Page 43 of Setting the Break

The whole camp has gone tight. He's seen it in houses, the particular stillness of a place where everybody has been arguing all evening and has run out of things to say.

And they're looking at him differently. This morning he was a crate that had been valued and must not be dropped. Now he's a crate they've started to suspect is full of sand.

One of them crouches down in front of him. It's the one with the jagged scar up the inside of his forearm, the one with the shaved head, and he has a little Rengaran, rough and thickly accented and perfectly clear. Fenris had given Indrie a name for him. Hyren.

"We were told wrong about you," Hyren says. "We think now you are nobody."

Indrie's heart goes so hard in his chest that he can feel it in his throat and at the back of his jaw, and he makes himself breathe out through his nose before he answers, because a voice that shakes is a voice that gets dismissed.

"No," he says. "I'm the only physician in Valen. I run the clinic in the city. I treat the king's own household. I'm the king's consort–."

The man takes a fistful of what's left of his hair and wrenches his head back.

"You are the king's whore," Hyren says. "And he is not coming for you."

Indrie makes himself keep his eyes open. It's the only thing he has.

"He sends men," Hyren continues. "To the road. To talk. Twenty warriors and a woman with a sword, at the stone, at dusk, and they talk and they talk and they say the king is delayed." He leans in. His breath is sour with something that's been fermenting a while. "The king is not delayed. The king does not come, because you are not worth the road."

And Indrie's stomach turns over, because he understands exactly what he's being told and these men don't.

Eskil didn't send a delegation to negotiate. Eskil has never negotiated for anything in his life that he could simply take. He sent twenty people to a waystone to stand in a road at dusk and talk in circles and waste an entire evening of Jakadi attention, and there's only one reason in the world a man does that.

He isn't going to the waystone. He's coming here.

But these men don't know that. What they see is a king who was invited to bargain for his lover and who couldn't be troubled to ride out and do it, and the conclusion they've drawn from it is crouched in front of Indrie in the firelight with a hand in his hair.

"Give him time," Indrie says. "Please. Whatever you think this means, you're wrong about it, and you have to give him more than one evening."

The backhand takes him across the mouth.

His head snaps around. There are white bursts behind his eyes and then the copper floods his mouth, thick and immediate, and he goes down onto his hip in the dirt. His ears sing. He runs his tongue along the inside of his lip without meaning to and finds the split, and finds that the tooth behind it is still seated, and some distant professional part of him files both facts away as not serious with a kind of weary relief, because he knows exactly what a serious one feels like and this isn't it.

He gets his hands under himself, the bound hands together, and pushes himself back up, because lying down in front of this man seems like a thing he must not do.

The man stands and draws his sword.

It doesn't come all the way out of the scabbard. It comes halfway and stops, and the firelight runs up the edge of it, and Indrie looks at that and is aware in a very distant and orderly part of himself that he has perhaps three seconds to become valuable again.

He's been afraid like this before. He was afraid like this in a hallway with an axe over him and afraid like this in his own clinic with a blade against his throat, and he's learned a thing about it he wishes he hadn't had to learn, which is that fear doesn't actually stop you from speaking. It only makes it feel impossible.

"If the king sent men to the waystone," Indrie says, "it's because he wanted you looking at the waystone."

The man pauses.

"He isn't delayed." Indrie's voice is thick and there's blood coming out of the corner of his mouth and running down his chin. "He isn't bargaining with you. He never was. He knows where I am, and he's already on his way here."

The camp goes silent. Not quiet but silent, thirty people all at once, and Indrie hears the fire for the first time since they threw him down.

"You lie," Hyren spits. "Nobody knows this place."

Indrie looks up at him.

And this is the part he'll turn over afterward for a long time, because his hands are tied and he's kneeling in the dirt at the feet of a man holding a sword, and he isn't afraid of him. He goes looking for it on purpose, the way he's learned to, prodding at the edges of himself to see where it gives. It isn't there. It's gone somewhere else entirely, and what's left in its place is cold and steady and almost pleasant, and he has no idea what to call it except that he recognizes it. It's the moment when he knows more than the person holding power over him.

"How certain of that are you?" Indrie asks.

The man doesn't answer.