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travel, come autumn, after plighting their troth before the Cruarch’s mother and kin in Alba.
    Of a surety, he met with the baro kumpai of the Tsingani, the four families who were foremost among their folk, and a successor was chosen among them. This meeting took place outside the walls of the City of Elua, for full-blooded Tsingani who follow the Long Road have ever been uncomfortable in enclosed spaces, and I am told it was the greatest gathering of their kind ever held in the shadow of the City walls.
    I missed it, for we were in Montrève at the time, returning to my long-neglected estate. It was good to visit Montrève. Imriel loved it there; I hadn’t reckoned on that. I should have, raised as he was in the mountains of Siovale. The pace of life is slower, there. We found everything much in order, for if I had been two years absent, Purnell Friote and his wife Richeline were capable seneschals, maintaining the manor in impeccable readiness for our return, all the while carrying on effortlessly without us. They had three children between them, Imri’s age and younger, and he fell in among them with ease, squabbling and scrapping and jumping out of hay-lofts as a boy his age ought. It did my heart good to see it.
    Between them, Joscelin and Ti-Philippe saw to the security of our estate, riding the borders and ensuring that every outlying crofter and free-holder knew the value of what they warded, setting up a system of watchers and messengers to maintain the borders. They are a shrewd folk, the Siovalese-and we had won their loyalty, as much by benign neglect as aught else. Siovalese prefer not to be troubled by their overlords, and I had surely done that much. If they had been uncertain of me at the beginning, they had accepted my stewardship of Montrève over the years. Now it had become a matter of pride, and not a few families sent sons and daughters to the manor to take positions in my household. The garrison, which had stood empty for years, was staffed with some twenty eager young recruits, and Ti-Philippe and Joscelin undertook to train them. By the time they were done, I had no doubts that there were few places in Terre d’Ange safer for Imriel than my lord Delaunay’s childhood home of Montrève.
    Afterward, Joscelin set about building a mews. I had promised him that, although I’d forgotten it. Elua knows, he remembered. A bestiary, I’d said, if we returned in one piece. I was fortunate that he sought only a mews; and a kennel, for after the initial word of our return, his brother Luc sent a long, gossip-filled letter and a gift of a hound-bitch from Verreuil ready to whelp, which delighted Imri to no end. As for the mews, Ysandre sent her own Head Falconer to supervise the construction of it, and I must needs be resigned to a portion of my estate being given over to the manly pursuits of hunting and fishing.
    If it hadn’t pleased them so, I might have minded more.
    A lively correspondence went in and out of Montrève all summer long, keeping me abreast of news in the City of Elua and beyond. Nicola L’Envers y Aragon sent a lengthy reply to my own letter, giving a full account of all that had transpired in Aragonia since our visit. It had been a considerable task, rooting out the hidden network of the Carthaginian slave-trade, and her husband Ramiro had distinguished himself in the process, much to the surprise of those who thought him good only for drinking and gaming. I was glad to hear it, although sorry it meant Nicola would not be travelling that year. It would have been pleasant to see her.
    Still, mayhap it was as well, for there was much to be done. For all that our surroundings were idyllic, my days were seldom idle. In addition to staying abreast of the changes being wrought in Montrève and continuing Imriel’s studies-when I could keep him indoors, which wasn’t often-I worked at cataloguing my new-found literary wealth, often lingering over individual texts longer than I ought. Visitors came and went, and our network of watchers in the countryside proved effective, for none came without warning.
    Save one.
    Hyacinthe.
    He came at dusk on an evening when a gathering of storm clouds warred with the setting sun. ’Twas Richeline’s cry in the herb garden that alerted me, and I left the manor in time to see him coming, a dim figure on a grey horse, his shape emerging from the veil of low mist that hung in the olive grove, shot through with the last slanting dazzle of the