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And then, slowly, the noise changes shape.

He does not catch it at first. He is too busy writing down the grooms and the records office and the kitchens, for form's sake, because if he doesn’t then he’ll have to hear about that too. But the voices start to drop. The theories stop coming. There is a look passing from one end of the table to the other, and then back, and then down the middle, and people are not quite meeting each other's eyes, and every one of them seems to be waiting for somebody else to say a thing out loud.

They have a name. Morgan realizes it with a small cold drop in his stomach. They have a name, and they all know the name, and nobody wants to be the one holding it.

He does not understand why until he registers his brother.

Eskil has not moved. For the past several minutes, while the room has been shouting about grooms and cousins, Eskil has been sitting at the head of the table with one forearm on the wood and the other hand flat beside his papers, and he has not moved at all. His face is perfectly calm. His breathing is slow and even. The fingers of the hand on the table are curled, and the knuckles are white.

Morgan knows that stillness. He has known it since he was six years old. It is the stillness that comes right before Eskil puts somebody through a wall.

The murmurs have gone thin and pointed. The air in the room has changed.

"If you are going to think it," Eskil says, "then have the gall to say it where I can hear it."

He does not raise his voice. He does not need to. The chamber goes dead quiet.

Nobody moves for a long moment. Then Seren clears her throat.

"With all due respect, your majesty," Seren says, "the boy has been threatened by the Jakadi twice, and twice he has come away from it unscathed. He is an outsider."

Morgan understands, all at once and with real horror, that they mean Indrie.

They mean Indrie. They are sitting around this table, all nine of them, the day after he came through the gates with his wrists torn open and his hair cut off at the scalp. They are proposing that the man who puts their children's broken arms back together has been selling their king to the Jakadi.

Morgan feels his brother go even more tense.

He did not know it was possible. It is. There is something coming off Eskil now that Morgan can feel along his whole left side without looking at him, and the councilman on Eskil's other side has leaned very slightly away from it without appearing to know he is doing so. Behind them, Bohdi has not made a sound, and Morgan knows without turning around that he has come off his heels and onto the balls of his feet. Morgan has perhaps five seconds. After that there is going to be blood on this table.

He does not look at Eskil. He moves his hand under the edge of the table, where nobody can see it, and puts it on his brother's knee. He does not squeeze. He just leaves it there.

Then he speaks, in the calmest, driest, most tediously reasonable voice he owns.

"I will remind the council," Morgan says, "that I have only very recently run for my life from a similar situation. And I would ask the council not to describe the damage a person carries out of an ordeal of that kind as unscathed, merely because there were no bruises to count." He lets one beat pass. "Which, in both cases, there were."

He watches it land.

They do not agree with him. He can see that plainly. Half the faces at this table have already decided, and nothing he says this afternoon is going to undecide them. But he has put his own name next to Indrie's, and not one of them is prepared to sit here and tell the prince of Rengara to his face that what was done to him in the Wolfe stronghold was nothing. He watches them work that out. He watches them decide the argument has become more expensive than it is worth.

Under his hand, his brother's knee is rigid. It has not moved at all.

Vigdis leans forward.

"We are not proposing anything hasty, your majesty," she says. "No one is suggesting any action be taken against anyone. We are only suggesting that it might be prudent to reconsider, going forward, exactly who is permitted to sit in on discussions between the king and his subordinates."

It is very neatly done. It does not say Indrie's name. It does not accuse anybody of anything. It simply closes the door of the king's study, quietly, in the face of one small dark-haired man.

Morgan opens his mouth.

Eskil leans forward first.

He does it slowly. He takes his hand off the table and puts both forearms on the wood, and he looks down the length of the table at Vigdis with an expression of perfect courtesy. Morgan has seen a man twice Vigdis's size wet himself at that expression.

And he does not put anyone through a wall. Morgan feels it the whole time. He feels the thing in his brother rise right up to the top of him and stop there, and hold, and go no further. He feels how much it costs. The muscle in Eskil's thigh under Morgan's hand is jumping. His breathing has not changed by one beat. He is sitting in his own council chamber listening to them call his lover a traitor, and he is holding every ounce of himself back by main force, and Morgan knows exactly whose voice is in his head asking him to.

A year ago this table would have been kindling.

"Indeed, councilwoman," Eskil says. "We should consider the validity of everyone who sits in counsel with the king."