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"You'd have allies," Eskil says. "You'd have Rengara at your back."

"I'd have Rengara's swords at the border and a hall full of men who'd watched me walk into the doorframe on my first morning." Fenris shakes his head slowly. "I have spent my entire life being the reason a room goes quiet. My father killed my mother over it. I am not going to walk into his hall and sit in his chair and be a joke in it for the rest of my life. I'd rather be nobody on a farm."

Morgan opens his mouth, and then shuts it again.

He cannot argue with any of it. He goes looking for the flaw the way he would in a contract, and there is not one. It is simply true. It is a clean, cold, unanswerable piece of reasoning, and the man across the table from him has clearly been living inside it since he was old enough to understand it.

He looks at his brother. Eskil's face has not changed, but Morgan can see him running it, the numbers of it, the shape of the east with a broken clan in it.

"They won't follow a blind man," Garrik says. "No."

Everybody looks at him.

He is sitting up straighter than his side should let him, and there is something in his face that Morgan has not seen in it before.

"But they will follow a seer," Garrik says.

Nobody says anything.

"You don't know the story because you didn't grow up there," Garrik says, and he is saying it to Fenris. "But every child in the Wolfe hills knows it before they can walk. The Wolf's own eye." He turns his head toward the rest of them. "The first chieftain had a brother. He was born with his eyes clouded. He couldn't see the world in front of him, because he was busy watching the one behind it. That's the story. The god touched him in the cradle and turned his eyes the other way. And the first winter of the clan, the famine winter, when the game had gone and everybody was dying, it was the brother who stood up in the hall and told the pack where to hunt."

Morgan has put his quill down again without noticing.

"They found the herd where he said," Garrik says. "They lived through the winter. Every Wolfe alive comes down from the ones who lived through that winter. It's the oldest story we have. It's the whole reason there is a Wolfe clan." He touches two fingers to his own face, a line across the eyes. "It's why the paint goes over the eyes. Not the mouth. Not the chest. Every warrior who's ever painted for battle in our hills has painted to honor him."

Morgan stares at him.

He is thinking about a gate in the south, and four warriors with dark bands painted across their eyes, and a younger version of himself sitting on a sore horse, looking at that paint with polite diplomatic neutrality and thinking, very privately, that a vow you could wash off with soap and warm water was not much of a vow. He is thinking that he had absolutely no idea what he was looking at.

"Your eyes," Garrik says to Fenris, "are pale. They're pale enough to see across a hall. Anybody who's ever heard that story will know what they are the moment you walk in."

"They'll know within a day," Fenris says. His voice has gone rough. "Garrik. They'll know it's a lie before I've finished my first meal. I'll walk into a table. I'll reach for a cup that isn't there. I'll turn to the wrong door."

"You won't," Garrik says.

"You can't know that."

"I can, because you won't be walking anywhere on your own." Garrik leans toward him. "Not once. Not into the hall and not out of it. Not to the hunt and not to the council table. You'll walk everywhere with your second at your shoulder, and your second will be talking to you the entire time, low and constant, telling you what's in the room." He spreads his good hand on the table. "And a clan that's expecting a seer won't look at that and see a blind man being led. They'll see a seer with his counselor beside him, murmuring in his ear. It's the same picture. It only depends on what you're told to look for."

Fenris opens his mouth. Nothing comes out.

"Let me be your eyes," Garrik says.

He says it plainly, without any ornament on it, and it sits in the middle of the table and nobody says anything at all.

Morgan understands, in the space of that silence, that this is the best chance they have.

He can see the whole of it laid out at once, the way he sees a ledger when the last column finally comes right. Garrik did not love Ivan. Nobody at this table is under any illusion about that. But Garrik loves his clan. He loves it so fiercely that he rode alone to an enemy king's gate with his chest cut open to beg for help keeping it whole, and he has just offered, in front of that king, to spend the rest of his life standing at a blind man's shoulder, telling him where the doors are. There is nothing Dade can offer anybody in those hills that is worth what that is worth.

A legitimate heir with the oldest story the clan has written across his face. A second who will die before he lets that story crack. And Rengara's swords at their backs.

Morgan can build a treaty on that. He can build one that will hold for twenty years.

He looks up the table at his brother.

Eskil's face is perfectly impassive. To anybody else in this room, the king of Rengara is sitting with his arms folded and his expression giving away nothing whatsoever. Morgan has been reading that face since before he could read anything else. He can see, behind it, that Eskil has already run the numbers on all of it, and come out at exactly the same place.

Eskil meets his eyes and gives him the smallest nod.