She left, instead. Demanded an escort. Eudes sent two men with her. It was the right thing to do, in the night streets. Always important to do the right thing, Thierry thought bitterly.

Eudes made arrangements for the dead serjeant to be taken to the Châtelet. They needed a cart. He seemed calm again. Thierry didn’t feel so. He remembered he’d promised his mother he’d sleep at home tonight. He said that to Silvy.

The look on her face froze him.

“You are not allowed to be a fool right now, Thierry,” she said. “You had two guards. They are both gone. One is dead. You are not leaving here.”

“They said I wasn’t in danger,” he said. “That I could come back.”

“And a man drew a sword on you, and a man was killed!”

“That…this was different. This was just Jolis!”

“Ah. Just Jolis. I see. And the man with the sword, the vicomte with a sword, has no friends in Orane? If you go to the door I’ll stab you myself, Thierry.”

He looked at her. She was rigid with tension. “Violent tonight?” he managed to say.

Silvy shook her head. “Don’t even try to be amusing. If you don’t want to stay down here, head up to my room. But you aren’t going into the streets. I will send a message to your mother that you’ll be home in the morning. Some of us know about sending messages.”

“Now you’re the one being amusing,” he said.

“Not really,” she said coldly.

He looked down again at the dead man.

“Very well,” he said.

She gave him the room key. He was deeply shaken. He watched the men Eudes had called in as they wrapped the body in linens and carried it out to a waiting cart. He could send a message with them to the Châtelet, he belatedly realized, and have another escort come take him home.

He let things be. For Silvy, he told himself.

He lingered in The Lamb for a time, talked to a few people he knew when they came over. Everyone was quiet, subdued. He drank some wine but not very much. The crowd slowly thinned out. Not a tavern people wanted to be in just now. Eventually, he went through the inner doorway and up the narrow stairway to the room where, really, everything about his present life seemed to have begun, in the dark of winter.

He used a taper he lit at a lamp in the hallway to light the one in Silvy’s room. It was a warm, late-summer night. He opened the window and the shutters. Needed air, even if he couldn’t go outside. Her orders. She had punched him. Then Jolis. Did he even know this woman? he thought.

Actually, yes, he did. He did know her.