Master Julius spoke very quietly, as if they were in church. “She saves us hours sometimes,” he said.

Michael nodded. “So that’s why he married you,” he said. “A genius cryptologist.”

Blanche glared at him. “I’m sure that was at the forefront of his mind,” she said.

Scrolls were read, passed back and forth, read again. The clerks began to copy them fair in plain text.

“But do you need a guard on the convoy?” Michael asked. “We seem to be in charge of the whole countryside.” He shrugged. “A forty-league ride in either direction is no small thing, Your Grace.”

Blanche glanced at Michael. “Julius, clear the room,” she said. “Just the three of us, please.”

“Ma’am,” he said, and shooed the messengers and secretaries out. The messengers took the birds; Blanche patted each of them in turn.

When the room was clear, she walked around it, looked out each of the arrow slits, and then opened the curtains on the master map.

“Michael, Master Julius,” she said. “Kronmir had a theory that the Patriarch was not a servant of the Necromancer, but of a third, or is it fourth, power.” She looked at Master Julius for confirmation. The notary nodded.

“Yes,” he said. Outside the rare occasions on which Master Julius drank too much, he became taciturn and wasted few words.

Michael sat back. “That’s an uncomfortable notion,” he said.

“Gabriel says there could be fifty powers, or more, and we wouldn’t know until they tip their hands,” Blanche said, tapping a roll of parchment on the table. “From now until Gabriel returns, we guard everything. Messengers go in pairs, convoys have guards. It seems to me that our most sensitive point right now is food.”

Julius was nodding along with his mistress.

She passed Michael a large, folio-sized sheet of paper. On it was a report in a small, expert hand detailing levels of dissent inside Arles, especially about the seizure of food.

“Christ, we spy on the new queen?” he asked.

“Michael,” Blanche said, the way a mother might speak to an erring son.

Michael grimaced. “Silly me, of course we do. Blood of God, you mean people are angered when we’re feeding those starving wretches out there?” he asked.

Blanche nodded. “There is a good deal of anger in Arles,” she said. “Not least of which is about how many or how few of the wretches starving out there in the fields may actually be missing sons and husbands. A very prickly topic. Comnena is trying to process people as fast as he can, but it’s not quick.” Comnena was, in fact, examining anyone who claimed to be from Arles. Twice now they had found men with living worms. “And the city people treat them like traitors; some of them anyway.”

“Merciful saints,” muttered Michael, reading the report to the end. “I wondered why someone as important as Comnena was on this.”