Chapter 29: Hooves Outside the Dream

Osric had known it was coming from the moment the man said I go out myself, and had still not entirely prepared for it.

"For a month."

"For a month, with a hundred and six, and the watch doubled on the creek roads, and a Baron who will want to be told things at inconvenient hours." Throderic said it without any weight on it at all. "You've done it for a week before. This is the same job with more of it."

"It isn't."

"No," the captain agreed. "It isn't."

He got up and went to the brazier and pushed a log into it with his boot, and stood there a moment with his back to the room.

"I'll take an escort," he said. "Before you say it."

"How many?"

"Six."

"Take twelve."

"Six is what I can take without stripping a patrol, and twelve is what I would take if I were frightened, and if I ride out of that gate looking frightened it goes round every hall between here and Osterwald before I have got my boots off." Throderic turned round. "I have to ask three lords for men. A man who arrives asking for spears with forty of his own at his back has already told them the answer he expects."

"That's politics."

"It is entirely politics, and I loathe it, and it is also true." He came back to the trestle. "Six. Good ones. And I'll not take Doran, before you offer him, because you will need somebody out on those roads who will tell you what he actually saw, and there is one of him."

Osric let it go, because it was the captain's decision and because every word of the reasoning was sound.

He would think about that conversation a good deal afterward, and would never once find the place where he could have said something that would have worked.

"When?"

"Ten days. Perhaps a fortnight. I want the reinforcement list done and I want the beacon fuel moved off Orswood onto the high ground, and I want to know that if it starts while I am at some lord's dinner, there is a chain of fires between here and there that somebody has actually checked."

"I'll walk it myself."

"I know you will. That is why I have not written it down as an order." Throderic began rolling the map. "There is one more piece and I have left it till last because I like it least."

Osric waited.

"If we send for help, we send in the Baron's name and we send early, because a barony that asks late is asking for a funeral party." The captain tied the map off. "And there is a version of this winter in which we ask, and they come, and Valmarch spends the next twenty years paying for it in grain and rights and river tolls, and my successor sits in this chair looking at a map with less on it than I have got."

"That's a long way ahead."

"It is about four years ahead and I have watched it happen to two other places." He put the map on the shelf. "I mention it so that when you are sat here you will know it was in the room."

Osric looked up at that.

"When I'm sat here."

"Some day. Not soon." Throderic said it lightly and did not quite manage it. "I am sixty-one this winter, Osric, and my knee has been telling me things since the wet came in that I have not repeated to Gerfried, and I have no intention of dying in this chair with a map in my hand."

"You'll outlast the wall."

"The wall is not finished, so that is a low wager and I resent it." He picked up the lamp. "Go home. Eat whatever your daughter has ruined. Come back in the morning and we will do the reinforcement list, and I shall want it in a hand that a clerk can read, which rules you out, so bring Doran."

Osric got up.

At the door he stopped.

"Six days ago you told me to bring you anything, however bad, however late."

"I did."

"Then bring me the same." He turned round. "If you're on a road and it turns, you send. You don't get to the third dinner and decide it isn't worth a rider. That's the deal both ways or it isn't one."

Throderic looked at him for a moment across the lamp.

"Aye," he said. "That's fair. You'll have your rider."

He told them the next morning, on the training green, because there was no keeping it and because a garrison that gets its news from the village gets it wrong.

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It went about as he expected.

"A month," said Alden.

"Perhaps less."

"Perhaps more, you mean, because that is how a month works when there are lords in it." He had his bad arm crossed over the good one. "And you've the yard."

"I've the yard."

"Right." Alden looked round at the others. "Well. I've no complaint. I'd sooner it was you than a man sent down from the hall who's never stood a watch in the rain."

That was as near to a speech as Alden had come in eleven years, and he heard it land and went red under the beard and looked at the ground.

Doran had been quiet through it.

"He'll take six," he said. "Is that his number or the Baron's?"

"His."

"And you argued."

"I did. He's right and I lost."

"He's not right." Doran said it without heat, which is how he said everything. "He's correct about the politics and he's wrong about the road, and those are two different arguments, and he's chosen the one he can win in a hall."

Nobody answered that. Voss shifted on the barrel where he had been sat with his ankle up for the whole conversation.

"Which road first?" he asked.

