Chapter 14
Eskil
Eskil has to put both hands flat on his desk and breathe.
In through the nose, out through the mouth, the way the old weaponmaster taught him when he was fifteen and too angry to hold a sword without shaking.
The technique is built for battle rage, for the red-misted fury that comes down in close combat and makes a man swing wild instead of precise.
It has no business being used by a king standing in his own study because he made a healer flinch.
But here he is. Breathing. Counting. Doing the exercise for controlling a killing temper because he cannot otherwise get his hands to stop.
There were two of them and he cannot decide which is worse.
The first was here, at this desk. The shoulders drawing inward, the chin dropping, the whole man folding back down into something smaller and older and trained.
The second he did not see. He felt it. His hand closed around Indrie's arm in the hallway and every muscle in that body locked at once, braced, teeth clicking together, the recoil travelling up through Eskil's own arm and into his chest. That is a body that has been grabbed before by hands that did not stop at grabbing.
He pulled Indrie against his chest and Indrie froze.
Stood there with his hands splayed at his sides and his breathing gone to nothing.
Eskil held on and spoke into his hair and felt the exact moment the ice began to crack, the shoulders coming down by degrees, the forehead settling against his collarbone with a trust so fragile it closed his throat.
And before that. Yes, your majesty. Quiet and hollow and obedient, out of a mouth that has called him by his name.
He spoke to Indrie the way Armond must have spoken to him. Same tone. Same authority. Same flat assumption that his word was the end of it and the person receiving it had no right to a second sentence.
He watched someone who had finally started standing up straight fold back into the shape of a servant, and he was the one who did the folding.
At least he followed. That is the one thing. The one thing he did tonight that he does not have to hate himself for. He heard the footsteps going away down the hallway and his body moved before his pride could stop it, and he ran, and he caught him, and he held on.
And Indrie stayed. Shaking, barely breathing, frightened, and he stayed.
He looked up and Eskil saw it in his face: the fear, and underneath the fear, the decision to stay anyway.
The choice. The one thing Armond never gave him, and the thing Eskil has been trying to give him every day since the ship, clumsily, with hands better suited to breaking than to building.
In through the nose. Out through the mouth.
He followed this time. He said the words. He held on. But the damage was done before the holding, and no apology in a hallway undoes the sound of yes, your majesty out of a mouth that had finally stopped saying it.
So he tries to work.
The documents are the same documents that were there an hour ago and they have not improved.
The requisitions blur. The patrol schedules swim.
The quill is wrong in his hand, too light, too delicate, an instrument for making things, and his hands spent a night and a day taking a man apart in a stone room and have not been properly washed since.
He thinks about sending someone to the clinic.
Not himself. He made a promise in that hallway, an unspoken one, when he loosened his arms and let Indrie choose to walk away.
The choosing was the point. But he could send someone.
A guard to check. A maid with food. Morgan, who would know what to say, who always knows what to say, who has never once put that look on anybody's face.
He doesn't. Sending someone would be another version of arriving. Another version of Eskil deciding what Indrie needs and when he needs it and who brings it to his door. He took Indrie's say in the matter once tonight and he is not taking it twice.
But gods, he wants to be standing in that clinic right now. He wants it so badly his teeth ache.
The evening goes. The last of the light drains out of the window and the room fills up with dark.
Eskil grinds through the patrol schedules by force of will, giving them the same mechanical attention he gives anything that must be done regardless of whether he is fit to do it.
He signs things. He reads Bohdi's preliminary plan for Greyhollow.
He reads Morgan's trade summary, wool and timber and a fishing dispute in the northern villages that his brother has resolved with his usual appalling competence, and absorbs not one word of it.
He keeps thinking about the weight of Indrie's forehead against his collarbone. The smallness of it. Something carried a very long way and finally set down.
He does not eat. The tray the kitchen maid left is still on the corner of the desk, the bread going hard, a skin of grease setting on the broth. He looks at it once. It looks back. Neither of them is interested.
He thinks about what Indrie said to him.
Tell me whether there is anything left of him worth treating, or whether I should simply wait to see him buried.
The words landed where they were aimed and they are still in him.
The cut was clean and it has not closed.
He cannot even be angry about it. Indrie was not wrong.
The man in the cell is a ruin and Eskil made him one, and the healer looked at the king who did the ruining and asked him to account for it, and Eskil answered with a crown instead of an answer.
He has to send someone to tend the prisoner.
He promised. Standing in that hallway with Indrie's hair against his mouth he said I'll send someone and he'll be treated and I'll see to it myself.
He said it and Indrie believed him and walked away believing him, and Eskil will keep the promise if it kills him, because it is the only clean thing that came out of tonight.
He writes the order. A guard with field training, under arms, the cell door open, the prisoner restrained, a second man posted on the stair.
He writes it in his own hand and seals it and sends it down with a runner and does not let himself think about how much less it is than what Indrie would have done.
He should light a lamp. He does not light a lamp, because lighting a lamp would be an admission that he intends to be awake in it, so he sits in the gloom reading by whatever is left of the day until there is nothing left of the day and the documents are only shapes and his eyes have been burning for an hour.
At some point, without deciding to, he puts his head down on the desk.
The trade report is unreasonably comfortable.
The parchment is cool against his cheek and the ink dried weeks ago and the curve of the desk edge fits under his temple better than any pillow he has ever paid for.
He tells himself he will shut his eyes for a moment.
Just long enough for the burning to stop.
He sleeps.
***
The alarm horns wake him.
The sound is enormous, a deep resonant bellow that goes through stone and timber and straight through the fog of sleep, and it fills the study and fills his skull and fills the space between two heartbeats with something older than thought. The horns mean danger.
Eskil is on his feet before the sound has finished, moving for the door with his cheek still bearing the reversed print of a wool tally.
