"Go see what you built."
Tauriel had said it from the bed.
She had said it at the third hour past noon, with Cael asleep against her shoulder and the keep woman who had been sitting with them since the morning bringing in the small basin of warm water that Arethil had asked for, and the small fire on the chamber hearth was at the half it had been at the morning. Aldric had been sitting in the chair by the bed for three hours. He had been there for two of them before Tauriel had opened her eyes, and one of them after. He had not, in the three hours, been outside the door of the chamber.
She had told him to go.
She had told him with the precise small set of her mouth that he had learned, in the year of the pregnancy, was the set that did not admit revision.
He had gone.
He had not, on going down the stair, intended to leave the keep.
He had intended to walk the inner courtyard for a quarter-hour and come back. The courtyard, however, when he came out of the keep's inner door, was full of people he did not recognise, and the people he did recognise were not in their ordinary work, and the dwarven quarter had a long line of small fires that he had not, in nine years of nights, seen at this hour in the courtyard, and the air smelled of something cooking — meat, and a thing the dwarves did with their honey at festivals — that had not been the smell of the courtyard at any of the festivals the realm had set on its own calendar.
Gorlim was on the inner step.
He had been waiting there. He had not been told, by any messenger Aldric had sent, to wait. He had been told, by someone — probably by Tauriel, by an inner-channel message Aldric had not seen sent — to be on the inner step at the third hour past noon.
He inclined his head.
"My lord."
"Captain."
"The Lady?"
"Sleeping. The child sleeps with her. Arethil is in the chair by the window. The keep woman is at the door."
"Good." Gorlim took a breath. "Walk with me."
He did not ask what they were walking through. He did not ask where they were going. He turned, and stepped down off the inner step, and crossed the courtyard at the easy pace of a man who had decided, an hour ago, that the lord would need a walk and that the walk would be the captain's gift.
Aldric followed.
They went out the inner gate.
The outer courtyard was busier than the inner. There were people in it Aldric had not seen, in his life, in this country — Bree merchants, by the cut of their coats, who must have come up the road in the last day; dwarves of the southern caravan who had been a week east on the trade-route and had ridden back at the news; a small group of Rangers who had been somewhere on the eastern circuit and were now standing in a tight knot at the eastern arch with their hoods back, talking with the keep guard. The keep guard had not been told to admit any of them. The keep guard had not refused any of them either. The keep guard was, by Aldric's reading of the small order around the gate, doing the thing a guard did when a thing it had not been prepared for had arrived and the thing was not a threat.
They went through the outer gate.
The settlement was in the streets.
Aldric stopped at the inside of the gate.
He stopped because the first thing his eye did, on coming out of the gate and seeing the long inner street with people in it from the gate to the curve, was assess the crowd. He counted heads in the first thirty paces of the street and corrected for the side-alleys that ran off it. He marked the position of the keep guard along the line of the route. He marked the small clear paths the keep guard had kept open along the centre of the street for the passage of someone who might need to pass. He marked the way the crowd had organised itself without orders — clusters by quarter, families with children near the walls and away from the centre, the older men along the inside benches at the wine-shops and the younger men along the outside.
He counted, in the count of perhaps twenty seconds, eighteen things that would have been the matter of a security report on any ordinary day.
He stopped counting.
He stopped counting because Gorlim, beside him, had not stopped at the gate, and Gorlim's not-stopping had been the small clean signal Aldric needed to put the counting away. The captain was three paces ahead, walking the centre of the cleared path, with his hands at his sides. He did not, on Aldric's resumption, look back.
Aldric followed.
The street was loud.
The street was, by his reading of nine years of streets, the loudest the inner street of Northwatch had ever been at the third hour past noon on a winter day. There was a fiddler somewhere along the line of the wine-shops; the fiddler had been at it long enough that he had moved past the standard tunes; he was playing the small old Dúnedain naming-song that had been, eight years ago at the wedding, on the lips of the older women along the back wall of the courtyard at the third hour of the feast. Aldric had not heard the tune since the wedding. He registered that the fiddler had not, then, known the tune; the fiddler had been a boy at the wedding and had learned the tune in the seven years since because it had been a tune of the country.
