Chapter 6: The Duke on His Knees

The rider had been let in through the small gate before it was light and had stood in the passage a long while before anyone would agree to wake the duke, so that by the time Mira came down with her aunt’s message the mud had dried on his boots and was cracking off onto the rushes in flakes.

Osric had the letter in both hands. He read it, and then he read it again, and Giles sat at the end of the table with a book open on his knee and his pen uncapped, doing nothing at all.

“Say it,” Osric said.

“Her ladyship the Dowager told me to say it with my mouth and not only with the paper.” The rider had the north in his voice, flat and slow, the words set down one after another like stones. “So there’d be no doubt of it. She says yes.”

“Terms?”

“Her ladyship says she’ll have the terms drawn by her own clerks and the margrave’s man will carry them south. She wouldn’t be telling me what’s in them.” He shifted. “She said to say also that the papers should be ready before the roads close, and she does not care to be kept waiting on the weather.”

“And an envoy?”

“Behind the papers by a week, my lord. The terms first, so there’s nothing left to argue when the man comes.”

Osric laughed. It came out of him strangely and stopped at once, and he put the letter down on the table and flattened it with the edge of his hand.

“She gave it her own hand,” he said. “Not her steward’s, not the boy’s. Hers.”

“Her own hand, my lord.”

“Then it’s done. Aldric Voss has a wife.”

Mira had come to the doorway and stopped there with her hands folded, and now she said, “My lord. My aunt asks me to say she is keeping to her chamber today.”

Osric looked up as if the door had spoken. “Yes. In a moment.” He turned back to Giles. “A fortnight, you said.”

“A fortnight if the weather holds and the roads are dry the whole way, and they are not.” Giles turned a page he had already turned. “In the eleventh month I’d sooner say three weeks.”

“She is not a woman who is refused twice.” Osric walked the length of the table and came back. “It will be heard in the town before the man’s at Alderford. You understand what that means, Giles. If it’s heard in the town before the terms are sealed—“

“Then it will be heard in the town after the terms are sealed.” Giles had written nothing all morning and wrote nothing now. “Have the papers in the chest before the town has the news. A thing said and not yet done is a promise, and a promise can be argued with. A thing said and already done can’t be argued with at all. Get the seal on it and let the news run behind.”

Osric rubbed his mouth. He was a big man going gray at the temples, and he had buried two children, and there were days when it showed in his face. It showed now.

“You may go,” he said to Mira.

She went out into the passage and pulled the door shut behind her and stood with her hand still on the latch, and heard him say something more that she could not make out, and heard Giles answer at greater length and in a lower voice.

Then she went up the stairs with her aunt’s tray under her arm.

Halfway up the turning she stopped and set the tray down on the step, because her hands had begun to shake and she did not want to carry a shaking tray into the room. She sat on the stair above it with her skirt pulled out of the way and her wrists on her knees.

Four years ago she had been fourteen and ill for nine days, and she had come out of the fever with another life in her head, a whole one, laid out from her wedding night to the cold of a palace floor. She had never told a living soul. In that life Ada went north. Ada went north and was never touched, and grew old in a house that hated her, and at the end of it she swallowed gold and died in a room by herself.

Ada was not going north now. Ada was on the coast road, or the border road, or lying under a hedge a day’s walk off, with a man with green eyes and no money.

And a Voss rider had come south with a yes in his mouth, and behind the yes there would be terms, and behind the terms a man, and all of it was coming to a house with no bride in it.

Mira did the arithmetic twice. It came out the same both times, and it came out badly.

She had changed the road. She had got her sister off it and had never once asked where the new one went, and the thing she had come out of the fever knowing — a Vale girl in Vauntholm, a cold hall, a bed she did not share — that thing had been true of Ada, and there was no Ada now, and the knowing was worth nothing at all.

She picked up the tray. Some of the broth had gone over the rim while she was sitting, and she dried the underside of the bowl with her sleeve, and carried it the rest of the way.

The ford road was frozen in the ruts, and Emeric came in off it with his cloak stiff with mud to the shoulder and his boots making a sound on the flags like a man walking on broken crockery.

He had been out with Rolf’s men since the day before, twenty miles out and twenty back, looking at a place where riders had been seen and finding the usual thing — a shepherd, three horses, a story that had got bigger with two days’ walking. He was tired and he was cold and he knew before he opened the study door that his brother had not waited for him.

“You’ve answered her,” he said.

“I have.”

“Before you spoke to me.”

Osric was at the window with his back to the room. Giles sat where he always sat, at the end of the table, with his book.

“There was nothing to speak to you about,” Osric said. “She offered. She is the only one in the north who has offered anything.”

“She offered you a rope and you’ve put your neck in it.” Emeric came into the room still in his cloak and did not sit. “You remember Leyton.”

“Don’t.”

“You remember him. He had a paper with a seal on it and a friend in the north, and a house with a wall round it and ten years of harvest in the cellars of it, and four winters ago Aldric Voss took it apart in a summer. There’s sheep in that hall now. I’ve spoken to a man who wintered there. There is sheep in the hall, Osric, and Leyton’s sons are in the ground with their father.”

