The moon went down and did not leave anything behind it. The hollow became a set of black shapes on a faint grey wash of frost, and the cold settled in the way it does in the last third of a night, patient and total, getting into the mail and the boot leather and finally into the bone.
Voss and Wilkin had the watch.
Voss had taken the high rock at the western lip because it gave him a sightline down the trail and because it was out of the wind, and he had been awake perhaps two hours and had reached the stage of tiredness where a man's eyes go on working while very little behind them does.
Wilkin sat at the eastern edge with his back against a stone and his spear across his knees and looked at the grass.
It went out from the hollow's lip for a hundred yards before the ground broke, pale and colourless, standing about waist high, and it had been perfectly still for as long as he had been watching it. Long enough that he had stopped trusting his own eyes about it.
There was something out there.
He had thought so for some minutes. Then he had decided it was a stone. Then he had remembered that there had been no stone there at dusk, and had looked away deliberately and looked back to see whether it moved, and it had not moved, and neither had the two others he found while he was looking.
He knew what he ought to do.
He knew it perfectly well. Doran had told him in his first week: you do not wait to be certain, you wake the serjeant and let him be wrong on your behalf, because that is what he is for.
He also knew that there were eight people asleep behind him who had ridden two days and fought once and got an arrowhead out of their serjeant's shoulder by moonlight, and that Voss had said something at supper about a lad who cried wolf, not meaning anything by it, and had laughed, and that Wilkin had laughed too.
If it's a stone.
He watched a moment longer, and in that moment the shape he was looking at came forward six inches, the way nothing made of stone has ever done, and it arrived in him all at once and he drew the breath to shout.
Osric's eye opened.
Only the one, and barely. He had not woken. He had surfaced an inch and no further, a dozen times in a night that was not truly sleeping through, and his body had not moved at all.
Past the rocks lay the grass, and low in it, some distance out, was a darker mass.
It read as nothing. It read as ground.
Wind's got up.
Then his eye, which had been doing its work without him, found the second and the third, and understood before he did that they were strung out in a line across the whole width of the grass, and that all of them were low, and that all of them were holding still in a way grass is never still.
He came fully awake without a single part of him moving.
There is no wind.
Wilkin's voice went up into the dark. It got out one word and most of a second.
Then it stopped.
It did not trail off and it did not choke. It stopped, the way a note stops when a hand is laid flat on the string, and the silence that came after it was the loudest sound Osric had ever heard in his life.
The grass tore open.
They came up off their bellies all at once and rushed the hollow, low and fast and entirely silent. No war cries. No shrieking. A line of men with sabres and short axes already out and level, coming on at a dead run over frozen ground, and the silence of it was worse than any noise they could have made.
Osric was off the stone with his messer half out of the scabbard before he had finished getting up.
"UP. ALL OF YOU, UP."
He got to the eastern lip in four strides and found the boy on his back in the frost with his spear still lying across where his knees had been and both hands up at his own throat, and a man crouched over him wiping a knife on his sleeve.
Osric took him with a downward stroke that split the collarbone to the sternum and had to put a boot on him to get the blade back.
He got a hand under Wilkin's shoulder.
It was already the wrong weight. The blood was going out of him in one long unhurried sheet rather than pumping, and it had made a black lake around his head that was steaming faintly, and his eyes were open and moving and had stopped being about anything in that hollow.
"Lad."
The boy's mouth worked once. His right hand came off his throat and went out sideways across the frost, groping, and found Osric's boot, and closed on the leather.
Then a sabre came at Osric's back and he had to leave him.
He turned into it and took the blade on his forearm guard, felt the edge bite into the leather and stop, and drove the pommel up into the man's mouth. Something gave. He put a knee into the body as it dropped, shoved it off, and looked for the next.
Voss woke to a corpse landing on him and got a knee up and caught the falling sabre on the stock of his crossbow. The blade went half through the wood and stuck there. He hauled the whole weight of it, blade and man and all, sideways off himself, and rolled, and came up with his belt knife because the crossbow was ruined and he knew it in the first half second.
In thirty years Osric had been rushed in the dark perhaps a dozen times, and every one of those dozen had come in shouting. Men shout because it frightens the other side, and because it frightens the noise out of their own fear, and because a man running at a stranger with a blade needs something to carry him the last few yards.
These ones did not. They had been told not to, and they had obeyed, out in the cold at the far end of a night with nobody standing behind them to see whether they did.
