20. Chapter 20
Eskil
Eskil has barely changed his clothes when the report comes in.
He is standing in his quarters, pulling a clean shirt over his head when the knock comes. A runner, breathing hard, holding a folded message sealed with the border garrison's mark. Eskil takes it, reads it, and the warmth that has been sitting in him since the library goes cold.
Jakadi forces spotted on the eastern border.
Not skirmishers. Not scouts. A column, moving in the numbers the dead spy described in the cells beneath the keep.
They are headed for one of the outer settlements, a farming village of maybe sixty souls with a grain store that feeds two neighboring towns and a wooden palisade that would hold off a stiff breeze and not much else.
Eskil dresses for war. The routine is muscle memory.
Leather first, then mail where the leather gaps, bracers at the forearms, the longsword at his hip and the two short swords crossed at his back.
He braids his hair tight to his skull with the practiced speed of a man who has done it a thousand times in firelight and darkness, and he does not think about Indrie's fingers in this same hair an hour ago.
He does think about it. He is not a monk. He is a man who has just had the best fuck of his life on a library desk and is now buckling a sword belt and trying to reconcile the two halves of his existence, and the reconciliation is not going well.
He sends word to the barracks. His men assemble with an efficiency that speaks to years of drill, saddled and armed and formed up in the courtyard inside the hour, torches throwing long shadows over the cobblestones.
The horses stamp and blow in the cold. The moon is high and the sky is clear and it is good riding weather, which is the only thing tonight has going for it.
The reluctance is enormous.
He is riding away from a man who was held at knifepoint in his own home two nights ago.
Before he goes, he doubles the watch on the healer's street.
Two men, every night, with standing orders that are explicit about what happens to anybody on that street after dark without a gods-damned excellent reason.
He gives the order to the captain of the night watch personally and makes certain the man understands that this is not a request and not a suggestion and that any failure will be handled by Eskil himself.
Morgan meets him in the courtyard, roused from sleep by the commotion, blond hair mussed and his expression sharp despite the hour.
Eskil pauses with one hand on the bridle. The courtyard is loud with men and horses and the jangle of mail, and Morgan is standing beside him in the torchlight looking very young and very awake.
"If Indrie comes looking for me," Eskil says, "tell him I will be back."
Morgan does not ask why Indrie would be looking for him. He does not raise an eyebrow or tilt his head or deploy any part of the arsenal he keeps for communicating that he knows more than he is saying. He simply nods.
"Of course."
Eskil grips his brother's shoulder. Holds it. The grip is harder than it needs to be and they both know why, because every time Eskil rides out there is a chance he does not ride back, and neither of them says it. Morgan puts his hand over Eskil's and squeezes once and steps back.
Eskil mounts. He turns the horse toward the gate and rides out with Bohdi at his side.
***
They stop to water the horses at a stream three hours south of Valen, a narrow thing cutting through a dark meadow, silver in the moonlight. Bohdi is sitting on a flat rock with his axe across his knees and a grin that promises nothing good.
He says, “I have heard a delightful rumor among the soldiers.”
Eskil, crouched at the water refilling his skin, does not look up. "I don't care."
"You'll care about this one."
"I will not."
"The rumor is that the king," Bohdi says, savoring every syllable, "has laid claim to the Kalkoan healer."
Eskil's hands still on the waterskin. The stream runs past his boots, cold and indifferent.
"What the fuck are you talking about?"
Bohdi leans back on his rock, supremely comfortable, the moonlight catching the red of his hair and the ink at his throat.
"The soldiers are talking. Apparently Harrak propositioned the young man in the baths some time ago and was told, in no uncertain terms, that Indrie was spoken for.
" He pauses. Lets the pause breathe. "By the king. "
Eskil thinks about finding Indrie in the hallway.
Wet. Half-dressed. A cut on his temple and a look on his face that was equal parts mortification and distress.
He didn't mean to. He connects the dots, the hot springs, Harrak, the misunderstanding that sent him fleeing bare-legged through the keep, and the surge of jealous fury that goes through him must show on his face, because Bohdi laughs outright.
