Jad’s blood, Thierry thought. The captain of the serjeants was impressive.

“We are not,” the leader of the duke’s guardsmen said, “going anywhere with you.”

At which point one of the other guards made a mistake. It was so easy, Thierry thought later, to make mistakes in life.

The man drew his blade. Or tried to. It cleared the scabbard, just, before he was killed from behind by a serjeant’s efficient sword thrust.

Someone screamed. Then a number of people did. A general push even farther away from the door. People crowding against the walls now. Murder was not unknown in taverns; this was different.

Medor and the other serjeants had their swords out. Six of them, around the remaining two of the duke’s guards. The third guard lay on the wooden floor. There ensued a stillness: as cold and deadly as the winter was, Thierry thought.

Medor said, mildly, “Is this poet worth dying for?”

The leader of the guards was a brave man. “Is taking me to the Châtelet worth it, for you?”

Medor smiled thinly. “Well, now it is,” he said. “More than before. A foolish threat, whatever your name is. The Duke de Barratin is unlikely to intervene before you are properly questioned tonight. After? Well, who can know the future?”

Properly questioned, Thierry thought. Also, the duke’s name spoken yet again. The greatest mistake, he thought, might not have been his guardsman’s. It might have been Barratin’s own, sending them. On the other hand, it was wisest to remember that the world in which they lived, in Orane, Ferrieres, beyond, was shaped and ruled by power, and the Duke de Barratin had as much of it as anyone, perhaps more than anyone.

—

I don’t know why that guardsman’s death stayed in my memory so vividly. Why that one? How do we control what we remember?

I had seen death before, including violent death, and I would see more, after. I had, to my sorrow, almost killed someone myself, in that knife fight over Jolis de Charette, Jad curse her. She had not deserved to be the object of such a fight. Which was part of my sorrow. The larger part being I’d had to leave Orane for months.

So, looking back, there’s no obvious reason the death of a guardsman in a tavern should have remained so vividly with me, given other events of that terrible time.

But that man in The Fife, late that day, not long after sundown, stayed as sharp in my mind as a master’s painted portrait of a noblewoman or lord. A man alive. A man no longer living.

I saw him in my mind at times, for years, usually when I was falling asleep, or trying to.

Moments that never leave us. Randomly? I don’t think it is that, but it might be.

—