Rutger crossed to him and took the doll out of his hand and set it down where it had been, gently, and put a hand on his shoulder and turned him toward the fence line, and the two of them stood looking at the fields until Ansel had got hold of himself.
"They took them off the road," Erryk said quietly, to Osric. "Same as they took the herd out of Marden's. Steppe men count wealth in what walks."
"I know what they count."
Osric crossed to the ruined hearth and knelt beside it, and the stones still held a faint warmth when he laid the back of his hand near them. Half a day, perhaps. Not more than one. He picked up a charred slat and turned it over and found the far side barely scorched, which meant the fire had been fed and tended rather than merely set.
He got up off his knee and looked at the yard properly.
Nothing had been carried out. That was the part that stayed with him. There was a good iron pot still hanging in the wreck of the house, and a scythe blade against the byre wall, and a fowl or two dead in the dust that nobody had troubled to pick up.
They had taken the people and left the property, and then they had stayed long enough to build the fire up.
Doran found it first, and said nothing, and only looked at it until the others came.
A crooked stake had been driven into the earth beside the trail at the yard's edge, at the height of a mounted man's eye. From it hung a scrap of cloth dyed deep red, and painted on it in some crude black pigment was a spiral serpent with its own tail clutched in its teeth.
Voss swore under his breath. "Same mark as Holdridge."
"They left it for us," said Doran.
"They're not raiding for cattle any more." Osric said it looking at the cloth. "This was a message."
Argilac looked over. "For us?"
"For anybody who comes past and can read it."
"Then it's a poor one," said Erryk, "because I've been reading Khesari sign for twenty years and I can't make anything of this. They fire a farm three days inside our border, take the women, leave the pot and the scythe and a live goat in the paddock, and then stop to put a flag up." He shook his head slowly. "Raiders don't advertise. Raiders want a fortnight's head start."
"Unless they want us out here," said Rutger.
Voss looked round at him. "You're a cheerful sod today."
"I'm a cold sod today. There's a difference."
Osric stood a moment longer with the wind moving the ash round his boots.
"We mark the site," he said. "The five of them go under stone. We've no time to dig and no priest and no way to carry them, so we'll do what we can and we'll do it fast, and I'll tell Lambert where the ground is when we're home."
"And the flag?" Voss asked.
"Leave it up," said Osric. "Somebody else may want to read it. But we'll answer it."
They built the cairn at the yard's edge with fist sized rocks off the field wall, and it was a poor crooked heap of a monument and it took the better part of an hour with nine men working. They laid the five under it as decently as the ground allowed. Rutger set to the work faster than any of them and never once looked up. Wilkin carried stones and kept glancing back at the doll by the trough until Ansel took him by the shoulder and turned him round.
Lambert would have said something over it. Osric knew about six words of the rite and used all of them and stopped, because a man who half remembers a prayer does the dead no honour by guessing at the rest.
When the last stone was set he went to the stake and took hold of it and drove it deeper into the earth, twisting as he pushed, until the shaft sat solid and the cloth hung level.
Then he drew his messer and cut the serpent in two across the middle with one stroke, and left both halves hanging.
"There," he said. "Let them read that."
He mounted without ceremony, his cloak catching in the wind as he settled into the saddle.
"West through the next valley, then back to the watchtower by dusk."
You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.
Erryk swung up with surprising grace for a man his size. "Suits me. I've had enough of this yard."
Nobody joked. They rode out with the smoke thinning behind them and the cairn small and grey at the fence line, and the two halves of the serpent turning slowly on the stake in the wind.
The trail dipped into a hollow and the ruin went out of sight behind them.
They rode tighter after that. The country grew quieter and lonelier and the trees thickened along the path, black branches scraping against one another with a sound like something dragging.
Ahead, the old road wound down toward the creek valley, where the barony's outer watchtower stood half forgotten on the crest of its hill. It would give them no comfort. It would give them height, and from height a man could see what was waiting in the far hills, and on that particular evening Osric would have traded a good deal of comfort for the chance to look.
Dusk had begun to gather in the folds of the land by the time they reached the old tower. The sky had gone to bronze and slate with the last amber of the day streaked low across it, and the wind came colder now, carrying the promise of a frost that would arrive early this year and be resented for it.
