Chapter 61: The Trail in the Snow

He sent Doran and five men and told them four days, and gave them the two soundest horses for the road as far as Orswood and told them to leave the horses there and go up the beck on foot, because horses on that ground in that snow would be a liability and a waste.

Doran heard all of it without a word and asked three questions at the end of it.

"How far up am I to follow it?"

"Until it stops being useful. You'll know."

"And if it does not stop being useful?"

"Then you'll come back anyway on the fourth day, and you'll tell me what it was doing when you left it, and I'll decide about it here." Osric said it flatly. "You do not go over the beck line onto the high ground. Not for anything. If it goes up there it goes up there without you."

Doran nodded slowly.

"Third question."

"If we come on them."

Osric had been waiting for that one and had spent a good part of the morning on it.

"Six or seven men on foot in the snow, and you'll have six with you and a bow between you," he said. "If you come on them and they run, let them run and mark the direction. If they come at you, kill them. If they put their hands up, bring them back."

"Bring them back."

"Aye."

"That's four days of feeding them."

"I know what it is." Osric held his eye. "Bring them back regardless. I want one of them in front of me and I want to know what he says, and I'd rather feed a man for four days than spend the winter guessing."

Doran took that away and thought about it and came back an hour later while they were loading the horses.

"Who am I taking?"

"Your pick. Not Alden."

"Not Alden." Doran did not ask why and did not need to. Alden's forearm had closed but had closed badly and there was a stiffness in it that came on in the cold, and Alden had spent two months telling anybody who mentioned it that it was nothing. "I'll take Hessek."

Osric looked up. "Hessek's a levy-man."

"Hessek's a levy-man who was born at Orswood and has walked that beck since he was six, and I'd rather have him than two of the garrison." Doran shrugged. "And he's had a poor morning."

That was as near as Doran ever came to a joke, and Osric let him have it.

They went out at the ninth hour with the light already thinking about going.

It was not much of a departure. Six men on foot leading two horses, with four days of bread and cheese and a sack of oats between them, in a yard that did not stop working to watch them go. Voss came out on his stick to the top of the steps and said something to Doran that made him laugh. Argilac checked a girth that had already been checked.

Osric stood on the wall and watched them down the track and out along the white road, and they were visible a long way, because everything is visible a long way in that country in that season, and it took them about a quarter of an hour to become six dark marks and about another quarter to stop being anything at all.

Then he went back to the chamber and could not settle to any work at all for the rest of the day.

That was the discovery of the whole nine weeks, and it came at him fresh every time.

He had spent thirty years being the man who went. It had never once occurred to him to think about what it was like at the other end of it, because he had never been at the other end of it, and he had assumed in a vague and unexamined way that waiting was simply the absence of doing.

It was not. It was a job in itself and it was worse than the other one, and it went on for four days, and there was nothing whatever to be done with any part of it.

He did the roster. He walked the wall twice. He heard a complaint about firewood from a woman in the lower lane and settled it and then sat and thought about whether he had settled it correctly for rather longer than the firewood deserved.

And about six times that day, without meaning to, he looked east.

Argilac found him at dusk.

He came in without knocking, which he had started doing about a fortnight ago and which Osric had decided not to remark on, and stood at the trestle and looked at the map for a moment.

"You wanted to go."

"Aye."

"Everybody in that yard knew you wanted to go." The boy said it evenly. "That's not a criticism. Alden said it and Voss said it and one of the levy lads said it in front of about nine people, and what he said was, look at the captain's face, he's dying to be out in it."

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Osric let out a breath.

"And?"

"And then you sent Doran, which is who anybody would have sent, and the same lad said, well, he's not going, is he, and somebody else said no, he's got the chair now." Argilac shrugged. "That was all of it. Nobody thought worse of you. Half of them thought better."

"And the other half?"

"The other half didn't think about it at all, because they were cold and wanted their supper." Argilac pulled the second stool over and sat down on it backward, which was a habit that had come from somewhere and that Osric had never once traced. "You've been standing about all afternoon."

"I've been thinking."

"You've been standing about. I've watched you do it since noon." He rested his forearms on the stool back. "What's at you?"

Osric considered whether to say it and then said it, because there was nobody else in the barony he could say it to who would not immediately do something about it.

"They walked."

Argilac's brow came down.

