There is one who watches with him, her gaze sharp and merciless. “It is too late for them,” she says.

“No!” He jerked back, slamming his head against the boat.

‘Alain?”

“She is the enemy,” he said raggedly. His head pounded. Stabs of pain afflicted him, waking that old headache that had caused his blindness and muteness.

“Who is the enemy?”

“The one who says, ‘This is as it must be, we can’t do anything else even if we want to.’ “

“Do you speak so of your aunt?”

“No, no.” He rubbed his head. Spots and flurries of light blurred his vision. “Of the one I met on the road.”

“What one?”

“The Lady of Battles.”

“Who is the Lady of Battles? Are you well, Alain? Is your headache back? Maybe we’d better go back to the hall and let you rest.”

“What was my mother like?”

There came a silence from Henri and only the answer of the land around them: the hiss of surf, the wind in leaves, a branch snapping under the weight of Rage’s paw, a distant shout of laughter, a bird’s warble, quickly hushed. The ache in his head faded as he breathed, waiting.

After a bit, he felt Henri move, then heard the noise of the file as Henri worked to shave the curve of a wooden plug to the exact fit for its oar port, to replace one eaten away by dry rot. Alain leaned back against the boat, recalling the familiar comfort of familiar patterns. Henri had always had a habit of thinking as he worked, or perhaps it was better to say that working helped him think, that the motion of hands teased patterns of thought into symmetry.

The hounds snuffled into the woods. The sea sighed.

“Is that what drove you?” Henri asked at last. “Seeking your mother?”

“I admit I have always wondered.”

The file scraped at the wood.

“Not so much about my mother,” Alain continued. “What she might have been like, of course I always wondered that. Yet if a birth is witnessed, and the witnesses tell the truth, there’s no doubt of a mother’s identity. It was wondering who my father was that drove me.”

The file stilled. “Do you wonder that still?”

Alain shifted to look into Henri’s face. He took Henri’s seamed, callused hand in his own and held it tightly. “No. I know who my father is. He is the one who raised me and cherished me.”

Tears fell, although Henri wept silently. One coursed down his cheek to land softly on the back of Alain’s hand, a warm salty drop followed by

“No good song is ever sung of a traitor,” he says to Deacon Ursuline.

“It is not treachery. It is an alliance,” she objects.

He sits and she stands in the hall built by his Alban carpenters to replace the one that burned in last year’s assault on Hefenfelthe. Most of his court have retired to their beds for the night, but he is, as always, wakeful, and Deacon Ursuline is persistent.