Osric turned round. “Leyton had a treaty and no men. I have men.”

“You have five hundred and forty men and half of them are holding a ford. And you’d put a girl into that hall and call it a treaty.”

“I’d put a hand on the Northmark’s accounts,” Osric said, “and a marriage with it, because the marriage is the only thing the man in the north has asked for, and I would pay it twice over rather than be standing at Brenmoor in the spring. You want to tell me about that house. I know what that house is.”

“Then give me leave to ride west.” Emeric said it flatly, the way a man makes an offer he knows will be refused. “There’s a man out there who owes our father’s father a debt and has not forgotten Dunmoor. Six weeks out, six weeks back, and we’d have men on the road by the thaw.”

“Six weeks out,” Osric said, “and Hask is at Brenmoor in three.”

“Or he is not, and he has gone into winter quarters, and in the spring he comes back and eats us, and there is no Northmark hand on the accounts and no Northmark man with a reason to be our friend, and you will have spent the winter being noble.” He turned to Giles. “You have a mouth. Use it.”

Giles closed his book. “My lord of Vale asks a fair question. There is a man in the west with eleven hundred spears and a road to us six weeks long, and this morning there is a woman in the north with ten thousand and a road of eleven days. If I were the duke I would send to the west in the spring and marry into the north in the eleventh month and have both.”

“Both,” Emeric said. “And a girl in the middle of it.”

“Yes,” Giles said. “In the middle of it.”

Emeric stood there a moment. There was a way his brother had of taking a thing that had already been decided and letting men argue at it until they were tired, and Emeric had watched him do it all his life and had never once seen him lose.

“Tomorrow,” Osric said. “We’ll speak of the west tomorrow.”

“We’ll speak of it now.”

“Tomorrow. I’ve had no sleep and neither have you.” Osric went back to the window. “And Emeric. Not a word out of this room. Not to your daughter, not to the men at the ford.”

Emeric went out into the yard. The frost was coming down and he stood in it until his ears ached, and then he went to his own rooms and slept in his clothes.

Two days later the town had it.

Mira heard the noise before she understood it, because it was the wrong noise for a market morning — a crowd noise, close in, all at one pitch, with somebody singing in it badly. She went up to the linen room at the front and opened the shutter and looked down through the cold and the smoke.

The gate was open and the road outside it was full. A woman had set a basket of apples down on the stones and gone to her knees beside it with her hands flat on the wet. Behind her a boy with a peeled stick, and an old man with his hat off, and then more, and further off along the road more coming, and a man in a dyer’s apron shouting something in a voice that carried, and the word the shout carried up through the cold was Northmark.

Nell came up the stairs two at a time with her cap crooked. “My lady, they’re saying Hask’s riders are off Brenmoor. They’re saying the fires are out along the whole east road. They’re saying it’s because of the marriage—“

“Who’s saying it?”

“Everyone, my lady.”

“Who said it first?”

Nell stared at her.

“Never mind,” Mira said, and closed the shutter, and stood in the dark of the linen room with her hand on the bar.

A story that comes out of a hall goes down to the kitchen in a night and out to the stables in a morning and into the town when the town next comes up to the gate for bread. A story that comes out of a hall and is at Alderford first has been carried. Somebody paid a man to carry it, and paid him to carry it early.

She went down. In the yard two of Rolf’s men were standing by the well-house with their cups, and one of them said, “—my cousin’s girl at Alderford had it a week ago, a week and more, and there wasn’t a thing on that road then but talk—“

Mira walked past them and out under the arch of the gatehouse, and stopped in the shadow of it, and looked.

An old woman had knelt on the stones with her forehead almost to the ground. A young man had a child up on his shoulders. A girl Mira’s own age, with a shawl over her head, had begun to cry and did not seem to know she was doing it. The man in the dyer’s apron was shouting the duke’s name and the vale’s name in the same breath, and every so often the whole crowd answered him — not with words, a sound, the sound a town makes when it believes it has been saved.

Mira stood in the shadow and looked for her uncle’s man.

It took her a while. Giles was under the arch on the far side, out of the road, with his hands folded in front of him and his cap on, saying nothing to anyone. He watched the kneeling the way a mason watches a wall he has built go up, and when a knot of them broke off and went away down the road he turned his head to follow them, and then turned back to the gate.

Rolf came out at noon with four men and told the crowd to go home. Mira caught him at the gate.

“Is it true?”

“Two of the ford men rode in at first light, my lady. The outriders are off Brenmoor and the fires are out. It’s true enough.”

They cheered him for it, and they went home, and after dark they came back with candles and stood in the road singing until the watch moved them on.

Emeric came to the study that evening and met Giles coming out.

Giles closed the door behind him and put his back to it and looked at him — a man checking what was in another man’s face before he decided what to give him. Then he bowed, and went off down the passage with his book under his arm and a folded paper in his other hand, and the top fold had come open, and Emeric saw three names in Giles’s small neat hand before the man turned the corner. Alderford. Brenmoor. The reach.

