Page 50 of Setting the Break

Eskil glances down at him. "Ivan is already dead. When he learns that, whatever he's been holding onto for all these years goes out from under him."

"I told him you had Ivan killed and that you need him to pick up the pieces. That you can help him live a life not owed to anyone else. I think he'll help us."

Eskil stops short and his lips twitch of their own accord into something so close to a smile it feels foreign after the last few days. The numbers are rearranging themselves into something he can use, and a door he thought was sealed turns out to have a hinge in it, and his lover's hand is in his own. He squeezes Indrie's hand.

"You've been quite the little diplomat, haven't you?"

Indrie laughs. The sound is unexpected and bright and it cracks at the edges. He has been running on fear for three days and somebody has finally handed him something close to relief, and it comes out of him in pieces. He smiles up at Eskil, and the smile is exhausted and genuine and so full of warmth that Eskil's chest aches with it.

"Well," Indrie says. "You didn't expect me to just wait around to be rescued, did you?"

Eskil does not answer that. The honest answer is that he expected exactly that, because Indrie is a healer and not a warrior, and the plan in Eskil's head had involved finding him bound and frightened and carrying him out of here over one shoulder. The honest answer is that the man walking beside him through a destroyed Jakadi camp, starving and bruised and talking about the intelligence he gathered while captive, is not the man that plan accounted for. Indrie has done something Eskil did not ask him to do and could not have asked him to do, and the shape of it sits in him and reminds him that he has underestimated this man's strength yet again.

He squeezes Indrie's hand a second time and says nothing, because everything he could say would be inadequate and he knows it.

They make their way through the forest and back to the camp. The trees thin and the wreckage opens in front of them, half of it still burning where his warriors have not yet stamped it out, the smoke going straight up in the windless cold. Leave it to the Jakadi to set their entire camp on fire as a distraction. No wonder they have never amounted to more than glorified bandits haunting the edges of his borders.

Bohdi is not here.

The absence registers in the same place it has registered all night, the cold space at his left shoulder. Eskil catalogues it and moves on, because there is nothing he can do about it. Bohdi is riding hard toward this forest with Dagny, if Dagny found them in time, if the eastern road was clear, if a dozen other variables fell the right way. Eskil sent for him because he needed him and because he always needs him, and the fact that the battle is over before Bohdi arrives changes nothing about needing him.

There are a handful of women and children off to one side, who are being kept wrangled but who are not quite being kept captive, exactly, and that is a whole mess waiting its turn. Of course the Jakadi were keeping civilians in a warrior camp while holding a prisoner they were ransoming to a king. These people have no fucking common sense and it is giving Eskil a headache he is going to be weathering for the rest of the night.

A shield maiden comes up and gives him the count. Twenty two Jakadi warriors dead, four taken alive and bound and sitting against the remains of a horse picket. Three of their own injured, none critically, and she implies without quite saying that one of the three managed it himself, being a seasoned warrior who could not tell the difference between a Rengaran and a Jakadi in the middle of a fight. The headache grows.

She also mentions, hesitantly, that they had several get through the lines and into the forest. On a regular day he would be a great deal more annoyed about that. Tonight his anger has been sated slightly by the grip on his arm.

"We'll deal with the stragglers later," he tells her, and he can see the relief in the set of her jaw. "Get the rest of these fires out before they take the whole damned forest with them. Pack the civilians up with what you can and tell them to get out of my sight."

She nods and goes. Indrie is standing beside him with his hand still in Eskil's, and Eskil can feel the tremor running through his fingers and knows it is cold and exhaustion and not fear. He pulls his cloak off his own shoulders and wraps it around Indrie and gathers it closed at the front. Indrie's hands come up to grip the edges and he sinks into the warmth with an expression that nearly undoes Eskil's composure entirely.

"Don't you need it?" Indrie says, looking up at him.

"I need you not to freeze to death before I get you home. Wear the fucking cloak."

Indrie huffs a sound that is too tired to be a laugh and too fond to be anything else, and pulls the cloak tighter around himself.

Eskil scans the camp. He finds what he is looking for near the smoldering remains of a hut on the eastern side. Two figures standing close together, one broad and leaning and holding a sword down at his side, the other slighter and holding a staff.

Garrik's shirt is dark from collar to belt. In the firelight Eskil can see the sheen of blood still wet on the fabric, and the way Garrik holds his left arm in against his body, and the careful shallow breathing that tells him the wound is bad enough to change every plan that involves this man on a horse in the next week.

The man beside him is unfamiliar, but Eskil can take a stab in the dark at who he is supposed to be on appearance alone. He was never on friendly terms with Ivan Wolfe, but he met him more than once and he never forgot that surly face. The young man's face is turned toward Garrik and aimed slightly wrong, and the pale eyes catch the firelight in a way that makes them almost luminous. Even at twenty paces the resemblance is unmistakable. The jaw. The brow. The set of the mouth. It is Ivan's face worn by a younger man, and the fact that Ivan is dead and this face is alive and standing in the ruins of his captors' camp is either poetic justice or the gods having a laugh. Eskil does not much care which.

He crosses to them with Indrie at his side. Garrik sees him coming and straightens, which costs him, and inclines his head. Fenris turns toward the sound of their footsteps and tilts his head to listen.

"This is him?" Eskil asks, though he already knows.

"This is Fenris," Garrik confirms. His voice is strained at the edges, roughened by pain, but he is still upright. "I'm told he had a hand in keeping your healer alive."

Eskil regards him. The young man does not flinch under a regard he cannot see, which tells Eskil something. He learned a long time ago that showing fear does not prevent the thing feared, and it is written into the way he stands, and Eskil respects it, because he learned the same lesson at roughly the same age and in circumstances he does not discuss.

Fenris's mouth twitches. "Don't listen to him. Your healer kept himself alive. I just made sure they didn't take his hand."

Beside him, Indrie's grip tightens, and the pressure is deliberate. Eskil looks down at him. Indrie meets his eyes and shakes his head once, small and firm. His hands are intact. Both of them, all ten fingers, the hands that stitch wounds and grind herbs and cup Eskil's face in the dark. The implication is clear enough without them.

Imagine if they had sent something other than hair wrapped in that cloth, says the voice in his head that is still finding reasons to be angry. These are the sort of men who would have sent him to you in pieces.

Eskil breathes through it. Indrie is holding his hand and asking him without words to put it down, and he puts it down. Not away. Down. There is always time to pick it back up later.