Page 37 of Setting the Break

The miner swallows. His throat moves visibly.

"He said dusk tonight, my lord. At the waystone past the second bridge on the east road. He said you were to come and discuss terms."

"What did he look like?"

"Tall. Not so tall as you." The man's gaze flickers up and then down again, checking. "Shaved head. He had a scar through the eyebrow." He touches two fingers to his own face and traces the line of it above his left eye. "I didn't look too hard, my lord, I'm sorry. I didn't think he wanted me looking."

"You did right not to." Eskil comes around the desk, and he watches the man decide not to step back again. It is a visible decision. The weight shifts onto the back foot and then shifts forward again, and he holds his ground, and Eskil respects him for it. "Which way did he come from?"

"From the east, my lord. But not up the track. Not from the direction of anything. Out of the trees, like he'd been standing in there a while, waiting for the first person to come along." The miner hesitates, his mouth working around something he is not sure is worth saying, and then he seems to decide that he has come this far and the king has not yet thrown him out, so it might as well be said. "And he smelled of cedar. Strong enough you could smell it over the animal, and that mule hasn't been washed since the spring."

Eskil goes very still.

"Cedar," Eskil says.

"Yes, my lord." The cap stops turning. The miner's hands go still on the brim, and for the first time since he came through the door he looks directly at Eskil's face, because he has worked out that this piece of it mattered more than the rest. "I'd wager he'd been sleeping in it."

Eskil turns back to the map.

The cedar forest sits on the eastern frontier in a long dark wedge, running north from the Tarn road, thick and old and largely impenetrable, the kind of forest that swallows sound and swallows light and has been doing both since before Eskil's grandfather's grandfather put a keep on this hill. It is Jakadi hunting ground and always has been. Eskil has haggled with them over the edges of it for fourteen years. This stretch is yours, this stretch is ours, here is the line, here is where we agree to pretend the line is, here is where we both know the line actually falls. They hunt it in autumn and early spring. They never keep a camp in it longer than a month or two, and they always come back to the same clearings every season, because the game does and the water does and the Jakadi are nothing if not practical.

They are also entirely confident that nobody on this side of the border has ever bothered to work out where those clearings are. That is what happens to people who live somewhere long enough. They stop believing anybody else could ever learn it.

Eskil has a man who spent two years in that forest. Eskil has a map that nobody knows he has. Eskil has been paying attention for fourteen years, and the Jakadi, for all their cleverness, have never once considered the possibility that the man across the table was doing exactly the same thing.

He finds the stretch of shale where Sten put his finger. He finds the nearest edge of the cedar. He measures the distance between them with the span of his thumb, pressing into the vellum, and it comes to four miles. Four miles of broken ground between the place where the trail disappeared and the tree line. Not far. Not far at all.

Six hours from where he is sitting. Maybe seven with a careful approach on foot for the last stretch. Close enough to take a man off the east road at dawn and have him under canvas by dark. Far enough that nobody in Valen would think to go looking in the trees when there was a perfectly good trail running straight on into Jakadi country, laid down deliberately for somebody to follow.

Eskil takes a gold piece out of the box on the desk and holds it out.

"My lord, I didn't–" the man starts, and both hands come up, palms open, defending himself against it.

"Take it." Eskil does not lower his arm. "You walked a long way to put that on my desk. Go home. Go home a different way than you came, and don't stop to talk to anyone on the road."

The man takes it. He closes his fist around it and puts it somewhere inside his coat, quickly, the way men handle money they did not expect and are not entirely sure they deserve. He bows twice at the door, once to the room and once to Eskil specifically, and then he is gone, and Eskil is alone.

He builds the plan fast.

He builds it the way he has always built them, piece by piece from the ground up, starting with the terrain and ending with the withdrawal. The withdrawal is the part that kills people when you get it wrong and the part most men think about last. The ground. The approach. The numbers. The timing. Where the horses wait. How long the fight takes if there is one, and how long the silence needs to hold afterward. He lays each piece down in order and checks it against the ones beside it, and if a gap shows he fills it, and if it will not fill he takes the whole row apart and starts again.

He is aware the entire time that he is building it slower than he wants to, and that this is Bohdi's absence and nothing else. It is the empty chair across the desk. It is the silence where a voice should be.

For fourteen years Eskil has done this out loud at one man. He talks, and Bohdi sits across from him with his feet on the desk and his boots on the map, and somewhere in the middle of it, usually at the exact moment Eskil is most pleased with himself, Bohdi tells him which part of the thing is going to get somebody killed. He does it without rancor and without ceremony, plainly, looking at the ceiling. Eskil does not always listen. He always hears. And more often than not he goes back and changes the piece, and does not thank Bohdi for it, and Bohdi does not expect him to.

Bohdi is a day or two east, and Dagny reached him yesterday or did not, and he is either on his way back at an unreasonably aggressive speed or about to be. It does not help him this morning.

So there is nobody at his elbow this morning to tell him he is being reckless, which means he has to be the one to say it, and he is in no fit state to be trusted with the job. He is making decisions with a fistful of somebody's hair in his desk drawer and three days of no sleep behind his eyes, and any man in that condition is a danger to the people around him and should not be allowed near a plan that puts lives at risk. So he checks every piece twice, and then a third time, slowly and deliberately, with the voice in his head that sounds like Bohdi asking and then what? after every single step. He resents all of it. He resents the caution and he resents the time and he resents the crawling patience of it when what he wants is to be in the saddle already. Then he goes back and checks the first piece again.

He sends for Sigrid.

"The Jakadi want an audience," Eskil says, when the door is shut. "Dusk tonight, at the waystone past the second bridge."

Sigrid's eyes widen. It is a flicker and she puts it away fast. She does not interrupt.

"You're going." He turns the map so that it faces her and puts one finger on the waystone, a small black cross on the east road where the vellum is starting to wear thin. "Take twenty. Enough to look like a king's party from a distance and not so many that it looks like an act of war. Ride slow. Let the dust show. I want them watching you come for a mile before you get there."

"And when they ask where the king is?"