“Lady Tallia doesn’t want to raise her own sons?”

Johanna paused before the doors with a hand on one latch. “Lady Tallia has no say in any decision, for all that she’s the last descendant of the royal house of Varre and they call her queen. She’s a frightened, petty, mean-hearted creature. For all that, I do pity her, caught between the stallion and the guivre.” She flicked a glance at the closed door, as if she could be heard by listening ears. “Have a care, Brother Ivar. The stallion is hot-tempered and hotheaded yet honest in its passions and will kick and bite to protect its fillies. It’s the guivre’s cold glare that will kill you.”

She lifted the latch and opened the door for him to slide through, careful as he balanced the pole on his shoulders so that the buckets would not clang against the walls.

In this fine chamber a middle-aged man with attractive features strummed a lute and sang a cheerful song about the fox that devoured the chickens despite the farmer’s efforts to hold it at bay. Tapestries covered the walls, and a dozen or more lamps, fearsome guivres with flame spouting from their eye sockets, gave light to the pleasant company collected around Lady Sabella. Her hair was half gone to gray, but she seemed otherwise vigorous and alert as she reclined on a couch and chatted with a circle of companions: several noblewomen, two men in cleric’s robes, and a blond man who sat with his back to Ivar. Two stewards waited beside the hearth next to a table laden with platters of meat and bowls of sweets and fruits, lightly picked over but otherwise ignored. They watched for any sign or gesture from their mistress. One marked the entry of the two servants and nodded at them briskly, a signal to get on with their work.

A third cleric sat at a writing desk, intent on his calligraphy, head bowed and pen scratching easily on parchment. Ivar skipped over him and fixed his gaze on the back of the blond man seated beside Sabella. There was something wrong about his shoulders. They were too broad, and his hands, when he gestured, were as wide as paddles, the hands of a man comfortable wielding a great sword with little thought for its weight and the thickness of the pommel.

Definitely not Baldwin.

“Hsst!” Johanna nudged Ivar toward the brazier placed beside the writing desk.

Obviously Sabella kept Baldwin sequestered. Perhaps after they had replenished the coals in this chamber, they would move on to the noble duchess’ most intimate inner chambers.

He set down the buckets and looked up into the confounded gaze of the cleric who had, until an instant before, been so busy writing that his face had been concealed.

Writing!

His fingers were stained with smudges of ink. The parchment was virgin; no one had written on it before. Ivar had just enough experience of the cloister to know that the knife had seen little use in scraping away mistakes, although half the page was covered with flowing, handsome letters.