There was laughter from across the room.

Branco led Thierry to the bar, poured wine into a battered cup, waited pointedly. Thierry fished out a coin, and waited, in turn, for his change. The other man gave him his wine. No coin back.

It was terrible wine. Watery and sour, both, which was hard to achieve. A reason, he remembered, that he hadn’t been unhappy avoiding The Needle.

“Have to be a powerful husband, then,” he said.

“Well, not as if Montereau slept with whores in a tavern,” someone else said from the fire. “And his own wife lives mostly outside Orane, they say.”

A second man added, “And if you can bed the queen of Ferr—”

“Hush with that! Not in my tavern!” Branco Merlant snapped. “Or you’re outside on your ass on the ice and frozen shit! Hear me, you slack-brained fucker?”

The man so emphatically addressed fell silent. They all did. Thierry thought of Lambert Maar, who had spoken too freely in a tavern about a robbery being planned. Which had led to his being here.

The things that could shape your life…

He sipped his wine, kept from grimacing because Branco was watching him. He said, “There’s really no idea who did this?”

The tavernkeeper snorted again, a habit of his. “As if someone will come into The Needle and tell us?”

“True enough. We’ll know more in the morning, I imagine.”

“Maybe,” said the man behind the bar. “Not always for the likes of us to know anything.”

Which was also true. Thierry said as much.

“Someone over that way said there was a tall man in a red cloak among the assassins,” said the talkative one from by the fire. “Maybe leading them.”

He was excited by the murder, you could see it. People were like that, Thierry thought. As long as it stayed just a story and didn’t shake up their own lives. People needed stories, he thought. They lived for them. But this was the sort of thing the provost would want to know. Odds were, de Vaux would hear it directly from whoever someone was, by now or come morning.

He finished his glass. Straight face again. “Thanks for the warmth, and for forgiving me,” he said. “I need to get to my bed. Probably we all should. Out after curfew on this night…?”

“Indeed,” said Merlant, wryly. “You look like the sort of man who’d kill a duke.”

“Really! Tall and with a red cloak?”

The tavernkeeper grinned.

He walked Thierry to the door, opened it, looked out, then stepped back with a nod. “You’re welcome here,” he said. “Just be careful with your verses.”

“Can’t be,” Thierry said seriously. “They’re no good if I am.”