Osric and Argilac hauled Erryk between them and Isolde came above with a fist knotted in Osric's cloak to steady the pair of them, and Doran fought the rear from three treads down, and the narrow stone did for them what open ground never would have.
The stair filled below. Bodies wedged on the lower treads and the men behind climbed over their own dead to get at them, and the blood came down the worn stone from step to step like rain running in a gutter.
A raider lunged up and got a fist round Argilac's ankle. He stamped down, heel to the bridge of the nose, twice, felt it break, tore the boot free and gave up another step.
Near the top Erryk went half senseless and his boots began to drag the treads, and Osric and Voss and swearing got him round the last turn.
They spilled out onto the upper half floor and Osric and Alden and Doran heaved a broken roof beam and the old shutters across the stair head behind them, and the makeshift block began to shudder and jump almost at once under the press from below.
And then, after perhaps two minutes of it, the press stopped.
The weight came off the barricade all at once. Below them there was shouting, and one voice going over the top of the others, and then boots going back down the stair and out.
The silence afterward was enormous.
The party stood ringed at the stair head with their weapons up, not trusting it, and then one at a time the blades came down and the men sagged where they stood.
The upper floor was cramped and low and half of it was open to a whitening sky where the roof had gone in years ago.
Osric counted.
Himself. Argilac. Doran. Alden. Voss. Erryk on the boards with his leg opened to the bone and an arrow still in his back. The woman.
Seven.
Nine had ridden out of Valmarch's gate.
"Rutger," said Alden. He said it as a question.
"No."
"Serjeant"
"He held the door." Osric heard his own voice come out flat. "He heard me call and he set his feet. Don't make me say it twice."
Alden sat down on the floor with his back to the wall and put his good hand over his face and left it there for a while.
Isolde had gone straight to Erryk without being told. She had a cloak folded into a pad and her whole weight on the thigh and both hands locked, and the pad had gone black inside a minute and she had replaced it and gone on leaning.
Osric watched her do it. He watched where she put her hands and how fast she had got there and that she had not looked round first to see whether anybody was going to tell her to.
Doran was at an arrow slit.
"They're forming up on the slope," he said. "Not coming. Just stood there."
"Then something's coming instead of them."
A voice came up from below.
It came from the ground floor, from the wreck of the room they had bled out of ten minutes earlier, and it was raised to carry up a stone stair, and it was speaking Acuseian.
"Men in de tower. Yu hear me, eh?"
Every head in that room came round.
"Yu fought well. Better dan we were told." A pause. "Six live. One dies. De woman, she is not hurt."
Nobody moved. Voss's mouth had come open.
"Up dese stairs I do not need t' come. Dis yu understand first, so yu know what I offer."
Osric put a hand out and pressed Argilac flat against the wall beside the stair head, and moved himself where the voice would reach him and nothing else could.
"Say it, then."
"Ah." Something like satisfaction in it. "De old one. Stone-Sitter."
"Say it."
"Send down de woman."
The room was entirely silent.
"Alone she walks down. Den yu go out frum dis place, wit all yu carry. Hohrses are below, an' yer hurt men ride dem. West yu go. No man follows, an' I give yu de day besides." The voice was patient. It was reasonable. Osric had not heard anything worse in a year. "Fer yu I have no use. Wit yer Baron, no quarrel. Dis ruin I do not want. Yer county I do not want. An' four o' mine lie dead on dose stairs fer nothing at all."
Alden had begun to get up. Doran put a hand on his chest.
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"Yer castle is one day west," the voice went on. "One day. An' it does not know yu are here, an' it will not know until somebody rides an' tells it, an' nobody is ridin'. Water yu do not have up dere. I have hundred men an' all o' de day, an' yu have a bad stair an' one door I already own.
"Send down de woman."
Nobody in that room looked at Isolde.
That was what Osric noticed and would keep. Seven people on a half floor with the sky coming up over them, and not one of them turned their head, and she stood over Erryk's leg with her hands in his blood and looked at the boards.
"And if I ask what you want her for?" Osric called down.
"Den yu have asked. An' I have not answered."
"That's honest."
"I am very honest wit yu, Stone-Sitter. Listen." The voice did not change at all. "I do not say she will be treated well. I do not say no harm comes t' 'er. I say what I give fer 'er, which is yer lives. Ten minutes past, yu did not have dem."
Osric looked round the room.
Alden with half his face open. Voss the colour of tallow. Erryk grey to the lips on the boards with a woman's hands holding him together. Argilac with another man's blood dried on his thighs to the knee.
And two men below on the ground floor who had not come up the stairs, and would not, and had been walked over by every Khesari in that building since.
"Anybody wants to speak," Osric said, low, "speak now."
