Awareness of past follies, deaths, ruinous ransoms for the captured…this did not enter the shallow waters of their minds, he thought bitterly. Even if they failed (heroically!) and were taken to Angland as prisoners to await redeeming in aristocratic comfort, hunting in new forests, banqueting with new friends and among compliant Anglcyn women who found the nobles of Ferrieres worldly and elegant…well, there were worse fates!

Disembowelling was on de Vaux’s mind too often of late, meeting with these men in the evenings, trying to make them understand and accept his commands. Perhaps, he thought, it was discomfort with his own bowels that made that the currently preferred fantasy for killing the fatuous.

That very evening, having learned from riders just returned that they were genuinely close to Hardan’s force, he was told that two of the lords wanted permission to duel each other in the morning. A slight of some sort, deemed irremediable.

It really was too much, the stupidity.

“Permission granted,” he’d said crisply to those assembled, including the two at odds with each other. “My only condition is this. You fight to the death. If one of you does not die, you will both be executed for vain folly, and for treachery damaging Ferrieres on the eve of war. I will happily be accountable to the king for this.”

He dismissed them all. Men shuffled out, in silence.

De Vaux doubted very much there’d be any duel. Whatever mortal offence had been done by one man to the other…it would somehow emerge tonight to be not so mortal, after all.

He had Aubrey stay behind. He’d brought him north, a man he could entirely trust. Medor was now provost in Orane. Arguably unfair to leave him there without the most competent of the other serjeants, but such things happened in a time of war. You did what you could with what you had. Medor, he thought, would manage.

Unless Hardan destroyed their army in battle here, and gained an open path to the capital. The city walls would almost certainly hold, and the Anglcyn would be a long way from the sea and their ships, but there would be panic. And possibly treachery. Always that risk. And hunger, if the invaders managed to besiege Orane.

Best he not be defeated here, in short. He had ideas as to that. Was unsure if the lordlings were sufficiently under control to make them happen. Commanding an army, de Vaux thought, was sometimes about battling your own people before battling the enemy. He wasn’t sure if that was his own idea, or if Jean Montel had told him something of the sort long ago, when they and the world were younger.

Aubrey affirmed no new messages from the king.

There had been some sort of evidence the previous constable had been in league with Laurent de Barratin. It might be true, it might not. The man was dead now.