Page 76 of Setting the Break

Vigdis's mouth snaps shut.

"Let's consider it now." Eskil looks around the table, at each of them in turn, taking his time over it. "When we count up everyone who knew I was sending my second and my brother east to find Ivan Wolfe's son, the list gets very long very quickly. The prince has been kind enough to start writing it down." He brings his eyes back to Vigdis and leaves them there. "I believe your name is on it as well."

The silence is total.

Vigdis presses her lips together until they go white. She sits back in her chair. She does not agree. Her face makes it plain she will never agree. But she is not going to push this one inch further today, in this room, with the king looking at her like that, and everybody at the table can see it.

Eskil pushes his chair back and stands.

The whole council stands with him, all at once, a scrape of wood on stone. No one mentions they haven’t discussed a single thing that was meant to be discussed.

"Adjourned," Eskil says, tightly, and walks out, and not one of them says a word to stop him.

Morgan takes his hand back from the place where his brother's knee was. He gathers his papers into a pile and squares the edges. He keeps his face perfectly still and his eyes on the pile, and he bites down on the smile that is trying to get out of him until he can taste it.

The room empties around him.

When he looks up, Bohdi has not moved. Everybody else has gone and he is standing exactly where he stood through all of it, arms crossed, watching the door the way he watches every door in this keep.

"I saw my life flash before my eyes there for a moment," Bohdi says.

"I don't think you're the only one," Morgan says. "Let us hope they don't dare bring it up a second time."

Bohdi laughs, low and helpless.

Then he comes around the table, and on the way past he puts his hand on the back of Morgan's chair, and lets his fingers rest against the back of Morgan's neck for one second, just above the collar, in an empty room with the door standing open.

Morgan goes on squaring the edges of a pile of paper that has been perfectly square for some time.

24

ESKIL

Eskil walks out of the council chamber so angry his hands are shaking, and he puts them behind his back so nobody in the corridor has to see it.

He does not break anything on the way down, which Morgan would call an improvement in his temperament. He passes three tapestries, two suits of his grandfather's armor, and a clerk carrying a tray of ink pots, any one of which would have gone through a window very satisfyingly, and he walks past every one of them with his hands clasped behind him and his jaw locked.

The boy has been threatened by the Jakadi twice and twice he has come away unscathed.

Unscathed. He had Indrie's wrists under his thumbs last night, weeping. He counted every bruise on that man in the firelight. He washed his hair and there was hardly any of it left to wash. He held him while he said I love you for the first time into Eskil's neck, and nine people who have eaten at Eskil's table for a decade sat in a room this afternoon and suggested that the man who said it is selling him to the Jakadi.

And Eskil sat there and let Morgan handle it. With his little brother's hand on his knee under the table, keeping him in his chair.

He is going to think about that for a long time. He is going to think about what his face must have looked like, for Morgan to feel the need.

It is not going to be a pleasant evening for anybody in the cells.

He takes the stairs down past the barracks level and into the cold. The cells under the keep are old stone and they smell of it, damp and mineral and something older under that, and the torches down here never burn quite right. There are four Jakadi in the long cell at the end, and Eskil has been looking forward to them since the moment Seren opened her mouth.

He has work to do. That is the only thing standing between him and the other thing. He has work, and the work is four men who were in that clearing, who stood around that fire and watched while somebody put hands on what is his. The rage is enormous and it has nowhere to go, and he is about to give it somewhere.

Harrak is on the door.

He straightens when he sees the king coming, and his hand goes to his chest. He is a good guard. He is reliable and honorable and he has never once in six years done a single thing to earn the look Eskil sometimes has to stop himself from giving him. It is not Harrak's fault that he kissed Indrie in a pool under this keep over a misunderstanding about a word. Indrie has told Eskil that, in so many words, more than once. Harrak apologized for it on his knees, practically, and then spent the next month telling every soldier in Valen that the healer was spoken for, and Eskil will eventually forgive him. Probably.

He is working on it. He is not there yet.

"My lord," Harrak says.