Chapter 8
Eskil
Bohdi finds him in the armory.
This is not unusual. When Eskil's thoughts turn in on themselves and begin to eat through the walls he's built to contain them, his body takes him to the only place that makes sense: a room full of things designed to be held, sharpened, and pointed at problems. He's been at the whetstone for the better part of an hour, running his longsword along it with the mechanical rhythm of hands that know their work while the mind attached to them is somewhere else entirely, when the heavy door creaks open and Bohdi's boots announce his arrival on the stone floor.
"You've been in here since before dawn," Bohdi says, closing the door behind him.
"I'm aware of how time works."
"That blade doesn't need sharpening. You could split sunlight with it."
Eskil draws the sword along the stone one more time.
The sound is a thin, clean scream that echoes off the walls.
He sets it down, braces both hands on the edge of the workbench, and looks at Bohdi, who has settled himself against the weapons rack with his arms folded across his chest and his massive axe leaning against the wall beside him.
Bohdi's red hair is freshly braided and the tattoos on his hands shift as he crosses his arms, knots and lines that climb from his fingertips to his jawline.
He looks comfortable. Patient. Prepared to wait.
Which is infuriating, because Eskil doesn't want patience right now. He wants to hit something.
"The Jakadi," Eskil says. "Let's talk."
Bohdi straightens. The shift from companionable to operational is seamless; it always is with him. Bohdi can go from a dirty joke to a battle briefing in the space between heartbeats, and this is one of the hundred reasons Eskil trusts him above all others.
Eskil lays it out. Everything the council gave him.
The fabricated intelligence about precious metals in Kalkoa, horseshit, every word of it, designed to draw Rengara's king and a significant portion of his fighting force across the sea on a fool's errand.
The timing of the attack on Askarte, precise and calculated, landing exactly when Rengara was at its most vulnerable.
Forty to fifty fighters, better armed than any border raiding party has a right to be, striking the mine and the granary at dawn in the second week of the voyage.
This was not a raid. It was a strategy. Coordinated, deliberate, and patient in a way the Jakadi have never been before.
Bohdi listens with the focused stillness that means he is memorizing every detail, filing it into the map he keeps inside his skull, the one that tracks every piece on the board, every movement, every possibility. His fingers drum against his forearm once, twice, and then stop.
"They played us," Bohdi says.
"They played us like a fucking fiddle." Eskil picks up the sword and slides it into the scabbard with more force than the action requires. "We sailed halfway to nowhere to scrape dregs out of a dead kingdom while they waltzed into Askarte and helped themselves to our eastern flank."
"The eastern flank held."
"Because of Morgan."
Bohdi nods. "The prince acted fast. Had warriors mobilized before the Jakadi's forward party made it to the outer wall. Smart work."
"Smart work that he understated to me when I got home.
" The anger in Eskil's voice is aimed inward as much as outward.
At himself, for leaving, for taking the bait, for not being here when his kingdom needed him.
At Morgan, for downplaying a coordinated enemy attack as a small engagement and slipping it between herring tariffs and a collapsed wall as though it were a minor scheduling conflict.
"Small engagement at Askarte. Handled. That's what he said to me, Bohdi. Those were his exact words."
"Your brother has a talent for understatement."
"My brother is going to get a very thorough education in the difference between a border skirmish and a calculated assault orchestrated by an enemy faction that fed us false intelligence to get us out of the fucking kingdom."
Bohdi doesn't argue. He knows when to let Eskil burn and when to douse the fire, and right now the fire needs air.
He tilts his head, working through something, and says, "Their resources are limited.
The Jakadi don't have the numbers for a direct assault on Valen.
Not even close. If they tried to take the capital, we'd break them inside a day. "
"Which means they're not trying to take the capital."
"So what are they trying to do?"
Eskil has been turning this over since the council meeting and the answer keeps coming up the same: he doesn't know.
The Jakadi are a fractured faction, tribal in structure, rarely united under a single command.
They raid. They harass. They strike at vulnerable points and melt back into their territory.
