Chapter 15: The Spring Court

The king's steward was reading my death aloud when I walked into the Great Hall.

"Whereas the Lady Maela, being reported dead in the province of Penhal before the first day of spring," he read.

He stood at the foot of the high table with the roll held up to the windows.

The hall was as full as it had been on the night of the feast.

Two hundred lords and ladies sat at the long tables in their spring silks.

My brother sat at the king's right hand in blue velvet, with a cup in his hand and black ribbon tied around his sleeve.

He was wearing mourning for me.

"Whereas the wager made before the king stands won by His Highness," the steward read.

Then he looked up from the roll and saw me, and stopped.

I had come in by the lowest door, the one the servants used.

I was wearing my clerk's gray dress, washed in the Aven, and Erwan's sheepskin over it.

Behind me came Erwan and ten of his forty, in their best coats, which were not very good coats.

Katell came last, with mud on her boots from the landing.

Nobody at the tables said a word.

I walked up the middle of the hall between them, the way I'd walked down it in the autumn.

The lowest table was near the door.

There was nobody sitting at the end of it.

I stopped in front of the high table.

"Go on," I said to the steward. "I'd like to hear how I died."

Tanguy put his cup down very carefully.

He was the only person in the hall who didn't look surprised.

His jaw tightened as he worked through the sum in his head.

"Sister," he said. "We'd heard there was an arrow."

"There was," I said. "It hit my reeve. She's nineteen. She'll keep her arm."

I didn't say where the arrow came from.