He had, and he knew it, too much anger in him. Was too easily provoked.

Yes, he had a very good life here. He still wanted more. For himself, for his heirs. What was a man if not what he left behind?

Someone more detached might have noted that his analysis of events might overlook how much envy he’d always felt for his golden cousin, from childhood. He himself had been the clever, ill-favoured one. Rollin? Rollin was the clever, beautiful one. It was, it always had been, unfair.

He didn’t believe, at all, that his own cool, haughty wife had been seduced by Montereau. That her portrait, unclothed, was on a wall in some secret chamber in his city palace or the château to the west of Orane. But it burned him like a brand that many people did think so.

It had been one more mark against the ledger of his cousin. Enough of them, over time, to have been worth a murder, he had finally decided. Accepting an ordered pilgrimage to Rhodias. And after returning to Berga sending letters of ingratiating entreaty to Orane that he be allowed back at court to take his proper place on the royal council.

In reply? Nothing. Nothing at all.

And you could not, you could not, even if you were the miraculously returned-to-health king of Ferrieres, ignore Laurent de Barratin. It was—it was really not permitted.

He’d been on the very edge of claiming that throne, ruling Barratin and Ferrieres. Even uniting them! He might be so again. If the world as Jad had made it would not give you the things you deserved, you needed to find ways to take them. That was the lesson. And in doing so burn away, as with a purging fire, some of the memories of childhood and his cousins.

—

Marina wasn’t certain, but she mostly believed the queen kept her close by because they were both from Batiara, and there was a trust in that. Odd, by some measures, as their city-states were rivals back home, but here in Ferrieres, that could be seen to be less important? Home was a long way off in time and over mountains or the sea, and both their lives were here now. Irreversibly, really, from when they were young.

She wanted to be home, in fact, but home was her château to the west, not the city in another land where she was born and raised, and from where she’d come north to be married. It had been—and she knew this was rare—a good marriage. Her husband’s death had been a wound, and not just for the financial disaster that had ensued for her and the children.

It had made her a poet, though. There was that.