Three days went by, and the barony did what a barony does, which is to absorb what has happened and go on.
The Baron heard it twice, once from Throderic and once from Osric, and said very little either time. The watch on the creek roads was doubled again, which left the north thin and could not be helped. Riders went out to Branlind and to Alderwint, not to raise anything yet, only to report what had been seen and to ask what had been seen in return. A man went to Hochbergen with a letter that Rothgar wrote and Waldric corrected twice.
Nothing came back east. The smoke on the horizon thinned on the second day and was gone by the third, and the patrols found the tower cold and empty and the ground round it churned by a hundred horses going east.
They had gone home. That was the part nobody could make sit still.
The village took the three deaths badly and took them quietly, which is the way of a place with no bodies to bury. There was no procession up the chapel bank and no laying out and none of the ordinary machinery by which people get a death behind them, and so nobody knew quite what to do with themselves.
Berta from the dairy took a loaf down the lower lane every second morning. Mette took it and thanked her and put it on the shelf, and by the end of the week there were four loaves on that shelf and neither woman had mentioned it.
Osric went to the three houses on the second day and got it done and did not speak of it to anybody afterward, and Throderic, who knew exactly what it had cost and exactly how long it had taken, gave him the following morning free and did not say why.
He spent most of it at the physician's.
Gerfried Halbern's house lay low along the southern wall of the outer courtyard, between the stable yard and the granary, a broad-beamed place that had belonged to a cooper before Gerfried came to Valmarch and made it smell of vinegar and boiled wine for the rest of time. Its doors stood open. Bedrolls had been thrown down across the trampled grass of the shaded yard in front of it, and a copper basin by the step had gone rust-coloured from too many washings.
The physician himself was an enormous man and a gaunt one, which in most people is a contradiction and in him was simply an accurate description. Long in every direction, sharp of nose, with hands like pale roots.
He was working on Erryk's leg when Osric came in and did not look up.
"You may stand where you are. If you come closer you will want to talk to him and he is not to be talked to."
"Is he keeping it?"
"Ask me at Rhumnacht."
"Gerfried."
"The bone is sound. The vessel is closed. The wound was cleaned in a creek by a woman with a good deal more sense than most of my apprentices, and I have had it open twice since and found nothing in it that frightens me." He drew a stitch through and did not hurry it. "He will keep the leg. I am not going to say that to him for another fortnight, because the moment he hears it he will get up, and if he gets up in the next fortnight I shall have to say something different."
Erryk's eyes were half open.
"I can hear you."
"You are meant to. That was the purpose of the exercise." Gerfried tied off. "You will walk. You will walk badly and you will walk with a stick until the spring, and after the spring you will walk with a limp that you will still have when they put you in the ground. The muscle is cut through and cut muscle does not knit back the shape it was. You will feel it going up stairs for the rest of your life and you will feel it in the cold, and you may complain about it to whoever will listen, provided that person is not me."
"That is the kindest you have ever been to me."
"It is the only time I have ever been kind to you, and I would be obliged if you did not repeat it."
Osric let a breath out that he had been holding since the creek.
"Voss?"
"Voss's ankle is broken in two places and has been walked on, which was heroic and imbecilic in equal measure." Gerfried straightened. "It will knit. He will keep the foot and he will run on it eventually, badly, and he will feel every winter in it and tell you about each one."
"And the shoulder?"
"The shoulder will come back. Not this month and not next. He asked me on the first evening whether he would span a crossbow again and I told him yes, which is true, and I did not tell him it would be somewhere around the turn of the year, which is also true, because he was grey to the lips and had just been carried in on another man's back." He wiped his hands. "You may tell him the second part whenever you judge he can hold it."
"He'll ask me tomorrow."
"Then tell him tomorrow. He would rather have it off you than off me, and he will pretend otherwise, and you will both find that comfortable."
"Alden?"
"Alden's face will heal into something that pulls when he chews and he will find that a greater insult than the wound. He has an arm that should have killed him and did not because somebody strapped it above the wound at a canter, which I would not have believed if he had not still been wearing the strap." Gerfried straightened at last. "That was Doran. He told me twice."
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"That sounds like Doran."
"It does not sound like Doran at all. Doran told me twice because he has been finding reasons to be in this yard for three days, and if you have any use for him I would give it to him today."
Osric absorbed that.
"And you," said Gerfried. "Coat off."
"It's packed."
"It was packed by a one-eyed man in a field by moonlight, and I have had three days of you walking about the yard holding that arm as though it belonged to somebody else. Coat off."
He took the packing out, which was worse than the arrowhead had been, and cleaned it, and looked at it for a good while.
"Bodkin?"
"Aye."
