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MORGAN

Morgan's hand still hurts from yesterday.

It is a small, stupid, specific ache, in the web between the thumb and the first finger and down along the outside edge of the palm where it drags across the paper. He has had it since yesterday morning. He sat at the end of his brother's desk for three hours with the door shut and wrote down every word Fenris said. There were twenty-two pages of it by the end, in a hand that got worse as it went, and Morgan has read them over twice since and is going to read them again tonight.

Fenris talked the entire time without once raising his voice or losing his place. He sat very straight in the chair with his staff across his knees and Garrik at his elbow, and he gave them twelve years. Every Jakadi camp he had been moved through, in order, and what season, and roughly how far each one was from the one before it by days on horseback. Which commanders had held him and which of them were still alive. What they said to one another at the fire at night when they thought the blind boy was asleep or simple. How long the plan had been in the making. How patient they were about it.

When Fenris ran out, Garrik went on. He gave them the stronghold. Who in it follows Dade and why. Which families are frightened and which are only waiting. Which old men sat at Ivan's table and hated him for fourteen years and never said so. Where the grain is kept. How many horses there really are, as opposed to how many Ivan liked to tell people there were.

Morgan wrote all of it down, and his brother sat and listened with his arms folded and his face shut, and did not interrupt once.

That was yesterday and it was about gathering what they know.

Today is about what they do with that knowledge.

The war room has a fire going and the big table has been cleared of everything but maps. There is the eastern border, weighted flat at the corners with somebody's knives. There is the southern road running down past the Wolfe stronghold. There is the ground between, which is going to belong to somebody by the spring, and the question in this room is who. Morgan has fresh paper and a fresh quill and a pot of ink he has already knocked over once and righted before anybody saw. He is the one who puts plans on paper and makes them into things that exist, and he is ready to do that.

Eskil is at the head of the table. Garrik and Fenris are across from Morgan. Garrik has been properly stitched now, and he is sitting with his left arm strapped against his body and his color a good deal better than it was coming out of the cedars. Fenris sits beside him with his staff leaned against the arm of his chair and his head tilted slightly toward the fire, listening to it.

Bohdi is standing behind them.

He is a pace back and a little to the left, between his brother's chair and Morgan's, arms crossed, in the place he has stood through every plan the three of them have ever made.

Morgan has gotten up twice for ink. Both times he has turned around and caught Bohdi looking at the back of Eskil's head.

They are short looks, there and then gone, and every one of them has the same thing in it. It is not fear, exactly. Bohdi is standing at the top of a very long drop and trying to work out how to go over it. Morgan knows exactly what drop. He has not said one word about it and he is not going to.

"Garrik," Eskil says. "Go on."

Garrik leans forward carefully, favoring the side.

"The clan needs a leader," Garrik says. "A real one. One with a claim that holds. Right now what it has is Dade, and Dade is a steward. He was a good one. He knew where every sack of oats in that stronghold was and what it cost. But he is not a chieftain, and he knows he's not, and he is trying to make up the difference with threats." He puts one finger down on the stronghold on the map. "The warriors who follow him are following because they're afraid of what happens to them if they don't. That kind of loyalty holds until something harder comes along. Then it breaks all at once, in every direction.

"If the clan breaks then it goes to pieces. Four or five factions, maybe more, every one of them with a claim and none of them with a good one. They spend the next ten years fighting each other in the hills." Garrik drags his finger east, across the ground between the stronghold and the border. "And all of this becomes nobody's. There's nothing standing in it. No law, no watch, no clan that'll ride out when the Jakadi come through. Your eastern border stops being a border with a neighbor on the other side of it and becomes an open road."

"The Jakadi would like that very much," Fenris says quietly.

"The Jakadi," Garrik says, "would throw a feast."

Morgan puts his quill down, because it is his turn. He turns toward Fenris, even though Fenris cannot see him do it.

"You're Ivan Wolfe's son," Morgan says. "His only son. He struck your name from the rolls, but striking a name is a thing you do with ink, and the blood's still the blood. By every law and custom the Wolfe have, the chair in that hall is yours. Not Dade's. Not anyone's."

Fenris inclines his head toward him.

Morgan puts his hand flat on the map, over the stronghold. "You could walk through the front gate of the place he threw you out of, and go into his hall, and sit in his chair. And then you could be better at it than he ever was, in front of every single person who watched him be what he was. You'd take it back from him. Every day. For the rest of your life."

The room is quiet.

Fenris sits for a long time without answering. The fire pops. Nobody moves to fill the silence. Eskil sits back in his chair with his arms folded and waits. Garrik does not look at Fenris at all. He looks at his own hands on the table.

"I can't," Fenris says finally. "I've thought about what you're offering since the moment Indrie told me Ivan was dead. I've thought about very little else." He turns his head toward the sound of the fire. "But the Wolfe will not follow a blind man."

"You don't know that," Morgan says.

"I know it better than anybody alive." Fenris's mouth twists. "Not because they're cruel. Some of them will be. That's not why. A chieftain leads the hunt. He holds the center of the line when the shield wall comes together. He walks into a hall full of armed men and reads it, who's angry, who's drunk, who's got his hand on his knife, before any of them open their mouths. I can't do a single one of those things. I will never be able to. And every man who ever wants that chair for himself, for the next twenty years, will know exactly where to press."