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knew Martin. Very well, in fact. “Wasn't that the Martin that was at my coming of age party three years ago? Thin, dark lad? Face like a girl's? And other parts of other sorts . . .?”
    Lengram flushed. Yvonnet wondered: jealousy? Probably. Lengram would just have to learn his place.
    Lengram's eyes had narrowed. “You want Martin, don't you?”
    Yvonnet laughed. “Who wouldn't?”
    “What about . . . ah . . . Ypris?”
    “What the hell are they doing now?”
    Lengram cast his eyes up at the ceiling as though choosing words, but Yvonnet knew that it was merely a ploy designed to make him wait for the news. Such was Lengram's revenge for the mention of Martin. “The embassy from Rome that you sent did not . . . ah . . . impress them at all,” he said at last, “even with the soldiers. The good monsignor and his servants were beaten before they could even reach the church, and the burghers . . .” He shrugged. “. . . killed several of the soldiers. I . . . ah . . . heard it was rather the Maillotins all over again.”
    Yvonnet was on his feet. “Those bastards ! Doing that to an anointed representative of God!”
    Lengram shrugged. “If Avignon sent an embassy to us, what would you do?”
    Yvonnet glowered. Lengram was showing his university snobbery again. Such things, the baron was sure, merited a place in hell even more than a few prick-to-prick encounters in a sodomitical bed. “That's different.”
    “Is it?”
    “Boniface is for God,” said Yvonnet, wondering why he was even bothering to argue. “Benedict is for Satan.”
    “Oh . . . indeed . . .” Lengram was nodding a bit too distinctly. “Which explains why the townspeople were . . . ah . . . calling the legate the Antichrist.”
    “Shut up.”
    Lengram's look was just as ironic as Yvonnet's had been. “Well, what do you propose to do?”
    “They're putting on airs down there,” Yvonnet mumbled. “They think themselves as great as Hypprux. If it weren't for Hypprux, the cloth industry wouldn't exist in Ypris.”
    Lengram cocked an eyebrow. “I repeat: what do you propose to do?”
    Yvonnet sung his legs out of bed and stood. If he could not knock immediate sense into Ypris, he would do it to this insolent chamberlain. And when Martin came, Lengram would see just how fast his place could be filled by the slender lad from Saint Blaise. “ Shut up! ”
    Roger's heritage was, once again, effective, and Lengram fell silent.
    ***
    The room finally came back to him.
    Lying amid featherbeds, comforters, and pillows, Christopher delAurvre, twelfth baron of Aurverelle, stared at the dark-beamed ceiling. Countless times before, he had been greeted in the morning by this same assortment of dark beams and white plaster, the trio of arched glass windows streaming with new light, the hangings, the bound chests, the heavy wardrobes flanking the fireplace; but now with years and memories intervening, his familiarity possessed no substance, held for him no more reality than a traveling miracle play—painted canvas, wings of glitter and glue, wooden swords, human entrails straight from the butchered pigs—or the fevered dreams of home and safety that had visited him as he had shivered in bracken and caves from Wallachia to Guelders. It was a familiarity reflected distantly and deeply, as from the bottom of a dark pool. He might as well have been a stranger in this place.
    He passed a hand over his face and was startled to find himself clean shaven, to run his fingers across bare skin and through hair that barely reached his shoulders. Gone were the briars and the beard, and now he thought he recollected the barber hacking off the mats and tangles, his eyes moist at the sight of his master's condition.
    Master?
    Christopher closed his eyes and sighed, feeling still the innumerable aches, the rawness of skin burnt by the sun and wind, the fevered clarity of a mind bleached as white as an old man's hair. Master? Master of what? Of Aurverelle? Of himself? Why,