The old knight let out a breath that was not quite a laugh.
"Then I shall write it down," he said, "and I shall put a fair copy in the strongbox, and when the Count's man comes I shall read it to him in a very serious voice and we shall see what he makes of it."
"Do that." Heinric sat back. "And in the meantime she is a guest of this house and will be treated as one. She is not to be questioned again by anybody except Lambert or Osric, and neither of them without telling me first. She does not leave the castle walls. She keeps the cord, and nobody is to lay a hand on her or on it, and if I hear that anybody has tried I shall find out who sent them and be extremely direct about it."
"And her father?"
"Her father will write to me," said Heinric, "and I will answer him, and we will see who blinks. He does not know I have her yet."
Osric shifted his weight.
"He will inside a fortnight, my lord."
"I know it. There is no keeping a woman in a village." Heinric almost smiled. "The whole barony knows already. I am simply hoping that the whole barony is slower at writing letters than it is at talking."
The council broke up a little after that.
Osric came out into the passage and stood a moment in the cold with the helm still under his arm, and Throderic came out behind him and stopped alongside him and did not say anything for a while.
"You didn't have to do that," Osric said.
"No."
"It wasn't your order."
"It was close enough to one." Throderic looked out along the passage. "You told me on the second night and I said hold it, and I meant hold it until you had decided how to say it, and you took that as until you had decided whether to. Those are near neighbours and I'd not have picked them apart in front of Waldric with the man's blood up."
"He knew."
"Of course he knew. He's been doing this since before either of us could lift a spear." The captain shrugged. "He let it go because he'd rather have you than have you cornered, and because Rothgar was about to say something about coin and he wanted the room moving. Waldric spends nothing he doesn't have to."
They walked out toward the yard.
"Osric."
"Aye."
"Don't do it again."
"No."
"I mean it and I'll say it once. I have covered you in that hall and I would do it again tomorrow, and the day I have to do it and I have not been told first is the day it stops working." Throderic did not look round. "Bring it to me. However bad. However late. I'd rather be woken."
"Aye, Captain."
"Good." He clapped Osric once on the good shoulder. "Now go and find out what a mason charges for three stones with nothing under them, because the Baron has just told me he's paying for it out of his own purse and he does not want it discussed, and I have been trying since Tuesday to work out how to have that conversation without discussing it."
Hesse set the stones on the eighth day.
He was the eldest of the four masons wintering in Valmarch rather than going home, because home for two of them was Lanndorf and for the others further, and the Baron had put them in the old grain shed and found them enough small work to justify the keeping. Hesse had been laying stone since before Osric could lift a spear. He was broad and silent and had opinions about frost that he expressed by refusing to work in it.
Osric had gone to him on the fourth day and had got as far as explaining what he wanted before the man interrupted.
"Two or three?"
Osric had not thought that far. He was ashamed of it and said so with his silence rather than his mouth.
"Three," he said. "Set them together. Rutger has a sister at Osterwald and I'll write to her. The wheelwright's boy is his father's to decide, but put it up regardless and let the man take it down himself if he wants it down."
"He'll not want it down."
"No. But it should be his to say."
The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.
Hesse had turned back toward the brazier and then stopped.
"There's nothing under them."
"No."
"Aye." The mason said it in the flat unbothered way of a man who has spent forty years putting stone over what was not there. "Well. There's nothing under half the ones on that bank, Serjeant. Folk drown, and folk go for soldiers, and the stone's not for them anyway."
They went up on a grey morning with the wind coming off the water.
The chapel bank ran along the high side of the burial ground where the ground looks down at the brook, and it was not a large place and not a tidy one, and there were stones on it going back six generations, and about a third of them leaned.
The garrison came. Not under arms and not in ranks, because Throderic had judged that wrong and had said so, and so they came in their own clothes and stood where they liked. Half the village came. Mette came with both girls and stood at the front with Berta beside her, and the eldest held her mother's hand and the little one held her sister's, and neither of them entirely understood what they were doing there.
Erryk came, on a stick, having got himself out of Gerfried's house by a method nobody ever established.
Lambert did the rite.
