But Blanche took her cues from the Queen, who beamed with apparent pleasure at everything, smiled at children however furtive, and raised her son to be cheered by even the thinnest, meanest crowds.

They were well up the High Street when the first scream echoed down from the citadel. Men flinched. Women hid their heads.

The Queen looked around as if she’d been struck.

The Red Knight made a face. Blanche found she spent far too much time looking at him, assumed everyone knew she did it, and cursed herself for it, but one result was that she’d learned he had a repertoire of facial expressions he used when he thought no one was looking, or perhaps he didn’t care—at any rate, she knew that one, and it told her he knew what the noise was. Even that he was responsible for it. He didn’t say anything, though, and it was not repeated.

In the main square—scorched and broken and marked by last year’s battle—the Queen stopped before the gates of the citadel and met the city’s sacred lord—the Bishop of Albinkirk. He escorted her to mass in the once great cathedral, which currently had a roof only over part of the nave. The knights of the Order did a great deal to aid the singing, as did a dozen monks and nuns who’d followed the Queen from Lorica.

Blanche enjoyed mass—the first proper mass in a proper church that she’d seen since the Troubles, as she had privately christened them, had begun. She enjoyed the thing, well done, with proper responses and good singing, and she reminded herself to go to confession as soon as ever she could—and then mass was over and she was swept along with the household, the Queen’s household, into the nooks and crannies of a fortress on the edge of war that had never, on its proudest day, expected to receive even a very small court.

The citadel had barracks space for two hundred soldiers and perhaps as many servants and support staff, and maybe—at full stretch, and sharing beds—maybe forty knights and noblemen.

The staff were overwhelmed immediately. The absence of their master—Ser John, the famous Captain of Albinkirk—was a disaster, and he had no master of household, no wife, no kin to oversee. He was his own steward.

As a result the Queen stood, almost forgotten, in the great hall—a great hall almost completely undecorated.

Blanche watched her temper rise. She had come to see that Desiderata was not unmarked by nights in a dungeon and a day waiting to be burned at the stake. Some of her light-heartedness was gone, perhaps forever. And she felt slights where none were intended, where before she had been immune, and sunny.

Blanche gave her wine from the glass flask in her basket. There was none for the other ladies.