Chapter 31: Sent to the Enemy's City

The Baron sent for him on the third of the ten days and told him he was going to Auenstadt.

"Waldric goes as envoy. You go with him, and Argilac, and three more of your choosing." Heinric did not look up from the sheet he was signing. "Wilhelm von Morav has not answered my letter. He has instead laid a petition before the city council, which is what a man does when he wants somebody else to make his argument for him."

Osric stood with his hands at his back.

"And what am I for, my lord?"

"You are for keeping my uncle alive on a road that has had Khesari on it, and for standing behind him in a chamber full of merchants so they remember there is a garrison at the far end of all this." Heinric set the pen down. "And for telling me afterward what you saw. Waldric will tell me what happened. You will tell me what it looked like. Those are two different reports and I find I want both."

"Throderic rides north in a week."

"I know where my captain will be."

"Then with respect, my lord, you'll have both your senior men off this ground inside a fortnight, with a warband across the water and half the garrison green."

Heinric looked at him properly then, and for a moment the tiredness in his face was very plain.

"I have thought about that for two days and have not found a way round it that I like," he said. "Aldric holds the yard. Tertius knows every man in it. And if they come while the pair of you are away, then they come, and Aldric will do what you would have done and probably do it better, because he will not have spent the morning arguing with me about it."

That was fair, and Osric did not like it any better for being fair.

"When?"

"Nine days after the captain goes. Waldric wants the frost off the road and I want the reinforcement list finished before either of you leaves this county."

"Then I've work to do first."

"You always have." Heinric picked the pen up again. "Go and do it."

The wind rolled low across the scrubbed hills east of Valmarch and brought with it the whole season: wet leaves, frost-bitten root, woodsmoke off the crofts.

And then, a half mile out, it brought the other part of it.

Argilac pulled his scarf up over his nose.

"Still smells like piss and rotted bark. The place hasn't changed a day."

"Better than the stink of thirty men packed in a stone hall," said Aldric, "which is what you'll be sleeping in for a month when the levies come up."

Osric said nothing. The smell had not troubled him since he was nine years old, which was a fact about himself he had long ago stopped bothering to explain to anybody.

Tanning ran late into the waning months, and the Lorgand yard was alive with its brutal honest labour. It sat on a patch of low sloping land at a bend in the brook, because it had to sit on water and because nobody in a village wants a tannery upwind of them, and those two together had put the family half a mile out of Valmarch for the better part of a hundred years.

Osric reined in past the fence line and got down slowly.

The yard was laid out as it had been laid out in his grandfather's time and his great-grandfather's before that, because there is one right way to do it and it was worked out a very long time ago. The soaking pits, covered with slats, the liquor in them dark and foul and working. The bark-stripped frames. The long lines where fresh hides hung stiff in the cold. The lime house at the far end, which was the part that had frightened him as a boy and still did, a little. Steam curling out of the smokehouse where the stronger oils and the finishing fats were rendered.

He had done all of it.

That was what nobody in the garrison knew and what he had never seen a reason to tell them. He had scraped flesh off the underside of a green hide with a two-handled knife before he was eight, and hauled bark, and turned the pits with a pole, and stood on a stool at the beam because he was not yet tall enough to work it flat-footed. He knew by the smell alone roughly how far along a pit was, and he knew it still, and could not have unlearned it if he had wanted to.

Two labourers were scraping a hide stretched taut on a beam, bare-armed despite the weather because a man cannot do that work in sleeves. They nodded and went back to it.

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Nine generations of us in this yard. One old man got out of it with a borrowed spear, and now there are three of us in mail and one in a cassock, and a fourth stood in the middle of it scraping hides because he liked it better.

Beren came round the back of the cottage with his sleeves rolled to the elbow and his apron stained deep with lye and oil.

He was three years younger than Osric and looked older, which had been true since about the time he turned thirty. His black hair had gone grey at the sides. His face had less weather in it than his brothers' and more of another kind of wearing, the kind that comes of thirty years of the same eleven tasks in the same order.

"You came." He was grinning. "Even brought the wild one."

"Always the wild one." Argilac threw up his hands. "You've been out here in sheep piss and bark stew too long, Beren."

