The queen nodded. “Yet it is my command, phoenix. I want you to go to Lavas and become praeceptor at the schola there. It is what I need from you, right now. Captain, if you will.”
The captain gathered horses and soldiers and directed them toward the barracks. Henry made his courtesies and headed for the chapel from which Fulk heard a pair of handsome voices singing the nightly chain of psalms celebrating Mother and Son.
The queen took Fulk’s arm and drew him away. Chabi followed as they crossed the court and entered into the innermost chambers, reserved for the regnant, which looked out over a garden made invisible by night. The scent of flowers wafting in on the night breeze teased them. He yawned, feeling both drowsy and strangely on edge.
As if the tide had already turned, and he was caught in the rip current, being dragged out to sea.
“Sit down,” the queen said to him, but she remained standing, as did Chabi, and it was to the phoenix that she addressed her words.
“Let me say this quickly, or I will not say it at all. The boy is restless. He is much like his father, a quick mind and eager heart. His father studied for a year at Lavas, that very first year, and learned much and would have learned more but he was sent away at the order of Queen Theophanu—of blessed memory—to marry an Alban princess. It was necessary to preserve alliances and to throw up obstacles in the path of a string of rebellions. I see that now, naturally. He did as he was told. He was still grieving for Conrad’s daughter. I see that now.”
She turned away, hiding her expression in shadow. The lamps hissed. At the door, a Dragon guard, one of the Quman youths come in this year’s levy from the east, stepped in with a full pitcher of water and a flagon of wine. At last, she cleared her throat and turned back to them.
“Even so, when after many years his Alban wife died and he could come home, he asked again to join the schola at Lavas. But it happened that I had been made a widow recently, when Benedict died of the flux, poor man, and the margrave of Villain would see her family raised as high as she could, and naturally my father listened to her second only to my mother, and of course I was all too eager for the match to think of what it might mean to him—”
Again, her voice caught. She touched Fulk on the arm affectionately, but did not smile.