She nodded. Tears were streaming down her face. She wiped at her cheeks with the backs of her hands, careful of the rings she wore. He noticed that because he noticed things.

“I don’t know what you did,” Gauvard Colle said softly to the girl beside him. “But thank you. For all of us.”

“I don’t know what I did, either,” said Jeanette de Broché. She sounded terribly young. He wasn’t a compassionate man, but he felt compassion then.

There are places in the world where important things have happened. Personal ones: births, deaths, childhood discoveries, love found, or lost. Or events impacting the wider world of kings and countries. Sometimes those larger ones happen years, or even centuries apart in the same place, if it survives.

It is not really surprising that a smaller reception chamber in the hunting lodge of Chervaux, built for royalty and loved by generations of it, should be one such place.

Decades after that day, in a time after the world has greatly changed, another king of Ferrieres, the grandson of this one, will receive an emissary from the High Patriarch in Rhodias. The emissary is a military leader, sharing military plans. A woman of no status at all will be present in the room, as she happens to be a part of the emissary’s entourage. She will discover, because she is clever and alert, a spy from a hostile country beneath the window, hidden among the flowers.

For reasons of state the spy will not be executed, but he is sent home, expelled from Ferrieres, and his right hand is severed.

On the way, he will die of the wound festering. It was not intended, but it happens.

He is in no way central to the tale of that later time, the conflicts that ensued not long after, but he has a family that mourns him, and his death speaks to a hard truth: you can die at the margins of a story as easily as at the centre of it.

Or just be a glancing comment in another tale.

Thierry could not sleep. He had a room to himself, a genuine luxury. Even with all the guards and courtiers accompanying the royal party, there was room for privacy in Chervaux for someone favoured—however improbably—by the queen. The bed was extremely comfortable, the room was large.

But he lay wide awake. He was thinking about the night his life had changed in the winter now past, when they had gone and seen a dead, butchered body in a street across the river.

Had that not happened…

How did you not think about moments like that?