Then he said it, because he had been going to say it since the hollow and there was never going to be a better moment.
"What's on the cord."
She went very still.
"You've a cord round your neck," he said. "It goes down under your collar and it has since I first laid eyes on you, and there's something on the end of it, and in three days you have not once touched it. Not once. Which is not what people do with a keepsake."
Alden's head had come up off the wall. Everybody was looking now.
Isolde's hand did not go to her throat. That took visible effort.
"It was my grandmother's," she said.
"That's not an answer."
"It is the answer I have." Her chin came up. "It was my grandmother's, and she gave it to me when I was eleven, and she told me to keep it on me and not to show it to my father, and she died the following winter without telling me why. I have worn it for fourteen years. I do not know what it is. I have looked at it perhaps a hundred times and it is a small piece of dark metal with nothing written on it and it is not worth a shilling."
"Show me."
"No."
"My lady"
"No." She said it flatly, and did not move. "You have my father's name and my errand and every scrap of what I have worked out in three days, and you had all of it inside two minutes of asking properly. But I have carried this since I was a child and it is the only object in the world that is mine, and I will not have it taken off my neck in a burning ruin by a man who is angry with me, however right he is to be."
Erryk's voice came up off the floor, low and level.
"Leave it, Osric."
"Erryk."
"She's given you the name. That's the part you can use." He got a breath. "She's ridden three days from whatever's on that cord and she's still wearing it, which means it's worth her life to her, same as ours are to us. Leave her what little she owns and let's all live long enough for it to matter."
Osric stood there for a moment with his heart going hard and the shoulder burning and the whole morning sitting on him.
Then he stepped back.
"Aye," he said.
He turned away and went to the arrow slit where Doran was and looked out through it at the slope, at eighty men sitting on the frost in the early light, and at the four who had gone into the scrub by the treeline and were coming back out of it.
They had their arms full. Deadwood, dry stuff, cut and broken and carried in loose bundles against the chest, and they were walking it uphill and setting it down at the foot of the wall on the downhill side, and going back for more.
"Serjeant," Doran said quietly. "Is that brush?"
"Aye," said Osric. "That's brush."
They watched the Khesari build it for the better part of an hour, and there was nothing whatever any of them could do about it.
The four who had gone into the scrub came back out with their arms full and went back for more, and after a while a dozen others got down off their horses and joined them, and what they carried up the hill was not what a man carries for a cook fire.
Green stuff. Whole armfuls of it, thorn and bracken and the wet black leaf litter from under the trees, and a good deal of grass torn up by the roots with the earth still hanging on it. They stacked it against the downhill wall where the doorway was, and they stacked it wide rather than high, and every so often somebody went off to the creek and came back with a soaked cloak and shook it out over the pile.
Doran had the arrow slit and had not moved from it.
"They're wetting it, Serjeant."
"Aye."
"Why in God's name are they wetting it?"
Alden answered before Osric could. He was sat against the wall with his face open from cheekbone to jaw and a strip of somebody's shirt held to it, and his voice came out thick.
"Because they're not lighting a fire," he said. "They're lighting a smoke."
Doran turned round.
"This is a stone tower," Osric said. "Stone doesn't take. They'd get the door and the boards on this floor and then they'd have a hot ruin and a woman cooked inside it, and they've come a long way and spent a good deal to have her walking."
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"So they smoke us."
"So they smoke us. And they sit downhill of it in the clean air and wait for what comes out of the top, and whatever comes out is coughing and half blind and can't see forty feet." He turned from the slit. "That's a better plan than any I'd have made in their place, and I'd like it a great deal more if it were mine."
Voss laughed from the wall, weakly.
"Well, that's the first compliment I've heard anybody pay them."
"They've earned a few."
Osric went round the upper floor once, properly, looking at it the way he had not yet had time to look at it.
It was cramped and low. Perhaps eighteen feet across, with a floor of old boards over joists, and half of it open to the sky where the roof had come in years back. The stair head in the northwest corner, blocked now with a beam and two shutters and whatever else they had been able to drag over it. Three arrow slits: one east, one north, one that had been widened at some point by a man with a hammer and no permission.
And the eastern wall.
Below them, on the ground floor, the east wall had come down a generation ago and left the breach. Up here it had not come down. Up here somebody had patched it, a long time ago, with timber and daub and lath because there had been no mason and no money, and the patch ran the width of a man's outstretched arms and had been doing its work badly for fifty years.
