Weeks went by, and the doubled watch became simply the watch, the way any new burden does once men have carried it long enough to stop naming it. The creek roads were ridden twice a day instead of once. Beacon fuel was stacked under oilcloth at three of the farmsteads. Nothing came of it, which the younger soldiers took for proof that nothing would, and the older ones took for nothing at all.
Then the season turned in earnest. The trees along the creek road went bronze and yellow and began to let go, and the curled leaves drifted down in silence to gather at the wayside. The cold that followed was not the sharp kind. It arrived slowly and stayed, settling into the bones without asking leave.
What had been rumour in the hall became something a man could count. A herd gone out of Marden's pasture. A granary at the Vale emptied and not burned, which was worse. Hoofprints in the wet earth beyond the stone line, unshod, running in a loose file that no drover in the county would have used.
Nine of them rode out on the fourth morning of the month.
Osric took the head of the column with his cloak drawn tight and his eyes on the road where it twisted between thinning woodland and low walls half swallowed by moss. Argilac kept close on his right, alert and silent. Doran rode the rear with his boar spear couched in the stirrup cup and watched the road behind. Beside him went Voss, short and bow legged, his crossbow slung across his back and spanning cord looped at his belt. Alden rode at Osric's left with a stoop that did not suit his size, his axe easy at his hip. Erryk brought up the flank, a mountain of a man in mail, his left eye lost beneath a pale scar that cut deep across the cheekbone.
The other three rode in the middle of the file where the middle of a file goes.
Wilkin was nineteen and had been with the garrison since the spring, a wheelwright's second son out of the near village who had joined because his brother had the trade and there was nothing else for him. He rode badly and knew it and had spent four months determined to fix it. Ansel was thirty and had come across from Hochbergen's levy years ago and never entirely explained why, and he had a wife in the lower lane and two daughters and a laugh like a gate hinge. Rutger was the oldest of the three and the quietest, a man of about forty with a farmer's shoulders who had served eleven years and had never once been recommended for anything, and who did what he was told with a thoroughness Osric had come to rely on without ever saying so.
They were the three whose turn it was. Nothing else went into choosing them.
The land opened as they went east. Forest gave way to long stretches of pale field and windswept heath, and the trees thinned into gnarled hedgerows and stone walls that the overgrowth had been eating for a generation. The soil out here was thin and poor. Harvests came late and never came in plenty, and every shape on the horizon looked worn down by the effort of being on it.
There were not many people. A farmstead every mile or two, set well back from the road and hunched down into the ground, with a byre and a midden and a dog that started barking before you were in sight of it. Between them, nothing but hedge and heath and the wind coming off the high country.
Two hours out, Voss got started.
"I'll say it if nobody else will. They've no business being here."
"They've been on the marches since before your father was whelped," said Alden.
"Aye, on the marches. On the edge of them." Voss leaned out to point his chin at the country ahead. "A dozen of them, twenty at the outside, in and gone in a morning. Lift a herd, fire a rick, run for the passes. That's a Khesari raid and I'd not be sat here talking about it."
Erryk grunted from the flank. "Then talk about what you mean and stop circling it."
"I mean they've come three days deep." Voss twisted round in the saddle. "Past the stone line. Past Orswood. Past four farms they could have burned on the way and didn't. What's out here worth that, when the Brennocs are sitting right on their road with better cattle and softer walls?"
Nobody answered him for a while.
That was the difficulty, and every man in the column knew the shape of it. The Khesari came over the mountains for the Brennoc lands. They had done it for as long as anybody had a story about it. The Brennocs bled and burned and gave ground and took it back, and the marches got the leavings: small bands, thin bands, the ones who had come round the long way and were looking for something easier than a tribal war-camp.
"Might be the Brennocs are tired of it," Argilac said. "If they've been hit hard enough this year, there'd be nothing left worth taking."
"There's always something left worth taking off a Brennoc," said Alden.
"Two years ago there wasn't." Doran's voice came from the rear, level and unhurried. "We saw to that."
This novel's true home is a different platform. Support the author by finding it there.
The column went quiet.
"We saw to some of it," Erryk allowed.
"We burned Caer Dunnoch's fields down to the sills so the prince could put his own name on the fort, and then we sat in it through a winter eating our own horses." Doran said it without heat, the way he said most things. "And then they came over the marches and burned ours. So if you're asking why the Khesari are riding through Brennoc country and not stopping in it, that might be the answer. There's nothing there to stop for."
"Serwinsfeste," said Voss, with relish.
"Aye."
"There's a name to carve on a hill." Voss spat. "Caer Dunnoch for eight hundred years, and a prince rides up, takes it in a fortnight, loses four hundred men doing it, and names it after himself before the ground's even hard."
"He took it," said Argilac.
