It was as if, he thought, someone was scripting all their lines, writing them down, assigning them roles. He pictured a man, bearded, blue-eyed, no longer young, evoking them all, guiding what they were to say, and do. Shaping and telling their stories, perhaps with compassion, perhaps even with love.

A folly, a fancy. No time for such things now. If ever.

“As you wish, your grace,” Thierry Villar said. “I have been known for improvising bequest poems. In taverns, mostly. But not only. Here is one for you.”

He paused, for effect as much as for words, because he knew how this should begin, and what it needed to do. His task.

And looking straight at the duke, on that ancient bridge across the Aven River, he said, feeling strangely, unexpectedly strong:

And for the Duke de Barratin in all his power

What can a poet bequeath that he has not?

Perhaps love and affection, for distaste and contempt?

The affection he has never had? So let him be given

A ring, dazzling, a splendid ruby, red as shed blood

On snow, on moonlit ice in a wintry night.

That all who see it can admire, and so, perhaps,

Admire the man wearing it. Let him seek

A reflected glory in that gift. But let him also know

It is all the glory he will ever have: that blood red stone,

Red as the heart’s blood of the winter’s dead.

Silence on the bridge after that. What could there be but silence? Thierry Villar thought. There wasn’t going to be applause. The sound of his voice faded away. They could hear the wind, the murmur of the river rushing past below, the tent flaps above them, birdsong overhead.

“Roch,” Duke Laurent said softly to his cousin the king, “whatever else, Roch, you must now let me kill him. This is too profound an insult. You know it. It cannot be endured.”

And that was when the cleric Ambroise Villar, with immense dignity, stepped forward to stand beside his son. He said, “You do like killing people, do you not, my lord? As his grace the king said. You also sent a man to kill the senior cleric of a sanctuary east of here, didn’t you? A holy cleric, my lord duke.”

“I did not!” Barratin exclaimed, too loudly. “I just wanted him to be—”

“You wanted him dead,” said Ambroise Villar, implacably. “You sent a soldier to do it. I can tell you we have sworn documents from the cleric and the soldier, both. These have also gone to Rhodias. But this is a matter, as well, for the clerics of Ferrieres.”

“What? I am to endure this from a wrinkled fool in a yellow robe?”