Page 47 of Setting the Break

Two of the riders get free and try to run. One makes it thirty yards before a thrown axe catches him between the shoulder blades. The man pitches forward off his horse and hits the ground face-first and the axe stays in him, the handle jutting up between his shoulders. The other wheels his horse and comes straight at Eskil, sword high, and the horse's eyes are rolling white and its mouth is foaming against the bit. Eskil sidesteps the charge, gets a hand on the man's belt as the horse blows past, and hauls him bodily out of the saddle. The rider hits the ground on his back and Eskil's boot follows him down, heel-first into the sternum, and the ribs go with the sound of green wood splitting. The man is still trying to breathe around the wreckage of his own chest when Eskil puts the sword through him and pins him to the forest floor.

He takes two of the men alive, which Bohdi would say is two too many, but Bohdi is not here and if Eskil wants to question the both of them then he is going to. He separates them, puts one with a guard thirty paces away, and kneels beside the other in the mulch and pine needles with the flat of his short sword resting across the man's thigh.

The man is young. Younger than Eskil expected, barely old enough to grow the patchy beard on his jaw. His eyes are enormous in the dark and his breathing is fast and ragged and he is doing a poor job of pretending he is not afraid.

"Where is the healer you took from me?" Eskil does not raise his voice. He does not need to. He also speaks in the rough Jakadi he happens to know, forced on him from years of dealing with them and through Morgan's insistence. He thinks of it now as a peace offering of sorts.

The man says nothing. His jaw is set and his chin is up and there is a tremor going through him from the knees that he cannot do anything about.

"You understand me," Eskil says. "You have been flinching in the right places since I opened my mouth."

Nothing.

Eskil turns the blade from flat to edge and puts his weight down on it.

The edge goes through the leather of the man's trousers and into the meat of the thigh and keeps going, slow, the way a knife goes through the rind of a fruit when you lean on it instead of cutting, and the man comes up off the ground screaming with his back arched and his heels digging trenches in the mulch. The two warriors holding his shoulders have been standing in shield walls since they were old enough to lift one and they do not move an inch. Eskil feels the blade grind, catch on the dense muscle of the inner thigh, and then find bone and stop there, and he holds it. Blood comes up around the steel, welling dark and steady, and runs down the inside of the man's leg in two channels and starts pooling black in the needles under him. The smell of it goes up into the cedar air, hot and coppery and sweet and so familiar it barely registers.

The man screams himself hoarse and then runs out of air and sobs instead. A thin, reedy sound. The sound of something that has stopped being a soldier and become a body with a problem it cannot solve.

"Where is the healer?" Eskil asks again, evenly.

"The camp." It comes out of him in pieces, in Rengaran so mangled Eskil has to lean in for it. "He is at the camp, he is at the camp, please."

"Where is the camp?"

The man cannot get the words out fast enough after that. Half a mile south and east along the game trail, past the deadfall, where the ground drops. Eskil asks him how it is laid out and the man tells him. A central fire with the horse lines north. A stream bed running out east with soft ground. Huts along the western edge and the healer has been kept in the third by the end.

The man's hands are scrabbling in the dirt. His face has gone the color of tallow and he is starting to shiver in the way they do when the blood loss gets ahead of them. He gets a hand on Eskil's forearm and Eskil lets him keep it there. "I never touched him. I never went near him."

Duly noted, Eskil thinks.

He pulls the short sword out of the man's leg and puts it through the base of his skull, quick and clean, and the man is down and finished before the sound of it reaches anyone. One sharp jerk. The body goes slack with its fingers still curled around Eskil's forearm, and he peels them off and wipes the blade on the man's shirt while his warriors drop him in the dirt and roll him out of the way.

The second prisoner has spent all of that thirty paces away in the dark listening to it and he cannot wait to say what he knows. He says it so fast he trips over his own tongue and has to go back and start again, and he keeps his eyes on the short sword the entire time, and every answer he gives matches the first man's to the detail. He gets as far as offering to walk them in himself before Eskil has heard enough.

"That won't be necessary," Eskil tells him, and kills him too.

Sigrid would call that wasteful. She would be right, in the narrow sense that you cannot ask a dead man a follow-up and you can trade a live one back across a border for something worth having, and that is one of several reasons he sent her to the meeting point instead of bringing her along. Eskil does not require a tactical assessment of what a Jakadi raider is worth tonight. He is not interested in leverage, and leaving enemies breathing at his back while he goes deeper into this forest is a courtesy he will not be extending to the people who took Indrie off a road in broad daylight knowing who he was.

They move.

He does not take them straight at it. He walks the line in a half circle around the west side of the camp, through the deadfall, picking his way at the pace of the slowest man in it. The detour costs him the better part of an hour he does not want to spend and it buys him the only thing worth buying, which is that when his shields come out of the trees there will be exactly one direction left to run in.

The horse lines are north and he will have men standing on them. South is the Tarn road and open ground and nothing to hide behind for a mile. West will be a wall. East is a stream bed with soft ground on both banks and a man cannot run through it at speed, and east is where Eskil intends to be standing when they get there.

The camp resolves out of the dark by degrees. First the smell of banked coals and horse dung. Then the low murmur of voices, too many voices for the middle of the night. Then the orange glow of embers through the thinning trees, and the angular shapes of tents and lean-tos clustered around a central pit, and the stamp and snort of horses picketed on the far side.

The camp is awake.

Eskil crouches behind a fallen cedar and studies the layout through the gaps in the brush. Men are moving. Not with urgency, not scrambling, but with the restlessness that comes of bad news nobody has finished arguing about. Packs are being loaded onto horses. Someone is arguing near the fire, gesturing south and then east, and another man is shaking his head and pointing at one of the huts.

That means someone escaped alive from the delegation he sent Sigrid to the meeting point with. Someone slipped through her cordon and ran back here and told them the audience was a ruse. Now they know Eskil is not where he said he would be, which means they are working out where he actually is. Sigrid is getting a week of mucking out the stables for letting one slip. Maybe two.

It also means they are getting ready to run.

He pulls his warriors in and splits them. Five and Garrik to the west, coming in hard and loud and driving everything east. He takes the other five and goes east to seal the stream bed, because that is where they will try to take Indrie out if they move him, and they are going to find it very difficult to do that with Eskil standing in it.

The stream bed is narrow, shin-deep water running over flat stones, the banks thick with fern and fallen timber. Good ground for an ambush. Bad ground for a retreat. Eskil positions his warriors in pairs along the bank, staggered so that anyone running east hits them in sequence rather than all at once, and puts himself at the furthest point downstream with his longsword drawn and a short sword in his left hand.