Page 55 of Setting the Break

It is happening again, the thing that happens in the market. His hands go cold first. Then the back of his neck, and then all at once his shirt is wet through under his coat even though he can see his breath, and his heart is going so hard that he can feel it knocking at the base of his throat. For a few seconds he is not behind a barn at all. He is face down over the back of a horse with his hands tied and a fist in his hair, listening to men argue in that dialect about which of them gets to break him first.

He does what Indrie told him to do after they spoke about it. He finds five things he can see. The barn wall. His own boots. The horse's near foreleg, which is muddy to the knee. A water butt with a skin of ice on it. A pale gray feather stuck to the frost in front of him.

He breathes. It helps less than he would like and more than nothing, and he resents that it works at all, because needing it is a small humiliation and he is already carrying a full accounting of those.

When he can think again, he makes himself think, because thinking is the only weapon he has ever been any good with.

Four riders, no pack animals, no spare mounts, nothing on the saddles for a long search. That is a patrol working out from somewhere, which means there is a somewhere, and it is close enough that four men expected to sleep in it tonight.

And there are Wolfe warriors on a farm lane half a day out from Valen, inside the border, weeks after anybody could have had a reason to hunt for him. Dade knows he and Bohdi are home. Dade has known that since the week they got back, because nothing moves faster across a border than a story about a dead chieftain, and the Wolfe clan does not waste men on a manhunt that has already failed.

They are here because somebody told them that Rengara sent the prince and the king's second east to look for Ivan Wolfe's lost son. Dade would very much like to find the boy first, or to find the prince on the road looking for him, and it does not much matter to him which.

Someone told them.

Morgan sits in the mud and feels the whole shape of it turn over in his head, and it is enormous.

Somebody in Valen is talking to the Wolfe and the Jakadi.

He tries to make a list. It is the thing he does, and he has been doing it since he was nine and Eskil first put a ledger in his lap to keep him from being bored. Who knew he and Bohdi were riding east, and who knew why?

His brother. Indrie. Garrik, who gave them the village, and whom Morgan tries very hard to suspect and finds he cannot hold onto it, because the man arrived at the gates with his chest cut open by the people he would be informing. Dagny and Ingrid, who would sooner eat their own swords. The council, all nine of them, who approved the reconnaissance in open session. Every clerk who wrote up the minutes. The quartermaster who issued the supplies. The grooms who saddled the horses and the gate guard who logged them out. The wives and husbands of all of those people, and whoever they had a drink with afterward, and whoever overheard them doing it.

The list does not narrow. It spreads out in every direction until it covers half the keep, and Morgan is sitting behind a barn with no paper and no ink and no way of doing anything about it. He would give a great deal right now to be at his desk.

"You're not a chicken," someone says.

Morgan startles so hard he hits his head on the barn.

There is a girl standing at the corner of the wall with a basket over one arm and her other fist full of grain. She is perhaps ten. She has a knitted cap pulled down over her ears and a great deal of very straight brown hair coming out from underneath it, and she is regarding him with the deep and thorough suspicion of a child who came round the back of her own barn to feed the hens and found a strange man sitting in the hen yard instead.

"No," Morgan agrees. "I'm not."

"You're sitting where the chickens go."

"I apologize to the chickens."

She looks at him for another moment. Then her eyes go to his hair, which is coming loose out of its tie and hanging down on both sides of his face, and to his eyes, and back to his hair. He watches the recognition arrive on her face all at once. Her mouth falls open. She takes a huge breath.

Morgan puts one finger to his lips.

Her mouth shuts with an audible click.

She looks at him very seriously for a moment. Then she comes over, quietly for somebody in wooden-soled boots, and crouches down next to him at the corner of the barn. Together the two of them lean out an inch and look at the lane.

The farmer is still in his gateway. He is a big man, going gray, and he has a hayfork in his hands with the tines resting on the ground, which is not quite a threat and is very much not quite not one. One of the painted men is leaning down from his saddle and saying something with a great deal of patience, and the farmer is shaking his head at every word. He is shaking it too early. He is answering before the question is finished, every time, which is what a man does when he has decided in advance that the answer is no and has stopped listening for which question it attaches to.

The girl leans back behind the wall. She looks at Morgan, and then she jerks her head toward the back of the barn and takes hold of his sleeve.

She takes him past a woodpile and a midden and a rain barrel to a low timber hen house built against the back wall of the barn. The door is open. There is somebody inside it, bent double in the doorway, collecting eggs into the front of his shirt, and he straightens up when he hears them and very nearly drops the lot.

He is fourteen or fifteen, all wrists and elbows, with the same straight brown hair as the girl and a nose that has been broken at least once. He looks at Morgan. He looks at Morgan's hair. His eyes go very wide.

"Hild," he says, in a strangled undertone. "Hild. Is that the prince?"

"There's men looking for the prince," the girl says, in a whisper loud enough to be heard in the next valley, "and Da is being stupid about it."

The boy rolls his eyes so hard it looks painful.