Page 26 of Setting the Break

"My lord."

"Ten riders, mounted, east gate, now. Armed and provisioned for two days. You have the yard and the gates until I'm back. Nobody in or out of this keep who can't give a name and a reason, and I want the walls doubled before dark." He is already walking. His strides are long and the yard parts for him without being asked, men peeling out of the way because they have learned to read a current and stay out of it. "Ermin, get a horse. You're coming to show me the place."

"I left him lying there. The guard. I left him in the road," Ermin says, trotting to keep up, his voice cracking at the edges. Then it goes high and young, younger than it has sounded in months. "I didn't know what else to do."

"He's past caring where he lies."

They are mounted inside a quarter of an hour.

The ride out is fast and nobody talks. Eskil holds the pace just short of what the horses can bear. It is a ground-eating canter that chews up the frozen track and sends clods of mud spinning behind them, and he spends every minute of it taking the thing apart.

The east road is inside his border. It is an hour from his gates. It is the road Indrie has ridden a dozen times with an escort Eskil assigned himself, and he assigned that escort out of a rotation chosen specifically for steadiness and good manners, because Indrie does not like being followed by men who frighten the patients, and because in his own mind Eskil had been guarding against a sprained wrist and a bolting horse. Against the ordinary small catastrophes of a healer who rides badly and works long hours in remote places, a turned ankle on a muddy path, the mild and manageable dangers of peacetime.

He had not been guarding against an ambush.

That is on him. He does not flinch from it and he does not waste anything on it, not guilt or recrimination or the indulgent luxury of self-blame that changes nothing and serves no one. It is simply a fact now, logged and filed, and it will inform every decision he makes for the rest of his life.

They come to the place in the late afternoon, when the light is going flat and the shadows are beginning to pool under the alders.

The guard is where Ermin left him, on his back in the churned mud with the arrow standing out from under his jaw and his eyes open to the sky. Jorund. Nineteen years old. The one who put in for the east rotation twice because the pay for escort duty is a half-copper better per week, and Eskil knows that much about him and nothing else. He does not know who the boy's mother is. He does not know whether there is a mother. He does not know if someone is waiting in a doorway somewhere in the lower city for the sound of this boy's boots on the step.

He looks at the arrow before he looks at anything else, because the arrow will tell him more than the boy will.

The fletching is Jakadi. Three vanes, cut short and square at the back, bound in the red waxed thread they use because they believe the colour keeps the shaft from warping. That is horse shit, and they have believed it for a hundred years, because belief does not answer to evidence. They did not police their shot. They left the arrow where it landed, on Rengaran soil, which means they wanted it found and they wanted it read and they do not care that he knows it was them. That is either arrogance or invitation, and neither one sits well.

He crouches and reads the ground.

Seven riders, possibly eight. Small-footed horses, unshod on the hind quarters, which is Jakadi again. Their farriers only shoe the front, something about letting the back hooves grip on mountain trails, and nobody else on this border leaves that print. They came out of the alder on both sides, which means they were waiting and knew the bend, which means they knew the road and the rotation and likely the hour. He can see where the scuffle was. There are boots and knees in the frozen mud, and the long drag mark of someone going down hard and being hauled up again, and a smear of blood that is not Jorund's because it is ten paces from where Jorund fell. Eskil crouches over that stretch for a while with his forearms on his thighs and his jaw set, reading the story the mud is telling him. There were hands and knees here. Someone went down and tried to crawl. Someone else stood over him and did not let him up, and then they pulled him to his feet and took him east.

Alive. They took him alive and they are carrying him on a horse rather than dragging him behind one, and Eskil holds on to that with both hands, because it is the only good piece of information in this entire wretched stretch of ground.

A hundred yards off, in the long frosted grass at the field edge where the track meets the open country, the placid brown mare from the keep stable is grazing with her reins trailing and Indrie's satchel still on the saddle. She has been there all day, by the look of it, unconcerned by the violence that happened within earshot of her. She is a stupid and good-natured animal who has never had an original thought, and Eskil has never been so angry at a horse in his life and knows it is irrational and does not care.

