Chapter 62: The Granary Tells the Truth

That was what a granary tells you and no ledger ever will. There were marks on the inside of the bays where a hundred years of grain had rubbed the wood pale to a certain height, and the barley was a hand and a half below where the pale ended, and it had been level with it in October.

Osric stood there a while with the lamp up and looked at that pale band on the boards.

It goes. If nothing else happens, it goes, and it goes with about a fortnight tospare, and a fortnight is not a margin. A fortnight is a bad month happening atthe wrong end of the winter.

And a granary is exactly what a hungry man walks eleven miles for.

He came out and put the lamp back in its bracket.

"Corrin."

"Captain."

"Has anybody been at this door in the night? Any night. Not to take anything. Just been at it."

The boy thought about it seriously, which Osric appreciated.

"Old Hesse comes past on his way to the shed. And the kitchen women in the morning for the day's meal, but that's light." He frowned. "There was a fellow the night before last stood over by the cartwright's for a while. Not doing anything. I thought he was one of the baggage men wanting the privy and not liking to ask."

"Would you know him again?"

"No, Captain. It was dark and he was over there and I was here."

"Aye. Fair." Osric put a hand briefly on the boy's shoulder. "Anybody stands about, you sing out. You'll not be laughed at for it and if anybody laughs, send them to me."

He went out through the arch as the sky was beginning to go grey behind the eastern tower, and stopped at the top of the steps and looked out over the yard: the granary with its lamp, the well, the physician's house, the snow banked against the north wall where two men had argued about it the previous afternoon.

A man walked eleven miles for a wheel of cheese and a pair of boots.

He'll have carried them. He'll not have put them on out there in the wet, he'llhave carried them under his coat the whole way back so they would stay dry.

A day and a half, in the drifts, carrying another man's boots against his chest.

And he will do it again inside a fortnight, and he will bring more men with him,and one of these mornings he will look at a door like that one.

And I am going to have to kill him for it.

The bell went for the change of the watch, and Osric went to see it done.

Doran came back on the fourth day, in the afternoon, with five men and no prisoners, and Osric had all of it out of him standing in the outer yard before either of them had got indoors.

They had walked the beck line eleven miles east and had lost it twice and picked it up both times, and had followed it to the stone line and about a mile and a half past it, and had turned back where Osric had told them to turn back.

Six men. Not seven. One of them was small, or a woman, or a boy.

They had gone out at a good pace and had held it, and had stopped four times in eleven miles and had built no fire at any of the stops. At the third stop they had eaten, and Doran had spent a quarter of an hour on the ground there and had found what he had gone eleven miles to find.

"They'd cut the meat off those cows in the yard and carried it raw," he said. "Some of it they ate raw at that stop. There's the mess of it in the snow, and the marks where they sat, and I'd say they were there about the length of a cold meal."

"And?"

"And there's a place where somebody was sick, and it wasn't from drink."

Osric turned that over.

"A man who eats raw beef after a fortnight of nothing is sick," Doran said. "That's all it means. But he ate it anyway, and then he got up and walked, and he did not build a fire to cook it because a fire is nine miles of smoke on a clear day and he knew it."

"Disciplined."

"Careful. Not the same." Doran shifted his weight. "There's no order in that trail. They're not marching. They straggle out and they close up and one of them walks wide the whole way and cannot hold to the file at all, and I'd say it was the small one. That is a family, Captain, or half of one, and the man in front of them knows what he's about and the rest of them do not."

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Osric said nothing for a moment.

"You went a mile and a half past the line."

"I did."

"And?"

"And there's nothing out there." Doran said it flatly. "It's not that I saw nothing. I saw nothing where there ought to have been something. There's a Brennoc steading two miles over that I've laid eyes on twice in nine years and it has smoke on it both times, and I went up onto the shoulder and looked at it from about a mile and there is no smoke on it now and no track in or out of it since the snow."

"Empty."

"Empty since before the first fall, at a guess, and the snow lying flat over the yard."

Osric looked east at nothing at all.

Gone before the winter. Not driven out in it. Gone before it, which means theyknew.

"You did well."

"I brought you nobody."

"You brought me a family walking eleven miles for raw beef and an empty steading two miles over the line." Osric turned for the steps. "That's a great deal more than a prisoner would have given me and it cost me nothing to feed."

They came in on the sixth day about the middle of the afternoon.

