Enraged, humiliated husbands could kill you, of course. That much was true. Someone told the story—Villar had heard it before—that the duke had commissioned portraits of the women who’d taken him to their beds, or come to his. He allegedly had those hanging in a locked room in his city palace. What the duke’s wife thought of this Villar didn’t know. How could you know?

Maybe she had had him killed.

Unlikely. Even for a woman from Batiara. If he was dead, she lost all significance here. Maybe, he thought, she wanted to go home. That was unlikely, too.

There was a feeling of agitation and unease everywhere he went as morning approached.

Few had loved the Duke de Montereau, that was known, well before tonight. The taxes he’d been levying on the flow of goods into Orane, and a new house tax in the city last spring, had ensured as much. He wasn’t the king, only the king’s brother, but the king was too often incapable and Ferrieres endangered because of it.

But not loving someone powerful didn’t mean you couldn’t feel fearful and uncertain when he was murdered. Some might celebrate it, but they were unlikely to proclaim that right now. Not yet. Too much was unknown, and the king was again mad this winter. He might emerge, as he did at intervals, and be…himself for a time, but governance would become an issue now, and behind that lay the possibility of civil war, while they were still at war with the Anglcyn.

It wasn’t a good night in Orane. And the day would be worse, Villar thought, when people woke up and learned of this.

It was also still stupidly cold.

At sunrise, as the shops began to open, he did the logical thing and went to get a haircut.

Barbershops were even better than taverns for chatter. He doubled back and went to one not far from the street where the duke had been killed. He avoided the site of the murder. Did see, glancing over and down the street as he passed, that there were still serjeants there. The provost had said he wanted to enter the house the assassins had leased, as soon as there was enough light to see by.

Would a jealous husband arrange so many killers, ahead of time, at such cost, and risk?

It almost amused him, how he was beginning to think the way the provost probably was, trying to work this through. There was an excitement in this. He didn’t want to think too much about that yet. Some hours ago he had been headed out in the night to rob a strongbox in a sanctuary because he needed money to pay a gambling debt.