"That's a long way to have thought," he said, "for a woman three days in a hedge."
"It is all I have done for three days." Her mouth moved. "You may take that as scheming or you may take it as what happens to a person with nothing else to occupy her. I have stopped minding which."
"And you'll still not name the house."
"No."
"Because you don't know who in it sold you."
She did not answer that either, and the not answering was answer enough for both of them.
Osric stood and pulled his cloak straight, and his shoulder made its opinion known and he ignored it.
"Sleep," he said. "You'll have four men awake round you all night and nobody will come near where you're lying. That's not a courtesy. If somebody's been finding you at three miles, I want them to find you here, where I've picked the ground."
Isolde looked up at him for a moment.
"That is either the kindest or the coldest anybody has been to me this week," she said.
"Aye. I've had that before."
He moved off across the hollow. She held herself upright until he was well gone, and only then let her shoulders come down, all at once, like a rope let go.
Then her hand went inside her collar and pressed something small and hard flat against her breastbone, and held it there, and did not draw it out.
Argilac was sitting alone on the frost at the far side of the hollow, scrubbing dried blood out of the joints of his gauntlet with a rag.
He had been at it a long while. The blood had come out some time ago.
Osric lowered himself down beside him, slowly, on the good side. Neither of them looked at the other.
For a while neither of them said anything at all, and the sounds of the camp went on behind them: Voss complaining, a horse shifting, somebody spitting.
"Say it, then," Argilac said at last.
"I'm not going to flay you."
"You'd have flayed anybody else." He did not look up from the gauntlet. "Doran got twenty minutes for going up a bank without orders at the Vale. Twenty minutes, in front of everybody, and he's four years older than me and he was right."
"Doran wasn't wrong. Doran was early."
"And I was?"
"You were disobedient." Osric let that stand. "And you were right about the woman and it makes no difference whatever, because you didn't know you were right when you kicked that horse. You did it because you couldn't bear to watch and you thought your legs would settle it."
Argilac threw the rag down.
"Twelve of them and one of her. You'd have sat on that ridge and watched them take her, and written it up. Twelve riders, low road, past midnight. Like she was weather."
"I'd have written it up. And a hundred souls in Valmarch would be breathing tomorrow who'll never hear her name."
"And her?"
"They weren't going to kill her." Osric said it flatly. "Watch the field next time instead of the man in front of you. Twelve bows in open ground at sixty yards and not one shaft loosed. They wanted her whole, which meant she had a night in hand, and which meant I could go home and come back with forty men instead of throwing nine at it in the dark."
That landed somewhere. The boy went quiet.
"You'd not have come back in time."
"No," Osric agreed. "Likely not."
Argilac stared at him.
"You could have said that at the start."
"I could have. You'd have kicked the horse anyway."
The boy laughed once, badly, and it went out of him almost at once, and afterward he sat with his forearms on his knees looking at the frost.
Then he said it.
"You've never done that to me before."
Osric had known it was coming from the moment he sat down. He had been sitting there assembling and discarding answers for the better part of five minutes and had not arrived at one he could use.
"No."
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"Your hand was here." Argilac touched his own collar, at the throat, without any drama in it at all. "And you weren't looking at me. I was looking straight at you and there was nobody behind your eyes, Father. It was like shouting into a house with the door open."
Tell him.
"How long?" Osric asked.
"You keep asking me that."
"Because I don't know, and you do, and it matters to me."
"A count of thirty. Perhaps forty." Argilac's voice was careful. "It was not so long as it felt."
Thirty. It had felt like nothing at all. It had felt like the space between one word and the next.
Osric put his good hand flat on his knee and looked at it.
Say it. Say the name and be done. He has a right to it. He has had a right to it since he was nine years old and asked you why you would not go to the grove on the day.
The words were there. They had been there for thirty years. He could feel the shape of them sitting behind his teeth, and he could feel, exactly as clearly, what would happen if he let them out: that his son would look at him differently from tomorrow onward, and that Osric would have to be looked at that way for whatever was left, and that the boy would begin watching him the way Anna watched him, sideways, checking.
He had spent thirty years being the man the others stood behind. It was the one skill he had ever truly owned, and it had kept a good many people alive, and he did not know what he became if he set it down in a frozen hollow in front of a seventeen-year-old.
