Chapter 15 #2
But Bohdi's eyes find his across the space between them.
And Indrie sees it.
Sees what is behind the mask. Behind the flat expression and the cold voice and the terrible calculated stillness.
Bohdi is looking at him the way he looked at him on the ship, when he pressed his forehead to Indrie's and thanked him for saving the king.
The way he looked at him in the hold, when he put his hand over Indrie's and promised that nobody on that ship would hurt him.
This is not abandonment. This is a play.
Indrie cannot see the whole of it. But he understands one piece, because he has spent a lifetime watching frightened people, and it is this: a man who believes he is still trapped keeps the blade where it is. A man who believes he has won relaxes his hand.
Bohdi is not giving the prisoner the gate. He is giving him the belief that he has already made it.
So Indrie breathes. He holds still. He trusts.
The guards step aside. Slowly, reluctantly, weapons still raised, bodies angled toward the prisoner with the coiled tension of men obeying an order they do not agree with. The gate opens, not fully, just enough, a gap wide enough for two bodies.
The man hauls Indrie through it.
The avenue beyond opens into a broad space, the approach road, lined with supply buildings and storage sheds, running to a tree line a hundred yards off.
The prisoner is backing out, eyes on Bohdi and the guards, using Indrie's body as a shield.
His grip on Indrie's hair is savage, pulling, wrenching, the roots screaming, and the scalpel is steady at his throat and Indrie can feel the man's heart hammering against his back in a rapid desperate percussion that matches his own.
Twenty feet from the gate. Thirty. The distance to the torchlight is growing and the darkness is closing in from the edges, and the man's breathing is getting faster rather than slower, not the breathing of somebody who has escaped and is easing, but of somebody whose terror will not lift until he is deep in the trees and far from the walls and alone with what he is holding.
Indrie knows that this man is going to kill him the moment they are out of sight.
The hostage has served its purpose. Once he is clear of the gate and the guards and the torchlight, Indrie becomes a liability, a witness, a burden, a mouth that can describe a face and a wound and a direction.
The scalpel at his throat is not a threat. It is a timeline.
Then he hears movement behind them.
Quiet. So quiet that if Indrie were not held rigid with every nerve straining outward he would not have heard it at all. A sound so small it barely exists, the whisper of cloth against cloth, the shift of weight from one foot to the other, the infinitesimal scrape of leather on stone.
And beneath it, the sound a blade makes coming out of a sheath.
Eskil is there.
He comes out of the black between two supply sheds, from the wrong side, from the outside, from ground the prisoner has spent six weeks mapping and never once found a way through. There is no gate behind him. There is nothing behind him but wall.
The dagger crosses the prisoner's throat, in a line from ear to ear, and the sound is wet in Indrie's ears.
The prisoner gurgles. Blood erupts from the wound, not in a trickle but in a gush, a pulsing arterial torrent that soaks Indrie's shoulder and neck and the back of his shirt in a wave of wet heat.
The body convulses. The legs buckle. The grip on Indrie's hair releases as the man's hands fly to his own throat in a reflexive futile attempt to hold the wound closed, and the hand holding the scalpel falters.
And it is only Eskil's hand, shooting past the falling shoulder and closing around the wrist that held the scalpel, that keeps the man's downward momentum from dragging the blade across Indrie's throat on the way down.
Eskil holds the wrist. Holds the dead weight of a dying man in one fist while the body slides to the cobblestones, and the scalpel clatters free and skids across the stone and comes to rest against the base of a supply shed.
The prisoner hits the ground. The blood spreads beneath him in a dark expanding pool. His body twitches, once, twice, the involuntary spasms of a system shutting down, and then he is still.
Indrie staggers forward.
His legs carry him two steps, three, and then stop working. His knees buckle, not slowly but all at once, and he would have gone down if his feet had not caught, if his body had not found some last reserve of balance to keep him upright and swaying.
He registers, distantly, that a man is dead. The man he argued for. The man he wanted to help. The man he stood in the king's study and invoked his vow for, and he is on the cobblestones with his throat open.
He was going to kill you, he thinks, and feels numb.
Eskil steps over the body.
He is already reaching, one hand extended, his blue eyes scanning Indrie's face and throat and neck with the rapid assessment of somebody checking for damage.
The other hand still holds the dagger, the blade dark, and he does not appear to notice it.
His longsword is still at his hip. He never drew it.
Six inches from Indrie's throat, and he came out of the dark with the shorter blade.
"Are you alright?" he asks, and his voice is rough and low and stripped of every wall and every layer of kingly composure.
It is the voice of a man who has been afraid, who ran through his own city in the dark because the thing he feared most was exactly what he found.
"Are you hurt? Indrie, the cut, let me see—"
Indrie does not let him finish.
He throws himself into Eskil's arms.
The motion is not graceful. It is not measured or considered or controlled.
It is the full unrestrained lunge of a body that has been held in check by terror and discipline and the thin cutting edge of a scalpel and has been released from all three at once.
His hands find Eskil's shirt and fist in the fabric and his face presses into the broad expanse of Eskil's chest.
He holds on.
He holds on with his hands and his arms and the desperate clinging strength of a man who has watched the ground open beneath his feet and grabbed the only solid thing in the world.
He presses himself against the warmth and the solidity and the heartbeat he can feel through the linen, rapid and strong and alive.
Eskil's arms come around him.
One across his back, spanning the width of him, pulling him in with a force that says I have you in a language that does not require words.
One cradling the back of his head, the large hand spanning the curve of his skull, fingers threading into blood-matted hair, holding him the way you hold something you are terrified of dropping.
Eskil holds him so tightly that Indrie's feet nearly leave the ground.
Indrie can breathe.
He presses his face into Eskil's chest and breathes, the first real breath since the man's hand closed in his hair in the clinic, the first that reaches the bottom of his lungs, the first that does not taste of blood and metal and fear.
It comes out ragged. Shuddering. One wrong tremor from becoming a sob.
But it comes. And the one after it comes. And the one after that.
He is alive. He is in Eskil's arms. The man who had him is dead on the stones and the scalpel is lying beside him and the alarm horns are still going, and Indrie cannot hear them, because the only sound that exists is the steady heavy thud of Eskil's heart against his ear.
He does not think about the blood soaking through both their shirts, or the body cooling behind them, or the fact that the man he is clinging to has just killed somebody for him.
He holds on.