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What he wants is four hundred men and the eastern reaches burned off the map one settlement at a time until somebody crawls out of a hole and tells him where his healer is. And the worst of it by far, the coal sitting at the centre of him, is that he could. That is the thing nobody understands about a king with an army. Every appalling thing he wants is available to him by noon tomorrow. He could give the order tonight and the torches would be moving east before the moon was up. He could turn the Jakadi hills into a wasteland of ash and screaming and not a soul on this side of the border would tell him he was wrong. Every atrocity is a logistics problem, and logistics is something he is very, very good at.

The only thing standing between the Jakadi and the ground, between his rage and the world it wants to remake, is that Eskil knows it would get Indrie killed, and possibly not quickly.

So he starts to plan, because the planning is a wall, and the other thing is on the far side of it, and it is leaning.

9

BOHDI

Bohdi knows they are barking up the wrong tree before they are fifty feet inside the village, and he keeps his mouth shut about it, because Morgan has been in the saddle for two days to get here and a man who has ridden two days deserves to reach the door before somebody takes it off him.

The place is called Helde and it is forty people and a mill. It sits a day inside the border in decent barley country, low rolling ground with the fields already cut and the stubble gone silver. The whole settlement runs along one lane with the stream on the south side and the mill at the bottom of it where the water has the most to give. It is a poor village and it is an orderly one, which is a combination Bohdi has a weakness for. The houses are small. The thatch on half of them is older than he is. But the byres are tight and the stock looks fed and somebody has been out here with a spade keeping the drainage ditches clear. That is the kind of unglamorous, thankless, nobody-will-ever-praise-you-for-it work that tells you a place fully intends to still be standing here in forty years.

Bohdi has burned villages. He has also defended them. He knows the difference between a settlement that is waiting to die and one that is digging in, and this one is digging in.

Every adult in Helde clocks the two of them inside a minute.

Nobody stops working. That is the thing he likes. A woman pegging washing watches them the entire length of the lane without the faintest attempt to hide that she is doing it, her hands going on with the pegs while her eyes do something else entirely. Two men stacking turf by the mill keep stacking turf and keep looking up, turf, look, turf, look, in a rhythm so steady it is almost a joke. Somebody's dog decides they are a problem and then gives up on caring. And a boy of about nine goes off at a dead run toward the top of the lane on an errand that Bohdi would put real coin on being tell somebody there are strangers.

He approves of all of it. People out here do not get visitors they have not heard about a week in advance. Two men on good horses are an event, and they are going to be looked at from every window in the village until somebody works out what they want and whether it is going to cost anything. It is exactly how he would run it if he lived here.

It is also, unfortunately, the reason this is going to take all afternoon. Careful people are the hardest people in the world to get anything out of. They are not frightened and they are not stupid and they have nothing to prove to you. Come at them sideways and they will hand you a pleasant hour of discussion on the weather and absolutely nothing else. You will not even be able to tell which sentence was the one where they decided against you.

So he does it the way he always does it, which is slowly and out loud.

He rides to the middle of the lane where everyone can see him and he gets off his horse with his hands visible. Then he buys a wheel of hard cheese he does not want from a woman who does not especially want to sell it to him, and he pays her roughly twice what it is worth and makes a show of being pleased with the transaction. Then he asks after the mill, because the wheel is dragging on one side and he could hear it from the road. A visitor who notices your mill has at least been paying attention.

That gets him a flat look. The flat look lasts long enough to be a message. Then it gets him a grudging explanation about the wedge and the wet and the shaft, and the explanation gets him his cloak off and his sleeves pushed up and his shoulder in under a cart axle, with the miller's son standing over him holding a lamp and offering advice, most of which is wrong.

It takes the two of them the better part of half an hour. Bohdi ends up flat on his back in the muck under the cart with his arm in up to the shoulder, feeling around a swollen wedge he cannot see, taking instruction from a nineteen-year-old who has been in this mill his whole life and has never once had to get a thing out that did not want to come. He gets filthy. He gets a splinter in the heel of his hand the size of a small knife. He swears with real feeling about the weather, the wood, the man who cut the wedge, and the gods in general. Somewhere in there the miller's son stops being careful at him and starts being useful. And when the wedge finally gives with a crack that Bohdi feels through his whole arm, the man laughs out loud.

That is the moment. You cannot buy it and you cannot rush it and you certainly cannot order it. Bohdi has watched better men than him spend an entire day in a village and leave with nothing because they never got on their back in the mud.

He gets twenty minutes of conversation out of that laugh. The harvest, which was middling. The price of iron, which is an outrage. The state of the eastern track, which is worse than it was and whose fault that is. Whether the barley will take another year in the bottom field or whether it is time to put it to grass. And the twenty minutes of conversation gets him the name of the family they’re looking for, and the name of the family gets him the house, and that is the afternoon.

Morgan stands off to one side for all of it with his hood up and his arms folded. Bohdi catches him watching with an expression he cannot entirely read, which is rare enough to be interesting.

"I didn't realize you were so handy," Morgan says, when they walk off.

"You can't get blood from a stone, my prince. You have to give people something before they'll give you anything back." And then, because he has never in his life been able to leave a thing alone, "And you know exactly how handy I am."

Morgan laughs at him. It comes out startled and bright and entirely unguarded. Bohdi puts it in his pocket for later the way he has started doing without meaning to, which is a habit he is going to have to look at one of these days and is not going to look at today.

That is when the child grabs Morgan's sleeve.

She is five or six and she is grimey in the committed way only a farm child can manage, and she comes out from behind a water butt at a dead sprint with some grand and non-negotiable demand about the horses. She takes a double fistful of Morgan's cuff and hangs on it with her whole weight, the way children do when they have decided an adult belongs to them now.

Morgan goes white.

It happens very fast and it is not loud. He does not shout. He does not pull away. He does not do one single thing that a bystander would remember or that the child will carry home and repeat at supper. He goes rigid from the shoulders down and his breath stops where it is, and his free hand comes up open and flat, halfway between defending himself and warding her off. For a second and a half the man standing in this lane is not in this lane at all. He is somewhere else and Bohdi has a decent idea where.

Bohdi is moving before he has decided anything.

He gets down on his heels, between them, with his back to Morgan. He tells the girl, in strict confidence, that the black one bites and the brown one is worse. He tells her the brown one took a finger off a man in Valen and the king had to pay for it. He tells her that if she wants to be genuinely useful she can go and find out whether the mill has any bread in it, because he has been riding since dawn and is in a desperate condition. Then he puts a coin in her hand that she has clearly never seen the like of, and her whole face opens up.

She goes. It takes twenty seconds, start to finish. Nobody in the lane looks up for any of it.

When he stands up, Morgan has his hand back at his side and his face arranged, and the arrangement is good, because Morgan has been arranging his face in front of people since he was eleven years old and he is better at it than most of the court will ever know. But he looks at Bohdi with a great many excuses stacked up behind his eyes and no idea which one is supposed to come out first. He is flushed to the ears. There is nothing Bohdi could say about any of it that would not make it worse.