There were four of theirs left and they were good, and they knew the ground better, and they were not trying to win. They were trying to break contact and get back to the two who had gone after the quarry, and twice they nearly did it, and both times Erryk was standing in the wrong place for them with that falchion and they had to come round again.
Alden lost his axe in a man's collarbone and could not get it out and went on with a bauernwehr off his belt, roaring the entire time, and took a cut across the forearm that he did not notice for another ten minutes.
Osric wheeled and could not find his son, and then found him, and the shout came out of him before he had decided on it.
"ARGILAC. YOUR LEFT."
The boy was pressed hard by a man half again his size, both of them on foot now, blades ringing off one another in the dark. His feet were good. His left side was wide open.
And out beyond the fighting, at the edge of the light, a Khesari sat his horse with his bow drawn and an arrow on the string.
He was not aiming at the quarry.
He had not once aimed at the quarry.
He was aiming at Argilac.
Osric put his heels in and drove the horse across the ground between them with his shield arm up and his shoulder low, and he did not decide to do it and did not think about it and would not afterward be able to describe any part of it.
The string snapped.
The arrow went through the pauldron.
He heard it happen more than he felt it, a hard flat punch and a sound like a nail going into green wood, and then his whole left side lit up and the arm stopped being his. The head had gone through the plate and through the mail beneath it and into the meat of the shoulder and it was still in there, and the shaft stood out of him at an angle that his eye kept trying to correct.
He did not stop.
He came out of the saddle onto the archer and the shaft caught on the man's shoulder as they went down together and snapped off short, and Osric heard himself make a noise he had not made in years.
Then he put the messer into him, low and hard, no art in it, meat and steel, and felt the point catch on something inside and shoved and twisted and tore it free.
The man folded over and slid off him and did not make any sound at all.
To the east the last of them broke.
One turned in the saddle to loose a final shaft and Alden's bauernwehr took him in the back, thrown, badly, but hard enough. Another got up to a gallop and went about eighty yards before he came off, and nobody could say afterward whether he had been hit or whether the horse had put a foot in a hole.
And then it was over.
It had taken, from the first horse coming off the slope to the last man going down, somewhat under five minutes, and every man there would have sworn to an hour.
The hollow stank of opened bowel and churned earth and horse. Bodies lay across the grass, steaming faintly. Somewhere off in the dark a wounded animal was making a sound that would go on for a while yet, and Erryk went and dealt with it without being asked.
Alden hauled his axe out of a dead man's collarbone with a wet dragging sound that hung in the cold air. Rutger was already going round the fallen with his knife out, checking, in the flat practical way of a man who has learned what a lying-down enemy can still do.
Ansel sat in the grass holding his shoulder and swearing without much conviction while Doran cut his sleeve away to look at it.
"It's nothing."
"It's four inches and it's deep. Hold still."
Argilac stood where the fighting had left him with his chest heaving and his messer hanging from his hand and his eyes fixed on the shape in the mud at his feet.
Osric came off his horse and crossed the ground toward him.
His left arm hung. There was a broken stub of shaft standing out of the pauldron and something under the plate that moved when he moved and made
a grinding he could feel in his teeth. He was aware of it and it did not seem important. The blood was still up in him and there was a high thin note behind his ears and his good hand had begun to shake.
"Boy."
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Argilac turned round.
"If you ever ride off like that again"
And the field went out from under him.
Not entirely. Not the way it went in the chair by the fire. He was still on his feet and could still hear Ansel swearing thirty feet away.
But the mud under his boots had been under his boots before, and the smell was the same smell, and the bodies were lying at the wrong angles the way they always lay at the wrong angles.
And the young man standing in front of him was standing exactly where Erik had stood.
Twelve years gone. A month after their father, near enough to the day. Erik at four and thirty with his helm off because he could never keep one on his head, laughing at something, in a field with the light going, and Osric had seen the riders come round the end of the hedge before Erik had and had shouted.
He had shouted his brother's name across sixty yards of open ground.
And Erik had heard him. That was the part that had never once let go. He had heard, and he had turned, and he had looked straight at Osric with an expression that was still asking what the matter was.