A woman stepped out of the crowd as he came past the wine-shop.
She was old. She was perhaps sixty. She had the hands of a baker — Aldric saw the hands first, the strong long hands with the small white scar across the second knuckle of the left thumb that all the bakers in the keep settlement had from the cutting-knife — and she was carrying a small round loaf in a cloth, with the cloth folded back so that the loaf showed.
She stopped three paces from him.
She held the loaf out.
She did not bow. She did not curtsey. She did not — Aldric registered, with a small inward flat surprise — do any of the small ritual things a settler woman did when she stepped out of a crowd to a lord. She held out the loaf as she would have held it out to her own son coming home from the market.
He stopped.
She said: "For your wife."
"Thank you."
"And there is a name."
"There is."
"They are saying — they are saying in the market that he has been called Cael."
"He has."
The old woman drew a small breath.
"Cael," she said. "That is — that is one of the old names. My grandmother had a brother of that name. He was a fisher of the Brandywine. He was — he was a long time ago. He was a good man." Her hands tightened, very slightly, on the cloth around the loaf. "I am — my lord — I am glad you have given him a good name. The country has not had a good name for a long time."
She held the loaf out a fraction further.
He took it.
He took it with both hands, because the loaf was warm, and the warmth of the loaf was the warmth of the oven in the old woman's bakery on the third street, and he had been told by the corner of his vision and by his own steady hand and by the small flat exercise of standing in the corridor for an hour and a quarter without pacing that he was a man who was holding things; the loaf was the second thing he had held that day with both hands, and the loaf, in the same way the small hand had, did the thing it did against his palms.
His composure broke.
It broke in the small private way it broke — not in tears, not in any sound, but in the small slow drawing of breath he did at the foot of the stair when the day's work had been more than he had been ready for in the morning. The old woman saw it. She did not, by any movement, make anything of it. She inclined her head once — the smallest, plainest inclination of a settler woman who had seen a lord be moved by a thing and who had been brought up not to take that for the lord's account — and she stepped back into the crowd.
He stood with the loaf in his hands.
Gorlim was three paces ahead.
Gorlim had stopped, and Gorlim had not, in the stopping, turned, and the not-turning was, in Gorlim's vocabulary of small unobtrusive gestures, the kindest gesture the captain had it in him to make.
Aldric drew the second breath he had given himself.
He went on after Gorlim.
He carried the loaf the rest of the walk.
He did not, in the walk, talk to anyone else. The crowd did not, in the rest of the walk, step out to him. The fiddler kept at the naming-song. The dwarves at the small fires gave him the small dwarvish bow-without-a-bow that they used for moments of quiet acknowledgment. A child or two reached out to touch the edge of his coat as he passed and was either pulled back by a parent or stepped past too quickly for the parent to manage. The smell of the meat the dwarves were cooking carried along the street. At the far curve of the street he could see, where the long view opened onto the second quarter, that two more streets were lit with lanterns, and that the second quarter had set out small braziers along the line of the windows of the houses.
He walked the second quarter.
He walked the third.
He walked the dwarven quarter, where Grimgar met him at the door of the long forge with a small clay cup of the dwarves' winter brew that Aldric did not, by his medical schedule, drink at the third hour past noon, but which he took today, and drank a swallow of, and gave back to Grimgar with the small inclination Grimgar had taught him to give a dwarf returning a cup.
He walked the keep settlement back to the inner gate.
The loaf was still warm when he came through the inner gate.
Gorlim, at the inner step, stopped.
He did not, on stopping, speak. He inclined his head — not the formal half-bow, the small private one that had become, in seven years, his most private gesture — and turned to take up the matter of the gate-watch, which had been waiting for him for the duration of the walk.
Aldric went up the stair with the loaf.
⚜ ━━━━ ROYAL PROCLAMATION ━━━━ ⚜
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