Chapter 26: Her Father Wants Her Back

"He has found her," Heinric said. He lowered the sheet. "Word has reached him that his daughter lives and sits beneath my roof. He wants her back. Restored to Auenstadt, and quickly."

His eyes tracked up to a line again, and something came into his face that had not been there a moment before, and it was not relief.

"And he will pay for the carrying."

The clerk's pen stopped.

"Handsomely." Heinric read it out. "For the barony's trouble, he writes. And for its discretion."

Waldric turned from the hearth.

"Its discretion."

"That is the word."

"A queer purchase." The old knight's mouth had gone thin. "For a man who wants nothing but his own daughter under his own roof again."

Throderic put out a hand.

"May I?"

Heinric passed it across the table, and Throderic took it to the window where the light was better, because his eyes had begun to go some years ago and he had never mentioned that either.

He read it twice.

The first time he read what it said, and it said what a demanding letter says: that the writer was grieved, and relieved, and grateful, and that his daughter's absence had been a torment, and that he would consider it the deepest of obligations, and that he was in a position to discharge obligations of that kind generously.

The second time he read how it said it, which is where a letter keeps the truth.

The hand was good and it was steady, and it had been steady for the whole first page and had gone slightly less steady on the second, on the sentences about money. There were no crossings-out anywhere. That meant a fair copy, and a fair copy of a letter this urgent meant the man had written it more than once,

and a man who writes a demand three times before he sends it is not grieving. He is calculating what will work.

And there was no threat in it. Not a hint of one. Not a line about the King's writ, or the Count, or the Mint's charter, or what a barony might expect from a man with the coining rights of the realm in his gift.

A man with that much hold over another man's purse leans on it. Every time. It is the first place they reach and they cannot help themselves.

This one has not reached for it once. He has offered coin instead, and offered too much of it.

He is not leaning because he does not dare draw attention. He wants this done quietly and he wants it done before somebody else hears of it.

There was one further matter and Throderic could make nothing of it, and it went on bothering him for a fortnight afterward.

The letter had been sealed twice. There was a first impression under the second, mostly obliterated, and only the outer curve of it showing where the second stamp had sat a little off true. It was not the crown and sword. It was something rounder, and there had been letters in the ring, and he could make out no part of them.

Sealed, and opened, and sealed again with the house sigil.

Or sealed by one hand and re-sealed by another before it went into the rider's coat.

He turned it toward the light and got nothing more out of it, and let it be, and did not mention it, because a man does not say that aloud in a hall on the strength of a smear of wax.

"He does not write like a father, my lord," he said.

Heinric looked up.

"He writes like a man with a blade at his spine. Every line of it is afraid and none of it says so, and that is the part that troubles me."

He came back toward the table, found the line he wanted, and set his finger under it.

"And here."

He read it aloud.

"Restore to me my daughter, and all that she carried from this house."

He let it sit.

"Not took, my lord. Carried."

Waldric made a noise.

"He sets the girl and what she carried in the one breath," Throderic went on, "and asks for both in the same sentence, and I would stake a month's pay that the second outweighs the first."

Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

"Or he is a fond old fool who wants his runaway and her dead mother's jewels back under his own lock." Waldric came off the hearth. "You will read a conspiracy in a butcher's bill, Throderic."

"A butcher's bill did not put a hundred Khesari over the river, Sir Waldric."

That took some of the wind out of the room.

"Something did. And they cut down four and twenty men to take that one woman, and they did it without killing her, which no raiding party in my lifetime has troubled to do." He put the letter down on the trestle. "And three of ours are dead on top of it, and one of those is a boy who was not due on that roster."

Waldric had the grace to let that go by before he pressed.

"Plots or none, the matter is simple, and it was simple the day she came through the gate. She is his blood and not ours. A father may call his own child home. That is older law than this hall and older than the pair of us." He spread his hands. "Send her back. Take the man's coin. And let Auenstadt keep its troubles behind Auenstadt's walls."

Heinric said nothing for a while.

Throderic watched him and knew precisely what was happening behind the man's face, because he had been watching it happen for twenty years and had helped it happen more than once.

