“What particular injuries has Lavas Holding sustained?”

“Ravnholt Manor was burned to the ground last autumn a few weeks after the great storm. Eight people were murdered, and perhaps more, because it was hard to discover remains within the ruins of the hall. A dozen or more we found later hiding in the woods, but four girls were never accounted for although witnesses had seen them alive and running from the conflagration. They were not little ones but youths, and one recently wed. You will have no doubt about what the bandits wanted with them, poor things.”

“Did no one seek them out? What happened to the bandits?”

“There was a single skirmish, my lord, two days later. Then the bandits vanished, or so Lord Geoffrey’s scouts said. I don’t know the truth of it.”

“Do you not believe them?”

She shrugged, reluctant to say more. After the silence grew thick, she went on. “The girls who were taken were only servants’ daughters. Two were slaves—their parents had sold them into service to discharge the debts they owed Ravnholt’s steward.”

“Did Ravnholt’s steward not seek to recover those lost souls?”

“The steward was killed in the raid.”

“Who is in charge there now?”

Her dark look matched the dreary day and the ominous swell of wind in distant trees. “Lord Geoffrey left the land fallow. Said he’d see to it later. Yet we’ve desperate need of planting. Surely you know … it’s hard to think of planting with frosts still coming hard every night. There is a blight in the apple trees here and eastward. There may be no apple crop at all this year. In the south a black rot has gotten into the rye …” She looked sideways at him, blushing again. “Yet you must know, for that’s where you were found, wasn’t it? In the south, by a mill.”

“Mad, so they tell me,” he said as they came up to the church and its narrow porch. He stepped into the shadow and turned to look at her, who stood yet in the muted daylight.

“Not mad,” she said, but she didn’t mean it. “You had the dancing sickness, my lord.”

‘And much else besides, I am thinking. I sustained an injury to my head. For a long while I wandered without my faithful hounds. I was lost and blind.” He snapped his fingers, and the hounds waggled up to him and licked his hands. He patted them affectionately and rubbed his knuckles into their great heads, just how they liked it, and scratched them behind their ears.

She wrung her hands together, gaze fixed on the dirt. “Now you are come back to us, my lord.”

“No,” he said kindly. “I am only passing through. I will not stay.”

She wept silently, nothing more than tears running down her cheeks.

“Do not despair,” he said. “The one you seek will come.”

He went inside into the gloomy nave, so shadowed that he had to stop four steps in and stand there for a while to let his eyes adjust. The hounds panted beside him.