Before she had finished speaking, Alexander was on his knees beside her chair. “I’ll go today! No, Mother, hear me! You said just now that you had planned to tell me about my father’s death when I was eighteen, and then send me to the High King to seek vengeance on the murderer?”

“Yes, but –”

“This is the day! What happened this morning – you could call it fate! Anyway, it has happened, and – you said so – there could be danger, so what matter a few more months? I will be eighteen within the year! So I will go now, today –”

“Today? Alexander – no, listen! Even if it were possible to let you go on such an errand –”

“Then the sooner the better!” He swept on, his eagerness blowing her protests aside like a high wind. This was his own ground, man’s business, and himself a man after his first fight and his first kill. He did not need wit and subtlety for this; he was his father’s son, brave and high of heart, but also young enough – and inexperienced enough – to see this as an adventure, like the tales of excitement and wonder he had listened to as a child. “Why not? With good horses, and two or three men, you can be sure we will overtake those two long before they reach March’s border. They’ll see no reason to hurry; in fact they may hang back from telling King March how their officer was killed, and even, perhaps, their news of Baudouin’s son. He sounds the kind of king who would have the tongue out of a bringer of bad tidings!”

“But – if you don’t manage to come up with them? If they take a different road? In any case you don’t know the way.”

“I’ll take someone with me who does, a couple of men. Uwain, I think, he’s a good man, and another – no more. Just the three of us; we’ll travel all the faster. We’ll catch them, never fear.”

“And when you do?”

He sprang to his feet. “Need you ask? They won’t take their news to King March, to put Sadok and his brother at risk. That’s what you want, isn’t it?” Something in her expression checked him. “What is it, Mother? You needn’t fear for me, you know! They won’t be expecting us. We’ll have surprise on our side, and –”

“It’s not that. You’re forgetting. These men are not likely to be March’s spies, why should they be? They must have been here by accident, on other business. I would like to know what that was.”

He stared in dismay. “You mean let them live? March’s men?”

“Even so. Until we know who they are, we can’t know if they were also Baudouin’s – your father’s – friends. I would not risk your killing men who perhaps stood against your father’s murder, perhaps even fought with him when he fired the Saxon longships. True, they serve March, but I would not have them killed without we know more about them.”