The drills ran at first light and Osric came up to the inner courtyard afterward with the dust of them still on his leathers, and stopped under the arch to take in the shape of what was gathered there.
A knot of ladies-in-waiting in good wool cloaks. Two garrison men with spears, doing the particular standing that men do when they have been told to be present and not told to do anything. A groom holding a fine grey palfrey, saddled and waiting.
One horse.
Saddled for one, and the rest of the world to walk beside it. That has always been the shape of things with her.
Anna was among the ladies and plainly not of them, apart in dress and bearing and in being the only one of them looking at anything. She caught sight of him and her whole face went up.
"You came. She had half a wager on you finding a reason not to."
"I've drills, a border, and a hundred better uses of a morning."
"And you came."
"She'd only send you down to hammer my door again," Osric said, "and I've grown fond of it unhammered."
There was a stir at the keep steps.
Lady Iselinde came out into the thin autumn sun dressed richly and sensibly, chin up, moving as though the courtyard had been arranged for the moment of her arrival, which in a sense it had. The ladies dipped. The guards straightened.
Then she found Osric in the crowd, and the courtly poise cracked clean across into something warmer and a good deal younger.
"Uncle Osric. There. I said you'd come. You always come."
"My lady." He inclined his head. "You leave a man little choice and less peace."
"Choice is for people with nothing better to do. You've me." She swept toward the palfrey. "Now help me up."
The groom started forward and did not get there. Osric was at the horse's shoulder with his hands cupped, and he tossed her to the saddle with his good side and did not let any part of the other one show.
She settled her skirts and looked down at him. Literally down, now, mounted while he stood in the mud of his own courtyard.
"Comfortable, down there?"
"I've stood in worse mud. And with worse company. Barely."
He glanced round at the rest of them: ladies, guards, groom, every one of them afoot.
"No mounts for the others? It's a fair walk to the eastern orchards and back before dark."
"They have legs, uncle." She said it airily. "And I like to be looked up to. It is the one place a woman is given the high ground without a fight for it."
Osric caught the edge under it and let it go past.
Over by the gate Anna had crouched down over something in the dirt with her back to the entire courtly assembly, wholly heedless of it. One of the ladies watched her with prim distaste and said something out of the side of her mouth to the woman beside her about grubbing in the muck like a stablehand's brat.
"I heard that," said Anna, not looking up. "And yes."
Iselinde rounded on the woman from the saddle, sharp enough to shut her mouth for her.
"Anna grubs in the muck because she is the only one of you who has ever once seen something worth looking at. Leave her be."
Anna straightened with a half-grown hare cupped gently in both hands, delighted, showing it to nobody in particular.
"Look at him. A leveret, near weaned. His mother's about somewhere close. I'll not keep him."
"See you don't," said Osric, without heat. "Wild things go poorly under a lady's roof."
She set it down. It sat frozen a heartbeat and then bolted for the hedge, and Anna watched it go with an open unguarded want on her face.
"Lucky beast," she said softly. "Nothing to do all his days but be a rabbit."
They went out through the castle gate and down into Valmarch: Iselinde mounted at the centre, Osric walking at her stirrup, the ladies picking their way behind with their hems already in trouble, a guard fore and a guard aft, and Anna ranging out to the flank like a loosed hound.
Villagers paused to bow and gawk as the Lady passed. She acknowledged them with a practised distant grace that Osric had watched her build, piece by piece, over about four years.
"You've been away three weeks," she said, "and come home with a rescued woman and three empty stones, and told me not one word of any of it. I had every word of it from the laundry."
"The laundry knows more than the council most days."
"Is she pretty? The Auenstadt woman. They say she is very pretty."
"She's alive, which is prettier than her escort managed."
"That is a serjeant's answer."
"It's the only one you're getting."
Iselinde made a noise, and let it go, which was new.
They passed out through the village palisade into open country: pale fields, twisting hedgerows, and ahead the dark line of the eastern woods.
Osric's manner changed by a degree that nobody in that party would have marked, and his eyes began to travel the treeline without his troubling to be quiet about it.
Anna loped back to his side with the wind in her loosened hair.
"Smell that? Frost and woodsmoke and the whole world lying down to sleep." She threw her arms out. "I'd sleep out here, if you'd let me."
"I wouldn't. Not this season. Not this ground."
She caught the weight in it and followed his glance to the trees, and the wildness went out of her by a shade, because she had been reading him her whole remembered life.
"You think they're still about."
