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"Harrak."

"They've been asking for you, my lord. All afternoon." Harrak glances at the cell door. "They want to talk."

Eskil stops.

"They want to talk," he repeats.

"That's what they've been saying. In Rengaran, the one who has any. We will talk to your king. Over and over, since midday. I thought you'd want to know before you went in."

That is almost a disappointment. Eskil stands there and has to admit it to himself. He had come down those stairs with a very clear idea of how the next several hours were going to go, and it had involved a great deal less conversation.

Still. He is not an animal. He is always willing to be diplomatic.

"Bring them out to me," Eskil says. "One at a time. Not together. Put me in the guardroom at the end, with a table and two chairs, and bring them in one after another. When you take one back, you put him in the little cell by the stairs, not with the others. I don't want them comparing notes."

"Yes, my lord."

"And Harrak."

"My lord?"

"Stay in the room. Behind them. You don't need to do anything." Eskil takes his coat off and hangs it on the peg. "They just need to be able to hear you breathing."

The guardroom is small and it has one lamp. Eskil sits on the far side of the table with his back to the wall and his hands folded on the wood, and the first one comes in.

He is young. That is the first thing Eskil notices about him, and it does not move him one inch. He is perhaps twenty-two and there is a split in his lip from the fighting and he is trying so hard to look unafraid that it is coming off him in waves. He sits down when Harrak puts him in the chair and he looks at the table.

"You wanted to talk," Eskil says. "Talk."

The boy has almost no Rengaran. Eskil speaks Jakadi, but he’s not going to give him a word of it in his own keep. The truth comes out in pieces, and Eskil lets it come out in pieces and puts it back together himself. It is nothing Eskil did not already have. It is the same story Fenris told him this morning in his study with the door shut, sitting very straight in the chair with Garrik beside him and speaking in a level, precise voice while Morgan wrote it down.

The Jakadi never meant any of it. They never meant the alliance with the Wolfe. They told Ivan they would stand beside him and they told him they would help him take Rengara, and it was always a lie. The plan was only ever to get Rengara and the Wolfe at each other's throats. Let them bleed each other white through a winter. Then come across the border in the spring when the snow was off the passes and walk in over whatever was left.

Eskil sends him back. He brings in the second, and the second tells him the same thing in worse Rengaran. So does the third, a squat bald man who talks very fast and keeps glancing at Harrak.

Three for three. It is, on its face, the most useful thing Eskil has had out of anybody in this keep for a month, and it lines up perfectly with what Fenris said. It is not enough.

The fourth one comes in.

He is the one with the most Rengaran. Eskil can tell before he opens his mouth, from the way he sits down, with a kind of settled confidence the other three did not have. He is bigger than the others and older, with a dark beard cut close.

"You wanted to talk," Eskil says.

"We tell you what you want," the man says. "Then you let us go."

"You tell me what I want," Eskil agrees, "and then I might not kill you where the others can hear."

The man tells it. It is the same story, in better words, with more names in it. Eskil listens to every word.

Then he leans forward, because he thinks that maybe this is one who can give him a little more than the others.

"Here is my problem with it," Eskil says. "You're a small people. I don't say it to insult you. I've been fighting you for fourteen years and I've counted you every one of them. The Wolfe clan can put a quarter of the men in the field that I can, on their best day. And you can put half what the Wolfe can." He turns one hand over on the table. "So you let us tear each other up all winter. Fine. Say it works. Say the Wolfe hurt me badly. I still come out of the spring with twice what you have, and you know that, and your commanders know that, and nobody sane crosses a border into those numbers. So there was something else. What was the something else?"

The man says nothing for a moment. He looks at Eskil's hands on the table.

"The prince," the man says.

Eskil waits.