Osric had been carrying it since Gerfried handed it to him and had not found a good hour for it, and had eventually accepted that there was not going to be one.
He found him sitting on a barrel outside the barracks with his bad foot up on a crate and the ruined crossbow across his knees. He had been at it with a knife for some days, cutting the split stock back to sound wood, which was pointless, and which everybody had been carefully not mentioning.
"That's beyond saving," Osric said.
"I know it."
"Then why?"
"Because it's this or sit here." Voss did not look up. "You've come to tell me something."
"I have."
"Then tell it."
"Gerfried says the shoulder will come back and you'll span again." Osric said it plainly, because the man deserved it plain. "Not this month. Not next. He puts it somewhere round the turn of the year and he says it in the way he says things he means."
Voss's hands had stopped on the stock.
"The turn of the year."
"Aye."
"That's Rhumnacht and past it."
"It is."
Voss looked out across the yard for a while.
"He told me yes on the first evening," he said. "In the yard. I asked him straight and he said yes and he did not say when, and I have been lying there for a week working out that a man who does not say when is telling you it is a long way off."
"He wanted you to have the yes first."
"Aye. Well." Voss went back to the stock. "He's a cold old bastard and that was kindly done and I'll not tell him so."
"He'd not thank you."
"He'd be insufferable." He cut a curl of wood off and let it fall. "The turn of the year. Right."
Osric sat down on the crate beside the bad foot and did not say anything for a while, which was correct and which he had learned to do late in life.
"There's four bows in that armoury," he said eventually, "and three of them have been spanned by men who don't know what they're doing since the summer, and one of those has a prod I'd not trust to a man I liked. Somebody wants to go through them and mark what's sound."
"Sitting down?"
"Sitting down."
"That's charity."
"It's a job that wants doing and you're the only man in this garrison who'd do it properly." Osric got up. "Take it or don't."
Voss did not answer, which meant he would take it, and both of them knew it.
Erryk walked for the first time on the ninth day and made an enormous production of it.
He got from the physician's door to the mounting block and back, which was perhaps sixty feet, and it took him a good while, and by the end of it his face was grey and his hand on the stick had gone white at the knuckles. Half the yard found excuses to be in it. Nobody helped him, because Alden had gone round beforehand and made it clear what would happen to anybody who did.
He sat down on the block at the end and breathed.
"Sixty feet," he said.
"Sixty feet," Osric agreed.
"Gerfried says it will be a limp."
"He told me the same."
"Aye, he tells everybody everything, the great gossiping crow." Erryk wiped his face. "A limp. Well. I'd have taken a limp on that stair for the asking, and I
asked for a good deal worse than a limp on that stair, and nobody was listening."
"I was listening."
"You were not listening. You told me to shut my mouth and hold the line." He grinned, and it was ghastly, and it was the first one since the tower. "Which is the same as listening, from you."
The house was warm and smelled of burnt leeks when Osric got home, and Anna was standing in the middle of the room with a wooden spoon in one hand and an expression of tremendous innocence.
"Before you say anything, the pot is fine."
Stolen story; please report.
"I didn't say anything."
"You were going to look at the pot."
He looked at the pot. It was not fine.
She was twenty and small with it, chestnut hair in a braid that had begun the morning with ambitions, and there was something down the front of her apron that might have been supper and might have been paint and was probably both. She fed him what had been stew when she started it. He ate all of it and did not mention this.
"Erryk walked," she said.
"He did."
"Sixty feet, and Berta says he told her it was a hundred."
"Berta's got it right and Erryk's got it right, and by Rhumnacht it'll be a quarter mile and a river crossing."
Anna grinned and took his bowl.
The knock came a while later: three heavy uneven thuds, a pause, then one more.
Osric did not move.
"Drunk," he said.
"Which one?"
He did not answer, because the answer was always the same.
She hauled the door open and Argilac came in half sideways with his cloak flaring wet, and Alden after him, one enormous hand braced on the doorframe as though the frame were what needed steadying. Cheap mead came in with them like weather.
"You're both soaked."
"An improvement," said Alden, grinning under his pale beard. The grin pulled at the seam down his cheek and stopped halfway, the way it had done since the tower, and he had stopped noticing it and nobody else had.
