Chapter 29
Eskil
The council agrees on nothing.
This is the first thing worth knowing about them, and Eskil has built fourteen years of governance around it.
They are twelve men and women whose primary function, as far as he has ever been able to determine, is to disagree with him and with one another in the most time-consuming manner available.
They could not settle the color of the sky if he held the session outdoors.
They are the reason Morgan exists in a diplomatic capacity.
They are the reason his jaw aches every third evening.
So when they agree, it means they met without him first.
They agreed about the Kalkoa voyage before he came through the door.
They agreed about the Wolfe envoy before he came through the door.
Today they are unanimous inside four minutes, and Eskil sits at the head of the war room table with his arms folded and understands that whatever is coming has been rehearsed.
What they want makes his blood go cold.
He listens to Bohdi present the intelligence.
His second is thorough. Maps spread across the scarred oak, troop positions marked in charcoal, the timeline of Jakadi movements laid out in order and without flourish, because Bohdi has been briefing this king for fourteen years and knows exactly how much decoration he will tolerate.
The council listens. They ask questions, and the questions are good ones, pointed and specific, because whatever else they are they have governed long enough to know the difference between information and implication.
Bohdi answers each one with the focused calm he keeps for rooms where his axe is not the most useful thing about him.
When he finishes, Seren leans back in her chair.
She has been on this council since Eskil's father sat where Eskil is sitting. She has held it through two kings and more crises than most people survive, and she says what everyone at the table has already worked out, because that is what Seren is for.
"The alliance proposal is a trap. The betrothal is the mechanism. Send the prince south and we lose our leverage and our heir in one stroke."
"Agreed," says Vigdis. "Which is exactly why we should send him."
Eskil's head turns. Slowly.
"We know what they intend." Vigdis does not soften it and does not look away.
She found the fabrication in the Kalkoa intelligence and she has clearly been working this problem since.
"They do not know we know. Ivan Wolfe is expecting a compliant diplomat.
An unsuspecting prince arriving for his betrothal with a guard escort and a trunk of wedding clothes.
He is not expecting us to be three steps ahead of him. "
"You are suggesting we play along," Seren says.
"I am suggesting we use their own plan against them. Send Morgan. Let him play the willing bride. Let the chieftain believe the scheme is working, and let him open his own gates to do it."
Nobody speaks.
Eskil leans forward. His arms are on the table and his jaw is set and he has been listening to this thing assemble itself in real time, and every instinct he owns is telling him to put a stop to it.
That his brother is not a piece on a board.
That the prince of Rengara is not going to be used as bait in a plan that requires him to walk through the gates of a stronghold belonging to a man who executed his last wife for trying to leave.
"No."
He says it quietly. He learned a long time ago that the words people argue with are the loud ones.
Vigdis does not flinch. "Your majesty—"
"You are asking me to put my brother on a horse and send him four hundred leagues south, through passes we do not hold, to a stronghold that has never been taken, and hand him over at the gate to a man who had his last wife put to death in front of witnesses for wanting to leave him.
" His voice does not rise. It goes flatter, which everybody at this table knows is the worse sign.
"Say the plan back to me and tell me where I have it wrong. "
"You do not have it wrong."
"Then we are finished."
Nobody moves. Alrik shifts in his seat and thinks better of whatever he was about to offer.
"And if we refuse they come in the spring," Seren says. No heat in it at all. "With the passes open and the Jakadi at our eastern reaches and a thousand fighters on our southern border who have never lost on their own ground."
"I have fought wars. I'm not afraid of shedding blood."
"You have. You fought them with the whole of your strength behind you and your borders quiet." Seren folds her hands on the oak. "You have never fought one on two fronts with a hole in your side."
She's not wrong, whether he'll admit it or not.
This is the trouble with the council. They are slow and self-important and they took four hours last spring to approve a bridge, and every so often one of them says a thing that is simply true, and there is no swordwork available against it.
The calculation is on the table in front of him and it is correct.
He can see every line of it. One prince against a kingdom.
