20. Chapter 20 #2
They come out of the tree line on both sides of the road, and this is not the ragged force from the border.
Better armed. Better organized. More of them.
They come out of the trees in a coordinated rush that has the precision of something rehearsed, and Eskil understands inside a single heartbeat that this was the plan from the beginning.
Draw the king to the border. Let him win.
Let him ride home believing the danger has passed.
Then take him on the road where there are no walls and no palisades and no time.
"Ambush!" Bohdi roars, and after that there is no time for anything but holding their ground.
The fighting is ugly and close and chaotic.
No room for formations. No time for strategy.
The trees crowd the road and the Jakadi use them, darting between trunks, striking from cover, disappearing and reappearing.
Eskil's cavalry advantage is worth nothing here.
His men dismount and fight on foot and the road becomes a killing ground.
Eskil is in the thick of it, his longsword singing, and the battle calm comes down over him, the quiet place in his skull where everything is precise and the only thing that exists is the next strike.
Bohdi is beside him. Always beside him, the way he has been since they were boys, the axe clearing space around them the way a scythe clears wheat. They fight back to back and the Jakadi learn quickly that the center of the Rengaran line is not the place to press, and the bodies begin to pile.
Then a Jakadi fighter with a warhammer, a big man, bigger than Bohdi, swinging the weapon in arcs that take out anything inside their reach, hooks the shaft under Bohdi's guard and catches the flat of the head against the side of his skull.
The sound is sickening. A dull wet crack that Eskil hears over the clash of steel, and Bohdi staggers.
His legs go wrong beneath him, not buckling but loosening, and he drops to one knee with his hand against the side of his head and his eyes unfocused.
The hammerman sees the opening and raises the weapon for a killing blow.
Eskil throws himself between them.
He does not think about it. There is no decision and no calculation and no weighing of risk. There is his brother in all but blood on his knees with his skull ringing and a hammer coming down at the top of it, and Eskil moves the way he has always moved when somebody he loves is in danger.
He catches the downswing on his longsword and deflects it wide.
The force of the parry jars his arms to the shoulders.
He steps inside the man's reach, too close for the hammer to swing again, and drives his short sword up under the ribs.
The fighter crumples. Eskil pulls the blade free and turns to the next one, and the next, two more in quick succession, running on something that is not adrenaline and not rage but older than either, the thing that lives in the marrow and says protect what is yours.
In the press of bodies and blades, a Jakadi sword finds the gap between his arm and his ribs.
The pain is not immediate. What he feels first is impact, a hard shove, as though somebody has punched him in the side, and then the wet sensation of his shirt clinging to his skin in a way it should not.
He looks down. A Jakadi fighter is pulling a sword out of him and the blade comes away red and there is a laceration running from below his ribs almost to his hip, through leather and flesh and down to bone.
Eskil kills the man who cut him. That part is automatic.
Then the pain arrives.
He drops to his knees. The world tilts sideways, a nauseating swimming tilt, and his breath will not come right. There is a wetness spreading across his side that is too warm and too fast, and when he presses his hand to it the blood runs between his fingers.
Bohdi is there immediately. Despite the hammer blow, despite the blood running down from his own temple and the fact that he is plainly seeing two of everything and correcting for it, Bohdi is on his feet and at Eskil's side and cursing him with a fluency that would shame a dockworker.
His hands are on the wound, pressing hard, and the pressure is agonizing and Eskil grits his teeth against a sound he will not make in front of his men.
"You stupid, self-sacrificing son of a bitch," Bohdi snarls, and his voice is shaking. His tattooed fingers are slick with Eskil's blood. "You absolute bastard—"
"Tend to your own head."
"My head is fine. Your side is open. Sit down and stop talking."
"Your head is not fine. You've got one eye going where the other isn't."
"Then it's a good thing," Bohdi says through his teeth, pressing harder, "that I only need one of them to see how much of you is on the road."
The ambush is coming apart around them. The Jakadi press when they see the king go down, and then falter when Eskil's men close around him with a ferocity that says something about what this man is to them.
The line holds. The Jakadi are pushed back and then routed, and they withdraw into the trees with their dead and their wounded.
Bohdi calls for bandages and works at Eskil's leather with fingers that slip in the blood. Eskil tells him to quit fussing like a mother hen, and Bohdi tells him, through his teeth, that this is nothing compared to the tongue-lashing he is going to get from Morgan.
"Morgan doesn't need to know."
"You think he's not going to notice you holding your own intestines when we show up?"
The field bandaging is rough. Competent, because Bohdi has done this too many times, but the wound is deep.
Too deep for what they have. It wants stitches and proper cleaning, and Bohdi's supplies amount to a roll of linen, a waterskin, and a vocabulary of profanity that, while extensive, does not close lacerations.
He gets Eskil back on his horse. The mounting takes two men and an amount of swearing that startles the animals, and Eskil sits in the saddle with one hand pressed to his side and the reins in the other and his vision doing something alarming at the edges.
They ride for Valen. Slowly, because they cannot race, because the jolt of a gallop would tear it wider, and Eskil is going paler by the mile.
His knuckles are white on the reins. Sweat stands out on his forehead despite the cold.
Bohdi rides close enough to grab him if he lists and keeps glancing over with a concern he is doing a poor job of hiding.
"Stop looking at me like I'm dying."
"You're the stupidest asshole I've ever had the misfortune to know," Bohdi says. "I want you to know that."
Eskil huffs something that would be a laugh if he had the breath for it. The road stretches ahead, winding through dark trees toward home, and every hoofbeat sends a pulse of fire through his side.
He thinks about Indrie. He does not want to, does not want to be a man riding home with his guts threatening to come out of him and his first thought is a pair of dark eyes and a pair of gentle hands, but the mind does what it does.
He thinks about Indrie bent over his herbs with that focused line between his brows.
About the way his hands move when he works, precise and sure and unhesitating.
The hands that stitched wounds and set bones and kept a dying king breathing for five years on skill alone.
The hands that held Eskil's face in the library and said I want you and meant it.
Don't die, he tells himself. You miserable, stubborn bastard. Don't you dare die before you see him again.
The gates of Valen appear through the trees as the sun begins to set, and Eskil has never been so relieved to see anything in his life.