Page 49 of Tending the Ache

He wrote that order four hours ago. Sealed it himself and put it in a runner's fist, and he did it because he had stood in a hallway and promised a healer that the man in the cell would be seen to properly.

He kept the promise. The promise is what opened the door.

And underneath that, arriving half a second later and far worse: if he had lost the argument in that study, there would not be a guard on the floor down there. There would be Indrie. He would have gone down those stairs with his satchel in his hands and he would have knelt, and the thing in that cell would have been awake and watching and waiting for exactly that.

Three seconds. That is what he told him. Three seconds of somebody thinking about injuries instead of about the man.

Then his mind does what it always does, which is work, cold and fast and without asking permission. The prisoner knows the inside of the cells. He knows the shift patterns, because he wrote them down himself before they caught him. He has been inside these walls for weeks. He knows the streets and the gates and the gaps in the coverage.

He knows where the clinic is.

He had documents on your location. In his possession. His own words, spoken in this room a few hours ago, to the person he was trying to keep safe. And now the man is out and the clinic is on a residential street with tall windows and a latch a child could lift and one person asleep alone in the back of it.

"He does not reach the Jakadi." Eskil's voice comes out as a king's and not as whatever he is underneath it. "Not with the rotations, not with the gate coverage, not with the inside of my keep in his head. Find him."

Bohdi nods. There is nothing in his face. No grin, no obscenity. This is the other Bohdi, the one on the far side of the axe.

"Every gate sealed and every patrol doubled inside ten minutes," Bohdi says. "He won't see the walls."

"Go."

Bohdi goes. Bare feet slapping stone, the sound of him receding, gone around the corner.

And Eskil turns the other way.

Not toward the gates, where the man will be trying to get out. Not toward the barracks, where three hundred fighting men are pulling on mail and waiting for someone to tell them where to stand. Not toward the cells, where there is a dead guard on the floor who is down there because Eskil sent him.

He goes toward the healer's street.

He is aware of what he is doing. That is the part he will think about later, in the small hours, when there is time for it. He is not confused and he is not panicking and there is no moment where the decision escapes him. He knows precisely what a king is supposed to do with the first ninety seconds of a manhunt, and he knows that this is not it, and he goes anyway, at a flat run, with his sword in his hand.

The bastard had the clinic on his map. Out of a whole city. Out of every barracks and armory and granary and gate worth writing down, he wrote down a physician's door on a residential street, and Eskil stood in a hallway a few hours ago and held the man who sleeps behind that door and said I can't let you run from me again and meant I can't lose you and now there is a killer loose between the keep and the clinic and Eskil is running and it is not fast enough. It will never be fast enough.

Let the council have that one. Let them convene and cluck about it and put it in the minutes. Eskil will sit through the meeting.

The streets are dark. The torches along the main road are guttering in a wind that has come up since nightfall, carrying pine and cold off the mountain. The horns have woken the city and lamplight is blooming behind shutters, faces appearing at windows, people moving in the confused half-panic that comes of hearing the horns and not yet knowing why.

He turns onto the clinic street.

The door is ajar.

Eskil goes from running to stopped inside a single stride, boots skidding on the cobbles, his fist closing on the hilt hard enough that the leather bites.

Ajar. Standing open the way a door stands open when somebody has shoved through it and not bothered with it after. The light coming out of it is wrong, too bright in one place and dark everywhere else, a lamp off its bracket and burning at an angle on the floor.

He goes in.

The front room has been through something. Nothing smashed for the pleasure of smashing it, only the quick indifferent wreckage left behind by somebody moving fast and not caring what he moved. A jar broken on the boards, glass in the scrubbed grain, a dark spill of herbs. A chair on its side. The lower shelf swept, bandages unspooled across the floor, a tin of salve up against the wall. The examination table shoved out of square.

The back room is empty.

The bed is rumpled. The blanket is not folded and not pushed back but thrown, halfway to the floor, the shape a blanket takes when the body under it left in a hurry.

Eskil stands in the middle of it with his sword in his hand and the lamp guttering on the floor, and for one full second he is nothing at all. No king. No plan. Nothing in his skull but a white sound.

He held him tonight. Felt his heartbeat through his own tunic. Spoke promises into his hair. Let him go. Watched him walk away.

Then it clears, and what comes up through it is the reasoning, because that is what he does, and it does not stop working just because he wants it to.