“I already have, your grace. They will be on their way.”

“We will wait for sunrise, then go back in our carriage with your escort, provost. You will remove the body from the road?”

“I will.” She’d already been told where the killing had happened. He wanted to ask about that, but did not.

He did have duties, however.

“Can you…are you able to tell me if the duke visited with you and…and the prince here?”

She nodded; she was utterly unreadable to him. “Why else would he have been in this street after dark? He came, we three played at cards. Girald went to bed, the duke and I were served our dinner, and he left.”

“When, please?”

“After dinner. I did not track the hour, provost. It is not a thing I do.” She spoke with a Batiaran accent still, if a slight one.

“And he showed no signs of distress or apprehension?”

“The duke?” She raised an eyebrow. “He never did that.”

Which was true, de Vaux thought. The Duke de Montereau was not a soldier by nature, though he’d been to war, but he was a worldly man. And why would he have been apprehensive, riding from a pleasant evening to what became his death?

“He was going back to his own palace?”

“I assumed as much, but he might also have been riding to a mistress or a friend.”

She was extremely clever. Wise to remember that.

She dismissed him—a word, a gesture. Had shown no hint of emotion or any disquiet, other than being awake and meeting him downstairs in the middle of the night. Almost too controlled, he thought.

She would wait for the serjeants, she repeated, and for daylight.

He had a task. To find who had done this.

It might kill him, Robbin de Vaux thought, back out in the night under a blue crescent moon. He wondered, briefly, how the small poet was faring. A possibly useful man. But his more immediate concern was with where the last caltrops had been found. Not towards the city gate. The other direction. The message that sent.

He was probably going to have to go there in the morning, he thought. He really didn’t want to. He had ambitions for his children, a life he was building for himself, for them. He didn’t think of himself as old yet, or ready to cross to the god.

But who controlled that, in life? Who could imagine they did so, after the plague years and so much war?

In some ways warfare had been easier, Robbin de Vaux thought. A bitter enough notion. He rode back towards the bodies in the street.

—

It was later said, a tale told, among many that sprang up, that the dogs of Orane had barked for much of that night, after the assassination.

Chapter III