Page 38 of Setting the Break

"Tell them I'm delayed."

"Delayed by what?"

"Tell them I'm taking a shit." Eskil puts two fingers on the waystone and leaves them there. "Tell them anything. Tell them I'm ill, tell them I'm in council, tell them I'm on my way and my horse threw a shoe. Your job is to stand in that road and talk. You talk for as long as they'll stand for it and you talk in circles. You ask for proof he's alive. You ask for proof again. You argue about the terms and then you argue about the words they used for the terms, and then you argue about the translation of the words they used for the terms. You do not agree to one single thing. Not a syllable. Not a gesture. You are a stone in the road with a mouth."

"And if they stop wanting to talk?"

"Then they'll run." Eskil hears how flat it comes out and does not soften it. The words land in the room and stay where they land. "And if they run, you cut them down before they get back to whatever they came out of. Every one of them. I don't want anybody reaching that camp tonight to tell them they've been had."

Sigrid looks at him for a moment. She looks at the two fingers resting on the waystone, and then at his face, and then back at his face. Something moves behind her eyes. It is not surprise and it is not quite understanding. It is the thing that comes immediately before understanding, when the pieces are all laid out in front of you and you can feel them wanting to come together.

"You know where he is," Sigrid says. It is not a question.

"I know where he's likely to be," Eskil says. "Which is more than they think I know."

"How many are you taking?"

"Ten." He says it to the map.

Her eyebrows go up. Eskil watches her decide whether to say it, and then watches her decide she is going to say it anyway.

"Into Jakadi ground. In the dark. With ten." She lays it out slowly, one piece at a time, giving him every chance to hear it in somebody else's mouth. They are the same words he has already said to himself, spoken back to him in a voice that is not his own and cannot be dismissed as easily.

"I took forty to Kalkoa and brought forty home," Eskil says. "Ten with me at the front of them may as well be forty. We're not fighting a pitched battle. We're going into a camp in the dark to take back one man, and if we do it right, most of them will be asleep when it starts and dead before they're not. Pick me ten who can move in trees without sounding like a drunken ox being dragged through a chandlery. Nobody who breathes through their mouth."

"Yes, my lord." She says it cleanly, without hesitation, and she is already turning toward the door when she stops and looks back.

She does not say what she is thinking. She does not need to. It sits in the room between them for a moment, all of it, the thing she wants to say about what happens if he is wrong about the location, and what happens if he does not come back, and what happens to this keep and this country and the people in it if their king rides into a cedar forest in the dark and does not ride out of it. Then she nods once and goes.

He sends for Garrik last.

The man comes in under his own power, which is something. He is still gray around the mouth, the grayness that comes from sustained pain held at a manageable distance through stubbornness and not much else. He is still holding the left arm close against his body, not in a sling but tucked tight against his ribs in a way that speaks of stitches and limits and a very clear understanding of what will happen if he moves it wrong.

But he is on his feet. And he has shaved.

"You said you know how the Jakadi move in woodland." Eskil does not get up and does not invite him to sit. He is not being unkind. If Garrik cannot stand through a conversation he cannot ride through a night, and Eskil needs to know that now rather than at midnight on a shale slope.

"I do." Garrik stops in front of the desk. He stands well. The arm does not move.

"You said you've fought them in it."

"Three times." The left arm stays exactly where it is. It does not shift and it does not flinch, and Eskil can see what that stillness is costing him in the tightness at the corners of his mouth. "Twice on our ground and once on theirs. The once on theirs, we lost eleven men getting out."

"The cedar forest," Eskil says. "North of the Tarn road."

Garrik is quiet for a moment. His chin comes up slowly and he goes very attentive. He is not surprised. He is recalculating. He is taking the pieces he already had, and he is fitting this last one into the space where it belongs, and the picture it makes when it comes together puts something new in his face.

"I know it," Garrik says. "Not well. Well enough to know how they'll lay out a camp in it."

"Then you're riding with me. We leave in an hour." Eskil looks pointedly at the shadow of the dressing under the man's shirt, the bulk of linen beneath the fabric, the place where the cloth pulls tight over whatever is holding him together. "If you open that up and fall off your horse, I'm leaving you where you land."

"Understood," Garrik says, and something crosses his face that on another man Eskil would call relief. On Garrik it is quieter than that and harder to name. He has been lying in a cot for four days with nothing to do but stare at the ceiling and listen to other people get ready for the thing he should be part of, and he has just been told he can stop staring.

Ermin does not take it nearly as well.

He finds out in the yard, because the yard is where everything in this keep gets found out. Nothing survives a courtyard full of grooms and soldiers, and this has not. Ermin comes across the cobblestones at a pace very close to a run, his kit bag banging against his hip, his face already set. He has heard something he cannot live with and he is on his way to say so. He plants himself in front of Eskil's horse.

"He can't ride." Ermin's hands are shaking and he does not appear to know it. His voice carries across the yard the way young voices do when they are too full of what they are saying to remember where they are saying it. "My lord. He can't. I looked at those stitches this morning and they're six days old and he's still weeping from the bottom of the wound. Indrie would never let him out of the clinic. Not for a day and not for an hour."