Also there, he realized a little later, hearing sounds behind him in the quiet street, were footsteps. He glanced back quickly. Two men. Maybe a third. Hard to tell. Not too close yet, but close enough. “Walk quickly,” she had said. He did quicken his pace. So, alas, did the crunching boots on the ice behind him, as twilight in Orane shaded towards darkness and Jad’s winter sun went down.

Chapter V

By late morning the provost had learned more details about the tall man in the red, hooded cloak.

De Vaux was having all information brought to him at his home. A more private place to work. The man, Barthelmy, was reportedly hostile to the Duke de Montereau, in ways that suggested the likelihood of his committing a murder.

Rather too suggestively, Robbin de Vaux thought.

It fit, and it didn’t fit at all, if you took a few moments to think. Even exhausted now, late in the afternoon, with a city and court in panicked turmoil, he was clear-headed enough to manage that.

Someone was very possibly guiding him to Corbez Barthelmy as leader of the killers. The enraged husband of a young, pretty wife the duke had seduced—and had then commissioned a portrait of, allegedly unclothed, for his notorious private collection. In which collection someone else was reported to have recognized her, and—evidently?—told someone who had then informed the hot-tempered, cuckolded military officer, Barthelmy.

Someone and someone and someone.

Except…except the seduction, if real (which was certainly possible, knowing Montereau), was said to have been years ago. Also, last night’s assassination had been meticulously and expensively planned. Down to arranging to lease a good-sized house with stables before the killing. Down to caltrops obtained and strewn behind assassins fleeing on horseback. Down to provisioning those men and horses for some time before an opportunity might arise for them to kill.

Corbez Barthelmy, no longer even in the army, had nowhere near the resources for such preparations. The provost had satisfied himself of that.

Nor, de Vaux had decided, after reading the reports brought to him, had Barthelmy the intelligence for it. A soldier, respectable rank, less respectable end to his career. Gambling and debts. An old, tired story.

In and out of Orane for some years now, doing…various things. Not all, it seemed, legal. But if he was going to kill the king’s brother in a long-delayed vengeance all these years later, it would have been done alone, and impulsively.

Still, the tall man was experienced enough, and fierce enough, and in need enough to have been assigned a series of tasks as tests, and then an assassination, for a fee. He would have planned none of this, and been paid out of someone else’s pocket.