"I think they went east and I think men who find a door open remember the road to it." He did not stop scanning. "Keep the Lady in your eye. And both of you near me."
Iselinde overheard and waved it off with the fearlessness of a girl who has never once been hunted.
"They are a hundred miles away and you fret like an old hen."
"I fret like a man who's buried the folk that didn't."
That landed. She went quiet a moment, and something real reached her and was covered over.
"Well," she said. "Then it is a mercy I have brought the fiercest old hen in the barony."
"Cluck," said Osric.
The eastern orchards ran in long rows of old apple and pear, half bare now, the last fruit gone brown in the wet grass, mist pooling low between the trunks. Lovely, and a little forsaken, in the way of a place people have stopped bothering with that has gone on regardless.
Iselinde reined up and took it in, and for one breath the courtly mask fell clean away and she was only a girl looking at a quiet, pretty place.
"There. Isn't it worth the walk?" She said it half to herself. "Father would have me shut in the solar with a needle and a chaperone. But this is mine, for an afternoon."
Anna was already halfway up a low bare apple tree, laughing down at the lot of them. Iselinde watched her go up, and beneath the poise there was a flash of something naked.
"She is afraid of nothing, is she."
"She's afraid of walls, mostly. Out here she forgets she was ever inside any."
Iselinde kept her eyes on the girl in the tree.
"I should like to forget them. Once." She said it very quietly. "To not be watched, and weighed, and sized for a marriage like a mare led round a fair."
"Then forget them a while, my lady. That is what an orchard is for." He did not look at her when he said it. "I'll keep the walls off you till dusk."
She looked down at the one man in her father's household who had never once looked down at her.
"You are the only soul who talks to me as though I were a person and not a treaty."
"That's only because I knew you before you were worth a treaty. Squalling, red, and no manners at all." He shrugged. "Not so changed, now I look."
"Beast."
But even while he said it his eyes had gone again to the far edge of the orchard, where the mist thickened between the trunks and the wild wood began.
A single crow burst up out of the branches, cawing.
Osric marked it, and filed it, and said nothing to spoil the Lady's afternoon. His hand rested near his belt, easy, and not easy in the least.
Nothing came out of the mist. After a while the quiet settled back over the orchard, and he let a slow breath go, and his shoulders came down by a degree, though his eyes made one last unhurried pass of the trees before he let them be.
The ladies spread cloaks over a dry hummock and unpacked a basket: black bread, cheese, a stoppered flask of wine. A small tidy island of court laid out in the middle of the wild. Anna became a distant figure wading through the low mist between the far trees, stopping to peer up into the branches, wholly her own creature.
Iselinde walked the row of old trees with Osric a pace off her shoulder, and reached up and plucked a late apple, wrinkled but sound.
"They forget these orchards up at the castle. Too far east, too near the wild. Father says they are not worth the pickers' wages."
"Your father counts wages the way a drowning man counts breaths. He's had reason to."
She bit the apple, and for a moment she was only a girl eating fruit in a field.
"Was he always so? Counting. Grey. Sour."
"No."
Something surfaced in Osric that he did not often let up.
"When I first knew your father, he laughed too loud, drank worse than Alden, and lost a good horse on a wager over which of two frogs would jump." He almost smiled at it. "Then the war took the men to either side of him. And your mother took the last of his laughing with her when she went."
Iselinde was quiet.
"When she had us."
"When she died, girl." Osric stopped walking. "Not when you were born. There is a whole wide world between those two, whatever your father's face has told you all your life."
She stood holding the apple and did not eat any more of it.
"No one has ever put it quite that way."
"No one else was there, and lived, to put it any way at all."
They walked on. She turned the apple over in her fingers a while.
"Elmine does not fight any of it. The marriage. The counting. The grey." Her mouth moved. "She says a quiet wife lives the longest, and she smiles when she says it, which is somehow the worst part."
"Elmine fights the battles she can win and calls the rest of it weather. That's not weakness. It's a different armour than the one you wear, and hers turns fewer blades than she thinks."
Iselinde's lightness thinned as the real matter came up under it.
"They mean to send me to the Count's nephew. Did you know? Wulfhere." She said the name flatly. "He is forty. And they say he has already put two wives in the ground."
"I'd heard a name mentioned. Not that one."
"Two wives, uncle. Think of the luck. I shall not even have to learn a new household." The brightness over it was very thin. "Only step into a dead woman's shoes and wait my turn to fill her grave."
"That's a black jest."
"It is a black match. The jest is the only part of it I am let to choose."