Page 25 of Tending the Ache

It is not a large place he has here. A clinic with tall windows and shelves filling slowly with gifts, a bed in the back room with a blanket softer than anything he has ever owned, and a handful of people who call him by his name and not boy.

It is not everything he wants. But he is learning, slowly and one day at a time, that wanting is not the same as needing, and that a life can be full even when the fullest part of it aches.

Chapter 8

Eskil

Bohdi finds him in the armory.

This is not unusual. When Eskil's thoughts turn in on themselves and begin to eat through the walls he's built to contain them, his body takes him to the only place that makes sense: a room full of things designed to be held, sharpened, and pointed at problems. He's been at the whetstone for the better part of an hour, running his longsword along it with the mechanical rhythm of hands that know their work while the mind attached to them is somewhere else entirely, when the heavy door creaks open and Bohdi's boots announce his arrival on the stone floor.

"You've been in here since before dawn," Bohdi says, closing the door behind him.

"I'm aware of how time works."

"That blade doesn't need sharpening. You could split sunlight with it."

Eskil draws the sword along the stone one more time. The sound is a thin, clean scream that echoes off the walls. He sets it down, braces both hands on the edge of the workbench, and looks at Bohdi, who has settled himself against the weapons rack with his arms folded across his chest and his massive axe leaning against the wall beside him.

Bohdi's red hair is freshly braided and the tattoos on his hands shift as he crosses his arms, knots and lines that climb from his fingertips to his jawline. He looks comfortable. Patient. Prepared to wait. Which is infuriating, because Eskil doesn't want patience right now. He wants to hit something.

"The Jakadi," Eskil says. "Let's talk."

Bohdi straightens. The shift from companionable to operational is seamless; it always is with him. Bohdi can go from a dirty joke to a battle briefing in the space between heartbeats, and this is one of the hundred reasons Eskil trusts him above all others.

Eskil lays it out. Everything the council gave him. The fabricated intelligence about precious metals in Kalkoa, horseshit, every word of it, designed to draw Rengara's king and a significant portion of his fighting force across the sea on a fool's errand. The timing of the attack on Askarte, precise and calculated, landing exactly when Rengara was at its most vulnerable. Forty to fifty fighters, better armed than any border raiding party has a right to be, striking the mine and the granary at dawn in the second week of the voyage.

This was not a raid. It was a strategy. Coordinated, deliberate, and patient in a way the Jakadi have never been before.

Bohdi listens with the focused stillness that means he is memorizing every detail, filing it into the map he keeps inside his skull, the one that tracks every piece on the board, every movement, every possibility. His fingers drum against his forearm once, twice, and then stop.

"They played us," Bohdi says.

"They played us like a fucking fiddle." Eskil picks up the sword and slides it into the scabbard with more force than the action requires. "We sailed halfway to nowhere to scrape dregs out of a dead kingdom while they waltzed into Askarte and helped themselves to our eastern flank."

"The eastern flank held."

"Because of Morgan."

Bohdi nods. "The prince acted fast. Had warriors mobilized before the Jakadi's forward party made it to the outer wall. Smart work."

"Smart work that he understated to me when I got home." The anger in Eskil's voice is aimed inward as much as outward. At himself, for leaving, for taking the bait, for not being here when his kingdom needed him. At Morgan, for downplaying a coordinated enemy attack as a small engagement and slipping it between herring tariffs and a collapsed wall as though it were a minor scheduling conflict. "Small engagement at Askarte. Handled. That's what he said to me, Bohdi. Those were his exact words."

"Your brother has a talent for understatement."

"My brother is going to get a very thorough education in the difference between a border skirmish and a calculated assault orchestrated by an enemy faction that fed us false intelligence to get us out of the fucking kingdom."

Bohdi doesn't argue. He knows when to let Eskil burn and when to douse the fire, and right now the fire needs air. He tilts his head, working through something, and says, "Their resources are limited. The Jakadi don't have the numbers for a direct assault on Valen. Not even close. If they tried to take the capital, we'd break them inside a day."

"Which means they're not trying to take the capital."

"So what are they trying to do?"

Eskil has been turning this over since the council meeting and the answer keeps coming up the same: he doesn't know. The Jakadi are a fractured faction, tribal in structure, rarely united under a single command. They raid. They harass. They strike at vulnerable points and melt back into their territory. They are irritants, not conquerors. And yet the precision of this operation, the quality of the fabricated intelligence, the timing, the coordination between the misdirection and the assault, speaks to a level of organization that is new. That is different.

Precision in an enemy is far more dangerous than strength. A strong enemy can be outmatched. A precise one will take you apart from the inside.

"I don't know what they're after," Eskil admits, and the words taste like iron. "But whatever it is, they've been planning it longer than we've been watching."