Page 36

He turns it around to face them. Sten leans over it and looks for a long time, long enough that Eskil can hear the man breathing through his nose, slow and deliberate. Then he puts his finger down where the contour lines crowd together in tight brown ripples, well east of anything Eskil would call his.

"There," Sten says, and the finger is not entirely steady. "The stream comes out of the high ground about here. We lost them about where it crosses the shale."

"Not about. Exactly."

Sten looks again, longer this time. He tilts his head and narrows his eyes and traces the contours with his gaze, and Eskil watches him rebuild the landscape in his mind, the angle of the slope and the bend in the water and the place where the shale gave way to scrub. Then he moves his finger a quarter of an inch south.

Eskil puts his own thumb on the spot and presses until the vellum dents under it, until he can feel the grain of the wood through the skin of the map. He stays like that for a long time without saying anything.

The scouts wait. They are good people. They are good at what they do and they have done exactly what he asked of them, ridden out into bad country and followed a trail that was built to be unfollowable and cast for sign until their eyes bled, and it has gotten him nothing, and none of that is their fault.

What he wants is to put his fist through the wall behind their heads. He can see it with perfect clarity. The plaster giving way, the lath underneath it, the bright stupid pain in his knuckles that would at least be a different sensation than this one. Two exhausted people standing in his mud are not the wall. They are not the shale slope and they are not the stream and they are not the men who rode into it. If he opens his mouth right now, something will come out of it that neither of them has earned, and he will not be able to take it back, and they will stand there and absorb it because he is their king and they have no choice.

"Go and sleep," Eskil says, when he can. "Both of you. Eat first."

They go. Kari puts a hand on the doorframe on the way through it, just a brush of her fingers against the wood, barely a pause in her stride, and Eskil sees it. She is holding herself upright by force of will and not much else.

He sits with his thumb on the map for another minute. Then he takes it off, because there is nothing underneath it. Only ink and vellum and the ghost of a trail that walks into running water and stops. He looks at the satchel sitting on the corner of his desk where he put it two nights ago and has not moved it since.

An hour later a guard knocks and brings a man in.

He is a miner from Askarte. Eskil can tell that from across the room. The gray grit is worked permanently into the creases of his knuckles, a second set of lines deeper than the ones he was born with. He has the hunch in his shoulders that men get from working tunnels built for somebody shorter and never widened for anybody who came after. He has his cap in both hands and a bundle of linen under one arm, and he is very frightened, and he is trying extremely hard to be polite about it. His eyes go around the room once, over the weapons on the wall and the map on the desk and the shuttered windows and the man behind the desk, and then they come back to the middle distance and settle on nothing in particular and stay there.

Eskil can do nothing about the frightened part. He has spent fourteen years being the thing in the room that ordinary men go quiet around. The crown does something to the air between a king and the people he governs. It puts a distance there that no amount of common decency can fully close, and Eskil learned a long time ago to stop trying to close it and to work inside it instead. Today of all days he does not have the patience to be gentle about it. He does not have the patience for much of anything. That is not this man's fault either.

"Your majesty." The cap turns a half rotation in the man's fists, the brim working through his fingers in a slow anxious rhythm he probably does not know he is keeping. "I'm sorry to come in like this. I didn't know where else I should go."

"Sit down." Eskil nods at the chair across from him.

"I'd sooner stand, if it's all the same."

"Then stand." Eskil sets the quill in its tray. He does it carefully, because if he does it carelessly it will snap, and he has already broken one this morning. "What have you got?"

The man puts the linen bundle down on the desk with both hands, carefully, the way one sets down something that might be fragile or might be dangerous and one is not sure which. The relief of not having to hold it any longer goes across his face and is gone again before he can stop it.

"I was on the eastern track this morning at first light, my lord, taking the mule down to my sister's place in the valley," he says, and his eyes go to the bundle and come away from it again, because it is not a thing he wants to look at for long. "And there was a man waiting in the trees. He came out onto the track and stood in front of the mule and gave me this." He nods at the linen. "And he said I was to carry it to the king. He said I was to tell you that the Jakadi want an audience with you."

Eskil unwraps the linen.

It is a fistful of long dark hair. It has been cut close to the root and it has been cut badly, in one rough pull, not sheared but hacked, the way a man with a knife and no patience takes what he wants and does not care what he leaves behind. Half of it is still bound up in the remains of a Rengaran braid, the woven pattern still visible, still holding its shape even now, separated from the head it belonged to and folded into a stranger's cloth.

Eskil knows whose it is.

He has run his fingers through this hair every night for months. He has buried his face in it in the dark, pressed against the back of a neck that smelled of soap and clean skin and something underneath both that was simply him, and he has fallen asleep that way, with his nose against the place where the braid began and one arm heavy across a body that fits against his own and always has. He has had this hair wrapped around his fist while the man it belongs to made sounds Eskil will take to his grave and well past it. He has combed the knots out of it afterward with more patience than he has ever had for anything else in his life, working through each tangle with his fingers while Indrie sat between his knees and tolerated it with his eyes closed and his head tipped back against Eskil's chest.

The rage comes up so fast that for a moment Eskil cannot see the room.

It arrives behind the sternum with weight behind it. The edges of his vision go white and the sounds of the keep fall away into a high thin silence, the yard below and the wind against the shutters and the miner's breathing, all of it gone at once, and what is left is older than thought and a great deal less civilized. It is not anger. Anger is what he felt at the council last month when they voted down the granary appropriation. This has heat in it and it has come up out of the floor of him, and it wants to do damage, and it does not particularly care to whom.

It takes a great deal to keep it under control, because he wants whoever held the knife that did this. He wants them specifically and he wants them close. He is already deciding which hand to start with, the one that held the blade or the one that held the braid, with his knee on their neck in the mud and the rest of them spread out underneath him while they watch him take them apart, knuckle by knuckle, joint by joint. It is easy enough to let the rage have that much. He lets it come all the way through with great clarity and in considerable detail, every sound and every angle of it, while the King of Rengara stands behind his own desk and says nothing at all. The rage can have the fantasy. The rage cannot have the room.

His hand has closed on the edge of the wood. He does not remember doing it. His knuckles are white and the desk is creaking under his palm in a long slow sound, the grain shifting under pressure it was not built to take, and the miner has taken a full step backward toward the door with his cap crushed against his chest and his face the color of old ash.

Eskil makes himself let go.

He folds the linen back over the hair. He does it carefully, corner over corner, the way one folds a dressing over a wound. Then he opens the drawer on his right and puts it inside and shuts the drawer, and he holds the handle for a moment longer than he needs to, and then he lets that go too. If it stays on the desk he is not going to be any use to anybody for the rest of the morning, and being of use is the only thing left that he can do.

"Did he say anything else?" Eskil keeps his voice exactly where it was before he opened the bundle, which takes some doing. It takes a piece of him he will not get back, holding the voice level and the cadence steady, but it stays where he puts it.