Chapter 40: Your Son Has Been Waiting

Waldric said what he had to say in the square outside the council hall, before they had gone fifty yards, and did not raise his voice at any point in it.

"You have handed him what he came for."

"I know it."

"You do not." The old knight walked fast for his age. "You think you have lost your temper in a room. What you have done is a great deal worse than that, and I want you to understand it tonight rather than tomorrow.

"If you lose, then the Baron's honour has been weighed in the old form before twelve witnesses and found wanting, and every one of those men will write it to somebody by Thursday, and Valmarch will spend twenty years living underneath it.

"If you win, you will have made a public fool of a mint-lord in his own city, in front of the council that feeds off him. And he will not come at you again with a champion and a herald and a set of rules. He will come at you the other way. And not necessarily at you."

He let it go in properly.

"He has two roads out of tomorrow and both of them pay him. You have one, it is not good, and it was not there this morning."

Osric said nothing at all.

"I called you a fool in there," Waldric said, more quietly. "I am not certain that was fair. I am certain it is not useful. So I shall tell you the other half and then leave you alone: I have been at this trade forty years and I have never once found an answer to what he said to us today, and if I had been ten years younger I would have wanted to say what you said, and I would have been just as wrong."

He did not eat with them that night.

The Bitter Prince sat tucked away in a narrow street behind the central square, between squat merchant warehouses and crooked half-timbered dwellings. It was modest and solidly built, its stone walls plastered rough and long since gone dark with chimney smoke. Above the iron-studded doorway hung a painted sign of a stout and disgruntled boar with a crown sitting askew on its head.

Inside, the common room was warm and full and smelled of peat smoke and cheap ale and roasted pork. The rushes on the floor had been trodden into pulp. Lamps flickered dim along the walls and threw long shadows that leaped and settled, which lent the place a comfortable gloom.

Osric sat at a worn oak table with his elbows braced on it and both hands round a tankard he had not touched in a quarter of an hour.

His men were not talking much either.

"You did what you had to," Argilac said at last. He leaned in to catch his father's eye across the candlelight. "What any man with a spine would have done."

Osric shook his head slowly.

"Perhaps I should have held my tongue. Waldric may be right. The Baron will not thank me for making his business more complicated than it already was."

"Nonsense." Alden was leaning back against the wall with the ease of a man who had already decided how he felt. "Morav's a weasel. Men like him bark loudest when they reckon nobody dares bite. He simply didn't expect you to draw blood in a room."

Doran said nothing, which was Doran, and turned his cup a quarter turn.

"Whoever he puts up," Osric said, "will not lack skill."

"Then let's hope his skill doesn't match your stubbornness." Argilac said it dryly, and the twitch at the corner of his mouth did nothing whatever to hide the worry underneath it. "If stubbornness alone won duels you'd have it before the sun's clear of the rooftops."

Osric laughed once, and there was more fatigue than humour in it, and he set the tankard down and looked at the battered wood of the table.

"This isn't a game. I spoke out of turn and there's no more to it than that. And it isn't my pride that'll pay for it, it's the Baron's, and there's a difference and I knew it at the time."

"No." Argilac's voice dropped and hardened. "You put words to what every man in that room was thinking and hadn't the standing to say. He called the Baron a coward. If we'd all stood there and said nothing we'd have proved him right in front of twelve people who'd have repeated it."

"Your boy's got it," said Alden, more soberly. "Your oath means something. Better to bleed tomorrow than be silent today."

Osric glanced across the crowded room, at men laughing and shouting and rolling dice, entirely unaware of any of it and likely to remain so.

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"Wilhelm's not the sort to let an insult go unanswered," he said. "Tomorrow won't end it. There'll be consequences even if I win. Waldric sees that. It's why he warned me."

"Waldric fears the storm." Doran spoke for the first time. "That's not a fault in him. He's the only one of us paid to fear it."

Osric drained the last of the ale, bitter and warm, and set the cup down with a soft thud.

"Aye," he said. "And it seems I've dragged the lot of you out into the rain."

He rose slowly and turned for the stairs.

"Try and sleep," Argilac said, softly but firmly.

Osric paused with his hand on the rail and looked back at the small circle of faces in the wavering candlelight: men who had marched and bled and mourned alongside him for more years than he cared to count, and who were sitting there looking at him with something he did not have a good name for and had never once been comfortable receiving.

"Tomorrow comes whether we're ready or not," he said, and went up.

Sleep did not come, and when it did it went again almost at once and left him worse off than before.

