The secretary shrugged. “The scholastica tells me that it was a matter of God using Judas’s evil for His own purposes.”
The archbishop sat back. “If God is free to use evil to further His ends, so then am I.” He looked over his steepled hands. “What of the Almspend woman?”
The secretary shook his head. “She went to a house she has in the country. I sent men. They did not return.” He shrugged. “It has become difficult to hire sell-swords, Eminence. The King’s Guard has hired every armed thug in the city.”
“That’s de Vrailly, preparing for a fight with the commons,” the archbishop said. “We need our own swords. Some swords that don’t wear our livery.”
The secretary nodded. “A man was recommended to me, Eminence. A foreigner, from the far north.”
“Well?” The archbishop was not renowned for his patience.
“I will see if I can contact him. He is very-careful.” The secretary shrugged.
The archbishop smiled. “He sounds Etruscan. Etruscans are the only professionals in these matters. I wish I’d brought a team from Rhum. If he seems suitable, retain him.”
The secretary bowed.
The Count D’Eu was moving briskly about Harndon, paying his debts. Tailors and grocers and leatherworkers and all the trades who supported his household, he visited in person and paid in silver.
Many a Harndoner who cursed Galles every day had reason to bless him, and Gerald Random shared an embrace. “It’ll turn,” he said, somewhat daring. “You should stay.”
The count met his eye. “No,” he said. “It will not turn. Ward the Queen. They mean her harm. And the King, in time, I think.”
“And you will just leave?” Ser Gerald said. He held up a hand. “I know-”
The Galle shook his head. “No, Monsieur. I know you are a good homme d’armes and an honest merchant. So I will only say this: the rumour from my home is that the Wild is coming to my doorstep. I wish to go home and do the work for which God has chosen me.”
Ser Random bowed. “Can’t say fairer than that,” he said.
At the door, the Count D’Eu slapped his magnificent gold plaque belt and turned to his squire, Robert. “Young man, what have I done with my gloves?”
Robert looked around wildly. “You had them, my lord. You wore them when we were in the tailor’s. With the bishop’s men.”
The count frowned. “Eh bien,” he said.
The sun was setting over the distant mountains when the Gallish ships appeared in the firth. Word spread up through the town-almost every man from the corner beggars by the Order of Saint John’s almost empty hostel to the Royal Guards on the walls knew what the ships contained. Men and women went to evening mass with their eyes on the firth.
They made the riverside docks only at first light-the packed men onboard had had to endure one more damp, cold night. But in the bright sunshine of a spring morning, the first day of Holy Week, the ships unloaded onto the same quays where the Venike round ships had unloaded and marketed their wares. But whereas the Venike brought silk and satin and samite and spices, the Galles brought more than three hundred lances of Gallish chivalry-big, tall, strong men. Each Gallish lance contained a knight and his squire, also armoured, and a rabble of servants and pages, in numbers that varied according to the social status of the knight.
The Sieur Du Corse, a famous routier, led the Galles down the gangplanks, and then stood, a baton in his hand, as the ships disgorged his men, their armour, their weapons, and all their horses. The horses were not in good shape, and some were unable to stand.
The King’s Champion, Jean de Vrailly, came in person, mounted and in a glittering new harness, the one of blued steel he would wear for the tourney. He was cheered in some streets.
He dismounted easily and embraced Du Corse, and they mimicked friendship with the slippery grabs of men covered in butter-steel arms grappled steel breasts. But the display seemed genuine enough.
“I asked for a company of Genuans. For some bowmen-or Ifriquy’ans like the King of Sichilia uses.” De Vrailly pursed his lips. “But your lances look fine, Blaise. Magnificent.”
Blaise Du Corse was as tall as de Vrailly, with hair as black as de Vrailly’s was white-gold. He was from the southern mountains of Galle, where the Kingdom of Arelat and the Kingdom of Galle and the Etruscan states all came together in a region of poverty and war and uncivil society. A region famous for soldiers.
“Ah, my lord. Truly, I meant to bring you more, but our liege the King has forbidden it. And more particularly, your friend the Senechal de Abblemont has forbidden it.” Du Corse shrugged. “I almost didn’t come. And Jean.” He put a hand on de Vrailly’s arm. “We have to go back. As soon as we’ve done the King’s work here.”
“Back?” de Vrailly said.
“There’s an army of the Wild in Arelat,” Du Corse said. “No-spare me, sweet friend. I’ve seen some heads. No fearmonger could create such a thing. They say that the Nordikaans have war on their very borders. They say that the Kingdom of Dalmatis is already fallen.”
“Blessed sacrament!” De Vrailly took a deep breath. “And the King? And the seneschal?”
“Are raising the whole of the Arrièrre Ban. Every knight in Galle will go east before midsummer.” Du Corse raised both eyebrows. “So I am told to say, privately, hurry.”
They watched a dozen sailors and longshoremen winching a heavy war horse up out of the belly of the largest round ship.
“Abblemont wished to point out to you,” Du Corse continued, “that you have almost a thousand of our kingdom’s lances. A tithe of our total strength, and in many cases”-Du Corse grinned-“the best men.” His eyes went to a young woman on a balcony, waving. “What a pretty girl. Is Alba full of pretty women?”
De Vrailly frowned. “Perhaps. Midsummer? Bah. Well-we will see.”
Du Corse frowned, but it was more a comic face than an angry one. “I cannot see anything here that can stand against a thousand of our kind,” he said. He winked at someone over de Vrailly’s shoulder.
A full bowshot away, the archbishop turned from the windowed balcony of his Harndon episcopal palace. He smiled easily to his secretary. “So-we have enough iron to hold the streets. Please tell Maître Villon to see that it is done.”
“See that what is done?” asked his secretary.
The archbishop smiled. “Best you not know, my son,” he said.
He sat at his desk and reviewed a set of documents he had had prepared. Each of them bore the bold signature and seal of the Count D’Eu.
He sighed, and inserted them, one by one, with his own hands into a small leather trunk-the sort of box lawyers used for scrolls and wills.
He locked the trunk, and threw the key into his fireplace. Then he rose. “I will be attending the King,” he told his chamberlain, who bowed.
Desiderata had spent three whole days in prayer, most of it on her knees. She was a strong, fit woman and by her arts had more knowledge of the babe within her than most midwives might have managed, so her piety no more affected her than to make her wish for better cushions on her private prie-dieu, where she knelt in front of a magnificent picture of the Virgin in a rose garden.
She spent a day perfecting her ability to read aloud from her Lives of the Female Saints and Legends of Good Women while moving about inside her inner palace. It was far more difficult than she had originally expected-reading aloud clearly occupied more of the waking mind than she had thought.
Despite which, by midday on the second day, knees aching like fire and her back near to separating from her breastbones with the pain of kneeling, she had it. She needed the outward show of piety to cow her new “ladies,” all of whom were spies, and none of whom had the brains of a newborn kitten.
The Queen knew she was in difficulty. The world around her had moved from long shadows to open war; her people were all gone except Diota, and she knew that an open, legal charge of adultery was in the works.