They stopped twice.
The first time was to get water into Erryk, which they did out of a cupped hand and which he mostly could not swallow. The second time was because Doran came back down the streambed at a crouch and put a hand up, and the whole party sat down in the water against the bank and stayed there for twenty minutes without moving while riders went along the rim above them.
Nobody looked up. Osric had told them that on the first mile and had not needed to say it twice: a pale face turned upward is the most visible object in a landscape, and men on a ridge look down out of habit and see nothing until something looks back.
The riders went. The party got up and went on.
It was after that halt that Alden said it, with Voss on his back and his voice pitched at the water rather than at anybody.
"He said something. Ansel. At the end."
Nobody answered.
"To the boy. I saw him take hold of his mail and I saw the boy put his ear down." He shifted Voss's weight. "That's all. I'm not asking. I'd only rather somebody heard it than nobody."
"Somebody heard it," said Osric.
They went on down the water and nobody said anything else for a good while, and Osric walked the front of the litter and let the counting start, because there was no stopping it and there never had been.
Mette works the dairy. Tuesdays her sister keeps the little one, and Ansel used to complain about the walk down and go anyway.
Berta will hear it from somebody in the lane before I get up that hill. She'll not tell her. She'll go and sit in the house and wait for somebody with a right to say it, and I am the man with the right, and I will be an hour behind the rumour whatever I do.
Two girls. The eldest carved him a face out of bone and got the nose wrong on purpose. The small one is four and will not remember him at all, and in nine years she will ask her sister what he was like, and her sister will tell her about the nose, because that is what will be left.
Rutger has a sister at Osterwald and no one else living. She will hear it in a letter that somebody else writes, in a hand she cannot read, and a neighbour will read it to her in a doorway.
And the wheelwright will want to know why his second son went out with a spear at all, and I signed the paper, and I will have to stand in that yard and say so.
He shifted his grip on the spear shaft and put his eyes back on the water.
Later. All of it later. Get them home first.
You can carry the rest of it up the hill on your own time.
Somewhere past the middle of the day the ravine began to open and lose its walls, and the creek widened and went shallow over gravel, and the country on either side flattened into hedge and thin pasture, and they came up out of the water at last onto a cart track that Osric knew.
They stood there for a moment in the open with the wind on them and none of them liked it at all after four hours in a hole.
"Two hours," Osric said. "Maybe less."
"Two hours," Alden repeated, from under Voss.
"Aye."
"Right." He shifted his grip. "Two hours."
They looked, when they came out into daylight, like nothing anybody would want at their gate.
Osric had gone over them once in the ravine and had not much liked the inventory. His own shoulder had opened again somewhere on the wall and had been leaking through the packing since dawn. Argilac had a hand he could not close and blood to the knee that was not his. Doran was the only man of them still moving properly, and he had been carrying the front of the litter and the reading of the ground and most of the water for four hours and had gone quiet with it.
Alden's face was the worst to look at. Voss's ankle was the worst underneath. Erryk was neither, because Erryk had gone somewhere else about noon and had not come back.
And the woman, walking, with somebody else's blood to the elbows and her hem gone above the ankle and her hair half down, and not one word of complaint out of her since the creek.
They had ridden out of Valmarch's gate four days ago, nine of them, and the muster roll would want amending in three places.
The track ran west between hedges and Osric put Doran a hundred yards ahead of it, and they went along it at the speed of the litter, which was slow, and the afternoon began to go.
Toward the fourth hour Doran came back at a jog rather than a crouch, which was the first good sign of the day.
"Riders," he said. "Coming east. Eight of them."
Every hand in the party went somewhere.
"Ours," Doran said. "Ours, ours. There's a standard."
They came over the low rise a few minutes later at a trot, eight men in the Baron's colours with a spear butt in a stirrup cup and the black and dark red hanging off it, and the gold wyvern turning slowly on the cloth as the pole moved.
The patrol pulled up hard.
For a moment nobody on either side said anything. Osric could see them working it out: seven people on a cart track, four of them upright, one of them a woman, one of them on a litter, all of them black to the elbows and stinking of smoke.
Then the man under the standard stood in his stirrups.
"Serjeant?"
Tertius.
He came the last thirty yards at a canter and was off the horse before it had stopped, and got about six feet from Osric and stopped there, because there was nothing about any of them that invited touching.
He looked at them one at a time. He took his time about it. And then he counted, because he had been a soldier for forty years and it was the first skill he had ever learned and the last one he would lose.
"You went out nine," he said.
"We did."
