Chapter 63: The Guest Who Stands Apart

He was in the middle of a sentence to his brother and he did not stop it, and he did not look round at his own man, and Osric would have sworn afterward that his eyes had never once left the Baron's face.

But he finished the sentence and then he said something else in the same breath and turned, and came across the yard toward Osric with his hand already out, and did it so smoothly that not one person watching would have said it was a rescue.

"You're the captain."

"Osric, ser."

"I know what you are. Nobody has written to me about anything else since November." He took Osric's hand and his grip was hard and dry. "You held a bank at the Alder Fork with nine men and a smith and a reeve until my brother came up. I have had that letter three times and it improved each time and I have decided to believe the second one."

"It was twenty men, ser, and most of them were Sir Eckhard's."

"Was it." Corwin's eyes came up. "Then somebody has been improving it in the other direction, which is rarer and more interesting."

He let go and glanced back at the column.

"And that is Batu," he said, without any preamble at all. "He has been with me eleven years and he is the best marksman I have ever employed and he is a Khesari, and I would rather say all of that in your yard on the first afternoon than have it said in your barracks tonight by somebody who has got it half right."

Osric said nothing for a moment.

"Eleven years."

"Eleven. He came over the water at fifteen with a horse trader and never went back, and he has fought for four houses and against two of his own people, and if you want that history you will have to get it from him and he will not give it to you." Corwin's face did not change. "I know what happened here in October. I have been told about your tower and your captain and your eighteen. I am not going to stand in a yard and tell you that this is a different sort of Khesari, because you would be entirely right not to care."

"What are you going to tell me?"

"That he is my man, that he has been my man for eleven years, and that whatever your garrison does about him this winter I will handle myself and not put on you." Corwin said it plainly. "And that if he gives you cause, you may hang him, and I will not say one word against it. I would want it done in front of me. That is all I would want."

Osric looked at him and did not answer.

That is the correct answer. That is the answer I would want and it is better thanthe answer I would have got out of most men, and he had it ready before hecame through the gate.

He had it ready because he has done this before, in about nine other yards, andhe knew exactly what my face was going to do when I saw that man's back.

"He'll want quartering apart," Osric said. "Not for his sake."

"He is already quartered apart. He has been quartered apart in every castle I have taken him into for eleven years and he prefers it, and he will tell you so if you ask him, and he will be lying." Corwin's mouth moved slightly. "Where do you want him?"

"There's a room over the cartwright's shed. It's cold and it's dry and it has a door that shuts."

"That will do."

"And I'll want to talk to him myself. Tomorrow."

"You may talk to him tonight if you like. He is not mine in that sense." Corwin pulled his cloak straight. "Captain. One further matter and then I shall go and be embraced by my brother again, which I gather is going to happen several more times before supper."

"Ser."

"I have twenty men and eleven pack animals and I have brought my own fodder and about four weeks of my own bread, because I have wintered in enough places to know what a household thinks of twenty extra mouths in January." He said it lightly and it was not light. "I know what your store looks like. I do not know the numbers and I do not want them. But I know what nine weeks of this weather does to a barony and I did not come here to eat it.

"When my bread runs out I will tell you before it runs out, and not after. That is a promise and you may hold me to it in front of my brother."

He went back across the yard.

Osric stood where he was and watched him go, and watched him take Waldric's arm on the way past and say something that made the old man walk with him, and watched the two of them go up the steps together into the hall.

He has been here about six minutes.

He has told me about the Khesari before I could ask. He has given me theanswer about hanging him before I could want it. He has told me he hasbrought his own food before Rothgar could work out how to raise it. And he hasgot Waldric up those steps on his arm, and Waldric does not take anybody'sarm.

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Every one of those was right. Every single one. I would have done all four ofthem myself if I had thought of them, and I would not have thought of them.

Osric turned and went to see about a room over the cartwright's shed.

He came out of it an hour later and found Argilac waiting for him at the bottom of the steps, in the dark, with his arms folded.

"You're not going to say anything about it."

"About what?"

"About the man with the bow."

Osric came down the last two steps.

"I'm going to talk to him tomorrow. And you are going to go into that barracks tonight, and when somebody starts, you are going to shut it down."

"Me."

