On the bridge, the duke of Barratin was still upright, somehow. Was not yet dead, even with a knife in his eye.

“Father!” his son cried.

Barratin lifted his head. He swayed. “Do not kill the boy, cousin,” he managed to say. “Do not do that, Roch!”

Before he was stabbed by a sword. From behind.

And this blow…this blow was inflicted by Count Burkard van Aribert, who thereby killed his lord, who had always trusted him.

Van Aribert immediately dropped his sword, bloodied as it was. The duke lay on the stones of the bridge, lifeless now. Medor Colle was on his knees not far away from him, a hand at the shoulder wherein another blade lay buried.

The king of Ferrieres, surrounded now by his officers, encircled by them, appeared to Thierry to be astonishingly at ease. How was that possible? he thought. Golden, preternaturally poised, King Roch said to Burkard van Aribert, “You did this why, my lord count?”

Van Aribert knelt before him. “Because there is no need for war now, your grace. There is no one to want it. And this killing can go against my name, no one else’s.”

Barratin’s son, Thierry saw, was also kneeling now, beside his father’s body, in the spreading of blood across the ancient stones. He had spoken of blood red in his poem a moment ago, he thought.

This was what had been intended, he knew. He knew. The king calling on him, twice. Provoking the duke to break the truce in his rage, his pride. A commoner addressing him with such contempt. They had—he had—acted to drive Barratin to a point where he could not kneel before the king and offer contrition. Could not. And so he had drawn his sword.

Lives saved, Thierry urgently told himself. So many lives might now be saved.

“You have not answered our question,” said the king to the man who’d just killed Laurent de Barratin. A boy was beside his father, weeping as if he would never stop.

“He…he should not have ordered the cleric slain,” said van Aribert. “And he did also direct that the soldier be killed, to hide it. It…was wrong.”

“Ah. And killing his cousin? My brother? In the winter?”

“I was not there, your grace. The two of them were enemies from long before. And they…they were equals? That, I could leave to Jad.”

“Not this?”

“Not this, your grace.”

The king said, almost in sorrow, Thierry thought, “No one will ever trust you again, van Aribert. Your name will be accursed. Though you might have helped avert a war.”

“I know this, your grace. I accept that fate. I would ask, if you are not now to execute me, that I be permitted to withdraw to a sanctuary of the god and take an oath of holy office among the clerics there.”

“Where?” asked King Roch.