Chapter 67: The Knight Who Lost Seven Men

The council broke a little after that.

Corwin caught Osric in the passage.

"Captain."

"Ser."

"That was not for you." He said it lightly and did not slow down, and the two of them walked together toward the yard. "In case you were wondering. What I said at the end. It was not to help you."

"I'd assumed."

"Good." Corwin's mouth moved. "It was for him. He is four and twenty and he lost seven men at the Alder Fork and he has spent the whole winter being the only man in that room whose plans are refused, and a young man who is refused often enough stops offering, and then you have a knight in your garrison who says nothing and thinks a great deal.

"I would rather have him wrong and talking."

Osric turned that over.

"That's sound."

"It is entirely sound and it is also convenient for me, and I would rather say both parts." Corwin pulled his gloves on. "He does not like you."

"I know it."

"He does not like you because you shoved him into a cart in front of the yard when he was twenty, and because eleven of his men rode to that bank and four came back, and because he has been raised his whole life to believe that men like you take orders and do not give them. Those are three separate objections and only one of them is about you."

"And the third?"

"The third is not going to be talked out of him by anybody, and certainly not by me, and I would not waste an evening trying." Corwin stopped at the door. "But the first two might soften if he is ever in a position where he has to be glad you were there.

"I should think about that, if I were you. Rather than about the third."

He went out into the yard.

Osric stood in the passage a while afterward.

That was good advice.

It was good advice, given generously, by a man who has been here eight daysand has already worked out more about my garrison than I had worked out innine weeks.

And he is right about all of it.

So why am I standing in a corridor turning it over instead of getting on with it.

He could not answer that, and did not try very hard, and went out to give the order about the granaries.

They told the village the next morning.

Osric did it himself in the square, standing on the mounting block outside the King Fish with about ninety people in front of him and the cold coming up off the ground, and he said it plainly and did not dress it and did not take long about it.

Men in the granaries. Fires and horns.

And if they come into your yard, let them have the byre.

Let them have the meal in the house. Let them have the cloak off the hook and the pot off the fire and the boots, if it comes to the boots.

Do not stand in the door.

He got to the end of it and there was no noise at all for about three seconds, and then somebody near the back said something that Osric did not hear and about nine people laughed in the wrong way.

He waited it out.

"Say it out loud," he said.

Nobody said anything.

"I'll not have it muttered. If a man has something, he can say it to me here, in front of everybody, and I'll answer it and there'll be no consequence to him whatever, and you have my word on that in front of ninety people."

There was a pause, and then a man came forward about three steps.

He was perhaps fifty, in a good coat, and Osric knew his face and could not put a name to it, which afterward he minded a great deal.

"My brother's at the north crofts," the man said.

"Aye."

"You're telling him to stand in his own yard and watch them take his winter."

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"I am."

"And what are you doing while he does that?"

Osric looked at him.

"I am sitting in a granary six miles off with eight men," he said, "waiting for them to come for the seed, because they will, and because when they come for the seed it will be forty of them and not nine, and that is the only night this winter that a soldier of mine is worth anything at all.

"Your brother will lose his pig. I am sorry for the pig. If I put my men in his yard instead, he keeps the pig and this whole barony has nothing to sow in April, and then it will not be a pig, it will be everybody, and it will be for years."

The man stood there.

"That's the truth of it," Osric said, "and it is a hard truth and I have not got a better one, and I would rather you heard it from me standing on a block than from somebody in a warm room afterward."

The man nodded slowly, once, and went back into the crowd.

Nobody else came forward.

Afterward, when the square had cleared, Anna was waiting for him by the corner of the King Fish with her arms folded and her breath going up.

"That was well done."

"It wasn't."

"It was well done and I've been in this village twenty years and I'd know." She fell in beside him. "You'll want to know what they're saying by tonight, though."

"Go on."

"They'll say the captain came down and told them to give the Brennocs their supper." Anna said it without any softening at all, which was exactly why he had wanted her there. "And by tomorrow somebody will have added that he did it

because the castle store is thin and the castle means to keep it, and by the day after there'll be a version where the seed corn in the tower is the Baron's and not theirs.

