He got up. He got most of the way up, and went down again, and Doran had him by the harness before he had finished falling.
"Leave it, leave it, don't stop for it"
"I can't feel my hand"
"You don't need it. Move."
Alden planted himself at the head of the picket line with the axe in both hands and bought the rest of them the seconds they needed. A sabre came in under his guard and laid his forearm open near to the bone, and he roared and split the man who had done it from the collar down and stood there with his own blood running off his fingers and dripping into the frost, waiting for the next one.
Erryk took Isolde by the waist and threw her bodily up onto the nearest sound horse with no ceremony whatever.
"Ride when I say. Not before."
Argilac swung up, wheeled his mount, and then did not bolt. He leaned down out of the saddle and got a fistful of Voss's harness and dragged him bodily across his own saddlebow, face down, and held him there with a hand in his belt while Doran got mounted.
He did not shout about it. He did not look round to see whether his father had seen.
Ansel could not mount. The thigh had gone and would not take him, and he got a foot in the stirrup twice and came off it twice, and the second time he stood there with his hands on the saddle and his forehead against the leather.
Rutger came round the horse's head, took him under the arms from behind, and put him up onto it as you would a sack onto a cart.
"Hold the mane. Not the reins. The mane."
Osric came last, on foot, backing toward his saddle with his shield up and arrows coming into it, one and then another and then a third, each one a solid punch through the boards into his forearm and the point of the last standing four inches through on the inside where he could see it.
He got a foot in the stirrup and stopped.
The boy was fifteen yards behind him in the frost, alone in the middle of the hollow now, on his back with his hands still at his throat and the pale hair gone black underneath his head. There were four men between Osric and the body and more coming through the gap in the rocks, and two of them were already stepping over him without so much as glancing down.
Osric stood in the stirrup for perhaps a second and a half.
Then he swung up.
He would think about that second and a half for a good while afterward, and would never once conclude that he had decided anything, and would never be able to leave it alone either.
He gathered the reins and threw out his blade to point, and it did not point east into the open ground where eighty riders were coming down off a ridge.
It pointed back the way they had come at dusk.
"WEST. The tower. Ride for the tower."
They went.
The horses had been frightened for an hour and needed no asking. The party came up out of the hollow and over the lip and onto open ground running flat out, strung in a ragged line with Doran ahead and Erryk hanging back on the flank where the arrows were, and the frost broke white under the hooves and hung in the air behind them.
Behind them a great noise finally went up out of the grass.
It was the shouting the crawlers had not permitted themselves, and it did not sound like anger. It sounded like men who had been promised something and had watched it get up and go.
Osric rode with the shoulder burning where the head had come out of it that evening, and his shield forearm numb from the elbow down, and did the sums as he went, because there was nothing else to do with the part of his mind that was not steering the horse.
Eight of them. One a woman. Voss shot through the shoulder and lying face down over a saddlebow. Alden bleeding hard from the arm. Ansel with a leg that would not hold him and no way at all to fight from a horse.
Four miles of open country in the half dark to a ruin with no gate, half a roof, and one wall fallen in.
And eighty men behind them who were in no hurry at all.
The first mile was the worst.
The Khesari had horses closer to hand than anyone had allowed for, and a scattering of them came up out of the low ground on the southern flank and ran parallel, whooping now, shooting from the saddle at a range where very little was going to land and shooting anyway.
They kept it up for the better part of ten minutes and it did more damage than it should have.
An arrow went into the rump of Ansel's horse and the animal put in four bucks in the middle of a gallop and very nearly finished him, and he stayed on it because Rutger came alongside and got a fist in the headstall and hauled it straight. Another arrow took Erryk's cloak and pinned it to his own backplate and hung there for two miles like a pennon.
And Voss began to slide.
Argilac had him across the bow by the belt and the belt was the only part of it that was working, and every stride the man's weight came further over the horse's shoulder, and at somewhere past the mile Argilac shouted for help and got none, because everybody who might have given it was doing something equally urgent.
So he stopped shouting and hauled Voss back up by main strength one-handed at the gallop, twice, and by the second time his hand had begun to cramp round the leather and he could not open it afterward for a quarter of an hour.
Rutger's mount began to blow badly at a mile and a half and would not come up when he asked it. Rutger said nothing about that and simply moved himself back down the line to where the slowest rider ought to be, which is the last place a man on a failing horse should be, and stayed there.
Doran saw it. Doran saw everything.
He came back down the line at a canter, shouted something at Rutger that nobody else caught, and then swung the whole party north across a stretch of broken ground where the frost had got into the turf and the footing was villainous.
