Ansel had the last of his bread in one hand and was turning something over in the other, a small flat piece of carved bone on a leather thong, and he caught Wilkin watching him do it.
"My eldest." He held it out. "She did the face herself. Six years old and she got the nose wrong on purpose, because I'd told her mine was already wrong."
Wilkin turned it toward the firelight and grinned. "It's a good nose."
"It is not, and she knows it." Ansel took it back and put it away inside his shirt. "The little one'll want one now. That's how it goes. Everything twice in my house, and both of them shouting."
Rutger spoke from the dark by the door.
"Sit further off the fire. The light's on your faces from outside."
Everybody moved.
Voss waited until the food was nearly gone before he started on the King.
"You'll not have heard about the hand."
"Here we go," said Alden.
"No, listen. A carter out of Brannen told me this and he had it off a man who'd been in the capital at Blindemartide." Voss leaned in. "The King doesn't speak. That much everybody knows. But this fellow says it's because he can't. Says his tongue's gone black in his head."
Erryk snorted into his cup.
"He says. Says the chancellor keeps him in a chair by the window with a cloth over his knees, and the King sits there all day pointing at things with his left hand, and nobody can work out what he's pointing at, and there's a clerk paid four marks a year to write down where he points."
"That's a lie," said Doran.
"It's a good lie."
"It's a stupid lie. Four marks a year to a clerk. You could buy a clerk outright for four marks."
"Then the clerk's part is a lie and the rest is true," Voss said, entirely unbothered. "Which is how it goes with the court. There's truth in there somewhere and it's got nine coats on."
Argilac had set his blade across his knee and was working the edge with a stone. "What do they say about the princes?"
"Ah." Voss brightened. "Now that I've had four ways and I'll give you the best two.
"First: Serwin and Marek have divided the court between them and it's got so bad that the chancellor won't let them into the same room, and when they must both attend, the elder comes in by one door and the younger by another, and there's a table put crossways so neither can reach the other."
"That's not so wild."
"No, and that's what makes me believe it. The wild one's better. There's a merchant sworn to me at Lindebrae last spring that Prince Marek has a Rhennic astrologer he keeps in a locked room, and that the man's been reading Serwin's birth hour for a year, and has told him the elder will die inside three years without any hand raised, and that Marek's been sat waiting on it ever since like a cat at a mousehole."
"That's a hanging offence," said Ansel.
"It's a hanging offence twice over and that's why it's a good story."
"You believe it?"
"I believe a man told it to me for the price of a drink, and I believe he told it to nine other men that week for the same price, and I believe there's a prince somewhere at the bottom of it who's waiting for his brother to die." Voss shrugged. "Whether he's paid an astrologer to tell him when, I couldn't say. But I know how I'd bet."
"You'd bet on the astrologer," said Alden, "because you've never once bet on the dull answer in your life."
"The dull answer's never once won me a supper either."
Erryk had gone quiet, and when he spoke it was not to Voss.
"It's Serwin I'd want to know about," he said. "Not for the court. For here."
That changed the room.
"Two years ago he was on the Ellen with eleven thousand men," Erryk went on, "and if his brother's got him marked and the King can't hold either of them, then the next time a prince wants a victory to wave in a hall, where do you suppose he'll come looking for one?"
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"East," said Doran.
"East. Because it's cheap and it's far away and nobody at court has to look at it." Erryk spat into the fire. "And we'll be stood on that same river again holding his flank while he names another hill after himself."
Wilkin, who had not said anything all evening, spoke up from the wall.
"Was he a good commander? The prince?"
There was a pause of the sort that goes round a fire when a young man asks a question the older ones have decided not to answer in front of him.
"He was brave," said Rutger.
"He was brave," Alden agreed, "in the way of a man who's never once been left to carry anybody."
"He was twenty-four," said Osric.
Everybody looked at him, because he had not spoken since the food went round.
"That's not a defence of him. It's the sum of it." He turned the cup on his knee. "He was twenty-four and it was his first command and he had eleven thousand men and three earls telling him what a fine fellow he was, and he pushed when he ought to have held. We took the fort. It cost what it cost. If they'd given him another five years and a smaller army he might have been worth following."
"You met him," Wilkin said.
"I stood in a line he rode along."
"That's meeting him."
"It's not." Osric said it without any edge. "He went down the line after the crossing and said something to about one man in twenty. He said something to me. I couldn't tell you now what it was and I doubt I could have told you that evening, and he'd not have known my face an hour later. That's not a slight on him. There were four thousand of us and he was one man on a horse."
