The council sat on the fifth morning and Osric was made to say it a third time.
The hall was dim despite the sun, its tall windows shuttered against the glare, and the smoke off the hearth drifted in slow spirals toward the rafters where the old banners hung faded and still. The long table of carved oak stood at the centre, worn smooth down its near edge by decades of men leaning on it while other men talked.
Osric stood behind his usual chair with his helm under one arm and did not sit, because the shoulder preferred standing and because a man on his feet gets interrupted less.
He gave it plainly. The croft and the five dead in it. The mark on the stake. The twelve on the trail and the woman. The hollow and the men crawling in the frost under orders not to make a sound. The count off the ridge. The tower, the stair, the smoke.
And the offer.
That part he gave last and gave slowly, because it was the part that mattered and because he wanted every man in the room to hear it in the order it had happened.
"He spoke our tongue," he said. "Not well, but enough to bargain in it and enough to be understood, and he was not shouting and he was not threatening. He offered me our lives for her. He named the terms. Horses at the bottom, the wounded to ride, no pursuit, a day's start."
"And you refused," said Rothgar.
"We refused."
"All of you?"
"I asked the question and nobody spoke, which in that room at that hour was the same as everybody answering it."
Waldric had been standing at the hearth with his back to the fire and his hands behind him, and had not moved once in all of it.
"Say that part again," he said. "The terms."
Osric said it again.
"He offered you a day's start."
"He did."
"Not your lives merely. A day." Waldric's mouth had gone thin. "A man who means to hunt you down afterward does not think of a day. He offers the lives, and he offers them because he wants the door open and the stairs empty, and afterward he does whatever suits him. The day is what a man adds when he has genuinely no further interest in you."
"That's how it sounded, Sir Waldric."
"It is worse than it sounds." He came away from the fire at last. "It means he was not there for the barony. It means he had no orders about us at all, and had to invent terms on a doorstep for seven people he had not expected to have to think about, and he did it well and quickly and in our language."
"Which he learned somewhere," said Throderic.
"Which he learned somewhere. Yes." Waldric let that sit in the room. "A hundred Khesari three days inside our border, with a commander who can bargain in Acuseian and who wanted precisely one woman out of a stone tower. My lord, I have been at this a long while, and I do not know what any of that is, and I dislike it more the longer I look at it."
Heinric had listened to all of it with his chin on his fist.
"Lambert," he said. "You spoke with her at the gate."
"I did, my lord."
"And since?"
"Twice. Briefly." Lambert folded his hands. "She answers what she is asked and she does not volunteer, and she has told the same account twice in the same words, which I would call rehearsed in anybody else and which I am not yet prepared to call rehearsed in her."
"Why not?"
"Because she gave the serjeant four and twenty names in a burning tower and I have since checked eleven of them against the Auenstadt rolls that Rothgar keeps for the wool tolls." He said it apologetically, as though the checking were the discourtesy. "They exist, my lord. They are Morav household men. Kestrin Roth was captain of the house guard nine years and there is a payment to him in our own ledger from the spring before last, for the escort of a silver train through the Vale."
Rothgar looked up sharply. "Is there."
"There is. I can show you the entry. He signed for it himself and his hand is a very poor hand."
The room took that in.
"So the girl is who she says," said Rothgar.
"The girl is who she says," Lambert agreed. "That was never what troubled me. A great deal of what she has said is true and can be checked, and I have checked what I could reach in three days, and all of it stands.
"What I cannot check is the part she has not said."
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Heinric shifted in his chair.
"Which is?"
"I do not know, my lord. That is rather the difficulty."
"Osric?"
Osric had been waiting for it and had decided somewhere around the second night what he was going to do, and had not enjoyed the deciding.
"There's a cord round her neck," he said.
The room turned.
"Something on the end of it, under her collar. She's not touched it once in four days. I put it to her in the tower and she gave me her father's name and her errand and every name of her dead, and she would not give me that. Says it was her grandmother's and she doesn't know what it is, and I believe the second part."
Waldric's head had come round.
"You have not mentioned this before."
"No."
"Why not?"
"Because what she gave me, I got by putting a hundred men and a fire behind it," Osric said, "and I judged it would keep four days, and because I have watched this hall decide things at speed before and I wanted it decided slow." He met the old knight's eye. "That was my judgement and it was mine to make and I'll answer for it if it was wrong."
The silence had an edge on it.
Throderic spoke into it, without any heat at all.
