Throderic set down his mug. "What news?"
Waldric read with his jaw tightening, turning the sheet toward the firelight.
"Raids again along the eastern marches. Khesari this time. Small bands, riding fast and light. Crofts burned, horses lifted." He turned the page over. "Out of Holdridge. They chased a dozen riders as far as the Vale and lost them in the reeds."
"The barony's on the edge of that line," Osric said.
"It is." Heinric's fingers had begun to drum against the arm of his chair. "And they know it. They always test the fence before they bite."
Gerfried sniffed and stabbed his cheese with the point of his knife. "Savages. Do they ever come for anything beyond a story to carry home to their worm god?"
"Their stories are written in blood." Lambert said it in the gentle sermon cadence he used from the chapel step, which somehow made it land harder than Gerfried's contempt. "And like all faiths that revere pain, theirs is never satisfied."
Heinric set down his cup and looked up the length of the table.
"Riders posted eastward. Double the watch along the creek roads." The drumming stopped. "It makes no difference to me whether they're ghosts playing at war. Ghosts burn a field the same as men."
"I'll prepare men, my Baron."
Waldric stepped back from the hearth. "March routes redrawn by supper. If they move west again I'll not watch patrols chase shadows across half the county."
"Aye," Throderic said. "We'll have it ready."
Someone tossed a fresh log onto the fire. The stew had begun to cool in the bowls, and there was bread sitting half torn on three trenchers that nobody had gone back to.
Heinric steepled his fingers beneath his chin.
"We keep it quiet for now. No panic in the villages. But make ready." He paused. "If their scouts are this far west."
He did not finish it. There was no need.
Nobody spoke. A spoon scraped the bottom of a bowl, and the sound carried the length of the hall.
And Sir Eckhard von Thurn put both hands on the table and stood up.
"My lord."
Every head came round. Heinric closed his eyes for the space of a heartbeat, which Osric saw and nobody else did.
"Sit down, Eckhard."
"My lord, I have waited four days."
"You have waited four days for a morning when I would have nothing worse in front of me, and this is not it." The Baron gestured at the parchment on the table. "There is a Khesari band inside the marches."
"And there is a serjeant at your table who laid hands on a belted knight in front of two dozen men," Eckhard said, "and who has not been so much as spoken to for it, and I would rather be told plainly that nothing is to be done than go on waiting to hear it."
He was not shouting. That was the difficulty. He was pale and entirely steady and had rehearsed it, and there was a real grievance in among all the pride, and every man at that table knew it.
Heinric set his cup down.
"Very well," he said. "Say it, and then we are finished with it."
Eckhard turned so that he addressed the Baron and not Osric, which was correct form and which put his shoulder to Osric like a wall.
"On the ninth I came into the stable yard and found my saddle badly strapped. I said so. The man responsible answered me slowly and I told him he was slow, which I have said to servants a hundred times without a hall being called on it."
"You put your hand to your dagger," Osric said.
"I had my hand on my belt."
"You had your hand on your belt with three inches of it showing, and you told him you'd take the fingers off a man who couldn't use them properly." Osric had not raised his voice and had not stood. "There were nine men in that yard and I'll fetch every one of them if you want it done that way."
A muscle went in Eckhard's cheek.
"He is a man at arms," he said, to Heinric. "He is not a soldier of my household and he is not entitled to be answered as one, and the correction of an idle servant is not a matter for"
"He is a soldier of this garrison," said Throderic, "and you have just told this hall you'd have taken his hand off over a strap. Sit down, boy, while you've a little dignity left in your purse."
"Captain." Heinric's voice was flat. "Let him finish."
Eckhard's colour had come up now.
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"I do not deny that I was angry. I deny that a serjeant may put his hands on me. He came across that yard and he took me by the coat, in front of the men, and I told him what I would do about it and I meant every word of it."
"What did you tell him?" Waldric asked. He had not moved from the hearth.
Eckhard hesitated for the first time.
"I called him out," he said.
The hall went very still.
"You challenged him," said Waldric.
"I demanded satisfaction. Which was my right."
"Which was your right," the old knight agreed, "against a man of rank. He has none. So you stood in a stable yard and demanded satisfaction of a commoner, which is either an insult to yourself or an offer to hang him, and I should be interested to know which you intended."
"I intended him to answer for it."
"He did," said Osric.
Everybody looked at him.
"You want it said out loud, so I'll say it out loud." He set down the crust he had been holding. "You called me out. Which meant I could stand there and take it, or I could draw on a knight and swing for it, and you knew that when you said it, because it's the only reason a man says it. So I put my hand on your chest and I pushed you, and you went back three steps and sat down in a dung cart, and the whole yard laughed at you." He let a breath out through his nose. "I could have done a great many worse things and none of them would have ended
with you alive at this table. You may take that as an insult or a kindness. I've stopped minding which."