"Branlind. North. Then west and round to Alderwint."

"Then he'll be on the north road four days and the west road six, and the west road is the one that runs against the trees all the way past the fork." Voss said it to the ground. "There's four miles of it where a man could put twenty horse in that wood and you'd not see them until they were on the road with you. I've ridden it. So's he."

"He's ridden it more than either of us," said Osric.

"Aye. Well." Voss went back to picking at the split stock in his lap. "Then he knows."

That was the end of it, and the men went back to the green, and Osric stood there a moment with the wind coming across the yard and a distinct dislike of the morning.

He turned it over twice on the way down to the armoury and then set it down, because Throderic had ridden that road forty times, and because six good men and a captain who knew the ground were not nothing, and because a serjeant who chases every bad feeling to the bottom stops being any use to anybody.

He would remember doing that. Not the reasoning. Just the moment of setting it down and walking on.

Night had come down properly over Valmarch when the day finally let him go. Osric walked the castle track with his cloak drawn tight and his breath clouding, and the windows below were dark, and a dog barked once somewhere in the village and thought better of it.

The whole tally settled on him as he went, the way it does when there is no longer another man across a table holding it flat.

A hundred and six spears. A hundred more that might. Two neighbours who would sell us the rope, a city that will not look east, six weeks before the ground goes hard.

And the man who holds all of it in his head is going to ride out of that gate with six men and sit at four dinners and come back, and for a month it is mine.

He came down past the mill with the water going over low and slow, and did not look forward to the morning, and slept badly, and did not remember afterward what he dreamed.

It was a different house.

Older, and smaller, and whole. There was firelight in it and the smell of new bread, and the light was too golden, and the corners of the room would not quite hold still, and none of that troubled him in the least.

He sat easy at a plain table and did not know himself to be anywhere but home.

A woman worked at the hearth with her back to him, humming something low and tuneless, the way she always did when her hands were busy and her mind was elsewhere.

A small girl sat barefoot on the swept floor at his feet, three years old, galloping a little carved horse across the boards and telling it in a fierce whisper exactly where it was to go and what it would find when it got there.

Osric watched the child, and his chest was so full of a warm feeling that it very nearly ached, and he could not have told anybody why a good evening should ache at all.

The girl held the wooden horse up over her head to him, demanding.

"Make him gallop, da. You do it the best."

He took it from her. His hands, in the dream, were whole and unscarred and young, and he did not remark on that, because in the dream they had always been so.

He galloped the horse up his knee and clean over the edge of the table, and the child shrieked with the enormous laughter that only very small children have in them.

"Don't you wind her up before her bed." The woman at the fire did not turn round. "You always wind her up. And then it's me that sits up singing her down again, and not you."

Osric opened his mouth to answer her.

The answer was right there. It was worn smooth with years of use and he had said it a thousand times and it came to his tongue exactly as it had always come.

And underneath the warmth, a very long way down, something went still, and very cold.

I know this evening.

I have been here before. I have been here so many nights I have lost the counting of them.

He looked at the child laughing at his knee, and at the woman's back at a fire she would not turn from, and he knew all of it at once, which only ever happens in sleep.

They're gone. The both of them. Ten years and more in the cold ground.

And I'm an old man asleep in a hard chair in another house, and this is a dream, and I know it for a dream.

And knowing it changed nothing in him at all except one part.

He did not want to wake.

God forgive him. Of all the grey mornings he had made himself rise into, of all the cold walls he had stood on and all the roads he had ridden out of duty and habit and stubbornness, he did not want to wake out of this one.

Not yet. Not yet.

Slowly, and very carefully, as near something that might startle and be gone, he reached out to touch the little girl's hair.

To fix her face. To keep it, this time, when it went.

His fingers came within a breath of her curls, and her face, the moment he looked straight at it to hold it, softened and blurred and slid away from him the harder he tried.

The way it always did.

I cannot even keep your face.

Ten years I have carried the two of you and I cannot so much as keep your face.

Stay. Just this once. Let me stay in it a while yet.

Don't make me be there for the rest of it.

Outside the warm house, faint and far off and wholly wrong, came the first sound that did not belong to that evening.

Hooves. A great many of them, hard ridden, out in a dark that the golden room had let itself forget was ever there at all.

The woman's humming faltered, and stopped.