It is the same calculation Morgan has been running since the first letter came, in the same tidy hand he uses for the grain accounts, and Eskil has hated it every time it has been laid out and has not once found the error in it.
He is not going to find the error today.
But they are talking about a boy who fell asleep against his chest in council meetings because he was too young to be there and too stubborn to be sent away.
Who learned his letters at this table, at that end of it, because there was nobody left in the keep willing to teach a child king's brother.
Who ate first through two famine winters because Eskil told him, every night for two years, that he had already had his portion.
The council can have their arithmetic. They cannot have him.
"Find another way," Eskil says.
"There is no other—"
"Then find one anyway. That is what you are for."
The silence that follows is the worst kind. Twelve people looking at the table, because they have all arrived somewhere he is refusing to go and none of them wants to be the one who says so out loud.
Then Vigdis says, "We are not proposing to send him alone."
Eskil looks up.
"When the doors are open and the guard is down." Vigdis holds his eyes and does not blink. "We send an assassin in with him who can end it. If Ivan's reign is ended, Wolfe struggles to regroup and we hit them in the chaos."
The words go down on the table between them.
And something in Eskil's chest, which has been pulled taut since the day Seren first said the word bride in this room, shifts. It does not loosen. It shifts, the way a load shifts when the weight comes off the one strap that was about to give.
"An assassin," he says. "You mean Bohdi."
At the far end, Bohdi tilts his head at the sound of his name.
Vigdis nods. "Bohdi accompanies the prince as his escort.
Standard protocol. A prince arrives for a betrothal with his personal guard, and nobody remarks on it.
Once he is inside, he has the access to assess their defenses and identify the chieftain's vulnerabilities and—" She makes a brief decisive gesture.
"—resolve the situation. Before any vows are exchanged, ideally. "
"And if it goes wrong?" Eskil's voice is level. Cold. "If they see through it? If the chieftain moves faster than we expect? If they're compromised before they can act?"
"Then we have a war with the Wolfe clan," Seren says flatly. "Which we will have if we refuse the betrothal, or delay too long, or let the Jakadi come at us before we are ready. This gives us the first move." She pauses. "Trust Bohdi to get the prince to safety."
Eskil looks around the table. Twelve faces. Twelve nods. Not one dissent.
They are right. He has known they were right since Seren opened her mouth and he has been arguing anyway, the way a man argues with a tide.
The plan is sound, which is a thing that should be a comfort and is not, because the sound plan requires him to put his brother on a horse and send him south into the hands of a man who wants him behind a wall.
Protected by nothing but Bohdi's axe.
He looks at Bohdi. Bohdi looks back. Decades of shared language, spoken in glances and silences and the angle of a raised eyebrow, and it says: I can do this. Not bravado. Not eagerness. He knows his own capabilities and he is stating them.
It is not enough. Nothing anybody put in front of him today was going to be enough. But it is the only thing in this room he can get his hands around, and he finds that he has got his hands around it.
Eskil nods.
"Fine," he says. "Bohdi goes with the prince. They leave in three days."
The council disperses. Chairs grind back over stone, documents are gathered, voices drop to murmurs as they filter out through the side doors, already spinning the decision into orders and timetables and supply lists.
Eskil stays where he is, hands flat on the oak, looking at the map with the Jakadi positions still marked in Bohdi's charcoal.
Bohdi waits until the room is empty. Then he drops into the chair beside Eskil and stretches his legs out and crosses his ankles on the table, which violates approximately six protocols and which Eskil does not care about in the slightest.
"So," Bohdi says. "That's a little unexpected."
"It was decided before I sat down."
Bohdi drums his fingers on his thigh. The rhythm is wrong, scattered rather than steady, and Eskil notes it and says nothing about it.
It occurs to him, and not for the first time, that Bohdi has been unusually quiet on the subject of the Wolfe betrothal.
Every other political development gets the full treatment.
Commentary, opinion, profanity, the occasional piece of genuine strategic insight buried inside a crude joke.
This one gets silence. The weighted, careful kind that means the thoughts behind it are not the kind Bohdi is prepared to say out loud.