Silk and velvet. Soft rose, deep pine, a blue the colour of dusk. Silver thread at the hems and small pearl fastenings at the throats. It was work bought with kingdom coin, the sort that comes up the river in a locked chest, and it was too fine for any woman in Valmarch and a good deal too fine for a guest with no name, no seal, and nobody living to speak for her.
"Whose are those?"
"Not the Lady Iselinde's, ser." She bit her lip, and then a small smile got away from her. "They're for the lady upstairs. From the Baron's own stores."
"She asked for them?"
"Oh, no, ser." The girl was pleased to be able to answer it. "His lordship sent word himself. Said a proper guest deserves proper dress."
Osric stood aside on the narrow stair and let her go past, and the scent of pressed lavender went up the turn after her.
He stayed where he was until the sound of her feet had gone.
It was a kindness. He turned it over and it stayed a kindness and did not stop being anything else at the same time. He had seen generosity used as a balm often enough and had seen it used as bait, and the trouble was that the two look identical from outside and frequently from inside as well.
Heinric did not give freely. It was not meanness. The man had spent nine years counting stone by the cartload and grain by the sack and had learned to hold whatever came into his hand a while before letting go of it, and the barony ran on that habit.
He had not held these. She had been behind that door two days.
He went on up, and the Baron was still not there, and he came back down again.
Lambert caught him in the yard.
He came through the press of grooms and levy-men like a shadow going over water, boots clean despite the dust, and fell in beside his brother without being invited.
"You've not been to see me."
"I've not been anywhere."
"You went to three houses on Tuesday." Lambert said it evenly. "I know because I went to two of them on Wednesday and was told what you had said, twice, more or less word for word, which is more than most men manage."
Osric kept walking.
"Say what you've come to say, Lambert."
"Not here."
The chapel sat low in the shadow of the curtain wall, half sunk into the slope where the ground rose toward the eastern battlements. It was a squat and sober building of rough stone and lime plaster with a shingled steeple the wind had bowed years ago and gone on working at since. There was no coloured glass. The narrow windows were oiled cloth stretched over carved frames, and a small bell green with verdigris hung from a crooked beam above the door.
Inside, the air was close and still and thick with tallow and soot and the dry herbal smell of ashwort. Dust hung in the bands of filtered light. Rows of benches worn smooth by six generations faced the altar in the apse, and the altar was darkened oak under a linen cloth dyed with ochre and iron earth.
Above it, in the central niche, stood Drakomar the Flame-Lord, whom the old tongue calls Rhumous: the god of dragons with his wings unfurled and flame cast from a gaping maw, his eyes cut from black stone and his claws etched in bronze. To his right stood Wunnaraht, She of the Wonder-Word, shrouded in a veil of silver thread with one hand raised in blessing and the other holding a serpent-twined staff. To his left loomed Sunnengar, the Spear of Light, beaten out of brass, with a hammer in one fist and a blazing spear in the other and his face etched all round with the rays of dawn.
Smaller icons flanked them. Haderic, grim and ironclad. Minhilda, her eyes tender and her grip anything but. Altharun the Runefather, cloaked in elder bark and crowned in a circlet of knot-runes. And apart from the rest, near the door where Osric had stopped, Blindemar the Veiled Arbiter, blindfolded and austere, with bronze scales in one hand and a broken blade in the other.
Osric had never been able to decide whether the broken blade was a promise or a warning, and had long ago concluded that was the point of it.
"Three candles on that shelf," he said.
"Ah." Lambert glanced over. "Yes."
"Whose doing?"
"Your daughter's. She came up on Tuesday evening and told me one candle was improper and that there were three men and there ought to be three, and I said the rite specifies one for a company, and she asked me to show her where it said so."
"And?"
"And it does not say so anywhere, as it turns out. It is simply how it has always been done here." Lambert almost smiled. "I have been at this eleven years and no one had ever asked. She is a menace and I have told her so and she was extremely pleased about it."
He folded his hands and the humour went out of him.
"She gave no name at the gate," he said. "Not until the third question, and then only the one. No house. No seal. No letter. She was stained with blood and half dead on her feet and I was the man called to speak with her first, and I have sat with a great many frightened people, Osric, and I could not read her at all."
"She gave the house in the tower."
"So Throderic tells me. Under a hundred men and a smoke fire, with your sword hand in front of her." Lambert let it sit. "Which is not the same as giving it, and you know it is not, and I would rather hear you say so than pretend with you."
Osric shifted his weight and the leather of his boots creaked.
"You think she's lying."
