Page 46 of Setting the Break

Fenris surges forward on the sound. His hand finds Indrie's arm and grips it and hauls, and Indrie twists into the pull, wrenching sideways against the arm holding him, and for one terrible second he's caught between them, Fenris pulling and the warrior holding and his shoulders screaming with the strain of it. Then Garrik steps in.

The sword goes through the warrior's chest and out the other side. Indrie hears the sound Garrik makes driving it home, the strain that pulls on the wound he’s trying to ignore and is slowly losing the battle against. The arm loosens and Indrie tears free and stumbles forward into Fenris, who catches him and puts him behind his own body without a word about it.

Garrik pulls the sword out and the man drops, and Garrik's free hand goes to his chest and comes away dark. The stitches have torn. Indrie knows it in the part of him that's always a healer and can't stop being one, the part that's already noted the color and the spread of it and the way Garrik's breathing has gone from hard to shallow. The wound is open and bleeding freely and Garrik is standing in the trees with a dead man at his feet and a sword in his hand and no intention whatsoever of stopping.

Indrie opens his mouth and Garrik speaks first.

"Both of you go."

"You're bleeding out where you stand," Indrie says.

Garrik turns toward the sound of movement in the trees behind them, more men coming, the crash of bodies through underbrush, running east out of the camp and into the forest. He brings the sword up and plants his feet, and Indrie can see the blood going down the front of him in the firelight, a dark spread from the collarbone to the ribs, and the ground is getting louder behind them.

"Healer." Garrik doesn't look around. His voice is flat and certain and leaves no room anywhere for argument. "There are six of them coming and one of me, and I would very much rather not spend what's left of tonight explaining to the Rengaran king how his lover came to be killed standing behind me arguing. Go east. Go now."

Indrie opens his mouth and finds he has nothing at all to put in it. He's been called a great many things since he came to Rengara. A healer. A foreigner. A servant. A friend. He once heard, in a tone that made his ears flush and him resolve to never tell Eskil, someone refer to him as the king’s boy. He has never once heard himself called Eskil’s lover, as a piece of information too plain to need any care taken with it, and it lands on him with a weight he hasn't felt before.

They're here for you, he thinks, with a jolt. Not because of the Jakadi, not because of a treaty, but because of you.

"Indrie." Fenris shifts his grip on the staff and puts his free hand flat between Indrie's shoulder blades. The push is firm and deliberate and says the topic isn't up for discussion. "Run. I’ve got him. Go!"

Indrie runs.

He doesn't run east, which is where he was told to go.

He runs toward the noise.

He's aware that this is stupid. He's aware that a physician with no weapon, in the dark, running at the sound of men killing each other, is precisely the sort the world disposes of without comment. He has no blade and no armor and no training of any kind in the business of violence, and he is running flat out through a cedar forest toward a battle.

It doesn't slow him by a single step, because the fighting on the other side is down in the stream bed, and because he's spent three days in this camp learning what every sound in it means, and because the shouts coming up out of the hollow are being given in Rengaran.

He came, Indrie thinks, with the breath tearing in and out of him and somebody else's blood drying on both knees.

He came, he came, of course he came.

15

ESKIL

The cedar forest is exactly where it's always been, but it looks far more remarkable than it ever has. Years past he's seen nothing in it but overgrowth and a sorry excuse for hunting grounds for Askarte. Tonight, in the moonlight and through what remains of his temperament, it looks downright inviting.

Eskil leads his warriors off the eastern road two miles before the shale bed where the scouts lost the trail, cutting south through farmland that has been fallow since the last harvest and into the tree line where the ground goes soft under a carpet of needles. The smell hits him first. Cedar, sharp and resinous, thick enough to taste. A man who has been riding through this forest would carry it on his clothes for hours. A man who has been living in it for months would not be rid of it at all.

They leave the horses tied to saplings on the outskirts. It is past midnight and the dark under the canopy is total, the kind of dark that swallows torchlight and gives nothing back, and Eskil does not light a torch. Neither do his men, because he has been taking them into worse than a forest after midnight for fourteen years and they are what you might call accustomed. Compared to the bog marshes four years ago this is a relaxing stroll in good company.

Garrik moves beside him through the undergrowth with an ease that puts half of Eskil's own warriors to shame. The man was raised in southern woodland and it shows in the way he places his feet, heel first, rolling forward, making less noise than men who have not been walking around with a six-day-old chest wound held together with Indrie's stitching. Eskil watches him from the corner of his eye and takes the measure of what it is costing him. The left arm stays close to the body. The breathing runs shallow on the inhale, catching where the muscle pulls across the injury. It changes nothing about how he moves. Eskil has seen wounded men slow a column before and Garrik is not one of them. Indrie will not be pleased that he brought him, and if Indrie is alive to be displeased about it then Eskil will sit and hear every grievance the man can produce.

They encounter the patrol less than a mile in.

Twelve Jakadi riders on horses, strung across a game trail in a loose cordon, bows cased and swords at their hips. The horses are hobbled for the night, which means this is a standing watch and not a roaming one, and it means they have been here long enough to settle. Eskil counts them twice, checks the tree line for sentries he cannot see, and finds none. Sloppy. They are relying on the forest and the dark to do the work for them, which is an assumption that men make when they have never had Eskil come looking for them in the dark.

He gives the signal and his warriors hit them from three sides.

The first rider dies sitting down. He is leaning against a tree with his sword across his knees and his chin on his chest and the Rengaran axe goes through the side of his neck before his eyes are fully open. The spray catches the horse nearest to him and the animal shrieks and rears against its hobbles and the sound of it breaks the night wide open. Then it is all noise. Steel on steel, the heavy crack of a shield rim slamming into a jaw, a horse going sideways into the brush with a dead man tangled in its stirrup. His men come through the cordon without once slowing and the Jakadi have no room to form up, no room to draw bows, no room to do anything but die on their feet or scramble backward into the dark where more Rengarans are waiting.

One of them gets his sword free and swings hard and wild at the nearest shape in the dark and the shape is Garrik, who steps inside the arc of the blade with his wounded side forward and puts his knife through the man's wrist, twists it, and rides the man down into the dirt. Eskil hears the short ugly sound of a throat being opened and then Garrik is up again and moving, and the blood on his knife looks black in the starlight.

It lasts less than fifteen minutes. His men are outnumbered and it does not matter, because a patrol that has gone soft after hours of nothing is not much better sport than a practice dummy with opinions. His own men have been riled up the entire ride out here and are banking on the payoff of routing a clan that has been picking at their heels for two seasons.