George never had a good answer to Meg’s sharp retorts, and he did not have one now. Instead he upended the entire board, and the brightly colored figures flew in all directions, startling Ambergris, who began to bark. Meg’s attendant Beatrice got to her feet “tut-tutting” and commanded George to pick everything up and apologize. George simply stormed off, pushing his sister aside.

“Holy Mother of God,” Meg swore. “I do not like George sometimes.”

“Sometimes?” Dickon muttered to his block of wood, but he put it down and went to help Beatrice pick up the chess pieces. As he righted the board, he glanced past Meg to the window and gasped.

“S…soldiers!” he stammered. “Look! They are coming over the hill.”

Beatrice shrieked and got up from her knees so quickly she knocked her high hennin askew. “Dear Lord have mercy, it must be the royal army. Quick Dickon run and alert your mother. Meg come with me.”

Dickon obeyed as fast as he could, dashing through the castle passages that ran inside the curtain wall to the solar in the Northwest Tower. But his mother wasn’t there. “She went up on the ramparts with Edmund,” Cecily’s chief attendant, Gresilde, told the boy, her face pale when she heard Dickon’s news. “She must have seen them, too.”

Not waiting for further instructions, Dickon scampered up the circular stairs to the roof of the tower. There he saw his mother and brother staring horrified at the thousands of troops massing across the Whitcliff hill, the royal pennants and banners as thick as any forest.

The shrill alarm from a shawm was real this time, and soon the air was filled with pealing bells, loud trumpets, and most frightening of all for those inside a castle, the grinding sound of the portcullis being lowered and the drawbridge raised against attack. Dickon ran to his mother’s side, terrified. Edmund swept him up in his arms, and Dickon was surprised to see fear in his brother’s eyes, too. It made him feel better that he was not alone.

“Come boys, we must prepare for our royal visitors,” their mother said airily, as though the king was here merely to dine with them. Despite himself—and the threatening horde at the gates—Edmund managed a smile.

Dickon stared at his mother’s retreating figure in astonishment. Prepare for the visitors? Is she serious? Doesn’t she know fear? he wondered. If the duchess was not afraid, then perhaps he could pretend he wasn’t either.

“You will fight the king?” Dickon whispered, daring to question his father, who had come to wish his boys goodnight. “What about the attainting thing?”

“Dickon!” George hissed, making York smile wanly.