Page 24

Somewhere past the middle of the night, the cloth moves.

Indrie goes rigid.

Someone comes in low and quiet and stops just inside the entrance, and Indrie hears him breathing, slow and measured, listening hard. Then he hears a hand travel along the inside wall of the hut, fingertips dragging on the cloth, steady and unhurried, mapping the space by touch. The hand finds the post. Then the man kneels, and he has a waterskin with him, and the leather creaks softly as he settles. He doesn't look immediately threatening, but Indrie is wise enough to be wary of an enemy warrior who comes into his tent alone in the dark.

"Are you awake?" the man asks. His Rengaran is accented and fluent, and his voice is low, barely louder than the sound of the stream outside.

"I am awake," Indrie says, carefully.

The man leans in, and Indrie's eyes have adjusted enough now to see the shape of him. He is young. He might be Indrie's own age, or a year or two younger. He has short brown hair and a muscular frame, compact and solid, and his head is not turned quite toward Indrie but slightly past his shoulder. When the light from the central fire catches through the seam in the cloth, Indrie sees his eyes and understands. They are pale, the colour of water with milk stirred into it, and they are not looking at anything.

"Your hands are tied behind the post, right?" the man says. "Tell me if I touch you somewhere you don't want."

"Yes," Indrie says. "Thank you."

The man finds his wrists with two careful fingers and follows the cord to the knot and works it loose with a practised ease that speaks to long familiarity, and it takes him no time at all. The moment it gives, Indrie's arms come around to the front and blood rushes back into starved muscle until every joint is screaming, and the pain is so vast and sudden that he has to put his head down and breathe through it in short, careful gasps. The man waits. He doesn't ask if he is all right, which Indrie appreciates more than he can say. There is a mercy in not being asked questions you cannot answer honestly.

Then a waterskin is pressed into both of his hands, and the man's hands stay under his until he is certain Indrie has a grip on it.

Indrie drinks. He has not had water since the farmhouse and the taste of it is so sweet and good that he has to make himself stop before he is sick.

"They're going to notice the rope," Indrie says, when he can speak again. "When they come in the morning. I don't want you to get in trouble on my account."

"I'll tie it again before I go. Looser." A pause, and then, mild as anything, "I can promise you they won't notice. Men like that don't notice people like us until it's too late to do anything about it. It's the one thing I've ever been able to rely on."

Indrie laughs. It is a wretched, broken little sound, and it surprises him out of nowhere, dragged up from some place he didn't know was still working. The man's mouth moves at the corner in something that is not quite a smile but the ghost of one.

"If I can offer you some advice," the man says. "They haven't decided what you are yet. Until they do, you should be very quiet. You should do what you're told and not look any of them in the eye, and you should be so dull and so small that they forget which tent you're in."

"I'm not good at being quiet anymore," Indrie says. "I used to be excellent at it."

"Well." The man tilts his head, and something in his expression shifts into an acknowledgement, quiet and precise, of a thing they share without needing to name it. "Give it your best try for a few more days. Be quiet. Be docile. Wait, and wait, and wait, and then show them your teeth."

He says it flatly and evenly and without any heat in it at all, with the worn edges of something he has done every day for a very long time. A stonecutter talks about stone in that voice. Indrie, sitting in the dark with his wrists on fire and a stranger's water in his hands, understands that he is being handed the only thing this person owns: a strategy for staying alive in a place that does not want you alive. It has been refined over years, and it is offered freely and without condition to someone he met five minutes ago in the dark.

"Thank you," Indrie says. His voice is rough. "Will you tell me your name?"

The man is quiet for a moment. Then he reaches out, finds Indrie's shoulder on the second try, and squeezes it firmly and briefly, with a pressure that is deliberate and warm.

"Tomorrow," he says.

8

ESKIL

It is cold enough in the yard that the men are smoking when they breathe, every exhale a pale ghost that hangs for half a second before the wind takes it, and Eskil has them running shield formations. He has been in a foul temper since he opened his eyes, which he would deny to anyone stupid enough to ask him about it.

The summons from the farm came yesterday before noon. A rider came up the east road with his hat in his hands and mud on his boots, and Indrie was out the gates inside twenty minutes with his satchel across his back and quiet instructions not to wait up for him. It is well into the next day now. Eskil is not truly concerned about that, because a woman in labour is not a thing that keeps to a schedule and because his healer has never once left a bedside before he was finished at it. Indrie would sit with a splinted finger until sunrise if he thought the patient needed the company, and a birth is not a splinted finger.

He could tell himself that he spent thirty-three years sleeping alone and that one night without a man who has been in his bed less than a year is a small and manageable absence, barely worth the noticing. He does not lie to himself. He slept badly and he knows exactly why. Every night with Indrie is a gift he did not earn and cannot account for, a thing so improbable and so entirely beyond anything he thought his life would contain that some part of him still startles at it in the dark. Indrie is the first thought Eskil has when he opens his eyes and the last one he has before he closes them. Waking in that bed without him in his arms had been a void he felt in his body before he was awake enough to name it. He had reached for him and found cold linen.

"Again," Eskil calls across the yard. "The third rank is late. The third rank is always late. Ulf, if that shield comes up after the man beside you, the man beside you takes the arrow that was meant for your stupid fucking head. Do you understand that? Do you understand that you are killing the man to your left every time you are slow?"

They go again. They are late again.

He has told them this three times. He has counted. He is keeping a record of it in his head, not because it is useful but because it gives him something to do with the restless, chewing energy that has been in him since dawn, and it is better spent counting failures in a drill than pacing the wall walk and watching the east road.

"Twenty laps of the wall," Eskil says.