"He brought it to me on the second night," he said. "Behind a shut door. I told him to hold it until this morning and I'll take whatever's coming for that, since it was my order and not his choice."
That was not entirely true. Osric kept his face still and said nothing, and did not look at him, and understood that he had just been given a considerable gift and would be a long time paying for it.
Waldric looked from one of them to the other and let it go, which meant he had seen the whole shape of it.
"Very well," he said. "It is noted. Nobody is to touch it and nobody is to ask her about it again without my leave, and I should like it not spoken of outside this room, which means it will be in the village by Thursday." He turned back to the Baron. "But I will not have us sitting here inventing what it might be, my lord, because we could do that all morning and be no wiser at the end of it, and we have a real question in front of us and it is not that one."
"Which is?"
"Whether she stays."
Throderic set his cup down.
"Before that," he said. "There's a piece of it that's been at me since Tuesday and I'd like it in the room. They went home. They failed at the tower and they turned round and rode east and they have not come back. A warband that has spent four days and lost fifteen or twenty men does not go home empty because they had a bad morning."
"Unless they were paid for a delivery," said Waldric, "and not for a campaign."
"Meaning?"
"Meaning that if I hire men to fetch a woman off a road, and the woman is not on the road any more but behind a baron's wall with a garrison round her, then the job I hired for no longer exists. It is a different job at ten times the price, and I would have to go back to whoever is paying me and ask." He shrugged. "That is a fortnight. Possibly a month."
"So they'll come again."
"They will do something again. Whether it is them is another question."
Heinric had gone still in the way that meant he was counting.
"What does she cost me," he said. "Plainly. All of you."
Rothgar was ready, because Rothgar was always ready.
"Nothing yet, my lord, in coin. She eats less than a page. But if her father learns where she is, and he will, then we are a barony holding the daughter of a man who holds the King's minting rights, without writ and without warrant, and he may make that whatever shape he likes in a letter to the Count."
"And if we send her back?"
"Then we are done with it in a fortnight and there is no letter."
"And she is in a cart going east with a strange escort," said Throderic, "and whoever wanted her gets her at the second attempt without spending another man."
"That is not the barony's affair."
"It became the barony's affair when four of mine died over it."
"Three," said Rothgar.
"Four." Throderic did not raise his voice. "Erryk will not stand a watch again before the spring and possibly not after. You may have him back at half and you will have him at half for the rest of his service, and I count that a man, and if you do not, come and tell him so yourself."
Rothgar had the sense to leave it there.
Heinric was quiet a good while.
"I will not send her back," he said.
Waldric shut his eyes very briefly.
"My lord."
"I know what you are going to say and you would be right to say it and I have already thought it." The Baron sat forward. "Say it anyway. I would rather have it said in this room than invented later in another one."
"Very well." Waldric came to the table. "She is not ours. She is a grown woman of a noble house with a living father, and there is no law in this kingdom under which we hold her, and every day she is behind that wall is a day we cannot explain in writing. If Wilhelm von Morav asks for her and we refuse, we are not protecting a guest. We are keeping a man's daughter from him, and the Count
will not need to be persuaded of anything else, because that is simply what it will look like on the page.
"And she is a lit torch. Whoever wanted her enough to buy a hundred Khesari will want her that much next month as well. You are not sheltering a woman, Heinric. You are moving a fire into your own hall and asking the roof to be reasonable about it."
"That is all true," Heinric said.
"It is."
"And I will not send her back."
"Then give me a reason I can write down," said Waldric, "because I shall have to."
Heinric turned his cup on the table.
"Four and twenty men," he said. "Household men. Men who had eaten at her father's board for years, some of them since before she was born. She asked them, one and two at a time, over a summer, with nothing to offer any of them but the asking. And they said yes, and it cost them everything, every one of them.
"That is not a woman who ran away from a marriage. Any fool can run. That is a woman that four and twenty grown men who knew her decided was worth their necks." He looked up. "And then a hundred horsemen came over a river for her and a serjeant of mine was offered his life for her and put it down without a heartbeat's thought, and so did six others, and one of them was a girl she had known four days.
"Every single person who has been near this woman, uncle, has decided she is worth more than their own skin. That is now nine and twenty people. I have never in my life had a report like it about anybody, and I have decided to take it seriously, and you may write that down exactly as I have said it."
Waldric looked at him and did not answer at once.
"You understand that is sentiment."
"It is evidence," said Heinric. "It is only sentiment when it is about someone I like."