Chapter 43: The Prince Starts a Brawl

He took a while to die.

That was the last cruelty of the morning and nobody had expected it either. He lay on the frozen ground making a wet sound for the better part of a minute while three hundred people watched, and his hand moved twice on the earth beside him, and then it stopped.

Osric stood over him with his chest heaving and blood coming down his leg and his face and did not move.

Silence gripped the hill.

Then the crowd broke.

Not with cheers. There were no cheers anywhere on that hill. It was stunned murmurs and gasps and three hundred exhalations of breath that had been held far too long, and underneath it a low ugly muttering that spread out through the ring like water going through cloth.

Osric heard the shape of it and did not like it.

They didn't come to see this. They came to see a lord's man kill a border serjeant in three minutes, and instead they've watched a man in good plate get opened at the elbow and bleed out in the dirt over a quarter of an hour, and they'll not forgive it and they'll not forgive me.

Wilhelm von Morav rose slowly from his seat with his jaw clenched.

And for the first time that morning, he looked at Osric.

It was not rage. Osric had braced for rage and would have known what to do with it. What was in the man's face was closer to what a merchant wears when a shipment has been lost at sea: a rapid, entirely practical reordering of the year.

He's not thinking about me. He's already three moves past me.

The council did not speak.

Waldric stared, unmoving, with his arms folded.

Argilac let out a breath and stepped forward.

Alden looked as though he might weep.

And Theobold did not move at all, but his green eyes found his father's across that trampled ground, and what was in them was not triumph and was not relief.

Osric could not put a name to it and would think about it a good deal afterward.

His knees went about four seconds later.

He got down onto them on the blood-soaked earth rather than falling, which he counted as a victory of a kind, and knelt there with his shoulders heaving under the weight of the mail and the ache in his side pulsing sharp and insistent.

The air stank of sweat and iron and churned soil. Blood was beading out of the slice in his thigh and soaking through the linen under his hauberk, and the dagger lay beside him with its bone grip red.

He tasted copper and grit. His vision wavered at the edges.

He did not fall. He would not fall. Not now, and not in front of them.

Boots came scuffing over the trampled grass.

"Father."

Argilac reached him first, skidding down beside him and catching him by the arm before he could sway.

"You stubborn old bastard."

"I'm not dead," Osric managed, and attempted a smirk that came out as a grimace.

"You're bleeding. And limping. And your nose is pointing somewhere it's never pointed before."

A second shadow came down on the other side, heavier and slower.

Theobold dropped to one knee opposite his brother, and his hands hesitated in the air a moment before they came down on Osric's shoulder.

His eyes were wide and searching and, for the first time since the street, entirely uncertain.

"You damn fool," he said, thickly.

Osric blinked at him, surprised at the plain feeling sitting there in the open on his son's face.

"Didn't think you'd come closer," he rasped.

Theo looked down at the blood coming out of the thigh, and at the red smear running from his father's brow into his beard, and his jaw set hard.

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"I didn't come to watch you die." He got the other arm. "You're getting up. Now."

Between the two of them they lifted him.

Osric grunted, and his knees threatened to go, and he locked his jaw and made his body obey. His legs trembled and then held. He leaned into his sons and stood up straight and looked toward the rise.

Wilhelm von Morav had not moved, but he stepped forward now, flanked by two councilmen in ceremonial robes, and raised a gloved hand for quiet.

"Let it be recorded." His voice carried well across the hillside. "That the duel has been fought in accordance with the ancient laws of Auenstadt. The victor stands before us, bloodied and unyielding. Let there be no further dispute in the matter."

He paused.

Osric met his eyes and did not blink, despite the sweat stinging them and the pain flaring behind his ribs.

"The judgment is concluded," Wilhelm said, more slowly. "No man may now question the honour or the loyalty of the Baron of Valmarch, nor of his serjeant."

Another pause, and this one was deliberate.

"Though others may yet answer for what they whispered. This matter is closed."

Murmurs rose and swelled through the crowd. Some of it was assent. A good deal of it was not. Nobody dared speak against a formal judgment, because the duel had spoken in blood and such was the law.

And it was in that moment, while everybody else on that hillside was looking at Wilhelm, that Osric happened to be looking the other way.

Down at the foot of the rise, where the horses were held, a man in a plain dark coat came out of the back of the crowd at a fast walk.

