Page 54 of Setting the Break

Garrik takes it, and his grip is weak, and he does not pretend otherwise.

Then Bohdi turns to the young man beside him and gets his first real look, and it is genuinely unsettling. He has stood across a hall from Ivan Wolfe. He has taken a drink from the man's hand and listened to him talk about his dead wives, and this is his face. Leaner, and twenty years younger, and with the gaze aimed slightly past Bohdi's left ear, and it is the same face.

"You must be Fenris."

"I am."

"Bohdi. I'm the king's second." He pauses. "It's good to see you alive. I'll be honest with you, when the woman who raised you told us the Jakadi came for you in the night, I did not have high hopes about what we'd be digging up."

"Neither did I, most years," Fenris says. "You spoke to Asta?"

"A few days ago. She seemed to miss you terribly."

Fenris's face does something complicated and does not settle. He asks no follow-up question, and Bohdi decides on the spot that everything else he has to say about that woman can wait until the man is sitting down in a warm room.

"Explain something to me," Bohdi says instead. "We've had it as gospel for a month that your Jakadi and the Wolfe clan were hand in glove. Ivan's alliance. The plot on the king. And now it turns out they've had the heir to the Wolfe chieftainship the whole time."

Fenris laughs. It is a short, dry sound with nothing happy anywhere in it.

"The Jakadi don't work with anyone," Fenris says. "They never have. They tell people they're working with them, and it's always in service of their own plots." He shifts his weight on the staff. "They fed your king false reports and sent him across the sea. They fed my father an alliance and a wedding. What they wanted was Rengara and the Wolfe with their teeth in each other for a winter, and a rightful Wolfe heir sitting in a tent where they could reach him, and when it was finished they would have walked in and taken whatever was left of the pair of you."

"Scavengers," Bohdi says.

"They wouldn't object to the word. They'd tell you the wolf does the running and the crow eats anyway."

"This," Garrik says, "is a conversation for Valen behind a locked door. There are too many ears on this hillside and four of them are tied to that picket."

"He's right," Bohdi says. "Also you look about to fall over, and if you die on my king's ground after all this I'll never hear the end of it."

They move out as the sky starts to go pale.

Bohdi holds Indrie's elbow while he gets a foot up, and then Eskil swings into the saddle behind him and gathers the reins and brings his arms forward around him. Indrie leans back into his chest and his eyes are closed before the horse has taken three steps.

"Time to go home," Eskil says into his ear.

Bohdi watches that and has to look at the trees for a moment.

He has watched Eskil hold exactly two people in his life. The first is a mouthy younger brother who is waiting for them in Valen and will certainly have something to say about how long they have taken. This is the second, and Bohdi intends to do his absolute damnedest to see that nothing gets between the two of them ever again.

He gets up onto his horse. Dagny falls in on his left and Garrik and Fenris behind, and they go down out of the cedars with the sun coming up gray and the snow coming through the trees.

18

MORGAN

Morgan does not make the gate of Valen by dawn.

He makes a great many other things by dawn. He makes a blister on the inside of each knee and one on the heel of his right hand where the reins have been sawing at it since midnight, and he makes the discovery that a horse can in fact be persuaded to keep walking long after both parties to the arrangement have lost all interest in it. What he does not make is Valen, because a little after sunrise the road comes down out of the pines and into the farmland on the eastern edge of the holdings, and there are men on it.

He sees them from the top of the rise. Four riders stopped in the lane between two fields, and a farmer standing in his own gateway talking to them, and something about the shape of it is wrong enough that Morgan gets off his horse without deciding to and leads it off the road behind the nearest barn.

Then he looks again, carefully, around the corner of the wall, and understands what is wrong with it.

The riders are wearing war paint.

It goes across their eyes. A broad dark band from temple to temple, and under it the flat unsmiling faces of men he last saw at a gate in the south with their swords out, and his whole body knows them before his head has finished the thought.

Morgan puts his back against the barn wall and slides down it until he is sitting in the frozen mud. His body has made that decision without consulting him, which is becoming a habit.