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That is where Indrie's mind is when the arrow takes Jorund through the throat.

There is no warning. There is a sound Indrie will never be able to forget, and the boy is still half turned toward him with his mouth open on the next word, and then he is going sideways off the saddle with the shaft standing out under his jaw. His horse bolts. Jorund hits the frozen mud and does not move, and the blood comes out of him in a dark, spreading sheet, and his eyes are open, and one of his hands opens and closes once against the ground and finds nothing to hold.

Indrie's body does not move. It stops entirely, reins slack in his fingers, his mind a white and empty field.

Then the mare screams and shies hard beneath him and he is on the ground.

Riders come out of the alder on both sides, four and then more. The horses are small and shaggy, and the men on them wear furs over leather and carry short recurved bows. He thinks immediately, with the clarity that comes only when the body's blood is running fast and hot with terror, that they are too organised to be bandits. They are too well armed and too coordinated, and their bows match closely enough to have come from one smith. He knows they must have been waiting for him specifically. The why doesn't come to him. He has nothing of material worth to offer them, and if they are looking for a healer, there are far better ways to go about acquiring one than assassinating his nineteen-year-old escort on a back road.

He gets his feet under him and goes for Jorund, because the boy's hand is still moving and there is an arrow in his throat and Indrie's whole life narrows to a single stupid, unkillable instinct that says get your hands on him. He makes it four strides before a horse cuts across in front of him and a boot takes him in the chest and puts him flat on his back in the mud.

Indrie hits the ground hard and for a moment cannot breathe. He rolls onto his side and his ribs are a bright, singing line of pain. He tries to crawl to his knees, and the man who kicked him is already dismounting and coming at him with a blade drawn. Before Indrie can do anything the man has a fistful of his braid and is hauling his head back until his throat is bared to the sky.

He weighs less than any man in this clearing and he has never won a fight in his life, and he fights regardless. The man who came off a ship from Kalkoa two seasons ago would have gone still and made himself small and waited to be told what to do, and Indrie is not that man anymore. He gets an elbow into something soft and hears a grunt. He gets his teeth into a wrist and tastes leather and salt and holds on until a fist comes down on the side of his head and the world tilts white and roaring.

After that it is only arms. They wrench his hands behind him and cord goes around his wrists and is pulled tight enough that his fingers go hot and then numb. Someone kneels on his spine, pressing his face into the cold earth. Someone else goes through his satchel and tips it out into the mud, and Indrie watches the brown glass bottles and the stoppered clay jars and the good scissors Ingrid gave him roll away into the grass, all of it tumbling into the wet dirt and worth nothing to anyone here.

They haul him up. He gets one more look at Jorund, lying on his back in the road with the steam rising gently off the blood, his face turned toward the white sky and his eyes still open, and then a hand closes on the back of Indrie's neck and throws him over a saddle, and they ride east.

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The ride goes on past any measure he can keep. They put him upright eventually, in front of a rider, with his bound hands hooked over the saddle horn so he will not fall, and every stride of the horse goes into his bruised ribs and lands again in the same place. The cold gets into him early and never leaves. It settles into his bones and his joints and the raw skin of his wrists and becomes a second body layered over his own. His fingers stop belonging to him. The mud on his face dries and cracks when he moves his jaw.

They speak to each other constantly and never to him. Not one word of Rengaran passes between them within his hearing in six hours of riding, and Rengaran is a trade tongue on this border, spoken by nearly everyone who does business here. There is no possible chance that none of these men has it. They are being careful. They have decided in advance that he will learn nothing, which means they intend to keep him long enough for learning to matter, which means they know exactly whose healer he is.

He makes himself take that apart while they ride, piece by piece, deliberately, because the alternative is to think about the boy on the road.

They know who he is. They did not take the horses and leave, as road thieves would. They did not kill him in the mud, which they could have done in the time it took to tie him. They clearly want him alive, at least for the time being, which means they believe he has some value to them and some use they have already imagined and planned for. He cannot help but think that it feels like he is a commodity again, being taken somewhere against his will for a purpose that no one feels the need to explain to him. No one explains it to the horse before they back it into the traces either.

