Amicia was no more than an arm’s length from the Archbishop of Lorica, unnoticed in the press. The archbishop, and the Sieur de Rohan, had just returned, hurriedly climbing the steps to the royal box—Amicia was interested to note that the archbishop was already sweating. She had also marked the thin, threadbare man in the badly dyed scholar’s scarlet as a hermeticist—his person carried two wards and a sigil.

Amicia was an observant woman, and she noticed that he wore a third device around his neck—a complex net of thin strands of dirty linen. It held no power, but the King wore a similar such amulet.

“Send the guard and have him taken,” shouted the archbishop. His words were received with hoots and catcalls from all the gentry seated nearby.

De Vrailly was grinning as if he’d just won a prize. “It is the mercenary—the sell-sword. The Queen must have bought his services.” He shook his head. “I understand him to be a good man of his arms, and his harness seems good.” His handsome face split in a wide grin. “Ah, God is good! An answer to my prayers. God has sent him that we may have a fair trial.”

De Rohan was trying to burrow through the close press towards the King. “Your grace—your grace!” he called.

Amicia was six feet from the King, below him, caught up amidst the press of Galles and Albans who followed the court.

Someone groped her.

She ignored her assailant and entered into her bridge. There, she was interested to find, she wore the same kirtle in the aethereal that she wore in the world.

She found the King in the aethereal. She saw the welter and tangle of his protections and wards and curses and she bit her aethereal lip in frustration.

She prayed. And curiously, as she prayed, she thought of her Abbess, that towering figure of wit and good sense, power and character—the old King’s mistress, and a potent magister.

What would she have done?

Amicia moved her focus back, looking over the crowd around the King. She was looking for a link—a thread of gold or green that might connect any one of them to the King.

She didn’t see any such.

It was possible, of course, that the King was acting of his own accord. The Prior didn’t believe that though, and neither, apparently, did Gabriel.

She sighed, completing her prayer, and tried another tack. She looked at the King not as a hermetical practitioner, but as a hermetical healer. As her Order taught.

As quick as thought, she was praising God inside her head, and acting.

De Rohan clasped the King’s hand. “I have ordered the arrest of the herald, and his knight,” de Rohan said.

The King nodded heavily. “Yeess,” he said slowly. His head barely raised off his chest.