Chapter 41: Beat the Better Man

"I've been to the end of your row twice," he said at last.

Theo stared at him.

"Twice. I stood at the corner and looked at the smoke coming off the forges and I couldn't tell which one was yours and I didn't ask anybody, because asking would have meant somebody knew I was there." He heard how it sounded and did not soften it. "That's not an excuse. There isn't one. But you asked why I didn't come, and the answer is that I got within four hundred yards of it twice and turned round, and I'd rather you had that than a lie."

Theo did not say anything for a while.

When he did, his voice had lost some of its hard edge and had something younger under it.

"Tomorrow might kill you."

"It might."

"Do you think that fixes anything?" He took a step closer, and the size of him was extraordinary in the dark. "Because it doesn't. It won't bring back the years and it won't mend one single hour of it. It'll just be another hole, and I'll have to carry that one too, and I'm not going to."

"I'm not going out there to die, boy."

"Nobody ever is."

Osric looked at his son and thought, with a kind of horrible fondness, that the last man to say that sentence to him had been himself, on a cold rock in the marches, to the other one.

"No," he agreed. "They're not."

A long silence went by. Somewhere off in the dark a cart went along a street and a dog took issue with it.

Theo let out a breath and some of the tension went out of his shoulders, and what was underneath was a seventeen-year-old who had been standing in a freezing street a long while working himself up to this.

"Stubborn," he muttered. "You've not got any better at it."

"No."

"I didn't come here to fight with you." He said it to the cobbles. "I've been telling myself the whole walk over that I did, and I didn't."

"Then why?"

Theo looked up.

"Because you're still my father," he said. "That's all of it. It's not forgiveness and I'm not offering it and don't take it as that. But I'd rather not have you go out there tomorrow with nobody there who's yours."

Osric found that he could not speak for a moment.

He reached out and got a hand on his son's shoulder, and the shoulder under his palm was a stranger's, wide and hard and entirely unfamiliar, and he gripped it anyway.

"I've faced worse odds than tomorrow," he said, when he could. "I've never once had one of them mean this much."

Something moved at the corner of Theo's mouth. It was not quite a smile and it went away almost at once, but it had been there.

"Let's worry about you surviving it first," he said. "We'll deal with the rest after."

"Aye."

"And Osric." Theo stopped. He tried it again, and the word came out with obvious difficulty, and he pushed it through anyway. "Father. Whoever they put in front of you tomorrow, he'll be half your age and he'll have been paid well and he'll have been told to make a show of it." His jaw set. "Don't give him a show. Just finish it."

Osric looked at his son in the dark and did not say anything.

"Where'd you learn that?"

"I put shoes on horses for men-at-arms four days a week," said Theo. "You hear things."

He turned to go and got about five paces up the lane before Osric said it.

"There's a mail shirt in my room with the rings gone under the left arm."

Theo stopped.

"Nine or ten of them. A sabre caught it and turned, six weeks ago, in a tower east of home." Osric said it to the man's back, because it was easier that way and because he had run out of any other method. "It's been like that since. I've had it in front of me every night for a fortnight and I've not taken it to anybody."

A long moment.

"Why not?"

"Because I couldn't work out how to walk into a forge and ask."

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Theo did not turn round for a while.

When he did, his face gave nothing away at all, and his voice was perfectly level.

"Bring it Thursday," he said. "Harbren's yard, off the coppersmiths' row. Ask for me at the gate and don't ask for me by the second name, because there's two of us and the other one's an idiot."

"Thursday."

"If you're still standing." Theo pulled his collar up. "And bring the coin. I'll not do it for nothing. I've a trade."

Then he went off up the lane without any farewell, which Osric found he did not mind at all.

And Osric stood outside the Bitter Prince in the last of the dark with the stars going out one at a time over the rooftops, and did not go back inside for a good while.

The sun came up hard over Auenstadt and cut across the rooftops and the city walls like pale fire, and by the time it had cleared them there were three hundred people on the hill.

That was the part Osric had not expected.

He had assumed a hundred at most: the council's men, a herald, a physician of some sort, and whatever idlers a walled city produces on a cold morning. But the word had gone round the wine-houses overnight the way such words do, and they had come out through the eastern gate in a slow stream since first light, and now they stood in a broad ragged ring about a patch of trampled bare ground on a low windswept rise a quarter mile beyond the wall.

They were quiet. That was the other part. Three hundred people and hardly a voice among them, only the wind and the sound of feet moving on frozen grass.

