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always sending me stuff,” he said. “Little things, but it’s usually stuff I really
need
as well as being cool.”
    He slit the note open with his dagger, a thin-bladed misericorde, and read it. Huon caught a slight waft of scent, some cool floral fragrance, maybe verbena.
    “Oh good, thanks be to the Virgin. The accouchement went easily—
like a watermelon seed
, she says, and they’re both doing well. Lady Valentine Renfrew was there at Montinore with her—the Countess of Odell—they’re old friends. And the Renfrew daughters were there, all three; they’re nice girls. It must have been a lot of comfort to Mom. And them. It’s hard on women, waiting, when there’s war.”
    “Bearing children is like battle,” Huon said, which was a cliché but had the advantage of being true. “You’re lucky to have three brothers and sisters.”
    The smile ended as Lioncel read the end of the note, and Huon could see a flush spread up to the other boy’s ears, along with an audible grinding of teeth.
    “Oh, sweet Saints,
Dolores sends her regards!
” he muttered angrily under his breath, and started to crumple the letter before he smoothed it out and tucked it into a pocket in his trews.
    “Ah…who’s Dolores?” Huon asked.
    They were thoroughly alone. The only sounds were the creak of saddle leather, the dull hollow clop of hooves on dirt, and the wind in the trees. Yellow-brown leaves fell around them, and a flight of starlings went by. Through town would be the most direct route, but impossibly crowded and slow. The witches-hat tops of the town’s towers and the taller ones of the castle on its northern fringe edged by, with the green slopes of the low mountains behind. You could see the peaks of Adamsand Ranier from here, and sometimes the cone of Mt. Hood southward and west.
    Lioncel’s face had relaxed a little. “A girl,” he said ruefully. “A really pretty girl. Friendly, too.”
    Well, at least it
is
a girl,
Huon thought. “Your leman?” he said.
    Lioncel was distinctly young to have a recognized lady-love and he wasn’t wearing a favor-ribbon on his arm, either, just a plain mail shirt and surcoat.
    “Ah…no,” he replied, and his mouth quirked, apparently halfway between humor and embarrassment. “She’s a servant girl at Montinore manor house. Part-time, boon-work, you know. Her father’s a blacksmith, and her mother’s a midwife.”
    Huon nodded; he did. All peasant families on a manor owed labor-service as part of the rent for their holdings. Usually the skilled upper house-servants were full-time retainers who moved with the nobles they served from manor to castle to court, but the routine scrubbing, potato-peeling and fetch-and-carry was done by young women from the nearest estate village, fulfilling part of their kin’s obligations. It wasn’t as hard as working in the demesne fields and there were other advantages.
    But Lioncel was rather too young to have an acknowledged mistress, either. Even if his parents were
very
indulgent.
    “And…well, Mom…my lady mother…caught us in a linen closet,” Lioncel went on doggedly.
    “Ouch,” Huon said sympathetically, trying to imagine
his
mother’s reaction…even when she’d been herself. “Trouble?”
    “Well, no. I mean, Dolores was nice about it. She didn’t try to pretend I’d
made
her do it which
could
have gotten me into trouble and her out of it; my lady my mother and Baroness d’Ath are both really strict about good lordship. Mom laughed at first, but…then she
teased
me about it. She’s still at it, and that was months and months ago.”
    “Oh, ouch, ouch,” Huon said sympathetically. “Totally
ouch
.”
    And I mean it. It would be bad enough having a
brother
tease you about something like that. Having your
mother
do it…you’d want to turn into a vole and crawl into a tunnel and never come out.
    “And then Lady d’Ath just
looked
at me and said that if Dolores’d gotten pregnant, the compensation money