“Not for so many as serve her now.”
“Why needs she so many soldiers?”
He flicked a fly off his arm and sank down into a squat. He was so thin that he looked likely to topple over if the wind came up. “How would I know?”
“You might guess. You might see things, and come to your own conclusions.”
He blew his nose and wiped mucus away with a forearm already streaked with unnameable substances. “I might. She fears some will take from her the duchy as they did before. Her Wendish brother took it from her. I saw that, I did.” He tapped himself on the chest. His ribs showed like bare twigs, his chest was sunken, yet he squared his shoulders a little, proud of what he remembered and what he had worked out, a common man never privy to the plotting and planning of his noble rulers. “Now she’s gathering soldiers to fight, she and that one they call Conrad the Black. I’ve seen him, too. Him and his lady wife, the one they call our queen.”
The one they call our queen.
There, in his heart, Alain felt the tremor, the pain of the affection and loyalty he had offered her which she had rejected. She had turned on him twice over. She had tried to kill him.
But the memory was only that. It no longer had purchase. It no longer dug deep. He was sorry for it, that was all, that folk caused pain because of their own fears. He was angry because folk did do so much damage to the innocent and guilty alike because of their own fears. On his own account, he was free of the burden of desiring revenge. That gave him a measure of strength.
“Lady Sabella. Conrad the Black. Tallia. Who do they mean to fight?”
The man shrugged. “How am I to know the comings and goings of the great nobles?”
“Why must they cast out the innocent folk who lived honestly in Autun, such as you and these others?”
The man said nothing. A rattle of illness sang in each of his exhaled breaths from a rot settled into his lungs. The child sat unmoving, fixated on the hounds, and that one word slipped again from him.
“Dog.”
The hounds waited patiently, heads lifted as they sniffed the air. Out in the woods he heard the rustle and snap of movement, but no one joined them in the clearing. After a while Alain realized he would receive no answer.
“What of this child? Where are his kinfolk?”