The flanking riders would not follow onto it. Steppe men do not ruin good horses to win a chase they expect to win tomorrow.
It cost the party a slower mile and bought them the rest of the ride.
Osric watched the woman while they went, because he could not help it and because it was information.
She rode well. Not the way a lady rides in a walled park with a groom at the bridle. She rode the way a courier rides, up out of the saddle over the bad ground with her weight forward and her hands low and quiet, and when the mare put a foot wrong and lurched she went with it and did not haul on the reins, which is the one mistake everybody who has not spent years on a horse makes at exactly that moment.
Three days in the trees. No fire. A garrison wall she looked at for an hour and walked away from.
And a seat like that. She's been running before. Not this week.
Behind them the noise of pursuit thinned and did not stop.
That was what got into the men. It never became a chase and it never quite stopped being one. There was always something back there in the half dark, a mile off or two miles off, keeping pace without closing. Twice they heard a horn go somewhere to the north, which meant there were riders out there who had never been in the hollow at all and who were being told where to be.
"They're herding us," Alden said, hoarsely.
"Aye."
"To the tower?"
"To anywhere that isn't Valmarch." Osric did not look round. "Ride."
The sky ahead went from black to the colour of dirty water.
Somewhere in the fourth mile Alden began to swear steadily under his breath in the language of his grandfather, which was how the rest of them knew the arm was worse than he was letting on, and Doran dropped back and got a strap round it above the wound at a canter, which took three attempts and cost the pair of them a good deal of skin.
Ansel had stopped talking at the second mile and had begun again at the third, quietly, and what he was saying was not addressed to any of them.
And Voss, face down across a saddlebow with an arrow in his shoulder and the pommel taking his ribs every stride, said nothing whatever for four miles, which frightened Argilac a great deal more than any noise he could have made.
Nobody said Wilkin's name.
There was no time for it, and there would be no time for it for some hours yet, and every one of them was carrying it anyway, in the particular way soldiers carry what they have not yet been allowed to set down.
Nineteen years old, and he sat and looked at a field until he was certain, because being wrong in front of us frightened him worse than the dark did.
Doran told him not to wait.
I never told him anything at all.
Ahead of them, black against a sky going the colour of old tin, the tower stood up on its hill.
They came at the hill out of the last of the dark with the Khesari closing behind them, because horses that have run four miles do not outrun horses that have run two.
The tower stood up black against a sky going the colour of old tin. Doran took them off the track at the foot of it and straight up the slope, which was steeper and which cost the horses and which meant nobody had to ride the last hundred yards along a line somebody else could aim at.
Somebody aimed at it anyway.
A rider got to within eighty yards on the southern side and put three shafts into the party as they went up. The first went into a horse. The second went nowhere. The third took Erryk under the left shoulder blade from behind, punched through the mail and the padding and into him, and he grunted, and folded down over the mane, and got a fist into it and stayed on.
"ERRYK."
"Ride." His voice had gone somewhere else. "Ride, damn you."
They spilled through the broken gap in the tower's wall and reined in inside, and for a moment the ruin held nothing but blown horses and bleeding men and the steam coming off both of them into the cold.
Osric came off his horse before it had properly stopped.
"Doran. The door. Alden, help him. Rutger, get the horses to the back wall and picket them short. Argilac, get Voss off that saddle without dropping him."
He put a hand flat against the stone for as long as he could afford, which was about two seconds, and then went to look at his position.
The ground floor was one room, twenty feet across, stone to the height of a man and patched timber above that. The old door hung in a frame that had shifted with the hill and would not close square. The east wall had come down a generation ago and left a breach eight feet wide at the base, opening onto the slope. In the northwest corner the stair went up, a tight spiral of worn treads barely a man and a half across.
Two ways in. One way out. Nothing else.
"Serjeant."
Doran had the door open a hand's width and was looking through it.
"They've stopped."
Osric came and looked.
The Khesari had drawn up in a loose ring about the hill, out at two hundred yards, and were sitting their horses. Not circling. Not shooting. Sitting.
Two of them had already dismounted and were leading their animals away downhill. Further out a man was building a fire he had no need of. Further out still, near the treeline, four more had got down and were walking into the scrub with their hands empty.
"They're not in a hurry," Doran said.
"No."
"Serjeant, they're making camp."
"I saw."
Osric shut the door and put his back against it.
Men who unsaddle are not passing through. Men who unsaddle intend to be on that ground long enough to want their supper.
"Bar it," he said. "Then come and help me with the breach."
They worked fast because there was no other speed available.