Page 33 of Setting the Break

Fenris scoffs.

"I didn't get to choose who sired me," he says. "Nobody asked my opinion on it."

He tells the story without much in his voice, in the flattened way people have of telling a thing they've told themselves so often it's worn smooth and doesn't catch on anything anymore. The Jakadi came to the farm where he was raised when he was eight. They came at night and they came straight to his bed. They knew exactly who he was and they knew exactly what he was worth, which was very little on his own and a great deal as a claim.

"My blood is worth something to them even if my eyes aren't," Fenris says. "They've moved me from camp to camp for twelve years. They've been waiting for my father's clan to get weak enough that they could walk me in and hand me over as the rightful heir and then own whoever sits in the chair behind me."

"And do you want that?"

"I want a great many things," Fenris says. "Nobody's asked about those either."

Indrie finishes the knot. He sits back on his heels and wipes his fingers on his trousers, which does no good at all. He thinks about how many people he has heard describe their own lives entirely in the passive voice, and how rarely any of them have turned out to be exaggerating.

"What are they going to do with me?"

"The same as they do with me," Fenris says. "You're a bargaining piece. They'll spend you however it helps them."

"And if I'm no help to them at all?"

"From what I hear, you're worth a great deal," Fenris says. "They won't kill you."

Indrie thinks about the considerable number of things men can do to a person without killing him, and decides that this is a very small comfort indeed, and doesn't say so, because it was offered kindly and there's no sense in spending kindness that has already been given.

"Do you want to go back?" Indrie asks. "To the Wolfe clan. To your father's stronghold."

"No," Fenris says. "All I have ever wanted from that place is to stand in front of my father and make him answer for what he did to us. He threw me out like refuse and told everybody she died in childbirth. I suppose it's even true, if you don't care much about the order."

Indrie doesn't say anything.

"I never knew her, of course," Fenris says. "The woman who raised me was my mother and I never once felt otherwise, but my father's actions are what led me here." He turns his face toward the gap in the cloth where the light is starting to come through. "The Jakadi took me because I was his. Every decision he made that night has shaped my entire life."

Indrie looks at him. He's thinking about the things Morgan told him about that man, late in the library, in pieces and never in any order. He's thinking about Morgan coming home from the south with bruises on his throat and that same man's blood dried under his nails. And he's thinking that he is, at this moment, the only person in this camp carrying the one piece of news Fenris has wanted his entire life, and that it is a strange and heavy thing to be holding.

He decides to show a tooth.

"Ivan Wolfe is dead," Indrie says.

Fenris goes completely still.

His hands on his knees close slowly into fists. Indrie watches it come over him, and it isn't relief and it isn't satisfaction. It's a grief so thoroughly tangled up with everything else that there's no telling where any one strand of it begins. This man has lived his whole life pointed at a single door, and Indrie has just told him the door isn't there anymore. Indrie knows precisely what that does to a person, because it has been done to him.

"How?" Fenris asks. His voice has gone flat. "When?"

"Before the autumn. He tried to overthrow the King of Rengara, and he was killed for it."

"Did the king kill him?"

"The hand of the king," Indrie says, which is a lie, of course, but it's the one Eskil is telling people. "But essentially, yes."

Fenris is quiet for a very long time. Somewhere out in the camp a man is chopping wood, and the sound goes on and on, and Indrie leaves him alone inside it.

Then he reaches out and puts his hand over one of the fists.

"You don't have to be his son," Indrie says. "You don't have to be anyone's bargaining piece. You could decide for yourself where you go and what you do, and nobody would be spending you."

"That's a pretty idea."

"It's not an idea," Indrie says. "I was a slave. I was bought and sold and I did what I was told for as long as I can remember, and the King of Rengara took me out of it and told me I was free, and he didn't ask for anything in return. Not one thing. I kept waiting for the price and there was never any price."