Page 30 of Setting the Break

She nods at that, once. Something that has been standing open for twelve years closes.

"Is he alive?"

And there it is.

Bohdi watches Morgan take the question and hold on to it. He watches him weigh it. And he watches him decide not to lie, which Bohdi himself would have done without a single heartbeat's hesitation and would have called it kindness, and would have gone on calling it kindness all the way back to Valen.

"We don't know," Morgan says. "We came here hoping you would tell us."

Asta puts the knife down on the table. She has been holding it this entire time and Bohdi does not think she knew she was.

"I never gave him another name," she says. "Not once. So if he is alive, he probably still answers to it." She wipes her palms down the front of her apron. "Although how he could still be alive, I don't know."

By the door, standing against the wall where Bohdi has been standing beside it for the last half hour without looking at it properly, there is a staff. It is cut from ash. It is worn pale and smooth at the grip and down one side where a hand went over it ten thousand times, and it is far too short for a grown man.

She has kept it there for twelve years, in the place where a thing goes when you expect its owner to come back in the door and want it.

Bohdi looks at that staff and works out something that is going to be a problem later, and he works it out fast and completely, the way he works out the ground before a fight.

If they find this man, and he is alive, and he is whole enough in the head to be reasoned with, there is going to be a part of him that chooses this woman and this warm little house and this ash staff over a chieftain's seat and nine hundred armed men who have never once come looking for him.

And nobody in Valen has spent thirty seconds thinking about that. They have been thinking about the Wolfe succession and the border and Ivan, and they have been thinking about the heir as a piece that will go where it is put. Not one of them has considered that the piece might have somewhere it would rather be.

Bohdi has considered it. Bohdi has considered it from the moment he saw the two chairs at a table with room for four. The family that chooses you buys more loyalty than the family that put you out, every time, in every village, in every century. He has twenty-five years of personal evidence on the subject and would be happy to lay it out for anybody who asked.

They stay a little longer than they ought to, because she has started to warm to them and because it is plain she is lonely, which she would take a strip off him for saying. She puts bread on the table and honey from her own hives, and will not hear one word about either of them, and tells Morgan he is too thin in a tone that suggests she is prepared to do something about it..

But they are on borrowed time. They need to get back to Eskil and they need to work out how far they are willing to chase this and what it is going to cost to chase it.

Before they go, Morgan stands in the doorway and promises her that if they find him, she will hear it from them. Not from a rider. Not from a proclamation. From them.

Bohdi believes him, and so does she, and that is the only thing either of them got out of this house that was worth the ride.

They go out of Helde with the light going, down the lane past the mill, and the miller's son straightens up off the cart and lifts a hand, and Bohdi lifts one back.

Morgan is quiet for most of the first day of the ride home.

He is not sulking. Bohdi knows the difference by now, and the difference is in the jaw, and he knows better than to go poking at it when the man is working. So he rides along beside him and talks at him about absolutely nothing for a few hours. The horses. The state of his splinter. A grievance about Sigrid that is four months old and has never been properly aired. And he lets him think.

He can practically watch it happen. Morgan takes the whole plan apart and sets the pieces out in rows and counts them, the way he does with a ledger that will not balance, and he will not say a word about any of it until he has found the row that is wrong.

Somewhere in the afternoon he finds it.

"The Jakadi have him."

"If he's breathing, they do."

"The Jakadi have had the Wolfe heir for twelve years and have not acted on it." Morgan bites his lip and shakes his head, which is what he does when the numbers are right and he hates them. "And they couldn't have known Rengara would kill the Wolfe chieftain. Not twelve years ago. We didn't even consider reaching out to the Wolfe until they sent the proposal."

"The Jakadi are small and vicious," Bohdi says, with a shrug. "It wouldn't be the first time a small, vicious people sat on something for a decade waiting for the right afternoon to come along. I think the piece that actually matters is that they've been playing both of us the whole time, and we found out before Ivan did."

They make camp in a fold of ground off the track with a stand of firs at their backs, which gives them one approach to watch instead of four and puts the firelight down under the lip where nothing on the road will catch it. Bohdi takes the first watch with no intention whatsoever of waking Morgan for the second. He walks the ground twice and listens to the firs for a while, and when he comes back to the fire Morgan is sitting up with the blanket around his shoulders and has clearly not been asleep for one minute of it.

Bohdi drops down beside him and hands him the waterskin.

"You want to tell me what's wrong," he says, "or do you want me to guess?"

Morgan turns the waterskin over in his hands a few times. He does not drink from it.