She was a sweet girl.

Jolis didn’t stay long, once aware Thierry wasn’t expected. She called a goodbye to Eudes when they left; he nodded courteously back at her. Silvy glared at him after the door closed. He didn’t pay any attention. He was good at that.

Three nights later, another thing happened. It brought excitement, fear, fragility, disruption. The awareness of how life and the world can wound us. The terrifying glory of flying. And the likelihood of a fall.

—

The messengers saying he could return came from Medor Colle at the end of summer. Thierry went with them the very next day. Didn’t linger. He’d been writing, yes. New work he thought might be good. He was less unsettled by the countryside and its strange silences—and noises—by now. He liked Marina’s children.

But he still didn’t want to be here. And to be told he could go back to Orane, well, it was like being freed from another imprisonment, wrong as that association surely was.

It was his association. He was allowed it, he told himself.

He rode back one more time to Arceval very early the next morning, but he could see, from the top of the drive, by the locked iron gates, that no one was home. They left for Orane right after that.

Medor’s message had been carried by four serjeants, so he had an escort for the ride. Excessive, Thierry thought, but he really had no way of knowing, did he?

Long, bright, late-summer days, not quite harvest time. They rode through wine country and past wheatfields tall with grain. Stick figures stuffed with straw to scare off crows. The tracks of boars at the edges. One very large one seen in the mist one morning, grey, scarred, colossally tusked. They didn’t get close to it.

They rode into Orane on an afternoon of brilliant sunshine and he heard the bells of his city again from all the sanctuaries, the great domed one on the island and the smaller ones. Almost but not quite in unison.

There were crowds in the streets, he heard cries, laughter, shouts of anger. Salespeople were hawking whatever it was they were trying to sell. The city smelled as any large city did; it would probably take him time to readjust to that, he thought.

That was all right. He was home.

He went to his mother’s house before anywhere else. Two of the serjeants went to the Châtelet to report their arrival, two stayed with him. He was going to protest that they need not, but he didn’t. Medor would have given them orders.

They would have to talk soon, he thought.