Thierry, of course, acceded. No choice, really. And his own doing. He even agreed to carry a letter west for de Thunier, to the high cleric of this district in his own château at Aurage a little farther west. Indeed, added the steward, it could well be a place Thierry might linger, given his own clerical status by way of the university in great Orane.

Linger. He was lingering. In a dungeon. It would have been amusing, except it wasn’t, at all. It was likely to kill him.

He hadn’t been careless this time. He’d steamed the letter open at an inn on the road. Its contents were innocuous, unimportant. A request from de Thunier for another cleric to be sent to serve him and his peasants, as there were “tasks enough for two of them here.”

He’d made a point of covering his opening of the letter by dropping it in the mud as he’d continued west, even though he’d been taught some time ago how to invisibly open letters. Two days later, he arrived at the small, well-appointed château of the high cleric of Aurage, along this road near the Livraise River. He’d prepared an apology for the mud stains.

No chance to offer it. He was seized by guards as soon as he entered the courtyard. Not greeted. Seized. Then hustled into the yellow-robed presence of another tiny man with intensely blue eyes and wispy blond hair around his tonsure. Two men flanked Thierry, standing very close. Neither was tiny. They each gripped one of his arms.

The high cleric of Aurage stared at him from a dais. He smiled. It was not a good smile, Thierry remembered thinking. The man said, “For our amusement, have you anything to say before we commit you to a dungeon?” It was not a good voice, either; reedy was a fair word. And he pompously deployed a we far beyond his status.

Thierry kept his temper. It had not been a moment for anger or demands. Also, he really ought to have considered that de Thunier might have sent another message by a faster horseman. And almost every horseman was faster than Thierry Villar.

“May I ask why, my lord cleric?” he’d said calmly. A flicker of the blue eyes, he remembered (he had relived this conversation endlessly in the dark), as if the other man had wanted rage. As an excuse?

“Why would we feel any obligation to answer that?” the cleric on his throne said. There was a sun disk on the wall behind him.

“Simple courtesy? To someone unaware of any offence done to you, or the god.”

“And yet we have good evidence of offence you have given,” the cleric—his name was Mercier—said. His voice was genuinely irritating.