She sighed. “I’m really about to be empress,” she said. “By myself.”

“You have George and Clarissa and Michael and Kaitlin and Nicodemus,” he said. “And Master Julius. But yes, my love.”

“A year ago I was a laundress,” she said. “In point of fact, as you like to say, I was a laundress four months ago.” They had reached the point in their relationship where each had adopted a legion of the other’s speaking ticks; point of fact was one of them.

He kissed her again. “That was then. This is now,” he said, and dry-eyed, went out.

Jock MacGilly was ironing. Badly. Blanche was tempted, but she did not fall. Instead, despite the hour, she passed into the scriptorium, went into the aviary and checked and fed all the messengers herself, then sat down with the night’s dispatches and began to read.

Down in the courtyard, Gabriel stood, now fully armoured, as Anne brought Ataelus, his tall black warhorse, to the mounting stool. Michael held the reins.

“I can’t believe you are leaving me,” he said.

“You are the Megas Dukas now,” Gabriel said. “Your time as an apprentice is over. You and Blanche are the helm.”

“Why don’t you take the helm and I’ll go hunt the Necromancer?” Michael asked.

“Because I am probably the third or fourth best human mage in the circle of the world, and this is an exercise in magistery,” Gabriel said. He got a leg over his gigantic horse, who grunted.

“Then why is Tom going?” Michael said. He knew he sounded like he was whining. He was whining.

“Because he’s the best killer I’ve ever met.” Gabriel moved his hips back and forth, establishing his seat. “And since you and Tom are equally unhappy, I must have done something right.”

“Tom’s just mad you chose Sauce,” Michael said.

“Advise Blanche,” Gabriel said, taking a white staff of command from Toby. Ser Tobias. “Pray for victory. Make sure—”

“That you get a digest of incoming messages. I know!” Michael patted Gabriel’s armoured knee.

Both men smiled.

Across the yard, Tom Lachlan vaulted onto the back of his eighteen-hand-high warhorse in his full blue-black armour. Men cheered.

Bad Tom snapped an order, and the casa, Gabriel’s personal retinue of knights and archers, fell in, a neat column of twos, every man leading a spare horse. The casa had once been four lances; now it was twenty: twenty belted knights, twenty armoured squires, twenty of the most expert archers, twenty veteran pages, all of whom wore turbaned bassinets and maille shirts and carried light crossbows. Adrian Goldsmith, the artist and Atcourt’s squire, carried the banner of three lacs d’amours on a field all sable. It rippled and snapped in the dawn breeze. Anne Woodstock waited by Ser Gabriel with the casa’s new trumpeter, an Etruscan: Alessio Monteverdi. He was tall, gangly, and ludicrously well read; Gabriel barely knew him, as he’d been recruited by Sauce in Berona. Behind him was the new page, an Islander, Jon Gang; short-legged and cheerful, he had signed on to the company after the coronation and had served two other knights and was ready to be a squire. He wore the scarlet jupon as if unaccustomed to so much finery, and alone of all the men and women in the yard, he wore his black bycocket backward on his head.