The ground itself was poor. Osric had walked it at first light with Doran and had liked none of it. Packed earth, dry and cracked, with frost still in the shadowed hollows and a slight fall from north to south that a man would not notice standing still and would notice a great deal on the fourth minute. Two flat stones half buried near the northern edge. A depression the width of a shield about six paces from the middle, where something had been dug out years ago and filled in badly.

"Keep him off the low side," Doran had said.

"He'll not need the low side."

"Keep him off it anyway."

On the rise opposite, Wilhelm von Morav stood dressed richly and stern-faced, flanked by four councilmen in ceremonial robes and their attendants, with banners snapping lightly above them.

He did not look at Osric. Not once, in the whole hour that followed, until the very end.

That, more than anything else that morning, told Osric where he stood in the man's accounting: somewhere between a matter of business and a chore.

Osric turned once and found his own.

Voss was not there and Erryk was not there and he felt the absence of both of them like a missing tooth. Alden shifted from foot to foot, jaw clenched, unable to be still. Doran quiet and watchful at the edge, having said his piece about the ground and nothing since. Argilac standing straight as an oak post with his arms folded, giving off a kind of confidence that Osric knew perfectly well was manufactured and appreciated all the same.

Toman stood behind them with his hands jammed in his belt and his face white.

Waldric stared coldly out over the ground with his mouth tight beneath a bitter scowl and his disapproval entirely unhidden, which Osric had expected and did not resent.

And a little apart from the rest of them, half obscured by the press of men, stood Theobold: silent, tense, unmoving as stone, a full head above the shoulders around him.

Their eyes met for a moment.

The boy did not nod and did not smile and did not do anything at all with his face.

Osric turned away, and swallowed something down, and found that his nerve had settled while he was not looking.

The champion came up onto the flat ground from the opposite side.

Osric had been assessing him since the first moment he came into sight, out of thirty years of habit, and did not much like the sum.

Polished half-plate, head to knee, etched with ornate flourishes and patterns of nobility, and the fluting on it was not decoration. It was there to turn a point, and it had been made for that body by a man who had measured it. A heavy rounded shield bearing Wilhelm's device, gripped properly, held at the correct height. A finely forged arming sword whose edge took the sun like silver flame.

He was moderate in build, compact and strong. Thirty, perhaps. Not more than thirty-two.

Half my age, and a hundredweight of good steel that fits him, and a smith who's been paid to make it fit.

And I've a mail shirt with a hole under the arm and a shield I bought in Lindebrae four winters ago.

Osric rolled the fingers of his blade hand inside the stiff leather and felt them creak. The shoulder that had taken the arrow at the tower ached under the weight of the mail. The knee that had been cold since Blindemartide had opinions about the ground.

He'll be quick in that. Men who wear good plate all their lives move in it the way you move in a coat.

He'll not be tired for a good while. I'll be tired in four minutes.

So it has to be short.

The steward stepped out between them, unrolled nothing, and spoke from memory in a carrying voice.

"This matter shall be settled in single combat, in the old form, before the gods and these witnesses. Let no man interfere. Let no man protest the outcome."

He looked at each of them in turn.

"Begin when ready."

The crowd drew one collective breath and held it.

Steel rasped softly as both men raised their weapons.

The champion advanced first.

There was no rush in it and no bellowed challenge. He came on like a machine, shield up and high, sword poised behind it, feet moving in short measured steps that never crossed.

Trained. Properly trained. Somebody paid for that when he was fifteen.

Osric mirrored him, guard wide, the messer angled forward, shield pressed close to the body.

They circled. Boots crunched on the frozen crust. The whole hill was silent.

Then the champion struck.

It came without any tell at all: a sudden lunge, the shield battering forward to occupy the space, the sword arcing low for the outside of Osric's thigh. Osric twisted aside and felt the edge grate off the skirt of his mail and slammed his own shield forward to catch the follow-up, and the impact went through the boards and up his arm and shook his teeth.

He answered with a short strike, more to test than to wound, and met nothing at all but the steel rim of the other man's shield.

They separated.

Quick. Too quick for the weight he's carrying. And he came back with the second before I'd finished with the first.

The second exchange came faster. The champion feinted high, pivoted, rammed the shield forward and slashed hard from the flank. Osric caught the edge of it on his own boards and the jolt went into his elbow, and he answered with a cut that skidded off the pauldron and rang like a struck bell.

Back again. Circling. Breathing hard already, which was too soon.

Osric's mind narrowed until nothing existed beyond the man in front of him, which is the only useful state, and he began to hunt for what he needed: a lapse in the stance, a sliver of skin, a habit repeated twice.

He got nothing.

The man fought with calculated precision. Sword and shield moved in harmony. Every step was measured and every attack had been rehearsed ten thousand times, and there was not one wasted motion anywhere in him.

He's better than me.