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undeniably witty satires on Soresina de Baude. Not by name, of course—rules were rules—but since the name he used now was the same one he’d coined to exalt the long-limbed elegance of her form and the dark fire of her eyes, no one in Arbonne was left even slightly in ignorance on this particular point. The students in Tavernel, Blaise had been given to understand by a seriously distressed Mallin, had taken up the songs and were amplifying them, adding verses of their own.
    After a number of weeks of this, En Mallin 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, toweringand 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