The horn went from the west tower and Osric was on the wall inside a minute, and stood there with his cloak flat against him in the wind and watched them come up the white road out of the west with the light going yellow behind them.

Twenty-one riders and eleven pack animals, strung out over a quarter mile because the drifts on the last stretch would not let them do anything else, and

the leading horse coming on at a walk with a man riding it who did not appear to be in any hurry.

They had come from Osterwald in nine days, which meant they had come in nine days over roads that had turned back Valmarch's own riders twice, and Osric watched them do the last half mile and revised something about the arriving party before it had got within a hundred yards of the gate.

The Baron came down to the gate himself.

He came down without a cloak, which for Heinric was a considerable statement, and stood in the arch in the cold with Waldric a pace behind him and half the household strung out along the wall to watch, and when the leading rider came under the gatehouse he was off the horse before it had properly stopped.

The two of them met in the middle of the gateway and Heinric got hold of his brother by both shoulders and did not say anything for about four seconds.

Osric had come down off the wall and was standing at the back of it, and had a clear view of the Baron's face, and had not seen that expression on the man in eleven years.

"You are thinner," Heinric said at last.

"You are greyer."

"I am a great deal greyer and I have earned every hair of it." The Baron let go of him. "Nine days from Osterwald."

"Ten. We lay up a day at the fork and dug." Sir Corwin von Aelrich pulled his gloves off. "Your road is a disgrace, brother, and I want you to know that I said so aloud about forty times and that every man behind me will confirm it."

He was forty or thereabouts and did not look it.

He was Heinric's brother in the jaw and the brow and nowhere else. Where Heinric had gone heavy and grey and tired, Corwin had gone lean and weathered and quick, and he had a good deal of dark hair going silver at the temple and a face that had been broken across the nose at some point and had healed well. He wore hard-used gear with no device on it and a fur-lined cloak that had been expensive about six years ago, and twenty years of getting on and off horses in bad weather were in every movement he made.

And he smiled at people. Osric noticed that first, and took a while afterward to work out why he had noticed it.

He smiled at the grooms. He smiled at the boy who took his bridle. When Waldric came forward and offered a stiff old hand, Corwin took it in both of his and said something quietly that made the old knight's face do something it had not done in Osric's memory.

Behind him his twenty came in through the gate and dismounted, and Osric stopped watching the brothers and watched them instead, because that was the job.

They were good.

He knew it inside about twenty seconds and it did not please him particularly. They came off the horses at the same time without being told. They had the animals seen to before a man of them thought about his own gear. Two of them peeled off without a word and went to the ends of the column and stood there facing outward, in a castle yard, out of pure habit, and neither of them looked as though he knew he had done it.

They were also not from anywhere.

Osric had spent thirty years on a border and had a fair eye for where a man came from, and he could not place more than about half of them. There were two who might have been southerners off the coast, very dark, with rings in one ear apiece. There was a great pale slab of a man with a beard down his chest who was speaking something in the back of his throat that was not any tongue Osric had heard. There was a fellow of about fifty with a face like tanned hide and a Velenski coat, and another who was certainly Acuseian and had the flattest northern speech Osric had ever heard out of a human mouth.

And there was a Khesari.

He was standing at the third horse from the end, unbuckling a case, and he had his back to the yard and Osric knew him from the back before he had turned round.

It is a way of standing. It is something about the shoulders and the set of the feet, and Osric had watched men stand like that across a hundred and fifty yards of frozen scrub in October and had watched one of them do it in front of a fire while forty men walked up a hill at his signal.

The man turned round.

He was perhaps thirty-five, with a flat broad face and a black moustache and his hair shaved back at the sides and long behind. He had a bow case on his back that had been made for him and a quiver at his hip with the lid on it, and

he was dressed like everybody else in that column and did not look like anybody else in it.

He caught Osric looking at him.

He did not look away and he did not do anything with his face. He held it for about two seconds, and then he inclined his head very slightly, and went back to his straps.

Osric stood there in the cold with his hand not quite on his belt and became aware, gradually, of about nine other people in that yard who had also stopped moving.

Voss on his stick at the top of the steps. Two of the men who had been at the tower. A lad off the wall who had been on the bank at the Alder Fork and had come back with a scar under his eye and had turned eighteen in December.

And Argilac, over by the smithy, entirely still.

Right.

That is going to be a problem and it is going to be a problem tonight.

Corwin had seen it as well.