The winter passed. Slowly, but the days did grow longer, the sun warmer, a gift. There were one day…and then the next, and again the next…songbirds in gardens. The god does not forget his children, clerics preached, even if they suffer. Time carries us, plays with us.

The ice melted in the rivers, dangerously in places, with flooding. Gifts can carry other things.

Some streets in Orane—and elsewhere, of course—were deeply under water, waist-high in places. You waded along them, or stayed away. Some houses near the river were ruined, people rendered homeless. Two of the city’s bridges were destroyed that spring by great, broken-off ice floes driven into them by the current. Gardens all through Ferrieres were drowned. The Great Sanctuary on its island in the river flooded. That had happened before.

Still, it was better than the killing cold. It was. And there was no plague that spring, either, by the god’s grace. People prayed. When the Great Sanctuary was dry enough, there was a ceremony of thanksgiving there. It was thronged with people.

Orane slowly regained its vitality, reclaimed a celebrated beauty. Leaves began to appear on trees. Trade picked up for everyone, from basket-makers to jewellers, wine-sellers to prostitutes. Happier people spent more money in taverns. Food for the markets came in through the gates or along the river. There was noise all day again, and music in the streets. Beggars also did better: people in good humour were more generous.

Yes, there were corpses rotting on Gallows Hill, mostly from the two riots after the Duke de Montereau’s assassination. But there were always corpses there. You didn’t have to look. Unless you were entering Orane from out that way. Or you wanted to see a hanging—or rob someone who’d gone there to watch a person swing and die.

Or unless, perhaps, someone you’d loved was hanging there.

In The Dance of Death, the great fresco on the wall of the sanctuary nearest the city’s largest cemetery, those dancing hand in hand with skeletal, scythe-bearing Death were shown doing so in springtime. A message: the world might flourish again, flowers and leaves return, but men and women could still be cut down, old or young—summoned to the god’s light, or the dark.

Thierry had actually begun making plans, deeply unhappy, to leave the city after the hearing before the court. The provost had made it extremely clear: if the Duke de Barratin was displeased with you, to say your life might be in danger was to put it very mildly.

Except the royal council had then exiled Barratin for a year, demanding a pilgrimage of contrition to Rhodias. And Barratin had accepted the terms, with a right to return, after.