Chapter 60: The Captain Sends Doran

Aldric had come up at some point and had his arms folded.

"That was too many words."

"I know it was too many words."

"It was the right answer in too many words, which is better than the wrong answer in nine." Aldric started walking. "He'd have said, that end, and pointed. But he'd have been doing it nineteen years and everybody would have known which end he meant before he pointed."

"And they don't know with me."

"They don't know with you yet." Aldric said it evenly. "That's not a fault in you. It's nine weeks."

Osric was quiet a moment.

"How long did it take him?"

"I don't know. I was twelve." Aldric glanced across. "Ask Tertius. He was here. He'll tell you it took a season and he'll be lying, and the lie will be closer to useful than the truth would be."

They went up through the second gatehouse.

The training yard had been cleared that morning and would want clearing again tomorrow. It was thin. A third of the men on the roll were out on the creek roads or standing the wall, another third were cutting wood, and what was left was working footwork on packed snow under Argilac, who had been given the drills nine weeks ago and had taken to it in a way Osric had not expected and had not yet said anything about.

Voss was on the mounting block with his stick beside him and a tally board on his knee, calling out something about the bolt count that nobody was listening to.

And Erryk was on the far side of the green, on his stick, watching.

He was there most mornings now. He came up from the physician's house after the light and stood at the edge of the yard with his weight on the stick and his bad leg out, and watched the drills for an hour in weather that was keeping healthy men indoors, and said almost nothing, and went back down.

Nobody had told him to stop and nobody had asked him why he came.

Osric went over.

"You'll take cold standing."

"I have taken cold standing for thirty years and it has never once killed me." Erryk did not look round. "Your boy's got them doing the half-step wrong."

"He's got them doing it the way you taught him."

"Then I taught him wrong." A pause. "That is possible. I'd not rule it out."

Osric stood beside him and watched the line a while.

"Gerfried says the thaw."

"Gerfried says a great many things." Erryk shifted his weight and something in the leg made him stop shifting it. "The thaw for the stick. Not for the leg. I'll have the leg till they put me in the ground and I have made my peace with it, which is a lie, but it is a lie I tell fairly convincingly before noon."

"Erryk."

"Don't." He said it without heat. "You've a garrison and a thin store and a lord's brother coming and forty men who are all watching to see how you do it, and you have not got the hours for me, and I'd not spend them if you had."

They watched a while longer.

"There's one hour I'll want," Erryk said. "Not today."

"You'll have it whenever you ask."

"Aye. Well." He turned and started back toward the physician's house, slowly, on the stick, testing each step where the ice had got into the ruts. "I'll ask when it's worth the walk."

Osric watched him go and thought about the hollow, and the terms Erryk had set in it in the autumn, and about how there was now nobody in the barony a man could take a complaint about the captain to.

He had thought about that perhaps twenty times in nine weeks and had got no further with it on any of them.

The light went early and went fast.

He walked down into the village at dusk, which he had no business doing and did most evenings, and the lane was ice to the ruts and packed hard down the

middle where people had walked it, and the shutters were closed the length of it.

There was one door standing open with light and noise coming out of it, and that was Warin's.

The forge ran late now. It had never run late in Osric's memory, because Warin was sixty-two and had a chest that whistled and had for six years kept the shortest hours of any smith in the county. It ran late because there was a second man in it, and had done since the end of the autumn.

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Osric stopped across the lane, in the dark, where he could see in and not be seen, and watched his son work for about four minutes.

Theo had the sleeves off his shirt in that weather and soot to the elbows, and was drawing something out with short economical strokes, half a dozen at a time, and turning it, and going again. Warin sat on a stool by the door with his hands on his knees and did not correct him and did not help him and did not take his eyes off him for one second of it.

At one point Theo said something. Osric did not hear it. Warin laughed, which was a sound Osric had not heard out of the man in about four years, and then coughed for a while, and then said something back, and Theo grinned and went on hammering.

Osric stood in the ice a while longer.

Two months he has been in this village and he has not come up that hill once,and I have not gone down and knocked.

I'd sooner stand in the road.

He went back up.