They are irritants, not conquerors. And yet the precision of this operation, the quality of the fabricated intelligence, the timing, the coordination between the misdirection and the assault, speaks to a level of organization that is new. That is different.
Precision in an enemy is far more dangerous than strength. A strong enemy can be outmatched. A precise one will take you apart from the inside.
"I don't know what they're after," Eskil admits, and the words taste like iron. "But whatever it is, they've been planning it longer than we've been watching."
Bohdi nods slowly. His fingers have stopped drumming. "What did the council say?"
"The council was useless, as expected."
"The council is always useless. That's what you keep me around for."
Eskil almost smiles. Almost. The muscles in his face make the attempt and are overruled by the tension in his jaw.
He picks up one of his short swords and begins cleaning it, not because it needs cleaning, but because his hands need something to do that isn't reaching for a drink or punching the wall.
Then he tells Bohdi about the Wolfe clan.
Bohdi's face lights up. The change is immediate and unguarded: his eyes sharpen, his posture shifts forward, and there is a hunger in his expression that Eskil recognizes from every strategic conversation they've ever had in which the odds suddenly tipped in their favor.
Bohdi is already listing the strategic advantages, ticking them off on his tattooed fingers with enthusiasm. "Southern trade alone would offset two years of poor harvests. Their mineral output is—"
"Bohdi."
"—and if we could station even a small contingent at the southern pass, the Jakadi would have to think twice about—"
"Bohdi."
His second-in-command stops. Looks at him. Reads his face.
The enthusiasm dies. The change in Bohdi's demeanor is immediate.
"What's it going to cost us?" He asks, and his voice is flat.
Eskil holds his gaze. "The chieftain wants Morgan."
Silence. The armory seems to close in around them, the walls tightening, the flickering torchlight suddenly inadequate. Bohdi does not move. He does not blink. The muscles in his jaw work once, hard, and then he is still again.
"He wants Morgan," Bohdi repeats carefully, as though he hasn't heard correctly.
"As a bride. A consort. The price of the alliance is a marriage between their chieftain and the prince of Rengara."
Bohdi's mouth shuts, and his face closes off, and he is quiet for a very long time.
Eskil knows Bohdi the way he knows his own weapons.
The weight, the reach, the points of weakness.
He has fought beside this man for fifteen years and known him for thirty.
He has watched Bohdi take a warhammer to the ribs and get back up laughing.
He has seen him drink a man twice his size under a table and carry the unconscious body home over one shoulder while singing.
He has never, not once in all those years, seen Bohdi at a loss for words.
Bohdi is never quiet. Bohdi fills silence instinctively and completely, as though emptiness were a personal affront.
His voice is the first thing Eskil hears in the morning and the last thing he hears at night and the constant, steady undercurrent of every day between.
And now he is silent, and the silence is not comfortable.
It is not the silence of a man thinking.
It is loaded and heavy, words held behind the teeth with an effort that shows in the tension of his shoulders, the stillness of his hands, the way his gaze has hardened like stone.
It is deeply, profoundly unusual.
And Eskil knows why, or believes he does.
Because Bohdi knows exactly who Ivan Wolfe is. Of course he does. Bohdi has been collecting what comes north out of those passes for as long as Eskil has, and half of what Eskil knows arrived by way of Bohdi in the first place, and neither of them needs to say first wife or second wife out loud.
So that is what this is. Bohdi has run the same calculations Eskil ran at the council table and arrived at the same place, which is that they are being asked to hand someone they both watched grow into a capable young man over to someone twice his age with a body count.
It is a neat explanation. It accounts for everything Eskil has just seen on his second-in-command's face.
He does not look at it any harder than that.
"What are you thinking?" Eskil asks.
Bohdi's jaw works again. A beat. Another. He lifts his head and there is something in his eyes that Eskil cannot quite name, something raw and bright and dangerous that flickers and is gone so fast it might have been imagined.
"I think," Bohdi says, and his voice is measured in a way it never is, each word placed with deliberate care, "it would be very quiet around the keep without the prince mouthing off to the king."
The words are light. The tone is not.
Then Bohdi pushes himself off the weapons rack and says, "I need the yard."