Page 42 of Setting the Break

For the first couple of hours he does not think about having sent Bohdi away. He does not think about the absence at his right shoulder, the space where a presence should be, the quiet constant taken-for-granted weight of another living person in his peripheral vision. He doesn’t think about the sound of another horse's hooves, the knowledge that if anything came out of those trees there would be a man between Morgan and the thing before Morgan's hand reached his boot.

He also does not think about the fact that the man who has become family to him, who was once a slave in a country that treated him as expendable, who was bought and sold and transported and used, has spent three days in an enemy camp with no way of knowing whether anyone is coming for him.

He does not have time to think about either of those things, because he is entirely occupied by a third.

Somebody had to have known.

The thought arrives fully formed, the way the best thoughts and the worst thoughts always do. It is not built piece by piece. It is simply there, whole and solid, sitting in the front of his mind and waiting for him to stop moving long enough to notice it.

The summons for the birth would have come up the east road. The rider would have come to the gate. Somebody signed him in and somebody took the message up and somebody told Indrie, and at each of those points somebody knew. And then Indrie left. He left on a specific morning, on a specific road. And eight men were waiting in the birches.

Eight men do not assemble in the birches on the chance that someone might come along. Eight men assemble in the birches because they know someone is coming, and they know when, and they know which direction, and they know what he looks like, and they know he will be lightly guarded. That information traveled east. It traveled fast enough to cross the border and reach a Jakadi camp and put eight mounted men in position on the right stretch of road on the right morning, and information does not travel that fast by accident. Information travels that fast because somebody carries it.

Morgan starts assembling the list of people who could have known, and it is not long. That is not comforting. A short list means the answer is close, and close means it is someone they trust, and someone they trust means the betrayal is not abstract and distant but specific and intimate and sitting at their table.

Somewhere behind that thought there is a much larger thought standing in the dark, waiting for him to turn around and look at it. It is always waiting now. It waits for him in any quiet that lasts more than a minute, in any darkness that lasts more than a breath, in the space between one heartbeat and the next when his body decides, without consulting him, that it is back there again.

It gets dark.

The road narrows. The trees on either side draw closer, their branches reaching over the track and lacing together above him, and the light goes from amber to gray to something that is not quite dark but is no longer willing to call itself light. The moon comes up behind a rack of cloud and Morgan sees the glow of it, diffuse and pale, a brightness without a source. Then the cloud thickens and takes it, and the glow fades, and the road ahead of him is visible only as a slightly paler stripe between two walls of black.

The horse's hooves are extremely loud.

He is twenty years old and he has never once ridden anywhere alone.

The understanding of it arrives with a kind of sad, exhausted clarity that is worse than fear. Not one journey. Not one errand. There has always been a guard, or a groom, or a clerk, or Bohdi.

For twenty years Morgan complained about it constantly and loudly and at considerable length. He complained about the guard at his door. He complained about the man who rode beside him. He complained about the fact that he could not walk to the privy without someone taking a professional interest in the route. He never understood for a single moment that he was complaining about the thing holding him up. He never understood that the cage he kept rattling was also the frame, and that the space inside it, the space he moved through confidently and fearlessly and without ever once having to wonder whether the dark was empty, was only safe because the bars were there.

He passes the Tarn turn a little after full dark.

There is nothing to see. There is a milestone and a cart track going off south into black, and the smell of cedar coming down off the trees on the moving air, resinous and sharp and strong enough to sit on the back of his tongue, and somewhere four miles along that track there is a fire and thirty men and a man who taught Morgan the Rengaran word for yarrow. He does not slow down. He does not speed up either, which takes more out of him than slowing down would have. He rides past the mouth of it at the same walk he has been keeping since dusk, looking straight ahead, with his hands steady on the reins and his heart going hard enough to hear.

A mile short of the ford there is a place at the roadside where the mud has been churned and then scraped flat again, and somebody has thrown fresh gravel over the worst of it, and the work is recent. Morgan knows what was scraped flat and why. He looks at it as he goes by, deliberately, for as long as it takes to pass, because not looking would be the worse of the two things he could do.

The hedge makes a sound. Morgan goes rigid. The horse walks on.

"You are perfectly fine," Morgan tells the horse, who is managing a great deal better than he is and requires no reassurance whatsoever. The horse has its ears forward and its pace is steady and its breathing is easy, and it does not appear to have noticed that the world has become a narrow strip of gray between two walls of black populated entirely by sounds that want to kill them. "You are on a road you know, in a country my brother owns, and the worst thing that happens to you tonight is that you are tired and unpleasant about it in the morning."

The horse has no opinion.

Morgan keeps talking to it anyway. He keeps talking because the sound of his own voice is better than the sound of the hedge, and because the moment he stops talking the quiet will come back, and when the quiet comes back the thing in the dark will take another step. And he is not turning around to look at it tonight, and not yet, and not alone.

13

INDRIE

He's asleep when they come for him.

The cloth tears back and there are hands on him before he's properly awake, two men hauling him up by the arms with his wrists still bound behind the post, and for a moment the cord holds and his shoulders take all of it. He makes a sound with no word in it. Somewhere in the part of him that never stops working he notes the angle of the pull and thinks that's how a shoulder comes out of its socket, and then one of them cuts the rope off the post and the pressure goes and his arms drop and the relief is so enormous it makes him dizzy.

They drag him out through the opening by his elbows. His knees skid over the frozen dirt, and the cold of it goes through his trousers and into the skin, and then they throw him down in the middle of the camp.

The fire is enormous. Somebody has built it up.

Indrie gets his head up and blinks against the light, and he understands, before anybody says a word to him, that something has changed.

There are far more men here than there were this morning. They're standing rather than sitting. Two of the smaller tents at the eastern edge are already down and rolled, and the poles are stacked beside them in a bundle somebody has tied with practiced hands. There's a man at the horse lines going along the row with a halter over his shoulder. The women have the cooking things gathered and nested and the big iron pot is off its hook and cooling in the dirt. Nobody is drinking.