Page 35 of Fought it Through the Teeth

The warchief talks about the alliance. He talks about the unified south. He talks about Rengaran trade routes and northern timber and the mineral wealth of the mountain passes. He talks about a future in which the Wolfe clan and Rengara move as one, their interests aligned, their enemies shared. He paints a picture that is grand and expansive and, Morgan notes with cold clarity, completely devoid of a living northern king.

Eskil is not a signatory in Ivan's vision. He is not an ally. He is not a partner or a collaborator or even a convenient figurehead to be managed at arm's length. Every road Ivan describes — every trade route, every military corridor, every line of authority and chain of command — runs through a Rengara with a different king on the seat. A compliant one. A biddable one. A king who was once a prince and who was married to the right man and who understands, because he was taught to understand, that his role is to sit and smile and sign what is put in front of him.

Morgan draws no attention to it whatsoever.

He nods in the right places. He asks smaller questions instead — the kind that sound interested without sounding sharp, the kind that make Ivan feel heard without making him feel examined. He asks about trade volumes. About the seasonal rotation of market goods. About the structure of the Wolfe clan's civilian governance, which Ivan answers with considerably less enthusiasm than he answers questions about military capacity, because a man who governs through strength does not find administration interesting and does not expect his bride to find it interesting either.

Morgan finds it extremely interesting. Morgan finds the cracks in the civilian ledger that Ivan doesn't know he is showing: the shortfalls in grain supply that don't match the population count, the surplus in weapons manufacture that doesn't match the clan's fighting strength, the discrepancy between what Ivan says his people need and what Ivan is actually producing. He catalogs every one of them with the quiet efficiency of a clerk noting errors in a column of figures.

He asks about the line of succession.

He frames it as a bride's practical interest — the kind of question any sensible consort would ask of a man whose first two marriages ended in death. "I'd like to know the shape of the family I'm marrying into," Morgan says, with a small, self-deprecating smile. "Who comes after you, should the worst happen? Who are the heirs?"

Ivan answers without suspicion, because the question is reasonable and because Morgan has spent the entire meeting being exactly the kind of attentive, intelligent, slightly deferential bride-to-be that Ivan has been trying to produce since they arrived.

"There is no son of my blood," Ivan says, and the bitterness in the sentence is old and deep and calcified. "The boy my first wife bore was not mine. I sent him away."

"And his name?"

"Fenris." Ivan says it the way you'd say the name of a disease — with distance, with contempt, with the absolute assurance that naming it does not give it power. "Twenty years old now, or near enough. I struck him from the records when he was an infant."

"And the family who took him?"

"A farming family. East." Ivan waves a hand, dismissive, as though the direction is sufficient and the detail is beneath him. "They were paid. That was the end of it."

Morgan nods. He does not write any of it down. He doesn't need to. The information is filed in the place where Morgan keeps things that matter — a mental manifest, indexed and cross-referenced, the boy's age and the family's location and the direction Ivan said with such carelessness it could only be true. Men lie about the things they care about. They don't bother to lie about the things they've discarded.

Fenris. Twenty years old. Farming family. East.

Struck from the records. But striking a name is a legal fiction. The claim exists in the blood, not in the ink, and no amount of crossed-out lines in a clan ledger changes whose son the boy is. Ivan threw him away because he wasn't his — but the clan acknowledged the child at birth, before Ivan disowned him, and that acknowledgment exists in the records even if the name has been scratched out of them. Morgan has seen this before. He has untangled succession disputes in Rengara where the claimant's name had been erased three generations prior and the blood claim still held, because blood does not care about bookkeeping.

If Fenris is alive, he is Ivan's legal heir, no matter whose cock sired him. And a legitimate heir to the Wolfe chieftainship whose claim supersedes both Dade and Garrik and anyone else Ivan has groomed to follow him is not a discarded child.

He is a weapon.

"And after Fenris?" Morgan asks, as though the boy is merely one entry in a list rather than the fulcrum on which everything is about to turn.

"Garrik," Ivan says. "My ward. He'll hold the clan if I fall, and the clan will follow him. He's a good fighter and the men respect him. He's a little soft for my tastes, but a man can't be too choosy."

Morgan nods and asks another question about the civilian quarter and lets the conversation move on, and Ivan moves with it, because the warchief has already forgotten the boy he threw away and sees no reason to circle back.

They talk for another hour. Morgan asks about winter preparations, about the forge output, about the southern trade routes that Ivan described to Bohdi on their ride. He confirms numbers. He cross-references details. He catches a discrepancy between what Ivan told him about grain stores and what Ivan told Bohdi about fodder supplies, and he does not mention it, because the discrepancy tells him more than the correction would. It tells him Ivan is inflating his numbers for different audiences, which means the warchief is less secure in his resources than he wants either of them to believe.

Ivan finishes the meeting expansive and generous. He stands, stretches, and grips Morgan's shoulder.

"I'm pleased with your interest, prince. A bride who understands the vision is a bride worth keeping." He steers Morgan toward the door. "I've told the baths to expect you and your escort this afternoon. You've been working hard. A man should rest before his wedding."

Morgan thanks him. He smiles. The smile is flawless and he wears it all the way out of the study and down the corridor and around the corner.

Then the smile drops.

Ivan didn't just discard Fenris — he buried him. Erased him from the succession, scrubbed him from the lineage, pushed him so far into obscurity that the name Fenris probably hasn't been spoken in the Wolfe Keep in twenty years.

And Ivan told Morgan where he went.

Not precisely. Not with coordinates or a family name or anything useful enough to put a scout on horseback this afternoon. But east is a direction, and a farming family is a starting point, and a boy who has lived two decades without a name can still be found by someone with the right resources and the right motivation and the right understanding of how to read the gap between what a man says and what a man means.

If the Wolfe clan consolidates power after Ivan — if Dade or Garrik or whoever crawls to the top of the pile in the aftermath takes the chieftainship and maintains the Jakadi alliance — then Rengara is back where it started. A new chieftain with the same vision, the same infrastructure, the same staging ground full of corrals and timber and Jakadi iron. The head of the snake removed and the body still moving.