Page 39

The yard has gone quiet. It is the kind of quiet that happens in a space full of people who have all simultaneously found something fascinating to look at on their own boots. The ten Sigrid picked are standing at their horses in a careful row, checking their girths and adjusting their tack and performing the small absorbing business of being somewhere else entirely.

There is a sentence sitting at the front of Eskil's mouth about what will happen to the next person who tells him what Indrie would want. It is a sharp sentence and a cruel one and it would do real damage, and the boy would not recover from it quickly. He keeps it where it is. It costs him something to do it. He can feel the exact shape and weight and edge of it behind his teeth, and the boy will never know that, and that is how it should be.

"Indrie can yell at me about it when he's back in Valen," Eskil says, and he says it quietly, which is the only concession he has in him. It is enough. It is meant to be enough. "Until then, get your kit and bind the man up tight enough to hold for the ride. Now, Ermin."

Ermin opens his mouth.

Eskil does not say anything else. He does not tell the boy he is overstepping. He does not raise his voice. He does not have to. He stands at his horse's shoulder in the pale morning light and looks at Ermin, and that is all he does, and it is sufficient. He watches it land on the boy's face, the understanding arriving all at once and all over him, the sudden vivid comprehension of exactly who he has been shouting at across a courtyard in front of a dozen armed men and women who could hear every word of it. He watches him go red to the ears. He watches him swallow. He watches him step back.

"Yes, my lord," Ermin says, to Eskil's boots. "I'll get my kit."

He goes. Eskil does not watch him go.

He is thinking, very clearly and with no comfort at all, that the boy is right. That every word of it was right. That Garrik's wound is not ready and the ride will open it and Indrie would never let him out of the clinic, not in a hundred years, not if Eskil himself came down and asked him nicely. And that Indrie is going to take the skin off him for it. Slowly and methodically, in that quiet voice Indrie uses when he is truly furious, the one that never rises above a murmur and is somehow a great deal worse than shouting. Eskil would give his sword arm to be standing in that clinic right now, being told off by him.

They saddle the horses.

Eskil is not thinking about the cedar forest, because he has finished thinking about the cedar forest. The plan is built and the pieces are set. The route is in his head, and the fallback is in his head, and the second fallback is in his head, and if he changes anything now he will only make it worse.

He is thinking about a promise.

He told Indrie he would give him anything. He meant it. He has meant it every time he has said it, and he has said it enough times now that it should have worn thin, should have gone smooth and hollow the way words do when you use them too often. It has not. He has said it in bed with his mouth against that man's temple, in the dark, in the small hours when the keep is quiet and the only sound in the room is breathing. He has said it standing in the doorway of the clinic while Indrie washed his hands and did not look up. He has said it without words, in the way he stands too close and stays too long and finds reasons to be in whatever room Indrie is in.

And in all of it, through every night and every morning and every impossible, improbable hour of whatever this is between them, the only thing Indrie has ever once asked him for was him. Just him. Just Eskil, present and whole and there.

He is thinking about the fucking fruit.

He has been chewing on it since the library in the spring. Since the afternoon he spun that book around on the stone floor and leaned over it and saw the illustration, the deep red of it and the delicate linework and the small careful hands that had painted it centuries ago, and then read the passage underneath. Three lines of Rengaran he could barely parse at first, and then could not stop reading, sitting on the library floor with dust on his knees and his heart somewhere in the vicinity of his throat.

Betrothal through consummation. A sacred rite, in a country that has almost nothing sacred left in it. A thing meant to be shared between a man and the husband he had already promised himself to. Not a marriage in itself, but the seal of one, the physical expression of a vow already spoken, carried out in private and in trust and with the understanding that what happened in that room would bind both of them in the eyes of whatever Rengaran god is left to witness it.

And Indrie shared that rite with Eskil, because the alternative was standing there and watching him die. Because the fruit required consummation to activate whatever property it carried, and Eskil was poisoned and fading, and there was no other way. And Indrie did it to save the life of a man who then looked him in the face in the middle of it and told him it meant nothing.

Indrie shared a rite meant for a husband.

Eskil wants to be that husband.

The thought does not arrive the way great thoughts are supposed to arrive. There is no thunderclap. There is no moment of crystalline revelation. It is a door he has been leaning against for months, and the door has been standing open the entire time, and he has been holding himself up against nothing, and the room on the other side of it has been waiting for him with considerable patience and not a little amusement.

He wants to be that husband. He wants to stand beside that man in whatever way custom asks and speak whatever words need speaking and mean every one of them. He wants to do it properly. He wants to do it right. He wants Indrie to have the version of it he was supposed to have, not a desperate act in a stranger's cabin with a dying man, but a choice, made freely, made in daylight, made by two people who are both fully conscious and fully aware of what they are agreeing to.

He has never in his life given marriage a moment of serious thought. He has watched other people do it with mild interest and a complete absence of personal investment. He has spoken the words over couples in the great hall and stood in the corridor outside while their children were born and felt nothing about any of it beyond mild goodwill and a wish to be somewhere else. He has never once wanted it. The word itself has always been a piece of furniture built for a room he does not live in. Sturdy and useful and clearly important to the people who own it, and nothing whatsoever to do with him.

He has also never once felt anything within a mile of what he feels for that man.

It is a crude, ugly, humiliating thing, this love. And it is love, and he can call it that now, he has given himself permission to call it that, which took a great deal longer than it should have. It has got its teeth in the middle of him and it is not letting go, and he would not ask it to if it could hear him. It has made him stupid. It has made him brave in ways he does not recognise and afraid in ways he has never been. It has made him stand at a window and watch a man cross a courtyard and feel his chest do something that a king's chest has no business doing. It is entirely undignified and he does not care, and he has not cared for some time, and the not caring is itself a kind of freedom he did not know he was missing.

The council will have opinions. The council has opinions about everything: the grain tax, the southern border, the color of the new curtains in the east wing. Eskil has made a lifelong practice of hearing them out with every appearance of thoughtful consideration and then doing exactly as he likes. On the subject of who stands beside him, their opinions are horse shit, and he will tell them so to their faces, and he will enjoy it. If they push him on it he will remind them that they serve at his pleasure and not the other way around. And if that does not settle it he will offer to settle it in a more traditional fashion, and they will back down, because they always back down, because they are politicians and he is not.

He just has to get Indrie back first.

12

MORGAN

They are a day out from Valen when Morgan hears the horse.

He has spent the whole morning rebuilding the problem from the foundations up, which is the one thing he is genuinely good at and better at than anybody in the keep gives him credit for, because the people who watch him do it see only the final shape of the argument and not the hours of scaffolding that went into it. It does not win arguments in the moment, because in the moment Morgan is still three steps behind, still building, still laying foundations while faster men shout at each other across the table. But what it produces, when he has had the time and the silence to finish it, tends to hold weight.