Page 13 of Tending the Ache

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."