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"Show-off," Bohdi says.

He gets down off his horse in a manner considerably less decorative and takes the second one across the chest with the axe, which ends that conversation. The third one has a spear and makes the mistake of committing to it. Bohdi steps inside the point, takes the shaft in his left hand, and brings the axe around. The last two try to go back into the trees. Dagny catches one at the tree line and Bohdi throws the axe at the other, which is also showing off, but that is what she does to him. She is the closest thing he has to a little sister and she has been daring him into stupid decisions in the middle of fights for years, and after all this time he has still not learned his lesson.

"Only five of them," Dagny says, breathing hard, wiping her blades on a dead man's coat. "You think more are coming?"

"Maybe," Bohdi says. "Let's meet them halfway."

They go up through the trees on foot leading the horses, because the cedars are too close to ride through in the dark. The glow comes up ahead of them orange through the black trunks. Bohdi can hear voices. He listens for a while as they climb, and then he lets out a breath he has been holding since the heath, because the voices are shouting in Rengaran.

The camp is a wreck.

Half of it is still burning. The Jakadi set their own stores alight on the way out, which is certainly a choice in a forest full of dried kindling in every direction. Eskil's people have stamped most of it down and are working along the western line with buckets and beaten cloth and a great deal of swearing. Tents are flat. There are bodies laid out in a row near the horse picket and another heap of them further off that is not laid out at all. Four Jakadi are sitting bound and back to back against the picket posts, alive and miserable, which in Bohdi's professional opinion is four more than anybody needs.

And standing in the middle of it, in the gray light with his cloak gone and his sleeves dirty to the elbow, is Eskil.

Bohdi's legs get him across that camp without any instruction from his head.

Eskil turns before he gets there, because Eskil always knows. The two of them meet somewhere near the cook pit and Bohdi gets a hand around the back of his neck and hauls him in until their foreheads knock together hard enough to hurt.

They stand there. Neither of them says anything for a moment. Eskil's hand comes up and fists in the shoulder of Bohdi's coat and holds on.

"You're late," Eskil says. "Did you fucking walk?"

"You very clearly started without me."

"If I waited for your sorry ass every time something needed doing we'd still be in Kalkoa."

"Apologies for being on a wild goose chase you yourself ordained," Bohdi says, and feels the worry of the last three days come out of him all at once. "I leave you alone for a week and you acquire an entire Jakadi camp. I hope you're pleased."

"I am not pleased," Eskil says. "It was a fucking miserable three days."

He lets go. Bohdi does not, for a second longer, and then he does.

"How's Indrie?" he asks, which is mostly rhetorical. If the answer were anything near worrying, Eskil would not be standing here putting fires out. He would be fanning them.

Eskil tips his head toward the eastern side, and Bohdi looks, and his stomach goes down out of him.

Indrie is kneeling on a folded cloak with his hands inside Garrik’s shirt. That much is so ordinary that for half a second Bohdi's brain refuses the rest of it. Then he takes in the filthy clothes, and the bruise spread purple across one cheekbone, and the split in his lip, and the raw red bracelets rubbed into both wrists.

And his hair is gone.

It has been hacked off close to the skull, unevenly, dragging in places where whatever they used was not sharp enough. Bohdi has known that man the better part of a year and has never once seen him without it. On a beach in Kalkoa, the first thing Bohdi ever noticed about him, before the bruises and before the way he flinched, was all that dark hair down his shoulders. He was allowed almost nothing of his own in that life and he kept it anyway, and somebody has gone and taken that off him too.

He is alive, clearly, and well enough to be fussing over an injured man, and there are far worse ways this could have ended than a haircut and a few bruises. One bruise is still one too many. One bruise puts every mile Bohdi spent on the eastern road into his marrow and leaves it there, every mile that kept him out of Valen on the morning this happened.

And if it sits on Bohdi like this, then what has his king been drowning in for three days?

"Did we get them all?" Bohdi asks, watching Eskil's face for the answer rather than waiting for the words. "Dagny and I caught five coming out of the trees. Is that all of them?"

Can I sleep tonight, he is asking. Or do I need to start planning on finding the ones who did this?

Eskil's expression does not ease, and something in Bohdi sets hard.

"Fenris only has an estimate of how many were in the camp," Eskil says. "Without a solid number, your guess is as good as mine."

"I'm sorry," Bohdi says, losing his train of thought entirely. "Did you just say Fenris? The same Fenris I went looking for on the aforementioned goose hunt?"

"The same. Try to keep up, Bohdi."