Chapter 45: The Road Home Starts Here

Osric got himself upright against the table with one hand pressed to his side and looked over the wreckage of the room: splinters, overturned stools, a bench in three pieces, and four men on a floor who had walked in with mockery on their lips ten minutes earlier.

Theobold wiped blood off his knuckles and stood over the scarred man.

"Tell Lord Wilhelm," he said, "if he wants another duel, we've no shortage of blades."

The innkeeper's wife lowered the poker and surveyed the room with a professional eye.

"You'll clean this," she said grimly. "Then you can drink again."

Argilac laughed for the first time that day. It was short and dark and entirely genuine.

Alden leaned on the table catching his breath and looked at Osric.

"Well," he said. "I was hoping for a quiet night."

Osric managed something.

"With friends like these, I never stood a chance."

The heavy door of the Bitter Prince banged open a moment later, and the cold came in like a herald.

Sir Waldric stood on the threshold.

His hard-lined face went over the room once. Slowly. He took in the overturned tables, the broken crockery, the fire scattered across the hearthstone. Alden with a bruised cheek and bloodied knuckles. Doran standing over a man with his hands entirely empty. Theobold beside his father with his face set like stone.

And Osric, propped on the table, pale, bleeding through the bandage again, one hand clutched to his side.

Then he saw the sprawled bodies.

One of them groaned and tried to get to his knees and collapsed again. Another lay face down in a smear of wine and ash. The scarred leader was slumped against a beam nursing a split lip and cradling his ribs.

Waldric's jaw clenched.

"You damned fools," he said, low and sharp as a drawn blade.

He stepped inside, boots thudding on the boards.

"What part of you won did you not understand?"

"They started it," said Alden, rubbing his jaw.

Waldric rounded on him.

"Aye. And now the watch will finish it. For all of us."

Theobold crossed his arms. "Wilhelm sent them. You know it."

"I do." Waldric did not soften. "And I also know what he will say when his men are found battered on the floor of a public house. Drunken brawlers. A disgrace. I disavow them, of course. And the council will believe him, because he has already made you look like unruly mercenaries spoiling for violence, and because they would rather believe him than believe the other."

He turned on Osric, and his voice went harder still.

"You bought your name back on that hill this morning. And now you spill wine and blood in a tavern the same day. He will not need to challenge you again. He will let the magistrates do the work."

Osric grunted, his face drawn tight with the pain.

"I sat," he said. "I sat and I told Alden to sit and I gave that man a joke instead of an answer, and I did it in front of forty people, and I'd have gone on doing it if he hadn't said what he said about"

He stopped.

"About your baron," Waldric finished.

"About my baron."

"Yes." The old knight let out a breath through his nose. "That is what they were sent to find. Well. You lasted longer than I would have."

Outside, down the cobbled street, came voices. Bootsteps. Slow and deliberate and in step, which drunks are never in.

"They're coming," Waldric said quietly. "And they'll not ask questions."

Alden glanced toward the window. "What do we do?"

"We leave. Now. All of you. Pack what you need and go out the back." Waldric was already moving. "This place has a stable alley. It'll take you through to the south lane behind the tailor's. From there, split up, and regroup outside the West Gate at dusk."

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"Are we running?" said Theobold.

"We are retreating. Which is what men do when the game turns dirty." Waldric's mouth was a line. "And this game has already begun to stink."

He turned to the innkeeper's wife, who stood behind the counter with her arms folded.

"You saw nothing," he said flatly. "You heard nothing. If anybody asks, the ruffians started it and ran before help arrived."

"I see nothing but broken mugs and unpaid tabs," she said, with a sigh.

Waldric came back to Osric and got a rough hand under his arm.

"Can you walk?"

"I can limp."

"That'll do."

They moved, quick and quiet. Argilac hauled Osric's gear. Doran took the rear, in case. Theobold got his shoulder under his father's arm on the bad side and took the whole weight without being asked.

And Voss's absence from that room was felt by exactly one man in it, briefly, and Osric found himself thinking that if Voss had been there he would have found something to do about the mood of it.

He was wrong about that, as it happened, because Alden had been thinking the same and had come to a different conclusion.

At the mouth of the passage Alden stopped, turned back, took the jug off the end of the bar, and emptied every drop of it over the scarred man where he lay half senseless against the beam.

It went on for some while. There was a good deal of ale in that jug.

"That's from Voss," Alden said, to a man who could not hear him, and set the jug down upside down on the floorboards, and came away laughing, actually laughing, for the first time since the tower.

Doran shoved him into the passage.

"Move, you great fool."

