Chapter 4
Eskil
Eskil assembles the council without Morgan present.
This is a bad idea. He knows it is a bad idea the same way he knows when a storm is coming or when the man across the table is lying to him, by instinct honed on years of being right about things he would rather have been wrong about.
Morgan is the buffer. Morgan is the thin and indispensable membrane that keeps the assembled elders of Rengara from receiving exactly what Eskil thinks of their opinions, delivered at volume, with embellishments that would make the gods wince.
Without him there is nothing between Eskil's paper-thin patience and the end of it except his own self-control, which on a generous day he would rate as middling.
This meeting has to happen without his brother anyway.
He knew it from Vigdis's face when she asked to convene, and from three other faces when she did.
The weighted, sideways looks people give each other when they are about to hand you something heavy and want to be certain you are the one holding it, and not the boy it concerns.
The war room is unchanged from the last time he sat at its head, which was before the voyage, before Kalkoa, before a slim dark-haired healer took his entire fucking life apart with two steady hands and a request he couldn't grant.
The long oak table still dominates the room, scarred by decades of fists and daggers and goblets slammed down mid-argument.
The banners on the stone need replacing.
The hearth is cold because nobody thought to light it.
The windows are narrow and set high and let in a thin grey light that does no favors for anyone sitting under it.
A dozen men and women arrange themselves around the table with the unhurried self-importance of people who believe their presence is a gift. Eskil takes the head, stretches his legs out under the oak, folds his arms, and lets them talk.
The first order of business is what he expected.
Irritation. The polite, measured, insufferable kind these people have spent decades perfecting, in which a king is told what he has done wrong in a tone that does not technically constitute treason.
The voyage was a waste of time and resources.
The treasury disbursement barely covers the cost of the journey, a pittance of coin, and a handful of metals that need extensive refining before they are worth anything at all.
"And the intelligence we acted on," Vigdis says, and pauses to select her word with visible care, "was unreliable."
Eskil could offer a more precise term.
The intelligence was horseshit. Pure, uncut, steaming horseshit of the highest order, and he knew it the moment he set foot on Kalkoan soil and saw the state of the place.
A kingdom rotting from the crown down. Mines picked clean, fields ruined by neglect, people too starved and too beaten to do anything but bow their heads and wait for the next boot.
No precious metals. No strategic advantage.
A dying king propped up by a healer too good at his work and too trapped to stop doing it, and a court of sycophants feeding off the carcass.
He says none of this. Morgan would be proud.
"I am aware the expedition did not yield what we anticipated. I was there.” His voice is even, which is how it always starts during these sorts of meetings. “What else?"
The what else lands the way he intends it: an invitation and a warning in the same breath. I know you are not here to tell me things I already know. Get to it.
A beat of silence. They glance at one another. The weighted looks again. His patience is slipping through his fingers like sand.
"The intelligence was fabricated," Vigdis finally says. "Deliberately. The Jakadi wanted us to have it."
She lays it out for him. Not bad information born of incompetence.
Not stale reports that failed to account for Kalkoa's decline.
A fabrication, engineered with care and precision and the kind of strategic patience that sets Eskil's teeth on edge, built to draw the king and a large part of his fighting force out of Rengara.
While he was four hundred leagues away playing conqueror and rescuer and every other role he had no business performing, the Jakadi attacked the eastern reaches. The mining village at Askarte.
Eskil's fist hits the table.
The sound is enormous, bone against oak, and it rings off the stone and rattles the inkwells in their brass holders. One goes over. Black ink bleeds across a document nobody moves to save. Vigdis leans back as though the spill might be catching. Fourteen years of this is why the table is so worn.
"I was briefed on a skirmish at Askarte.
" His voice comes up out of him loud and rough and he does not haul it back down.
"A skirmish. Handled. One sentence, dropped between the herring tariffs and a hole in the western wall.
Are you telling me my brother stood in front of me yesterday and filed it down to something I would not chase? "
He already knows the answer. That is the part lodged under his ribs like a swallowed stone.
Seren folds her hands. She has been on this council since Eskil's father sat where Eskil is sitting, and possibly since the table was built. She, like the table, has also seen better days.
"The prince became aware within hours," she says. "He mobilized warriors from Valen and the nearest garrison. The village held. Casualties were minimal. The Jakadi were repelled." A pause. "He handled it well, your majesty. Whatever else is true."
Handled. Morgan's word, coming back at him in an old woman's mouth.
Eskil files it in the place where he keeps things that will result in a conversation his brother does not enjoy. The file is extensive. At this point it is practically a library.
He makes his hand unclench.
The council trades looks. The specific kind, eyes meeting across the table and dropping and meeting again, that comes before information he is not going to enjoy.
He knows the shape of it before it arrives.
He has sat here long enough to read their silences, the pauses where they decide what order to deliver the blows in, the set of their shoulders when they are bracing for him.
Whatever is coming, they have discussed it without him.
They have formed opinions. They have probably rehearsed.
He hates that. He has always hated it. A room of people who serve at his pleasure, sitting around in his absence, working out how best to manage him. As though he were a horse and the trick were in the bit.