"The coin would raise the west wall before the frost splits it," the Baron said at last. "It would pay the masons I sent home unpaid at Blindemartide. It would buy a season's grain I have no other way to find, at a price nobody in this county can meet."

He turned the cup on the table without drinking from it.

"I have prayed for a purse to fall out of the sky. And here is one, ridden to my very gate on a horse worth more than the message."

"A purse with a frightened man's marks all over it." Throderic kept his voice level, because a raised voice in that hall lost every argument it entered. "And whatever is at his back. Purses like that come with the rest of the man still attached, my lord. Sooner or later he arrives with them."

Heinric's gaze went down the length of the table, to the empty place near its foot where his serjeant would have been standing.

"Osric had her three days on a road and a night under siege," he said. "He questioned her. What did she give him?"

"That you would have to ask Osric, my lord."

"And Osric is."

"A league down the eastern road, walking your daughter's palfrey round an orchard." Throderic did not smile. "At your daughter's invitation and with your leave."

Waldric seized on it.

"Then we shall not sit idle until a serjeant ambles home from a lady's picnic. This is a lord's business, Heinric, not a soldier's. The woman was never Osric's to keep."

"No." Heinric said it slowly. "She never was."

He sat back.

Throderic waited. He had learned a very long time ago that in a room like that one you never fill a silence that is doing your work for you.

"Write to Auenstadt," Heinric said to the clerk.

The pen moved.

"His daughter is found. She is safe. She is under my protection and she wants for nothing."

He paused.

"And she is not a parcel."

Waldric's head came round.

"Tell the Mint Master that Valmarch does not sell what has come to it for shelter, and that I will not treat with a man about his own daughter through two clerks and a hired rider." Heinric's voice had gone flat and hard in a way

Throderic had not heard from him in perhaps four years. "If he wants her back he may come to Valmarch himself and look her in the eye and ask her, and I shall be standing in the room when he does."

The clerk's pen had stopped again.

"Write it," said Heinric.

"Heinric." Waldric came to the table. "That coin."

"That coin is the largest sum any man has offered this house in nine years, and it has been offered for a woman in a locked room by a father who has not once asked how she is." The Baron looked up at his uncle. "Not once, uncle. Read it yourself. Four hundred words and he does not ask whether she took a wound, or whether she is fed, or whether the men who died for her had names. He asks for her, and he asks for what she carried, and he asks for silence, and he names a price for all three in the one sentence."

He pushed the letter away across the trestle.

"I have sold a great many things out of this hall to keep it standing. I will not have it said I could not tell the difference between selling grain and selling a woman who came to my gate half dead."

Waldric stood there a moment.

"That is a fine speech," he said. "And it will not roof a granary."

"No. It will not."

"And in three months, when the garrison is unpaid."

"Then I shall have been a fool, and you may say so, and I will not argue with you." Heinric picked up his cup at last. "Write the letter."

The clerk wrote the letter.

Throderic stood at the window afterward while the hall emptied, looking out and down the eastern road, and turned the whole business over the way he turned everything over, slowly and without much comfort in it.

He had won the argument and did not feel as though he had won anything at all.

He did not refuse because I told him the letter smelled wrong. He heard that. He filed it. It moved him about a hand's breadth.

He refused because the man never asked after her.

Which means what decided it was not the coin, and not the danger, and not the law, and not one argument any of the three of us put in front of him.

It was that he has begun to think of her as somebody in his house.

Down on the eastern road, far off and small, a party was turning for home from an orchard: a grey palfrey with a rider on it and half a dozen people walking, and one of them ranging out ahead across the field like something loosed.

Throderic watched them come.

And Osric was a league away in an orchard, and I have just watched a barony choose a road with nobody in the room who knew the woman's face.

He thought about the word again. Carried.

He thought about the three he had put in the ground that season, and the two he could not put anywhere, and about how a man who is afraid writes a letter three times before he sends it.

The light was going. Somewhere below, a horn sounded for the change of the watch, and Throderic straightened off the window frame, because he had a garrison to see to and a west road ride to plan before the ground went hard, and because standing at windows had never once solved anything in forty years of trying.

He took the letter off the trestle on his way out and read the line one more time in the doorway.

Restore to me my daughter, and all that she carried from this house.

Then he put it face down where the clerk would find it, and went out to his work.