“I want to know that, and also,” he added, taking a chance, but he was like that, “why you sound uneasy right now.”

A silence. Too long a silence.

He’d had a good enough life, on the whole, Thierry Villar thought. Aside from too much poverty, and Jolis de Charette, curse her. People liked his verses, were amused when they were meant to be. And women liked him, too.

He heard laughter now, short, bitter, but laughter. Only from the one man, the provost himself. The others, however many were behind de Vaux, remained silent. They’d kill him at a word, Villar knew, perhaps take pleasure in it. Or not. Just another thief killed in a city they tried to control for the mad king.

“I sound uneasy because I am,” de Vaux said. “It has to do with the reason I’m here.”

Thierry said nothing. But something like hope began, like a stringed instrument plucked, inside him. At least a chance, from that answer, that he might not be on his way to a cell in the Châtelet to be tortured into a confession, and then taken to be hanged on Gallows Hill. He thought of his mother weeping for him there. Curse Lambert Maar forever, he thought—loose-lipped, sober and drunk. Stupid at all times.

“There is a horse for you,” the provost of Orane said. “Mount up. Someone will help you. I’ll explain as we ride. You’re right, of course, I’m not out in this night with ten men to arrest a poet about to do something stupid.”

Ten. And the provost knew he was a poet.

“I don’t ride with any great—”

“I said someone would help you. You have two choices, Thierry Villar. You come with me, or we arrest you now and you are taken for interrogation. I like your stepfather, he’s an honest cleric, a better man than you deserve, but he won’t save you once you are with the questioners. Nor will your mother’s pleas.”

Bastard, thought Thierry. Had to mention his mother?

“I say these things,” said de Vaux, “to make matters clear for you, and because I have little time. I need to know some things before sunrise.”

Thierry blinked. There felt to be frost forming on his eyelids. An image for a poem? “And you expect me to know these things?”

“I do not, no. But I do need a clever man who is known in the taverns. Mount up, Villar. I won’t offer again.”

A clever retort came to his lips. He didn’t speak it. You didn’t have to say every witty thing you thought.