The tower stood alone on a rise above the creekbed, squat and half sunk into the hillside as though it had been trying for a century to sit down. Its lower courses were rough stone, laid by men who knew their work. The upper levels had been patched at some later date with timber and daub that the moss had since claimed. One side had partly collapsed a generation ago and left the east facing rooms open to the weather. The stairs still held. The roof had not yet given way. It had watched this stretch of the marches for the better part of seven generations and went on standing out of stubbornness rather than out of any care shown it.
Osric drew rein at the foot of the track and sat looking at it a moment longer than the others.
He had been inside it four times. Twice as a young man in his first season of border work, when the place still kept a garrison of four and a fire that never entirely went out. Once on a wet autumn night with nothing worse to fear than the weather.
And once, two summers past, with eleven men and a Brennoc war party between him and home.
They had been out past the Ellen when the country turned on them, which it did that whole season without warning and without pattern. Cattle men one week and three hundred spears the next. He had lost four in the open ground getting to the hill and had brought eight up the track, and by the second morning two of the eight had been past helping and had known it, and had spent the day in the corner by the stair asking for water he could not spare and then, later, asking for other things.
Somebody had come for them on the fourth day. The Baron's riders, out looking for a patrol that had failed to report. Osric had walked down that track with six men and had taken the news of the other two to their families himself, and had not been back to the tower since.
"Serjeant?"
Argilac had drawn up beside him.
"Nothing." Osric put his heels to the horse. "Get them in."
Voss swung down and looked the tower over with an expert's contempt.
"Ugly as I remember. Still beats sleeping with my face in a ditch."
"You'd sleep in a ditch if there was a wineskin at the bottom of it," Alden said, tying his reins to a crooked post.
"Only if I knew you hadn't pissed in it first."
Osric left them to it and ducked under the low beam of the doorway.
The interior was dark and musty and thick with the smell of cold stone and old rot, but it was dry, and dry counted for a good deal. A few broken stools lay heaped in the corner where somebody had piled them years ago and never come back. The firepit at the centre was intact, ringed with scorched stone and blackened earth, the ash in it old enough to have set hard.
He did not look at the corner by the stair. He had known he was not going to look at it since the moment the tower came into sight, and he did not, and that was the end of it.
Argilac had followed him in and was scanning the country behind them through the gap in the wall.
"Watches," Osric said. "Doran and Rutger first. Erryk and Ansel after. Voss and Wilkin before dawn."
The boy nodded and went out to relay it, and did it without hesitation and without embellishing any part of it.
The men moved into the quiet routine. Packs came down. Cloaks were shaken out and spread. Weapons were checked over by touch in the failing light, edges thumbed, straps tested. Voss wandered off behind a scrub of hawthorn. Erryk took up a position at the base of the ruined stair, leaning on his spear with his one good eye fixed east where the hills were going dark.
Rutger went round the horses without being asked and checked every girth and every hoof, and found a stone in the near hind of Wilkin's mount and worked it out with a pick, and said nothing about it to anybody.
Osric knelt at the firepit and built it small: dead wood off the overhang, a handful of straw out of his saddlebag, flint struck against steel until the third spark took. The flame caught slowly and reluctantly, the way flame does in a cold room, and he fed it and got it standing.
Argilac crouched beside him.
"No sign of anything close. Doran says the valley's quiet."
"They're out there."
He put another piece of wood on and watched the shadows begin to crawl up the walls. The fire gave off very little heat but it pushed the damp back a pace. The tower creaked once in the wind and groaned like a ship at its moorings, and something in the rafters, a sparrow perhaps, shifted and resettled.
They ate in the low steady glow. Smoked sausage went hand to hand, hard and oily and welcome. A wedge of soft white cheese followed it, then coarse brown bread that crumbled more than it sliced. The wine came last, thin and sharp, drawn out of a worn goatskin and passed round without ceremony.
"A poor man's feast," Voss said, lifting his cup.
"Better than cold oats and silence." Alden chewed slowly, looking at nothing.
Erryk sat near the fire with his legs stretched out, the scar across his ruined eye catching and losing the flame, turning a sausage on the tip of his dagger over the embers.
"Could use mustard."
"You want spice, go marry a Rhennic widow." Voss spoke round a mouthful of bread. "They say they keep it under the tongue."
"I was married once." Erryk let a beat go by. "Once."
Argilac looked up. "Was she blind?"
"Not at first."
The laughter that went round was low and tired, rolling through the room like far off thunder and going out as fast. Osric, seated with his back against the wall, said nothing, though the corners of his mouth moved as he chewed.