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"Then I owe you a debt," Eskil says to Fenris. "Along with answers to the questions I'm sure you've been turning over the last few days."

Fenris inclines his head. Eskil turns to Garrik. "You need Indrie to look at that chest before we move, or you won't make it back."

Garrik shakes his head. "It can wait."

"I can promise you that you do not want to argue with him," Eskil tells him, almost friendly.

Garrik's mouth closes around the hint of a grin. Indrie is already moving forward, letting go of Eskil's hand and stepping into the space between them with the authority that comes over him the moment somebody within arm's reach is bleeding.

Eskil watches him work. Indrie pushes the cloak back off his shoulders and takes Garrik's shirt at the hem and lifts it carefully, peeling the blood-soaked fabric away from the wound. His hands are steady. They have been steady since the moment he pulled back out of Eskil's arms, since the moment he stopped being the man who was rescued and became the man who has work to do. The wound is open and weeping and the stitches have torn along the top third of the original line.

"The lower stitches held," Indrie says, mostly to himself, pressing gently along the edges. Garrik hisses through his teeth but does not move. "The tear is clean. I can close this again, but I need supplies."

His mouth presses into the thin line that means he is working a problem and the problem is that he does not have what he needs and is going to make do with whatever he can get. He turns to the shield maiden, who has not gone far, and asks her whether anybody has clean cloth and fresh water and a needle that has been through a flame.

She looks past him at Eskil. Eskil gives her the smallest nod in the world and she goes.

She comes back with the satchel.

She holds it out to Indrie in both hands the way she would hand over a weapon, and Indrie takes it, and then he stops. He stands there in the middle of the ruined camp with the worn leather in his two hands, and he does not open it. He looks at it. Then he lifts his head and looks at Eskil.

Eskil looks back at him and gives him nothing at all.

He has carried that bag for three days. It sat on the corner of his desk for two of them and he did not move it and did not open it again after he threw it across a room in a temper he is not proud of. It has been strapped behind his cantle since before dawn, pressing against the small of his back for six hours of hard riding.

He said he would put it in this man's hands himself. He said it standing in the frozen mud of the east road with the bag empty in his fists and a dead boy in the ditch behind him, and he said that the price was not a consideration, and the price has since come to twenty two dead men and a burning forest and a hole in Garrik's chest that will take a month to close. He would pay it again tomorrow without considering it twice.

Indrie's eyes shine. He blinks hard, once, and then he turns the satchel over and works the buckle open with fingers that are shaking from the cold and not from anything else, and he goes to work.

Eskil regards Garrik while Indrie works. He speaks quietly.

"How many did you take at the tree line?"

"Fenris and I took six." Garrik pauses. "Well, we took five. One changed his mind when he saw the others go down."

"He ran?"

"East. Into the forest."

Another runner carrying the story back. Good. Let them carry it. Let every Jakadi camp between here and the border know exactly what came out of the trees tonight.

Eskil watches the involuntary tightening around Garrik's eyes that confirms how much pain the man is in and how good he is at not showing it.

"You have earned my consideration tonight, Garrik. Do not squander it by dying of stubbornness before we reach Valen."

Garrik holds his gaze. There is something in his expression that is not gratitude, because gratitude would be easy and cheap, but is closer to recognition. One man seeing another clearly and being seen clearly in return, and finding that the exchange is bearable.

"I won't die of stubbornness," Garrik says. "It's the blood loss that concerns me."

Eskil snorts. It is the closest thing to a laugh he has produced in three days.

17

BOHDI

They hit the stragglers at the eastern edge of the trees.

There are five of them coming out of the forest on foot, moving fast and looking backward. They are on the road Bohdi and Dagny are riding up before anybody has time to think about it. Dagny does not even slow her horse. She comes out of the saddle at a canter with both short swords already drawn and lands running, and the nearest one turns into her and she puts the left sword up through the soft of his throat and rides him down into the dirt with her whole weight behind it.