The Dowager Duchess’s hand stayed at her mouth a long time.
Below her, in the courtyard, the houndsman had stopped with the mallet at the top of its swing. He was looking at the dog. He had known that dog since the dog was a pup in a basket, and he had never, in forty years, seen him stand for anyone but the woman on the gallery.
“Lower it,” Lady Aelinor said.
Her voice did not carry. She tried again.
“Lower it.“
Gerolt lowered the mallet. He set it head-down on the cobbles and stepped back from it as if it were hot.
The young Duke turned on the gallery. “Mother —”
“Be quiet, Rolant.”
She was already moving. Down the stone stair, one hand on the rail because her left hand had a tremor she usually hid, the black veil pulled back from her face. The bannermen parted for her without being asked.
Brida did not see her coming. Brida was still kneeling with her hand on the back of the dog’s head, humming.
Lady Aelinor stopped two paces away.
“Child.”
Brida looked up.
The Duchess knelt. A woman of fifty-six, in black silk, on the frost. Her knees would hurt for a week. She did not seem to feel it.
“Where did you learn that song?”
“I didn’t, my lady. I’ve always known it.”
“Show me your wrist.”
Brida’s free hand went to her left cuff without understanding why. The cuff was frayed. Under the fray was a knot of ribbon so old it was almost grey, but if you turned it to the light, there was still green in it.
Lady Aelinor made a sound that was not quite a word.
She did not reach for the ribbon. She reached, instead, for the dog. She put her gloved hand on his head beside Brida’s bare one, and the old wolfhound, whose eyes were closed, leaned the smallest fraction of his weight from the girl’s chest onto the woman’s palm. As if he were dividing himself, carefully, between the two of them. As if he had been holding the place for eighteen years and could now, finally, set it down.
“His name was Grey when I was a bride,” the Duchess said. “I sang to him when I couldn’t sleep.”
“He likes the song, my lady.”
“I know.”
Brida did not yet understand. She would understand by evening, when the green ribbon was untied from her wrist and laid in the Duchess’s lap and matched, thread for thread, against the scrap kept in a locked box for eighteen years. She would understand when the young Duke, ashen, would not meet her eye at supper. She would understand slowest of all that the woman kneeling in the frost beside her was her mother.
But for now, in the courtyard, she only knew that the old dog was warm against her chest, and that a stranger in black had put her hand beside hers, and that the three notes she had hummed all her life had finally been heard by someone who knew them.
The dog’s breathing slowed.
He did not lie down again. He stayed standing between the two women, his head resting on the girl, his shoulder against the mother, for as long as he had left.
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