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“What?”
    “I went out to the stables to tend Comet, and he was just riding in. He’s brought a friend with him called Jean and he’s got a lute. They’re in the hall, breaking their fast.”
    Hawise stared at her son while various thoughts galloped through her aching head. She knew the court was spending Christmas at Windsor, which was less than two days’ journey, but she had no particular expectation that Fulke would manage a visit. King Henry was notorious for not staying in one place above a few nights and a squire’s duties were many. Indeed, she had sent him a new cloak and a box of honey comfits against the likelihood that she would not see him this side of Candlemas. “What’s he doing here?” she wondered aloud.
    “Why don’t you ask him?” Her husband emerged from the bed curtains and, scratching his beard, ambled over to the latrine shaft.
    “He says he’s got some news.” Ivo did a handstand and fell over in the rushes.
    “I’m sure he has,” Brunin said. He looked down at his stream of urine. “The question is what.”
    “That’s why I came to fetch you.” Ivo stood on his hands again. “He won’t say until you come down.”
    “Careful of the brazier,” Hawise snapped as Ivo’s feet landed perilously close to the wrought-iron stand. She drank the rest of the watered wine and turned to her clothing pole. “He’s like you,” she said to Brunin. “Never writes a letter and springs surprises like coneys popping out of a warren.” She selected a gown of pine-green wool hemmed with tawny braid.
    He turned around, sharp humor in his eyes. “And I suppose that your contrary nature is not part of the melting pot?”
    Hawise raised her arm so that Peronelle could tighten the side lacing of her gown. “Does not the Church say that it is a man who plants the seed and that woman is just the vessel?”
    “Aye, well, wine takes on the taste of the oak in which it’s matured,” he retorted.
    Hawise made a face at him and Ivo giggled. She sent him out to herald their arrival, bundled her hair into a silk net, and covered it with a veil and circlet.
    Brunin in the meantime had donned his own clothes. Latching his belt, he went to the door and opened it, ushering Hawise before him. “Let’s find out what that wretched boy has done,” he said.
    “You gave him a man’s shield for his year day,” Hawise reminded him and laid a cautionary hand on his sleeve. “Just remember that he is almost an adult. He has been away from us for ten months and the court will have wrought changes.”
    “He’s still my son, is he not?”
    “Exactly,” Hawise said and led him from their chamber into the hall.
    Fulke was sitting on a bench drawn up to the fire, his long legs extended to the warmth and his new cloak still pinned across his shoulders. Seated beside him was a handsome youth whose dark hair, brown eyes and tanned complexion could have made him a family member. As Ivo had said, he carried a lute. However, after one brief glance, it was not at the guest she looked, but at her eldest son, and in shock.
    The malleable features of childhood had been pared to the bone and remolded to leave a hawkish visage, so reminiscent of her father that she almost gasped. All that he possessed of the FitzWarin line was the heavy, crow-black hair and quick brows. The rest was pure de Dinan—even down to the nose, where thin, straight symmetry had been replaced by a version that held echoes of his grandfather’s war-battered visage.
    “Mama.” He drew in his legs and stood up.
    “Jesu, what have you been doing!” Hawise cried and threw her arms around him. He had grown again. She was tall for a woman, but the top of her head only reached his collarbone. Pulling his head down, she kissed him heartily on either cheek and then ran her finger down the dent in his nose. “How came you by this?”
    “That’s what I’ve come to tell you, or at least part of it.” He broke from her grasp to embrace his father.