"You spoke to me yesterday," Osric said. "Most people wait to be invited."
"Most people do not have armies in their wheat," Miren said. She kept the crank moving. Work made truth easier to hold. "I am Miren. I haul water. I help at the mill when Corin's back aches. I am not a councillor."
"Councillors lie better." He rested a hand on the well's rough lip. "This stone is older than the cottages."
"Older than the castle's first tower, Sibley says. The well was here when Veyne was only a watch-post. The castle grew up around the deep water, and when the castle burned, the water stayed."
Osric's fingers tightened almost invisibly. "Do you know how it burned?"
"Stories. Northern banners on the ridge. Your order to deny them the hold. Fire set from the inner courts outward. Rain that came too late."
"Stories tidy the edges," he said. "I was twenty. My father was dying in the capital of a coughing sickness that made every decision taste like blood and peppermint. The northern dukes had already taken three keeps. Veyne was my childhood and my brother's pride—my brother trained the garrison; I was the one who could read a map. When the scouts said the dukes would reach us in two days, the cisterns were low from a dry summer. We could not withstand a siege. So I chose the fire. I told myself it was mathematics."
Miren hauled the bucket over the lip and set it on the stones. Water slapped. "Did the mathematics sleep afterward?"
"No." He looked at her directly. "Neither did the brother. He died of smoke in the lower hall trying to save a ledger of names. The dukes arrived to ashes and moved on to easier meat. The capital called me decisive. The valley called me worse. Both were correct in pieces."
Edric approached along the wall with a load of kindling and slowed when he saw them. Osric noted him with a flick of glance—staff, open shirt, the particular readiness of a man who loved someone standing near a king.
"Your man?" Osric asked.
"My neighbor," Miren said, and then, because precision mattered, "and the person I intend to marry when the harvest is in and the world is quieter than this."
Edric heard that; color rose under his tan. He set the kindling down and came to stand near enough to be counted.