Chapter 27: The Raids Are Planned

They came back off the eastern road at a pace that fooled nobody.

Osric had given the guard his orders quietly and the horse had come round quietly, and Iselinde had been handed up into the saddle in the middle of a sentence about squirrels and had understood inside four seconds, because she was her father's daughter in the ways that counted and had spent her life reading men's faces for a living.

She did not ask. That was what Osric had never quite got the measure of in her: she could be insufferable about a picnic for a week and then, when something actually mattered, hold her tongue like a soldier.

The ladies were made to walk faster than was dignified and complained and were ignored. Anna ranged out ahead and kept looking back, and after the second mile she dropped in beside Osric and matched his stride and said nothing at all for a while.

"How bad?"

"I don't know yet."

"You know something."

"I know a man rode a horse to death getting to that gate." He kept his eyes on the road. "That's all I know and it's more than I'd like."

They came up the castle track in the last of the light and found the yard in the state Osric had been expecting: the spent horse being walked in slow circles by a groom who plainly did not believe in the exercise, two of the household at the hall doors with the particular idleness of people who have been sent out of a room, and a clerk crossing the courtyard at speed with his arms full.

Throderic was on the steps.

He came down them as Osric handed the palfrey's bridle off, and the two men met in the middle of the yard, and Throderic said it without preamble because they had known each other twenty years and had long since stopped decorating anything.

"It came from her father. Four hours ago. It's answered."

Osric stopped.

"Answered."

"Sealed and gone before the light went." Throderic's mouth did something that was not a smile. "Walk with me."

They went along the colonnade where the old carts and spare planks leaned against the wall, and the noise of the courtyard fell off behind them.

Throderic gave it in order, the way Osric would have given it. The rider, the wax, the offer, the sum, the word about discretion. Waldric's old law. His own reading of the hand.

And the line.

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

"Not took," said Osric.

"Not took."

"And the Baron?"

"Refused the coin. Wrote back that Valmarch does not sell what comes to it for shelter, and that if the Mint Master wants her he can come here himself and ask her to her face with Heinric standing in the room." Throderic let that sit. "I'd have said, before this morning, that there wasn't a chance in ten of it."

Osric was quiet.

It was the answer he would have argued for. It was the answer he would have stood in that hall and fought for. He had not been in that hall, and it had come out right without him, and he found he could get no pleasure out of it whatever.

"You're not glad," Throderic observed.

"I'm glad of the answer."

"But."

"But what comes out right for reasons a man can't see has a way of coming out wrong later for the same reasons." Osric rubbed at his jaw. "Why'd he do it?"

Throderic walked on a few paces.

"He'll tell the council it was the smell of the letter. He'll tell you the same, and there's truth in it, because the letter does smell, and I said so and he heard me."

"And?"

"And it moved him about a hand's breadth." The captain stopped and looked out across the darkening yard. "What moved him was that in four hundred words

her father never once asked how she was. Not whether she'd taken a wound. Not whether she was fed. Heinric read that out to Waldric with the sheet shaking in his hand."

Osric turned that over and did not like the shape of it at all.

"That's not a lord refusing a bad bargain."

"No," said Throderic. "It isn't."

The council sat after supper.

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The chamber was dim despite the last of the light, its tall windows shuttered against a wind that had got up as the sun went, and the smoke off the hearth drifted in sluggish spirals toward the rafters where the old banners hung faded and still.

Osric stood behind his usual chair with his arms folded and his helm under one arm, because he had come straight in from the road and had not been given time to be anything but a serjeant.

Waldric had the letter.

"She is no simple girl," he said, and said it to the room rather than to any man in it. "Isolde von Morav. Daughter to Wilhelm von Morav, who holds the minting rights under the crown and stewards the royal silver yields along the western range. The same Wilhelm granted title to prospect and extract under royal seal nine years back, if any of you troubled to notice at the time."

Nobody had.

"And the same Wilhelm," Waldric went on, "who tried four years ago to sell half his daughter's inheritance for a seat at the Count's table and was laughed at for it in three counties. That is the man we have now declined money from."

Ulman Rothgar grunted over his ledger. "First we house her. Then we feed her. Now we are refusing to be paid for the privilege."

"She is his daughter," Lambert said carefully from further down. "And he is within his rights to ask for her. That much is simply true and it will go on being true however uncomfortable it sits."

"Is he?"

The room turned slightly at the tone. Osric had not moved.

"She was fleeing, not travelling," he said. "And four and twenty men who had eaten at that man's board for years decided she was worth their necks, and

every one of them paid it. Whatever the law says he is owed, the men who knew him best made their judgement in the field."

