He stepped out, wincing as the wind hit him. Heard the oak door close. He wasn’t going to his bed, or Silvy’s. He was supposed to keep moving through the city, asking questions, listening.

I am a spy for the provost of Orane, he thought. Then, And the Duke de Montereau has been murdered.

King’s brother. A world-shaking event. Jad of the sun was under the world right now, the liturgy taught, defending his children. Some of them, maybe.

The blue moon crescent was up in the sky now. Spirit moon. He continued east, walking away from bed and Silvy’s wonderful blankets. He glimpsed an animal ahead, big one. He hoped—could only hope—it was a dog, not a wolf. He didn’t really feel he was destined to die eaten by a wolf, but who could know? His father had died of a fall in the barn.

Death was always in life. His primary poem sequence, his best-known work, was an ongoing series of bequests he purported to make to various people. Some he knew, some were just celebrated, or notorious. Villar was known to be impoverished, he had nothing to bestow—which was a good part of what made the poems funny. He had bequeathed Branco Merlant a strap-on device such as women used with each other in lovemaking—to make up, he’d written, for the tavernkeeper’s own diminutive needle.

It had been a very successful improvisation, he remembered. Enormous laughter that night. Had gotten him thrown out of The Needle. And the poem had been greeted with delight elsewhere, every time he recited it. A measure of achievement for a tavern poet. Not like being printed and sold, or read aloud at some nobleman’s court to aristocratic acclaim, but this was his world. You took what it gave you.

—

He went into three other taverns before sunrise. He was well known in two, not so much in the third. In that third he learned that the man in the red robe was said to be tonsured like a cleric or university graduate. But having a tonsure only took a barber, or a friend skilled with a razor. You could do it for yourself if need be, if you wanted a disguise of sorts. It didn’t mean that much. Villar had one himself, courtesy of his degree in law from the university, home of his wildest years—assuming those weren’t still to come.

Speculation in all three taverns still centred on Montereau’s women. Mostly wives of other men of stature, it was confidently said by people who would know nothing about it at all. Knowing nothing, in Thierry’s experience, did little to slow rumours.