Eckhard's hand had gone white on the back of his chair.
"Lashed," he said, to the Baron. "That is what I have come here four mornings to ask for. Twenty at the post in the lower yard, in front of the garrison, and the matter is closed and I will never speak of it again."
Nobody said anything for a moment.
"No," said Waldric.
Eckhard turned. "Sir Waldric, with respect"
"With respect, boy, you have asked me for a thrashing and I am going to give you a lesson instead, which is cheaper and lasts longer." He came away from the fire at last. "There was a law in this kingdom, in my grandfather's time and for thirty years after, that a commoner might defend his own body against a man of any rank whatever, and be judged by what he did and not by whom he did it to. Sigismund wrote it. Four hundred knights were made under it and a good many more men were saved from the post by it."
"That law is dead."
"It was never repealed." Waldric said it mildly. "Nobody repeals a good law. It merely stopped being done, and then stopped being remembered, and now young men your age have grown up believing it never was."
He set his goblet on the mantel.
"You drew on a soldier over a saddle strap and then you called him out, knowing he could not answer you and could not walk away. He handled it the old way, and he handled it without steel, and the worst you took out of it was a bath. There is not a hall in this county where that reads as anything but a boy having been let off lightly."
"He is a serjeant"
"He is a serjeant with thirty years on him who could have broken you across his knee in that yard and did not." Waldric's voice did not rise. "I would think very carefully, Sir Eckhard, about which part of that morning you would like the county to remember."
Eckhard stood with his jaw working and no answer anywhere in him.
Heinric had watched all of it with his chin on his fist. Now he sat forward, and the room turned.
"Enough," he said. "Both of you have had your say and I have listened to more of it than the morning could afford.
"Sir Eckhard, there will be no lashing. Not of my serjeant and not of anybody. You put a hand to your dagger in a stable yard over a strap and you were answered without one, and if I called that a crime I should have to call half my hall to account for worse. You have my sympathy for the cart and none whatever for the reason you were sat in it."
Eckhard's mouth opened.
"And Osric." The Baron's eyes came round. "You will keep your hands to yourself in my yards. If a knight of mine misbehaves you will bring him to Throderic or to me, and you will do it before there is a crowd. I do not care that you were right. Being right in front of two dozen men is how a story starts, and I have enough stories."
"My lord."
"So." Heinric picked up his cup. "There it ends. I will hear nothing further from either of you on the subject, at this table or anywhere in this castle, and if I do I shall find work for the pair of you at opposite ends of the county until the snow comes. There is a Khesari band in my marches. I have not the patience for childish squabbling between a knight who cannot govern his temper and a serjeant who cannot govern his hands."
He drank.
"Sit down, Eckhard. Eat something. You have looked like a man going to the gallows for four days and it is putting the servants off."
There was a long moment in which the young knight might have gone either way.
Then he sat, stiffly, and pulled his trencher toward him, and did not eat anything at all.
The hall let out a breath it had been holding and began, cautiously, to make noise again. Knives went back to scraping. Mugs were refilled. Rothgar reopened his ledger with the relief of a man returning to a country he understood.
"These don't match the Lanndorf tally," he muttered.
Gerfried unfolded himself from the bench, stretched his gaunt frame with an enormous and entirely unembarrassed yawn, and made for the door.
"Wake me if the world ends," he said, to no one, and went out.
Lambert glanced once at his brother, unreadable as he generally was, and returned his attention to a very modest portion of porridge.
Osric ate the rest of his bread and did not look down the table, and could feel Eckhard not looking back.
He'll not let it lie. He hasn't the years to know how.
Outside, the wind pressed the shutters and rattled them softly. A crow cried somewhere beyond the wall. The sun had climbed far enough now to lay long gold bars across the flagstones through the slit windows, and the dust turned slowly in them.
Heinric set down his cup, pushed back his chair with a scrape, and rose. He swept the hall with a look like a man measuring timber before a storm. Then he went out, and Waldric fell in behind him with a whisper of robes and boot leather.
Throderic got to his feet and rolled a stiff shoulder.
"Well," he said. "You let him lose it."
"He did most of it himself."
"He did all of it himself. That's what twenty gets you." The captain glanced back down the hall, where the young knight still sat alone in front of a full trencher. "Watch that one on the road, Osric. Not here. On the road, when he's had a season to think about it."
They went out into the brightening courtyard, and the cold came at Osric sharper for the warmth he had left behind. Down in the lower yard the chapel bell rang once, calling to prayers that not one soldier in Valmarch would attend.
His mind had already gone on ahead of him, turning over names and patrol routes and what remained in the grain stores, and the thin line of steel that would have to hold if the horse lords truly came this time.
There was work to be done.