Osric did not offer her anything false, because she would have known it for what it was and it would have cost him something with her that he could not afford to lose.
"I can't unmake a treaty, girl. I'm a serjeant, not a king."
"I know it. I have never asked you to." Her chin came up a little. "I ask only that somebody knows it is a cage, before they gild the bars and call it a wedding. That is all. That one soul knows."
"I know it."
A beat went by. Then Osric shouldered the weight aside the way he did.
"And for what little it buys. Should this Wulfhere ever lay a hand on you in unkindness, treaty or no."
He let it stand a moment.
"He'll find the barony keeps one old serjeant who never learned to read a marriage contract, and thinks even less of them than he does of the man."
A real smile broke through.
"There he is."
They came back to where the picnic had been laid, and as she neared the others Iselinde's court mask slid quietly into place and the private girl folded herself away, and Osric watched it happen and had watched it happen a hundred times and had never once got used to the speed of it.
There was a crash and rustle overhead. Anna hung upside down from a branch by her knees with her hair streaming.
"There's a hawk's nest up here. Old, mind. They've long flown."
"My lady," said one of the ladies faintly, "she will break her neck."
"She will not. She never does." Iselinde settled onto a cloak without glancing up. "Anna, come down and eat before you fall on my father's guests and dent one."
"I've eaten. Three of your apples and one very confused beetle."
She dropped out of the tree, landed in a crouch, and came over all mud and grin to flop down beside Iselinde with an ease that plainly scandalised the watching ladies and delighted the guard who was pretending not to watch.
The two of them put their heads together, and the rank between them went clean out of the orchard.
"He told me it wasn't my fault," Iselinde said, low. "My mother."
"I've been telling you that for years."
"You are my lady's maid. You have to."
Anna shook her head.
"I'm your friend, you great goose. The maiding is only what your father pays me for."
Iselinde rested her head briefly on Anna's shoulder, a rare and entirely un-Lady moment, and nobody at that picnic said a word about it.
A little apart, Osric watched the two of them: the highborn girl and his wild foundling, heads together on a cloak in a mist-wet orchard.
One raised with everything and free of none of it. One raised with nothing and bound by none of it.
God alone knows how they found each other in the middle.
The afternoon settled. A bored guard leaned on his spear at the orchard's edge. The other shared a heel of bread with a lady-in-waiting who had decided the mud was not so very bad after all.
Anna sprawled on her back on the cloak and stared up through the bare branches.
"If I were highborn I'd have a horse of my own and ride till the map ran out. I'd not stop for any treaty ever written."
"If you were highborn," said Iselinde, "you'd have men with spears fetching you home before you had crested the first hill."
"Then I'd ride faster than the spears."
"That, I would pay coin to watch." Iselinde said it dry and fond, and then, more wistfully: "You truly would, though. Wouldn't you. Just go."
"One day." Anna tipped her head toward Osric. "When he's too old to chase me."
"I'll never be too old to chase you," said Osric, without turning round. "I'll pay a younger man to do the running and watch him from a good chair."
"That one I believe."
Anna sat bolt upright and pointed off across the hedge-line with her whole face alight.
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"Kestrel. There, over the hedge. Look at it hang on the wind." She was up on her knees. "God, to do that just once."
In the quiet she left behind, Iselinde turned to Osric with a gentler and more careful question.
"Were you happy, uncle? Before. When you had your own."
Osric was a while answering, and his eyes went to Anna without his meaning them to.
"I had a house once," he said, "and folk in it I loved. The war took some. What it did not take it spoiled, and the spoiling took longer and it took more."
He turned his cup in his fingers.
"I've two sons living. One will speak to me and one won't, and I'd not say the one who won't is wrong to it."
Anna had gone very still on the cloak, listening. She rarely heard him talk about any of it.
"And about a year after," Osric said, "the same war left an orphan on a road. And I found I was not done being a father after all."
A look went between them, father and daughter, and did not need anything hung on it.
"You never told me you found me on a road," Anna said softly.
"You never asked. And I'd no wish to remember the road." Osric looked at the branches. "Only the finding."
The three of them held that a moment, and even Iselinde kept her peace, feeling that she had come near something not hers to touch.
Then Anna, who could not abide heavy air for long, sprang to her feet.
"Right. That's enough sad old men and dead orchards for one day." She hauled her sleeves up. "Iselinde. I'll wager I'm higher up that tree than you before the wine's poured."
