She did not touch it. Not once, in all the talk that followed, and Osric would remember that afterward with more interest than he gave it at the time.
"How many were with you?"
Her chin came up slightly, and she thought about it, and answered.
"Four and twenty."
Behind Osric somebody said something under his breath. Erryk, probably.
"Four and twenty," Osric repeated.
"Sworn men. Mounted, mailed, and paid for the season."
"Where?"
"Two days east. An hour past a village with a great oak in it, on the road that runs down to the river crossing." She was looking somewhere between his boots and the grass. "They came out of the treeline on both sides at once. Not in front. Both sides, at once, at the place where the road narrows and a man cannot turn a cart."
Erryk had come up on Osric's left and was listening.
"How long did it last?"
"I don't know. Somebody took my bridle and turned my horse and struck it, and I went back down the road the way we had come, and there were men fighting behind me and then there was nobody." Her jaw worked once. "I have been three days in the trees. I don't know what became of them."
Nobody offered her anything on that.
"They came for me," she said. "Not the baggage. Nobody touched the carts. I could see the carts standing in the road when I looked back, and there was nobody on them."
Alden shifted his weight. Osric did not look at him.
"And twelve on your heels since."
"Not the same twelve. There were more the first day." She got a breath. "They kept finding me. I moved at night and I lit nothing and I went off the roads entirely, and they kept finding me, and I have spent three days trying to understand how and I cannot."
Osric let a moment go by.
"Four and twenty sworn men is a company, my lady. Somebody was paying wages. Somebody was moving you somewhere, and you were three days east of anywhere worth going on the river road, and there's not a great deal out that way but the crossing and what lies beyond it."
She said nothing.
"You'll not tell me who."
"No."
"Nor where you were bound."
"No."
He nodded slowly.
"Then you'll not be offended when I say I don't believe a word of what you haven't said."
Something went across her face that might have been the beginning of a smile and did not get anywhere near finishing.
"I'd think less of you if you did."
"Aye." Osric turned to see about the horses. "You'll have food and water and a place by our fire, such as it is, and men round you who'll be awake. There's nothing under the offer. But tomorrow I'll want the truth, and I'll want it before we're in sight of Valmarch, because I'll not walk something into my own walls that I can't put a name to."
He heard her let out a breath behind him.
"Serjeant."
He stopped.
"My horse is finished," Isolde said. "I know she is. I've known since noon and I kept on anyway."
"Aye. She'll not carry you another league."
"Then I'd rather it was quick, and I'd rather it wasn't me."
Osric looked at the mare a moment. Ribs going like a bellows, head down, one hind leg not taking any weight at all.
"Rutger."
"Serjeant."
"See to the lady's horse."
Rutger went and got his knife and did it well and did it out of her sight, and Isolde stood with her back to it and her hands closed at her sides and did not flinch when it happened.
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Osric led his own horse over to her.
"You'll ride mine."
"You're hurt. There's a piece of arrow in you."
"There is. It'll keep four hours and it'll keep better than you will." He offered his good hand. "Up."
She took it. Her fingers were cold and her grip was firm, and getting her up into the saddle one-handed cost him more than he let show, and she sat straight-backed with exhaustion in every line of her face and none of it in how she held her spine.
The party formed up around them. Alden and Argilac ahead. Erryk at the rear. Doran already gone forward into the dark, quiet as dusk coming on.
They moved off under the cold breath of the wind with the moon going down behind the highlands and the frost silvering the tops of the grass, and behind them the hollow lay full of dead men and two dead horses, already going quiet.
Osric walked at his own horse's head with the reins in his good hand and the arm hanging on the other side, and his son somewhere up ahead in the dark, and did not call him back, and could not have said what he would have said if he had.
They made camp in a hollow behind the ridge where broken rock stood up on the windward side and gave them something to put their backs against. There was no fire. The horses were picketed in the dark and their breath went up in slow plumes, and the men were shapes among other shapes, and the cold came down out of a clearing sky with nothing in the way of it.
Erryk got the arrowhead out first, because it could not wait for Valmarch and everybody knew it.
