He was standing at the castle gate. Doran was in front of him with a boar spear grounded beside his boot and his black braid pulled neat down his back, pale eyes sharp beneath a face that looked carved out of some patient grey stone. Throderic waited at his shoulder, saying nothing, watching him the way only a man who has worn that expression himself knows how to watch another.
The chapel bell. The clatter of the yard. The whole waking racket of the world came back at once.
He let out his breath. His hand had closed hard around the clasp of his cloak. He made it let go.
"It's nothing, Doran."
"Aye, Serjeant."
Crisply, and without a flicker, and the young man stood aside.
Osric had gone two paces past him when Doran spoke again, and his voice had changed.
"Serjeant."
Osric stopped.
Doran had turned round and was looking at a point somewhere near Osric's collarbone rather than at his face, and had gone slightly red about the ears, and was plainly working his way toward something he had been rehearsing for four days.
"About the saddle strap," he said. "I've not had a chance."
"There's nothing wants saying."
"There is, though." He got his eyes up. "I'd have stood there and taken it. That's the truth of it. I'd have let him say what he liked and I'd have gone on fixing the strap, because he's a knight and I'm a man at arms out of a fishing village, and I know exactly how that goes if I so much as look at him wrong."
Osric said nothing.
"And you didn't stand there," Doran said. "That's all. That's all I meant to say and I've made a mess of it."
"You've said it fine."
"Aye. Well." Doran looked out over the yard. "The lads have been talking about it. All week. Some of them think it was for the garrison, and it was, and some of them think it was because he's an arse, and he is." He shifted the spear an inch. "But I know it was for me. And nobody's ever done that for me before, and I'd rather say so once and then not say it again, if it's all the same."
Osric let a moment go by.
"Next time he comes at you," he said, "you fix the strap and you say nothing and you come and find me. That's the order. Not because you can't answer him. Because you're the one who'd hang for it and I'm the one who'd only be shouted at."
"That's not fair, Serjeant."
"No. It isn't." He clapped Doran once on the shoulder as he passed. "Mind the gate."
Beside the arch Alden was propped against the post with his helm under one arm and his axe haft doing rather more to hold him upright than the reverse. His fair hair stood in its usual thick crest and his eyes were red to the rims, and he was somewhere in his middle thirties and looked, that morning, older than Throderic.
Osric had known him for eighteen years. He had known him a good while before Argilac was born and a good while before Argilac was old enough to be led anywhere, and the fact that the two of them now went out drinking together as equals was a development Osric had watched arrive with a certain resignation.
"If the day keeps this bright, Serjeant, it may kill me."
"You're in your thirties, Alden. Not your twenties."
"I've been told."
"You'll have him in the ditch one of these nights."
Alden had the grace to look at his boots. "He's quicker than he looks, that boy. Wouldn't stop when I said stop."
"And whose voice does he hear saying it?"
That landed. Alden did not answer, and Osric did not press it, and the two of them left it where it lay.
"Sober up," Osric said. "You're on the east road with me before the week's out."
Past the gate the outer courtyard was already at work. Forge smoke rose in slow grey ropes beneath the weathered roof beams. The smithy, the cartwright's shed, the tanner's lean-to: wattle and timber for the most part, a few with new stonework laid in at the corners where the repairs had reached. Children ran shrieking between stacks of seasoned wood and nobody troubled to stop them.
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Inside the smithy door, Martin stood holding a messer flat across both palms while the blacksmith traced the ruined edge with a blunt finger and shook his head. The smith tapped a notch. Martin's jaw set.
"He's let it dull again," Throderic said. "He'll blame the scabbard. We both know he chops kindling with it when he thinks nobody's watching."
"Tell him next time it comes out of his pay."
They went under the broad arch of the second gatehouse, its mortar still pale and rain streaked from the week before. Beyond it the training yard was loud with the smack of wood on wood, a grunt, a barked correction carrying flat across beaten earth. Men at arms worked their footwork in loose pairs among the straw dummies.
Aldric paced behind a young soldier with his hands at his back, then stopped to knock the boy's guard up with two fingers.
"Wrist higher. You'll lose the hand otherwise."
Osric watched his brother a moment as they walked. Two years the younger, leaner than Osric had ever been, fair hair tied back short. The war had marked him somewhere that did not show on the face. It showed instead in the way he never entirely stopped taking the measure of a room.
"He'd make a decent master at arms one day," Osric said. "If he ever lost the habit of calling every man under forty a boy."