"I've been carrying that since the Vale and I'll not be told."

They were halfway down the stable alley when Waldric caught Theo's sleeve.

"You. Smith."

"Ser."

"You put a lord's man on a floor tonight in front of forty people, and eleven of them know your face and where you work." Waldric said it fast and low. "Do not go back to that forge tomorrow. Do not go back to it next week. Go tonight, take what you own, and be somewhere else by morning."

Theobold's jaw set.

"That's my trade."

"It was your trade this afternoon." The old knight let go of his sleeve. "Now it is a place where somebody will come looking. I am sorry for it. I have nothing better to give you."

He went on ahead.

Theo stood a moment in the dark of the alley with his father's weight on his shoulder and did not say anything at all, and Osric, who could feel all of it through the arm across his back, did not say anything either.

Then Theo shifted his grip and started walking again.

"Thursday's off, then," he said.

"Aye."

"You still owe me for the mail."

"I do."

"Right." His voice did not change. "Then you'll pay me at your own gate, because I'm not staying in this city to be found by four more of those, and I'd sooner be a smith in a village with a garrison than a corpse in a good yard."

Osric did not trust himself to answer that, and Theo did not appear to want an answer, and the two of them went on down the alley with Argilac ahead and Doran behind.

Moments later the front door of the Bitter Prince burst inward and the city watch came through it in numbers.

But the men they had come for were already gone, and there was nothing left in that room but a wrecked floor and four groaning strangers, a flickering hearth, the slow drip of spilled wine, and an empty jug standing upside down on the boards.

They came out of Auenstadt's west gate at dusk on the day after the duel, which was two days earlier than Waldric had intended and one day earlier than the council had been told, and nobody in that party regretted any of it.

The old knight had spent all of the afternoon making the leaving look ordinary. He had paid the inn. He had sent a formal note to the Council Lord regretting that the barony's business elsewhere required his return, and had regretted it at length and in a hand that gave nothing away. He had walked once round the market in the middle of the day where a great many people could see him doing it.

And then he had got them all out of a side gate in the last of the light with a hired cart and no banner.

"They will know by breakfast," he said, when they were a mile clear. "But by breakfast we shall be twelve miles gone, and a magistrate who wants a man twelve miles outside his jurisdiction has to want him a good deal more than these people want us."

Osric rode badly.

He had not expected to ride well and had still not been prepared for how bad it was. The nine stitches in his thigh pulled at every stride, and the leg had gone stiff overnight in the way a wounded leg does, and by the end of the first hour he had worked out a way of sitting that hurt slightly less and was ruinous for his back.

Argilac watched him do it for four miles and then rode up alongside.

"There's room on the cart."

"There is."

"Toman would be glad of the company."

"I'm sure he would."

The boy gave up and dropped back, and Osric stayed on the horse, and stayed on it for three days, because a serjeant who arrives home on a cart has arrived home on a cart and every man in that garrison would have known it inside an hour.

Theo rode a borrowed mule and did not complain about it once.

He had come out of the city with what he could carry, which was more than Osric had expected and a great deal less than a man ought to be able to take out of three years of his life. A bundle of clothes. A leather roll of small tools that he would not let anybody else touch and that he checked twice a day. A good hammer with a shaft he had turned himself.

He had gone back to the forge in the small hours after the brawl and had got Harbren out of bed and had told him, and Harbren, who was sixty and had four apprentices and a business to protect, had listened to all of it and had then given him the tools.

"He didn't have to," Theo said, on the second morning, apropos of nothing at all. "They're the yard's. He could have kept them and been within his rights and I'd not have had a word to say about it."

"What did he say?"

"He said I was a fool and that he'd taught me nothing and that I'd never make a smith." Theo looked at the road ahead. "And then he wrapped them and put them in my hands and told me not to come back, and then he stood in his own doorway in his shirt and watched me all the way down the row."

Osric did not say anything to that for a while.

"He was telling you both at once," he said eventually. "Men that age do."

"I worked that out about the second mile."

The country softened as they went east, then hardened again, and the hedges gave way to thin walls and heath, and by the third day the wind came off the high ground and had winter in it.

Osric spent a good deal of that ride talking to his son, which he had not done in three years, and which he found himself extremely bad at.

They talked about the trade, mostly, because the trade was safe. Theo explained the difference between the work Harbren gave the apprentices and the work he kept for himself, and why a good hinge is harder than a bad blade, and how you tell a forge weld that will hold from one that will open in a year. He was fluent about it in a way he was fluent about nothing else, and Osric asked questions and got long answers and understood about a third of it.