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Fenris turns his face toward him.

"Why would a king bother," he asks, "with the blind son of a dead chieftain? I have nothing to give anybody. I can't lead a hunt. I can't hold a line. I'm a burden."

Indrie takes both of his hands.

"You're thinking about this wrong. You're asking what you could offer my king, and what you should be asking is what my king can offer you," Indrie says. "There's no Wolfe clan without you, Fenris. You're the last of the bloodline. Rengara and the Jakadi both know it and neither of them can force you to take up rule. You hold all the power here. You only have to decide how, and whether, you want to wield it."

Fenris doesn't seem to know what to do with that. Indrie can feel it in his hands, a small uncertain tension that comes and goes. His fingers don't quite close around Indrie's and don't quite let go.

"And you're saying your king can offer me freedom," Fenris says after a moment, and his voice isn't entirely steady. "That I wouldn't be his pawn."

"Not a pawn," Indrie tells him, and he's certain enough of it that it comes out without any hesitation at all. "An ally."

Fenris is quiet for another long moment. Then he lets out a breath.

"I don't know these woods," he says. "Not well enough to get us out of them without being caught. I've mapped this camp, but they never stay anywhere long enough for me to learn the ground outside it." His mouth twists. "And I obviously can't see."

"I have eyes enough for the both of us," Indrie says. "What I need is somebody to help me be brave."

Fenris's grip tightens around his fingers until it's nearly painful.

"I don't think you need any help with that, Indrie," he says. "You're braver than I am, and I'm the one with nothing to lose."

Indrie opens his mouth to tell him that's untrue on both counts, and doesn't get to.

The cloth is torn back and the light floods in, and a big man ducks under the frame and takes Indrie by the upper arm. It's the bad arm. Indrie cries out, and the man doesn't notice or doesn't care, and he hauls Indrie up off the ground and out into the cold.

The camp is awake now. The fire has been built back up and there are people around it, and the big man drags him into the middle of all of them and throws him down on his knees in the trodden dirt. There's another man waiting there. The two of them start to argue immediately, loud and fast in the language Indrie doesn't have, and the second one keeps pointing at him. At his face. At his hands.

Then the big man draws a knife.

Indrie doesn't understand. He doesn't understand until two others come in and take him by the shoulders and bear him down, and the knife man crouches and takes his left hand and pulls it out across a flat stone at the edge of the fire and spreads the fingers with his own.

He understands then.

A finger, perhaps. Perhaps the hand. Something small and unmistakable enough to send to a king.

He fights. There's no deciding about it. He throws his whole weight backward and gets one knee under him and tears at the grip on his wrist, and it gains him nothing at all. There are three of them, and the hand on his wrist only presses down harder until the bones grind on the stone.

The fear is enormous and it's very old and he knows every corner of it. He has lived with it for most of his life and he genuinely believed he'd left it behind on a dock in Valen. He can't get a breath. His hands are all he has. His hands are how he takes care of people and how he stopped being a thing and started being somebody, and he lies in the dirt watching the knife come down toward the stone and there is nothing in the world he can do about it.

Someone yells a word he doesn’t understand, but can gather is panicked.

Fenris comes out of the hut faster than Indrie has seen him move, with the staff in his right hand and his left leg a little unsteady, and he doesn't stop at the edge of the crowd. He walks straight through it. He finds the knife man by his voice and says something to him in Jakadi, low and hard and fast, and the knife man says something back.

They argue. Indrie can't follow a word of it. He can only watch, pinned in the dirt with his hand spread out on the stone, and what he's watching is a man who has done this a hundred times before. Fenris knows when to go quiet and when to push. He lets the knife man shout himself out and then says one short thing that makes somebody in the crowd laugh, and the knife man's face changes. There's an argument inside the argument between the knife man and the one who was pointing, and Fenris waits it out with his head tilted and his weight on the staff, perfectly patient. Indrie thinks all the way through it that he has never been so glad to owe anybody anything in his life.

Then the hands on his shoulders let go and haul him up onto his knees.

He doesn't know what has been agreed. His hand is off the stone and he pulls it in against his chest and holds it there with the other one. The knife man comes around behind him and takes the top of his skull in one broad hand, and Indrie feels his head pulled back hard.

He feels the blade go through his hair. It takes one pull. It's ragged and rough and there's a sound he's going to remember for a long time, and then the weight on his scalp lets go all at once.

Indrie gasps. He doesn't know whether it's relief or shock, and he suspects it's a good deal of both.

The man walks away from him with a long dark fistful of it in his hand, most of it still held in the remains of the braid Morgan put in the morning before he rode east. He holds it up to the man he was arguing with and the other man nods. A message. Something to fold into a cloth and send up the road to a king.

They take him back to the hut and put him against the post again, and this time the cord isn't loose.