He hadn’t ever thought of himself as hiding.

And of course there were hiding places! He could walk into the woods, be lost there for a morning or afternoon. Avoid his desk or a table that way. Perhaps a bear or a wolf would devour him. In which case someone else—Marina!—could write his elegy.

Maybe he’d find Jad there. Or a forest god. Or maybe words, a poem about doing that?

He swore. Declared himself a fool.

But the countryside really was too different, too unsettling to him. He had almost died earlier this spring in the Jad-cursed countryside, in a dungeon not far from here.

He didn’t hunt, hadn’t any sort of taste for early-morning rides, even if he now liked having a horse.

He could read here, yes, Marina had many books. But he could also fail to find his own words and pin them down.

He was wide open, accordingly, to what happened, like a coastline without a sheltering bay before a storm.

The steward informed him that someone had come riding.

He assumed Marina’s mother had a guest, which was not infrequent. It was not so. She herself had gone visiting; he had seen her leave in the carriage. He didn’t know where. Why would he? She was distantly polite to her daughter’s poet-guest from the city, but no more than that. They hadn’t dined together since Marina had gone back to the court from Chervaux.

He didn’t think Clare di Seressa approved of him. A tavern poet of dubious reputation? Two young children in the château? The children liked him, as it happened. He told them stories here in the garden each afternoon when the weather allowed, inside if not. He liked them, too. Thierry had no siblings, of course, little experience of children.

Her son—six years old? seven?—had asked him once, at story hour, “Are you a poet like Mama?”

Someone had told them, obviously.

“I am, yes. Not quite the same.” Not an important thing to say, he thought, but…

“Mama works very hard.”

“I’m sure she does.”

“All the time!”

He really didn’t know children, but the earnestness touched him.

The steward, approaching now across the garden, explained that the lady of Arceval, their visitor, evidently wished to greet him. Should he have her shown out here, bring wine for the stone table?

Thierry, mildly confused but grateful for a diversion of any sort, agreed that this would be the proper thing to do. He was adequately dressed. Had taken to wearing—at Marina’s suggestion—some of her late husband’s clothing. The servants had altered shirts and tunics and trousers to fit a smaller man. He even had on a well-made dark-brown hat against the afternoon sun just then.