Page 35 of Setting the Break

The cold on the back of his neck is strange. It's the first thing he notices when they leave him, before the shoulder or the eye or his hand, which is still trembling against his chest and which he can't seem to persuade to stop. There's air where there has never been air. When he moves his head, the weight that has always moved with it isn't there, and it catches him out every single time. He keeps turning his head on purpose, the way a man keeps pressing a bruise.

He has worn it long his whole life. His mother wore hers long. He doesn't remember a time before it, which makes it one of about four things he still has from before. Now it's in a stranger's fist somewhere on the other side of that fire.

He thinks about Eskil's hands in it. Eskil winds it around his fist in bed and pulls, and then combs it out afterward with enormous clumsy patience, swearing quietly at every knot and refusing to let Indrie do it himself. He thinks about Morgan on the library floor with the comb in one hand and a ribbon between his teeth, working the Rengaran braid in for the first time and telling him to stop fidgeting, and how Indrie had looked at himself in the basin afterward and not recognized the man there.

He reminds himself this isn’t the time to get sentimental about hair when he could have lost an entire hand. He sits in the dark with the cold on his neck and breathes, and counts, and gets to forty, and starts again.

Fenris comes back a long time after, when the camp has gone quiet and the man outside the hut has wandered off to the fire. He comes in the way he always does, one hand trailing along the cloth, and he sits down beside Indrie close enough that their shoulders touch. Then he feels his way along Indrie's arm until he finds his hand, the left one, and holds it.

"Are you all right?" Fenris asks.

Indrie thinks about the question for a good while.

"Thank you for my hand," he says, very quietly.

Fenris squeezes it once.

"I've always found hair grows back," Fenris says lightly, but it's clear he's a little shaken too.

They sit with that for a moment. Then Fenris turns his head toward him, like he’s been deciding on whether to say something or not.

"The man with the knife," Fenris says. "His name is Hyren. He's the chieftain."

Indrie doesn't say anything right away. He sits with it in the dark and turns it over the way he turns everything over, slowly, fitting the edges together. The broad hand on his skull. The weight of the blade through his hair. The shaved head and the jagged scar running all the way up one arm.

He closes his fingers around Fenris's hand and holds on.

He folds up the name he's been given very small and puts it somewhere deep and dark and safe, the way he has learned to keep things that matter in places where no one thinks to look. It sits warm against his ribs like a coal wrapped in cloth.

He sits in the dark with his shorn head and his aching hand and a blind man's shoulder pressed against his, and he holds the name close, and he breathes, and he waits.

11

ESKIL

Through the shutters the sky is going the color of dishwater. It is the flat, used-up gray that comes before a morning nobody asked for, and Eskil has been watching it arrive for an hour with dread in his stomach.

It is the third day and he has not slept any of it. He has not tried. Sleep requires a man to put down what he is carrying, and Eskil is not putting anything down.

Yesterday he had the boy's people in. The mother and the sister and an aunt who did most of the talking, the three of them standing in the middle of his study in their good clothes with their hands held in front of them. He told them what happened on the east road. He did not decorate any of it. He gave them the shape of the ambush and the number of men and the place where the boy fell, and the only lie he told them was that the boy went down fast and did not suffer, which he does not actually know. It is possible the boy suffered a great deal. It is possible it took some time. Eskil looked the mother in the face and told her it didn't. There are things the living deserve not to carry.

He gave them the death-price out of his own strongbox rather than the treasury, which the council will find out about eventually and can choke on. Let them bring it up at the next session. Let them tell him to his face that a man's life should come out of the public ledger with conditions and receipts and a vote, as though the boy died for a line item and not for his king. Eskil will sit at the head of that table and listen to every word of it, and then he will pay the next one out of his own coffers too, and the one after that, for as long as the strongbox holds. That is the tax a man pays for sending other people's sons out onto roads they do not come back from.

The sister asked whether anybody had told a girl called Runa in the dye house. Nobody had. Eskil sent Harrak down the hill himself, because Harrak is steady and will say the thing plainly and will not leave the girl alone with it afterward. He is the reason the man is not coming home. The least he can do is send somebody kind to say so.

The scouts come back just after the sky gives up pretending it might clear, and Eskil knows before either of them opens their mouth that they do not have what he needs.

It is in the way they come through the door. Not slowly and not reluctantly. They come in squared off and quick and grim, because they decided somewhere on the road that they were going to get it over with. They are both travel-worn and gray with road dust. Sten has a split lip from something he does not bother to explain, and the dried blood has cracked into the stubble along his jaw, and he has plainly come off worse in an argument with the ground. Kari has been awake so long that her eyes have gone distant and glassy. She is seeing double and she has stopped trying to correct for it. The two of them stand in front of his desk in the mud they rode in wearing, and the mud is already drying in pale flakes on the floorboards, and neither of them looks down at it.

"We lost it, my lord," Sten says, and he gets it out fast, the way men do with the part they have been dreading since they turned the horses around. He does not dress it up and he does not soften it. He puts it down on the desk between them and steps back from it.

"Where?" Eskil does not look up from the ledger he stopped reading an hour ago.

"East of the Tarn road. About a day out." Sten shifts his weight and the floorboard under him gives a small, tired sound. "They came down off the heath onto a slope of loose shale. Steep, maybe two hundred yards of it. There's a stream runs straight through the middle of it at the bottom, narrow but fast, knee-deep on a horse. They went into the water there." He rubs a hand down his face and leaves grit on it in a long pale smear. "They meant to. There's no other reason to put horses on that ground. They picked their way down careful and they went into the stream and that was the last of it. We cast for it until dark, both banks, a mile each way. Went back out at first light and did it again."

"There was nothing, my lord." Kari has not shifted her feet since she came through the door. She stands the way she always stands, weight even, shoulders back, hands loose at her sides, but there is something underneath it today that Eskil has not seen in her before. She is angry at herself. She has ridden two days back to this room to tell him she failed, and she has not forgiven herself for it. "Not a scrape. Not a broken branch, not a stone turned the wrong way. They rode out of that stream somewhere. Upstream or downstream, I couldn't say, and I couldn't tell you where."

"Show me." Eskil sweeps the ledger aside with the back of his hand. It goes harder than he meant, and the inkwell at the corner of the desk rocks once and settles. He drags the map into the cleared space, the big one, the one that covers the desk from edge to edge and curls over the sides, vellum worn soft at the folds from years of handling.