"I think she is hiding something and I think she has been hiding it very well and for a long time." Lambert turned his hands over. "And I want you to notice that I said hiding, and not scheming, because I do not accuse her of anything and I have no grounds to. She has told a great deal of truth. That is what troubles me. Liars do not usually give you four and twenty names and a captain and a road."
"Then what?"
"A person who gives you a great deal of true detail is generally doing one of two things. Either she is being honest." He paused. "Or she is building a wall out of true bricks so that you will not look at the door."
Osric said nothing to that for a moment.
He had a thought that he did not much want, which was that Lambert had arrived at that in three days without having been in the tower at all, and that Lambert had always been the cleverest of the four of them and the one nobody in the family had ever quite liked being read by.
"So what would you have me do?"
"Nothing dramatic. I am not asking you to bind her or bring her before the Baron and cry spy." Lambert's voice was gentle. "Only watch her. Keep your eyes open. That is all."
"I always do."
"You always do with strangers. You have stopped, rather quickly, treating this one as one."
That landed somewhere Osric had not left open, and he did not answer it, and Lambert had the good sense not to press.
They came out of the chapel together into the grey rising light, and the door creaked shut behind them. Across the yard the first clash of wood on wood came off the training green, and the crows were up along the high walls making their opinion known.
"Osric."
He turned.
"There will be a rite," Lambert said. "For the three. I have been working at it since Tuesday and I will have it by Sunday."
"The rite wants a body."
"Every word of it wants a body. It is written to be said over a man lying in front of you and it is useless otherwise, and I could stand at the bank on Sunday and say it over turned earth with nothing under it, and every soul there would know I was doing it, and it would comfort nobody."
"Then say something else."
"That is what I arrived at, at about the third hour of Wednesday morning." Lambert almost smiled again. "There are older forms. For men lost at sea, and for men taken by a mountain. They assume no body and they do not pretend. I have never had cause to look at them and they are in poor Rulian and I have been three days making sense of them, and they are better than what we have."
"Good."
"Mette will ask me where he is," Lambert said. "Not the tower. Where. She will ask it at some hour when she cannot sleep, and probably of me, and I would rather have thought about it beforehand than invent something on a doorstep."
Osric stood there in the cold for a moment.
"Tell her he's on high ground with the river in view," he said. "It's true. That tower looks down the creek valley the whole way to the fork."
Lambert wrote nothing down and did not need to.
"That will do," he said. "Thank you."
The house stood past the village palisade where the ground began to fall away toward the brook: squat and timber-built, leaning very slightly toward the water in a manner Osric had been assured for eleven years was of no consequence.
The dog came out to meet him and got halfway and thought better of it, which it had done every evening for three days now, because he still came home smelling of the physician's yard.
Anna opened the door before he reached it.
She was twenty and small with it, her chestnut hair in a braid that had begun the day neat and had long since abandoned the ambition, and there was something down the front of her apron that might have been supper and might have been paint. A wooden spoon sat behind her ear. She kept it there the way other people keep a pen, and had lost three that way in the last year by forgetting about it entirely.
She looked at him for perhaps two seconds.
Then she stood aside and let him in, and did not ask him a single question about any of it.
She had asked, once, years ago, and had learned. So she put water on and got the boots off him, because his shoulder would not let him reach them, and made a noise about the state of his hands that she plainly intended him to hear and equally plainly did not expect him to answer.
She fed him something that had been stew when she started it.
He ate all of it and did not mention this.
"Erryk?" she said, eventually.
"Gerfried says ask him at Rhumnacht."
"That's not a no."
"It's not a yes either."
"It's better than yesterday." She took his bowl. "I'll go up in the morning and sit with him. He'll pretend to hate it and he'll be insufferable if nobody comes."
"He will."
"And I'll take the good bread, not ours." She said it with her back to him at the water. "I saw Mette."
Osric stopped chewing.
"When?"
"After you'd gone. Berta fetched me." Anna did not turn round. "She'd put the little one down at her sister's and she was scrubbing the floor. It was already clean. She'd done it twice."
He did not say anything.
"She told me what you'd said to her. About the bone and the nose." Anna's hands had stopped moving in the water. "She's told it to Berta twice since, and she'll tell it to the girl every year on his day until the girl's grown, and then the girl will have it to tell."
"It wasn't much to give."
"No," Anna agreed. "It's only everything there's going to be."
She went back to the bowl.
Argilac came in near midnight, grey with it, and sat down on the bench without taking his cloak off and stayed there. Anna put food in front of him too. He ate about a third of it.
Nobody said anything of consequence. The fire went down.
It was, Osric thought, lying afterward on the straw mattress with his shoulder aching and the ceiling three inches above where he wanted it, the best hour he had spent in a week, and none of it had involved a single word worth repeating.