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Dagny's eyes widen. Her eyebrows, if possible, go higher, which Bohdi would not have thought anatomically available to her.

"What do you mean he's not back yet?"

"I mean his horse is not in this stable, his saddle is not on that rack, and there is no sign he has passed through that gate." Bohdi keeps his voice even. He learned a long time ago that panic is a contagion and the fastest way to start an epidemic is to let it into your own voice. "He should have been here before us."

Dagny processes it in about two seconds, which is one of several reasons Bohdi would walk into fire for her. She does not ask unnecessary questions. She does not suggest he might be overreacting. She knows what is sitting between Valen and the eastern border and she knows Morgan was on that road without an escort, and she is already running contingencies behind her eyes before she has finished hearing the sentence.

"Go," she says. "I will handle things here. If the council asks, the prince is bathing and you are briefing him privately. That buys you an hour or two. Maybe three. After that Vigdis is going to start pounding on doors and you know it."

"Let her pound."

"Bohdi." Dagny catches his arm before he can turn away. Her grip is firm and her eyes are steady. "If you need me, come and get me."

She does not smile. She hands her reins to the nearest stableboy without looking at him, straightens her coat, and walks off across the yard toward where Garrik is leaning against a post with his eyes shut and Fenris is standing beside him with a hand on his arm. Bohdi watches her go up to them and say something, and Garrik opens his eyes. She is shepherding the pair of them toward the keep at a brisk impatient clip, having never in her life asked anybody's permission for anything.

Bohdi goes back to his horse.

It is dead on its feet. It has carried him three days with almost no rest, it has earned a week in a field with nothing to do but eat, and Bohdi is about to ask it for one more hour. He gets up into the saddle. The animal puts its ears flat back at him, holds the position long enough to make its position known, and then goes.

"I know," Bohdi tells it. "I am aware. I will make it up to you."

He rides out of the stable yard at a walk, because people are watching, and at a canter the moment he is past the corner of the keep. He takes the long way down to the east gate through the back streets, where there are fewer people to wonder why the king's second is riding back out an hour after he rode in, and he smiles and lifts a hand at every single one of them who looks up, because that is what he does, and because a man who looks worried in the streets of Valen will have the whole city worried by supper.

He thinks about Morgan by a fire three nights ago with the blanket around his shoulders, telling him in that dry, level voice that he could not sleep and could not add a column of figures and came out in a cold sweat every time a child took hold of his sleeve. And then the very next day volunteering to ride through the night alone, because Indrie needed Eskil and Eskil needed Bohdi, and Morgan had done the sums and decided that he was the one who could be spared.

Bohdi knows exactly what that is. He has been doing it himself for thirty years.

20

MORGAN

Morgan is tired, and muddy, and he smells of creek water and horse, and he hates traveling. He hates horseback. He hates the outdoors, in general and in every one of its particulars. He has just spent a day and a half becoming intimately acquainted with a great many of those particulars at close range, several of them from underneath.

He did fall in. Twice. The second time the horse came in after him out of what Morgan can only assume was solidarity.

And now he is standing in the arch of the east gate of his own city, soaked to the thigh and miserable. A guardsman who is barely old enough to be off his mother's teat is telling him, with enormous patience, that he cannot be the prince.

"The prince doesn't travel alone," the guardsman says. "Sir."

"The prince very much wishes that were still true."

"And he'd not look like–" The boy stops. He appears to realize, partway through the sentence, that there is no good way to finish it. "Like that. Sir."

"Like what?"

"Like he'd been run over by a cart," the boy says, and then goes pink, and then squares his shoulders and doubles down with the doomed courage of the extremely young. "There's orders, sir. Nobody comes through the east gate on horseback without a pass or somebody to vouch for them. Not since the Jakadi."

Morgan closes his eyes for a moment.

He left the Kettle ford outpost three hours ago. There were three men there and not the six Tor promised him, and all three had jumped to their feet and offered to escort the prince home. He had told them instead that there were four Wolfe riders in war paint on Einar's lane at the edge of the eastern holdings, and that there was a family in that farmhouse, and that they were to go there now, all three of them, and not come back until the lane was clear.

The corporal had tried to argue. Morgan had looked at him in a way he had learned from his brother at a very young age and never previously had cause to use, and the corporal had stopped arguing and gone.

So he has ridden the last stretch alone, again, because he gave away his escort, again, and he is going to be extremely annoyed with himself about it later. Right now he is too tired to be annoyed with anyone but the child in front of him.

"What's your name?" Morgan asks.

"Pell, sir."