Page 48 of Setting the Break

Eskil lies in the bracken and waits.

He thinks, inevitably, about how he is very noticeably missing his right hand. The boisterous and reckless one, who would have been at his shoulder for this without being asked and without shutting up about it, and who would have been nearly as outraged about Indrie as Eskil has been. Bohdi has had a soft spot for their healer since the day they took him out of Kalkoa. Eskil has no doubt at all that the man is going to run himself and three horses into the ground getting here once Dagny reaches him, and he is going to arrive filthy and furious and late. Eskil would give a great deal to have him here now.

The nightbird call comes from the west. Three short notes, then silence. His warriors are in position.

Eskil gives the order.

The night splits open.

His western force hits the camp at a dead run, and the camp comes apart in front of them. The shouting starts instantly: men scrambling for weapons, the high whicker of panicked horses pulling at their pickets, a tent rope snapping taut and then giving way with the sound of a bowstring. Eskil hears the crash of a frame collapsing under a body's weight and a scream that begins as a word and ends as a wet, startled nothing, and the flat, heavy sound of a shield rim meeting a man's face at speed. Fire blooms as someone kicks the central pit apart and embers scatter across dry canvas and bedrolls. For a few seconds the tree line glows orange and the shapes of men fighting are thrown in silhouette against the remaining tents: a sword arm rising and falling, a figure doubling over, a body being dragged.

Then the stream bed fills.

They come in ones and twos at first. Men running east because west is on fire and east is dark and the water is soft underfoot and quiet. The first one comes splashing down the stones at a dead sprint with his arms pumping and no weapon in his hands. He hits Eskil's outermost pair of warriors and goes down without a sound, one blade in the gut, one in the back, the two Rengarans working in silent tandem, having done this piece of butchery a hundred times. The body folds and the water takes it and it bumps downstream past the second pair.

The second man is armed and gets past the first pair with a wild swing that puts one of Eskil's warriors back on his heels. He runs straight into the next pair, and the noise of that fight reaches the men behind him, and for a long moment the stream bed becomes a bottleneck of running men who have just realized they are running into a wall.

Eskil waits. The water around his boots is turning dark. He can feel the current pulling at his shins, heavier now, thickened with what is washing down from upstream.

The wall holds for about four heartbeats and then it starts to buckle, because there are more of them than there are of his and because men with fire behind them stop being careful. Six come down the water together, shoulder to shoulder in a channel built for two, shields locked where they can manage it and a press of blades behind the shields. They hit his second pair hard enough to put one of his warriors on his back in the stream. Eskil hears the splash and the grunt and the half second of silence that follows a man going under and then he hears the warrior's partner roaring a word that is mostly vowels and the thick, meaty chop of an axe finding a collarbone through a leather guard. The half second resolves into something he does not have to go and fix.

Two of the six get through and come downstream at a run, splashing, water kicking up around their shins. Behind them a voice is shouting orders in Jakadi, sharp and percussive and not panicking. That is the part Eskil has been waiting for. Somebody up there has stopped running and started thinking, and has worked out that the stream bed is held and that the way through a held line is all at once, fast and heavy, and that the dead men in the water are the price of admission.

They come all at once.

Eskil counts nine of them coming down the water in a ragged wedge and he stops counting. He comes up out of the fern with the longsword already moving, the blade swinging level in a flat arc that uses the rotation of his entire body, and takes the lead man across the throat before the man has finished registering that the bank has grown a king. The cut goes deep enough to hit the spine and the head snaps back at a wrong angle and the body sits down in the shallow water as if its legs have been stolen from under it, and the two behind him trip on the deadweight and stagger.

Which is the only reason Eskil gets the second one so easily. The short sword goes up under the jaw while the man is still trying to find his footing on the slick stones. The angle is ugly, the point entering below the chin and grinding upward through the palate, and Eskil feels the man's teeth through the steel before he rips it free. Blood sheets down the man's chest. He drops face-first into the stream and the splash catches Eskil across the eyes.

He blinks it away. The third is already on him.

This one is better. He has a shield, round and iron-bossed, and he comes in low with his weight behind it and tries to drive Eskil backward into the bank. Good instinct, but on the wrong man. Eskil gives him the ground, lets the man commit to the push and feel the certainty of it, and then plants his back foot on a submerged root and brings the longsword down on the top edge of the shield with everything he has. The impact jars up through his arms and into his shoulders and the shield drops four inches under the force of it and the man's face appears above the rim, eyes wide, mouth open. Eskil puts the short sword through the gap. The point takes him just below the eye and he goes sideways off the blade and into the current.

A spear comes out of the dark on his left.

Eskil gets the longsword across and catches the shaft just barely and turns it, and the point opens a line along his hip through the leather, shallow and hot and immediate. He feels the skin part and the air get into it and the warm crawl of blood down his thigh, and he files it under a problem for later. The man on the other end of the spear is committed to the thrust and cannot stop and cannot pull back and his momentum is a gift. Eskil drops the short sword into the stream, takes the spear shaft in his left hand, and hauls the man in close and drives his forehead into the bridge of the man's nose.

The crack of it is enormous. The man's head rocks back and his knees buckle and Eskil rides him down into the water, gets a boot on his chest, and holds him under. The water comes up around the man's face and takes his scream and turns it into bubbles. His hands claw at Eskil's boot and then at the stones and then at nothing. The thrashing lasts longer than Eskil expects. It always does. Then it stops, and the hands drift, and the stream takes him.

His warriors are working now, the way they do when the shape of a fight has settled and the muscle memory takes over and everyone has stopped improvising. The upstream pairs have come down off the bank and are driving what is left of the nine into the narrow part of the bed where the ferns close in and the footing turns treacherous. One of his shield maidens has taken a man's legs out from under him with a low sweep and is finishing him in the shallows with a short blade, kneeling on his chest with the water running red around both of them, and she is swearing at him in a way that seems personal.

A Jakadi man throws down his axe. It hits the water with a flat splash. He puts both hands in the air and starts shouting something with the word king in it, his voice cracking on the second syllable.

"Bind him," Eskil says, without looking, and moves past him upstream. He picks up his short sword from the stream bed as he goes, finds it by feel, the hilt rolling under his boot.

The last two try to go back the way they came and get caught between Eskil coming up the bed and his own men coming down it. One of them turns around in the water with nowhere to go and Eskil can see him working out, in the second he has left, exactly how far east this stream runs and exactly how long the Rengarans have been standing in it.

The man's sword comes up. A reflex. There is nothing behind it.

Eskil knocks it aside and opens him from hip to sternum and steps over him while he falls.

Then nothing. The stream bed goes quiet except for the sound of water running over the bodies and around the bodies and between the bodies, rinsing the blood out of their clothes and carrying it downstream in pale red threads. The distant noise of fighting in the camp is quieter now, winding down, the sounds of a thing that is coming to a close.

Eskil stands in the stream with his boots in the water and his swords dripping and listens. His breathing is hard but it is slowing. The cut on his hip is bleeding freely and the water around his left boot is stained with it. He does not look down. He listens for the one sound that will tell him whether this is over or whether it has just begun, the sound of someone being dragged, or carried, or crying out in a voice he knows.

The fighting in the camp tapers off. Individual sounds resolve out of the noise: a man surrendering in broken Rengaran, the stamp of a horse being brought under control, one of his warriors calling out a count. Then there is movement coming from the wrong direction.

Indrie is coming out of the tree line toward the camp, alone, and moving quick enough that Eskil knows he’s seen him.