His hand goes to his hip. His sword is not there, it is on the rack by the door, and he takes it without breaking stride, and the weight of the hilt in his palm is the first thing that has felt right in eight hours.
The keep is awake. Torchlight jumping, voices calling, boots hammering on stone as men and women who were asleep a minute ago come up moving, because this garrison drills for exactly this. A servant flattens herself against the wall as he passes with a water pitcher clutched to her chest.
Bohdi comes around the far corner at a dead run.
Axe already in his hand. Not on his back, in his fist, head angled forward, the way he carries it when he expects to be swinging inside the minute. His braids are loose, his tunic is unlaced, and he is barefoot, which means he was asleep and did not stop for boots.
"The prisoner," Bohdi says, hauling up in front of him, breathing hard. "He killed the guard you sent to tend his wounds. Took the man's keys and his knife and went up the stairs through the second post. He's loose in the city."
Eskil does not move.
He wrote that order four hours ago. Sealed it himself and put it in a runner's fist, and he did it because he had stood in a hallway and promised a healer that the man in the cell would be seen to properly.
He kept the promise. The promise is what opened the door.
And underneath that, arriving half a second later and far worse: if he had lost the argument in that study, there would not be a guard on the floor down there.
There would be Indrie. He would have gone down those stairs with his satchel in his hands and he would have knelt, and the thing in that cell would have been awake and watching and waiting for exactly that.
Three seconds. That is what he told him. Three seconds of somebody thinking about injuries instead of about the man.
Then his mind does what it always does, which is work, cold and fast and without asking permission.
The prisoner knows the inside of the cells.
He knows the shift patterns, because he wrote them down himself before they caught him.
He has been inside these walls for weeks.
He knows the streets and the gates and the gaps in the coverage.
He knows where the clinic is.
He had documents on your location. In his possession.
His own words, spoken in this room a few hours ago, to the person he was trying to keep safe.
And now the man is out and the clinic is on a residential street with tall windows and a latch a child could lift and one person asleep alone in the back of it.
"He does not reach the Jakadi." Eskil's voice comes out as a king's and not as whatever he is underneath it. "Not with the rotations, not with the gate coverage, not with the inside of my keep in his head. Find him."
Bohdi nods. There is nothing in his face. No grin, no obscenity. This is the other Bohdi, the one on the far side of the axe.
"Every gate sealed and every patrol doubled inside ten minutes," Bohdi says. "He won't see the walls."
"Go."
Bohdi goes. Bare feet slapping stone, the sound of him receding, gone around the corner.
And Eskil turns the other way.
Not toward the gates, where the man will be trying to get out. Not toward the barracks, where three hundred fighting men are pulling on mail and waiting for someone to tell them where to stand. Not toward the cells, where there is a dead guard on the floor who is down there because Eskil sent him.
He goes toward the healer's street.
He is aware of what he is doing. That is the part he will think about later, in the small hours, when there is time for it.
He is not confused and he is not panicking and there is no moment where the decision escapes him.
He knows precisely what a king is supposed to do with the first ninety seconds of a manhunt, and he knows that this is not it, and he goes anyway, at a flat run, with his sword in his hand.
The bastard had the clinic on his map. Out of a whole city.
Out of every barracks and armory and granary and gate worth writing down, he wrote down a physician's door on a residential street, and Eskil stood in a hallway a few hours ago and held the man who sleeps behind that door and said I can't let you run from me again and meant I can't lose you and now there is a killer loose between the keep and the clinic and Eskil is running and it is not fast enough. It will never be fast enough.
Let the council have that one. Let them convene and cluck about it and put it in the minutes. Eskil will sit through the meeting.
The streets are dark. The torches along the main road are guttering in a wind that has come up since nightfall, carrying pine and cold off the mountain.
The horns have woken the city and lamplight is blooming behind shutters, faces appearing at windows, people moving in the confused half-panic that comes of hearing the horns and not yet knowing why.
He turns onto the clinic street.
The door is ajar.
Eskil goes from running to stopped inside a single stride, boots skidding on the cobbles, his fist closing on the hilt hard enough that the leather bites.
Ajar. Standing open the way a door stands open when somebody has shoved through it and not bothered with it after. The light coming out of it is wrong, too bright in one place and dark everywhere else, a lamp off its bracket and burning at an angle on the floor.
He goes in.
The front room has been through something.
Nothing smashed for the pleasure of smashing it, only the quick indifferent wreckage left behind by somebody moving fast and not caring what he moved.
A jar broken on the boards, glass in the scrubbed grain, a dark spill of herbs.
A chair on its side. The lower shelf swept, bandages unspooled across the floor, a tin of salve up against the wall.
The examination table shoved out of square.
The back room is empty.
The bed is rumpled. The blanket is not folded and not pushed back but thrown, halfway to the floor, the shape a blanket takes when the body under it left in a hurry.
Eskil stands in the middle of it with his sword in his hand and the lamp guttering on the floor, and for one full second he is nothing at all. No king. No plan. Nothing in his skull but a white sound.
He held him tonight. Felt his heartbeat through his own tunic. Spoke promises into his hair. Let him go. Watched him walk away.
Then it clears, and what comes up through it is the reasoning, because that is what he does, and it does not stop working just because he wants it to.
The man wants out. On foot, alone, in a city that is hunting him, with the gates sealing right now, he has nothing. Unless he has a body in front of him. Somebody the guards know by name. Somebody they have watched the king walk home in the dark.
Then he has everything.
South gate. Closest to this street, and the approach is broad and open, so the guards will see the blade at the throat from forty feet out and will not be able to do one useful thing about it.
Eskil is already moving.
I will kill him. Whatever else happens tonight, that man does not see the sun.