“Tell your father,” Desiderata said when the sobs had died back into the woman’s fear, “that you and your child will be welcome at my court. Tell him that his grandson will be a Fitzroy; that I will see he is raised with Constantine, and knighted, and treated in every way as the king’s son.” She went forward and put a kiss on Jane’s cheek. “Come,” she said. “We have other enemies. Let us be kind to each other. And no one should be punished for love.”

Lady Jane, unbelieving, fell into the queen’s arms. Then, Desiderata found herself weeping. But when they were both done, the queen felt a weight lift from her, as if, in facing this one task, she had begun well on all of them.

She dried her eyes with a fine lawn handkerchief—pressed, folded, but without the scent of rosewater that Blanche would have added—and then she dried Lady Jane’s. She passed the door again, and Ser Ranald stood rigidly on the other side.

“Take Lady Jane wherever she wishes to go,” the queen said. “I didn’t rip out her throat with my fangs, if that’s what you were imagining.”

Ranald gave her a wary smile.

“And then bring me my council. I need to plan to take the army north.”

“Now ye’r talkin’,” Ranald said.

“And bring me Lady Mary in private, please. In my solar.” She was thinking clearly, for the first time in a week. Maybe it was just sleep. She could see exactly how she could be in two places at one time.

Sauce was standing with the duchess and two men Long Paw had not seen before: a nondescript man like an Etruscan foot soldier, and a well-dressed man with a horribly maimed face and one eye gone, half his hair lost under a tangle of angry scar tissue.

The scarred man bowed to Long Paw when he was introduced as “Ser Roberto.”

“Paw, this is Fernando Lucca. He was Kronmir’s . . .” She looked at the man.

“Friend?” the scarred man asked. “Squire?” He frowned; the expression was normal on one side of his face and vanished into the caricature of ruined flesh on the other side.

Long Paw looked at the second man. “And this?”

The man answered him with a very slight smile. “Most people don’t notice me,” he said quietly.

“This is Master Brown, who helped save my life once,” the duchess said.

Long Paw held out his hand, and the nondescript man took it. Very close, he was easier to describe; his face had a forgettable roundness to it, and his clothes were the frayed-hem wools of the lowest order of agricultural workers. He smelled a little bad.

“Just to catch you up,” Sauce said, “they came in on the convoy.”

The duchess looked tired, but not distraught. Long Paw doubted she’d ever been distraught in her life.