“You think Ticondaga then?” Ser John asked.
“I think it is the most exposed fortress we have; its lord and lady do not really desire to cooperate with the rest of us, it is the strategic key to the lakes and the inner sea, and despite its reputation for invulnerability, it is overlooked by Mount Grace.” Ser Gabriel shrugged. “And-do you really want to face an army of the Wild in the deep woods?”
Ser John nodded. “You are very persuasive. And the Galles?”
Ser Gabriel frowned. “I confess I cannot fathom what they are about. But with a Galle knight at the king’s court and another leading an army in the far north-” he waved a hand. “Jean de Vrailly is…”
“Insane?” Ser John asked.
The Red Knight raised an eyebrow. “Your words, my lord captain.”
Ser John nodded emphatically. “I mislike the man, and Ser Ricar detests him.”
Ser Gabriel nodded. “You understand that if Alba is indeed tipped towards civil war, Thorn”-he seemed to savour the name-“might be our salvation.”
It was Ser John’s turn to frown. “Why?”
“Because if he strikes into a civil war, every baron will unite against him under the king, and that will be the end of it.” Ser Gabriel spoke with all the arrogant satisfaction that made him so easy to loathe. He made it sound as if he’d planned the whole thing.
Ser John put his wine cup down.
“Come, Ser John,” Ser Gabriel said. “Let’s put our crooked dice away and speak like honest men. It is civil war that you fear, and not the sorcerer in the north. And you want to know where I stand, where the Westwalls stand, where the Brogat barons stand.”
Ser John’s eyes narrowed. “If the King were to send de Vrailly north to collect taxes as he did in Jarsay last summer, we’d have a war right here.” He frowned. “Your lady mother said as much.”
Ser Gabriel nodded. “I thought that’s what you feared. It is certainly what the duchess fears-she’s more interested in laying the claims to her own sovereignty than in facing the sorcerer.”
“Where do you stand?” Ser John asked.
Ser Gabriel met his eyes. “As the Duke of Thrake? Or as a sell-sword?” He smiled. “Nay-I’ll answer honestly. I despise de Vrailly. But there’s no reason behind it. I met him, and I know him.” The Red Knight leaned back and sipped wine. “So are you really assembling a northern army to face de Vrailly?”
“God between us and evil!” Ser John spat. “I would never fight against the king, no matter how misguided he might be. But if I can build a force in the north, I’ll tell the King that the northern army is his taxes ‘in kind’ and give de Vrailly no excuse to march here.”
The Red Knight raised his goblet and toasted his companion. “Well thought out. I missed it-a fine gambit.” He sat back, savouring the wine and the idea together. “On that understanding, perhaps I’ll modify my course and approach my mother.” He smiled, clearly pleased. “For everyone’s benefit.”
“I can see through a brick wall in time,” Ser John grumbled, but he was pleased. “Now-when you go south, will you take my writ and gain the king’s appointment? And you see why I must have your lady mother’s agreement as a vassal and not as an ally?”
Ser Gabriel closed his eyes and frowned. “Damn,” he said. “I’ll do my best.”
A day later-the hour after dawn, and the spring sun was the warm, golden colour that men remembered in mid-winter. It sparkled on the muddy puddles that lay at the corners of fields, where snow had lain just a few days before. Ser Ricar’s messengers brought word-a day of constant fighting, but no organized foe, and the roads both north and south of the fords were clear.
For an entire day, the duchess hinted that sovereignty was her price for alliance, and most of the other lords refused to discuss what was to some treason, and to others irrelevant.
In the great hall, for the Red Knight a day that had begun well with Ser John proved trying. His mother refused to discuss vassalage; she was using the council to press her claims to a kingdom, and her pretensions were scaring the Brogat barons. By dinner, she was flirting outrageously with Lord Wayland, whose slow and cautious politics were in danger of being overwhelmed by the main force of a low-cut gown and a pair of flashing eyes.
After dinner, Ser Gabriel sent a note by means of Nell, and then went in person to his mother’s door. The bronze-eyed girl opened it and bade him welcome, her cool, demure voice oddly at odds with her body and eyes.
“Your lady mother bids you wait, sir knight,” she said.
Ser Gabriel bowed distantly and sat in a chair in the solar. He leafed through an illustrated breviary; he picked up a very prettily inlaid lute and started to play an old troubadour song, and found it wildly out of tune.
He began to tune it.
Time passed.
A string broke and Ser Gabriel cursed.
Bronze-eyes smiled prettily.
There were noises on the other side of his mother’s door, but none that made any sense, and eventually, having found a set of strings inside the belly of the instrument, having stripped the offending string, which had been the wrong-sized gut all along, having replaced the string and then tuned the instrument to its intended range and not the very odd tuning that his mother had arranged, he played Prende I Garde.
“You are splendid!” Bronze-eyes said, enthusiastically. She clapped her hands together.
Ser Gabriel rose. “Please tell my mother I was most pleased to have this opportunity to tune her instrument, and she may call on me at any time.” He handed the lute to the servant girl. She dropped a beautiful curtsey.
“If there is anything I might do to help you pass the time,” she whispered.
He paused. And sighed. “Have a pleasant eve,” he bade her, and passed the door.
He considered going to the great hall and joining the men there. He considered inflicting his anger and his annoyance on strangers.
He even paused outside the chapel, where he saw a straight-backed nun in the gown of the Order kneeling at the altar. He stood and watched her.
She didn’t turn her head.
Eventually, he took his irritation to his own rooms. Toby and Nell stayed out of arm’s reach, and with the assistance of two cups of wine, he managed to get to bed.
To the ceiling over his bed, he said, “I prefer fighting.”
Then he lay and felt the fracture in his leg throb. He lay there with the pain, and thought about life and death and Father Arnaud. And Thorn, and his master, and where it all had to end. He was beginning to see the end. He lay, and imagined it.
Eventually he began to consider his miraculous survival of the recent ambush. That gave him the opportunity to savour each error he had made in the course of the fight-committing the knights too early, over-powering his emergency shields so that they drained him of power. Allowing an oak tree to fall on him.
He shook his head in the darkness.
At some point in the night he began to consider the constant flow of ops that had trickled to him while he lay awaiting death.
He heard Toby toss on the straw pallet at his feet.
Ser Gabriel considered many things, and eventually, his annoyance increased by each new thought, he entered into his memory palace and walked along the floor.
Prudentia nodded coolly. “You remind me of an unruly boy I knew once,” she said.
“Are you simply magicked to say these things? Did he invest you with some particular ability to assess my thoughts and make suitable witticisms?”
Prudentia’s blank ivory eyes seemed to glance at him. “I believe my re-creator discovered that a great many of my habits of thought were overlaid on your memories and he retrieved them.”
“Well,” the Red Knight said. “Well.” He went to the door to Harmodius’s palace. “I need to see something from another angle.” He opened the door and went in.