Chapter 39: They Hang a Girl

Osric counted the chairs from the left as the formalities went round.

The fifth held a thickset man of about sixty in unremarkable brown wool, with a heavy gold ring and a face like a closed ledger, who had not said one word and did not look as though he intended to.

Ottokar Reiss. Wool and river tolls.

Right. We'll see whether the Imperial earned his four hundred marks.

The Council Lord steepled his fingers.

"You come to us in the matter of the Lady Isolde von Morav. We have reviewed her father's petition. Say what you have come to say, Sir Waldric, and say it plainly, for we are eleven men and one woman with a great deal of business today."

Waldric did not sit either.

He gave it plainly, as instructed, and Osric, who had heard him rehearse none of it, listened to a man do a difficult job extremely well.

The lady had come to Valmarch's borders pursued by Khesari riders. Her escort of four and twenty sworn men had been killed to the last. She had been taken off them alive by a patrol of the barony at the cost of three of its soldiers, two of whom had no graves. She had been housed, fed, physicked and guarded, and had at no point been held against her will, and remained under the Baron's protection at her own express wish.

Her father had written to Valmarch offering money for her return and for the barony's discretion, and the Baron had declined the money and had invited Lord Wilhelm to come to Valmarch and ask his daughter to her face, with the Baron standing in the room.

That invitation stood. It had not been answered. It was being answered here instead, by a petition, and by a man who had never come.

"The Baron does not sell what comes to him for shelter," Waldric finished. "He will not begin with a woman."

The room did not react.

Osric had expected a murmur and got nothing at all, and understood in that moment that not one person at that table was hearing any of it for the first time.

A thick-necked man with gold rings and a waxed moustache leaned forward.

"The girl is not of your household, Sir Waldric, and her father's claim stands. You understand the delicacy."

"I understand that she sought the Baron's protection of her own will, fearing a marriage she did not consent to."

The Council Lord raised a hand before a murmur could form.

"We are not unsympathetic. But her father is a trusted agent of the Royal Mint, and the King's writ is not lightly dismissed, and this city cannot afford to sour relations with the men who coin His Majesty's silver."

Forty seconds in and we have arrived at the mint.

Not at the law. Not at the woman. At the coin, and at what happens to this room if the coin stops.

He looked down the table at the fifth chair.

Ottokar Reiss had his hands folded on the wood and was looking at nothing at all, with the patient boredom of a man attending a play he has already read.

A grey-haired woman further down said the matter must be settled properly, in writing, before witnesses. Another said the lady might speak when summoned. Waldric asked what would be done if she declined to be summoned, and the Council Lord observed, with the air of a man brushing dust off a sleeve, that they might then be obliged to appeal to His Excellency the Count for guidance, and that they all knew how slow that process was.

That's not a threat. That's a warning wrapped in procedure. If this goes to the Count's court it goes out of everybody's hands for two years, and she's settled by clerks in another county.

It went on like that for the better part of an hour, and Osric stood and watched it and grew steadily colder.

It was not that Waldric was losing. Waldric was not losing. Every point the old man made stood up and stayed standing, and twice he turned a question round so neatly that Osric saw two of the twelve exchange a look.

It was that none of it was making the smallest difference, and that everybody in the room except Waldric knew it.

They were not being argued with. They were being waited out.

They've no answer and they don't need one. They'll agree it's difficult and complicated and that everybody has behaved honourably, and then they'll let it sit here until winter closes the roads, and then until spring, and by then it's a matter of long standing and nobody's fault.

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

And all the while that mint keeps running.

Wilhelm von Morav spoke for the first time in fifty minutes.

He did it quietly, which was worse.

"I have listened to a great deal about my daughter's wishes." He turned the garnet ring once on his finger. "I would ask this chamber to consider what is actually being described. A woman of one and twenty, alone, without papers or seal, taken up on a road by armed men in another lord's country and conveyed behind that lord's walls, where she has remained these seven weeks. Guarded, we are told. Housed and physicked and guarded."

He let it sit.

"And now that lord declines money, and declines to return her, and sends an old man to explain to us that she is happy."

Waldric's voice did not change.

"She is safe, my lord. I did not say happy. I would not presume."

"No." Wilhelm's mouth moved. "I imagine there is a great deal you do not presume."

"Meaning?"

"Meaning that your Baron rules a frontier barony like a petty king and has forgotten himself." He was still quiet. He had not raised his voice once. "He hoards what is not his. A woman. A name. A dignity he cannot defend. He wraps what little he has left about his bastion like a beggar's cloak and calls it honour."

Waldric said, evenly, that those words edged close to dishonour.

