It ran along the outside of the forearm, four fingers wide, and had been a burn. It had gone past the angry stage and into the shiny tight stage and it had not been dressed properly at any point, and the skin round the edge of it had cracked in three places.
"That's not a fortnight old," Osric said.
"Six weeks."
He waited.
"There was a candle," Isolde said. "And a conversation with my father in which he explained to me, at some length, the arrangements that had been made for my life, and I did not take it well, and I put my hand out to steady myself on a table that had a candle on it."
"You put your arm on a candle."
"I put my arm on a candle and I did not move it for a while, because moving it would have meant making a sound, and making a sound in front of him would have been a great deal worse." She pulled the sleeve back down. "There. Now you have it and I would be obliged if it went no further, because it is the single most humiliating fact about me and I have been managing not to think about it for six weeks."
Osric said nothing for a moment.
"Gerfried will want to see it."
"Serjeant."
"Not for the reason you're thinking." He kept his voice level. "It's cracked at the edge in three places and it's been going eight days in a wet creek and a hedge before that, and I've seen a burn like that go bad on a healthy man in a fortnight. You'll show it to him tomorrow, and you'll show it to him because I'm asking and not because anybody's ordering, and he'll not ask you how you got it because he never does."
She sat with that.
"Never?"
"Not once in eleven years. He asks what it is, and how long, and whether it has bled. He has never in my hearing asked anybody how." Osric shrugged. "You'll
find that either restful or unnerving and it takes most people about a fortnight to decide."
"I shall go tomorrow," said Isolde.
"Good."
He looked at the table then, because he had been not looking at it since he came in and had run out of reasons.
It was not a letter. He could see that from where he stood, because a letter has margins and a shape and this had neither. It was a list. Names in a small careful hand, one to a line, running the length of the sheet and continuing onto a second beneath it, and beside some of them a word or two more.
She saw him see it and did not cover it, which she could easily have done.
"May I?"
She hesitated for perhaps two heartbeats and then turned the sheet a quarter round so that it faced him.
Osric read a little way down.
Kestrin Roth. Captain. Two girls. Would not eat before a ride.
Wend. Taught me to sit a horse. Bad hip in the wet.
Otho, the younger. Would not eat fish. Nineteen.
He read to the bottom of the first sheet and did not touch it.
"How many have you?"
"Twenty-one." Her voice did not change. "Two more I have the faces of and not the names, because they came on at the muster and I never once spoke to them, and I have been sitting in this room for eight days trying to hear somebody say them."
"And the last?"
"The last I knew. I knew him perfectly well." She was looking at the sheet rather than at him. "And it has gone. It went sometime in the second week and I cannot get it back, and I have tried at every hour of the day and night, and the harder I go at it the further off it stands."
Osric came a step closer and looked at the careful hand and the small notes beside the names and the blank lines that had been left blank and had stayed that way.
"Twenty-two," he said.
Isolde looked up.
"At a ford called Hallenmark, two summers ago. Thirty-one of us went onto that bank and nine came off it." He kept his eyes on her paper. "I can give you the two and twenty in order. I could give them to you at any hour you woke me. I have never written them down and I have never needed to, and there have been months when I would have paid a good deal to be rid of the trick of it."
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She was very still.
"Does it stop?"
"No."
"Good," said Isolde.
That was not the answer he had expected, and he looked at her properly for the first time since he had come through the door.
"They died because of where I was standing," she said. "Not for a cause and not for the house and not for the King. Because I asked them, one and two at a time, over a summer, and they said yes." Her jaw was tight. "If I am going to be the reason, then I will at least be a reason that knows their names. It is a very poor exchange. It is the only one available."
Osric turned that over and found no part of it he could argue with.
"Three of mine went out with me on that patrol and did not come back," he said.
Her hands went still on the table.
"Ansel Vesk. He had a wife in the lower lane and two daughters, and the elder carved him a piece of bone with his own face on it and got the nose wrong on purpose. Rutger, who never once said a word he did not need and mended everybody's kit without being asked, and who had no second name that anybody ever thought to ask for. And a boy called Wilkin, nineteen, wheelwright's second son, who was on the watch in that hollow and saw what was in the grass and waited, because he was frightened of being wrong in front of us."