"None of that is true and all of it will be said, and there is nothing you can do about any of it, and I am telling you now so you are not surprised on Thursday."

Osric walked a while.

"Two people," he said.

"What?"

"Nothing." He put a hand briefly on her shoulder. "Thank you."

The church calls it Drakomartide and has called it that for four hundred years, and Lambert said so from the chapel step at the third hour of the afternoon, as he was required to, in a clear carrying voice, to about ninety people who had been calling it Rhumnacht since they woke and would go on calling it Rhumnacht until they died.

Nobody minded. Lambert did not mind, and said the word once and did not press it, and afterward stood at the chapel door shaking hands and calling it Rhumnacht like everybody else.

It is the longest night. That is all it has ever been, and the church came late to it and put a name on the front and left the rest of it alone, because there are some customs a man does not argue with in a country where the dark lasts sixteen hours.

The custom is this.

At noon on the shortest day every fire in the barony goes out.

Every one. The hall, the kitchens, the smithy, the ovens, the physician's house, every hearth in every croft from the mill to the far palisade. They are raked out and the ash is carried away and the stones are swept cold, and by the middle of the afternoon there is not a flame burning anywhere in Valmarch except one.

The one is on the chapel bank.

It is built through the day out of what people bring, and everybody brings something, and it is bad luck not to. A man brings a broken hurdle or a dead branch or a stool that has been mended twice and will not survive a third. What goes onto that fire is supposed to be something that is finished with, and there is an unspoken competition in the village about it that goes back further than

anybody living, and every year somebody puts on something they should not have and is spoken about for a month.

Warin the smith once put on his own father's chair. That was eleven years ago and it was still being discussed.

The Lorgands did it at Beren's, because they had always done it at Beren's, because it was the only house any of them still had that had been in the family longer than the people in it.

They came out along the tannery track in the middle of the morning, which is the only hour of Rhumnacht when a person can go anywhere, because after noon there is no fire to arrive at.

Osric walked out with Anna on one side of him and Argilac on the other and Theo about four paces ahead of the three of them, and had not managed to say more than nine words to his elder son in the whole half mile.

That had been Anna's doing. She had come down to the forge at the eighth hour and got Theo out of it by main force and had not asked anybody's opinion, and Osric had come out of the castle gate to find the two of them waiting in the lane with Argilac, and had understood immediately that he had been arranged.

The yard stank, as it always stank. The pits were slatted over for the winter and the frames were bare and the frost had got into the top of the liquor so that it had a grey skin on it, and the smell came up off all of it into a still cold morning and hung there.

Nobody remarked on it. Nobody in that family had ever remarked on it.

The house was full before they got to it.

Beren had the door open and was in the yard in his shirtsleeves in that weather, and got Osric by both arms and then got Anna off her feet, which she objected to loudly and had been objecting to for twelve years.

Lera had the fire built up higher than it needed to be and the whole room smelled of pork and onions and burnt sugar, and there was a pot on the fire and two more standing off it and a griddle and about nine other things going, because the fire goes out at noon and everything a household means to eat that night has to be cooked before it does.

Marella got to Argilac first. She was eight and had grown four inches since the autumn and had lost the top of her front tooth to a gate, and she attached herself to his arm and told him about the tooth in considerable detail.

Toman was at the table and got up when they came in and did not know what to do with his hands.

He had been to Auenstadt in the autumn and had come back and told the story for a month, and had got somewhat quieter since, and Osric had heard from Beren that the quiet had come on at about the time the news came up the road about the Alder Fork.

"Uncle."

"Toman." Osric took his hand. "You've got taller."

"So everybody says."

"They say it because it's true and because nobody can think of anything else to say to a lad your age." Osric let go. "How's the hide going?"

Toman's face came alive, and that was the boy back, and they talked about bark liquor for four minutes.

Lambert came in a quarter of an hour later with snow on his shoulders and his hands raw, having walked from the chapel, and Lera put a cup in one of them before he had got the door shut.

Aldric was already there and had been since the light, and had been carrying wood and shifting the trestle and doing the six other jobs that get done in a house on that morning, which was what Aldric did in any house he was in.

So there were ten of them in that room, and it was too small for ten, and that was the point of it.

They ate at about the tenth hour.