"I speak the truth. Your lord has grown soft." Wilhelm turned his head slightly and addressed the chamber rather than the man. "Hiding behind dead oaths and peasant counsel. Perhaps it is not only my daughter he finds himself unable to let go of. Perhaps it is power itself."

And Osric, looking down the table, saw Ottokar Reiss lift his eyes and look at the ceiling.

It was nothing. A man tilting his head back an inch in a warm room, the way men do.

Osric felt the whole business close over like a door.

Already decided. Decided before we crossed that square, and probably before we left Valmarch.

Everything since has been the play, and we've been standing in it, and Waldric has spent an hour being brilliant at a room that was never listening.

And the man who paid for the deferring has just called my Baron a coward in front of twelve people who'll repeat it in nine houses before supper, and there is nothing in this chamber that can be done about it by law.

He heard his own voice before he had entirely decided to use it.

"You'll watch your tongue."

The room stilled.

It was not loud. It had not needed to be. It went out across that polished table and hit the painted wall and came back, and every head turned, and not only the twelve: the scribes, the herald, the two guards by the door.

Waldric closed his eyes.

Wilhelm von Morav's brow lifted, and something that had been coiled in the man for an hour uncoiled with visible pleasure.

"And who are you," he said, "peasant, to speak in a chamber of lords?"

Osric had a moment then in which he understood entirely what had been done to him, and understood also that it had been done well, and that the understanding was going to be no use to him whatever.

"I'm the man who was under this city's walls when your house was still deciding which way to face," he said.

The quiet got worse.

"I bled in the breach at the east gate. My father died on that rampart and my brother went into the ground a month after him, and I have buried more friends for this county than you have shaken hands with." His voice stayed level, which took a good deal more effort than shouting would have. "And I stood in a burning ruin six weeks ago with six men and your daughter, my lord, while a hundred Khesari came up the stair for her. Three of mine are dead of it. Two of them have no graves, because we could not carry them out.

"You may call my Baron what you like. You'll not call him a coward while I'm stood in the room."

Somebody at the table drew breath audibly.

Waldric's hand came up. "Enough."

Osric stepped back. He did not apologise, and he did not look away from Wilhelm, and there was no regret anywhere in his face, because there was not yet any in him.

Wilhelm smiled.

"A baron's dog with a sharp bark." He said it to the chamber. "No wonder he surrounds himself with mutts."

"You have made your point, my lord." Waldric's voice had gone cold in a way Osric had not heard from him before. "And I will see that it is delivered. Unless you wish to compound it with further spectacle, we will take our leave."

But Wilhelm was already standing.

"You wear your loyalty like a badge, peasant. Loud, and polished, and untested before men of rank." He came round the corner of the table. "If your tongue speaks for your master, then let your steel do the same."

He turned to the chamber and spread his hands, and Osric understood that this sentence had been written some days ago.

"Tomorrow. Before the gods, on the ground outside the walls, in the old form." He was entirely calm. "Let this loud-tongued retainer prove his Baron's honour with a blade, since he sees fit to speak in his stead. My own shield shall answer him."

Waldric rose to his full height.

"This is absurd. The matter before this chamber is one of governance and rightful claim, not a tavern grudge to be settled with blades in a field."

But it had already gone out of his hands.

An older noble with rings stacked on every finger nodded gravely and observed that the man had spoken in the chamber and had insulted a lord, and that the ancient rights were clear: if he wished to speak as a noble, he must answer as one.

Another said, with the satisfaction of a man watching a difficulty resolve itself, that there had been enough words, and that truth might now be drawn out of blood, and that it was old custom and not petty grudge.

At the fifth chair on the left, Ottokar Reiss lowered his eyes from the ceiling and looked, for the first time that morning, directly at Osric.

He looked at him the way you look at a horse before you buy it.

Then he went back to his hands.

"Say nothing more," Waldric said, low and urgent, at Osric's shoulder. "Not one word. We leave. Now."

Osric held Wilhelm's eye a moment longer.

The blood in him felt thick and slow and entirely calm, which frightened him rather more than temper would have.

Waldric turned on his heel and marched for the doors, and Osric followed, and behind them Wilhelm von Morav's laughter came down that painted chamber after them, unhurried, and pleased, and not remotely surprised.

They came out at the top of the stone steps into the light of the square, and the pears were still there, and the boy was still sweeping, and the pigeons went up off the paving all at once as the doors banged behind them.

Osric looked across at the arcade.

They hanged a girl of twelve off those beams to shorten a conversation.

And they have just spent an hour being unable to arrive at one.

"Don't," said Waldric, without looking at him.

"I've not said anything."

"No. You are about to say something in about four hours, when it wears off, and I should like to be somewhere else." The old knight came down the steps fast for a man of sixty-eight. "Walk. And do not stop walking until we are inside that inn."