Because they both thought now, both feared, that the immensely wealthy and powerful, the ferociously volatile duke of the vast Barratin lands to the north and east—larger than Ferrieres by many measures, even if nominally part of it—might have ordered the assassination of his cousin last night.

Thierry had a sudden, vivid image in his mind again, in bright daylight, of the dead man under torches and a blue moon. The two guards lying beside him, too. Destined to be forgotten, he thought. Such figures always were.

Before leaving, he had said again to the provost, the two of them still alone, on either side of the desk in the other man’s handsome room, “You’d probably be safer to leave this alone, no?”

“I am quite certain I would be,” said Robbin de Vaux.

“Dog with a bone?” Thierry asked.

But after a pause the other man shook his head. “Provost of Orane. And the king’s brother was murdered last night.”

Had to respect that, Thierry thought.

He walked through streets and lanes he knew only slightly. The river was behind him. This was a wealthier part of Orane. Larger homes, most with guards in front, he saw. The streets were quiet here.

He was headed, as instructed, towards the very grand mansion near which caltrops had been seen by de Vaux’s serjeants last night. A mistake, that had been, Thierry thought, too clear a trail. But men overwhelmed by the enormity of what they’d just done, fleeing real or imagined pursuit in the night, could make mistakes.

A cold, westering sun. Still a bright winter’s afternoon, few clouds. He had been offered a page as an escort, but a tavern poet would never have such a companion, and he’d declined. This needed to be an impulsive visit. Presumptuous, absolutely, but not beyond reason or possibility, if Thierry had recently learned (as he had!) that Marina di Seressa was in Orane and staying with Barratin.

It was delicate, of course, choosing today, with word of murder racing through the city like a runaway horse, to pay some sort of collegial visit—at that palace—but it wasn’t something that could be deferred, and it was where she was staying, wasn’t it?

The provost was right. Speed mattered. There would be a funeral procession, de Vaux had said. They’d give the widow and children time to come to the city—more winter travel—from the Montereau estate in the west.

He found himself briefly hoping that Marina di Seressa, who had come to Ferrieres as a child when her father became a doctor and astrologer to the royal court, might not be at the Barratin palace just now, or choose to receive an unexpected visitor on such a day as this one was.