He gave it up somewhere in the small hours and swung his legs over the side of the narrow bed, and the aged frame creaked under him. The silence in that room had got thick and close, the way silence does when a man is lying in it waiting for something.

His mail hung over the chest at the foot of the bed where he had left it four nights ago, with the gap under the left arm still in it.

He looked at it for a while in the dark.

Then he pulled on his cloak and went down the dim staircase into the common room.

The hearth had gone to a soft ashen glow. Even the barkeep had abandoned his post. There was nothing down there but overturned benches and the smell of a night that had finished.

Osric unbarred the heavy oak door and stepped out.

The street was still dark. Torchlight guttered weakly along the stone lanes and made very little difference to any of it. The cold got into him at once and he stood there and let it, and looked up.

The sky sprawled wide and black over the rooftops with the stars scattered carelessly across it. They offered nothing. They never had.

"Been a long while, old man."

Osric turned.

The voice was one he knew and did not know, and the shape that came out of the shadows and into the weak light of a distant lantern took him about four seconds to make any sense of at all.

He was enormous.

That was what arrived first and very nearly all that arrived. Whatever picture Osric had been carrying for three years, and he had been careful about that picture, had taken it out and looked at it perhaps twice a month and put it back, the young man in front of him had comprehensively broken it.

Theobold Lorgand was seventeen years old and stood a full hand taller than his father and half again as broad through the chest and shoulders. Three years of a forge had done that. His arms were a smith's arms, corded and thickened at the wrist, and his hands hung out of his sleeves like a man's hands.

His dark hair was cropped short. A ragged scar ran from the brow down across the cheek, whitish and badly healed, the sort a man gets in a tavern from somebody with a cup and a grievance.

And his eyes were green, and they were his father's eyes exactly, and they were fixed on him without blinking.

"Theobold."

The name came out of Osric's mouth and sounded like something in another language.

He took a step forward without deciding to.

"I didn't expect to find you here."

"Nor I you." Theo's voice had dropped somewhere in the last three years and had not entirely settled into itself, and he was holding it carefully the way a young man does when he is afraid it will do something he has not authorised. "Argilac came to the forge this afternoon. Told me about your duel."

"Did he."

"He's been coming since the spring. Every time he's in the city. You'll not have known that either."

"He told me. A fortnight ago, at a table, in front of four men, because he reckoned I'd not shut the door on him with witnesses about." Osric's throat was doing something. "He was right."

Theo blinked.

He had plainly come armed for something else and had to reset.

"He said you'd not known."

"I'd not. Not until he said it." Osric let it stand. "He was right to go and he was right not to tell me, and I've had a fortnight to be angry about it and I've not managed it once."

They stood in the street with about eight feet between them and neither of them closed any of it.

"So it's true, then," Theo said. "You're fighting a lord's man in the morning."

"Aye."

"Why."

"Because he insulted the Baron in front of a chamber and I opened my mouth."

Theo's jaw worked.

"Is that honour, or is it pride?" It came out too loud and too fast and he had plainly rehearsed it and it had not come out the way he had rehearsed it. "Because from where I'm stood they look the same, and one of them's got you in a field at dawn."

"Perhaps both," Osric conceded. "I've made mistakes enough for two lifetimes. This one's mine and I've chosen it."

"Mistakes."

The word came out of the boy like something thrown.

"You say mistakes. Like it's a word for something that happened to you." His voice cracked on the last of it and he stopped and got hold of it and went on lower. "And you're still making them. Right now. Tonight."

Osric felt every year of his age.

"I never meant to hurt you," he said. "Or your brother."

"Don't."

"I left because I couldn't be near it. That's the truth and it's a poor truth and I've had three years to find a better one and there isn't one." His voice did not sound like his own. "I thought you were both better off away from me, and I told myself it was for your sakes, and I've known for a long while that it wasn't."

"We were children."

"You were five."

"I was five." Theo's hands had closed. "I was five and I was stood at that graveside holding Argilac's hand, and you were there, and then you weren't, and I have never once in twelve years been able to work out which of those two I'm actually angry about."

That went through Osric cleaner than any blade had ever managed.

"And then three years ago you and I had a row about a horse," Theo said. "A horse. And I said things I'd been storing since I was six, and you said nothing at all, which is what you do, and I walked out that door and got on a cart and I have not been back. And I want you to know I did not intend that to be three years, because I thought you'd come."

He said the last part almost quietly.

"I thought you'd come."

Osric stood in a cold street in the city where his father had died and found he had nothing to put in front of that.