The clearing settled into the particular quiet that followed violence — not peaceful, not comfortable, just emptied. The kind of silence that arrived after loud things and stayed until people remembered how to talk again.
Eskar moved through it with purpose.
He went to Wyla first, because Wyla was the one still on the ground, and the ground was where you didn't want to stay after a fight in the Greyswood. She was conscious, had been conscious the whole time, which was either a good sign or the particular cruelty of an injury that hurt enough to keep you present for all of it. Her chest plate had taken the worst of the hegoblin's blow; the leather cracked and caved inward along the left side, and when Eskar helped her to sit and asked her to breathe deeply, she did it once and then made a sound through her teeth.
"Ribs," he said.
"Two," she said, with the clipped certainty of someone who had broken ribs before and knew the specific register of the pain. "Maybe three."
"Can you ride?"
She looked at him with the expression of a woman who found the question mildly offensive.
"I can ride fine."
Cort was gone.
Eskar had confirmed it quickly, in the way he'd learned to confirm things over fifteen years completely, without lingering, because lingering didn't help Cort and it didn't help the people still breathing. He'd closed the man's eyes and said the short mercenary's acknowledgment under his breath, the four words that guild custom held for the field: your contract is done.
Then he'd stood up and moved on, because that was what you did, and the weight of it was a thing you carried and didn't put down but also didn't stop walking for.
Brenn had a deep gash along his forearm longer than Cort's earlier scratch, genuinely in need of binding and Ossian had taken a glancing blow to the helmet that had left him with a ringing head and the slightly unfocused eyes of someone whose skull had been used as a bell. Not serious but concerning enough to monitor.
Jake was upright by the time Eskar finished the circuit.
Barely upright. The kind of upright that involved one hand braced against a tree trunk and a very careful relationship with the act of breathing, but vertical, which was the relevant metric. His left side had taken the full impact of the hegoblin's blow, and even through the padded leather, the bruising would be spectacular by morning. Possibly cracked a rib or three. His face had the concentrated stillness of someone who had discovered exactly which movements hurt and was editing all other movements around that knowledge.
"Well?" Eskar asked.
"Standing," Jake said. "As advertised."
"Your ribs."
He took a careful breath. "I don't think they are broken."
Eskar looked at him for a moment with the assessing eyes of a man who had seen enough injuries to have a reasonable sense of what broken looked like versus what hurts badly enough to feel broken looked like. He decided Jake was probably right, which was only mildly reassuring given how bad hurts badly enough to feel broken still was.
"Can you ride?"
Jake's expression suggested he also found this question mildly offensive.
"I can ride."
*
Lady Ankerita had given them space during the wound-checking not distance, not coldness, just the particular consideration of someone who understood that a group needed a moment to handle its own accounting after a hard thing.
She'd stood with her men near the treeline, weapons cleaned and sheathed, speaking quietly with the young one who'd led the cheering — who turned out, at closer observation, to be barely older than Jake, with an eager open face and the kind of devoted attention directed at his lady that suggested he'd follow her into considerably worse than a Greyswood clearing without needing to be asked.
When Eskar approached, she turned to meet him with the composed readiness of someone who had been waiting for the conversation.
"My lady," Eskar said.
A slight inclination of the head, the mercenary's version of courtesy, stripped of ornament but genuine.
"I owe you a debt that the guild's standard language doesn't really cover."
Something that might have been warmth moved briefly across her careful face.
"The road offers its own accounting, Mercenary. No formal debt."
"The road had three of my people in trouble, and one of them didn't make it out," he said it plainly, without self-pity. "Your intervention changed the shape of that considerably. I won't forget it."
She regarded him for a moment. Then she nodded once, the same kind of nod, Eskar thought, that settled things without ceremony.
"We were already making for the city," she said, her tone shifting to the informative.
"The northern trail from Cristfall cuts through the Greyswood's eastern edge — we heard the fight and moved toward it."
A brief pause.
"Fortunately."
"Fortunately," Eskar agreed.
"The creature was old."
She glanced back at the fallen hegoblin, where two of her men were now confirming the kill with the businesslike thoroughness of people who wanted to be certain.
"A nest that size, that long undisturbed — I'm surprised the guild hadn't contracted the clearance sooner."
"We pulled the contract three days after it went up. Someone filed it late."
Her eyes moved back to him. Not accusatory — simply noting the information and placing it somewhere.
"Someone will need to review the filing process," said without heat. The tone of a person who would be having that particular conversation with someone at some point.
"I imagine so," Eskar said, carefully neutral.
A moment passed. Clean air moved through the clearing. Somewhere in the deep brush, one of her men called a confirmation back, and she registered it with the slight loosening of attention that meant she'd been carrying a small remaining tension about the hegoblin and had now put it down.
"Safe return to the city," she said to Eskar. Her gaze moved briefly, precisely, with that characteristic quality of hers to Jake, who was still conducting his careful negotiations with the tree trunk across the clearing. Something in her expression did the thing, the door held at a crack.
Then she looked back to Eskar.
"Keep the young one from riding too hard. Bruised ribs and a horse's gait don't agree."
Eskar almost smiled. "I'll pass that along."
She turned. Her men fell in around her with the easy synchrony of a group that moved well together, the young one materializing at her left shoulder with his eager face now wearing the focused expression of someone taking his job seriously.
They moved southeast, back toward the trail, and within thirty seconds the Greyswood had taken them — the trees closing behind them the way trees did, indifferently, finally.
The cheering name had faded with them. But it sat in the clearing's air for a moment longer, the way sound sometimes did.
Adolina.
Eskar stood and listened to it fade.
Then he turned back to his group and said, "We move in ten minutes. Wyla, I want you on the gentlest horse we have. Ossian, ride beside her. Brenn, your arm needs a proper field wrap before we go — sit down and let me do it."
He paused.
"Jake. Stop holding that tree. It doesn't need your help standing."
"We're helping each other," Jake said.
But he let go of it.