Chapter 46: What Happened to the Tower?

They did not talk about the graveside. They did not talk about the row about the horse. Neither of them went near any of it, and both of them noticed the other not going near it, and by the second evening there was something almost restful in the arrangement.

Once, at a halt, Theo asked about the tower.

"Argilac's told me the shape of it. He's not told me what it was like."

"He'll not tell you that."

"No. He starts and then he goes somewhere else."

Osric worked his leg out straight and thought about how much to give.

"It was cold," he said. "That's what nobody puts in it. It was very cold and we were all of us wet from the hollow, and the smoke came up through the boards and there was no heat in it at all, which is not what a man expects. And there was nothing to do about any of it for about three hours. That's the part."

Theo waited.

"Fighting's quick," Osric said. "Waiting isn't. And a man will tell you afterward about the fighting because it's got a shape to it, and he'll not tell you about the three hours because there's nothing in it to describe. It's just sitting on a floor with your friends going grey and no water and somebody outside being patient with you."

"And the offer."

"Aye. And the offer."

"Would you have taken it?"

"No."

"Not for a second?"

Osric turned that over honestly, because the boy had asked honestly.

"For about the length of a breath," he said. "Somewhere in the middle of him talking. Not because I meant to, but because it was there and a man's head goes where it goes. And then I looked round that floor and there wasn't a face on it that would have let me."

Theo nodded slowly and did not say anything else about it, and they rode on.

That second night they made a fire in the lee of a wall on high ground, because Waldric wanted ground rather than a village, and Osric approved and said so.

It was a good camp and a quiet one. Doran walked the ground before dark and came back and reported it clean. The cart was drawn across the open side. There were seven men and a woman and a boy round that fire and about a hundred and ten miles behind them, and for the first hour it was almost pleasant.

Then Argilac made a joke about the duel, and Osric watched his younger son laugh at it, and watched his elder son not laugh.

He got up not long after and went out to the horses and stood there a while with his hand on the neck of one of them, taking the weight off the leg.

Theo came out after him inside two minutes, which Osric had not expected.

"I'll not stay in that village," he said, without any preamble whatever.

"All right."

"I mean it. I'm not"

"I said all right." Osric did not turn round. "You've come out of a city with your tools in a roll because four men in a tavern know your face. You've not come home. I'd not insult you by pretending otherwise."

Theo stood there.

"I've nowhere else," he said, and it came out badly.

"Then you've nowhere else, and Valmarch has a smith who's sixty-two with a bad chest and no apprentice, and I'd say that to any man on this road and I'm saying it to you." Osric ran his hand down the horse's neck. "That's not a door. It's a fact about a village. What you do with it is yours."

Theo was quiet a moment.

"You'd have me under your eye."

"I'd have you within a mile of my daughter, who is going to be intolerable about this the moment she sets eyes on you, and within a mile of your brother, who has been riding four days to a city twice a year to see you and has never once told me why he wanted the leave." Osric shrugged. "And aye. Under my eye. I'll not lie about wanting it."

"That's the first time you've said you wanted anything."

Osric turned round at last.

"Then I've been worse at this than I thought," he said, "and I'd thought I was very bad at it."

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Theo looked at him in the dark, and then went back to the fire, and did not answer, and did not need to.

Venessa travelled on the hide cart with Toman, which had been arranged in a tavern in another city and which nobody thought about twice.

She was, Osric noticed, extremely good with the boy.

By the second day Toman had told her about the merchant who had tried to buy the whole load at half its worth, and about his sister, and about the mule that had gone lame at Lindebrae, and about what his father said concerning bark liquor, at some length. She listened to every word of it and asked the right questions and laughed in the right places, and Toman got down off that cart on the second evening with the look of a boy who has decided he is excellent company.

She kept out of the men's way otherwise. She helped at the halts without being asked and without making a performance of it. She mended a strap on Alden's saddle on the second night, quickly and well, and would not take anything for it.

"She's all right, that one," Alden said, on the third morning. "Not many'd sit on a cart for four days with a boy who talks like that and never once tell him to shut it."

"No."

"Where'd she come from, again?"

"Coyne's lane. Under the rise." Osric shifted his weight off the leg. "Come in about seven weeks ago. Does sewing."

"Right." Alden lost interest entirely, which was the correct response, and started talking about his saddle instead.

Waldric said very little on that road until the third afternoon.

