She made no motion towards the extended goblet. Not yet. She was the daughter of Guibor de Barbentain, count of Arbonne, ruler of this land.
"You trusted your cousin's life to my aim?" she asked. "Your own? An irrational trust, surely? I might have wounded you as easily as he."
His expression changed. "You did wound me, Aelis. At the midwinter feast. I fear it is a wound that will be with me all my life." There was a gravity to his tone, sharply at odds with what had gone before. "Are you truly displeased with me? Do you not know the power you have in this room?" The blue eyes were guileless, clear as a child's, resting on her own. The words and the voice were balm and music to her parched soul.
She took the wine. Their fingers touched as she did. He made no other movement towards her though. She sipped and he did the same, not speaking. It was Talair wine, of course, from his family's vineyards on the eastern shores of the lake.
She smiled finally, releasing him from interrogation for the moment. She sank down onto the one bench the cottage offered. He took a small wooden stool, leaning forward towards her, his long, musician's fingers holding the goblet in two hands. There was a bed by the far wall; she had been acutely aware of that from the moment she'd walked in, and equally aware that the charcoal-burner was unlikely to have had a proper bed for himself in this cottage.
Urté de Miraval would be a long way west by now in his favourite woods, lathering his horses and dogs in pursuit of a boar or a stag. The sunlight fell slantwise through the eastern window, laying a benison of light across the bed. She saw Bertran's glance follow hers in that direction. She saw him look away.
And realized in that instant, with a surge of unexpected discovery, that he was not nearly so assured as he seemed. That it might actually be true what he'd just said, what was so often spun in the troubadours' songs: that hers, as the highborn woman, the long-desired, was the true mastery in this room. Even the birds above the lake…