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Indrie holds his eyes and doesn't blink and doesn't look away. Slowly, the firmness in that face begins to go. It doesn't collapse. It just loses its edges, the way a man's expression does when he's coming to reasoning he doesn't like.

Then Hyren looks away first, and he looks at the others to see what they think, and that is the whole thing right there, because a man who is certain doesn't need to check.

The camp stirs. Somebody says something short and uneasy and somebody else answers him, too fast and too loud, and four men turn at once toward the tree line to look at a forest that has been perfectly dark all night and is still perfectly dark now.

Indrie brings his bound hands up and wipes the blood off his chin with the side of his wrist.

"You shouldn't have taken me," he says.

The sword goes back into the scabbard.

Hyren shouts something over Indrie's head in Jakadi, fast and furious, and then hands close on both of Indrie's arms and he's hauled up and marched back across the camp and thrown into the hut.

They're rougher with him than they've been. They shove him down against the post and drag his arms back around it and haul the cord tight, two turns, three, until it bites deep into skin that was already raw this morning and is past raw now. One of them puts a boot on his thigh for leverage while he pulls.

Indrie doesn't make a sound. He doesn't give them one.

Then the cloth drops and he's alone in the dark. He breathes in through his nose until the shaking slows, and he works his fingers against each other behind the post to keep something moving in them, and then he starts, in order, on the thing he's just given away.

If they believe him, they run. They'll strike this camp tonight and be gone before dawn and they'll take him with them, because a man they think might be valuable is worth a horse. Eskil will come through those trees into an empty clearing with a cold fire in the middle of it and no trail worth following, and every hour after that one will be worse than the hour before it.

If they believe him, they might also stay. Not to run. To wait. Men in a forest they know, armed and awake and positioned, expecting him, instead of men asleep.

He may have just sent the man he loves riding into the teeth of it, but the grief doesn’t settle into his spine because he knows something they do not.

There's no preparing for Eskil.

That's the piece these men don't have, and Indrie has it, because he was on the other side of it once. You can see him coming. You can know the exact hour and the exact direction and have every man you own standing in a line with a sword in his hand, and it will not matter. Kalkoa saw the ships from the horizon. The watchtowers lit their fires and the horns sounded and the walls were manned and the archers were in position, and they had hours, not minutes, hours to ready themselves. The city fell before noon. Indrie was inside it.

Thirty plus armed men won't stop Eskil. They might not even slow him.

So Indrie sits in the dark with the cold coming up out of the ground and the blood drying in the creases of his palms, and he works his fingers, and he counts his own breathing to keep himself from counting anything worse, and he does not let go of the thing he put into the base of his spine.

14

INDRIE

He hasn't slept since the fire.

Indrie sits with his back against the post and his bound hands in his lap and listens to the camp bed itself down for the night, and doesn't sleep, and has stopped pretending to himself that he's going to. Every time he closes his eyes he's back on his knees in the dirt with a hand in what's left of his hair and a flat stone in front of him and his fingers spread out on it. His left hand aches where nothing has happened to it, which is a thing he'd tell a patient not to worry about and can't talk himself out of. He's checked it four times in the dark, counting, the way a child counts, and there are five every time, and every time it's a relief he's ashamed of.

The cold comes up out of the ground. The rope has taken the skin off the inside of both wrists and the raw places sting when he shifts, so he doesn't shift.

Then the camp comes apart.

It starts on the west side with one shout, and the shout turns into a word he doesn't know and then into a sound that isn't a word at all. Another voice takes it up. Something heavy goes over. Then the metal starts, that flat ugly ringing he knows now and didn't know three seasons ago, and underneath it a horse screaming.

He's upright against the bindings with his heart slamming in his throat before he's decided to move.

He knows this noise. He heard it from a corridor in Armond's castle coming out of sleep and no idea how it was about to shape his life. He had stood in the doorway and watched men in Rengaran armor come up the stairs, and that was the morning his whole life turned over. His body remembers it better than he does. His hands have gone cold and his ears are ringing and he's pulling against the post hard enough to open his wrists further, and he makes himself stop.

The cloth over the entrance is pulled back.

"Indrie."

"I'm here." His voice comes out thin. He clears his throat and tries again. "Fenris, I'm here."

Fenris comes in low and fast with the staff held across his body and kneels down beside him. He finds Indrie's shoulder with one hand, follows the arm down to the bindings, and gets a small knife out of his boot.