Chapter 32: The Boy Who Rode Along

Argilac snorted behind them.

"I was thinking." Beren was looking at the racks rather than at his brother. "The city would do him good. You'll be in Auenstadt and you've the cart, and I've a batch of cured hide near ready. He could ride up with you, hawk the lot, and learn what it means to haggle with proper merchants instead of fleecing some shepherd out of the next village."

Osric studied him.

"You mean to send him with us. Through raider country."

"You've a dozen men with steel, don't you?"

"I've five and an old knight."

"Then five is four more than the carrier I'd otherwise pay." Beren raised a brow. "The lad's not green. He's run the traps and stripped carcasses and he knows how to hold a knife. He'll be more use in your train than sitting here scraping bark, and I'll not hand coin to some fool courier when I've family riding the same road."

Aldric leaned on his saddle with his arms crossed.

"You think coin's the answer to everything, Beren."

"No." Beren said it evenly. "But it solves more than pride ever did. And I'd rather the boy learn trade than war, if there's still a choice in it."

That went into Osric further than Beren had meant it to.

He thought about the boy's head coming round at the mention of the tower, and about Lera's hand flat on the table, and understood what was actually being asked in about two seconds and did not say so.

He's not sending him for the hides.

He's sending him with me so the boy can have four days of soldiers and come home sick of them.

And he wants me to be the one who spoils it for him, and he has asked without saying a word of it aloud, and he is right to.

He looked at the yard: the frames, the vats, the stained ground where nine generations of Lorgands had laboured and sweated and got up the next

morning and done it again. It was harsh work and thankless work and it had fed bellies and paid rents for a hundred years, and his brother had chosen it with his eyes open and had never once been sorry.

Stability over stories. Coin over honour.

And three of my own are under empty stones this month, and I have not got one word to put against him.

"He'll ride in the rear with the cart," Osric said at last. "Kept close to the wagons and out of it if there's trouble."

Beren's expression barely shifted, but his shoulders came down.

"Good."

"And if there's trouble he does exactly as he's told the first time. Not the second. I'll not have a boy asking questions on a road with arrows in it."

"He'll do as he's told." Beren almost smiled. "He's got the measure of me. But he looks up to you. Thinks you piss fire and never tire."

"I piss like an old man and ache when I ride," Osric said. "But I'll see he doesn't make a fool of himself."

Argilac scratched his jaw.

"As long as he doesn't start smelling like the hides, I'll not complain."

That got a snort out of Beren, which was as near to laughter as he generally came.

"He'll be ready the morning you go. You've my thanks, Osric."

"You'd do the same."

He said it, and knew as he said it that Beren would not, and that it was not a fault in him. Beren simply did not deal in sentiment when silver was the shorter road. He never had. It was one of about four subjects the two of them had never once managed to say aloud to each other in fifty years.

The sky dimmed. The light went low and amber over the hills, and they stood a while longer without much to say, listening to the sounds of the yard: knives scraping, wood creaking, the low grumble of the brook.

Marella came out to the fence to be lifted up and swung about and was, and shrieked accordingly, and was set down again.

Then they mounted, and Beren stood at the fence line with the rag still in his hand, and did not wave, because he never had.

They were a quarter mile down the track before Aldric spoke.

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"He'll not come back a tanner."

"No," said Osric.

"You know that."

"I know it. So does Beren, whatever he tells himself." He kept his eyes on the road. "But he'll come back having seen what four days of it actually looks like, which is a cart and a cold arse and other men's arguments, and if that's not enough to put him off then nothing his father says to him at a table was ever going to."

Aldric considered that.

"And if it isn't enough?"

"Then in three years he'll be stood in a yard with a spear in his hand," said Osric, "and I'll be the man who taught him how to hold it, and Beren will never once say a word to me about it, and that will be worse than if he did."

Throderic rode out on a grey morning at the end of the ten days with six men behind him and the Baron's seal in his coat, and the whole yard turned out for it, because a barony that has had a bad autumn takes an excuse for a ceremony wherever it can get one.

He had picked well. Osric had given his opinions the evening before and had been overruled on two of the six and had lost both arguments on their merits, which he minded rather less than he expected to.

Martin went, because he could read a road and would not sulk at four dinners. Two of the younger men went because Throderic said openly that he wanted them seen at other lords' tables while they were still cheap. And Tertius went, which Osric had argued against and lost.