Emeric went in.

His brother was sitting behind the table. He had a cup at his elbow and a fire built up high in a room that was already warm, and he was not pacing. He looked like a man at the end of a long business.

“Close it,” Osric said.

Emeric closed it. “There’s been no word of Ada.”

“No.”

“Four men out and no word in eleven days, and you’re sat there like a man who’s heard good news.”

“I’ve heard no news of my daughter,” Osric said. “I don’t expect to. She is gone, and she is not coming back, and I’ll thank you not to say her name in this room again.”

There was a silence in which the fire moved.

“How did the town have it?” Emeric said.

“The town hears things.”

“I had it from a carter on the ford road yesterday, coming back, and the carter had had it at Alderford a week before that.” Emeric put both hands on the back of the chair and leaned on it. “A week before that there was no answer from the north. There was nothing to answer. Whatever they had at Alderford, it was not that the Dowager had said yes, because she had not said it yet. It was that we had asked.”

Osric drank.

“Somebody let it out,” Emeric said. “Before there was anything to let out. And I saw the list in your man’s hand in that passage just now. Alderford, Brenmoor, the reach. Those are not the roads we’ve had four men on for eleven days. Those are the roads a story takes.”

“Somebody did,” Osric said.

“Who?”

His brother looked at him and did not answer, and Emeric straightened up slowly, because the answer had walked into the room on its own and was standing between them.

“Ah,” he said.

“Say it.”

“You’re going to send her instead.”

“I am.”

Emeric heard himself laugh. It was a bad sound, and short. “She’s promised to Auberon. The papers are drawn, the man’s father has been to Eastvale twice, and there’s a wedding in the spring.”

“Auberon’s father will have a gift and a letter and a very good reason, and he will take all three.” Osric set the cup down. “He is not a man to go to war over a girl he has never met.”

“And if he is?”

“Then in the spring I’ll have an enemy in the east and a friend in the north. And today I have a man in the east sitting in his winter quarters because he believes a thing that is not yet true, and I mean for it to be true before he learns otherwise.” Osric stood up. “You’ve said your say. Now hear mine. Brother—“

“No.”

“Emeric.”

“No. You’ll not have her.”

“My lord of Vale.”

Emeric stopped.

Twenty-six years, he thought. Twenty-six years since their father was buried, and his brother had never once called him that — not at the grave, not in any room in any house they had ever stood in together — and he had done it now, from behind a table, with a fire at his back, to put a wall between them that could be seen from the door.

“One girl,” Osric said. “Twenty thousand households.”

“Don’t.”

“In twenty-six years I have never asked you for a thing that you did not first offer me. I’m asking now. The town outside that gate knelt on the stones today. There is a song about it already; I heard two boys singing it at the kitchen door this morning and did not have the heart to stop them. If I go out there tomorrow and tell them it’s off — that the girl is ill, that the girl is whatever Giles puts in the letter — then I have made liars of twenty thousand people in one afternoon, and they will remember it, and the next time I ask them for a thing they will ask me why.”

“She’s eighteen years old.”

“She is,” Osric said. “And she is the cleverest person in this house, and she has been sitting in her aunt’s room for eleven days being useful, and she has not once come to me asking to be spared, which is more than I can say for you.”

Then he came round the table and went down onto his knees.

Emeric said, “Get up.”

He put his forehead down toward the floor, and the floor was stone and cold and full of grit where the rushes had worn through, and he said, “I had one daughter and she’s gone and I don’t know if she’s alive. I have no son living. What I have goes to a nephew and I’ll not be here to see what he does with it. I am asking you, as I have never asked you for anything, for the sake of twenty thousand households and the men who will die in their doorways in the spring if I do this badly—“

Emeric caught him under the arms and lifted. His brother was heavier than he had been and did not come up easily on the first pull, which was somehow the worst of it, and Emeric got him up and held him by both elbows and said, “Get up. Get up, Osric. All right. All right.”

“You’ll do it.”

“I’ll do it. God help me. I’ll do it.”

Osric let out a long breath, and it came out of him easily. Then he straightened his coat and took Emeric’s hand in both of his and held it hard and said, “There was never a brother like you. Never. I’ll not forget it,” and he was up and across the room and calling for the man to bring wine before Emeric had got the door open.

Emeric went out.

He went along the passage and down the stair and across the yard past the well-house, and the night had gone clear and the frost was coming down on the stones, and he got as far as the arch that led to his daughter’s court and stopped.

There was a light in her window. He could hear her moving about up there, and once a chair leg scraped, and then nothing for a while, and then the shutter going to.

He stood in the arch with the cold coming up out of the flags through his boots and thought about how he would say it. He tried it three ways. Mira. Your uncle has asked a thing of me. That was no good. Mira, there’s been word from the north. That was worse, because it was a lie by leaving a hole in itself, and she would hear the hole.

He got as far as the bottom of the stair and put his hand on the rail and looked up at the light.

Then he took his hand off the rail and went back to the arch and walked to the end of the gallery and turned and walked back, and the light in her window went on burning, and he walked it again.