“Can you?” asked the other man. “Can you still use a friend loyal until death?”

“Oh, Jad, yes!” said Thierry.

“Good,” said Medor. “That’s good. Now go. We will drink together when it is allowed. If we live.”

But then he added one more thing, himself.

Fear and happiness could coexist in the world, Thierry thought, outside. However strange a truth that was.

“I think we might also want your father for this,” the other man had said. “Please advise him. If this idea of yours comes to pass, it may also be about clerics and the god.”

Bright sun above Orane as he walked, a beautiful late-summer’s day, for all those living in that time and in that place.

Chapter XVII

“Have you been ordered to do this? Or are you choosing to, Thierry?”

Silvy’s face. Fear, fury, some potent mixture of the two.

He said, “Love, I doubt they’d punish me if I said no. But I don’t believe Medor would have asked if he didn’t think there was cause.”

“If he didn’t think there was cause,” Silvy mimicked. An attempt to sound sardonic. It fell flat; she was too distressed. “You want to be there, at whatever risk. You are…you are drunk on being so close to great events! Even if it kills you. And your father!”

He looked at her. At the woman he knew he loved and would always love now.

“Please don’t say that. I don’t think it’s true. Silvy, if you ask me to decline, I will. I cannot speak for my father.”

“Don’t put this on me!”

They had quarrelled before, over the years, as friends do. This was different. They were more than friends. That enormous change in the world.

“You are right. I won’t. I’m sorry.” He meant it. But…Medor had suggested he work this through, and by now he had.

They were in the small garden at the back of The Lamb. He wondered if anyone could hear them. Hoped not.

He said, “It is not on you. It is me. I need to see through what began that night in winter. And then later, when Barratin tried to kill me.”

“Ah! Give him another chance, you mean?”

“Silvy.”

“Don’t you dare say my name that way! Don’t you dare!”

She had tears in her eyes. Of rage.

“Again, you are right. But I played a role at the start, and there may be one for me now because of that. Or not at all. It may come to nothing, and I’ll ride back here with my father while armies shape our lives with a war. This is…about trying to stop that.”

“And Thierry Villar is so important in this!”

He almost said her name again, the same way as before, but did not.