Page 95 of Tending the Ache

He says it quietly. He learned a long time ago that the words people argue with are the loud ones.

Vigdis does not flinch. "Your majesty—"

"You are asking me to put my brother on a horse and send him four hundred leagues south, through passes we do not hold, to a stronghold that has never been taken, and hand him over at the gate to a man who had his last wife put to death in front of witnesses for wanting to leave him." His voice does not rise. It goes flatter, which everybody at this table knows is the worse sign. "Say the plan back to me and tell me where I have it wrong."

"You do not have it wrong."

"Then we are finished."

Nobody moves. Alrik shifts in his seat and thinks better of whatever he was about to offer.

"And if we refuse they come in the spring," Seren says. No heat in it at all. "With the passes open and the Jakadi at our eastern reaches and a thousand fighters on our southern border who have never lost on their own ground."

"I have fought wars. I'm not afraid of shedding blood."

"You have. You fought them with the whole of your strength behind you and your borders quiet." Seren folds her hands on the oak. "You have never fought one on two fronts with a hole in your side."

She's not wrong, whether he'll admit it or not.

This is the trouble with the council. They are slow and self-important and they took four hours last spring to approve a bridge, and every so often one of them says a thing that is simply true, and there is no swordwork available against it.

The calculation is on the table in front of him and it is correct. He can see every line of it. One prince against a kingdom. It is the same calculation Morgan has been running since the first letter came, in the same tidy hand he uses for the grain accounts, and Eskil has hated it every time it has been laid out and has not once found the error in it.

He is not going to find the error today.

But they are talking about a boy who fell asleep against his chest in council meetings because he was too young to be there and too stubborn to be sent away. Who learned his letters at this table, at that end of it, because there was nobody left in the keep willing to teach a child king's brother. Who ate first through two famine winters because Eskil told him, every night for two years, that he had already had his portion.

The council can have their arithmetic. They cannot have him.

"Find another way," Eskil says.

"There is no other—"

"Then find one anyway. That is what you are for."

The silence that follows is the worst kind. Twelve people looking at the table, because they have all arrived somewhere he is refusing to go and none of them wants to be the one who says so out loud.

Then Vigdis says, "We are not proposing to send him alone."

Eskil looks up.

"When the doors are open and the guard is down." Vigdis holds his eyes and does not blink. "We send an assassin in with him who can end it. If Ivan's reign is ended, Wolfe struggles to regroup and we hit them in the chaos."

The words go down on the table between them.

And something in Eskil's chest, which has been pulled taut since the day Seren first said the word bride in this room, shifts. It does not loosen. It shifts, the way a load shifts when the weight comes off the one strap that was about to give.

"An assassin," he says. "You mean Bohdi."

At the far end, Bohdi tilts his head at the sound of his name.

Vigdis nods. "Bohdi accompanies the prince as his escort. Standard protocol. A prince arrives for a betrothal with his personal guard, and nobody remarks on it. Once he is inside, he has the access to assess their defenses and identify the chieftain's vulnerabilities and—" She makes a brief decisive gesture. "—resolve the situation. Before any vows are exchanged, ideally."

"And if it goes wrong?" Eskil's voice is level. Cold. "If they see through it? If the chieftain moves faster than we expect? If they're compromised before they can act?"

"Then we have a war with the Wolfe clan," Seren says flatly. "Which we will have if we refuse the betrothal, or delay too long, or let the Jakadi come at us before we are ready. This gives us the first move." She pauses. "Trust Bohdi to get the prince to safety."

Eskil looks around the table. Twelve faces. Twelve nods. Not one dissent.