That fact went into Osric alongside the fighting and sat there and waited to be looked at properly.
The next two minutes had no shape at all.
There were perhaps twenty of them in the hollow and eight of Osric's on their feet, and it was fought at arm's length among rocks in the dark by men who had been asleep. Nobody had a shield on. Half of them had no helm. Erryk came off the perimeter too slowly and knew it and made the distance up with his falchion, taking a man across the back of the neck as he passed and not
stopping to watch it land. Alden came out of sleep already swinging and caught a shape across the chest before it had fully risen, and then stood over his own bedroll and killed the next two who came at it because he had not yet worked out that his kit no longer mattered.
Rutger got to his feet with a man already on him and killed him with an economy that had nothing in it of panic, and then put himself between the fighting and the place where the woman had been sleeping without appearing to have decided to.
Ansel took a sabre across the outside of the thigh in the first rush and went down on one knee and kept fighting from there, on the knee, with his back to a rock, and did well for perhaps forty seconds until Doran arrived and stood over him.
Argilac was up with his messer clear and his guard tight and his left held high. He caught a short axe on the strong of the blade and turned it, and when the axe skidded wide he put a hand's width of steel up under the man's arm and let him fall.
And then, instead of hunting for the next one, he set his back to the rock and looked out east.
What he saw stopped him where he stood.
"Father."
Osric did not hear him.
"FATHER."
He heard that.
He came round with blood on his face that was not his, and followed the line of his son's arm out past the hollow's lip, past the near grass, to the low ridge beyond.
The ridge was moving.
Mounted men stood strung along the crest against a sky that had begun, very faintly, to grey, and below them more were coming up out of the dead ground at a walk, unhurried, not bothering to hide any part of it.
Osric counted them.
He did it because he had been counting other men's numbers for thirty years and could not have stopped himself if he had wanted to, and because a figure is
worth more to a captain than an adjective, and because the counting kept his hands still.
Thirty on the crest. Perhaps twenty more coming up behind them. Twenty in the hollow already or dead in it.
Call it eighty. Call it a hundred, allowing for the ones a man never sees.
It was not an army. That was the part that took the ground out from under him. A hundred Khesari was not a horde and not an invasion and not something the Baron could take to the Count with a straight face. It was a warband. It was the sort of number a chief brings when he means to take something specific and go home, and it was four times what any Khesari band had put across that river in Osric's lifetime, and every single one of them was here for a woman standing behind a rock forty feet away.
"Eighty," he said aloud, to nobody.
"That's not eighty," Alden said, somewhere on his left.
"It's eighty. Count the crest and double it and add for the dark." Osric wiped his face with the back of his wrist. "It's eighty and we've eight."
The first arrows came out of the grey a moment later.
It was a loose flat volley from the mounted line with no aiming in it at all, sent to make people put their heads down, and it did. One shaft buried itself in the turf beside Doran's boot and stood there quivering. Another skipped off Alden's pauldron and went away into the rocks. A third took one of the picketed horses through the neck and the animal screamed and went over into the picket line and took two more down with it in a tangle of rope and legs.
Osric had put his back to the rock where Isolde was and had not thought about why until the volley came in.
It came in high and it came in wide and it came in everywhere except the northern quarter of that hollow, where a woman stood flat against the stone with a dead man's knife in her hand, and where not one shaft landed.
They know exactly where she is. They've known since the grass.
Doran was flat behind a stone with his spear across his forearms and his head turned to watch the ridge.
"Serjeant. They're not coming in."
"No."
"Why aren't they coming in?"
"Because they don't have to." Osric was already moving. "HORSES. Everybody. Now."
They broke for the picket line without formation, each covering the next as he went, and Osric bellowed over the top of it that they were to move and fight and not stand, and above all not stand.
The picket was a shambles. One horse dead across the line, two down and thrashing in the ropes, the rest of them mad with the smell and hauling backward against the pegs. Rutger got in among them with a knife and cut four free in about nine seconds and got kicked hard in the hip doing it and said nothing.
A raider came up out of the dark into Voss's path. Voss had a ruined crossbow in one hand and a belt knife in the other, so he swung the crossbow like a club and staved in the side of the man's head with the wooden stock and kept going.
Three strides later an arrow caught him high through the back of the shoulder and drove him forward onto his hands and knees.