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Roland flung one leg over the freighter’s rail and climbed on board.

No one in the Saint Victor made an effort to help him. He used the lance, point down, to steady his weight, the point making tiny scars in the deck.

He looked bruised and bloodied but as hale as ever, although it appeared to be a challenge for him to keep his balance as the two craft lifted and fell in the water. The remaining royal guardsmen in the vessel looked on with a pensive, neutral air that Simon found curious.

If Roland had shown a combative fierceness and offered an attack with a loud cry and a ringing curse—like the war chiefs in the poems Simon used to love—it would have been much easier to strike at the marshal, and strike again, until he lay motionless.

But what actually happened was less like the poetic histories, and more like a royal protector taking possession of a conveyance and its occupants, all his to lawfully seize. Simon was surprised at Roland’s quietly businesslike manner, as though detached from the tumult of the day’s proceedings, until he recognized the feeling in the marshal’s eyes.

It was grief, Simon guessed, that caused Roland to gaze at Walter, down the length of the big freighter, in such a solemn manner.

“So, Simon,” began Roland, with something like weary regard. “You are in league with the slayer of our lord king.”

The marshal sounded almost satisfied with Simon’s status as a regicide’s accomplice, as though this merely confirmed the marshal’s long distrust. His lips were swollen, and his voice subdued.

“Lord marshal,” said Simon, “allow my friends to escape to Normandy.”

The two ships were fast together now. The armed men of the Saint Victor remained as they were, Climenze foremost, his crossbow cocked. Roland had no need to hasten his efforts. The entire company of the captured ship could be named traitors and foreign enemies, as the terms applied, and the ship itself be taken as legal plunder.

“Escape?” echoed the marshal, as though the idea was unthinkable. “I would hunt you and your companions down any hole in Christendom.”

“I forced the ship, and her owners,” Simon continued, “against their expressed desire and will.”

This was, he thought, very nearly the truth.

But Roland was not an officer about to trade a string of declarations with criminals. He made an eloquent gesture, Away with all of you.

“Walter Tirel,” the royal marshal began, in a ringing voice, “I arrest you—”

For the death of the lord king.

That was what Roland was expected to say, and that was what Simon very nearly heard, finishing the marshal’s formality in his mind.

But his utterance was never completed.