Page 88 of Setting the Break

"Tova," Indrie says, very gently, for the ninth time. "If I don't take it out it's only going to hurt more."

Tova screams at him.

"It will be so quick," her mother says, from the other side of the table, holding Tova's other arm. She has the fixed, glazed look that comes of three nights awake with this child. "He'll be so quick, won't you, healer. So quick."

"I will be extremely quick," Indrie promises.

Tova takes a breath deep enough to shatter glass.

The door opens.

Indrie looks up, already half turned to say that the clinic is closed for the next quarter hour for the safety of everyone involved, and it's Eskil.

His heart does the thing it always does, the small lift in the middle of his chest that he's never once managed to get used to. He would be delighted to see him on any other morning. He's delighted anyway. Eskil is standing in the doorway of the clinic in the middle of the day in his good coat with snow on his shoulders, filling the whole frame of it, and Indrie's heart lifts.

Then he sees Eskil's face, and his heart goes straight back down into his stomach.

It isn't anger. He knows Eskil's anger by now, every kind of it. It isn't the flat cold look he wears when there's trouble brewing, either. It is something Indrie has never seen on that face before. It takes him a full second to put a name to it, and when he does, the name frightens him more than either of the others would have.

Eskil is nervous.

On the table, Tova has stopped screaming.

She has stopped mid-breath. She is lying perfectly still on her back, staring past Indrie at the doorway with her mouth open. She sits bolt upright, with ointment on one elbow and the wounded finger held out in front of her, and puts her shoulders back. She knows exactly who that is. Every child in Valen knows who that is.

Her mother looks at the king and then at her daughter's sudden silence, and looks so relieved that Indrie thinks she may actually sit down on the floor.

Indrie lets out a breath of his own.

The pot of willow bark chooses that moment to boil over. It comes up over the rim in a rush and pours down into the fire, and the fire hisses and spits and sends up a cloud of steam that smells strongly of bark and ruin.

"Ermin," Indrie pleads.

"I know," Ermin says, from the floor. "I know, I've got it."

"I apologize," Eskil says, from the doorway. He is already taking a step back. "I can come back."

"No," Indrie says. "No, no, it's fine."

He waves Ermin off toward the fire. Ermin scrambles up out of the ointment and goes, wiping his hands on his trousers, and grabs a cloth and hauls the pot off the hook and swears under his breath at it.

Indrie turns all the way around to face the door.

"What's wrong?" he asks. "Has something happened? Is everyone all right?"

"Everything's fine," Eskil says.

Everything is plainly not fine. Eskil has walked down here from the keep in the snow. From the look of him he stood outside the door for some time before he opened it, which, Indrie realizes, looking at the snow on his shoulders, is very likely exactly what he did. He is holding himself very straight. One of his hands is opening and closing at his side.

"It's snowing," Eskil says.

Indrie looks at him.

Eskil closes his eyes, very briefly. His mouth moves around a word that Indrie is fairly certain would get him scolded by Tova's mother.

"I'm sorry," Indrie says. "What?"

"Nothing," Eskil says. "It's nothing. Finish what you're doing. I'll wait."