Page 29

"Come on," Bohdi says, taking pity on him. "We're running out of daylight."

The house belongs to a woman named Asta.

It is at the top of the lane with a good kitchen garden behind it and a row of six beehives along the south wall where they will catch the morning sun. The path up to the door has been swept, which this late in the season is practically an act of defiance. She opens the door with a paring knife still in her hand, because she has been at something on the table and has not thought to put it down and is not going to put it down for two strangers. She is somewhere past sixty. She is broad across the shoulders from fifty years of hauling water and her forearms are better than some of the men Bohdi trains. She stands in her own doorway with her feet planted and waits for the two of them to explain themselves.

Bohdi has gotten them this far, which is as far as he goes. There is nothing in his face that is ever going to make a woman holding a blade feel better about her afternoon. He knows what he looks like. He has made a career out of what he looks like. Morgan, on the other hand, has the kind of face that gets mothers to hand him their children in the street, and it is time the two of them changed places.

He holds up both hands and backs off a step with half a bow, and Morgan comes forward with his hands clasped loosely in front of him and goes to work.

Morgan is good at this. Bohdi has watched him do it in council rooms a hundred times and he has never once watched him do it on a doorstep. It turns out to be the same instrument played quieter. He does not announce himself. He does not lead with the king, or the clan, or the seat, or any of the things a lesser man would put on the table in the first ten seconds to establish that this conversation matters.

"We're looking for someone who came here as a boy," Morgan says. "His name was Fenris, though he may not still be called that. We'd like to speak to him about an inheritance."

And the woman goes still.

It is not a flinch. Bohdi has seen every kind of flinch there is and he has caused a fair number of them, and this is not one. A flinch is a thing the body does to get out of the way. What Asta does is stop. The whole of her stops at once, with the door in one hand and the knife in the other and her weight still on her front foot, and something moves behind her face and then keeps on moving for a good while after.

"He's not here any longer," she says.

"May we come in?"

She looks at them for a long moment. Bohdi can see her pricing it out, the two of them, the horses, the accents, the word inheritance, and whatever the years have taught her about men who come up a lane asking questions.

Then she stands out of the doorway.

The house is one room and a loft and it is warm and close and it smells of woodsmoke and apples. There is a fire going properly, banked and tended, not the miserable smoulder of a house where somebody has stopped caring. There is a table with two chairs at it where there is very obviously room for four. And on a shelf above the hearth there is a carved horse, pale wood gone dark at the edges from handling. There is nobody living in this house young enough to play with it.

Bohdi takes all of it in without appearing to take any of it in, and puts himself near the door with his back against the wall and the room laid out in front of him, which is habit and not suspicion. He would do it in his own mother's kitchen if he had one.

Asta stays standing with the knife still in her palm, and she tells it plainly, without a scrap of weight on any of it, in a flat and level voice. She has told herself this story so many times at three in the morning that she has worn all the sharp edges off the outside and none of them off the inside.

"It was winter. They brought him to me wrapped up in about four blankets, six days old if he was that, by a man who wouldn't give his name and never came back. My husband and I had buried two of our own by then." She breathes in sharply, as though it’s still something she’s dealing with. "We decided the gods were handing us a blessing and we had better not argue about the packaging. The man said the child's name was Fenris. He said the boy was blind and his father didn't want him."

"Did he say who the father was?" Morgan asks.

"No. He did not." She turns the knife over once in her hand. "We had our suspicions. You keep that kind of thing to yourself in a village this size."

"He was a good baby. He was a good baby and he was a good boy. He learned this house by the time he could walk." She says that last part with a small, hard emphasis, aimed slightly past Morgan's shoulder at somebody who is not in the room and has not been in it for twelve years. "By the time he could walk. I taught him the rest myself. The count of steps from that door to the well. The two gates, which you can tell apart by the hinge if you listen, the near one sings and the far one doesn't. How to find the path in the dark by the change underfoot where the gravel stops. My husband cut him a staff when he was five and cut him a longer one every year after, on his birthday, and made a whole performance of it."

She stops. She looks at the fire.

"He could go anywhere in this village," she says. "Anywhere. He took the sheep up to the top field on his own at seven, and brought them all back, every one, and was insufferable about it for a month. People forgot about his eyes."

Morgan lets that sit for a moment before he continues, which is not a thing Bohdi would have managed.

"When did you see him last?" Morgan asks.

"The Jakadi came in the night twelve years ago. The worst thing anybody in Helde had ever had to deal with before that night was a dog worrying the lambs." She shifts her grip on the knife. "They came in the dark and they took grain, and two horses, and my boy out of his bed, and they were gone before anybody in this lane got a torch properly lit. My husband went after them with four other men. They were gone nine days. They came back with nothing."

Bohdi knows they would have lost the trail inside half a day. They would have known by the end of the second day that there was nothing at the end of this, and that every mile further east was a mile they would have to come back through.

And they kept going for nine.

That is the part that gets him, and it gets him somewhere low and unpleasant. Nine days is a long time to keep looking when you already understand that you are not going to find anything. Seven of those days were not searching. Seven of those days were a man refusing to turn his horse around, because turning his horse around was the same as saying it out loud.

"They knew where to come," Asta says. "I have had twelve years to think about it and I will tell you exactly what I think. They rode past three villages with better horses in them than ours. They came up this lane in the dark, and they went into the right house. They did not take him because he happened to be there. They came here for him."

"Yes," Morgan says. "I think you're right."