Osric put his palm flat against it and pushed.
It gave. Not much. Enough.
"Doran."
"Serjeant."
"Come and lean on this."
The two of them leaned on it together, and the whole panel moved perhaps an inch at the bottom and made a sound like a door in a bad frame.
"That'll come out," said Doran.
"It'll come out with three men and ten minutes."
"And then we're twenty feet up a wall with a hundred Khesari sat round the hill."
"Aye."
"Serjeant"
"I know what it is." Osric turned round. "Get me Argilac and start looking at your ropes."
The first smoke came up through the boards a quarter of an hour later.
It came thin at first, in threads, in through the seams between the planks so that the floor seemed to be steaming gently. Voss said something about it and nobody answered him, and then within a few minutes it was not threads any more, and it was coming up in slow grey ropes that hit the underside of the open roof and rolled sideways along it and began to fill the room from the top down.
It was cold smoke. That was what nobody had expected.
There was no heat in it at all. It did not burn the face or singe anything. It was thick and greasy and it stank of wet leaf and green wood and there was a sweetness under it that Osric did not want to think about, because they had thrown the ground floor dead onto the pile as they built it and everybody in that room knew they had.
The first cough went round in the fifth minute. By the tenth, none of them could stop.
"Down," Osric said. "Down on the boards. Nose to the floor. Breathe what's coming up between the planks, it's cleaner than what's over your head."
They went down.
It bought perhaps a quarter of an hour and no more than that, because the room was filling from the top and the level of the clean air was coming down toward them like water going out of a bath.
Erryk had begun to make a sound with every breath.
Isolde had got herself down beside him with her cheek almost on the boards and was talking to him steadily and quietly, and Osric could not hear a word of it and did not want to. Erryk's eyes were half open. The leg had stopped bleeding, which at that point was not good news.
"Serjeant." Doran's voice came out of the murk near the east wall, hoarse. "Ropes."
Osric crawled to him.
They had between them: two horse reins off the picket line, which the horses had taken when they went and which had been lying in the corner ever since. Four cloaks. Two belts. A bundle of harness strap. Voss's crossbow cord, which was the strongest single length in the room and which Voss cut off the ruined stock himself, one handed, without being asked, and handed over without a word.
Alden's cloak went in. Doran's went in. Argilac cut the sleeves off his own gambeson and gave them.
They knotted it in the smoke with their eyes streaming, and when they had done, Osric ran the whole length of it through his hands twice.
It was not a rope. It was a line of six different materials, joined by eight knots, made by men who could not see properly.
"How long?"
Doran measured it against his own arm-span, twice, and swore.
"Fifteen feet. Perhaps sixteen."
"And the drop?"
"Twenty. More on the low side."
Nobody said anything for a moment.
"Then it's fifteen feet of rope and a five foot fall onto a slope," Osric said, "and that's better than any of us had this morning. Argilac, find me something to tie it to."
"There's the joist stub. Where the roof came down."
"Test it."
Argilac hung his whole weight off it and it held, and then Alden hung his whole weight off it as well, and it held, and Osric put a hand on it and did not entirely believe it and had nothing else.
"Right." He got them round him, low, in the smoke, close enough to touch. "Hear this once, because I'll not shout it twice.
"We go out the east wall, which is uphill and dark and away from the fire, and there'll be men on that side because there are men on every side, but there'll be fewer, because the fire's at the door and men go where the interesting part is.
"The wind's out of the north. That smoke is going across the back of this hill and down into the creek line, and that's the only friend we've got. We go into it and we stay in it and we do not come out of it for anything.
"Doran first, because he's whole and I want somebody on the ground who can kill. Then the woman. Then Voss. Then Alden. Then Erryk, and Erryk goes down on the rope with the line under his arms and the rest of us paying it out, and I'll want two on it and Argilac on the beam.
"Then the boy. Then me.
"Anybody who gets down and can run, runs north along the wall and then down into the creek ravine and does not stop. There's a goat track on the near side and I've come up it twice. If you can't find it, get into the water and go downstream. Horses can't take that ground and they'll not follow us into it on foot in the dark for a good while."
"And if they're on the east side in numbers?" Alden asked.
"Then we die on the east side instead of up here, which is the same outcome and better air."
Nobody laughed. Voss made a sound that meant he would have.
They took the wall out in eight minutes.