Autumn came to the marches without ceremony. It took the leaves first and the warmth after, and by the middle of the month there was frost in the shaded hollows that lasted past noon.
Morning light threaded the thinning cloud and lay across Valmarch in long bars of pale gold. The lanes glistened. Smoke stood off the slate roofs in columns that did not waver, because there was no wind yet to trouble them, and the village smelled of wet earth and fallen oak and the warm brown crust coming out of the baker's oven at the head of the square.
Osric stopped at the edge of the market and let the morning settle on him.
He was forty-three, and twenty-nine of those years had been spent in mail. The cold had found his knees in the night and had not left them. His left shoulder held opinions of its own about the weight of a wool cloak. He straightened his back against the ache out of long habit and walked on.
The square was waking around him in its usual order. The baker first, hours before anybody, then the smith, then the alewife who kept her shutters closed until she judged there were enough people about to be worth the draught. A boy went past at a trot with a yoke of water and did not spill any of it, which meant he had been doing it for years. Two women had a pig between them and disagreed about where it was going. Somewhere out of sight a cart wheel wanted grease and had wanted it for a fortnight.
Throderic kept pace at his shoulder with his hands clasped behind him. The captain moved through Valmarch like a man who could have crossed it blindfolded, which after forty years he very nearly could. His hair had gone silver and he wore it cropped to the skull, and nothing in the cut of it softened a face that weather and command had worked over thoroughly.
"He'll not thank you for it," Throderic said.
"He doesn't have to thank me."
"No. But the Baron has to hear it." He watched two workmen haul limestone off a cart bed and stack it along the roadside. "And he's had a season of Eckhard already. There's a limit to how much of one knight a man can stomach before breakfast."
Osric shifted the cloak off the bad shoulder. "Eckhard rides better than half the knights in this county. He can go on riding. But if he puts a hand to one of my soldiers again, the Baron will be the smallest of his troubles."
"Spoken like a true savant," Throderic said.
"You've been saving that."
"Since the cart." He lowered his voice as they passed the workmen. "A word, though. Noble pride wounds easier than a soldier's backside, and it stings a good deal longer."
"I'd rather a bruise than a blade in a boy's ribs."
Throderic had nothing to set against that. He let a few strides go by with his eyes on the road ahead.
"He'll be at the table this morning," he said instead.
Osric looked round at him.
"Since when does Eckhard rise before the sun?"
"Since he began sleeping badly." Throderic's mouth did something dry. "He asked the steward for a place at the board four days ago and has taken it every morning since, and has said perhaps nine words at it in total. He's waiting for you to walk in."
"Then he'll have his wish."
Above the rooftops the castle wall stood half made against the sky. Scaffolding ribbed it from the footings to the unfinished crown, ladders leaning where the masons had abandoned them the evening before, and pale limestone lay heaped beneath in piles that put Osric in mind of bleached bone. The old Baron had begun the work nine years ago and it had died with him, coin and will together, until his son took it up again. At Waldric's prodding, Osric had always assumed, though neither the Baron nor his uncle had ever said so where it could be overheard.
Nine years for a wall. Stone outlasted timber, and stone took its time.
A voice hailed them from the square's edge, hoarse and altogether too cheerful for the hour.
Tertius stood beneath the baronial standard with the pole butted against his boot, black and dark red cloth stirring above him and the gold wyvern showing and hiding as it turned. The old Imperial was lean and sinewy and had been so far past the age when other men went soft that the village had stopped remarking on it. He was bald as a river stone. His salt and pepper beard had for years been losing a war against any comb that came near it, and he held his post as though he had mislaid the fact that he was old enough to be Osric's father.
"Up before dawn again," Osric said.
"Someone must set an example." Tertius drew himself up. "Young men want reminding of their duty. Why, back in my Legion days, when a soldier was made rather than merely enlisted, we marched before dawn and built roads before breakfast and thought nothing of either."
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Throderic set a hand on Tertius's shoulder before he could get up any speed. "We know, old friend. Roads before breakfast."
"There you go again, Captain." The whiskers twitched. "Leaping ahead without a sprinkle of my meaning. I was going to say reminders on how to drink a night away and still stand by dawn."
"Alden." Throderic did not make it a question.
"Alden. Sleeping it off and swearing the mead was watered, which nobody who watched him come down the lane would credit for a moment." Tertius said it fondly enough. Then the humour went out of his voice. "Argilac was with him."