"You." Osric said it evenly. "Not Aldric and not me. If I do it, it's the captain protecting a stranger. If Aldric does it, it's the master at arms doing as he's told. If you do it, it's a lad who was on that bank telling other lads who were on that bank, and it will hold, and it will not hold if it comes from me."

Argilac was quiet a moment.

"That's not fair."

"No."

"He was there, Father. Not him, I know it isn't him, I'm not a fool. But a hundred of them came over that water and eighteen of ours went into that ground and one of them was in a cell under our own tower until"

He stopped.

"He's still in the cell," Osric said. "I know."

"And now there's another one in the yard eating our bread."

"His own bread. He's brought it." Osric put a hand on his son's shoulder, briefly. "I know what it is. I stood in that yard and my hand went to my belt and I'd not have been able to tell you it was going.

"And a man who has served eleven years for a lord's brother is a man who has been on somebody's roster longer than you have been in mail, and if I let this garrison decide about him with its blood up on the first night, it will not be decided by anything but the blood."

Argilac let out a breath.

"Aye."

"Tonight. Before supper if you can."

"And if it goes badly?"

"Then come and get me and it becomes the captain protecting a stranger, and we'll deal with what that costs."

Argilac went off toward the barracks.

Osric watched him go and stood a while in the cold yard, and up in the hall the shutters were open and there was firelight and a great deal of noise, and somewhere in the middle of it he could hear the Baron laughing, which was a sound he had heard perhaps four times in eleven years.

The cloak was too long in the body by about two inches and always would be, and Osric had worn it for nine weeks and had stopped noticing it except when it got wet, at which point it dragged and picked up the yard and he noticed it a great deal.

It had also torn.

It had torn on the third day of the snow, on a nail in the stable door that had been sticking out of that door since before Osric came to Valmarch, and it had gone about four inches in the seam under the left arm where the body meets the shoulder.

He had left it eleven days.

He had told himself four separate reasons for leaving it and had believed none of them, and on the twelfth day, in the hour before supper, he came down the hill with it under his arm and went along the lower street and turned into Coyne's lane.

The lane ran under the castle rise between the backs of the cooper's yard and the dairy wall, and it had been dug out down the middle and the spoil banked either side above head height, so that walking it was like walking a trench. There were nine or ten dwellings along it. Hers was the fourth on the right, which he knew because he had asked Berta at the dairy and had spent the rest of that afternoon being annoyed with himself for having asked.

There was light behind the shutter and a smell of onions.

He stood in front of the door for slightly longer than a man stands in front of a door in that weather, and then knocked.

She opened it with a needle still in her hand.

"Captain."

"Mistress."

"You've a cloak under your arm."

"I have."

"Then you'd best come in, because I am not standing in that lane at this hour discussing it and neither are you." She stood back. "Mind the step. It ices."

The room was small and low and a good deal warmer than he had expected, and it took him a moment to work out why, which was that she had hung an old blanket over the shutter and stuffed rag into the gap under the door and had banked the fire properly rather than building it up, which is what people do who have thought about fuel.

There was a table with sewing on it in three piles. A stool. A bed against the far wall with a curtain half across it. A shelf with about six objects on it, one of which was a small worn wooden token that he did not look at twice.

She took the cloak off him and shook it out and had the tear found inside four seconds.

"Eleven days."

"Twelve."

"Twelve, then, and it has been rained on since and dried on you, which is why it has gone crooked at the edge and will want easing before I can close it." She was already turning it toward the light. "Sit down. You're standing in the middle of my floor like a man waiting to be told where the fighting is."

Osric sat down on the stool, which was the only seat in the room, and worked out about two seconds too late that this meant she was going to sit on the edge of the bed.

She did, without any evident opinion about it, and put the cloak across her knees and got on with it.

He watched her do it for a while because there was nothing else to look at and because it was worth looking at.

She had a way of holding a seam that he could not have described and would have known again anywhere. The cloth went over two fingers and the thumb came under it, and the needle went in and out about six times before she pulled the thread through, and she did not look at the needle at any point. She looked at the cloth about four inches ahead of where she was working, reading it forward the way Doran read a road.

There was a scar across the back of her left hand, old, a burn, a long thin one that had gone in the shape of a hot wire.

He did not ask about it.

For a while neither of them said anything, and it was not uncomfortable.