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Fenris is still sitting there with his mouth a little open and his hands gripped together on his knees. Somebody has just handed him something very heavy and very precious, and nobody has told him where to put it down.

"You don't have to answer now," Eskil says. His voice is quieter than usual. "Think on it. Take a day. Take a week, if you need it. Nobody at this table is going to hurry you."

Fenris shakes his head.

"No," Fenris says. "No. I don't need a week."

He turns his face toward Garrik. He does not need to see him to find him. He has been listening to him breathe for the last several minutes.

"If a man is devoted enough to his people," Fenris says, "that he'd give his whole life over to walking beside me and telling me where to put my feet, so that they don't tear each other apart." His voice catches on the last word, and he stops, and starts again. "Then I'm not going to insult him by saying no to it."

Garrik's jaw works. He does not say anything. He puts his good hand out on the table, palm up, and after a moment Fenris finds it, and holds on.

"I accept," Fenris says.

The fire pops. Nobody says anything for a moment.

Then Eskil unfolds his arms and leans forward and puts both forearms on the map.

"Then Rengara recognizes Fenris, son of Ivan, as the rightful chieftain of the Wolfe," Eskil says. "And when he goes south to take his seat, he'll have Rengaran swords behind him. As many as I can give him."

"Thank you," Fenris says.

"Don't thank me." Eskil looks at the map for a long moment, at the stronghold and the southern road and the crossings between here and there. His mouth pulls sideways into an expression Morgan knows very well. Eskil has agreed to something and already dislikes it. "I'll be honest with you. It's a mad plan. It's a blind man pretending to be a holy man, walking into a hall full of armed men who want him dead, and it depends entirely on a story about a god and a famine and a lot of paint." He sits back. "I hope to every god listening it works. I'd very much rather not be marching the lot of us into our graves over a children's tale."

"It isn't a children's tale," Garrik says.

"It had better not be," Eskil says.

Morgan picks up his quill again and dips it, and finds that his hand has stopped aching. He looks down at the fresh sheet in front of him.

He could not agree with his brother more. It is a mad plan. It rests on a legend he did not know existed until ten minutes ago, and on Fenris's eyes, which have been hidden his whole life, and on Garrik's devotion, which Morgan once took for treachery. If it fails, it will fail very badly and in front of a great many people.

It is also the most beautiful thing Morgan has ever seen anybody put on a table.

He writes the date at the top of the page, and under it, in his best hand, the first line of the treaty.

26

BOHDI

There is a knock on his door that Bohdi would know in his sleep, and it is past midnight, and nothing good has ever come through that door at this hour.

He is not asleep. He has not been asleep. He has been lying on his back in his own bed for two hours looking at his own ceiling, which is a thing he has been doing a great deal of lately, trying to work out how a man says a sentence he has spent a great deal of time making sure he would never have to say. He has tried it several different ways. He has tried it out loud once, very quietly, to the ceiling, and hated the sound of it so much he rolled over and put his face in the pillow.

Then the knock, and he is on his feet with his hand on the axe before he has decided anything.

For about thirty seconds, crossing the room, he is certain somebody is dead. His head runs down the list at a gallop. Fenris, most likely, because everything they built in the war room this morning is sitting on that boy's shoulders, and there are at least nine people in this keep who would not weep to see it knocked off. Then Garrik, whose chest has opened up twice already. Then a great many people he does not let himself get to the end of, because the list gets shorter as it goes and the names at the bottom of it are not ones he can think about at a run.

He opens the door.

Eskil is standing in the corridor in his shirtsleeves. No armor. No sword. Bohdi lets out a breath so large it makes his ribs hurt.

"Nobody's dead then," Bohdi says.

"Not as far as I know," Eskil agrees. "Let me in."

Bohdi stands aside. Eskil comes in and does not sit down. He walks to the middle of the room and turns around and stands there with his arms folded. He has the look he gets before a battle he is not certain of, which Bohdi has seen perhaps five times in thirty years and has never once liked.