"Then you were fortunate, because a broadhead would have left you a shoulder that does not lift and a career in the stables." He began repacking it. "It is clean. It will close. It will ache in the cold from now until you die and you will
have a lump in it the size of a knuckle, and the arm will come back to about four fifths of what it was, which at your age you were losing anyway."
"That's the first good news I've had all week."
"It is not good news. It is ordinary news, which at our age is the same currency." Gerfried tied it off. "Keep moving it. Every day, to the limit and no further, and when it hurts, stop and do it again in an hour. If you sling it you will stiffen and I will have to break the adhesion in six weeks and you will find that memorable."
Osric got his coat back on.
At the door he stopped.
"He asked me for his falchion," he said. "Up in the tower. So we could go and leave him at the stair."
Gerfried was already washing his hands.
"Yes," he said. "He would."
Osric found him behind the granary, doing something to a spear that did not need doing.
He had the head off and the socket cleaned and was rebinding the ferrule with wet cord, which is a job that takes a quarter of an hour and which Doran had plainly been at for most of the afternoon. There were three other spears laid out on the sacking beside him, all finished.
"Those aren't yours."
"No, Serjeant." He did not look up. "Wilkin's, and two out of the rack that wanted doing."
Osric sat down on an upturned barrel a few feet off and let a good while go by.
"Gerfried says you've been in his yard three days."
"I've been carrying water."
"He's got apprentices for water."
"Then I've been in the way." Doran wound the cord and pulled it and wound it again. "I'll stop."
"I didn't say stop."
The cord went round twice more.
"You'll have seen the roster," Doran said.
"I've seen it."
"Then you'll have seen my hand on it."
"I've seen your hand on it."
Doran set the spear down across his knees and looked at the granary wall.
"He wasn't due," he said. "It was Halden's turn and Halden had gone out east with the beacon party, so there was a place. And the lad came to me at the end of the month and asked how a man gets onto a proper patrol instead of standing at a gate, and I told him to ask you, and he said he wouldn't."
"Why not?"
"Because he'd got it into his head that you thought he sat a horse like a sack of turnips." Doran's mouth did something that was not a smile. "He was right, and all. You said it to Aldric in the yard in July and he heard you say it."
Osric did not deny it. He remembered saying it and he remembered exactly why, which was that the boy had been sitting a horse like a sack of turnips.
"So I said I'd mention it to you," Doran went on. "And I did. And you said aye, put him down, and that was that. It took about eleven words."
"It did."
"Eleven words, Serjeant."
"Aye."
Doran turned the spear over on his knees.
"And I told him the rule. On his first week. Don't wait to be sure, wake the serjeant, let him be wrong on your behalf. I've told it to every man I've ever had under me and I told him twice because he was young." His hands had stopped. "And he sat there and looked at that grass and waited, because he'd rather have been killed than laughed at, and there is nobody in this world who taught him that but us."
Osric let it sit.
He could have said several things. He knew about four of them by heart, because a serjeant learns them the way he learns knots, and every one of them was true and none of them was any use, and he had watched better men than himself hand them over and watch them not work.
"You'll carry it," he said instead.
Doran looked up.
"That's what I've got for you and I'll not dress it up. You'll carry it. It'll go quiet in a year or so, and then it'll come and find you on some ordinary afternoon a long way from here for no reason at all, and it'll be as bad as it is now for about an hour, and then it'll go quiet again."
"That's a poor comfort."
"It isn't a comfort. It's the truth, and it's the only true word anybody's given you in three days, and you'll thank me for it in about ten years."
Doran looked at him for a moment.
Then he let a breath out, and something came off his shoulders that had been there since the hollow, and he put his hand back on the spear.
"Aye," he said. "Well."
"Finish that and come and find me. I want the north roads walked before the ground goes hard and I want them walked by somebody who'll tell me what he actually saw."
"Tonight?"
"Tomorrow. Sleep first." Osric got up off the barrel. "And Doran."
"Serjeant."
"You gave a boy a place he'd asked for and you gave him the right rule twice." He said it flatly, because said any other way it would have sounded like absolution and would have been refused. "Whatever else is in that, it isn't cowardice and it isn't carelessness, and I'd not have either of those two on my roster and I've got you on it."
He went before Doran could answer, which was a kindness and which both of them understood as one.
Osric climbed to the keep in the afternoon because the Baron had asked for him and then had been called elsewhere, which happened often enough that the household had stopped apologising for it.
He was near the second landing when he came round the turn of the stair and very nearly walked into a girl coming up.
She was young and auburn-haired and her cheeks were high with the climb, and she caught the bundle in her arms against her chest as she checked herself.
"Forgive me, serjeant."
He looked at what she was carrying, because he could not have stopped himself.