"He's sixty-eight."

"He is sixty-eight and he has stood in more halls than you have stood in fields," Throderic had said, "and Marek of Branlind will spend the first hour of my visit telling me about a campaign that neither of us was at, and Tertius will be able to tell him he is wrong about it in a way that will make the man laugh instead of bristle. I am not taking him for his arm."

So Tertius went, standard and all, and was insufferably pleased about it, and told three people in the yard that morning that he had been specifically requested.

Osric held his stirrup while he got up, which was an old joke between them and not entirely a joke any more.

"Mind that knee on the north road."

"Mind your own, you decrepit article." Tertius settled himself. "Thirty days. I'll bring you back a lord's opinion of you and you'll not enjoy it."

Throderic said very little.

He came along the line at the last and stopped at Osric's shoulder and looked out at the yard rather than at him.

"The list's on the trestle. The seal's with Rothgar and he knows what he may use it for and what he may not, and if he tells you otherwise he is lying and you may say I said so."

"Aye."

"The Vale beacon wants its fourth fire and Rothgar will pay for it in about ten days of complaining, so start him complaining today."

"Aye."

"And Erryk will try to stand a watch inside the fortnight. He will come to you and not to Gerfried, because he thinks you are softer, and he is right."

Osric let a breath out through his nose. "I'll hold."

"You will not, but hold as long as you can." Throderic turned his head at last. "Thirty days. Send if it turns."

"Both ways."

"Both ways." He put his heels in.

They went out through the gate and down the track and along the north road, seven riders and a banner, and the yard watched them go, and by the time they were a mile out you could not have told the standard from any other dark cloth on a pole.

Osric watched them out of sight, which he had not intended to do, and then went and found some work.

The tailor's cottage stood near the edge of the village green, set apart from the other workshops behind a line of low hedges, with a patch of drying cloth strung on cords between the fence posts. A small carved sign, a needle and a pair of shears, swung on iron hinges above the door.

It was a modest place and an industrious one. The walls had been limewashed recently enough to still be white in the sheltered places. The window frames were picked out in dark green. There was a smell of soap and tallow coming out of it that did not belong to any other building in Valmarch.

Osric ducked through the door with Aldric behind him.

Inside, the smell was stronger and better: dyed wool, leather oil, and smoke off the small hearth in the corner. A long worktable dominated the room, cluttered but not disordered, with neatly folded bolts of fabric at one end, threads wound round pegs along the wall, lengths of twine laid in tidy coils. Paper patterns hung on hooks. A worn pair of boots stood drying by the fire.

Patric was at the table turning a strip of violet wool between two charcoal-stained fingers.

Short and wiry and slight, in a short-sleeved jerkin with a belt that hung loose about the waist. Dark hair in a tousled fringe. Freckles across the bridge of the nose and the cheeks, and beneath them a face put together out of straight lines: pointed chin, high cheekbones, and a mouth that seldom went the whole way into a smile but frequently looked as though it were considering it.

Green eyes came up.

"Osric. Thought you'd come crawling in before you left." Patric set the wool down. "Can't march into the city with a hole in your belly."

"You're the only one I trust not to ruin the stitching."

The tabard came out from under his arm and went across the table, and Patric took it and ran a thumb along the torn hem with the automatic assessing motion of somebody who has done that ten thousand times.

"Frayed edge. That's a blade, or that's your luck."

"Argilac's boot, if you ask Aldric."

"That boy has a talent for trampling." Patric was already reaching for needle and thread.

"He trampled an entire stewpot last winter," Aldric said from beside the hearth, arms crossed. "Tried to kick a rat. Missed. Scalded two guards."

"That sounds like him."

The needle went in and out with a smooth economy of movement, neither hurried nor hesitant, and Osric watched the hands do it because there was nothing else in the room worth watching.

"You're off again soon."

"Nine days. Baron's business."

"I figured. Half the village is already talking about it." A knot was pulled and snipped. "Some say you're escorting treasure. Others reckon you've been sent to find the Count's missing son."

Osric raised a brow.

"That'd be news to me."

"Folk make up their own stories when they're not told any." Patric shrugged without breaking rhythm. "Easier to believe some grand business is afoot than to admit it's just men and roads and trouble in between."

A quiet fell, filled only by the snip of thread and the soft creak of floorboards as Aldric shifted his weight.