And so the shrewd, bitter, ambitious Duke de Barratin was agonizingly suspended between the too-swift running of time and the terrible thought that he might not actually have any good choices now.

He rejected that second thought, that dagger. He had to, it was his nature. There were, he had always believed, ways to proceed. You thought things through, you forced a passage. Especially if you knew what you wanted and devised well. He was good at thinking and devising.

Better than his cousins. He would be a better king for Ferrieres, ruling it with Barratin. He lived in that belief—and many shared the thought.

Still, it was challenging. Roch might recede into spittle-flecked, straggle-haired madness again, but right now, now, he was on the throne and giving commands. And he was loved, loved as Laurent de Barratin had never been, loved because he had returned. Because of the Maiden. The fucking Maiden.

As if the whore would have been a maiden, thought Laurent de Barratin.

And meanwhile, the prince, the heir, the older son, once frail and wan, was reputedly less so now. He was coming of age. Month by month. Day by day!

Windows and doors closing.

He still wanted Robbin de Vaux dead, though it was harder to have him killed now, for many reasons, including the fact that the man was an exalted hero of Ferrieres, elevated to the nobility.

Also, he hated the scrawny, scruffy, inexplicable poet who had somehow stood up in winter and balked the process for which Cassin—that fraud, that poseur, that failure, Denis Cassin!—had been paid a fortune to ensure that the murder of the Duke de Montereau would set the stage for Barratin’s emergence as the saviour of Ferrieres. The resister of tyranny. The voice of the people!

It hadn’t played out that way. Who could have known that the foul-mouthed gutter poet was an advocate? Trained by Cassin, even! Bitterest irony. In certain moods he could appreciate irony. Not in this matter.

So he had been sent into exile. On holy pilgrimage through the mountains to this gross, greedy High Patriarch and the grasping clerics surrounding him, standing in a row with their hands extended. They hadn’t been subtle in their demands.

It offended him. You could be greedy and ambitious but keep it decently cloaked, couldn’t you? Were they what Rhodias was today? He would swear before Jad he was a more decent man than any of them.

He was wealthy, he could pay them. He did pay. He had travelled with chests of money and many guards. But he kept a ledger in his mind with the names of those who had crossed him.