Page 91 of Setting the Break

Something slides out of the back of it and falls onto the table.

It is a sheet of paper, folded twice. It has been tucked in behind the last page, between the page and the binding, where nobody turning forward through the log would ever find it.

Morgan unfolds it.

It is a list. It is written in a small, careful hand that he does not know, and it takes him perhaps three seconds of reading to understand what it is. His stomach drops straight through the floor.

It is the muster. It is the numbers for the spring, company by company, exactly as he wrote them into the treaty draft. Below that is the southern road, with the stages marked. Below that, the crossings, every one, in order, with the date each one ought to be passable after the thaw, which was a figure Morgan himself worked out with the quartermaster over two long evenings and which does not exist anywhere in this keep except in his own papers and in the minutes of a closed council session eleven days ago.

He reads it again. His hands have gone cold.

It is not a draft. It is a copy. Somebody has sat down with the minutes, or with his papers, and copied it out neatly, and folded it, and put it somewhere nobody would ever think to look, to wait for somebody to come and collect it.

He is still standing there with the sheet in his hands when the door opens behind him.

Morgan turns.

It is Lars.

He knows Lars. Everybody in the keep knows Lars. He is a big, quiet, fair-haired man of thirty or so who has stood the door of the council chamber for three years. He has a slow smile, and he always says your highness politely. Morgan has walked past him a thousand times. Last winter, when Morgan's hands were too cold to manage the latch, Lars opened the door for him and made a joke about the weather in the north.

Morgan opens his mouth to say good evening.

It dies in his mouth. Lars is not looking at him. He is looking at the paper in Morgan's hands, and his face has gone completely gray, and the expression on it is one Morgan has only ever seen twice before in his life. Once on Ivan's face, when the dagger went in. Once on his own, in a basin of water, afterward.

Lars is watching the end of his own world arrive.

Morgan looks past him at the door.

Lars is standing in it.

Morgan understands, then, in one long cold second, exactly what is about to happen, and there is nothing whatsoever he can do about any of it.

Lars comes for him.

Morgan is not a fighter. He knows it. He has always known it. He has spent twenty years being told it in one form or another and has made a great many sharp remarks to cover it. Lars is a keep guard in the prime of his life, a head taller and fifty pounds heavier, and the room is very small. Morgan gets one hand up and gets the edge of the table between them for about half a second, and then the table is gone and Lars has him by the front of his coat and has put him back against the wall so hard that his head cracks on the stone and the room goes white.

Then he is on the floor. He does not remember going there. There is a knee on his chest, and both of Lars's hands have closed around his throat.

This is nothing like the stronghold.

He has thought about the stronghold so many times since, at three in the morning. He has turned it over and over. And there was a warchief there, a known enemy in an enemy's house, and a plan, and a dagger he drew deliberately knowing precisely what he meant to do with it. None of that is here. This is a guardroom he has walked past every day of his life. The fire is going. There are men laughing on the other side of a wall. The man on top of him is somebody who has known him most of his life.

He cannot breathe.

Lars is talking. He is talking the whole time, very fast and very low, and his face is so close above Morgan's that Morgan can feel his breath. It takes Morgan a long moment through the roaring in his ears to understand that the man is crying.

"My brother," Lars says. "My brother was at Askarte. He was on the eastern watch, the night they came. He was twenty-two." His hands tighten. "I buried him. With my own hands. I dug the hole myself because there was nobody else to do it, and your brother was three weeks out at sea, chasing lies the Jakadi fed him, and he didn't even know Askarte was burning."

Morgan claws at his wrists. They are iron.

"And then there was the wedding," Lars says. "The south. A marriage and an alliance and an end to it. An end to all of it, no more boys in holes, and I stood that door every day while the council argued about it, and I prayed for it. Every night. And then his second put a knife in the chieftain and you rode home, and all of it went up at once. All of it." His voice gives out in the middle of it. "Somebody has to stop this. Somebody has to stop it before there are more of them in the ground. I only told them what they needed. That's all. I only told them what they needed so it would stop."

Morgan's vision is going.

It closes in from the edges, gray and then darker gray. There are spots in it, bright ones, swimming. His hands have stopped clawing and are only pulling weakly at the man's wrists, and he cannot feel his fingers properly anymore, and there is a very clear small thought somewhere at the back of his head, perfectly calm, noting that this is how it happens. This is how it ends. On a floor in a guardroom, a fortnight before his brother's wedding.

And then another thought, which is Bohdi's voice.