Page 45

"Hold still." The knife goes in between the cord and Indrie's skin, and Fenris saws at it with the blade angled carefully away. "Your king has come for you. Either that or there's another group of Rengaran-speaking warriors who've decided to take up grievance with the Jakadi." The cord parts. Fenris catches Indrie's hands before they can drop and turns them over and runs his thumbs once across the pulped skin at the wrists, reading it, and his mouth goes tight. "We need to get you out before they try to run with you."

Indrie gets his legs under him. His feet have gone numb and the hut tips sideways and Fenris's hand is on his elbow before he's finished going over.

"Not the front," Fenris says. "Stay on me."

He cuts a slit low in the back wall of the hut, dragging the knife down through the hide in one long pull, and holds the edge of it open with his forearm. Indrie goes through on his hands and knees into the cold and comes up into air that smells of cedar smoke and scorched cloth.

The camp is lit wrong. There's fire where there shouldn't be fire, and the light of it comes through the gaps between the tents in long moving bars, and everything in between is black. Fenris takes his arm and sets off along the back of the hut line at a walk rather than a run, counting under his breath. Four. Five. Six. He turns them left at the count of nine, with no landmark Indrie can see anywhere, and keeps counting.

Indrie gets the fight in pieces through the gaps as they pass. Rengaran shields coming through the firelight in formation, disciplined and steady, the line not breaking for anything. A Jakadi man running with a burning brand and his shadow thrown up huge on the canvas beside him. A loose horse rearing and screaming with its hooves striking air. The wall is advancing out of the west and everything in front of it is going east, and Indrie stops walking for half a step, because he's just understood the shape of what Eskil has done. The west is the hammer. The east is the anvil. Everything that runs is being made to run into the stream bed, and the stream bed is where Eskil will be standing.

He doesn't see Eskil yet.

They make the tree line. The dark closes over them and the noise of the camp turns into something happening in another room, muffled and far off and no longer anything to do with them. Fenris’s steps falter, because he’s gone past the point of knowing where he is, and Indrie takes his arm and pulls him forward through the undergrowth.

"Keep going," Indrie says. "I’ve got you."

Fenris nods and lets Indrie lead him further into the surrounding woods. The ground is uneven, littered with roots and fallen branches, and Indrie holds onto his elbow and steadies him as they stumble through it together. The moonlight is bright, but it’s still hard to see, and Indrie doesn’t know that he’s doing all that much leading. It feels a little like the blind leading the blind.

And then a man comes out of the blackness ahead of them with a sword drawn.

Indrie has half a second and he wastes all of it on the wrong thing. He sees the shape of the head with one side shaved down to the skin, and his mind gives him the clinic before it gives him anything useful at all.

Fenris hears the boots and shoves Indrie behind him with his forearm and brings the staff up.

"Wait!" Indrie says, far too late.

Garrik comes at him fast and low. The sword cuts a line through the air where Fenris's shoulder was a moment ago and isn't now, because the staff is already there, turning the blade aside with a crack of wood on steel that goes off through the trees. Garrik adjusts and cuts again, high this time, for the head, and Fenris reads the whistle of the edge and drops half a step and turns that too. The staff catches the flat of the blade and slides it wide, and Garrik's own weight carries him a pace past before he can check it, and Fenris gives ground and resets.

Indrie stands three feet away with his mouth open and watches it happen twice more. Garrik cuts at the legs and the staff is there, a sharp block downward that puts the blade in the dirt. Garrik disengages and circles left and comes in again and the staff tracks him the whole way, and Fenris tilts his head, listening to something out at the edge of hearing. Indrie realizes with a lurch that Fenris is fighting off sound alone. The whistle of the blade through cold air. The scrape of a boot on needles. The hitch in a man's breath before he commits his weight. He's reading every tell Garrik doesn't know he's giving, and he's quick enough to use them.

"Run!" Garrik snarls it at Indrie over Fenris's shoulder. "Healer, get into the trees. Go!"

"Stop!" It comes out of Indrie at a volume he didn't know he had. He hears his own voice ring off the trunks, louder than the fighting behind them, and both men freeze. "Stop, both of you. He isn't your enemy. He's been helping me. He cut me loose. He's the only reason I'm standing here."

Garrik doesn't lower the sword. His chest is heaving and his eyes don't move off Fenris and the blade stays perfectly steady in his grip, which is more than Indrie can say for the front of his shirt, where the blood is coming through dark and the stitches have started to give.

"You've made friends with the Jakadi?" he asks.

Fenris is breathing hard with the staff braced across his body and his head tilted at that listening angle. His pale eyes are turned toward Garrik and aimed slightly wrong, at the air beside his head rather than at his face, and in the light coming through the trees they're visible and unmistakable.

"I'm not Jakadi and you're not Rengaran," Fenris says. "You speak like the south."

"I am from the south."

Indrie watches understanding arrive in Garrik's face. It comes in pieces, one at a time, and each one shifts his expression another degree. He looks at the staff. He looks at the shoulders, the build, the heavy brow. He looks at the eyes.

"Fenris?" Garrik says, and his voice has gone thin.

Fenris goes absolutely still. The staff doesn't lower and his hands don't relax anywhere, because a stranger has just said his name in the dark and he has no way yet of knowing whether that's a weapon.

"How do you know my name?"

"Gods." Garrik's sword arm drops, and he doesn't decide to let it. It drops because the man behind it has just been hit by something a good deal heavier than steel, and Indrie watches it happen and knows he's seeing something private and doesn't look away. "How did I not see it? You have his face."

Whatever Fenris means to answer, nobody hears it.

The sound comes from behind Indrie. A rustle of undergrowth, the soft thud of a boot on wet ground, and then an arm comes around his chest from behind and locks tight and Indrie cries out. The man is close enough that Indrie can smell the sweat on him and feel the heat of him against his back, and the arm across his chest is crushing and immovable.