"I am a lady. I don't cli." Iselinde was already rising and hiking her skirts. "Oh, very well. One tree. One."
They went up into a low apple tree in a flurry of skirts and laughter, the scandalised ladies fluttering below, a guard hiding a grin behind his hand.
Osric watched them laugh in the branches, and a rare unguarded softness sat on him and was not remarked upon by anybody, because there was nobody looking.
An hour like this one, once in a long while. A man could very near believe the world means to let him keep something.
The afternoon stretched low and gold. The mist thinned to gauze.
And out of long habit, with no thought behind it at all, Osric turned to make his slow survey of the horizon: the road, the fields, the fold of the land back toward Valmarch.
Something on the road.
Far off, back toward the castle. His eyes fixed on it and the ease went out of his stance by a hair.
A lone rider, small with the distance, low over the neck of a hard-galloping horse, a thread of dust kicking up behind. Riding flat out. For the castle.
One rider, alone, and killing a horse to do it.
Behind him the laughter of the two girls in the tree carried on, bright and unknowing.
"Higher, I said. That's cheating, you've hands like a squirrel."
Osric lifted a hand a little. The nearer guard followed his gaze down the road and the grin died on his mouth.
"Rider," Osric said, low, nowhere near loud enough to reach the tree. "Hard for the castle."
"Serjeant?"
"Bring the Lady's horse round. Quiet." He did not take his eyes off it. "Don't spoil her hour before you must. But be ready to end it."
Far off, tiny against the grey rise, the rider reached the foot of the castle track without slowing, and the gate began to swing, and up on the wall, faint with distance, a horn sounded once.
In the apple tree, Anna stopped laughing.
She had known that man all her remembered life, and she read the stillness in his back like a page.
"Osric? What is it."
He did not answer her.
The horse came into the inner courtyard at a gallop it should not have been capable of and stopped the way an animal stops when the man on it hauls rather than asks, sliding the last few feet on the wet cobbles with its head up and its sides going like a bellows.
Throderic was on the hall steps and saw all of it.
He saw the rider come off the saddle in a way that was not dismounting, and catch himself on a guard's arm, and stand there swaying with the dust of forty miles caked into the creases of his face. He saw two grooms get to the animal, and one of them look up and shake his head very slightly, which meant the horse was finished, which meant somebody had ridden it to that point on purpose and had known they were doing it.
Somebody paid for that horse and spent it anyway. That's the news before a word's out of him.
The rider got a hand inside his coat and dragged out a sealed packet and held it up.
"The Baron. For the Baron's own hand." He was still gulping air round the words. "From Auenstadt. It's not to wait."
They brought him through into the hall and Throderic went in behind him and shut the door on the courtyard.
At that hour the hall held three men and a clerk. Heinric von Aelrich sat at the head of the long table with a cup near his hand, as ever. Sir Waldric stood at the hearth with his back to the fire and his hands behind him, warming the parts of himself that had been cold since about the year of the old King's coronation. The clerk hovered where clerks hover, at the edge of the light and out of reach of anything requiring an opinion.
No serjeant. Throderic noted the absence out of forty years of habit and put it down.
A league off in a wet orchard, walking a girl's palfrey round the apple trees. Of all the mornings.
The rider bowed and held out the packet.
"My lord Baron. From the Mint Master of Auenstadt. He bids you read it the same hour it arrives."
Heinric turned it over in his broad hand. The wax was thick and dark and the sigil pressed into it was a crown above a downward sword on a grey field, and there was a good deal more wax on that packet than any letter needs.
"House Morav," he said, low. "Auenstadt."
"That's her house, my lord." Throderic did not move from where he stood. "The one Osric carried off the Khesari. Wilhelm von Morav is her father."
Heinric broke the seal with his thumb. The wax cracked loudly in the quiet hall.
He read.
Throderic watched him do it, and watched the brow come down, and watched a man who had spent a decade learning to show nothing at a table fail at it in three places.
While he waited he shifted his weight off the right knee, which had been giving him trouble since the wet came in and which he had mentioned to nobody in that castle and did not intend to start mentioning.
Sixty-one this winter. Two more seasons. Three at the outside. Then I hand it to Osric and let him find out what the job is actually made of, and go and be a nuisance to somebody in a warm room.
He'll take it and hate it and be twice the captain I ever was, and I shall not tell him that either.