The tavern called The Lamb was, predictably, known for its mutton, when it could be obtained. There was a large door at the front, with the signboard over it. It would not reopen for some hours yet.

Robbin de Vaux, the king’s provost in Orane—the mad king’s provost—sat astride his horse, shivering. They heard the last of the three bells ring and fade away. They’d been waiting for some time, but he expected a door to open now.

Not the main door. The small, half-hidden one, recessed, to the side, that led to stairs and the private rooms The Lamb rented by the year, the month, or the hour sometimes.

The hooves of their horses had cracked the ice of the roadway as they stamped in the cold. The smell of the street came to de Vaux. People threw their refuse from upper-floor windows. Frozen dung and piss from pots and everything else one could hurl from a window. It was not one of the best neighbourhoods of Orane’s south bank, though hardly the worst.

There were no moons right now. That would have been planned, by the small-scale thieves and by the possibly much more important men whose reported deed had driven him from his bed tonight.

De Vaux had had years of war against the invading Anglcyn, or fighting outlaw bands, rebels against the crown, or disbanded soldiers who chose a different, unlawful life. He had known hardship, cold nights, savagery, wounds, fear.

He was more frightened right now than he could ever remember being.

And he could not have entirely explained why he had asked certain questions of his senior serjeant and come here to The Lamb, after being summoned to view a dead body on the other side of the river. An…identified dead body. A named one.

Was it instinct? Something else?

There was an extremely good chance that, come morning, when word of this death got out—he could only hold it back for so long—the city and much of the country would explode into violence. Possibly civil war. Depending.

Depending on a thing he really didn’t want to think about.

A sound. Soft, but he’d been listening for it. The small door opened. Precisely when he’d thought it might. A minor pleasure, of a sort, to have anticipated so well. A man, a shadow in blackness, stepped out.

“Torches,” de Vaux said quietly, and three were lit behind him from a single carried flame.

—

Villar knew he had a reputation for swearing. Invective worth remembering, and reusing with laughter. He didn’t mind that, though he knew that some of his own most quoted phrases he himself had taken from others, if modified sometimes. He was a poet, after all, he worked hard on his words.