Chapter 30: The Night He Cannot Escape

The child at his knee went still, the wooden horse forgotten in her small fist, and turned her half-there face toward the door.

And Osric, who knew exactly what came through that door, who had known it for ten years and more, reached for the both of them at once.

Too slow. Always too slow.

His young whole hands closed on the warm and empty air.

His eyes opened in the dark.

There was no shout in it and no thrashing. He came awake all at once and entirely, rigid in the chair with his heart going hard against his ribs, and for a moment he did not move a muscle anywhere.

The fire was dead. The room was black except for the shutter, which had gone the very faintest grey along its edge. His boots were still on.

He did not move. He breathed.

The grief came in slowly behind the waking, the way it always did, and he let it, because he had learned a long time ago what it costs a man to fight that in the dark.

His hands lay on the arms of the chair. He looked at them without lifting his head. Old hands, scarred across the knuckles and thick at the joints, with thirty years of soldiering worked into them.

Not the young whole hands of an hour ago.

"Still gone, then," he said, to the dark.

He sat with it. That was all there was to do. Not weeping, and not thinking about anything in particular, only sitting with it until it eased off enough to let a man stand up.

The curtain of Anna's alcove stirred.

She came out barefoot with a blanket round her shoulders and took the room in: her father in the cold with his boots on, and the fire out, and the shutter going grey.

She did not ask him what was wrong.

She had asked once, years ago, and had learned. So she crossed to the hearth and crouched down and laid fresh wood on the coals and blew them up, and after a while the small light came up between them and she sat back on her heels and did not look at him too straight.

"Go back to bed," Osric said. "It's not near dawn."

"Near enough. And the fire was out." She poked at it. "You'll catch your death in a cold chair."

"That'd be a poor way to go, after the month I've had."

"You're not old." She said it to the fire. "You're just tired in a way sleeping doesn't fix."

That landed a good deal nearer the bone than she likely knew. Osric looked at her a moment and said nothing at all.

The wood caught properly. She fed it another piece.

"Thank you for the fire."

"It's my fire too," said Anna. "I only let you sit nearest it."

They stayed there like that in the last of the dark, the two of them, not talking, and the worst of that hour went past the way it always did if a man could only outlast it.

Down in the village, in the same hour, a narrow lane ran under the castle rise with its shutters closed and its gutters running, and one low window had a candle behind it.

The room behind that window was small and spare and cold, and had been rented for four weeks in advance by a widow who kept to herself and paid on the day.

There was nothing in it worth looking at. A table, a stool, a jug, a twopenny candle. Folded sewing on a side table in three different weights of cloth, which was a trade, and a reason to be left alone, and a reason for people to come to the door at odd hours. No maps. No cipher wheels. No cabinet of poisons.

Only a woman doing careful damning paperwork at four in the morning the way a clerk does accounts, because that is what the work is.

Venessa sat at the table and did not sew.

She was working through a soldier's crude scrap of a note, scrawled on the back of a torn quartermaster's tally in a hand that had learned its letters late

and badly. She read it twice and took what she wanted out of it into a small fast hand of her own, on a page barely bigger than her palm.

She wrote nothing that could be read by anybody who did not already know what it was about. No names where a rank would serve. No place on its own line. Somebody had taught her that a long time ago and she had improved on it since, and the improving had been the work of years and had cost her something every year.

Then she held the scrap to the candle and watched it curl to ash between her fingers, and rubbed the last of it off her thumb into the dish.

Three taps at the door. A pause. Then one.

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She set the pen down. She did not get up.

The girl who slipped in wore a castle maid's dress under a drab cloak and had a narrow nervy face, and had come down the hill in the dark and wanted very much to be going back up it. She did not sit. She had never once sat, in seven weeks of this.

"I can't be long. I'm meant to be at the linens."

"Then quickly."

Gerta talked low and fast, wanting only to say it and be gone.

"The Auenstadt woman's kept, not sold. Third floor, guard on the stair, and the bolt's drawn at night." She twisted the edge of her cloak. "She wears something on a cord and never takes it off. Not to sleep, not to wash. That's all there is of her."

"Good."

Venessa wrote it down, brief, and then, without any change in her voice, asked for what she had actually come for.

"The captain."

Gerta shrugged, glad to have an easy one.

"He's to ride out. To the two villages first, to shake the levies loose, and on to the baronies after if the Baron lets him." She hurried it. "A month, they say. He goes with six. Always has. Says a captain who needs forty men to cross his own county has already lost it."

