Huon had already seen Yseult, riding beside the old warrior Abbot. At her he did grin, and then made a little game of handing her down highcourteous-wise.

“Fine manners you’re picking up at court,” she said.

He snorted. “Bruises black and blue are what I’m picking up,” he said pridefully. “Her Majesty beat me up and down the exercise yard, and when it isn’t her it’s Ogier. They’re merciless.”

A shadow of concern flickered through the tilted blue eyes, and he smiled and shook his head slightly, giving her his hand to the table. The camp cook served out bowls of the evening’s variation on what the army spread through the western fringes of the Horse Heaven Hills seemed to eat every day about this time.

“Ah, yes, the old soldier’s superstition,” Dmwoski said.

Everyone looked at him, and he went on: “The stubborn belief if the sun rises in the east it is an omen predicting stew for supper.”

“And that would be funny, if only it were funny,” the High King said, without looking up from a stack of papers he was editing with quick flicks of a pencil; no or yes or investigate this.

Huon helped to hand the bowls around—page-work, but Mathilda hadn’t had time enough for any squeakers yet, appointments like that were delicate political balancing acts anyway—and sat. The stew was mostly beans and peas, and chunks of an extremely salty dried sausage that had probably been mostly pork at some point, and whatever vegetables were available, fresh or starting in a sun-dried state. There was a stack of flat wheat cakes fresh from the griddle as well, and a rock-hard Sbrinz-type cheese to grate on the stew, and a bowl of raisins for dessert.

Yseult was eating hers willingly enough, but she raised her brows at the way Huon shoveled down his bowlful and went back for seconds before she said, “It just occurred to me that Odard probably ate like this all the way to the lands of Sunrise, on the quest for the Sword. And, well, he was sort of picky about food and clothes and keeping state. If I’m remembering him properly.”

Rudi Mackenzie . . .

Or should I just think of him as High King Artos or simply Artos or what? Huon thought.

. . . snorted and handed the papers off to an assistant who seized them as if they were a precious relic and dashed off virtually dancing with glee. Huon jumped slightly; Mathilda was acute, but the way the High King could concentrate on several different things at once was disturbing.

“Your recollection is entirely correct and true,” Artos said to Yseult. “He would haul that set of court dress for himself and Matti all the way to Iowa despite all our mockery—and it’s well that turned out. It helped him charm the Bossman there.”

“And my cote-hardie did the same for the Bossman’s wife.”