"I told him not to knock," he added. "He said it was tradition."
"Drunk hammering on my door isn't tradition."
"It is," said Anna, fetching a towel off the rail. "You just don't care for it."
Argilac pushed back his hood. His hair was flat to his skull and his jaw was set the way it went when he was concentrating on walking, and his eyes softened the moment they landed on Anna.
"There's honey bread," she said, "for a man with the manners to ask twice."
"Please. Most gracious lady of the burnt stew."
She threw him the loaf.
The evening went low and warm around the fire, and Argilac fell asleep sitting upright, which he had done since he was four, and Alden became a large contented heap at the hearth and started on a song that Anna stopped with a rag.
It was late when she said the other part, drying her hands with her back to the room.
"My lady's asking for you again. Twice this week she's had me carry it down the hill." She turned round. "Will dear Uncle Osric ride the eastern orchards with her before the frost strips them."
Osric let his head go back against the chair.
"Of course she is."
"She was at the bank this morning."
"I know. I was there."
"I know you were there, that's how I know she was." Anna hung the cloth up. "She came down after and she was in a mood I've not seen on her before, and she has not said one word about it to me, and Iselinde says everything to me eventually."
"Give her a week."
"I'll give her a week." She sat down on the stool with her knees up. "Will you go? To the orchards."
"Aye."
Anna raised an eyebrow. "That was quick. You usually make me work for it."
"It's been a poor month," Osric said. "Let the girl have her ride."
The retainer on the third floor came to something like attention and then, seeing who it was, relaxed by exactly the amount a man relaxes for a serjeant and no more.
"Serjeant."
"Quiet?"
"Quiet." He shifted. "She had a bad night on Tuesday and I heard her walking about till near dawn and I put it in the book, and then I thought better of putting it in the book and scratched it out, and then I put it back in." He looked faintly aggrieved. "I've never had one of these before."
"How's she taking the food?"
"She eats it. She never asks for anything and she never sends anything back and she thanks the girl every time, which the girl has got quite attached to."
"Tell her I'd have a word. If she's willing."
The room had been a study once, or a place for storing what a household cannot decide about, and had been converted in an afternoon by men told to make it fit for a guest with whatever was to hand. There was no adornment beyond a faded antler rack above the lintel. A narrow window let in a long bar of cold light across the worn rushes. The floorboards groaned.
Somebody had made an effort since. There were dried flowers in a cup on the sill and a good wool blanket over the foot of the bed and a comb and a hand-glass laid out on a cloth, as though this were a room a lady had arrived at with baggage rather than one a woman had been walked into with another man's blood to her elbows.
The effect was not homely. It was a cell that somebody had been ashamed of and had tried to soften, and it made the bolt on the outside of the door more noticeable rather than less.
The dresses were folded on the chest at the foot of the bed with the pearl fastenings uppermost and the creases still in them exactly as the girl had carried them up the stair.
Isolde sat at the table by the window with her back half to him and a sheet of parchment in front of her.
She had on a plain woollen dress the colour of wet ash that somebody sensible in the household had found for her, and her dark hair was braided and looped and fraying at the edges, and there were shadows under her eyes that eight days of good beds had not shifted.
She did not rise and did not offer him the courtesies, and he found he appreciated it.
"My lady."
"Serjeant."
He shut the door behind him and stood a few paces in.
"You've not worn them."
She glanced at the chest.
"No."
"Is there a reason, or is it only that you haven't?"
"There is a reason and it is not a very good one." She set the pen down. "If I put one of those on, I am a lady staying at a castle, and everybody in this building will treat me as one, and I will start being asked what I think of the hangings." She turned in the chair to face him. "I would rather go on being the woman they carried in. It is closer to true and it keeps people honest with me."
"That's not a bad reason."
"It is a slightly vain one and I am aware of it."
Osric let that be and looked at her properly.
"Your arm," he said.
Her chin came up half an inch.
"You favoured it in the hollow and you favoured it on the road and you were still favouring it when you came off that wall, and Gerfried tells me you have not once been near him."
"It is nothing."
"You said that eight days ago to Erryk and he was too polite to press it and I am not."
Isolde looked at him for a moment.
Then she pushed her left sleeve back to the elbow.