Anger and fear wouldn’t shelter you from this cold. Silvy went back to the bed, which was indeed warm with two bodies. She didn’t sleep, was tangled too much in questions. At some point Anni woke in the dark, turned to her, and they made love quietly, carefully, so as not to wake Eudes, who would have to rise soon enough to open The Lamb, sweep it, start the fires. It didn’t ease Silvy very much, the lovemaking, but Anni rolled over happily after and fell back asleep.

They were both friends of hers, for years now. Anni liked to push, to define. “Am I your closest friend?” she’d asked, more than once.

“Anni, I don’t think that way. Really.”

“Is Eudes? Is Thierry? It’s Thierry, isn’t it?”

“Anni. Stop.”

Anni usually stopped. She was very sweet.

Silvy lay awake. She thought about the men and women who had been her lovers, how it was easier in the life she lived to be with a woman, be with Anni, really. She thought about the time she’d had to seek help, from a woman with rooms by the river, to deal with being with child—a child she couldn’t possibly have. She thought about that often. The woman had been gentler than Silvy had expected, even kind. It had gone well, but Silvy had wept for days. Not regret. Sorrow. They weren’t the same thing.

She had no idea what was happening outside tonight, with Thierry. She wished, even though she knew it was embedded heresy, that she had more of her mother’s gift of the sight.

She slept, eventually. When she woke again, dawn was breaking on what would prove a dramatic and terrible day.

The winter would not last forever, even if it felt that way at times. Winters never did. And this frigid savagery was not a marker of how soon or late spring would arrive, with the ice in the river melting, buds on the trees of Orane, rainfall, flowers springing up, shops and their wares spilling into the streets again.

The city was harder to love in the dead of winter, easier when spring came. Very easy, in fact. It was a glory of the world, Orane. Fewer people than it had held before the worst years of the plague—which was why there were places with young trees and open meadows within the walls. But it was growing again. The sounds of construction would begin all over at first light, even in the cold: shops and homes being built—in some neighbourhoods they were the same thing. But also new sanctuaries and great, tall city mansions for the wealthy who needed to be in Orane because the mad king’s court was still here.