Venessa wrote. Her face gave back nothing.

"Which road first. Branlind, or Alderwint."

There was a flicker of unease across the girl's face then, the sort that comes when a person does not know why a question is the wrong question and knows that it is.

But the coin was the coin.

"Branlind first. North." Gerta said it quickly. "Then west and round. He'll be on the Alderwint road by the second week."

"When does he go?"

"Ten days. A fortnight if the beacon work runs on."

Venessa slid a coin across the table. Gerta took it and was already at the door.

"His road, and any change to it. Before anything else you bring me." Venessa did not raise her voice. "Understood?"

Gerta paused with her hand on the latch and turned, and there was nothing clever in her face at all. Only a girl who wanted none of the weight of it.

"It's only messages I carry. Whatever comes of them's none of mine."

"None of yours," Venessa agreed. "Go on."

The door shut. She barred it.

Then she sat alone with the candle and the small plain page and read back what she had written, and knew perfectly well what a captain's road and a captain's escort are wanted for.

There is no other use for them.

The careful face slipped, once, for nobody.

"They mean to have him on that road."

Her fingers found, without her looking at all, a small worn wooden token half under the folded sewing. A convent's cheap make, the kind they give out by the hundred, the paint long gone off it and the edges rubbed smooth by a great many years of exactly this.

She held it a while.

Whatever had put her in that room, she had never once got free of it.

Then she looked back at the page, at the two lines near the top that were not about the captain at all.

The Auenstadt woman. Third floor, guard on the stair, bolt drawn at night.

Wears something on a cord. Never takes it off.

Up on that hill, some days ago, a serjeant had stood in a council chamber with the word carried read out of a letter in front of him and had spent four days deciding how to say one sentence about that same cord, and had reckoned the deciding the hardest work he had done in a year.

It had come down the hill anyway. In a maid's mouth. For the price of a coin, from a girl who wanted no part of it and did not know what she was selling.

Venessa did not know any of that and would not have found it interesting if she had. She wrote the two lines out fair, because they were the two lines somebody a long way off had been waiting three weeks for.

Then she folded the page small and sealed it with a drop of plain wax and no mark on it, and worked it in behind a loose stone in the hearth surround, for a hand she would never see and had never seen.

And then she took up the sewing at last, the real cover, the widow's honest work, and her face closed and went calm, and she put four inches of a very good seam into a merchant's wife's underskirt before the light came.

In the grey of first light her door opened and she came out with a basket over her arm, an ordinary woman about an ordinary morning. A neighbour passed with a nod.

"Cold one, mistress."

"Bitter." She pulled her shawl up. "Mind the ice at the well."

She went on up the waking lane with her basket, a seamstress about her business, and not one soul in all of Valmarch would have thought to look at her twice.

Dawn came grey and cold over the castle and the first smoke lifted off the village chimneys, and it was an ordinary morning in a place that believed it knew where its enemies stood.

Osric was up on the wall in the thin light with his cloak drawn against the cold, looking east over the river.

He had not slept again after. He was up there because it was his hour to be up there and for no cleverer reason than that.

The far country lay grey and empty in front of him. He watched it a while, because that is where they had come from, and because that is where a soldier looks.

Boots on the stair behind him. Throderic came up onto the wall with two cups of something hot and put one into Osric's hands without asking whether he wanted it.

"You've the look of a man who slept in a chair."

"I've the look of a man who slept at all."

"I'm cold this morning. It's cheaper to share than to carry two."

They stood a while at the parapet with their hands round the cups, looking east at nothing in particular.

"Beacon fuel's moved," Osric said. "Orswood's up on the high ground and I walked the chain myself on Thursday. There's a gap between the Vale and Alderwint fork that wants a fourth fire and I've told Rothgar and he's told me what it costs."

"He would."

"He'll pay it. He always pays it, he only wants it on the record that he suffered."

Throderic almost smiled.

Below them the town came awake, the lanes filling, shutters going back one at a time. A cart went along the lower street. Somewhere down there a seamstress carried a basket to market, and neither man on the wall marked her, because there was nothing whatever about her to mark.

"Ten days," Throderic said.

"Ten days."

"You'll want to go over the roster with me before I take six men out of it. I've a mind who I want and you'll have opinions."

"I've opinions about all six."

"Aye. I thought you might." The captain drank. "Give them to me tomorrow and give them to me short."

They stood there in the cold a while longer, and the light came up over the eastern country, grey on grey, and neither of them said anything else worth repeating.