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Constable.”
    “I suppose the Free Cities remember the old wars,” Huon said. “My father fought there, when we took the Tri-Cities; I’m too young to remember it.”
    “Mine too. And do they
ever
remember the old wars! Not the way we Associates do, either. But by the end, they were cheering her whenever she rode by. And the enemy got a lot more cautious, even with their numbers. I grew up with her, but that was the first time I knew, really knew, why so many people are so frightened of her.”
    Huon nodded respectfully; they both served warriors of note and of famous deeds, even if they were women.
    And running the Grand Constable’s messages or carrying her spare lances must have been pretty dangerous too. He’s younger than me, but he’s already well-blooded.
    He glanced through the door of the tent; Lady d’Ath was speaking, referring to a notebook in her left hand and tracing something on the map. Just to add to the puzzle, she looked a lot like Lioncel, enough to have actually been his mother herself; blond and regular-featured and tall. Not ladylike or feminine, but not really mannish, either—very female and very, very dangerous, like a she-tiger.
    “You’re Baron Odard’s younger brother, aren’t you?” Lioncel asked. “The late baron, of course. We’ve all heard about his deeds and how well he died.”
    Huon nodded. Lioncel was looking at
him
a little oddly, too, because the Barony of Gervais wasn’t exactly normal either. House Liu had producedhis elder brother, Odard, who had been one of the Companions of the Quest with the High King and Queen, all the way east to Nantucket. He hadn’t come back.
    So far, so good
, he thought.
I miss Odard. He was a good guy and a good brother when he remembered me at all, but a knight has to expect to die by the sword—and he died like a hero from a
chanson.
He brought honor to our House and he saved Yseult and me. Without him, when Mother was arrested for treason…
    The problem was that their mother hadn’t just been arrested and executed for treason; she had been
guilty
as the proverbial Dragon of Sin itself, in league with the Church Universal and Triumphant, and so had his uncle Sir Guelf been. They’d both died for it, and nearly taken House Liu down with them; he and his sister had spent a lot of time under arrest and parole, not to mention constant suspicion. It hadn’t been any fun at all.
    That’s over by now, thank God and His Mother, but I’m still feeling…prickly…over it.
    The High King and the Queen had been generous to a fault since they got back from the Quest. He was a royal squire now, a post a lot of young noblemen would kill for, and Yseult was a lady-in-waiting to the Queen; she’d been promised a dowry of manors from the Crown demesne, and it had been made known the High King and Queen would stand godparents to any children either had, a priceless
cadeau
. All that made them a lot less of a pair of lepers socially. It still hadn’t stopped suspicious glances out of the corners of eyes.
    He wondered if anything would, except the passage of more time than he liked to think about.
    “Huon!”
    The High Queen’s voice snapped him out of his reverie. He left his tethered horse and strode briskly into the tent, sweeping off his brimless squire’s flowerpot hat and bowing before standing to attention.
    “Your Majesty,” he said.
    Mathilda Arminger had been a kindly mistress to him in the month of his service, but she was all business in the field. Which was just what you wanted, of course. Nobody who’d met her was going to tease him about being a woman’s squire.
    “You’re going here,” she said, tucking a lock of her dark-brown hair back into place with one finger, then tracing a path on the map.
    He watched closely as she tapped four points in the high country north of the town and Crown castle of Goldendale.
    “There are posts here…here…here and here.”
    He memorized the locations; map-reading and knowing terrain