Voss had been waiting, and now he leaned in with the grin of a man about to spend a coin he had been saving.
"He'd have known your face if he'd seen the ford."
"Voss."
"I'm only saying." Voss turned to Wilkin, who had gone very still and very attentive. "You'll not have heard this, lad, because he'll not tell it and Argilac won't either.
"Hallenmark. Two summers back. There's a crossing on the Ellen and the whole army's on the wrong side of it, and the Brennocs come down off the ridge in the afternoon meaning to take the near bank and pen us. And there's one man on that bank with forty spears and no orders, and he holds it. All afternoon. Forty against six hundred, and when the relief comes up at dusk there's your serjeant standing in the water with the bank behind him and not a Brennoc across it."
"Thirty-one," said Osric.
Voss stopped.
"There were thirty-one of us. Not forty." He was looking at the fire. "And it was not six hundred. It was a warband of perhaps two hundred and they were not trying to take the bank, they were trying to get their own people back across it, and the difference matters, because a man fighting to get home fights differently from a man fighting to take something."
Nobody said anything.
"And there were no orders because the man who had the orders was dead in the reeds forty yards upstream, and I did not choose to hold that ford, I could not get off it." Osric turned the cup once. "Nine of us walked off that bank. Nine out of thirty-one. The relief came up at dusk because it came up at dusk and not because anybody sent it."
The fire popped and the room stayed quiet.
Voss cleared his throat.
"Aye. Well. That's how I heard it told."
"I know how it's told." Osric drank the last of his cup and set it down. "It's told better than it happened. They generally are."
He got up and went to see to the horses, and the flap of his cloak in the doorway was the last of it, and nobody at the fire said one word until they heard him move off outside.
"Nine," said Wilkin, quietly.
"Aye." Erryk was looking at the doorway. "And he'll tell you the names of the other two and twenty if you're ever fool enough to ask him, and he'll not stop until he's done, and you'll wish you hadn't."
Osric came back in after a while, and the talk had moved on to a mule that Alden had once bought and regretted, and he sat back down against the wall and let it go over him.
The fire burned down to coals. Outside the wind rose and worried at the half broken shutter until it clacked against the stone, over and over, at intervals just irregular enough to keep a tired man from sleeping through them. Far off down in the hollow a fox barked once and thought better of it.
Erryk got up and sheathed his blade.
"First watch. Doran, with me."
"You'd said Rutger."
"I've changed it." Erryk said it without explanation, and Doran, who was quick, did not ask for one in front of the boy.
Osric let it stand. He had set Rutger with Doran and Erryk with Ansel, and Erryk had rearranged it inside ten seconds without appearing to, and the result put the two steadiest men in the party on the darkest hours and the two youngest on the ones nearest dawn.
He had been going to do the same and had not got round to saying so.
They took their cloaks and went out into the dark, boots thudding down the stair, and after that there was only the wind and the small sounds of the others settling.
Osric went out once more before he slept, and found Wilkin sitting on the bottom tread of the ruined stair with his back against the stone and his knees up.
The boy got to his feet fast enough to bang his elbow on the wall.
"Sit down."
He sat down.
Osric leaned against the door frame and looked out at the dark country rather than at him.
"You're not on till before dawn."
"I know, Serjeant."
"Then sleep."
"I will." A pause. "I'd only lie there listening."
Osric let that be, and after a moment the boy found something else to say, in the tone of a young man handing over a small offence in the hope of getting it over with.
"At the farm. I couldn't stop looking at the doll."
"I saw."
"I know it's nothing to look at. There were five men on that ground and I kept looking at a bit of carved wood." Wilkin's hands were between his knees. "Ansel had to turn me round like I was a child."
"Ansel turned you round because he'd been looking at it for a quarter of an hour himself and needed something to do with his hands." Osric watched a cloud go off the moon. "You'd not have known that. Now you do."
Wilkin thought about it.
"Does it get easier?"
"Some of it. The wrong parts."
The boy did not have an answer to that, and Osric did not offer him anything further, and after a moment he pushed off the frame.
"Get your head down, lad. You've the cold watch and I'd sooner you were awake for it."
He went out to the horses. Behind him he heard the boy get up and go back inside, and lie down, and take a good while about going quiet.
Osric lay down eventually with his cloak over him and his messer within reach of his hand, as he had done for thirty years, and listened to the shutter tap against the stone and the men going quiet one by one.
The corner by the stair was six feet from where he lay, and he did not look at it, and slept badly, and told himself in the morning that it had been the cold.