Marina di Seressa murmured, “Also, I’d never expect a man in your state to be of use to a woman tonight, to address your earlier comment. Your almost comment. I am here, as I said, because I didn’t think you should awaken alone in the dark tonight, Thierry Villar. After where you were.”

“My lady…” he managed.

“If you call me that again, I will be forced to injure you myself,” she said.

“I’m sorry,” he managed. “I’m…Is Silvy…is she…?”

“Silvy is asleep in the next room. Would you prefer her to be here?”

“No! No, we aren’t…”

“I know. She told me. But,” said Marina di Seressa, “you and I aren’t, either.”

He sighed. He truly wasn’t equal to this. To anything, really.

She shifted the bedcovers over him better, quite gently, and turned the other way in the bed.

“Sleep, Villar,” she said. “It is safe to sleep.”

So he did that. He slept. Was dimly aware at one point of her head upon his chest, her hair loose about them both, and a sense of being alive and in an infinitely better world than it had been when he was awakened that same morning in the dungeon of Aurage.

The wheel of fortune. Artists and poets use it as an image. We live upon it, rising and falling through our days.

Chapter X

On a bright morning in the late spring of that year, someone loosed an arrow at the provost of Orane as he rode out from his home in the city.

“Provost! Down!” one of his serjeants screamed. They’d been on extreme alert all spring. It saved his life.

Robbin de Vaux threw himself forward over his horse’s neck, to the right, clinging on. The arrow flew over him. It struck a glancing blow to the horse immediately behind his before falling to the street. Serjeants immediately surrounded the provost, screening him. The man who’d shouted the warning, was pointing across the square at an open window on an upper floor.

The horse ought to have been only slightly injured. It died, foaming white at the mouth.

Poison on the arrowhead.

There was rage among the serjeants, both for the attempted assassination and for the dead animal. They loved their horses as extensions of themselves. Half a dozen men galloped across the square, dismounted, and were surging up the stairs, having banged open the front door of a building with a goldsmith’s shop on the ground level and accommodation above.

Two lingered to seize the goldsmith, who shouted an urgent protest that he knew nothing about what had happened. He was arrested and interrogated at the Châtelet. It was fairly quickly decided that he had spoken the truth. He didn’t own the building. Hadn’t leased space upstairs to anyone. His left hand never worked properly again, unfortunately.