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He has gotten as far as this. They need a Jakadi who knows where the camps are, and they need him alive. Not willing, because willing would be a miracle and Morgan does not build on miracles, but breathing, and in a position to be spoken to at length by somebody patient enough to find the seam in him.

The problem is that every Jakadi they have taken in two years has been taken in a skirmish, by men whose entire instinct, drilled into them since they were old enough to hold a weapon, is to leave nobody alive. The word prisoner does not exist in the vocabulary of a border engagement. It barely exists in the vocabulary of Valen's military at all. Eskil's men are trained to be fast and final and thorough, and they are all three, and the result is that Eskil has the most effective fighting force in the northern provinces and not a single living source of intelligence on the other side of his own border. It is, Morgan thinks, a very Eskil-shaped problem. Brilliant in its construction, completely blind in one direction, and fixable only if somebody is willing to stand in front of his brother and tell him he has been doing it wrong.

Morgan is composing the argument he intends to put to Eskil when they reach Valen.

It is going to work. Probably. It really depends on what sort of mood Eskil is in once he learns that this entire endeavor to Helde has been for naught.

Then there are hooves on the road behind them, coming fast. Not the easy rhythm of a messenger holding pace but the hard flat urgent drumming of a horse being ridden at something very close to its limit. Bohdi turns his horse across the track and puts himself in front of Morgan without appearing to have moved at all.

It is Dagny.

She pulls up in front of them in a spray of grit and road dust, her horse blowing hard, its flanks dark with sweat and heaving. Morgan sees her face and everything in his chest drops straight through the floor of him, because he has seen that expression before. It is what Dagny looks like when there are a great many things going wrong at once and she is only capable of doing a very small amount toward fixing any of them. She has taken the measure of a disaster and found it larger than her hands, and she is furious about the difference.

"The Jakadi have Indrie," Dagny says.

Morgan's hands go numb on the reins.

It happens all at once. Not a gradual loss of feeling but a sudden total absence of it, the lines between his hands and the rest of him cut clean through. The leather sits in his fingers and he cannot feel it. The horse shifts underneath him and he registers the movement as information rather than sensation.

She gives it fast and flat, which is what a good soldier does, and Dagny is a good soldier before she is anything else, and the friendship in her is not permitted to interfere with the report. Not now. Not with this. It comes out cleanly and in one motion, without hesitation and without apology.

Indrie went out to a birth on the east road three days ago and did not come back. He was expected back from the farmstead by midmorning and he did not arrive. Eskil rode out with an escort and read the ground. Seven riders or eight, because the tracks overlapped in places and were difficult to separate, but the consensus was seven at minimum, heading east. Fast, organized, deliberate. Not a raiding party stumbling into an opportunity. A group of men who went to a specific place at a specific time and took a specific person, and knew exactly who they were taking and exactly where they were going with him.

"Where is he now?" Bohdi asks. “The king. Where is he?”

Morgan looks over, and the man on the horse beside him has gone somewhere else entirely.

There is no seam in it. There is no visible transition, no moment where Bohdi sets aside one version of himself and picks up another. One breath ago Morgan was riding next to the man who held him by the fire last night, who sat behind him on a fallen log and put both arms around him and rested his chin on the top of Morgan's head. Now he is riding next to the king's hand. And they are the same person. They are always the same person, and that is the unsettling thing, the thing Morgan has never quite been able to reconcile. It is not that Bohdi becomes somebody else. It is that the warmth and the steadiness and the terrible patience are still there underneath, still present, still him, and the thing sitting on top of them is also still him: the cold tactical clarity, the absolute stillness, the voice that has dropped half a register and lost every trace of softness. Morgan has known this man his entire life and he has never once gotten used to watching it happen.

"He said to send you east," Dagny says. "I don't know whether they've found him. I don't know where Eskil is or how far he's gotten. I only know he sent me with orders to find you, and he said you'd pick up the trail better than anyone else he had."

"East of Valen," Bohdi says. It is not a question. His eyes are fixed on Dagny's face, not aggressive and not threatening but simply present in a way that makes it very clear he is processing everything she says considerably faster than she can say it. "Then he is in front of us. He has been in front of us all day."

Morgan stares at him.

"There are two camps they keep coming back to on this road. The cedar forest north of the Tarn road," Bohdi says, as though he is reading it off a list, "and the Salyk riverbend, which is about four miles further south and which they keep going back to even though it is riddled with nests of badgers and has been for years." He lifts one shoulder in a half-shrug, a small gesture in the middle of all that stillness. "The cedars sit half a day out of Valen. That puts the tree line half a day up this track, the way we are already pointed, and the Tarn turn is the last bend before it."

It is the sort of information Bohdi would carry without knowing when he would need it, filed away in whatever vast unorganized archive sits behind those quiet eyes, among the trade routes and the patrol schedules. He files things somewhere he does not label and does not organize and does not think about again, and then the moment it becomes relevant it surfaces whole and unhurried. Morgan does not know when Bohdi started doing it. He suspects the answer is always. He knows it is one of the things that makes Bohdi invaluable to Eskil, and it is not the fighting or the loyalty or the willingness to stand between the king and whatever is trying to kill him today. It is this. The watching, the remembering, the quiet and relentless accumulation of everything.

"Then we decide which one to check first," Dagny says. She gathers her reins and her horse tosses its head, sensing her impatience. "Whichever is closest. We ride for it and if we're wrong we ride for the other."

"No." Bohdi's voice does not change. It stays exactly where it is, level and unhurried and certain. "You're taking the prince back to Valen."

"Excuse me?" Morgan says.

They both ignore him, which is unfortunately how it usually goes with these two. It is a thing they have in common, a shared and apparently unshakable conviction that Morgan's opinion on matters concerning his own safety is interesting but ultimately decorative, to be heard and acknowledged and then set gently to one side while the adults in the room get on with the business of keeping him alive. They do not coordinate it. They do not need to. It is simply a fundamental feature of the way they relate to him.

"With respect," Dagny says, in a tone that contains absolutely none, "I have known that man since the first day we found him. Since before he could speak a word of anything we could understand." Her jaw tightens, and something comes into her face that Morgan has seen before, the ferocity Dagny reserves for the people she has decided are hers, which is not a long list and is not a negotiable one. "I taught him to say rope. And fish. And friend. I am not turning around one day short of where he is so I can walk a grown man down a road he has already ridden."

"He is the crown prince of Rengara." Bohdi says it slowly and carefully, with the exaggerated patience of somebody explaining a very simple thing to a very small child he does not want to frighten. "We do not send him on his own. We do not send him on his own regardless of whether we are an hour from Valen or a week from it."

"We don't have to send him on his own." Dagny jerks her chin up the road ahead of them, toward the bend and the country past it. "We bring him with us and drop him in Askarte on the way through. It's right there. It's the next walls on this road. We collect him when we're finished."

Bohdi turns in the saddle and looks at her for a long moment. It is not a kind look. He is visibly reconsidering a number of assumptions he has been making about the intelligence of the person in front of him.

"You want to leave the prince four miles from a hostile enemy force. That is the plan you have landed on. You want to put the heir to the throne nearer to the people who have just taken one member of the king's household than his own brother's gates are, and then ride away and leave him there."

"Askarte sits on the edge of the cedar forest." Dagny does not flinch. Dagny does not flinch from anything, which is one of the things Morgan loves about her and also one of the things that makes her periodically impossible. "He'll be perfectly safe there."