But as she thought of such things, Miri found a core of sadness inside herself that had little to do with the affairs of state.

“It was hard, being away from home on his birthday,” she said, the first words either she or Simon had spoken in some time. “I did not expect it to be so hard after all this time. But it was.”

Her husband accepted the offered peace. “For me, too, my dear. I sometimes feel like a cat.” He saw her look and smiled sadly. “I mean, Old Shem the groom used to say that he had to watch the stable cats carefully, because if they had a small spite, a rat bite or wound from another cat’s claws, all would seem well and healed on the outside, but the wound would still be festering under the skin. Sometimes it would kill them weeks later, when they seemed to have been long past it.”

“Now that’s a lovely, reassuring thought.”

He flushed. “I meant only that grief . . . that sometimes we have not healed as well as we thought, my love.”

She saw that she was doing it again, biting at him when she most needed their old companionship, the thing that bound them together from the very beginning as surely as the love they later came to feel. The subject of John Josua especially brought it out in her, as though her husband somehow bore the blame for that agonizing loss instead of being another victim. “I’m sorry. You’re right. It is hard sometimes. I thought it would be easier as the years went on. I suppose most of the time it is. But when it isn’t . . .”

“I try to remember all the good that came from his life, cut short though it was. I remind myself of the good things we still have . . . Morgan, and Lillia.”

“Do you count the Widow too?”

He smiled, but there was a pained twist to it. “Idela is the mother of our grandchildren. And I don’t think she is as dreadful as you sometimes paint her.”

“John Josua should not have married so young. And he should not have married her.”

“He loved her. No one could talk him out of it, Miri. You know that.”

“But we were his mother and father! We should have—!” This time she swallowed the words before they could come out, then violently expelled her breath. “All the saints, give me strength! I cannot bear to hear myself.” She bent forward in the saddle and ran her fingers through her horse’s mane, trying to distract herself. She saw Eolair riding a short distance away, close to them now but not too close. “Everything seems sad or frightening to me today,” she told her husband. “Isgrimnur, John Josua’s birthday, and that mad, rude performance in Hernystir. Hugh treated us like unimportant old relatives. And spending three days with that witch he’s going to marry only made it worse. Demons or no demons, that Tylleth probably killed her husband, you know. People certainly think so.”

“People think many things. Often they are wrong.” This time, Simon’s smile looked a bit foxy. “Perhaps you simply have an aversion to widows.”

She glared, but she knew it was only a jest. “There is Eolair. Ask him to tell you again what he thinks of her. And what Queen Inahwen thinks.”

She said it loudly enough that the Hand of the High Throne looked over to them, his expression carefully empty. “Did you call me, Majesty?”

“You have been riding beside us for a while, good Count,” she said. “I can see you are waiting for us to stop talking.”

“I do not want to trouble Your Majesties or interrupt your conversation.”

“Call it saving us from ourselves, then,” said the king. “Miri and I are both out of sorts. Come, ride here beside us and tell us what’s on your mind.”

Eolair looked at Miri, who nodded. “Very well, then,” he said. “I have had a messenger from Hernysadharc just now. Pasevalles’ dispatch came after we had left, so Hugh sent it on by fast rider.”

“Very kind of him,” said Simon flatly.

Eolair was the last man in Osten Ard to miss something simply because it was unspoken. “Majesties, I still do not know what King Hugh was thinking to keep you waiting at the gate,” he said. “I apologize again on behalf of all my countrymen for such strange, discourteous behavior. Queen Inahwen was surprised and shamed that the king kept you waiting so long outside the walls. She told me so.”

Simon waved his hand. “Inahwen is kind—she always was. I am not too troubled. Men are men, whether king or kitchen worker, as I should know better than anyone. Hugh may be a bit overexcited by his own grandeur, as well as by the prospect of marriage. As for Lady Tylleth . . .” Simon had just noticed the halves of the broken seal that bound the folded papers in Eolair’s hand. “Well, enough of her for now. What does Lord Chancellor Pasevalles have to say?”

“Do you not want to read it yourself, Majesty?”

“I know you too well to think you would have broken that seal if the letter was not addressed to you, good Eolair, and I also know you will have read it carefully and probably more than once, because you are someone who ‘never has time for clean hands,’ as my old taskmistress Rachel the Dragon used to say. So please, tell us what is on Pasevalles’ mind, or at least the things we need to know.”

Miriamele nodded. When they were young, and the fact of their sudden power was like a waking dream, Simon had tried to be all things to all people, unable to refuse a favor or to turn his back on a cry of need. Miriamele, raised in her father’s courts in Meremund and then the Hayholt, had already known that a monarch who could not stand aloof sometimes was a miserable monarch indeed. It had taken years, and the elevation of several old, trusted friends to the most important positions in court, but her too-kind husband had finally learned he could not be all things to all people.

Eolair undid the flattened roll and, as Miriamele had expected, immediately found the first thing he wished to discuss, several pages in: He prepared for any and all of his duties, no matter how small, with the anguished care of a general outnumbered and at bay.

“After much talk about the dedication of the new chapter house and the work on the library—as well as a few other matters I will save for later, like the League’s complaint about Yissola’s latest outrages, as they deem them—the Lord Chancellor gets to the business at hand.” Eolair’s rueful smile pulled his strong, weathered features into a droll face, and Miriamele remembered when she had thought him perhaps the most handsome man in all of Osten Ard. “I do wish our friend Pasevalles could be persuaded to put the most important business at the beginning of the letter, but he still writes like a child of a provincial court, full of flowery greetings and formal phrases even in a dispatch.” Eolair’s eyes widened a little. “Forgive me, Majesties. I did not mean to sound as if I was criticizing the Lord Chancellor. He is an able man and a fine administrator . . .”

Simon laughed. “You need not worry—we know you admire him.”

“Indeed. Your Majesties are lucky to have him, and he will take good care of the Hayholt and Erkynland in your absence.”

“But you were not so certain of that when we made the decision to travel to Rimmersgard, were you?” Simon said. “Come, I am teasing you, old friend. I know you were only doing your duty. It is a difficult thing to take away the king and queen from their court for so long. But we should get back to the business of Pasevalles’s letter.”

“Let me just read this to you,” said Eolair, moving the heavy parchment until he found an appropriate distance from his eyes. “But, my gracious lords and lady, I fear the news from your great southern duchy of Nabban is not so good . . .” he began.

•   •   •

“He can be a bit wordy, our Pasevalles, can’t he?” Simon remarked when Eolair had finished.

“But the essence is clear enough,” said Miriamele. “Duke Saluceris is struggling more than ever with his brother, and Drusis as always is champing at the bit to push the boundaries of Nabban farther out into the Thrithings. And the rest of Nabban, also as usual, is waiting to see which of them wins the contest, as though it were no greater matter than a horse race.”