De Vrailly’s face darkened and grew mottled with rage. Occitan and Gallish were different enough in pronunciation—but the words were clear enough.

The crossbowmen leaned their spanned weapons on the tops of their great pavises to steady them.

“No!” bellowed de Vrailly.

“You can send your squires to fight the survivors, if you insist,” Du Corse said. He turned in his saddle. “Loose!”

Desiderata was very far gone when the woman came.

She was scarcely able to distinguish between the real and the aethereal anymore. At first she thought the woman was Blanche, come to help her. Reality and the aethereal had all but merged to her sight, and she had begun to overlay the aethereal version of the world on the real, so that the shadows were darker where the thing called Ash seemed to pool, and the bright green coils that some other power was laying, hideously, about her and what bloomed inside her showed stark against the walls of her cell.

But despite the crisis in her sanity—and her outward attempts to repel her enemies, if they were not creations of her mind—she was also aware that it was Easter—the greatest festival of the Christian year. And the moment of rebirth in all the old ways. The moment when young spring killed old winter.

In between her prayers to the Virgin—a ceaseless litany—she thought of her springs. Of her riding out in spring with fifty knights to make the May come in. Of the fecund earth, and the dances. The green of the grass.

It was with these two thoughts in her head—the green of the leaves of spring and the Virgin—that she first saw the woman come through the door of her cell.

The closed door.

She did not shine. In the aethereal, she appeared solid, and in the real, she appeared insubstantial. There was no outward sign of power about her—a tall, grave woman who wore a simple kirtle of rich brown.

But as Desiderata looked at the brown, she thought it was perhaps a foreign textile, some wonderous silk of Morea or farther afield. The brown was itself made up of a thousand tiny patterns—there, of flowers, a riot of colour covering whole fields, if only for a few days, and then another portion with a border of birds so cunningly wrought that they appeared to move and sing, and another, a lady on horseback, riding with a hawk on her wrist…

The lady had a dignified face. The face of mature wisdom, and fecund strength. Motherhood and virginity, or perhaps something older and better than mere virginity—a serenity of strength.

Desiderata was on her knees, and her mouth was already saying the Ave Maria.

She raised her hands to the woman.

Who smiled.

“Oh, my child,” she said sadly. “Would that I might tell you they know not what they do.”