One courier arrived before noon with news of the skirmish. Another appeared two hours later soaked through to the skin and carrying casualty counts wrapped in oilcloth. A third came near supper with corrections to the second, because apparently even in the thirteenth century bureaucracy had discovered the joy of making everything worse in triplicate.
The Baron read every report in order at the long desk in his study while I stood beside him pretending not to hover. I wasn’t very good at pretending.
His master sheet lay open beneath his hand. Columns of names. Dates. Movements. Private marks in the margins, onlysome of which I had learned to interpret. The Nottingham raids had not gone the way the alliance intended.
The Baron’s face gave away nothing. That was how I knew the news was bad.
“He is alive,” he said at last without looking up.
My stomach unclenched so abruptly I almost sat down on the floor out of gratitude.
“Aldwin?”
“Aldwin,” he confirmed.
He turned one parchment toward me. “He took a wound to the leg during the second engagement. Not from a blade. A horse went down beneath him and trapped him under the saddle.”
I exhaled slowly. “He’ll recover?”
“The report says the bone is intact.” The Baron dipped his quill again. “And Aldwin is too stubborn to die from being inconvenienced by a horse.”
I sat down in the chair across from the desk, because over the weeks it had become my chair. It even had an embroidered cushion. Someone had put it there without comment, which was how affection worked in this house. No one admitted anything. They simply furnished around it.
The Baron continued reading. His eyes moved steadily down the page, then stopped.
“What?” I asked.
He didn’t answer immediately which was never good.
“What?” I repeated.
“Aldwin writes that the names on the second sheet are accurate.” The Baron took up the smaller page and angled it toward the candlelight. “He also says Lord Beaumont was not present at the engagement.”
The room seemed to narrow.
“He was supposed to be there.”
“Yes.”
I reached for the master sheet and ran my finger down the column of names.
There.
Beaumont.
The Baron’s small notation beside it had originally marked him expected. Now a faint second mark sat beside it in darker ink.
A question.
My pulse began climbing unpleasantly. I knew this campaign. Not one battle specifically. Worse than that. The long collapse afterward. Failed supply seizures. Fractured alliances. Smaller lords abandoning the coalition one negotiation at a time.
Beaumont had been at Nottingham, had been wounded there. And his injury had mattered because he was the negotiator holding three smaller Midlands lords inside the alliance. If Beaumont had not been there at all?—
“Harper.”
“Give me a minute.”
He sat quietly across the desk while rain tapped softly against the study windows and servants moved through the corridor outside carrying trenchers toward supper.
