She rose and, bracing herself on a cane, came around the table. As the crowd parted to let him through, she dropped to her knees.

“I beg you, my lord, return to Lavas Holding. Forgive us our sins. Come back.”

Henri whistled under his breath. Sorrow barked. The chatelaine, noticing the two black hounds, wept quietly.

“Does Lord Geoffrey know you are here?” Alain asked.

“He does not, my lord. He is the false one. He lied to gain the county for his daughter.”

“Did he? Is he not descended legitimately from the brother of the old count, Lavastina, she who was mother of the first Charles Lavastine and great grandmother of Lavastine?”

“He is, my lord.”

“How has he lied?”

“If he had not lied, then why do we suffer? He abused you, my lord, because he feared you. Why would he fear you if he did not believe that you were, in truth, Lavastine’s rightful heir?”

He nodded. “I’ll go, Mistress Dhuoda.”

“To Lavas Holding?”

“I’ll go, because I must. But I pray you, do not address me as ‘my lord.’ It isn’t fitting. I am not the heir to Lavas County.”

“Yet the hounds, my lord!” Angry, she gestured toward the hounds, who sat one to his right and one to his left. “The hounds are proof! They never obeyed any man but the Lavas heir!”

“Is that the truth?” he asked her. “Or are you only looking at it from the wrong side? Any man but the Lavas heir, or any man but the heir of the elder Charles?”

“I don’t understand you, my lord. The hounds themselves are the proof.”

“I am ready to leave,” he said, “as soon as you are able to go.”

It took her only until midday to collect what little Osna village could afford this year in taxes, and as Lavas Holding hadn’t the wherewithal, so she said, to feed any more mouths, she took no young folk out of the village to serve the count for the customary year. The cleric with her filled in the account book that listed payments and shortfalls, and there were far more of the latter than the former.

“It seems you will leave us again,” said Aunt Bel to Alain, “and it grieves me that you go. I do not know when we will see you.”

“I do not know,” he told her. “My path has been a strange one. I know only that our way must part here.”

She wept, but only a little. “There is always a place for you with us, Alain, though I think you are not really ours.”

He kissed her, and she hugged him. The others, too, gave him in turn a parting wish and a kiss or an embrace, depending on their nature.

“I pray you,” he said to Stancy and Artald, “stay strong, and keep the others well. Do not let the family splinter.”

“Be temperate,” he said to Julien, and to Agnes, “Don’t wait forever. Marry again in another year, if you’ve had no word of your lost husband.”

“I should go to Medemelacha myself!” she said fiercely, but in an undertone, so the others wouldn’t hear. “But Uncle won’t let me. He says it’s the place of women to guard the hearth and men to do the dangerous traveling, as it says in the Holy Verses. Everyone says I should just marry Fotho, but I don’t want to! I want to go to Medemelacha and see if there’s any news of Guy.”

“Then make a bargain. If they let you go this spring, when the sea is passable, and if you find no word of him, you’ll make no objection to marrying as Aunt Bel wishes.”

All this time Blanche clung to his arm, lips pinched together and expression so curdled that it would turn sweet milk to sour.

He came to Henri last of all.

“I am sorry to see you leaving, Son. But I know you must go. You were never ours, only a gift we held for a time until it was reclaimed.”

At last, what calm had sustained him shattered. Alain could not speak as he embraced the man who had raised him. Blanche began to wail.

“No! No! I won’t let you go!”

Henri looked both amused and annoyed, as they all did when dealing with Blanche. “You’ll have a hard time scraping that barnacle off.”

“Perhaps.” Alain did not try to dislodge her, although the others came swarming to scold at her and tug at her. “Perhaps best not to,” he said, which made them all regard him in surprise.

“What do you mean?” Aunt Bel asked.

Julien was flushed, looking ashamed, and Agnes rolled her eyes in disgust.

“She doesn’t thrive,” said Alain. “She’s like a tree growing all twisted, and not straight. Let me take her with me as far as Lavas Holding.”