“Only in a long time?” said Alaina d’Arceval. “Not…ever? I am disappointed.”

Thierry laughed softly. “It might be ever, yes.”

“Good,” she said. “That’s better.”

And it seemed talk of excitement had him excited again. She seemed to sense it. She reached down and discovered that this was so.

“How pleasing,” said the lady of Arceval. “You make me happy the fog came in, so unexpectedly, and forced me to stay the night.”

He still half believed she was a faerie from the forest, a wild creature. From a world farther from his own than courts could ever be.

Are you here for my soul?

—

Later, another owl outside, in what might or might not now be mist and fog. Still in her bed, still entangled, both of them damp with sweat.

Later yet, in darkness, he dressed and went back to his own chamber. She’d kissed him from the bed, quite gently, after not having been gentle at all. He felt unsteady on his feet, drained. He felt as if he’d taken a journey. A boat without sailors, he thought.

In the morning when he went downstairs he was informed that their guest had already gone.

Later that week, unable to stop himself, he went riding one morning to Arceval.

He went through the open gates and across the courtyard. He was watched by two guards, then greeted, courteously, at the doors. He was informed that the lady had gone to stay with her family during the time of the lord’s absence at war. Thierry was offered food, a refreshment. He declined, rode back.

He never saw her again.

I only wanted your body for tonight.

He dreamed of her, and those dreams he remembered. They woke him, in fact, many times.

He wrote, while still at that château, and in that solitude, a sequence of poems through the late spring and into summer that were different from anything he’d ever done before. Often late at night, in his chamber. Written by a candle’s light. Then he’d blow the candle out and sleep. Darkness, light, darkness. The way the bird of legend was said to fly, from the night through a lighted hall and back into the night.

Those poems marked a demarcation, it would afterwards be said, in what Thierry Villar had to say with and through his work. And perhaps also in who he was.

Marina di Seressa, when she read them after his eventual return to Orane, said, eyes bright, looking up after she was done, “Ah. Oh my. I see Alaina visited you.” And laughed at how vividly he flushed.

—