Chapter 44: The Quiet Night Turns Violent

By evening the Bitter Prince had gone from an inn to a celebration, which was not Osric's doing and which he had been entirely unable to prevent.

The hearth roared. Tankards met tables. Somebody had produced a fiddle from somewhere and was making poor use of it. Half the common room had no idea what they were drinking to and had joined in regardless, on the sound principle that a man buying rounds does not require examination.

Osric sat with his back to the wall and his leg stretched stiffly out beneath the bench.

Gerfried would have had opinions about the dressing. The city surgeon had been competent and expensive and had put nine stitches into the thigh and set the nose with a crack that Osric had heard from the inside of his own skull, and had told him to keep off the leg for a fortnight, which Osric had received in silence and had no intention of obeying past Thursday. The wine had gone some way toward dulling the steady pulse under the bandage.

Not far enough.

Argilac was recounting the duel for the third time and getting it steadily wrong in the direction of glory, and Osric let him, because he had watched Voss do the same to Hallenmark and had learned that correcting it only makes the story better.

"And then he drops the messer"

"He didn't drop it," said Doran.

"He drops the messer"

"He put it down. Deliberately. There's a difference and it's the entire business."

"He drops the messer," Argilac continued, "and steps into the swing like a man walking into his own kitchen"

It might have gone on being that sort of night. Loud, foolish, and healing, which is what men need after a morning of that kind and generally do not get.

The door opened.

It made more noise than it should have. The wind came in cold and unwelcome, and with it came four men who stepped inside with a deliberateness that had nothing casual in it.

Osric's eyes came up and sharpened at once.

None of them wore colours, which he noticed first. They were in road-dusty cloaks and worn leathers and looked, at a glance, like travellers who had come a long way.

Their boots were new. That was the second.

And the leathers under the grime were too clean, and the grime itself was on the outside only, and men who have actually ridden four days do not have four days of dirt distributed that evenly.

Dressed as travellers by somebody who has never travelled.

Here we go.

The one at the front was thick-set with a closely shaved head and a scar that pulled at his upper lip and gave him a permanent half-sneer he had likely learned to use. He scanned the room until his eyes found Osric and the men round him, and he smiled.

"Well, well." His voice carried, and was meant to. "Thought we'd come and raise a drink to the man of the hour. Quite the show on that hill this morning."

The tavern went still, the way a room does when the fire itself seems to draw breath and hold it.

Osric did not move. He took another slow sip of wine and set the cup down with precision.

Waldric said it in this city on the first night. If a man starts a quarrel with you, you lose it.

"Then raise it, and go."

The scarred man chuckled and came further in. His companions spread out behind him, and they did it correctly, the way men do when they have been told where to stand.

"No, no. We'd not miss the chance to drink among heroes." He spread his hands. "Didn't expect your kind to hold a blade so well. Then again. Sometimes a pig gores a boar, if it's lucky enough."

Alden stood up so fast his chair screeched across the floor behind him.

"Sit down, Alden," said Osric.

"He"

"Sit down."

Alden sat down, with his jaw working and his good hand flat on the table.

The scarred man looked delighted.

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"There's discipline. Border discipline." He came another step. "You made a fool of a nobleman today. In front of lords. Councillors. His own people." The half-sneer settled. "That doesn't sit right. Not with men like us, who've eaten well off his coin."

Osric's mind had gone entirely cold and was working fast.

He said it. Out loud, in a public room, in front of forty witnesses.

Nobody says that by accident. Which means he was told to say it, and the man who told him wanted it heard and remembered.

So this isn't pride and it isn't a grudge and these four aren't drunk.

They want us to swing first. In front of a room. And then the watch comes, and it's Valmarch's men brawling in a city that has just done us a formal courtesy, and Waldric's embassy is finished and I'm in a gaol here and the Baron has nobody speaking for him in this city at all.

Don't give them it.

"You'll have to take that up with the council," Osric said. "They've a chamber for it and everything."

Somebody at the next table laughed and stopped laughing.

The scarred man's face did something.

"Big words," he said. "But that's the way of men like you. Drunk on a bit of attention, drunk on a few mugs, and thinking you matter."

Argilac rose from the bench.

He did it slowly, and his face had gone into an expression Osric had seen exactly once before, on a winter night when he had split a man's skull without saying a word.

"Argilac," said Osric.

The boy did not sit down. He did not do anything else either. He simply stood there with his hands loose at his sides and looked at the four of them, and after

a moment Doran got up as well and stood beside him, and Doran had not touched his spear and did not need to.

