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He dips two fingers in and begins putting the paste on in careful strokes. Morgan hisses through his teeth.

"Sit still," Indrie tells him. "Bohdi, would you hold his shoulder?"

Bohdi crosses behind the bed and puts his hand on Morgan's shoulder, and Morgan relaxes under it immediately.

Not because he needed steadying. Because the hand is Bohdi's.

Eskil watches the contact. Bohdi's thumb settles against the back of Morgan's neck, barely above the collar, and stays there. Morgan's eyes close for half a second, just long enough to take it in, and then open again with the same stubborn displeasure he has been wearing all evening.

If Eskil had not been told, he would have missed it. But he was told, several nights ago, by a man standing in his own room with his heart in his hands, and now Eskil cannot stop seeing it. The whole choreography of it. The three feet of air the two of them keep between themselves in every room in this keep, kept to the inch, for a month. Bohdi loves his brother. His brother loves Bohdi. They have been standing in front of him performing distance the entire time and he missed every bit of it.

He is going to sit with that failure later, when there is time.

There is not time now.

So while Indrie works, Eskil reasons it through.

Lars stood at the council chamber door. He gave the Wolfe the reconnaissance orders on Fenris, which is how they had men on the border farms when Morgan rode through. He gave them the winter grain movements, which tells Dade to the week when the stores run thin and a kingdom's attention turns inward. And eleven days ago, he gave them the approved plan for the spring campaign, which is the muster numbers, the southern road, and every crossing between Valen and the Wolfe hills.

Eskil turns the pieces over, one at a time, and puts them down in order.

Dade has the route. He has had it for eleven days. Eleven days is enough to hold the crossings before the thaw, or to move first and set positions along the southern road where an ambush is easy and a retreat is not. Everything Eskil built for spring has been read, folded twice, pushed down behind the last page of a gate log, and delivered to the man sitting in Ivan's chair.

They cannot ride in spring on a road the enemy has already read. The plan is dead, and the man who killed it is sitting in a cell with a wound in his thigh from the prince’s dagger.

His first thought is the one his hands reach for without being asked, which is to go now instead. Winter, over crossings Dade will not expect to be passable, light and fast, and take the stronghold before the thaw. He has the numbers for it. He worked them already for the spring assault, and the winter variant costs him a third of his cavalry for footing and another week for snow in the passes. The Wolfe palisade is timber and pitch built to turn a raiding party rather than sit out a siege, and Eskil knows precisely what timber and pitch do when a man sets them alight.

He holds the thought for as long as it takes Indrie to work the paste down the last inch of his brother's throat. Then he puts it down, because it is the wrong answer to the right question.

Dade is expecting an army. That is the whole value of what Lars carried south, and it is the one thing Eskil cannot undo by choosing a different crossing. Eleven days or eleven weeks, a new road or the old one, the man in Ivan's chair is sitting in that hall waiting for Rengara to come and prove him right.

And he needs them to. That is the piece Eskil has been slow to turn over. Dade cannot hold that clan on his own merits, because he is a steward and he knows he is a steward. The warriors follow him out of fear of what happens if they stop. What he can hold them with is Rengara at the gate. Burn the palisade and Dade stops being the man who seized a chair that was not his and becomes the man who died defending his people from the north, and every farmer in those hills spends the next twenty years telling his children about the winter the northern king came and set the roofs on fire.

Garrik said it in this keep with a hole in him and no reason left to lie. Dade and a handful of his loyal men want to finish what Ivan started. The entire rest of the Wolfe clan wants what they had for decades, which was a quiet border and an open market and their sons at home.

Dade wants a war. His people do not.

So Eskil is not going to give him one.

The weapon is not a siege. The Wolfe will fight a siege. The Wolfe will not fight their own blood, because they’re the kind of people who see tradition above all else. Their best weapon is a blind twenty-year-old with Ivan Wolfe's blood in him, who is willing to stand up in that hall and say he can give them what they’ve always had and keep the conquering king away from their door with an alliance he’s already secured.

"Nothing is permanently damaged," Indrie says, over his shoulder. His fingers are still on Morgan's throat and the paste is half on and the focus in his eyes has not moved an inch. "He's very lucky."

Eskil thinks about his brother on the floor of the guardroom with a man's hands around his neck, his heels scraping the stone, the sound of his breath going thin. He thinks about the sound Morgan made when he screamed for the guards. He heard it from the corridor. He was already moving.

Lucky is not the word Eskil would choose.

"We brief the council tonight," Eskil says. "It does not wait until morning."

Bohdi nods. He looks relieved to be handed something to do that is not standing still in a room watching someone else's hands on the bruises he could not prevent.

"I'll get them assembled," he says. "Give me an hour."

It takes two, because it is the middle of the night and apparently the prince being throttled in his own keep is not enough to shift an aging council out of bed. Three separate messengers come back with variations on the same sentence, which is that Councilwoman Vigdis requires time to dress appropriately. Eskil tells the third one that if Vigdis is not in that chamber in fifteen minutes she may dress appropriately for the stables, because that is where she will be working.

He brings Indrie with him.

He had the thought earlier and he is willing to see it through. Indrie looks startled when Eskil tells him. He glances down at his own shirt, the one with the herb stain at the hem and the paste smudge across the cuff, and then back up, with the expression of a man certain he has misheard something. Eskil tells him again. Indrie smooths the shirt down with both hands, tugs the hem straight, and follows him to the door.