Chapter 7: The Prince at the Gate

Tanguy sat on a white horse in front of Penhal's gate with snow settling on his shoulders.

Six of his friends from court sat their horses around him in furs.

Twenty of his own guards stood behind them in his blue and silver.

Inside the gap where the doors used to be, a dozen of Erwan's men stood in a line with their bows across their chests.

Behind them, the whole of Penhal had come out into the yard to look at a prince.

Tanguy saw me coming up the road and spread his arms.

"Sister!" he said. "You're alive. I've lost money on that."

His friends laughed.

I walked past his horse and through the line of bowmen, and then I turned around to face him from inside my own gate.

Erwan came and stood beside me.

"Let me in," Tanguy said. "It's cold."

"Penhal is a holdfast," I said. "Its gate is shut to anyone who doesn't carry the king's own seal. Do you?"

Tanguy laughed, but he touched his belt where his own seal hung.

It was the stag, not the crown.

"Shut?" said one of his friends, a pretty woman in a fox hood. "It hasn't got any doors."

"It's got forty men," I said.

The bowmen didn't move.

Tanguy looked at them, and then over their heads at the yard.

He looked at the thin children and the half roof and the snow drifting through it.

"Is this your court?" he asked. "It smells like a pig yard."

"It smelled worse before we fed them," I said.

"I came to see where you'll die," he said. "I'd pictured it smaller, but colder. I was right about the cold."

His friends laughed again, but less.

Tanguy turned his horse a little so he could see Erwan.