"She gave no sign of any of that at the gate." Waldric turned toward him. "No writ. No seal. No cry for protection. She rode in half dead and half starved, and now we are holding the purse and the problem, and we have declined the purse."

"She carries no danger to this house that I have seen," Osric said. "She carries something more useful than a purse, which is the truth of what is out there. And her father would rather bind her to some crown-loving noble than admit she ran, and that is telling by itself."

Throderic looked up from where he sat with his arms crossed over his breastplate.

"You think he fears what she might say."

"A girl fleeing a marriage is a family matter." Osric let a moment go by. "You send riders. You send a cousin with a purse. You do not write to a Baron's court, invoke royal ties and mint charters, and buy silence in the same sentence." He nodded at the sheet in Waldric's hand. "That stinks of worry. And it is not worry about the girl."

The Baron stirred at last.

Heinric had said nothing at all so far, sitting with one elbow on the carved arm of his chair and his chin resting on a gloved fist, and when he spoke his voice was low and gravelled and entirely certain, which was rare enough in that room to make Rothgar put his pen down.

"Let the court fret," he said. "If Wilhelm von Morav wants his daughter back, he may come to Valmarch and look her in the eye. I have written it and it has gone."

Waldric's brow drew in. "You mean to hold her."

"I mean to speak with her." Heinric shifted. "Without threats hanging over her like a chain. If she wishes to go back, I will not stop her, and I will send her with an escort worth the name. But if she has come here seeking refuge, I will not hand her over like a prize goat because a man in a counting house says please and puts silver on the table."

A murmur went round the chamber, half approval and half something a good deal more careful.

"She is noble blood," Waldric pressed. "We risk being accused of overreach."

"Then let them accuse." The Baron's voice went hard. "I have sent men to die keeping the east from burning and I have buried three of them this month that I cannot even put in the ground. I will not be lectured on propriety by a silver-tongued mint-lord who hid behind court tapestries and sent his daughter into wolf-country with a wedding contract in the saddlebag."

Nobody said anything for a moment.

Lambert bowed his head slightly. "I will speak with her again, my lord. Alone, if I am permitted."

"Do it." Heinric waved a hand. "Osric. She is to be guarded, but not caged. That has been the standing order and it remains so."

"She'll be safe under my watch until we hear more."

Throderic came forward then from where he had been sitting and laid a short dispatch flat on the table, and the room's attention turned with a kind of relief toward something it could handle.

"My lord. With your leave. There is more than noble daughters stirring on our borders."

Heinric gestured.

"Fresh word off the east road. Hochbergen sent it three nights past." Throderic smoothed the sheet. "Three villages struck in as many weeks. Storehouses looted, livestock driven off, one hamlet half burned. He has posted men along the ridgelines but says the ground is too wide to cover without thinning his garrison to nothing."

"The markings?" Waldric asked.

"Khesari. Same serpent, same hit and flee. They come out of the passes in twos and threes, fast, lightly armoured, mostly horse." He looked up. "But the damage is consistent, my lord. Village to village, week to week. These are not hungry raids. They are planned."

Lambert folded his hands. "Planned by whom? The Khesari do not take orders."

"They do," said Osric, "if they think glory is in it. And they always strike in autumn."

"Superstition dressed in steel," Waldric said. "I care a great deal less for their season than for the fact that they are measuring our ground."

"They are testing us." Throderic said it flatly. "Seeing how fast we answer. How deep they can bite before we pull the blade."

Rothgar leaned forward, ever the steward of coin. "If Hochbergen is losing crops and herds, the cost reaches us by winter. We already feed too many mouths since the storm took the east granary, and we have just refused the only silver anybody has offered this house in nine years."

"What of our own patrols?" Heinric asked.

"I have doubled their range." Throderic's jaw set. "It thins the watch. If they come in force, the outer farms burn before we can reach them."

A silence followed, broken only by the soft crackle of the hearth.

Heinric looked down the table.

"You saw them yourself, Osric. Not three weeks past. Do they fear us?"

"No." Osric said it without any softening. "They fear nothing. But they respect pain. Blood them enough and they will ride elsewhere."

"And if they do not?"

"Then we bury them."

The Baron tapped his fingers slowly on the arm of his chair, and then sat forward and spoke with more weight than he had used all evening.

"Draw up a list of farms to reinforce. If a croft has no man fit to ride, I want a horn on the wall and fuel laid for a beacon and somebody who knows how to light it. Send word to Hochbergen that he will have three carts of arms out of our stores by week's end. Let him know he is not alone in it."

Throderic inclined his head. "As you command."

"Good." Heinric picked up his cup and did not drink from it. "And gods help us if the snow comes early."