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"I think I'm entitled to know who you're serious about," Eskil says. "Especially when he's my fucking best friend of thirty years. Especially when I find out about it at one in the morning with him standing in the middle of his room in his smallclothes, crying at me."

"There is a great deal," Morgan says, with enormous dignity, "about my private life that you do not need to know."

"There is a great deal about your private life that I would pay good money never to know." Eskil fixes him with a look. "But I'll tell you one thing, and you can take it to him. If he ever fucks this up with you, I'll break his front teeth. Best friend or not. Thirty years or not. Both of them. With my fist."

Morgan stares at him.

"You're a savage," Morgan says.

"I've been told."

"You are a complete, unrepentant savage, and thank every god there is for Indrie," Morgan says. "Somebody has to keep you on a short leash, and gods know it was never going to be me."

Eskil does not argue with that, which Morgan notes, and files away, and intends to bring up at every possible opportunity for the rest of his life. He only puts his hand on the back of Morgan's head again and pulls him back in, and Morgan goes, and puts his face back in his brother's shoulder, and lets himself be held.

Morgan does not let go. Eskil does not make him. They stand there for a long time, Morgan halfway across a desk with ink soaking into the knee of his trousers and his brother holding onto the back of his head. Nobody opens the door.

Eventually Eskil grunts.

"You're leaning on my bad side," he says.

"Sorry." Morgan does not move.

"Morgan."

"I'm getting off it."

He does get off it, eventually. He climbs back down off the desk, which is a great deal less dignified than climbing over it was, and stands there in front of his brother with his eyes stinging and ink on his knee. He is sure his face is doing something very undignified. He cannot make it stop.

Eskil studies him for a long moment. He looks at the ink on the desk, and the ruined pile of treaty drafts on the floor, and at Morgan's face.

Then he reaches out and cuffs him on the side of the head. It is exactly the way he used to when Morgan was nine and had talked his way out of something he should not have, not hard enough to hurt, just hard enough to count.

"Get back to work," Eskil says.

He gets up off the desk and walks to the door and opens it, and goes.

Morgan stands in the middle of the library with the door open and ink drying on his knee, and a laugh comes up out of him that he cannot do anything about. He stands there and laughs at nothing, alone, with his hand pressed over his mouth and his eyes streaming.

Then he picks his chair up off the floor, and sets it right, and sits down in it.

He pulls a clean sheet toward him, and dips his pen, and writes out the first clause of the treaty in one go without stopping. It is perfect.

28

INDRIE

Indrie is frazzled.

He isn't often frazzled. He has a gift for staying calm. People tell him so. They say it to him in the doorway of the clinic with their children on their hips, and they seem to think it's something he chose.

He didn't choose Tova.

Tova is five years old. She has a splinter in the pad of her left forefinger, which has been in there for at least three days. It's gone red and hot and swollen around the edges, and she isn't going to let Indrie anywhere near it under any circumstances. She made that clear the moment she understood that the small man with the short hair was the healer. Before that she liked him very much. She showed him her doll. Then her mother said this is the healer, Tova, he's going to look at your finger, and Tova's whole face changed, and she hasn't trusted him since.

She is currently lying on her back on the examination table screaming. It isn't a crying scream. It's a murderous, full-throated, entirely furious scream of injustice. As far as Tova is concerned, everybody she has ever loved has betrayed her. The scream is going on and on and on, and Indrie has never heard anything like it come out of a person so small.

On her way onto the table, she kicked the crock of comfrey ointment off the end of it, and it went over and shattered and spread thick pale green across the side of the table and down onto the floor. Ermin is on his knees in it, scraping it into a bowl with a flat knife and muttering. That would be fine, except that Ermin was meant to be watching the pot of willow bark on the fire, and nobody is watching the pot of willow bark on the fire, and it's beginning to rattle its lid.