Page 25 of Setting the Break

"Ten," Sigrid says.

She has come up on his left without being invited, which is her habit, and she says it loudly enough for the whole yard to hear her, which is also true to character. Sigrid does not believe in conversations that happen at a volume the men cannot benefit from. She thinks authority is half theatre, and she is probably right, though Eskil would sooner swallow his own tongue than tell her so.

Sigrid is the captain of the guard and she is not Bohdi. Nobody is Bohdi. But she could give him a hard run for his money on a good day, and Eskil has never said so out loud to either of them, because telling Sigrid she is nearly as good as Bohdi would earn him a look that could strip paint from wood, and telling Bohdi would only make the man unbearable at supper. She is his second when his second is elsewhere, which is not often but does happen. Five years ago Bohdi came down with a cough that took him off his feet for six weeks. It was a deep, wet, rattling thing that put him on his hands and knees in the corridor twice and turned his face the colour of old ash. There had been nothing in the world to be done about it but rest and time, because Indrie had not yet been brought into their lives, and the keep's previous physician had been a well-meaning old man whose primary treatment for everything was warm broth and prayer. Sigrid had picked up the axe, so to speak, and carried it without complaint and without once asking when Bohdi would be back, which Eskil suspected had cost her more than she let on.

She is kinder to the men's stamina and their knees than Eskil is, which is not difficult, and it makes for a decent balance. Eskil pushes them until they hate him, and Sigrid pulls them back before the hatred calcifies into something that won't wash off with rest and a hot meal.

"Twenty," Eskil says.

"Ten," Sigrid says, "and then they can perform the drill again, properly, which is what you actually want."

He would like to tell her to go and fuck herself. He would like it enormously. She is also right, which is the part that galls him, because what he wants is three ranks that can raise a shield at the same time and what twenty laps gets him is forty men too tired and too resentful to try. Punishment is satisfying; results are useful. He knows the difference. He has always known the difference. He is simply not in a frame of mind to care about it today.

They look at each other. The warriors in the yard have stopped pretending not to watch and are openly trying to decide who they would side with if blades came out. Eskil holds it for a five count and then jerks his chin at the wall.

"Ten," Sigrid calls, turning to the yard. She has never in her life doubted that she will be obeyed, and the men hear it. "And then we do it again, until the third rank remembers it has arms."

The yard empties out into a ragged line of warriors running along the base of the wall, breath steaming, shields banging against their backs. That is the balance.

"You're in a mood today, my lord," Sigrid says, and she only says it because they have known each other long enough that she thinks she can get away with it. She is right, to a degree. He married her to her husband four years ago and poured the ceremonial cup and stood in the corridor outside the birthing room while she wept over her first child, and he is inclined to let her say her piece from time to time. It is a privilege she has earned. She does not abuse it often. "The warriors are going to be sore for a week."

"How will I sleep?" Eskil asks dryly.

"Avie looks like she's about to light herself on fire, she's so red."

"Your shield maiden came out of the keep last night with an ale in each hand, captain." He does not need to look at Sigrid to feel the betrayed stare she levels at the woman in question, somewhere out among the runners. "She's done this to herself."

Sigrid opens her mouth, because she always has something, always one more remark or correction or observation delivered with a cheerfulness no argument has ever dented. Then her eyes go past him and the something dies.

Eskil turns.

Ermin is crossing the yard at a dead sprint.

The boy has not come to drills since he went from warrior-in-training to physician's assistant, trading the sword for the mortar and pestle and the early-morning runs for early-morning rounds at Indrie's elbow. But he was fast then and he is fast now, and he is covering the frozen ground in long, ragged strides with his cloak flying behind him and no gloves on his hands. He is not flushed with effort. He is white, the colour of tallow, the colour that comes when the blood has pulled itself somewhere deep and left the surface empty. He is not pacing himself, which means he has already been running a long time, which can mean nothing good.

Eskil's gut knows before the rest of him does. It drops, low and cold and certain, the way it has always dropped in the half-second before a blade swings.

Ermin pulls up three paces in front of him and doubles over with his hands on his knees and gets it out on one torn breath.

"Indrie's been taken."

There is a ringing in Eskil's ears and it eats the rest of the yard. It eats the runners and the wall and the cold white sky and the sound of Sigrid shifting beside him. He hears the words. They arrive whole and plain and perfectly intelligible, and he can feel some part of himself standing in the doorway of his own mind, refusing to let them into the house.

He takes Ermin by the shoulder and pulls him upright so that he can see the boy's face, because a face will tell him things that words will leave out.

"What do you mean he's been taken?"

It comes out of the boy in a rush, the words stumbling into one another, every one of them queued up behind his teeth the whole ride back and fighting now to be first out. Indrie should have been home by midmorning, because the farm is an hour out and the baby came before dawn. Ermin knows that because the farmer's eldest rode in at first light with the news for the parish rolls, grinning fit to split his face, a healthy boy. By midday Ermin had talked himself out of worrying twice, once because Indrie always stays to check the mother a second time and examine the child properly in daylight, and once because Indrie rides at the speed of a napping cat and has been known to stop on the road to look at interesting weeds. By early afternoon the knot in his stomach had cinched tight enough that he took a horse from the stables without asking anyone's permission and went out the east road to see whether there had been complications.

He found the escort in the mud a mile short of the ford with an arrow through his throat and no sign of Indrie at all.

The ringing stops.

What comes after it is not panic. Eskil knows panic from the outside. He has watched it take hold of grown men on decks and in shield walls, watched it turn warriors who were steady a moment before into something thrashing and useless. Panic belongs to people who do not know what to do next. Eskil always knows what to do next. What he has instead is a kind of enormous, flat quiet, a clearing, sudden and vast, every tree in it felled at once, nothing left but open ground and a very clear view of the horizon. And underneath the quiet, sitting very still and waiting to be let off its chain, is the other thing, the one with teeth.

He does not let it off the chain. Not yet. It is no use to him yet.

"Sigrid."