"Osric."
"Ansel and Rutger are in the tower." Osric got it out in one go, because there was no version of the sentence that improved with handling. "Wilkin's in a hollow four miles east of it. His throat was cut on the watch and we could not get to the body."
Tertius stood very still with the standard canted on his shoulder.
"Right," he said, after a moment. "Right."
He turned round and started giving orders in a voice that had gone flat and quick, and the patrol came off their horses. Two of them took the litter off Osric and Argilac before either could object. Somebody got Voss onto a horse. Somebody else went to Erryk and came back and said nothing to anybody except Tertius, in his ear, and Tertius nodded once.
Osric let it happen. There is a point past which a man should let other people carry things and he had been at it since the ravine.
Tertius came back to him.
"How many?"
"A hundred. Give or take."
The old man's jaw moved.
"Khesari?"
"Khesari. Horse and foot, this side of the water, three days deep, with one of them who speaks our tongue well enough to bargain in it." Osric held his eye. "They smoked us out of the old march-tower this morning. That's their smoke on the horizon behind us and it has been up since dawn."
Tertius turned and looked east.
The column stood up thin and dark and perfectly clear against the pale sky, a good way off now, and it had been visible from the Valmarch wall for eight hours and every soul in the barony would have seen it by noon.
He opened his mouth.
It was something Osric had watched him do a thousand times over eleven years, on a wall, at a table, in the rain, at a funeral. The intake of breath, the lift of the
chin, the reach back into forty years of a shameless and largely invented career for whatever tale would sit on top of the one just told.
Nothing came.
He closed his mouth and stood there with the standard on his shoulder and the reins loose in his hand.
"There's not been a hundred of them on this side of that river in my lifetime," he said at last, and quietly. "And I have had a long and shameless lifetime."
"Then it's the first."
They came into Valmarch as the light was going.
Word had gone ahead of them, because word always does, and the lane up from the ford was lined by the time they reached it. Not crowded. Lined. People had come out of their doors and stopped and stood, and had not made any noise, and that was worse than shouting would have been.
A man with a barrow stood still in the middle of the road and did not move it out of the way, because he had forgotten it was there.
A woman drew a child back by the shoulder and kept her hand on it.
Osric walked at the head of them and looked straight ahead and did not acknowledge anybody, because there was nothing he could have said out of the side of his mouth to a village counting seven people where it had waved off nine.
Somebody near the smithy said Ansel's name, once, as a question.
Osric kept walking.
At the foot of the castle track he stopped and turned round and did the last of his work.
"Tertius. Take the wounded up to Gerfried, and get Erryk there first and get him there now, and I don't care what you have to knock over on the way."
"Aye, Serjeant."
"Argilac, go with them. See Erryk into the man's hands with your own eyes and don't leave until a leech has laid his on him."
His son opened his mouth.
"That's not me sparing you. It's the harder job of the two and it's yours."
Argilac shut his mouth and went.
Isolde had stopped a few feet away and was standing in the road looking up at the castle on its rise: at the grey walls and the half-built stonework and the banners going stiff in the evening wind.
Her face closed as she looked at it. Osric saw it happen and had no time for it.
"My lady. You'll go up with them."
"And then?"
"Then a fire, a bed, a bolt on a good door, and somebody outside it." He met her eye. "I'll not dress that up for you. You're the garrison's guest and you're the garrison's charge and which of those it is depends on a conversation I'm about to have."
"I understand."
"You'll be asked all of it again. By men with a great deal more patience than me and a good deal less reason to like you."
"I know."
"Then say it the same way twice," Osric said, "and say the part about the four and twenty. Say that part exactly the way you said it in the tower."
She looked at him for a moment.
"Why?"
"Because it's true," he said, "and because it's the only part of your account that can't be got at, and because you'll need it."
Then he turned and went up the hill on his own.
The climb took him longer than it had ever taken him.
He got to the top of it and through the gate and across the outer yard with men stopping what they were doing to watch him go past, and did not look at any of them, and went along the inner wall to the captain's chamber and pushed the door open without knocking.
It was cold and spare and there was one lamp lit and a campaign map weighted flat on the trestle, and Throderic looked up from it as the reek of smoke and blood came into the room ahead of the man on the threshold.
He took him in from the boots to the gash above the eye. He set down what he was holding.
"I sent you to look at burned crofts, Osric. Not to bring the whole steppe home at your heels."
He pushed the second stool out from under the trestle with his foot.
"Sit before you fall over. Then give it to me slow, so I've a hope of believing it."