"Out with it."
Seren clears her throat.
"The attack was likely not foremost in the prince's mind," she says. "Days after Askarte was relieved, an envoy arrived from the south. The Wolfe clan has proposed a formal alliance with Rengara."
Eskil sits back.
The Wolfe clan.
He turns the name over the way he would turn a coin of uncertain value, checking the edges, checking the weight.
Reclusive to the point of religion. Sealed into their southern stronghold behind passes that discourage visitors and terrain that punishes armies all the same.
They do not ally. They do not negotiate.
They sit behind their walls and mind their own business, having decided some generations ago that everyone else's business is beneath them.
Every approach in forty years has come back as a blunt refusal, or as silence so complete it may as well have been a closed fist.
And now they are offering.
An alliance would be worth more than anything he has ever been handed.
The southern overland routes, which cut months off the sea journey to the lower kingdoms and stay open when the passes north close.
Mineral wealth that is rumored to be considerable and is certainly untapped by anyone who is not a Wolfe.
And their warriors, who may not be cut of the same hardy cloth as the Rengara, but who Eskil would not dismiss as allies if the call needed to be made.
On its face it is the opportunity of a generation. The thing a king thinks about when he cannot sleep and the borders are too long and the enemies are too patient and the treasury is too light.
So why is every person at this table holding their shoulders like they expect him to put it through a window?
Maybe because he knows the man behind those walls.
Ivan Wolfe. Forty-four years old, chieftain since he was thirty, and the kind of man who has had nothing but disdain for Eskil's rule since he took the crown.
The man has always seen him as beneath him, despite the vast differences in the sizes of their armies and lands, and that says something all on its own.
They've been ruling for the exact same amount of time, but their sovereignties could not be more varying in scale.
Eskil rules a kingdom. Ivan rules a stretch of land that, while unmistakably valuable, requires almost nothing to hold.
Which is to speak of nothing of the man’s personal life.
Eskil has never met him and does not need to, because he has spent two decades collecting whatever comes north out of those mountains.
Ivan buried his first wife in childbed. That is nobody's fault and it happens in every hall in the north and Eskil will not hold it against a man.
The second one he executed. She tried to leave the clan and he had her put to death for it, in front of witnesses.
The account that came north was neither apologetic nor especially detailed, because the Wolfe clan does not explain itself to anybody and nobody down there is stupid enough to ask twice.
How a man treats his partner tells you how he will treat his allies.
He looks at Seren. "What's the catch?"
The silence that follows has weight to it. It comes up from the floor and fills the room and keeps rising. Nobody moves. They look at their hands, or at the spreading ink, or at the narrow windows where the grey light is doing its thin cheerless work.
Seren says it, because that is what Seren is for. The blade nobody else wants to hold.
"The chieftain wants Morgan."
Eskil's blood goes cold.
Not the slow chill of a season turning. Not anger cooling into patience. This is immediate, and it is total, and every nerve in him pulls taut at once.
"What do you mean," he says, very quietly, "he wants Morgan?"
Seren does not flinch. She has held this council through two kings and more crises than most people survive, and she meets his eyes without moving hers.
"As a bride."
The silence in the war room is absolute.
It has mass. It presses on the walls and the windows and on everyone breathing under it. Nobody blinks. Eskil can hear the blood in his own ears, a low rolling tide that has nothing to do with his heartbeat.
He clenches his jaw until he can hear his teeth creak, a small private destruction his body performs because his hands are not permitted to perform a larger one.
His fist has not moved since the first blow.
The knuckles are white. The tattoos on his forearm pull taut over muscle doing everything in its power to stay still.
A bride.
His brother. The six-year-old who clung to his leg and cried for their mother.
The boy who played at his feet while he held council at nineteen.
The young man who handles the books and the diplomacy and every other thing that requires patience and literacy and a temperament Eskil was not issued.
The prince who held the kingdom upright while Eskil was an ocean away chasing a fiction, who mobilized a defense and repelled an invasion and reported it as one sentence between tariffs.
A soft heart and a mouth that argues the way other men fight.
And Ivan Wolfe, who kills the people who try to leave him, has sent an envoy north to ask for him. As though he were negotiating for a trade of timber.
Someone is talking. Alrik, on his left, the young one with the unfortunate beard and a compulsion to fill silences that do not need him.
"The strategic merit alone, your majesty, is unprecedented. An offer of this nature, in this hour, with the borders as they stand—"
"Shut up."
Alrik’s mouth snaps closed.
"Is there anything else," he asks the room at large, "or have I had the full measure of your counsel for today?"
"The matter will require a formal response," Seren says, mildly.
Absolutely fucking not.
Eskil stands. The chair grinds back over the stone and two people flinch.
He puts both hands flat on the table and leans in.
"I will respond. On my own terms. And this council will not send a single word south without my seal on it. Is that understood?"
A murmur of assent. The kind that is given because the alternative is not assent, and the man asking has a sword at his hip and a documented history of using it.
Eskil straightens, turns and walks out.
The door slams shut behind him, and the council lets out a collective breath that not one of them will admit to afterward.