He had been quiet since the city in a way that was not his usual quiet, and Osric had let him be, and on the third afternoon the old man brought his horse alongside without being invited.

"The rider."

"Aye."

"I have been at that for two days and I have got somewhere and I do not like where."

Osric waited.

"There are three sorts of message a man carries out of a city like that at speed," Waldric said. "News, which goes to whoever is paying for news, and generally goes to the gate and out on the main road with a proper courier's satchel and no attempt at concealment.

"Orders, which go from a man to his own people, and which also go openly, because there is nothing to hide.

"And signals." He let it sit. "A signal is not information. A signal is one bit of it, agreed beforehand. Yes or no. Go or hold. And you send a signal by a man who does not want to be seen going, because the entire value of it is that somebody is waiting on it and has been for some days."

"So somebody was waiting on the outcome of a duel."

"Somebody was waiting on the outcome of a duel, north of that city, on a road that runs eventually to Osterwald and eventually a good deal further, and had a horse held ready before dawn." Waldric's mouth had gone thin. "And here is the part I have not been able to put down. If Wilhelm won that duel, he had you dead and his daughter's return a matter of time and no need of anything else at all.

"So the signal was for the other outcome."

Osric felt the cold come up his back.

"It was arranged for me winning."

"It was arranged for either, and that is worse, because it means all of this was somebody's second choice and somebody's first was still worth having." Waldric rode a while. "Whoever that rider went to had a plan for a dead serjeant and a plan for a live one, and had both of them written before you spoke a word in that chamber. You were not the point of it, Osric. You were a question they needed answered on the way to something else."

They came over the last rise into the Valmarch vale on the fourth evening with the light going and the cold coming down hard.

The village lay below with its smoke standing up straight, and the castle above it on the height, and the half-built wall pale and unfinished against a sky the colour of a bruise, and the scaffolding still standing along the top of it with nobody on it and nobody due until the thaw.

Osric sat his horse a moment at the top of the track and looked at all of it and found that his shoulders had come down about an inch, and had not known they were up.

Theo drew rein beside him on the borrowed mule and looked down at the place he had left at fourteen.

Neither of them said anything for a while.

"It's smaller," Theo said at last.

"It is."

"Everything's smaller. I know that's how it goes and I still wasn't ready for it." He shifted the tool-roll on his back. "That's the chapel. That's the mill. And that lane with the four crooked ones is where Anna and I got the goat onto the roof."

"That was you?"

"That was mostly me."

"Eleven years," said Osric, "and I never once had that off either of you."

"You'd have skinned us."

"I'd have skinned you both."

Theo almost smiled.

Then his jaw set again, and he looked down at the village as at a room he had decided to walk into.

"They'll all know," he said. "By tomorrow."

"By tonight. Somebody's already run down that hill."

"And they'll have a version."

"They will. It'll be wrong and it'll be kinder to you than you'd like and it'll be unkind to me, and if you let it alone it'll be forgotten by the spring." Osric gathered his reins. "And Anna will come down that lane at you inside the hour, and I'd not stand in her way if I were you, because she's been eleven years without you and she has opinions."

They went down.

The word had gone ahead of them, because it always does, and by the time they came up the lane past the mill there were people out at their doors.

Not many. Not a crowd. But enough, and quiet with it, and Osric rode through it with his face straight and his leg screaming and did not acknowledge anybody, because there was nothing he could have said out of the side of his mouth to a village that had been counting since October.

Anna was at the gate of the house with her sleeves pushed up and flour on her forearms, and she had plainly been told about ten minutes ago and had been standing there ever since.

She looked at Osric first, and did the count, and got seven where she had waved off six, and her face went through about four expressions in a second and a half.

Then she looked at the seventh.

Osric watched his daughter recognise his son.

She got about two steps before she started running, and Theo came down off that mule badly and got hit at the bottom of it, hard, by a woman half his size who had a fist in the front of his coat before her feet had properly stopped, and who was saying something furious into his chest that nobody else could hear.

Theo stood there with his arms half up and no idea what to do with what had just hit him, and then put them round her.

Osric got down off the horse on the good side and stood holding the bridle and looked somewhere else entirely for a while.

Up on the hill, the castle bell rang the hour.

It rang flat and cracked and nothing like a good bell should, and Osric heard it and thought, with no particular weight on it, that a woman on a hide cart forty yards behind him had told him in a tavern in another city exactly why it did that, and that he had not thought about the conversation since.

He put the horse away and went up to the castle to make his report.