"He took it." Erryk said it flatly. "And two years on we've got a hillfort we can't garrison, a village of Brennocs who'd cut our throats for the practice, and every stick of feed east of the Ellen burned twice. If that's a victory I'd sooner we lost the next one."
Osric had not said anything.
He rode with his eyes on the hedgerows and let them have it, because they were right and because there was no profit in a serjeant agreeing out loud with any of it.
"So which is it?" Argilac asked, and he asked it of his father, which the others noticed. "Have the Brennocs got nothing left, and these are hungry men come further than they'd like? Or is it something else?"
"Hungry men don't come three days deep," Osric said. "Hungry men take the first byre they find and go home. These have ridden past four."
"Then they're looking for something."
"Or somebody's told them where to look." Rutger said it from the middle of the file, and it was the first sentence out of him since they had left the gate.
Erryk turned his head. "That's a large thought for a Tuesday."
"It's a large country to get lost in." Rutger shrugged. "I'm only saying a man doesn't ride past four farms unless he knows there's a fifth."
Nobody had an answer to that, and the column rode on in a silence that was not entirely comfortable.
To the south the rise sloped away toward a farmstead sitting alone in its fields, low roofed and moss blanketed, with its shutters closed tight. A lean column of smoke curled from the chimney. Nobody stood in the yard. No children played in the ditch. There was a dog somewhere and it did not bark.
"They've heard," Alden said.
"Aye." Osric kept his eyes on it as they passed. "And they're waiting to see who comes riding first. Our men or theirs."
They went on more slowly after that, hoofbeats muffled by soft earth and wet leaf. A murder of crows burst out of the trees to their right and scattered into the grey. The road narrowed and dipped into a shallow vale flanked by ridges of crumbling stone, and the breeze that came up out of it carried peat smoke, and beneath the peat smoke something else. Faint. Distinct.
Burnt straw. Char. And under the char, thinly, the sweetish edge that comes after.
Osric raised a gloved hand and the column halted behind him.
"Doran. The next rise. Quietly."
The dark haired man gave a sharp nod and urged his horse ahead, and was gone into the folds of the land like a shadow sliding across water.
Argilac eased his mount alongside his father's. "That's no hearth fire."
"No."
They waited. Voss checked the cord on his crossbow and muttered something to himself. Erryk swung down with a grunt and stretched his legs, one hand resting on the hilt of his falchion while the other rubbed absently at the scar. Wilkin's horse shifted under him and he corrected it too hard, and Rutger reached across without a word and steadied the bridle.
"I don't like this quiet," Alden said. "Not a bird singing in it."
Doran came back at a trot a few minutes later with his horse lathered and his face set.
"Farmstead over the rise. Still smoking." He drew up. "And you'll want to see it rather than have it told."
"How many?"
"Three that I counted from the track. There'll be more in the barn."
"Dismount."
The order was obeyed without a word. Boots came down heavily in the damp leaf litter. Voss pulled his crossbow free and spanned it, and Argilac tightened the strap on his vambrace, and the nine of them went up the slope on foot.
They crested it, and saw.
The house stood at the centre of the yard as a charred skeleton, its beams blackened and bowed inward where the fire had eaten the strength out of them, still leaking thin grey tendrils into the air. The barn had fared no better. Its roof had sagged into the frame and the straw within had gone to cinder. Ash lay over everything, over the well cover and the fence posts and the trampled mud of the yard, fine and pale as the first fall of a bad winter.
The first man was face down between the house and the byre with a thrown spear still in him. He had been running for the byre when it caught him and had not been given a chance at whatever was in there.
The second lay across the threshold of the house with his arms flung out and his head turned away, and there was a bill hook a foot from his hand that he had either dropped or never reached.
The third was the oldest and he was in the yard on his back near the well, and he had been given a chance, because there was a good deal of blood in the mud around him that had not come out of his own body.
Osric walked down into it slowly.
"Doran. The barn."
"Aye, Serjeant."
He came back inside a minute, and stopped at the barn door and stood in it, and did not come the rest of the way.
"Two more. A boy of about fifteen and a man that's likely his father." His voice did not change and his face did. "They were in there together and the door was barred from the inside."
Nobody said anything.
Ansel had gone three paces past the well and stopped, and was looking at the ground beside the water trough.
There was a wooden doll there, half burnt, one carved arm gone.
He crouched and picked it up and turned it over, and then looked round the yard, slowly, at the house and the byre and the barn and the ground between them, and everybody knew what he was doing because they had all begun doing it themselves.
Five men. Four grown and one nearly.
And nobody else at all.
"There's no women here," Ansel said.
"No."
"Nor children." He was still holding the doll. "There was a child in this yard, Serjeant. There's a doll and there's a cot in what's left of that house and I can see the drying line from here with a small shift on it, half burned off, and there's nobody."
"I know."
"Then where are they?"
Osric did not answer him, because there was only one answer and Ansel had already worked it out and was asking anyway.