She burst into tears. “How do you do that?”

“Just be patient, little one. If you find what is quiet within yourself, even the wild creatures will trust you.”

“No one trusts me.”

“That robin did.”

She sniffed, wiping eyes and nose.

“Best come now,” he said. “Let’s hope we see more birds this spring, for it’s an ill portent to have them all vanish like that.” He tilted his head back to look up into the bare trees. “For so it was then. An ill portent.”

“Here, lad, are you having another headache?” Henri had returned, leaving the others waiting up the road. “Let me help you up if you’re not feeling well. No need to go on today if you’ve a mind to go back home.”

“No, no, Father. I’m well enough. Just remembering a forest once where all the birds had fled. But there was a terrible black heart alive in that place. That was why they fled. They feared evil.”

Henri looked around nervously as Blanche whimpered. “Think you we’re haunted?”

“Here?” He patted Blanche tenderly on the head. “Nay, I think it was the wind blew the poor creatures so far that it’s taken them this long, those that survived, to find their way back home.”

“So it may be,” said Henri, still holding his arm and gazing at him. “So it may be. A poor creature may be blown a far way indeed before it turns its gaze toward home.”

They caught up to the others, who set on their way without question or comment. They smelled the tannery before they saw it, and marked the square steeple of the village church rising above trees. In the common ground and meadow in front of the church, an assembly had gathered by the chair and table where the count’s chatelaine held court to choose young folk to serve for a year at Lavas Holding and to receive the tithes and taxes the village paid to the count in exchange for his protection in times of war. Alain did not at first recognize the old woman who sat at the table. It was not until she looked up and saw him walking among his kinfolk, and turned her face away in shame, that he realized this woman was Chatelaine Dhuoda, but so aged with white hair and wrinkled face that anyone might be excused for mistaking her for a woman twenty years older.

She rose and, bracing herself on a cane, came around the table. As the crowd parted to let him through, she dropped to her knees.

“I beg you, my lord, return to Lavas Holding. Forgive us our sins. Come back.”

Henri whistled under his breath. Sorrow barked. The chatelaine, noticing the two black hounds, wept quietly.

“Does Lord Geoffrey know you are here?” Alain asked.

“He does not, my lord. He is the false one. He lied to gain the county for his daughter.”

“Did he? Is he not descended legitimately from the brother of the old count, Lavastina, she who was mother of the first Charles Lavastine and great grandmother of Lavastine?”