He said it evenly, because he had never found any other way to say it.
"Two of them are in the tower. There was nothing to bring home. We put three stones up on the chapel bank on Tuesday with nothing under any of them."
Isolde had gone white about the mouth.
"You did not tell me."
"You were bleeding and we were running."
"That is not the same as not telling me." She got up. She was a good deal smaller standing than she had seemed sitting and it made no difference whatever. "Eight days, Serjeant. Nobody in this castle has said one word to me about it. They bring me broth and they bring me dresses and they take the tray away, and I have been sitting up here writing out the names of my own dead, and it did not once cross my mind that there was a woman down in that village writing hers."
"There's no writing. She can't."
That landed harder than anything else he had said.
Isolde stood in the middle of the room for a moment with her hands closed.
"Then give me the three names."
"My lady."
"I am not asking for absolution and I am not asking you to forgive me, because you cannot and it is not yours to give." Her voice was perfectly level and there was something underneath it that was not. "I am asking for three names to go at the bottom of a list. I have the list already. And when I am somewhere else and a great deal older and all of this is a long time ago, I should like there to be one page in the world with all of them on it."
Osric considered her.
Then he gave them to her, and she wrote them without asking him to spell any part of it, and when she had done she set the pen down and looked at the sheet and did not thank him, which was correct.
He let the room be quiet a while.
"You said the tower business would keep till Valmarch," he said eventually. "It's kept. The Baron's made his decision and you'll want to hear it from me rather than from a boy with a tray."
She sat down again slowly.
"Go on."
"You stay. He'll not send you back and he's said so in front of his council and his uncle argued against it for a quarter of an hour and lost." Osric put his hands behind his back. "You're a guest of this house. You'll not be questioned again by anybody but me or my brother, and neither of us without the Baron's leave. You'll not go outside the walls. You keep what's round your neck and nobody's to lay a hand on it or on you, and he was extremely clear about that last part in a way I'd not want to be on the wrong end of."
Isolde did not answer for a while.
"Why?"
"Why what?"
"Why would he do that?" She said it flatly, without any softness in it at all. "He has met me twice. He owes me nothing. I have cost him three soldiers and a tower and he has a wall he cannot finish, and every argument in that room was on the other side and I know it was, because I have been making those arguments to myself up here for eight days."
Osric thought about how to answer it.
"He said that four and twenty grown men who had known you since before you could walk decided you were worth their necks," he said. "And that six of mine were offered their lives for you and put it down without thinking about it. And that in his whole career he has never had a report like that about anybody, so he has decided to take it seriously."
She stared at him.
"That is not a reason. That is a feeling."
"That's very near what Waldric said." Osric's mouth moved slightly. "The Baron told him it was evidence, and that it was only a feeling when it was about somebody he liked."
Isolde put her hand over her mouth briefly, and took it away.
"I do not know what to do with that," she said.
"You don't have to do anything with it. That's rather the point of it." He went to the door. "There's a bolt on the outside of this and it gets drawn at night. Nobody's mentioned it to you and you've not asked, and I'd sooner say it out loud than have it sit there.
"You're a guest for as long as the Baron can afford it. If that changes I'll not pretend otherwise on the day."
"Thank you."
"I'd not thank me for that."
"I was not thanking you for that." Isolde was looking at the sheet on the table. "I have been eight days in this room and you are the first person who has said any part of it plainly. Everybody else has been kind."
Osric got the door open.
"Serjeant."
He stopped.
"Otho the younger," she said. "The one who would not eat fish. He was nineteen as well."
Osric stood in the doorway a moment.
"Then he'd have got on with Wilkin," he said, and went out, and shut it behind him.
In the passage the retainer straightened.
"All well?"
"Well enough." Osric started for the stair, and then turned back. "She's to have as much parchment as she asks for. If the steward makes a noise about it, tell him it's on my account and I'll settle at the quarter."
The man's brows went up a fraction.
"Aye, Serjeant."