Page 7

"Calm down, your highness," Garrik hisses.

Morgan tries to twist free. His breathing is too fast and his vision has narrowed and his body is somewhere else entirely–on a floor with a large man approaching him with violent intent, and he would very much appreciate it if his body would return to the present and participate in this situation with some degree of rationality.

"Let go of me!" Morgan demands, and the words come out steadier than he would have given himself credit for.

Garrik does not let go, but he loosens his grip enough to signal that he is restraining rather than attacking, and his expression shifts from alert wariness into something more careful. He is reading Morgan's face, and whatever he finds there seems to concern him more than the attempt to hit him did.

"I'm not going to hurt you," Garrik says. "I am unarmed and freshly stitched and in your healer's bed. I am of no harm to anyone in this room."

Morgan's jaw tightens. "You sent armed men after us. After me. I was thrown across a horse and dragged halfway back to your stronghold."

"Dade sent men after you," Garrik says, and there is an emphasis on the name that Morgan notes even through the adrenaline. "Dade took control of the clan. He sent men after you and your warrior because you killed the chieftain and fled. From his position, Rengara had just assassinated the leader of the Wolfe clan. What was he supposed to do?"

"We killed the chieftain because he was planning to torture me," Morgan says through his teeth. "And then overthrow my brother. Your chieftain was not hosting a betrothal. He was staging a coup."

Garrik's expression changes, and it is not subtle. Genuine surprise cracks through the composure, and his grip on Morgan's arms slackens further. His brow furrows and his mouth opens and then closes and he shakes his head once.

"I had no idea that was Ivan's plan," he says. His voice has lost the measured quality it held a moment ago. Whatever he had prepared to say, this is not part of it. The floor has gone out from under him and it shows. "I was told about the betrothal and the alliance. A partnership between the Wolfe clan and Rengara, cemented by a marriage. That is what Ivan presented to me and to the warriors of the clan. None of us were briefed on an overthrow."

Morgan studies him. He is still breathing too fast, still running on the remnants of the fear response, but the part of him that reads people for a living is already working, already comparing the claim against what he knows. It is not a ridiculous thought that Ivan might have kept his true ambitions close. That he shared it only with Dade, his steward, and with the Jakadi, his covert allies, is no stretch at all. That would make the Wolfe warriors muscle, willing to strike wherever their chieftain pointed them, and Garrik something else entirely. He would have been a ward without real power. Someone with military weight who could rally the men in a way a steward never could, but who could not question his orders. Plans of that shape are routinely built so the men carrying them out never see the whole of it.

Garrik continues, and Morgan lets him, because a man filling a silence will give you more than a man answering questions. Morgan has used this technique in every political negotiation he has ever sat through.

"I was told my role would be military coordination. Strengthening the combined force, integrating Wolfe warriors with Rengaran units. Ivan said the alliance would benefit both peoples and I believed him, because I'd spent my entire life watching him build this clan and I had no reason to think he was building it into a weapon aimed at the largest military force on the continent."

"By the time I understood the scope of what was happening, Ivan was dead on his own floor and Dade had seized control," Garrik finishes. "There was nothing left to understand."

Morgan stops fighting. The shift is not a conscious decision. Something in Garrik's voice, in the quality of the surprise and the anger underneath it, tells the part of Morgan's brain that assesses honesty for a living that this man is not lying. He cannot prove it. He cannot verify a word of what Garrik is telling him. But he has sat across the table from liars and diplomats and merchants and kings, and he has a sense for the difference between a man constructing a story and a man who is living one.

Garrik releases him and steps back, one hand going to his injury, and his breathing is labored in a way that tells Morgan the exertion of grabbing him has cost something. Morgan is not feeling charitable enough to be sorry about it.

"I thought you were in on it," Morgan says, and his voice is flatter now, the prince reasserting itself over the frightened man. "I thought that was why you told me to be wary of Ivan's ambitions. At the stronghold. Before everything fell apart. You warned me."

Garrik grimaces. The expression pulls at the corner of his mouth and ages him by five years. "I warned you because I know what kind of sick bastard Ivan was. I grew up in his household. I watched him destroy two wives and discard a child and build an empire on fear and call it loyalty. I didn't know what his plans for you were, specifically, but I knew they weren't good. I warned you because I thought you deserved the chance to be careful."

Morgan turns this over. He remembers Garrik on the hunting trip, the boar he took on to spare Morgan and Bohdi, the easy charm, the proposition in the gallery that had been forward without ever being a threat. Garrik had looked at him with interest rather than avarice, desire rather than ownership, and had taken Morgan's refusal without resentment or argument, and he had never pressed the matter again.

The man standing in front of him does not match the image Morgan built of a co-conspirator. A co-conspirator would not have warned him, and would not have arrived at the gates of Valen alone and wounded with neither weapons nor escort. A co-conspirator would not be standing in a healer's back room with his chest bandaged, explaining himself to an enemy prince and needing very badly to be believed.

Then again, Morgan has been wrong about people before, and the last time it nearly killed him.

"Then what are you doing in Valen?" Morgan asks.

Garrik lowers himself carefully onto the edge of the bed. He braces one hand on the mattress and meets Morgan's eyes.

"The Wolfe clan is fractured under Dade's rule," he says. "It has been since Ivan died. Some of the clan wants to follow Dade in his campaign against Rengara, finish what Ivan started, burn the northern kingdom to the ground and take what's left. The vast majority wants what we've had for decades. Peace. Stability. To be left alone in our territory to hunt and farm and live as we've always lived."

Two factions, then. Morgan notes the proportions, the framing, the language Garrik is choosing. What we've had for decades, he said, and not what I want. He is positioning himself inside the peace faction without stating it outright, which is either genuine conviction or good rhetoric, and Morgan needs more before he knows which.

"Dade doesn't care about governance," Garrik continues. "He cares about power. He's holding the clan together with threats and violence, and the warriors who follow him do so because they're afraid of what happens if they don't."

"And you?" Morgan says. "Which side are you on?"

"I tried to challenge him." Garrik touches his chest, just above the edge of the bandage, and the gesture is small and bitter. "This is what I got for it. The wound and an exile. He told me if I showed my face in the stronghold again, he'd take my head and send it to Rengara in a box."

"So, no worse off than you arrived here on your own."

The corner of Garrik's mouth twitches into something that is not quite a smile, and Morgan notes that too. Taking a barb from the person you are trying to win over and finding it funny requires either very thick skin or an actual sense of humor. Both are useful in an ally, if that is what Garrik turns out to be.