Nobody did.
Doran shook his head once. Alden looked up and said nothing and his face said the rest. Voss made a sound like a laugh with nothing in it.
Argilac said, "No."
Osric turned back to the stair head.
"You'll have to come up," he called down.
There was a pause.
"Ah." Something moved in the voice that had not been there before, and it was not anger, and it was not quite respect either. "Dis is a pity."
"You'll find it a bigger one in an hour."
"No. I tink not." A shifting of boots down there, unhurried. "Yu are brave men in a bad house, an' brave men in bad houses are still only men in houses. Stone makes yu feel tall, Stone-Sitter. It does not make yu tall."
"We'll see."
"We will see. Yes." The boots began to move away. "Sit by yer wall a while an' tink about it. Old man learns nothing frum first hour dat he cannot learn better frum second."
And then he was gone across the ground floor and out through the ruined door, and the tower was quiet again.
Osric stood at the stair head a moment longer.
Then he turned round and crossed the floor to Isolde in four strides.
"Right."
Her head came up.
"That was a hundred men sat down to wait, and a man who speaks our tongue well enough to bargain in it." He did not raise his voice and did not need to. "He offered me eight lives for you and he offered it like a man buying a horse. Not a raid. Not plunder. You."
"Serjeant"
"Four and twenty of your father's men died on a road. Three of mine are dead in this building and out in that grass. Rutger held a door for me twenty minutes ago and he is lying in it now with his feet in the doorway, and I am going to walk over him on my way out of here if I ever get out of here."
Erryk said his name from the floor.
"Not now, Erryk." He had not taken his eyes off her. "You've had my protection since a field two nights ago and you've had it on nothing. No house. No father. No reason. I've asked twice and been refused twice and I let it go both times because you'd been three days in a hedge and I've a daughter of my own.
"You will not be refusing me a third time."
Isolde stood up.
She did it slowly, and her hands were red to the wrist, and she wiped them once on her skirt in a small automatic gesture that did nothing at all.
For a moment she looked as though she might hold out.
Then something went out of her shoulders, and she looked round the floor at six wrecked men who had just been offered their lives for her and had not taken twenty seconds about it, and she said it.
"My father is Wilhelm von Morav."
Nothing happened. Nobody in that room had ever heard the name.
"He is the Mint Master of Auenstadt," she said. "He holds the King's minting rights for the western range and the silver that comes out of it, under royal seal, and he has held them nine years."
Voss whistled, weakly, from the wall.
"Say the rest," Osric said.
"There is no rest that I am certain of."
"Then say what you're not certain of and let me sort it."
Isolde took a breath.
"They were not guarding me," she said.
Osric waited.
"You said it yourself in that hollow. Somebody was moving me somewhere. And I let you go on believing it, because it is what everybody believes, and because it is what my father will tell the world, and because it was easier than saying the other." Her voice had begun to go. She got hold of it. "Four and twenty men rode out of Auenstadt to take me east to a contract I had not been asked about. And two days out we turned off the road, and we went north instead, and we were going to keep going north until there was no possible way of putting me at the end of that contract."
Nobody in the room moved.
"They were my father's men," she said. "They had been my father's men for years. Erlan had carried me on his shoulders when I was four. Wend taught me to ride. Sixteen of them had eaten in my father's hall since before I was born, and I spent the whole summer working on them, one and two at a time, and I want you to understand that I did not buy them, Serjeant, because I had nothing to buy anybody with.
"I asked them. And they said yes."
Alden had gone very still against the wall.
"Their captain was a man named Kestrin Roth and he had two daughters of his own and he told me it would cost him his position and his pension and very likely his neck, and he came anyway." Her hands had closed. "They were not sworn men. They were not an escort. They were four and twenty people who decided that a woman ought not to be handed to somebody like a sack of grain, and they gave up their whole lives for it, and it took two days for that to kill every one of them."
"And you don't know how they found you," Osric said quietly.
"No. And that is what I cannot put down." She looked up, and her eyes were dry and furious. "Nobody outside that column knew we had turned north. Nobody. We told no one at the halt and we passed no village and Kestrin picked the road himself out of his own head.
"So it was one of them. It was one of the four and twenty, and he rode with us and ate with us and he is lying dead on that road with the rest of them now, and I will never know which one he was, and I will go on loving all of them anyway because I cannot work out how to stop."
The floor was silent.
Voss, against the wall, said something under his breath that was not a joke.
"That's the truth of what I have," Isolde said, "and you have all of it now, and I would have told you the second night if I had known you three days instead of two. I have not been playing at anything. I have been trying to work out which of the people I love betrayed the rest, in a hedge, in the cold, with no food, and I have not managed it."
Osric let it sit a good while.