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Thomas flushed. “I didn’t mean—”
“I know what you meant,” Osric said. “I’m thinking the same thing.”
No one at the table spoke for a while, though around them the room carried on: men boasting, dice rattling, spoons scraping wood. No one else saw anything wrong with the painting’s place. To them it was just how things were: King on the wall, fire in the grate, coin on the counter if they were lucky.
“Do you regret it?” Thomas asked at last. “Making that? Starting people on all this…” He gestured vaguely, meaning the candles, the offerings, the faith.
Osric stared into his bowl. Fat shone in small circles on the surface, catching the light from the hearth. “I regret not thinking where it might end up,” he said. “I thought I was painting for the King, for the capital. I didn’t think of someone hanging it over a starved fire and asking it for mercy.”
Miles scraped his bowl clean and set his spoon down with a clack. “You didn’t burn their wood yourself,” he said. “Don’t twist the knife too deep.”
“No,” Osric said. “I just painted the place that made the knife seem holy.”
Miles looked up at the canvas, then back at him. “If you’re going to start pulling all the thread that far,” he said, “you’ll have yourself strangled in string before we hit the next town.”
“Maybe,” Osric said. “Better strangled in string than asleep in it.”
Alice returned again, collecting empty bowls. “You three want ale?” she asked. “Or are you King’s men on a holy fast?”
“Ale,” Miles said promptly. “If His Grace meant us to fast, he’d pay us better so we could afford virtue.”
She snorted. “Virtue doesn’t sell in this house. Ale does.” Her gaze flicked to Osric. “You’ve barely touched yours.”
“I will,” Osric said. “I was looking.”
“At the picture?” She followed his glance. “You’re not the first. We had a man last spring who sat under it all night and cried into his beer. Said the heath looked like where he grew up. Couldn’t go back there. Stewards had ‘im off his strip.”