He heard me. He turned round. It made no difference at all.
There was rain on his face and there was no rain. There was his brother's face turning toward him with the question still on it. There was his father's head in his hands and the rain falling into the open eyes because there was nobody left to close them.
Twelve years, and the two of them inside a month, and by the time the year was out there had been a third piece of news waiting for him that he had not been there for either, and he had come home the following spring to a house with two boys in it and nobody else at all.
"Father."
Somebody had hold of his wrist.
"Father. Father, look at me."
Osric came back.
He was standing in a frozen hollow with his fist closed in his son's collar and the mail bunched up under Argilac's chin, and he had no memory whatever of taking hold of him. Not the reach. Not the grip. His arm was locked out straight and his hand had gone white on the leather.
It was his right hand. The left could not have done it. He noticed that afterward and it did not comfort him.
Argilac was not fighting him. That was worse than if he had been. He had both hands up round Osric's wrist and he was not pulling, only holding on, and his face two feet away had gone the colour of the frost.
Six men were watching. Osric could feel them not moving.
"How long," he said.
Argilac swallowed. "What?"
"How long have I been stood here."
"I don't" The boy's voice cracked on it. "A little while. You said watch your guard. Twice. Then you stopped and you didn't say anything else and you didn't let go."
Osric opened his hand.
The fingers did not want to. He got them off the collar one at a time and stepped back a pace and stood there with the stub of the shaft standing out of his shoulder and his heart going hard and nothing at all to say.
He had done that four times in two years. Twice at home, where it had been nothing and Anna had put a cup in his hands and talked about paint until it passed. Once on the wall at dawn, in front of nobody. And once, now, with his hand on his own son in front of six of his men.
"That wasn't"
He stopped.
Tell him. Tell him you weren't seeing him. Tell him you were seeing a man dead thirty years who had your grandfather's jaw and could never keep a helm on his head, and that it is not the same and never was.
He could not get any of it into a shape that would come out of his mouth.
"You do not throw yourself away," he said instead, low and rough. "Not for pride. Not for haste. You had orders."
"I know."
"You do not"
"I know." Argilac's hands had come down. He was still very pale. "Father, I know."
Osric turned away from him and walked six steps and stood with his back to the whole hollow and put his good hand on the pommel of his saddle, and breathed, and did not turn round again until he could.
Erryk came past his shoulder a moment later on his way to the horses, and did not stop, and did not look at him.
"He's fine," Erryk said quietly, as he went. "So are you. Get that head out of your shoulder before it goes green."
Up on the low ridge, the rider they had come down that slope after was circling back.
The horse was finished. It came on at a trot and the trot was ugly, and the rider let it come rather than making it, and stopped it thirty feet short of the nearest of them.
Then the hood came back.
A woman. Perhaps five and twenty. Her face was pale from the cold and the riding and finely made under the dirt, and her black hair was braided tight and knotted at the back of her head with strands of it stuck to her cheek. Her eyes were green and there was more sharpness in them than fear.
She came down out of the saddle before anybody offered her a hand, and did it well, and had to put a hand on the animal's neck afterward to stay upright.
For a moment nobody said anything at all. Nine men stood in a field of dead men and looked at her, and she looked back at them and did not move.
"My name is Isolde," she said.
She let it sit there.
Osric waited. He waited a good deal longer than was comfortable, because a woman who begins with a name generally goes on to the rest of it, and every person present knew what was supposed to come next.
Nothing came.
"Isolde," he said.
"Yes."
"And whose daughter?"
"Does it matter?"
"It does to the man who has to explain you at a gate." He kept his voice easy. "I'm Osric, serjeant of the garrison at Valmarch, and that's my name and my house and my business all in one breath, and it cost me nothing to say."
"Then you're fortunate in your house."
That answered a good deal.
Osric let it go, for the moment, and looked her over instead. Riding dress, dark, good cloth badly used. Boots that had been made for her. Mud to the knee and three days of hedge in her hair, and no ring on either hand and a paler band on one finger where something had been until recently.
And under her collar, running down out of sight, the line of a cord.