Page 27 of Fought it Through the Teeth

They ride out at midmorning with a small escort — four warriors in boiled leather and face paint, the kind of honor guard that says I trust you enough to bring you here and also I don't trust you enough to bring you here alone. Bohdi notes the number. He notes the weapons. He notes that two of them are carrying bows, which is odd for an escort and less odd for men who have been told to put an arrow between his shoulder blades if he does something unfortunate with the information he is about to receive.

Ivan is in an expansive mood. He has been warming to Bohdi for days now — the sparring, the ale, the manufactured camaraderie that Bohdi has been laying down with the careful, cheerful persistence of water wearing at stone. The man wants a peer, and Bohdi recognizes the shape of it because he has seen the loneliness of command in Eskil a hundred times. The difference is that Eskil has Morgan and Bohdi and Indrie and a kingdom full of people who would die for him. Ivan has warriors who fear him and a bride-to-be who despises him and a dead woman's blood on his reputation, and the nearest thing to companionship the man has found in this stronghold is a grinning northern spy who is actively plotting his assassination.

Bohdi almost feels sorry for him. Almost.

The road south from the stronghold cuts through dense forest and then opens up into a wide river valley, and this is where Ivan's holdings spread out before them. The warchief sweeps a hand across the vista, proud and expansive, displaying his life's work, and Bohdi leans forward in the saddle and makes a low, appreciative sound and begins counting.

Corrals first. Wooden-fenced enclosures running along the river flat, and there are too many of them. The Wolfe clan runs horses — Ivan mentioned this on the tour, proud of breeding stock he treats as currency — but the corrals Bohdi is looking at could hold three times the herd Ivan described. They are not full now. Some are empty entirely, the gates standing open, the ground inside churned by hooves that have been and gone. Bohdi counts twelve enclosures. The clan's horse stock, by his estimation, requires four.

"Impressive corrals," he says.

Ivan grins. "We breed the finest horses south of the mountains. I'll show you the stallions later."

Bohdi nods, easy and interested, and files it.

Fodder stores next. Long, low-roofed structures built against the hillside, stacked to the rafters with hay and grain. Bohdi has quartered armies. He knows what it takes to feed a fighting force through a campaign, and he knows what it takes to feed a clan through a southern winter, and the two numbers are not the same. The stores he is looking at are the latter masquerading as the former — enough feed to sustain not just the Wolfe horses but hundreds more, for months, through conditions considerably harder than anything this mild green country could throw at them.

He lets out a low whistle. "You're well provisioned."

"A man who doesn't prepare for winter deserves the hunger," Ivan says, with quotable certainty. He has obviously said the phrase many times and enjoys how it sounds.

Bohdi hums agreement and files it as well.

Fresh-cut timber. This is the thing that pulls the picture into focus. Stacked along the riverbank in neat, squared rows — palisade logs, stripped and seasoned, ready for assembly. Cook-fire wood piled beside it, cut to length, bundled and stored under tarps to keep it dry. And beyond the timber, in a flat clearing that has been stripped of brush and leveled with obvious care, the unmistakable footprint of a camp that has not yet been built. Fire pits dug and lined with stone. Latrine trenches marked with stakes. Water channels cut from the river in precise, military intervals.

Bohdi walks the ground in his head and adds all the pieces together. He has been doing this since Eskil first sat him down with a supply manifest and told him to figure out how many men they could feed for how long on what they had. The answer had been not enough, and Eskil had said that's why we take theirs. The corrals hold horses for a force of five hundred. The fodder sustains that force for a season. The timber builds a palisade camp large enough to quarter them. The fire pits, the latrine trenches, the water channels — all of it sized and spaced for a military encampment, not a clan's overflow.

He is standing in a staging ground for a force considerably larger than the Wolfe clan can field.

Ivan is watching him, waiting to be admired, and Bohdi gives him what he wants. He turns in the saddle and says, with genuine warmth and not a shred of genuine feeling, "Chief, this is remarkable. How long have you been building this?"

"Two years," Ivan says, and the pride in his voice is so naked it borders on obscene. "A man is measured by what he builds. Any fool can fight. It takes vision to prepare."

"Eskil would be impressed," Bohdi says, and watches the light in Ivan's eyes flare at the mention of the northern king's name, because that is what Ivan wants — recognition from the only ruler in the region whose military reputation exceeds his own. "He's always said the south doesn't understand logistics. I'll have to tell him he was wrong."

Ivan straightens in his saddle. His chest swells. He looks sideways at Bohdi with something that is either affection or acquisitiveness. "A man is measured by who he chooses to stand beside."

"Couldn't agree more," Bohdi says with a grin.

They ride the perimeter. Ivan points out features with childish enthusiasm — the smithy built beside the river for water-cooled forging, the armory dug into the hillside where the temperature stays constant year-round, the training ground at the eastern edge of the valley where the terrain has been shaped into a series of tactical obstacles. Bohdi asks the right questions in the right order. He asks about forge output and gets a number. He asks about training rotations and gets a schedule. He asks about supply chains.

"The southern trade routes bring iron and leather from the Jakadi settlements every six weeks," Ivan tells him, expansive and unguarded. "Regular as the tide."

Bohdi does not let his expression change. He asks how long the arrangement has been in place and Ivan says over a year, and Bohdi says that is shrewd, and Ivan preens, and the numbers keep stacking in Bohdi's head. Wolfe horses. Jakadi iron. Wolfe warriors. Jakadi reinforcements. A staging ground big enough for an army that doesn't exist yet, built by a chieftain who is assembling the pieces of it from two different factions and waiting for the moment to put them together.

And the moment, Bohdi understands with cold clarity, is the wedding.

A northern prince married to a southern warchief. An alliance that gives the Wolfe clan legitimate access to Rengara — not as invaders but as family, as in-laws, as partners with a claim on the throne through the body of the man sitting at the chieftain's table. And behind that alliance, invisible and deniable, the Jakadi — feeding the machine with iron and men, taking their cut in access and territory, building toward something that makes the border skirmishes look like what they were. Distractions. Feints. The left hand waving while the right hand assembles a fist.

Bohdi shakes his head with the appearance of genuine admiration. "You've thought of everything."

Ivan reaches across the gap between their horses and grips Bohdi's forearm in the warrior's clasp. His grip is strong and his eyes are bright with fervent sincerity, convinced he has found someone worthy of his vision. "When this is done," Ivan says, "I'll need good men beside me. Men who understand what we're building."

"I'd be honored," Bohdi says, and clasps his arm back, and smiles into the face of a man he is going to kill, and feels nothing about it except impatience.

On the ride home the shadows are getting long and the escort fans out along the road, two ahead and two behind, and Ivan draws his horse alongside Bohdi's and talks with easy flow, warmed by an afternoon of being admired. He talks about the future — about what the south will look like under unified leadership, about trade, about the weakness of the northern kingdoms in winter, about the foolishness of kings who let sentiment interfere with strategy.

Then Ivan asks, casual as weather, whether Eskil would ever come south himself.