Chapter 9: What the Brothers Did Not Say

The men had the trestles out and were stacking them on their sides under the gallery, and there was a place just inside the door where the frost had come in and begun to go off again: the print of a boot heel, and over it a scatter of smaller tracks where the servants had carried things through, and a wisp of straw that had come out of somebody’s shoe.

Emeric had his hand on the doorframe and had not moved it in some while.

Beyond the gate the road went down between the houses and out through the town and up the valley, and there was nothing on it now but the two empty carts coming back up the hill.

“Come in,” Osric said from behind him. “There’s nothing out there to look at. There hasn’t been this hour.”

“He got back, then.”

“Your son came in through the gate an hour ago and shut his door on himself. I heard it.” Osric came and stood in the doorway with a cup in his hand and did not drink from it. “They’ll have her in Brenmoor by dark. Roof, fire, men who know their business.”

“Forty riders and a coach.”

“Forty riders and a coach. Do you know what’s on that road tonight? A marriage. Because of it the Northmark’s horse stands where it stands for another year, and there’s no muster in the valley this spring.”

“A year,” Emeric said. “And when it’s up, it’ll be my tenants’ sons at the ford.”

“Then I’ll have had a year.”

Giles came through the hall with one boot cut open across the toes and his arms full of papers, said good evening to them both, and went out into the yard to see about something or other. The women with the brooms had got as far as the first pillar and had stopped there, waiting for the lords to be gone.

Emeric looked at the boot print by the door a while longer.

“They wore their knives at my table,” he said. “Every night for four days. In the hall, at the boards, with my own tenants sitting across from them.”

“They’re soldiers a long way from home. It’s what they’re used to.”

“They wore them at dinner.” He took his hand off the frame and turned. “And not one of my men asked them to take them off. And I didn’t ask.”

“Say the thing you mean to say. I’ve your hall full of borrowed benches and four of my carts standing empty in your yard.”

Emeric had been carrying the question a long time and had never once put it down in front of anybody.

“Ten years ago. At the Sarrow.” He kept his voice level, because the women were still in the hall. “Father brought the host up and stood off. The Vosses went in without us, and the old Margrave and his son didn’t come out of it. That’s the shape of it. That’s the shape everyone gives it.”

“That’s the shape of it.”

“Before the crossing. Did Father send them word?” He made himself say all of it. “A rider. A letter. A man with a lantern and one sentence in his mouth. Did he send anything at all to tell them he wasn’t coming?”

Osric’s face did something and then stopped doing it. He turned the ring on his finger, once.

“Ten years,” he said. “That’s a bone to leave in the ground with him.”

“Did he send word?”

“Whatever our father did, he did with reasons, and he’s dead, and it isn’t for sons to open a man’s grave and count what’s in it.” Osric had not raised his voice. It had gone flat instead, flat and even, which was how he sounded when a door was shut and meant to stay shut. “We don’t say it in this house. We don’t say it out of this house. Not in Aldemar. Not in the Old Capital. And not in the north.”

“I’m not asking the north. I’m asking you. You were with him. I was here.”

“And now you’ve asked me.”

“Because this morning I put my daughter into a coach and sent her up that road, and I find I’d like to know what we did to those people.”

Osric set the cup down on the chest by the door.

“She’s married,” he said. “She isn’t riding into a feud, she’s riding into a house — a roof, a table, a husband who has taken our terms and our gold and given his word in front of witnesses. That’s what a marriage is when it’s done properly. Feuds are for men with nothing better to do in the winter.”

Emeric said nothing.

In the silence his brother made a small motion with his hand, as though brushing ash off his sleeve.

If there had been a rider, Osric would have said so before he finished asking. He would have said it, and he would have used it — at every table in Aldemar, every year since, at every mention of the Vale name said sideways. In ten years Osric had never once kept a good thing quiet.

No rider, then. He would never prove it — the men who could prove it were in the ground, and the ones who weren’t would carry it down with them — but he had asked, and his brother had turned his ring, and that was as near to it as anyone was ever going to give him.

He had seen Voss steel once before. Not across a dinner table.

The mourning. His father had sent him north to stand in the Voss hall for the Vale and be seen standing there. He remembered the smell of it — pine pitch and juniper, and something under both — and the black hangings lifting where the door let the draft in, and the two long boards on their trestles at the head of the hall, taking up more of the floor than two men should.

He remembered the men better.

They were along the wall and in the passage and in the doorway, and they had their knives out, in their own house, and they were not being quiet about it. One of them came out from the others and said it to Emeric’s face, in front of the whole hall: the Vale men had sat their horses on the ridge and watched the Vosses go down into the water, and had not come, and had not sent word that they were not coming.

He had no answer for it then. He had one now, and it had come to him in the small hours at Eastvale with the fire down, years too late to be any use to anybody.

The man was not drunk and he was not raving. He said it for the hall, and the hall had been waiting to hear it said to a Vale man.

Emeric thought, with great clarity and no particular fear, that he was not going to leave that house.

“Put them away.”

She did not raise her voice. She said it across the hall the way another woman would set a dish down on a table. The knives went away. The man who had spoken did not look at Emeric again, and nobody touched him or moved him; he went back into the dark with the rest of them.

She had one eye. It did not leave him.

He rode home and told his father all of it, in order, without putting himself in the middle of it, as he had been taught. His father heard him out. It was a long time before he answered.

“That one put steel away with a word,” he said at last. “A house with her at the head of it will cost us.”

He said it the way a man remarks that the weather is coming in, and then he asked whether Emeric had eaten.

When the knives were gone she came down off the step and took his hands — an old woman’s hands, dry and very strong — and had a stool brought, and a cup, and stood over him while it was poured. She asked after his father by name. She asked whether the ford at Alderford had held through the thaw, and whether the Vale had had rain. She said the escort would take him as far as the border, and that he was to eat before he went out again, because a man who has ridden in out of the cold doesn’t know how tired he is until he is back on the road.

She knew. He had understood that much then, and ten years had only made it plainer. She had buried a husband and a son that week, and she had stood in her own hall in front of her own men and sent the Vale’s son home alive and warm and fed, and she had done it in front of them, so that every man there would know afterward whose hand he had walked out under.

He drank the wine because she was watching him and he could not think what else to do with his hands.

“Emeric.”

Osric was at the far end of the hall. Emeric had not heard him go.

“Those four carts that came back from Brenmoor — put them on the Aldemar grain while the road holds. And whatever’s left of the guest bedding goes with the spring carts, not before.”

“My lord.”

Osric stopped at the screen. “Write to her. Short letters. Nothing in them that would shame her if her husband read it out at his own table.”

“That’s a thing to say to me.”

“It’s a thing to do.” He went out.

The women came on as far as the second pillar and swept around his boots without being asked.

Emeric turned back to the door, to the boot print going soft at the edges, and the empty place beyond the gate where the chests had stood in their rows, and the road going up out of the valley. Then he put his hand on the frame again and left it there.