Page 71 of Tending the Ache

"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.

They come out of the tree line on both sides of the road, and this is not the ragged force from the border. Better armed. Better organized. More of them. They come out of the trees in a coordinated rush that has the precision of something rehearsed, and Eskil understands inside a single heartbeat that this was the plan from the beginning. Draw the king to the border. Let him win. Let him ride home believing the danger has passed. Then take him on the road where there are no walls and no palisades and no time.

"Ambush!" Bohdi roars, and after that there is no time for anything but holding their ground.

The fighting is ugly and close and chaotic. No room for formations. No time for strategy. The trees crowd the road and the Jakadi use them, darting between trunks, striking from cover, disappearing and reappearing. Eskil's cavalry advantage is worth nothing here. His men dismount and fight on foot and the road becomes a killing ground.

Eskil is in the thick of it, his longsword singing, and the battle calm comes down over him, the quiet place in his skull where everything is precise and the only thing that exists is the next strike.

Bohdi is beside him. Always beside him, the way he has been since they were boys, the axe clearing space around them the way a scythe clears wheat. They fight back to back and the Jakadi learn quickly that the center of the Rengaran line is not the place to press, and the bodies begin to pile.

Then a Jakadi fighter with a warhammer, a big man, bigger than Bohdi, swinging the weapon in arcs that take out anything inside their reach, hooks the shaft under Bohdi's guard and catches the flat of the head against the side of his skull.

The sound is sickening. A dull wet crack that Eskil hears over the clash of steel, and Bohdi staggers. His legs go wrong beneath him, not buckling but loosening, and he drops to one knee with his hand against the side of his head and his eyes unfocused. The hammerman sees the opening and raises the weapon for a killing blow.