Page 78 of Setting the Break

"The Wolfe have your prince, you do not march on the Wolfe," the man says. "Everybody knows this. The whole east knows how the king of Rengara is about his brother. You do not send your army south with your brother inside the gates. You sit. You wait. You make treaty. And while you sit, the Wolfe get stronger, and you get weaker, and we wait."

It is not a new idea. It is simply laid out on a table in front of him plainly, by a man with no reason to be kind about it, and it lands harder than Eskil expects it to. That is what they thought of him. That was the entire plan. Take the one thing he could not stand to lose, and then stand back and watch him fail to do anything about it.

They were right, is the worst of it. If Morgan were in the Wolfe stronghold right now, Eskil would still be sitting in this keep.

"Didn't quite go to plan, though, did it?" Eskil says.

"No. The prince came home." The man spreads his hands. "Your warrior kills the chieftain. No betrothal. No wedding. Nothing in the gates." He tips his head. "So we look for another."

Eskil does not interrupt him.

"Another thing the king will not lose," the man says. "It is not so hard to find. Everybody in Valen is talking. The king has a healer. A little Kalkoan, from across the sea, and the king dove into the ocean in a storm for him, and the king walks down to his door every night. So." He shrugs again. "We take the healer. Now the king sits again."

Eskil does not move for a moment.

Behind the man, Harrak has gone very quiet.

"Except the king did not sit," the man admits, and for the first time something like real feeling gets into his face, and it is a kind of aggrieved bewilderment. "Nobody thinks you find him. Nobody thinks you come into the cedar in the night with ten men. And the boy." He makes a sharp, disgusted sound. "The blind one. We keep him twelve years. We feed him. We carry him from place to place. We make him ours. And he turns on us for a Kalkoan slave he knows three days."

Eskil laughs.

He does not mean to. It comes up out of him, one short hard bark of it in the little stone room, and the man across the table flinches back from the sound.

"You lie to everybody," Eskil says. "Do you know that? Every plan you've ever had depends on lying to the people standing next to you. You lied to Ivan Wolfe. You lied to that boy for twelve years. You lied to your own men about what they were getting out of any of it. And every single time somebody finally turns around and does to you exactly what you did to them first, you're shocked. You're insulted by it. You sit in my cells looking hurt that a blind boy you stole out of his bed didn't love you back." He shakes his head slowly. "How the fuck do you people ever expect to build anything?"

The man does not have an answer. Eskil did not think he would.

He sits back. He has what he came down here for. It is more than he expected and less than he wanted, and he has been doing this long enough to know that is how it usually goes. He puts his palms flat on the table and pushes himself up out of the chair.

"Wait," the man says.

Eskil looks down at him.

"What happens to us?" the man asks. "We talk. All four. We tell you everything. What happens now?"

It is a fair question. Eskil has been turning it over since the cedar forest.

Four prisoners are four mouths to feed through the winter and four men to guard, and they know nothing he does not now know twice over. Keeping them gains him nothing. Killing them gains him nothing he does not already have. If he wanted the Jakadi to fear him he saw to that on a heath two miles out of the cedars, and the story of it went east with whoever got away. Four more bodies add nothing to it.

Four live men walking back across the border and telling their commanders exactly how the king of Rengara treated them might add something.

There is also the other thing, which has been getting larger all day, and which he is finally ready to look at.

"That healer you said I was so fond of," Eskil says lightly, pushing the chair in. "The one you took from me." He tilts his head, considering. "I'm going to bring him down here tomorrow. To look each and every one of you in the face."

The man tenses.

"If he tells me none of you laid a hand on him," Eskil says, "you'll be taken to the border and turned loose, and told never to let me see you again. You'll walk home. You can tell whoever you like whatever you fucking want."

He goes to the peg and takes down his coat and puts it on, taking his time about it. He is aware that the man is watching his hands.

"And if he tells me otherwise," Eskil says, "then the man he points at will not be walking anywhere."

The man has gone gray under the beard.

"Every gods damned one of you had better hope," Eskil says, "that my healer remembers you kindly."

He nods to Harrak, and walks out, and goes back up the stairs into the warm.