"That would require Aldric admitting he's old."
They passed through the second inner gatehouse, where the stone stood near its full height and the arrow slits had been cut dark and clean. The passage between the walls ran narrow, and the light came through the slits in thin bars that crossed their shoulders as they went.
The inner courtyard was quieter and better ordered. Two stablehands walked a nervous destrier across the pavers, its hooves ringing sharp on the stone. Two washerwomen crossed the other way with bundled linen on their backs and dipped their heads to the officers as they passed.
Throderic tipped his chin at the hall doors ahead.
"Remember he's twenty years old and everybody in that room knows he's wrong," he said. "You'll not need to win it. You'll only need to let him lose it."
Osric's hand tightened once at his belt.
"Let's not keep him waiting."
Warm air rolled out to meet them as the oaken doors swung inward, thick with hearth smoke and the fat of something roasted, and beneath it the cold mineral smell of old stone that no fire had ever driven out of the keep.
The feast hall ran long and dim. Fire moved in the wide hearth along the western wall and its smoke drifted up into rafters the size of young oaks. Down the length of the room stood the table, rough hewn and scarred by two generations of knives, and the morning board had been laid along it: coarse black bread, soft cheese sweating in the warmth, hard eggs, dried sausage, smoked trout out of the river. A pot of barley stew steamed near the centre. A serving girl went down the row filling mugs with a steady hand.
Osric saw him before he was three steps inside.
Sir Eckhard von Thurn sat halfway down the near side of the table in a doublet of good green wool with slashed sleeves, entirely upright, with his hands flat on either side of an untouched trencher. He was twenty years old. He had a handsome, unfinished sort of face, and his fair hair had been combed that morning with more attention than the hour deserved, and there was a dagger at his belt that no man wears to breakfast in his own lord's hall.
He did not look up as Osric came in. He did not need to. Every part of him had gone into not looking up, and it made him about as inconspicuous as a drawn blade.
At the head of the table the Baron sat slouched with a cup in his broad hand. His doublet hung open at the collar over boiled linen and his golden brown hair was tousled in a manner that might have meant he had risen before dawn and might have meant he had never gone to bed. Grey had come into his beard at the chin. He looked tired. His eyes, pale and quick, tracked the two of them the whole way in, and then went to Eckhard, and then came back.
Sir Waldric von Aelrich stood near the hearth with a goblet, warming one hand and watching the pot come to the boil. The Baron's uncle carried his years in the tight line of his mouth and in a grey tunic bearing the faded embroidery of a sharper age.
Further down, Lambert Lorgand sat upright and careful in plain dark wool with the sunwheel of the Rulian Order stitched at his collar in modest silver. Osric's youngest brother had never in his life slouched at a table. He gave Osric a small nod, cool and formal and not unfriendly.
Ulman Rothgar hunched over a ledger, murmuring figures at Othwin the chamberlain, who scratched them into a wax tablet with the eyes of a man half asleep and hoping the fact would go untested. Gerfried Halbern sat apart from all of them, gaunt and sharp nosed and enormous, folded onto his bench the way a heron folds onto a fencepost, chewing a piece of cheese and watching the room with open interest.
"Serjeant. Captain." Heinric lifted his cup a hand's breadth. "You're late to breakfast. Eat."
"My lord." Throderic bowed his head.
Osric mirrored it, took a trencher, and settled onto a bench four places down from Eckhard on the opposite side, which was neither pointedly near nor pointedly far. Throderic eased down beside him with a faint grunt his knees had contributed without permission.
Waldric half turned from the fire. "Masons started?"
"They have. Stone's coming in from Lanndorf, same quarry as the gatehouse. It'll hold better in a frost than the southern cuts."
"Expensive," Rothgar muttered into his ledger.
"Everything that doesn't rot in a season is." Waldric did not trouble to turn round. "Let them work."
The hall filled with the small clatter of knives. Nobody spoke of anything that mattered. Eckhard ate three mouthfuls of nothing in particular and set his knife down twice.
Then the outer door thudded, and a guard's voice barked something short in the passage, and a young courier came into the hall still brushing road dust from his cloak. His boots left thin dark tracks over the rushes. He was very young, and his eyes were too wide for the hour.
He bowed stiffly and held out a scroll sealed in green wax. Heinric took it without a word, broke the seal with the press of his thumb, and read.
The hall went quiet around him. Osric watched the Baron's brow draw down.
Heinric passed the parchment across the table to his uncle and said nothing at all.