"Still cleaner than you. By a margin."

They embraced the way men do, short and rough, with a good deal of clapping on the back. Beren got a hand on Osric's shoulder last and held it a moment longer than the others, and felt the packing under the coat, and said nothing about it.

"Thanks for sending word."

"We ride at first light in nine days. It was now or never."

"I figured. Come in. Lera's got something hot and the children won't shut their mouths till they've seen their uncles."

The cottage was low-beamed and warm and the fire had been built up for company. The smell inside was stew and drying herbs and woodsmoke, and it came as a blessed contrast to the yard, which was the whole reason the door had been hung on that side of the house.

Lera greeted them with a quick curtsy and a ladle still in her hand and her chestnut hair bound under a linen wrap, and had them at the rough table inside two minutes.

The children came bounding.

Toman was fifteen now and had his father's chin and a good deal more curiosity in the eyes than was strictly convenient in a tanner's son. Marella was flaxen-haired and eight and hid behind her mother's skirt for exactly as long as it took her to establish that Argilac had come, at which point she attached herself to his arm and stayed there.

They ate. Stew, and thick slices of coarse bread, and cider that Beren made himself and was quietly and unbearably proud of.

"Word is the Baron's sending you back to Auenstadt," Beren said, after a long pull at his cup.

"Waldric goes. I go with him."

"Politics again."

"It always is."

Argilac tore his bread. "You ever think what it'd be like if your grandsire hadn't taken the blade?"

Beren smiled faintly and looked round his own kitchen.

"I'd still be here tanning hides," he said. "And you lot would still be tramping off to bleed for noble names, only you'd be doing it out of somebody else's village." He shrugged. "He did it. And now you carry it."

Osric looked into the fire a while.

The old man went out of this yard with a borrowed spear because there was a war and the money was good and he was the fourth son of a tanner with no pit of his own coming to him.

And he came home a serjeant, and my father went after him and came home a serjeant, and I went after the pair of them.

Three generations to get out of a tannery, and Beren walked back into it at nineteen and never once looked over his shoulder.

"You don't regret it," he said.

"Not one hour." Beren said it without any heat at all. "I know the work. The work knows me. It'll not kill me in an afternoon and I'll not be told to go and stand somewhere by a man who's never smelled a lime pit." He tipped his cup at his brother. "And I sleep. Every night. Which is more than I'd wager on you."

Lera came round with more cider and the talk went to lighter matters: a neighbour with a roof problem and strong opinions, the old bastard down the

lane who used to shout at all four of them from his roof with a cane, the time Aldric put a wasp's nest in the drying shed and blamed Lambert, who had been six.

Toman said very little through all of it and watched Osric the entire time.

He had a way of doing it that his father did not seem to notice and that Osric noticed inside a minute: the eyes going to the messer hanging on the back of the chair, and to the scar at the jaw, and to the hand that had gone stiff in the wet and did not close all the way any more. Not staring. Cataloguing.

At one point Argilac said something about the tower, some small joke about Voss and the ale ration, and Toman's head came round so fast that Lera put a hand flat on the table.

"Not at my table," she said.

"I only"

"Not at my table, Toman."

And that was the end of it, and the talk went back to roofs, and the boy went red to the ears and studied his cup, and Osric filed it and said nothing.

But in the pauses between the laughing, Osric caught the other business more than once.

Beren watching him, and the gladness of the visit sitting plain on his face, and underneath it something the gladness did not cover: the awareness of distance. Of two men who had come out of the same four rooms and had lived, since about their twentieth year, in different countries.

As the light went amber and began to fail, Osric got up.

"We should go. There's much to prepare."

Beren walked them back down to the fence line, wiping his hands on a stained rag, and whistled at one of the yard boys to check the straps on a drying frame that had gone slack.

The wind had shifted. The low sun stretched long shadows off the racks and laid broken shapes across the sodden earth.

Osric paused at the horse with his hand on the saddle horn and did not mount.

"You'll be taking the east road?" Beren asked.

"Aye. Same as we came. Weather should hold."

Beren glanced back toward the house where the door still stood ajar.

"Toman's near grown," he said, quieter. "Thinks he knows everything now. Still stumbles when the mule breaks wind too loud."