“Please! Do not. That would very much grieve me,” said Barratin. “You are as welcome as you have always been. I spoke far too bluntly, in my concern for you and…for my household. You will stay, my lady?”

Her turn to nod. A forgiving smile. “Happily!” she said. “After I do my duty to the queen.”

Barratin turned back to Thierry. “Messire…Villardin, is it? Please accept my apologies. These are sad, difficult times.”

Thierry bowed again. It was generously spoken, even with the mangled name. Dukes did not apologize to tavern poets.

And because of that apology, looking back, he would decide that it was in that moment that he knew with certainty that Laurent de Barratin had ordered the Duke de Montereau’s death in the street the night before.

Too conciliatory a tone, suddenly. Too much fear behind it, underlying it. And it wasn’t a fear of being assassinated himself by someone pursuing the nobility of Ferrieres in the city. Not that. Thierry had a swift, sure sense of a truth. Nothing reasoned through yet, but it arrived with a terrible immediacy. He felt sick.

And then, after the duke withdrew with another nod, to both of them this time, and closed the door behind him, there was more.

Marina di Seressa waited a moment—as if to be certain no one was listening on the other side of the heavy door, he thought—then said, quietly, but with great force, “I really want to leave. I think I will, after the funeral. I do not wish to remain in this house.”

She looked at him, waiting. It was, he realized, an invitation to ask. He almost didn’t want to.

“Why?” he said. “Why do you not want to be here?”

Last night he’d been headed out to rob a sanctuary strongbox with three men from his own world. One had gotten drunk in a tavern and talked too much. And now…

Her expression was strange, he thought. A kind of tenderness? She said, quietly, “Thierry Villar, you didn’t come here to meet me and talk of poetry. You need to be extremely careful in doing what you are doing.”

“With you?” he tried.

Only a flicker of a smile. She shook her head. “Clever, but no. Because of the man who just came in.”

She knew, he realized. He opened his mouth, closed it. Had no idea what to say. She held his gaze another moment, then turned and took an object hidden behind a pair of silver candlesticks on the mantelpiece behind her.

She came forward with it. “I’d conceal this when you leave, were I you.”

It was a caltrop.

She handed it to him. Along with, he thought, everything it meant.

Again he could find no words.