One of the four reached down and lifted the edge of his cloak. Steel winked underneath.

And Theobold stood up.

He had been sitting at the end of the bench for two hours saying almost nothing, and the room had by and large forgotten he was in it, and when he came up onto his feet at his full height a good deal of the room remembered at once.

"This isn't your tavern," he said. His voice was flat and had not risen at all. "This isn't your city. And if you draw in here, in front of this many people, you'll not crawl back behind Lord Wilhelm's walls. You'll swing for it."

That stopped them.

The scarred man looked properly at Theo for the first time: at the corded forearms, the soot ground permanently into the creases of his knuckles, the shoulders, and the eyes.

"You hear that, lads?" He spread his arms mockingly. "We've been told to behave. By a boy with forge soot on his sleeves and piss in his boots."

The other three laughed. It was dry and rasping and about as convincing as their cloaks.

The one with the long braid pulled back his hood, showing a puckered scar running from temple to ear, and tilted his head at Osric, and spat on the floor.

"That old goat's half-dead already. You could've saved yourself the trouble and waited a few months for the grave to do the job proper."

Alden's chair scraped again. Slower this time. Deliberate.

He stood, and picked up his mug, and looked at the braided man.

"You've a funny mouth," he said, low and tightly wound. "You wear that scar like it was earned. It looks more like a goat stepped on your face."

The braided man stiffened.

The scarred leader raised a hand as though to keep the peace, and Osric saw all of it coming and could not get up.

That was the entire problem, and there was no getting round it.

He put his hands on the table to rise and the leg would not take it, and the nine stitches pulled and something tore slightly and the pain went white behind his eyes, and he got about four inches off the bench and had to sit back down.

"Alden. ALDEN."

"Now, now." The scarred man reached over and took a tankard off a nearby table, somebody else's, and held it aloft as though to toast. "Let's not get in over our heads. The good serjeant's got loyal dogs." His eyes came to Osric. "But loyalty's easy to buy these days. And cheaper to break."

He raised the cup.

"To Osric the Wretch. Champion of guttersnipes and bastards, and a lowborn cur for a lowborn baron."

And Alden threw his drink into the man's face.

The mug went with it. It came apart against the jaw in a crack of earthenware and a spray of ale and froth, and the man reeled back clutching at his face, and after that there was no more talking anywhere in that room.

The braided man lunged for Alden with a knife half drawn.

Argilac was already moving. He came in shoulder-first and drove the man backward into a table, and the table went under their combined weight in a splintering crash of wood and pottery.

Doran took the third before the man had got his hand to his belt: not with the spear, which was upstairs, but by putting a boot into the side of his knee and following him down and hitting him twice.

The scarred leader roared and got a short blade clear, eyes flashing, and came for the table where Osric sat.

Theobold met him before he had covered half of it.

It was not a duel and there was nothing beautiful in it. Blacksmith's strength went into street-fighter's speed and the street-fighter came off worse. Theo ducked under the first slash without any grace whatever, drove his fist into the man's gut hard enough to fold him, and then brought his head forward into the nose with a crunch that Osric heard from six feet away.

The knife went onto the floor.

Osric tried to rise again and the leg went out from under him entirely.

So he did the only act available to him, taking hold of the table edge and hauling himself half upright and slamming the butt of his empty cup down onto the hand of the fourth man, who had come round the end of the bench and was reaching for his belt.

The man howled and the knife dropped, and Osric got a fist in his collar and pulled him down onto the table and put an elbow across the back of his neck and held him there, which was the sum total of his contribution and which he found humiliating in a way he did not have time to examine.

"Behind the bar!" the innkeeper's wife shouted at a pair of stunned onlookers, and came out from behind it herself with the iron poker in both hands.

Tables went over. Chairs crashed. The braided man shoved Argilac off and scrambled up in time for the innkeeper's wife to hit him across the shoulders with the poker, which she did with a good deal of practice and no hesitation whatever.

Alden and the scarred leader collided in the middle of the floor and traded punches like men who had both done it before and meant it. The man was fast and savage. Alden fought like a soldier: tight footwork, clenched teeth, no wasted motion and no anger in it at all.

Theobold came in from the side and put a boot into the back of the man's knee and sent him sprawling, and between the two of them they dragged him down and held him there until he stopped.

And then it was over.

The silence afterward was ragged and breathless and broken only by the crackle of the fire and the groaning of the beaten.