Wind moved through the canvas of the stalls and carried over the smell of apples and turned earth.
"I'll have a word with Alden," Osric said.
"Will you." Tertius shifted his grip on the standard.
"I've been having words with Alden since he was younger than the boy is now and it has never made the slightest difference." Osric said it without heat. "But I'll have one."
Tertius, who had spent a long career learning when to shift a conversation off bad ground, nodded up at the rising wall. "Masons seem slower this year."
Osric ran his eye along the scaffolding. "Haste sets soft. Frost knows the difference."
Throderic's mouth twitched. "Listen to that. Choose your words with more thrift, Osric, or you'll be composing verse by Blindemartide."
Tertius looked scandalised. "Sword for the quill, is it?"
The barracks door banged open across the square before Osric could answer.
Argilac came out of it too fast and stopped too suddenly, one hand still working at the lacing of his tunic. He caught sight of his father and drew up as though a rope had gone taut through him, then dragged his other hand back through his hair, which improved nothing.
He crossed the square attempting a soldier's stride. He very nearly had it. The rest of him walked alongside it, seventeen years old and hoping nobody would notice.
"Father." Then, catching himself. "Serjeant."
Osric looked him over. "Late night."
"Later than usual." The colour in his cheeks might have been shame and might have been the last of the mead. "Alden insisted that we"
Osric raised a hand and the excuse died standing.
"Muster first. Then saddles and blades until dusk. A day's work will clear your head faster than sleep will."
"Yes, Serjeant."
He took it without flinching, which was something, and answered properly, which was more.
Osric stepped past him and did not slow and did not look back. Behind him he heard the boy hold still for a breath and then turn for the barracks. Chastened, and not broken. There was a narrow road between those two and he had been walking it with his son for four years without ever once being certain of his footing.
"Firm touch," said Tertius.
"One day he'll thank me."
"So you say," said Throderic.
They took the packed dirt path toward the castle rise with the low sun throwing their shadows out long and thin ahead of them. Tertius came a few paces behind, boots cracking through the crust of frost that survived in the shade of the wall, then slowed, tapped the standard's butt against the ground in a small and perfectly serious salute, and went off to see to his equipment.
The village fell away beneath them as they climbed. A smith's hammer rang once and stopped and did not ring again. A woman swept her stoop with slow strokes and paused to watch them go up. Somewhere below, a child was chasing a hoop and losing at it, judging by the shouting. A door closed softly. Every chimney in Valmarch was breathing, and nothing anywhere in it was wrong.
That was the trouble.
Years now, since steel had rung anywhere along this border in earnest. Peace settled into a place the way frost settled into ground, soft at first, then rooted so deep in the grain of ordinary lives that people forgot it had ever been otherwise. They forgot how thin it was.
Some mornings it sits in the chest like a stone. Not the ache of old wounds. Something older.
And the world went out from under him.
Rain, coming down hard enough to sting. Stone dust in it. Mud to the ankle, churned and gone red, and the smell of burning pitch over everything.
He was at the wall. Twelve years ago and about four hundred miles of memory away, and he was thirty-one and had not slept in three days and had eleven men left of the nineteen he had brought up that morning.
The siege tower on the left going over under ballista fire with men still in it. The noise that made.
Somebody shouting for the ladders to come forward and nobody bringing them.
And on the broken rampart above him, his father.
Orunhard Lorgand, nineteen years a serjeant, broad in the shoulder and iron in the will, working with a spear because his messer had gone somewhere on the fourth day and he had never bothered to complain about it. His mail dark with wet. His voice torn to pieces from shouting.
"Hold the flank."
And then he turned, and found Osric in the press below him, and looked at him.
That was all. One glance and no more than a second of it, and everything a man has to say to his son went through it, and none of it was in words.
Then the crossbowman on the rubble above put a bolt through his chest.
Osric's voice tore out of him and did precisely nothing.
His father went back a step. Then another. And then he came down off the rampart into the breach among the corpses and the shattered stone, and he was already gone before he landed.
Osric got to him. That was the part the dream never spared him. He always got to him, and it was always too late, and there was never anything to do when he arrived.
He knelt in the muck with his father's head between his hands. The bolt stood out of the old man's chest and the blood came round the shaft thin and pink and washed off and came again, and the rain kept falling into the open eyes, because there was nobody left standing who could close them.
His father's mouth moved once, and shaped his name, and made no sound at all.
"Serjeant?"
He blinked.