The jealousy is stupid. He knows it is stupid.
Harrak is a good man and a competent guard and the misunderstanding was mutual and Indrie has made it abundantly clear, on a desk, in a library, with his arms around Eskil's neck and his legs around his waist, that his interests lie elsewhere.
But the image of Harrak's body close to Indrie's in the warm water of the springs is a splinter Eskil cannot stop pressing on.
He's mine, something in him says, primal and ugly and undeniable, and he hates himself for the words even as they go through his skull.
"Don't reassign the poor bastard to the southern stronghold just because he made eyes at your boy," Bohdi says.
"I'm not making any promises."
Bohdi shakes his head, still grinning, and uncaps his own waterskin. "The rumor came from Ermin, apparently. He's the one who corrected Harrak. Told the man to keep his distance."
Eskil stares at the stream. He thinks about Ermin, earnest and enthusiastic and eighteen years old and evidently incapable of minding his own business, marching up to a guard twice his size to inform him that the healer was off limits because the king had claimed him.
The audacity is staggering, but it does sound exactly like Ermin.
They mount and ride on. The border is another two hours south and the column of torchlight stretches behind them through the dark. Eskil settles into the focused quiet of a king riding to war, a state of mind he has occupied so many times it fits him like old leather.
Except his mind keeps slipping. Keeps sliding sideways to the library. To Indrie's arms around his neck. To the broken beautiful sound he made. To the way he buried his face in Eskil's throat and smiled against his skin, and the smile was so warm and so close that Eskil felt it rather than saw it.
To the way Indrie looked at him after. Dazed and trembling with his hair destroyed and ink on his elbow from a spilled well and his lips swollen and his dark eyes full of something Eskil has never had directed at him before.
Not gratitude. Not relief. Not the careful deference of a man who thinks he owes a debt.
Just affection. Plain and enormous and unhidden. As though Indrie could not have concealed it if he tried and had decided, finally, to stop trying.
Eskil shifts in the saddle and tells himself to focus.
***
They reach the border at dawn and engage the Jakadi troops attacking the settlement.
The rout is swift. Suspiciously so. The Jakadi had the numbers to hold, enough men to pin the settlement and wait out a siege, but when Eskil's force hits their flank they break and withdraw.
Not in the panicked scattering of a routed army.
In good order. Cleanly. Deliberately. They peel off the engagement, reform into column, and retreat south into the tree line with a discipline that says the withdrawal was always the plan.
Eskil and Bohdi ride the perimeter together afterward, posting sentries, checking the tree line, and the silence between them has the weighted quality that means they are thinking the same thing and neither wants to say it first.
"Too easy," Eskil says.
"Too clean," Bohdi agrees. He is standing in the stirrups, scanning the southern ridge, his axe resting across his thighs. "They didn't commit. Not really. That was a probe. They wanted to see how fast we'd come and how many we'd bring."
The implication is cold and precise. The Jakadi are measuring them. Cataloguing response times, force strength, the route Eskil takes from Valen to the border. Building a picture. The border engagement was not the attack. It was the reconnaissance for it.
Eskil looks south, toward the tree line and the mountains beyond, and thinks about the Wolfe stronghold on the far side of those peaks. About the shifting tone of the correspondence. About a betrothal that began as an invitation and has become a demand.
"There's a larger picture we're not seeing," Bohdi says.
"I think we're starting to see the shape of it pretty damned well, Bohdi."
Eskil gives the order to camp at the settlement for the night. His men help with repairs to the palisade. An old man died holding the gate with a woodcutter's axe. Eskil kneels beside the body and closes his eyes and stays there a moment longer than required, because the man earned that.
He sleeps three hours on the floor of the village hall with his sword beside him and his boots on, and when he wakes before dawn, stiff and sore and aching, he gives the order to ride for home.
The ride back is quiet. The men are alert in the way soldiers are after a fight that went too well, wary with the knowledge that the easy victory was the bait and the hook has not yet set.
The column moves at a steady pace through the grey morning light, breath misting from horses and riders, the creak of leather and the jangle of mail the only sounds.
Halfway home, the Jakadi hit them.