Amelia’s chest hurt. “It wasn’t your fault,” she said.
He only looked down at his hands as if they belonged to another man.
“It was my command.”
He said it without heat, without argument, with the flat certainty of a man who had carved the words into himself long ago and called the wound truth.
“You led them,” Amelia said carefully. “You didn’t choose the field. You didn’t choose the weather, the river, Edward’s army, Montfort’s mistakes, or any of the men who put those boys there.”
“I called them to follow me.”
“And they did.”
“Aye.”
“Because they trusted you.”
His mouth tightened.
“That is not mercy, Amelia.”
The sound of her name in that voice, in that dark, struck her hard enough that she nearly forgot what she meant to say.
“You brought seven home.”
His eyes went cold. “I lost sixteen.”
“You brought seven home,” she said again, steady now because if she let him turn this into only blood, he would drown in it. “And Wat. And Alyson. Hob told me. Wat told me too.”
“I found the children in a ditch,” he said after a moment. “That is not heroism.”
“It is if you’re the child in the ditch.”
For a long while, neither of them spoke. Rain filled the hall, not inside, though in several places that was becoming negotiable, but in sound. It drummed on the roof, rushed from the eaves, hissed when the wind drove it against stone. The world had shrunk to the low fire, the sleeping household, and Thomas with his ghosts.
At last he said, “I know what I am.”
Amelia’s fingers tightened around the edge of her cloak.
“I am a sword.” He lifted one shoulder, as if this were simple and not the saddest thing she had ever heard. “A sword is useful.You can build naught with it, mend naught, grow naught. It will not coax grain from a field or keep accounts from turning into lies. It will not make children laugh, nor bread rise, nor an old woman’s rent vanish because mercy once put it in the wrong column.”
Amelia swallowed.
“But it will keep the people behind it alive a while longer,” Thomas said. “And that is no small thing. It is the thing I have. Mayhap the only thing.”
“That isn’t true.”
He ignored that, or couldn’t hear it.
“So I stand where I am put. I mend what walls I can. I get the grain in.” A brief ghost of humor crossed his face, gone almost before it arrived. “Well. You get the grain in.”
“I had help.”
“You had all of Ashcombe by the scruff of the neck.”
“Only because Ashcombe needed scruffing.”
This time his mouth moved, barely.
