It seems to me that most moments in a life can be called interludes: following something, preceding something. Carrying us forward, with our needs and nature and desires, as we move through our time. It also seems to me that it is foolish to try to comprehend all that happens to us, let alone understand the world.

Part III

Chapter XIII

There were many people he wanted dead. Some more urgently than others. Laurent, Duke de Barratin, had a long memory, back to childhood slights and indignities from his cousins. King Roch and his brother had been beautiful when young, too. He never had been. Such things could matter in a life.

His immediate ambitions were not diminished, even if circumstances had changed.

The greatest change being, of course, the king’s return to health.

It had happened before. Roch could come back to his right mind, then slide again into reclusive, frightened madness, throwing Ferrieres into chaos again. They had watched it happen many times.

The chaos of the king’s madness last winter was what the duke had hoped to use to claim the power he felt should have been properly his, not residing in greedy, cruel, elegant Montereau.

Elegant Montereau was, at least, dead. In an icy street near the home of the cold bitch queen—who had then arranged for an investigation and hearing that had undone his own plans comprehensively.

He didn’t underestimate the queen. But he hadn’t expected her to proceed so decisively. Burkard van Aribert, the only one of his courtiers he really trusted, had warned him about her. Had to give the man that.

Barratin had been forced to leave home when the snows melted in the lowest mountain passes to the south. He made the demanded pilgrimage to Rhodias. Had had no choice, really. He’d knelt before the fat High Patriarch, Tessio, with his narrow, watery eyes, paid the fat bribes expected, kissed his ring and foot, expressed his contrition in the throne room and then again in the glittering sanctuary, before Jad’s altar.

A hugely expensive, time-consuming journey.

He was very much aware of time passing.

And while he was away south…some peasant girl no one had ever heard of (how could they have heard of her?) had somehow brought the king back, at Chervaux.

Demons surely controlled her, Barratin believed (he believed in demons, everyone did)—because it could not be the will of Jad. The god using a vessel like that? An ignorant, unwashed girl?

She had been burned as a heretic, quite properly, by the Anglcyn.

But then…then the army of Ferrieres under Robbin de Vaux, another man he hated, had defeated and captured the king of the Anglcyn. And Hardan was still imprisoned in the Châtelet of Orane, shockingly (no ransom!), against all norms, and so…