He did not use the one they all knew. He said so at the start, plainly, before he began, which Osric had not expected and which turned out to be the best decision anybody made that week.
"The rite we say here is written for a man lying in front of us," he said. "Every word of it. It tells him to go and tells him the road and tells the ground to take him kindly, and it is a good rite and I have said it over a great many people and I am not going to say it today.
"Three men are not here. Two are in a tower we could not get back into and one is in a hollow four miles east of it, and saying words over turned earth with nothing under it will not alter that and everybody standing here knows it.
"So I have gone and found something else."
He had it on two sheets in his own hand, and he told them where it came from: the forms said over men taken by the sea, and over men lost in the high passes, which are old and are in poor Rulian and are almost never used in a landlocked county.
"They are not comforting," he said. "They do not pretend. They were written by people who knew there would be no body and they say so out loud, and I have found that I would rather have that today than something kinder that we would all have to agree to believe."
Then he read them.
Osric could not afterward remember most of it. He remembered that the language was old and rough and had a swing to it, the way old language does when it was made to be said aloud by people who could not read.
It named the elements one at a time and asked each in turn to hold what it had taken and to hold it gently: the water first, then the high ground, then the fire, and each of them addressed as a neighbour is addressed who is not much trusted and cannot be avoid. It did not ask anybody to be comforted. It did not say the men were at peace, and it did not say they were anywhere in particular, and at one point it said plainly that the living would not know and would have to go on regardless, which Osric had never heard said in a chapel or out of one.
And near the end it asked that the man's name be spoken in his own house at the ordinary hours. At meals. At the fire. At the mending. Not only on the day.
Mette put her hand over her mouth at that part and took it away again and stood straight.
Beside her the eldest girl, who was nine and had been watching Lambert with fierce attention throughout, said something up at her mother in a whisper that carried about four feet, which was far enough.
She wanted to know whether that meant they were allowed to.
"Aye," said Berta, quietly, before Mette could get anything out. "That's what it means, love. That's exactly what it means."
When it was done, Lambert said the three names.
Ansel Vesk. Rutger, who had no second name that anybody had ever asked for. Wilkin, the wheelwright's second son.
And that was the end of it, and people began to move, and it took a long while for the bank to clear because nobody quite wanted to be the first to walk away.
Osric stayed until the last of them had gone, because that had become his habit and he had never examined it.
He was still there when the Lady Iselinde came up the path.
She came on her own two feet with her skirts held out of the wet and no retinue at all behind her, which for the Baron's eldest daughter walking through a village was very nearly a public statement, and she had plainly meant it as one.
Osric straightened.
"My lady."
"Don't." She stopped a few feet from the stones and looked at them. "I have had four days of people telling me it was not suitable and I do not want it from you as well."
"I wasn't going to."
"No. You wouldn't." She stood there a moment with her chin up. "I wanted to come to the rite. My father said no."
"He'd have had his reasons."
"He had a good one, which is the aggravating part." Her mouth twisted. "He said a lord's daughter at a graveside makes it about the house instead of the man. He said they would have had to find me somewhere to stand and somebody would have swept a patch of ground for me and Mette would have spent the morning being looked at instead of being let alone. And he is right. He is always right about that sort of business and it is insufferable."
"He is right."
"I know he is right. I said so." She turned and looked at him properly. "So I came after. On my own legs, like anybody, and nobody has swept anything and nobody has had to stand about waiting for me, and my father can be right about rites and he cannot be right about this."
She looked back at the three stones.
"Which is which?"
Osric told her.
She was quiet for a while.
"I did not know any of them," she said at last. "That is the honest position and I am not going to pretend otherwise to you of all people. I knew the middle one's face because he brought a cart up to the kitchens in the spring and I remember thinking he had a laugh like a gate hinge."
"That was Ansel."
"Ansel." She said it once, carefully, the way a person does when they intend to keep a name. "Well. Now I know three names and one laugh, which is more than I knew last week, and I would rather have it than not."
She stayed a few minutes longer and then went back down the path, alone, and Osric watched her go and thought that Heinric had raised something rather formidable and had very likely not noticed.
Voss found out about the crossbow that afternoon.