Page 27 of Setting the Break

He does not get his gloves off before he is sending for Dagny.

She comes at a run, down the stairs from the upper keep with her hair half out of its tie and both short swords already on her belt, which tells him she heard something in the yard on her way up and armed herself before she arrived. That is Dagny. She does not waste time arriving unprepared for things she can prepare for on the walk over.

"The Jakadi have Indrie," Eskil says. He says it plainly and without preamble, because Dagny does not need to be eased into things and would resent the attempt. "They took him off the east road this morning and they killed his escort doing it. I need Bohdi."

Dagny does not waste his time with any of the noises other people would make: the sharp intake of breath, the stammered questions, the reflexive and unhelpful expressions of shock that serve no purpose except to let the speaker feel they are participating in the crisis. Her face does a rapid sequence of emotions that crosses her features and is mastered before any single one of them can take hold, and then she says, "Where are they?"

"Two days out toward Helde, maybe less. You'll meet them coming back if you ride through the night."

"I'll have him here in two days."

"Don't bring him here. It'll take too long. Send him east. He'll find the trail, and probably every last one of them, before we do. That man can track a bird through the air."

"I'll be gone within the hour," Dagny says, and she is already turning, already moving, and he can see her calculating the provisions and the horse changes and the fastest route east in the set of her jaw.

Garrik finds him in the corridor outside the study.

He is up and dressed and moving stiff and slow with one arm held in close to his body, guarding the left side, and the dressing on his chest shows pale under his shirt where the collar sits open. He has clearly walked the length of the keep to do this, which is further than Indrie has allowed him to walk in the six days since the wound, and he is in more pain than he intends to let on, and it shows around his eyes.

"I heard," Garrik says. "Whatever use I am, I'm offering it."

Eskil looks at the dressing. He looks at the careful way the man is holding himself, the slight forward lean that takes the tension off the stitches, the pallor under the weathered brown of his skin.

"You're six days off a blade wound that opened your chest from the collarbone across, and my healer is not here to close it a second time when you tear it open. Go back to your room."

"I know the southern tracks and I know how the Jakadi move in woodland better than any man behind these walls." Garrik does not step back and does not raise his voice. He says it the way he says everything, evenly and without inflection. He has thought carefully about the words and does not intend to say them twice. "They put their camps where water covers the sound and they run east by habit when they're pushed. Your men will go in looking for a stockade and there won't be one. There won't even be a proper clearing. There'll be hides strung between trees and a fire pit you can't see until you're standing in it."

It is all true, and Eskil already knows most of it, some from Bohdi's reports and some from the old campaigns and some from the long nights poring over dispatches from the eastern border. The fact that the man came up here in the state he is in to say it is not nothing. It is a considerable thing, and Eskil is not so far gone in his own crisis that he cannot recognise it.

"I'll call for you if I need you."

Garrik holds his eyes a moment longer, steady and measuring, offering without insisting. Then he inclines his head and goes, his footsteps slow and deliberate down the corridor, each one costing him something he does not show.

Eskil goes into the study and shuts the door.

The sound of the latch is very loud in the empty room, and the silence that follows it is the silence of a room with nobody left to perform for. He has held the thing at arm's length for hours and he has just run out of arm.

He sets Indrie's satchel down on the desk, carefully, precisely, centering it on the wood the way Indrie would, because it is the only thing of his that Eskil currently has. Then he puts both hands flat on the surface and leans his weight into them and waits to find out whether he is going to be able to do this, whether the wall is going to hold, whether the enormous, howling thing that has been pressing against the back of his ribs since Ermin opened his mouth in the yard is going to stay where he put it.

He determines very quickly that it is not.

The lid comes off. He takes the whole surface of the desk with one arm and sends it into the far wall. The inkpot goes first and bursts against the stone in a spray of black that keeps spreading across the pale surface after it lands. Two months of correspondence goes with it, letters from the southern holds and trade agreements and a half-finished reply to the council at Orm that he has been putting off for a week, and the grain ledgers with their careful columns, and the sealing wax in its brass dish, and the wooden tray Morgan brought up here so that his brother would stop losing things under piles of paper. All of it goes across the floor and keeps going, sliding and scattering and coming to rest in the corners. Eskil puts a fist into the panelling hard enough to open his knuckles and feel the hot bloom of pain run up through his wrist and into his forearm, and then he swears at nothing at all, in an empty room, at the top of his voice, with every foul and vicious word he owns.

He swears at the Jakadi. He swears at the eight men on that road and at whichever of them decided that the gentlest person Eskil has ever known was worth something as a bargaining tool. He swears at himself, longest and worst and lowest, standing in the wreckage of his own desk, for allowing him out of the gates with one guard and a gentle horse and the naive, criminal belief that his roads were safe, for thinking that peace meant safety, for confusing the absence of war with the absence of danger, which is the most basic and the most unforgivable mistake a king can make.

When it is out of him he is standing in the middle of a ruined floor with his chest heaving and blood on two knuckles, and he feels no better. It never does help. He has known that since he was nineteen years old, since the first time he put his fist through something that didn't deserve it, and it has never once stopped him. The anger burns down rather than out. It has not been satisfied. It has simply consumed everything within reach, and there is nothing left in the room to take.

Then he sees the satchel.

It went with everything else. It is lying on its side against the leg of a chair with the flap open and the contents spilled across the stone floor. There is ink on it. A long black streak runs up the worn leather where the pot burst, dark and wet and still going into the grain.

Eskil goes down on one knee and starts picking it up.

He does it slowly. The scissors. The roll of linen. The three glass bottles, and one of them is broken now. The one that was already cracked has given way entirely, and he gathers the pieces into his palm carefully, one by one, so that nobody steps on them. He puts each thing back where it was, in the order he thinks Indrie keeps them, though he is not certain and the uncertainty bothers him more than it should. He works his thumb over the ink stain and it does not come out, only smears deeper into the leather, and he is going to hear about it. Indrie is going to run his fingers over that stain and give him a look, and Eskil is going to have to explain that he threw the man's satchel across a room in a fit of rage, and the explanation is going to be worse than the stain.

He stays down there a good while longer than the task requires, on one knee, on the floor of his own study, with a dead boy's blood still on the road and his lover's bag in his hands.

Then he gets up. He sets the satchel on the window ledge, in a square of fading light, out of reach of anything else he might decide to do. He rights the chair. He leaves the rest of it on the floor, the scattered letters and the shattered inkpot and the wax and the tray and the ruined ledgers, because the rest of it does not matter. None of it has ever mattered less. He drags the map across the bare desk and weights the corners with whatever is still standing: a candlestick, a cup, the brass seal, and one of the brown glass bottles from the satchel.