The flat dread comes out of wherever it has been hiding, pushed deep inside of him where he had thought it buried, and floods into his stomach, cold and rising. He knows this. He has been cargo before. He has been inventory, listed and valued and moved from one man's house to another's, a piece of furniture that can bleed. He spent years trying to be as useful as possible, to keep the worst of the consequences at bay, and he had believed that all of that was behind him. He had believed it honestly and completely, with the whole fragile weight of his rebuilt life resting on the belief. He had been picking herbs on a mountainside four mornings ago with the wind coming clean off the snowline and a basket on his hip, and he had thought, in so many words, I am free.

He breathes through his nose and counts the breaths and tries his very best not to fall back into that way of thinking. The old posture. The old silence. The careful, practised smallness he learned when taking up space was dangerous.

The land changes in the late afternoon. The open country closes up and the track climbs and the air fills with cedar that is resinous and sharp and strong enough to taste at the back of the throat. The trees go up and up with their trunks shaggy and red-brown and their roots knuckled over the stone in the grip of very old hands. The light under them is green and very old, and the floor is deep in needles that take every sound out of the horses' feet, so that they ride in near silence through a cathedral of wood and shadow.

Indrie makes himself note it. Cedar. Six hours, perhaps seven, generally east and a little south, with one ford crossed and one long climb. He is not very familiar with the Rengaran countryside and he feels foolish for it now. It is a small and useless regret among so many larger ones, but every scrap he can learn may help if he gets a chance to run. Go west to get back to where he was. If he can figure out which way is west. If he can run at all with his hands bound and his ribs screaming and the cold settled so deep in his muscles that he isn't sure his legs will carry him.

The camp they bring him to sits in a hollow where the ground flattens and a stream runs clear and fast over dark stone. Hide tents and lean-tos stand in a loose ring around a central fire pit, and there are drying racks strung with dark strips of meat, and a horse line pulled taut between two cedars, and a midden that has been used long enough to stink even in the cold air. Indrie counts a handful of women and children, plus thirty men of fighting age at least, before someone drags him off the horse and his legs fold under him and do not hold.

They half carry him to a hut at the edge of the ring. It is a frame of bent poles with hide stretched taut over it, low-ceilinged and dark, and they put him on the dirt floor and run a cord from his bound wrists to the centre post and pull it short. One of them says something in their own tongue that makes two others laugh, a sharp, ugly sound. The hide flap falls shut and the light goes out of the place and Indrie is alone.

For a while he does nothing but shake.

Now that there is no one to see it, the cold and the shock and the long hours of holding still come over him all at once, and he puts his forehead against his knees and lets his body do what it needs to do. His wrists are raw and swollen, the cord having bitten deep enough to leave ridges in the skin. His ribs catch when he breathes too deep. There is blood dried in his hair where his scalp split under someone's fist. He is thirsty. He is frightened. He is so tired that the ground beneath him seems to sway, the whole earth come unmoored.

He thinks about Eskil.

It is not a comfort, not exactly, and he reaches for it anyway. He thinks about the weight of an arm across his chest in the dark and the ridiculous, furnace-like heat of him. The man is a banked forge all night long and still complains about the cold, every single morning, without fail. He thinks about the way Eskil says his name when he first wakes, rough and unguarded, before the day gets hold of him and makes him into a king again. He thinks about how Eskil will find out.

Ermin will come looking. That is certain, and it is also the worst part, because Ermin is eighteen and will ride that road alone and will find Jorund in the mud with the arrow still in his throat and Indrie nowhere to be found. Indrie would give more than he has and more than he is to spare him that.

And then Eskil will know.

Indrie closes his eyes in the dark and finds, under the fear, something that steadies him more than it should: an absolute and unembarrassed certainty that the king of Rengara is going to come apart over this, and that he is going to come apart in a straight line pointed east. The certainty is stone. Eskil will come. It is not hope. It is simpler than hope and more structural. Water runs downhill, fire burns, and Eskil comes east.

Be careful, he thinks, and he means it, and he also knows it is the one thing Eskil will not be.

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