He was not running. He was walking as men walk when they have been given something to do and do not want to be remarked on doing it. He got to a good bay horse that somebody had been holding ready for him, and mounted, and turned it, and put it straight into a canter on the road that ran north.

Not toward the city gate. North, away from Auenstadt entirely.

Osric watched him go until the road took him behind a rise.

The fight's been over about ninety seconds.

And somebody's already on a horse.

"Serjeant." Doran had come up on his blind side and had followed his eye. "You saw him too."

"Aye."

"That's the Osterwald road out of here, or it's the road that meets it."

"I know what road it is."

Osric shifted his weight off the leg and found there was no good leg to shift it onto.

"Say nothing to Waldric until we're off this hill," he said. "And Doran. Remember the coat."

"I've got the coat and the horse and the way he sat it." Doran's voice had gone flat and careful. "He'll not be hard to know again."

A crunch of gravel behind them made Theobold turn.

Waldric came through the press of the city guard at a slow deliberate walk, his weathered face unreadable, and the crowd parted for him without being asked to.

"Serjeant," he said, coming to a halt. "Well fought."

Osric stared at him.

There was none of the usual scorn in the old knight's face. Only a hard-cast approval with something a good deal heavier sitting underneath it.

"Didn't think you'd a kind word left for me," Osric said, barely keeping the pain out of it.

"It was a fair duel and you stood your ground and you bled for the Baron's name." Waldric gave the faintest nod. "That demands recognition. Even from an old mule like me."

Argilac narrowed his eyes slightly at the knight and said nothing.

Waldric's gaze had gone up the hill toward the place where Wilhelm had stood, now empty but for boot prints in the earth and the mark where a banner spike had been driven and pulled.

"But do not mistake this for an end," he said, low. "Men like him do not forget the sting of a public humiliation. And councillors remember everything except gratitude."

He looked at Osric again with eyes hard as flint.

"They will speak of today in wine-houses and guildhalls. But not as a tale of justice. They will call it an insult. They will dress it in finer words, but make no mistake: it was a wound, and men do not suffer wounds to their pride without dreaming of knives in the dark."

Osric followed his eyes. The last of the councilmen were going in through the city gate, trailed by murmuring retainers and footmen.

"There's more," he said.

"There is always more. What in particular?"

"A man went north off this hill on a good horse about a minute after it finished. Not to the gate. North."

Waldric went very still.

"You are certain."

"Doran saw him as well."

The old knight looked north up the empty road a while, and something moved behind his face that Osric had not seen there before and did not enjoy at all.

"That is a rider," Waldric said slowly, "who was told to wait on a hill and go the moment he had an answer. Which means somebody wanted this outcome inside a day, and wanted it somewhere that is not this city, and had arranged the horse before dawn."

"Wilhelm?"

"Perhaps." Waldric was still looking north. "But Wilhelm has been sat on that rise all morning with his own men round him and a chamber full of witnesses, and if he wanted word carried he could have sent any one of them at a walk and nobody would have thought about it twice."

He turned round.

"Whoever that was, he did not want to be seen leaving. And that is not the behaviour of a man carrying good news to his master. That is the behaviour of a man carrying a signal."

Nobody said anything for a moment.

"Get him off this hill," Waldric said to the sons. "Get him behind a door and get that leg sewn. And Osric."

"Aye."

"Do not go anywhere alone in this city between now and the morning we leave," said Waldric. "Not to a tavern. Not to a market. Not down a lane to look at a forge, and I am aware of that arrangement, because your son is not as quiet as he believes he is."

Osric said nothing.

"Take three men with you when you go on Thursday," the old knight said. "Take them and let them stand in the yard and be bored, and pay the boy his coin, and come back."

Then he inclined his head curtly and strode back toward the city, boots crunching over the churned soil, without a farewell of any kind.

Osric stood in silence a beat, feeling the weight of that settle in alongside the ache in his bones.

"He's not wrong," Theobold said.

"No." Osric shifted his weight off the bad leg and found there was still no good leg to shift it onto. "He rarely is. That's what makes him so bloody difficult."

Argilac adjusted his grip under his father's arm.

"Come on, old bear."

Together the three of them passed in under the looming gatehouse, the last of the morning light throwing long shadows at their heels.

Behind them, the low hill stood empty but for churned earth and dark spatters and four men lifting a body in good plate onto a board, and the road going north out of it, and nothing on that road at all.