Page 92 of Setting the Break

It is Bohdi's voice in a courtyard a month ago, bored and patient, making him do it again. You won't win the grip. Don't try to win the grip. Go for something he can't guard. Elbow, knee, throat. Then the knife. Every time. Stop complaining and do it again.

Morgan stops pulling at the hands.

He brings his right elbow up and across as hard as he has ever done anything in his life, and drives it into the side of Lars's throat.

It is not a good blow. It is badly placed and he has almost nothing left to put behind it. But Lars was not expecting it, and it catches him just under the jaw, and he chokes and his grip slackens and he rears back off Morgan's chest, gagging, one hand going to his own neck.

The air comes into Morgan all at once. It is agony. It is the best thing he has ever felt.

He does not waste it.

His hand goes to his boot. It knows the way. The dagger has been in his right boot every day since he came back from the south. Bohdi put it there, and put the habit there, and made him practice reaching for it until his hand went there without asking him, and he complained about every minute of it. It saved his life once already. He does not need to think about it.

He gets it out of the sheath and drives it into the thick of Lars's thigh, as deep as it will go.

Lars screams.

He goes over sideways and crashes into the bench, and both his hands go to the hilt in his leg, and he does not come at Morgan again. He cannot. He is lying on his side on the guardroom floor with his hands wrapped around his own leg, making a high thin sound through his teeth, and he is still crying.

Morgan scrambles backward on his heels and elbows until his back hits the wall.

He opens his mouth. At first nothing at all comes out of it but a dry wrecked rasp that hurts all the way down. He tries again. He fills his lungs with everything they will take, and he screams for the guards.

It does not sound like his voice. It is a tearing sound, raw all the way through.

On the other side of the wall, the laughing stops.

He hears a bench go over in the barracks. He hears somebody shout a question, and somebody else shout back, and then boots, a great many boots, coming fast.

Morgan sits against the wall with his knees drawn up and both hands wrapped around his own throat. The copied list is lying on the floor between him and the man who wrote it, half under the overturned table, with a bootprint across the southern road.

30

ESKIL

Morgan is sitting upright in his own bed radiating displeasure, and he is not actually stopping Indrie from fretting over him. Which is a good decision, because the gods themselves could not stop Indrie when he is taking care of his own.

Eskil stands off to the side, out of the way, and watches Indrie work. He asks Morgan questions. He prods at his throat. He sends Bohdi off on pointless errands to keep him out from under his feet. He has had him fetch towels nobody needs. He has had him heat water for a tea that any kitchen boy in the keep could have heated. He has him crushing herbs in a mortar, and Bohdi is doing it, carefully, with both hands. Bohdi, who carries an axe bigger than most children.

Indrie's ability to handle a room is formidable. Eskil should bring him to council.

"Tilt your head back," Indrie says.

Morgan obeys. He does it stiffly and slowly and with his jaw set, which is how he has agreed to every single thing he has ever been made to agree to. He knows better than to argue. He also wants it on the record that he is suffering.

Indrie's fingers go along the bruising, pressing lightly, and Morgan winces once and tries to pass it off as a cough.

It does not work. Indrie gives him a look.

"Sorry," Morgan says, with no apology in it whatsoever.

"You don't need to apologize for being in pain," Indrie tells him. "You need to stop pretending you're not."

Morgan opens his mouth, probably to produce something cutting, and then shuts it again. The bruises are livid. Blue-black fingerprints laid in a line across the column of his windpipe, one of them sitting directly over the hollow of his throat, pressed there by a man who held that council door open for him every day for three years. Eskil has been looking at them for twenty minutes and the rage has not ebbed by a single degree. It has simply gone somewhere useful.

Bohdi comes back with the mortar. His hands are stained green and there is a leaf in his hair and he sets it down on the bedside table without a word. His face has been wiped of everything except patience, and the patience is costing him. Eskil can see what it costs in the set of his jaw, and in the way his eyes go to the bruises on Morgan's throat and then away again, as if he can only hold them for a second before something in him starts to pull.

"Perfect, thank you," Indrie says, and takes the mortar from him.