He came out at the top of the track with his breath going up and the cold coming down out of a hard clear sky with more stars in it than the summer ever had, and looked east over the wall at the country going dark.

A hundred and sixty-six of barley. Sixty-one of rye. Eighty of oats that would not keep. Fifty-two horses, of which forty-one were sound. A hundred and six men.

Nine weeks of it gone and eleven to come, if the thaw came when it usually came, which it had not done for two years.

And him.

Nine weeks and I have not once come into that room without expecting to findhim in it. Not hoping. Expecting. I put my hand on the latch and some part ofme is entirely certain that when the door goes back he will be at that trestlewith his boots up and something rude to say about my timekeeping.

And then he is not, and I have to take the news again, standing in a doorway,before I can start the morning.

Nine weeks. It has not shortened by one hour.

He went up to the wall to see the watch changed, because it was his hour to do it, and because it was the one part of the job that had not changed at all.

The word came up from Orswood on the fourth morning after, brought by a man on foot who had walked eleven miles through drifts to do it and had frostbite in two fingers by the time he arrived.

His name was Hedd and he was a cottar off the Orswood common and he had never in his life been inside Valmarch castle.

He was perhaps forty and looked sixty, thin in the face, with a beard that had grown rather than been kept and a squint in one eye that had been there long before the snow. He stood in the outer yard in a borrowed cloak with his hands round a cup he could not properly hold, and he kept glancing up at the walls between sentences as though he expected somebody to come and tell him he had no business under them.

He told it to Osric twice.

They had come in the night before last. Six of them, or seven. They had gone into Selvic's byre at the far end of the common where the ground rises, and they had taken the two milk cows and the yearling, and they had cut the throats of all three in the yard because they could not drive them through the drifts, and had taken what they could carry off the carcasses and left the rest.

They had also gone into the house.

Selvic was sixty and had a bad hip and had come out with a hedging bill and had been knocked down and had not been killed, which Hedd said twice as though he had been surprised by it and was still turning it over. His wife had been in the house and had not been touched. They had taken the meal out of the crock and the salt and a wheel of cheese and a woollen blanket off the bed, and they had taken Selvic's boots, and they had gone.

"His boots."

"Off his feet, Captain. While he was down." Hedd shifted the cup. "He's not got another pair."

"How long were they in the yard?"

"Not long. Selvic says a quarter of an hour. His wife says less."

"Which of them was watching a glass?"

Hedd looked at him.

"Neither of them, Captain."

"No. That's right. Nobody ever is." Osric said it without any edge. "Which way did they go out?"

"East. Along the top and down into the beck line."

"On foot?"

"On foot. There's no hoofprints in it anywhere. My brother went out at the light and walked it a half mile and there's nothing but boots."

That was the part Osric came back to afterward, over and over, and it was the part he did not say anything about in the yard.

Six or seven men on foot, eleven miles inside the border, in this.

A man does not walk into another county in January to steal a blanket. A manrides in, takes what will carry, and rides out, and if he cannot ride he does notcome.

They walked.

He got the rest of it out of Hedd in about ten minutes and then had him taken to the kitchens and fed and had Gerfried look at the fingers, and the physician came out afterward and said he would keep both of them and would not keep the ends of them.

Then Osric went and stood in the middle of the outer yard for a while and worked out what he was going to do, and did not like any part of the process.

He wanted to go.

That was the first and largest fact and he had to put it down before he could think about anything else. He wanted to take six men and go up to Orswood and walk that beck line himself and read the ground, because he could read ground

and there was nobody else in the barony who could read it as well, and because he had been sitting in a stone room for nine weeks being read figures.

He could feel how much he wanted it. It was sitting in his chest like a held breath.

And if I go, I am four days out of this castle in weather that could shut the roadbehind me, with a lord's brother arriving and a store that wants watching and agarrison that has not yet decided about me.

And when I come back, if there has been a second raid while I was gone, everyman here will know that the captain was up a beck line on his hands and kneeslooking at boot prints instead of being in his chair.

That is the job. That is the entire job and I have known it for nine weeks and ithas not once got easier.

He sent Doran.