, but trying to shape her own response today, now, in this room, to the coldness of destiny.
    He took a step, the one step necessary, and gathered her in his arms, and lifted her, and then he carried her to the bed that was not the charcoal-burner’s, and laid her down where the slanting beam of