“Hugo!” I cried suddenly as recognition came.

“Glad you remember me,” he said with another smile, swinging down from his horse and wringing my hand. “You didn’t think you’d be able to leave on this trip without me, did you?”

Hugo had been a tall and rather gangly youth, learning knighthood in the royal court, when I first came to Yurt ten years earlier. He had returned home to his family a year or two later, but other than his beard, the earring, and increased musculature he looked very much as I remembered. He was related to the king or the queen in some way, I recalled. He was- He was the queen’s cousin, the son of the man who had disappeared.

“I expect the Old Man is sitting on a warm beach somewhere,” said Hugo, grinning, “surrounded by scantily-clad dancing girls. He said he wanted to go on pilgrimage to contemplate the state of his soul, but I hear the East can be distracting! I can’t approve of course-I’m much too fond of Mother. It’s high time he came home. But in case he’s not all right-” and for a second his cheerful mask cracked a fraction “-I’d better do my best to find him.”

I accompanied him into the castle, thinking that he would make a good addition to our company. As a youth, I remembered, Hugo had had an excellent sense of humor. The chaplain still didn’t, in spite of years of my trying to teach him, and the king had a sweetness of temper that precluded many of my best jokes. I had never know Ascelin well enough to joke with him, and Dominic was out of the question.

These cheerful thoughts reminded me of something much less cheerful. Evrard, lost on the same expedition as Hugo’s father, had also had an excellent sense of humor. And somewhere along the miles of road between here and the Holy Land his bones might be lying, bleached white by the same sun that shone on the azure sea.