Page 42 of Tending the Ache

"I do not know, I was never told, they do not tell a man like me the—" His voice breaks. "A village. It is a village. That is all I have."

"When?"

"A week." A wet sound. "A week, maybe less."

Eskil pushes once more.

"The healer's clinic," he says. "The prince. You monitored both of them."

And Aren looks up at him out of a face that has come apart.

"I wrote down everything," he says. "That is what they told me. Write down everything. Every building, every name, every face, all of it, so I wrote it down." His breathing is ragged and his eyes are streaming and he is looking at Eskil with something close to pleading. "I do not know what any of it was for. I never knew. I only wrote it down."

Eskil stands. He sets the stool back in the corner where he found it.

"I'll be back tomorrow," he says, in the same tone he opened with. "Think about what else you might like to tell me."

Aren spits at him with what little he has left.

"You will not sit on that throne another winter."

The door clangs shut.

Eskil has heard better threats from his brother.

***

There is a basin of water on a stone shelf in the corridor. Eskil rolls his sleeves higher and puts his hands into it.

The water turns pink immediately. He scrubs. Palms, fingers, the spaces between them, the beds of his nails, the lines and creases where blood has settled and dried and gone tacky. There is a great deal of it. There is more of it than he expects, and some of it is not blood, and he scrubs at that too.

The water runs pink and then red and then pink again and then clear. His hands are clean. They do not feel clean. They will not feel clean for some time.

Bohdi is beside him. Bohdi has been beside him the entire time.

He always is. That is the thing Eskil has never found a way to thank him for and has therefore never tried.

Bohdi does this work himself and does it well. He has sat in Eskil's place a dozen times, has gotten answers out of men Eskil could not have gotten answers out of, and does not lose a night's sleep over any of it. He offered this morning, the way he always offers, and Eskil said no, the way he almost always says no, because there are some things a king does not hand to another man to do on his behalf and this is one of them. The city is his. The cells are his. The prince and the healer that man wrote down in his little book are his.

So Eskil takes it. And Bohdi, refused, comes down the stairs anyway and stands by the door and watches every hour of it and does not speak and does not leave and does not look away.

Fifteen years. In all that time Eskil has asked him for a great many distasteful things. Bodies moved in the dark. Men put down quietly. Orders carried out that could not be written down or spoken of afterward. Bohdi has never once hesitated, never asked whether it was necessary, never made Eskil explain himself, and never once looked at him afterward as though he were something that needed washing.

He simply arrives, and he stays, and he is there at the end holding the coat.

Eskil takes it from his outstretched hand and shrugs it on.

Chapter 13

Indrie

The mortar scrapes against the pestle in a steady rhythm, and Indrie focuses on the sound of it, on the grain of dried yarrow breaking down beneath his hands, because if he focuses on something concrete then he does not have to think about the other thing.

The other thing being the man chained in the cells beneath the keep.

He heard about it from Ermin, who heard it from a guard, who heard it from another guard. News in Valen travels like fire through dry grass, and by midday the whole city knows there is a Jakadi spy in the cells and that the king has been interrogating him personally.

Ermin delivers the details with breathless energy, leaning against the examination table with his arms folded and his eyes wide, the way he does when something has captured the full force of his attention and he cannot contain it.