"Six or seven men on foot, eleven miles in, in January." Osric put a finger on the map, out east past Orswood, on the empty part. "You do not walk into a barony

in this weather for a blanket and a wheel of cheese. You do not walk into it at all. Not for plunder, not for glory, not for a story.

"There is only one reason a man walks eleven miles through drifts to steal food."

Argilac looked at the map for a while.

"They've none."

Osric let that sit where it was.

"That's not raiding. That's"

"No," said Osric. "It isn't."

Neither of them said anything for a moment. The fire moved.

"They knocked an old man down and took his boots off his feet," Argilac said. "In the snow."

"They did."

"So they're not saints either."

"No. And a man with nothing does a great deal worse than take boots, and will do it in about a fortnight." Osric sat back. "That's the shape of it and I do not much like where it ends. Hungry men come in small numbers and they come again, and they get bolder because getting away with it once teaches you it can be done, and by the second month they are not coming for a byre at the far end of a common. They are coming for a granary. And there is a granary in every village in this barony and I have got a hundred and six men."

"Then we hit them hard the first time and put the fear in."

Osric looked at his son.

He is seventeen and he has stood on a bank at the Alder Fork and he has giventhe right answer, and it is going to be a great deal easier to say than to do.

"Aye," he said. "That is what we will do."

The Baron heard it that evening in the hall over the remains of supper, and heard it well, which Osric had learned to be grateful for. Heinric had a bad habit of hearing bad news better than good.

He listened to all of it and asked about Selvic's hip and about Hedd's fingers before he asked about anything else, which Waldric noticed and Osric noticed Waldric noticing.

"They walked," the Baron said, at the end.

"They walked, my lord."

"That is what you have brought me. Not the cows and not the blanket."

"That's what I've brought you."

Heinric turned his cup on the table.

"Then it will not be six or seven for long," he said.

Waldric came off the hearth. "It may be six or seven all winter. Hard men out of a hard country doing what they have always done. We have had Brennocs over that line every year since I was a boy and I have never once known it to be anything but cattle."

"In summer," said Osric.

"In summer, aye."

"They come in summer because that is when a man can move and there is grass for a driven herd and the ground will take a horse. Every raid I have ever ridden out on has been between the sowing and the frost." Osric shook his head. "I have been on this border thirty years and I have never once turned out for Brennocs in January, because Brennocs are not fools and there is nothing in this county in January worth walking eleven miles for."

"And yet."

Waldric was quiet a moment.

"Then there is something wrong on the other side of that line," he said.

"There is something wrong on the other side of that line."

"And we shall not find out what, because nobody goes over it in this weather and nothing comes across it but them." The old knight sat down, which he did not often do. "Wonderful. We have a mystery we cannot look at and a border we cannot patrol, and half the men who would tell us are the ones robbing us."

Heinric had not moved.

"How long can they keep it up?" he asked.

Osric had thought about that on the wall.

"If it is a bad year over there, then until the thaw. If it is a very bad year, then until they have eaten what they take and then they will come again, and go on coming, and it will not stop when the snow does. It will get worse when the snow does, because then they can bring horses."

"So we have until March to make it not worth their while."

"That's how I read it, my lord."

Heinric looked at the table and did not answer at once.

"Do it," he said. "Whatever it costs in men out on those roads in this weather, do it, and tell Rothgar I said the fodder is to be found, and if he tells you there is no fodder tell him to come and say so to me and he will not.

"And Osric."

"My lord."

"When you take one of them alive." The Baron's eyes came up. "Not if. When. I want to know what they have been eating."

Osric slept badly and woke before the light, and lay there for a while listening to the wind come round the corner of the house.

He got up and put the fire in and went out into the dark, and went up the hill, and did not go to the chamber.

He went to the granary instead.

It stood on staddle stones in the corner of the outer courtyard with its door barred and a lamp in a bracket that was kept lit all winter because Rothgar insisted on it, and there was a boy of about fifteen sitting outside it on a stool with a blanket over his knees, who came up off the stool so fast he knocked it over.

"Captain."

"Sit down, lad. What's your name?"

"Corrin, Captain."

"How long have you been out here?"

"Since the second hour. Wilm has it after me."

"Right." Osric took the lamp out of the bracket. "Open it."

The boy got the bar up and Osric went in, and stood in the door with the lamp held out, and looked at it.

It was not empty. That was what a man had to keep saying to himself. There were four bays and three of them had grain in them, and the fourth had been empty since the autumn and would have been empty in a good year too.

But the level had come down the boards.