Eskil walks out to her. She lifts her head and lets him come, ears forward, entirely placid, and he puts a hand on her neck and takes the satchel down himself.

The flap is open. It has been gone through and tipped out, the contents scattered back along the trampled grass in a careless trail. Whoever searched it had not been looking for anything specific, or had been looking and not found it, and had dumped the rest without a thought. Eskil stands there for a moment with the empty bag in his two hands, the worn leather soft under his fingers, and what goes through his head is crude and savage and detailed. He gives it room. He lets it run its full and bloody length, every image, every consequence, every specific and inventive thing he would do to the men who touched this bag and the man who carried it. And then he puts it away.

Then he walks the grass and picks the pieces up.

The brown glass bottles, two whole and one cracked down the side with a thin line running from the lip to the base. The clay jar with the wax seal still intact. A roll of clean linen gone dirty and dark on one side where it landed in the mud. The scissors, half trodden into the earth by a boot that did not notice them, and Eskil crouches and digs them out with his fingers and wipes the mud off them on his thigh and puts them in the bag with the rest. He handles each piece like it matters, because it does. Every one of these things has been in Indrie's hands, chosen and arranged and used with the same care he gives a wound, and they are not supplies. They are evidence of a life being lived well and on purpose.

Indrie will be indignant if these are not returned to him. He will hold the cracked bottle up to the light with the expression that is too dignified to be a pout but not by much, and he will say something gentle about how the glass can be boiled and the linen can be washed and nothing is truly ruined.

Eskil is going to return them to him. He is going to put this bag in that man's hands himself, and he will burn his way through every living thing standing between here and there if that is the price, and the price is not a consideration. It is a choice he finished making before he got off the horse.

He buckles the satchel and hangs it from his own saddle, next to the sword.

He sends the boy home with two of them, wrapped properly in a cloak and carried across a saddle on his back with his arms folded over his chest, and not slung. He tells them to find out who his people are before the body is in the gates, who to send for and where they live and whether there is family, and that he will speak to them himself, and that nobody is to go to them first with a kind word and a guess. The dead deserve the truth from the man who put them in the ground, and the families deserve it from the man who sent them out on that road.

He sends two scouts east on the trail. Their orders are to follow it until they lose it, and then to stop, and to come back and tell him exactly where they lost it and what the ground looked like when they did. They are not to engage. They are not to be clever. They are not to improvise or interpret or decide on their own that they can handle whatever they find. They are to look at the ground and come home. He says it twice and makes them repeat it, because he has buried scouts before who thought they knew better.

Then he turns his horse around and rides back to Valen, and that is the hardest thing he has done in years.

Because every part of him wants to go east. There is a track in the mud in front of him and the man he loves is at the end of it. He has armed warriors at his back and a longsword on his hip and enough cold fury in his chest to carry him through the dark and out the other side, and the pull of it is physical. It is lodged under the breastbone, hooked into the meat of him, dragging with every stride the horse takes in the wrong direction.

And he would be riding into Jakadi country in the dark with no idea where the camp is and no notion of its size or its defences, against an enemy whose entire way of war is to be somewhere else when you arrive. The first thing they would do when his torches came up out of the trees is put a knife in their hostage and scatter, and the woods would close over them. He knows that. He has studied these people. He has sat with Bohdi over maps and talked through their tactics until he could recite them in his sleep: the fluid camps, the refusal to hold ground, the absolute willingness to sacrifice anything that slows them down. Knowing it is the only thing keeping him on this road, and he is honest enough with himself to admit it is a near thing, and that ten years ago it would not have held. Ten years ago he would already be in the trees, and Indrie would already be dead, and he would have no one to blame but his own roaring, useless heart.

Back at the keep he comes through the gate in the last of the light, the sky above the walls the colour of a bruise going yellow at the edges, and the yard is full of men who all stop what they are doing to look at him. Every face turns. Every conversation dies. He can feel the weight of it: the questions they will not ask, the fear they are trying to hide, the tension that fills a place when the people inside it know something has gone badly wrong and have not yet been told how badly.