"Would you like to see it more nearly?" she asked Ariane mildly. The girl nodded, never taking her eyes from the arch. Aelis lifted her voice, calling ahead to Riquier, the leader of the corans detailed to ride with her. He dropped hastily back to her side.

"My lady?"

She smiled up at him. Balding and humourless, Riquier was much the best of the household corans, and she was, in any case, prepared to smile at almost anyone this morning. There was a song winding through her heart, a song written this winter, after the festive season, in response to a promise a lady had made. Every joglar in Arbonne had been singing that song. No one knew the troubadour who had written it, no one knew the lady.

"If you think it safe," she said, "I should like to stop for a few moments that my cousin might see the arch more closely. Do you think we could do that?"

Riquier looked cautiously around at the serene, sunlit countryside. His expression was earnest; it was always earnest when he spoke with her. She had never once been able to make him laugh. Not any of them, actually; the corans of Miraval were men cut from her husband's cloth, not surprisingly.

"I think that would be all right," he said.

"Thank you," Aelis murmured. "I am happy to be in your hands, En Riquier, in this as in all things." A younger, better-educated man would have returned her smile, and a witty one would have known how to reply to the shameless flattery of the honorific she had granted him. Riquier merely flushed, nodded once and dropped back to give his orders to the rear guard. Aelis often wondered what he thought of her; at other times she wasn't really sure she wanted to know.

"The only things that belong in that one's hand are a sword or a flask of unmixed wine," Ariane said tartly and not quite softly enough at Aelis's side. "And if he deserves a lord's title, so does the man who saddled my horse." Her expression was scornful.