By sundown Barthelmy had confessed to several things, and begged, through broken and missing teeth, for a cleric to help usher his soul to Jad’s light and mercy. This was denied him. There was great anger.

He was dead in the Châtelet before the moons rose that night. His disembowelled corpse was carted to Gallows Hill the next day and hanged.

He’d been a soldier. A disreputable, thieving one, though not without courage in battle, apparently. He’d hated the Duke de Montereau for reasons to do with his wife. She’d left him years ago, the interrogators determined, and there were no children.

So no one but the darkly curious went to view his gutted, swinging body on the gallows. The archer from the window, hanging beside him, did have family in Orane. They mourned, weeping, on the bare slope below. He’d been hanged in the normal way, which is to say while alive. The money he’d been paid had been found and seized in their home. They were going to have difficulty surviving. None of the serjeants was sympathetic.

There were, as always, and even more so in turbulent times, messages to be sent about crime and justice.

And at least one more message yet to come, Robbin de Vaux decided, late at night in his own study. He had calmed the fears of his wife and the two older children as best he could. Now there were things to do. Again. He sent men to awaken and bring to him the cleric responsible for the university, who happened to also be the high cleric of Orane.

Hutin Peyre lived now not in the cleric’s house on university lands but in the magnificent palace created when the Great Sanctuary on the island was built.

A discussion needed to be had to stave off a conflict in the city, the sort de Vaux had lived through before. He wanted someone arrested, and he wanted the high cleric to agree to it.

It didn’t happen. He hadn’t really expected it would.

“Understand me, and what you are doing,” he said to the golden-robed cleric quivering with fury in front of his desk. “We will do this. He will be taken and questioned. This is about treason, in winter and now today. We have new information sustaining this allegation. When you object today before the queen and the two dukes, you will be aligning yourself with that treason. No one will be inclined to be indulgent. You have a choice.”

“I have none,” the high cleric said, bravely enough, though a quaver was in his voice, too. “Clerics and students and teachers of the university are entitled by settled law to our own judicial procedure. One that you do not control, provost!”