"I was seeing an old field," he said.
Argilac waited.
"That's as much as I can give you tonight."
It was cowardice. He knew it while he was saying it and heard it in his own voice, and said it anyway.
Argilac was quiet for a moment.
"All right."
"Ask me again another time."
"Will you answer?"
"I don't know."
"That's honest, at least." The boy scrubbed at the gauntlet again, needlessly. "Does it happen often?"
"No."
"Father."
"It does not happen often." Osric heard how it sounded. "It happens more than it did."
"Since the ford?"
"Since before the ford. The ford made it worse."
That was more than he had said aloud to anybody, including Throderic, including Lambert, who had asked twice and been refused both times. He sat with the fact of having said it and found that the sky had not fallen in.
"Does Throderic know?"
"No."
"Does Anna?"
Osric did not answer that one, and Argilac, who was quicker than his father generally allowed for, worked it out from the silence and did not press.
"She never says," the boy said.
"No. She wouldn't."
They sat a while longer. The moon had gone behind the ridge and the frost was coming up in the grass in the dark, and somewhere over by the rocks Voss was still complaining about the fire to a man who had stopped listening.
"I want to say something," Argilac said, "and I've been going round it for an hour and I'm going to make a mess of it."
"Go on."
"I'm not frightened of you." He said it fast. "I want that said first. Whatever it was tonight, I wasn't frightened of you, and I'll not have you thinking I was, because I saw your face after and you'd already decided I was."
Osric looked at his son properly for the first time since he had sat down.
"Then what?"
Argilac's jaw worked.
"You were somewhere I couldn't reach," he said. "And I had hold of your arm and I was saying your name and you were four feet from me and I couldn't reach you." He stopped. Started again. "And I thought, this is what it will be like. When it comes. He'll be right there and I'll not be able to get at him."
Osric had no answer to that.
He had gone into that conversation prepared for anger, and had braced for it and had a dozen ways of taking it, and had not once considered that the boy might be grieving him in advance.
"I'm not going anywhere," he said, which was worthless and was all he had.
"You've been going somewhere for two years." Argilac stood up and shook out his cloak. "I'll take the second watch off Rutger. He's not slept since the farm and he'll not say so."
He got three steps away and stopped.
"Your guard drops on the left," he said, without turning round. "When you're tired. Doran and I have both seen it. So that's twice tonight you've said it and neither of us has fixed it."
And he went off to find Rutger.
Osric sat where he was for a good while afterward.
Then he got up, because there was ground to walk and men to check on, and his shoulder had begun to burn in earnest, and sitting still with it was worse than moving.
Erryk was against the rock at the hollow's edge with his cloak drawn to his chin, awake, as he always was.
"He's fine," Erryk said, without being asked.
"He's not."
"No. But he will be, and that's the same word in a soldier's mouth." The big man shifted. "Sit down. You're standing like a man with an arrow hole in him."
Osric sat.
"You going to tell me what happened out there?"
"No."
"Right." Erryk turned a whetstone over in his hands without using it. "I'll say it once and then leave it be, and you'll not like it, and I'd rather say it out here than in the yard where somebody might hear.
"I've stood next to you since the year before the ford. And the last two seasons I've watched you go away twice. Not like tonight. Small ones. Half a breath, once at the muster and once on the wall, and both times you came back before anybody but me noticed."
Osric said nothing.
"I'm not going to Throderic," Erryk said. "I want that clear. It's not mine to carry up that hill and I'd not do it to you. But I'll not stand next to a man who's gone away in the middle of a line, either, and if it gets to where it's a danger to the lads I'll say so to your face first and then I'll say it to him." He put the stone away. "That's the deal. You've my word on both halves."
"That's fair."
"It's not fair. It's the best I could think of." Erryk settled back against the stone. "Get your head down."
Osric lay down with his cloak over him and his messer within reach of his good hand.
The stars had come out hard over the hollow. Somewhere on the far side of it a woman who would not name her house was lying awake with her hand at her collar, and somewhere out east there were men who had been finding her for three days at three miles, and somewhere behind Osric's own ribs a thirty-year-old field was waiting to be walked into again the next time he was tired enough.
He did not sleep for a long while, and when he did it was thin, and he woke twice, and the second time he lay still and listened to his son moving quietly round the perimeter on a watch he had not been given.