The Queen entered her city of Albinkirk on the second Wednesday after Easter. She rode easily with her babe on her lap, and the Red Knight rode by her side. She was attended by a dozen ladies, and at their backs came more than two hundred knights, led by the Red Knight’s retinue, and then the Royal Guard, both in scarlet, and they were followed by the riot of armorial bearings that marked the lords of the northern Brogat—Lord Wayland with his knights and retainers, and the Squire of Snellgund and his men, and a dozen lesser lords. Behind them came the archers of the company, such as were present, and then companies of archers from throughout the north and east of the realm—twenty small companies that the Red Knight had gathered on the road, or that had already made camp in the fields around the chapel at South Ford.

Last of all—a post of honour—came two dozen knights of the Order of Saint Thomas, led by their Prior. They had already gone as far west as Lissen Carak and returned in the night, but whatever they had said to the Queen and her captain was known only to a few. Men marked that they looked grave.

Blanche Gold was one of the few. She rode close to the Queen, ready to take the babe if required, and carrying water and a cup in case the Queen had need. That morning, Toby had brought her a fine riding horse with a new saddle, and she had not spurned it.

“For the entrance,” he said, and he grinned.

She accepted it. In the midst of war, and peril, her own troubles had sunk away to nothing. The Queen’s insistence that she be treated, not as a servant, but one of her ladies, had met with no resistance. War changed many things. The Queen’s court was a riding court, and by the time she passed under the archway that marked the stained old gates of Albinkirk, Blanche was Lady Blanche in every way that mattered.

She liked it. Come war and Wild, she was happy enough.

To Blanche, the town looked dirty and ill-used. It was hard to hide that it had been taken—brutally—by the Wild the year before. A few house fronts were new—the Etruscan merchants had frescoed the fronts of their houses, and rebuilt the fine porticos that had once lent the street distinction. But for every house repaired, five looked at the street with gaping empty windows and broken doors. The cobbles themselves were ill kept, and raw sewage ran down the middle of the High Street.

It was all rather provincial to a woman from Harndon, with deep cisterns, sewers that functioned most days, and where a stream of effluvium like this was only seen by the poor north of Cheapside.