They did it by feel and by the little moonlight there was, with Osric sat on a stone and his mail off and his shirt cut away and Alden holding him by the good
shoulder and Rutger holding a strap between his teeth. The head had gone in under the plate at an angle and had turned when the shaft snapped and had wedged itself against the shoulder blade, and Erryk's hands were the size of trenchers and had done this perhaps thirty times.
It took a while.
Osric did not make much noise. He bit through the strap in one place and afterward could not remember doing it.
"Bodkin," Erryk said, holding it up to what light there was. "Not a broadhead. Clean sides. It'll close."
"Then throw it away."
"I'll not. You'll want it in a year to show people."
"Erryk."
"You'll want it in a year." He put it in his belt pouch and began packing the wound with a strip off his own shirt. "Move that arm tomorrow or it'll set stiff and you'll be no use for a fortnight. Move it and don't lift with it."
Voss had wedged himself against a rock across the hollow and dragged his cloak tight.
"No fire. Coldest night of the autumn and we sit here like a heap of stones thinking warm thoughts."
"You've a cloak, a full belly, and nobody currently shooting at you," said Alden. "My grandfather would have wept for a night this soft."
"Your grandfather wept at everything. Your own testimony."
"He had cause. He was related to me."
Nearer the rocks, Erryk finished with Osric and went and set a waterskin and a heel of bread on the stone beside the woman without any ceremony about it, as a tool is put down when it is finished with.
"Slow with that. Three days on nothing and your belly's forgotten what it's for. Bring it back up and you've wasted good bread, and there's little enough of it."
Isolde's hands closed round the skin. They were shaking. She saw that they were, and stopped them, which Osric found more interesting than the shaking.
"Thank you."
"Don't thank me. Thank whoever taught the boy to charge a hill he was told to sit on."
Osric came across the hollow and settled onto a stone opposite her and did not begin. He let her drink.
She took it in small pulls, lowering the skin between each one, setting it on her knee, lifting it again. She had a full skin in her hands and food beside her and nine armed men round her, and she was still measuring it out a mouthful at a time.
"There's more in that," he said. "Don't spare it. We've plenty."
"Old habit. Three days teaches a person to make food last."
"Three days in the trees. No fire in any of it." He let it sit. "You said they kept finding you."
"They did."
"How close did they come?"
She thought about it, and he watched her decide to answer, and watched her decide how much of it to answer.
"The second night I lay under a fallen elm within twenty feet of four of them and they went past me. The third morning I was in a ditch and one of them rode the length of it and did not look down." Her voice was flat. "And then by noon there were more of them on the road behind me again, and by dusk they had the direction, and I do not understand it, Serjeant. I was careful. I was very careful."
"You're not being tracked."
Her head came up.
"A tracker doesn't lose you at twenty feet and find you again at three miles," Osric said. "That's not sign-reading. That's a man being told where to go and going there."
She did not answer him.
Osric let a good deal of silence go by.
"There's a garrison town on the Ostheim road," he said. "Forty men behind a good wall. Fires. Two days from where your escort went down and you'd have passed within a mile of the gate on the second afternoon."
The pause before her answer was noticeable, and she did not pretend otherwise.
"I saw the smoke off it."
"And went round."
"I stood in the treeline the better part of an hour and looked at that wall," Isolde said. "I want you to understand that I looked at it. I could smell their cook fires from where I stood and I had not eaten in two days."
"But."
She turned the skin in her hands.
"Somebody sold my road."
Osric said nothing at all.
"The Khesari came out of both treelines at once, at the exact place where the road narrows and a cart cannot turn. Not a mile before. Not a mile after. There." She had not raised her voice. "They knew which road, and which day, and near enough which hour, and there were perhaps nine people alive who could have told them, and I could give you every one of their names."
"Go on."
"Six of them were in my father's household. Two were with the party that was meant to receive me at the end of it." She looked up. "So when I stood in that treeline and looked at a garrison town, Serjeant, I was not looking at a wall. I was looking at a door, and I did not know which side of it I would come out of, and I could not find any way to work it out from where I was standing.
"So I went round. And I have gone round every door since, and I would have gone round yours, if you had given me the choice."
Osric turned that over slowly.
She's not hiding from her enemies. She's hiding from her own people and she cannot tell which of them is which.