"I did tell them, truly," Bertran repeated, attending to the wine bottle. "Valery chose not to. He doesn't like armour. Says it impedes his movement. He'll never make a proper coran, my cousin Valery." He shook his head in mock sorrow and then glanced over his shoulder at her again. "Green becomes you, as the leaves the trees. I cannot believe you are here with me."

She seemed to be smiling, after all. She struggled to keep control of the subject though; there was a real issue here. She could easily have killed the man, Valery. "But you chose not to tell him why he ought to protect himself, correct? You didn't tell him I planned to shoot. Even though you knew he would be the one standing beside you."

Smoothly he opened the bottle. He grinned at her. "Correct and correct. Why are all the de Barbentain so unfairly clever? It makes it terribly difficult for the rest of us, you know. I thought it might be a lesson for him—Valery should know by now that he ought to listen when I make a suggestion, and not ask for reasons."

"I might have killed him," Aelis said again.

Bertran was pouring the wine into two goblets. Silver and machial, she saw, not remotely belonging in a cabin such as this. She wondered what the charcoal-burner was being paid. The goblets were each worth more than the man would earn in his whole life.

Bertran came towards her, offering wine. "I trusted your aim," he said simply. The simple brown jacket and leggings became him, accenting his burnished outdoor colour and the bronze of his hair. The eyes were genuinely extraordinary; most of the lineage of Talair had those eyes. In the women, that shade of blue had broken hearts in Arbonne and beyond for generations. In the men too, Aelis supposed.