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“I know,” Sai started to say. His mouth hung open and he frowned as I stepped away from my bench and scooted across to the table where Magnus, Peter, and Neil sat. “Jace. Jace, come back here.”
“I think I’ll sit with my own people for a while,” I said firmly, hoping my eyes held the softness I truly felt for my brother. “I don’t want Genny to feel second-best when he is first in my heart.”
Magnus, Peter, and Neil—along with Sebald and Avenel, a few of Jorgen’s men, and Ox and Katrina farther down the table—watched the entire exchange. Neil scooted closer to Magnus and the man from Jorgen’s camp cleared space on the bench in the other direction, so I wedged myself between them, then pulled Genny awkwardly onto my lap.
Whatever conversation had been going on at that table stopped. That entire side of the room grew suddenly quiet. I could feel Magnus staring at me with narrowed eyes before I turned to meet his gaze.
“Do you disagree with my assertion that nothing at all will get done over the next few days if the people of the Kostya Kingdom continue to view wolves as savage perverts?” I asked him, not even caring that I was challenging him.
Magnus’s face twitched, and he resumed wiping up the remnants of egg yolk from his plate with a corner of toast. “There are ways to address the matter and ways not to.”
“We don’t have time to play nice with the very same people who shoved us out of their cities,” I argued. “Not if we want to make our points, establish an equal alliance, and keep everyone alive through the winter.”
I was actually surprised by how much I sounded like Magnus with that statement. I’d been part of his household, listening to his rhetoric, for too long.
As I’d spoken, Sai had stood and stepped over to stand behind the bench between me and Neil.
“My brother is right,” he said, giving me my second surprise within ten seconds. Everyone on our side of the bench twisted to look up at him, and those on the other side of the bench sat up a little straighter. “I understand fully that wolf acceptance is the single greatest hurdle we face. Sebald has been dealing with it since he first arrived two months ago.”
As Sai nodded across the table to Sebald, Sebald sat straighter. I couldn’t see for certain, but from the way his arm moved, I was fairly certain he’d either reached for Avenel’s hand under the table or placed his hand on Avenel’s thigh. I felt that gesture. It was what I had just done with Genny a few moments before.
“It’s true,” Sebald said, as if reluctantly admitting to something. “My welcome here in Hedeon has been…mixed.”
“It needs to be unmixed,” Jorgen’s man said, looking at Sai with as much offense as some of the Hedeon people had looked at me. “We didn’t come her to be insulted by you lot. We came here to work out agreements for all of our mutual benefit. We have things that you need, but we’re under no obligation to hand them over to you.”
“I understand that,” Sai said, trying to remain patient. “Believe me, I do.”
I noticed a bit of movement out of the corner of my eye and turned to find Jorgen and Hati, and also Lefric and Olympus, leaving the tables where they’d been seated for breakfast and making their way over to us. It looked like the meeting between the four kingdoms was about to start. Immediately.
“I cannot just snap my fingers and make the people of the cities forget prejudices they’ve held for generations,” Sai went on. I knew my brother. He was good at hiding it, but he was at his wits’ end. “Believe me, if I could, I would. I have a vested interest in keeping relations between the city-dwellers and the forest-dwellers as cordial as possible.”
He rested a hand on my shoulder as he spoke. I don’t know why that affected me so much, but my throat closed up. I might have changed and become a man in my own right, but it still felt good to have my older brother’s affection like that.
“Is there a problem here?” Jorgen asked as he came to stand near Sai.
Lefric and Olympus stopped on Sai’s other side, closer to Magnus and Peter.
“The only problems we have are those that I expect we will spend the next several days talking about,” Magnus said with a smile. He was a master at looking casual and amused in the tensest of circumstances. “They are the same problems that have landed us in the situations we are all in now.”
That was another loaded statement. It wasn’t just the prejudice of city-dwellers against wolves. It was the tenuous balance between survival and disaster that had decimated the cities through the winter. It was the antagonism between different factions of wolves being forced to work together and accommodate each other. It was the fact that any one of the four kingdoms that had pulled up a seat at the negotiating table we all stood around now could tip the balance and make life exceedingly difficult for the others. And it was the fact that we weren’t the only powers on the frontier or beyond.
None of us knew what the future held—not years ahead of us, months or weeks ahead—but we all knew that our success or failure, living or dying, would depend on resolving issues that had plagued the frontier for a hundred years or more.
So much for a pleasant family reunion and friendly negotiations.
“Perhaps we should finish up this lovely breakfast that has been so kindly prepared for us,” Magnus said, wriggling his way out of the tight confines of the bench and stepping over it to face Sai and the other leaders at their eye level, “and be shown to our quarters so that we might rest a bit. Then we can continue this conversation in a more structured, less public forum.”
He glanced to Jorgen, then to Sai, with a look that told me Magnus was going to do his best to control the whole meeting.
“I think that would be wise,” Sai said. He seemed to take a page from Magnus’s book and feigned easiness when I knew he felt anything but relaxed. “Actually, Sebald has prepared a surprise for you all.”
Magnus glanced across the table to where Sebald and Avenel were standing. “A surprise?”
It wasn’t lost on me that Sai had referenced Sebald twice since stepping over to our table. Either he liked and valued whatever council Sebald had given him in the last two months or he was trying to deflect his discomfort onto someone he thought could take the blame for any mistakes he might make.
Sebald squared his shoulders and said with an air of authority, “I thought it would be more convenient for King Sai’s guests to stay in cottages outside of the palace rather than to be closeted away here. Particularly considering Peter, Neil, and Jace were not given the best accommodations last time they stayed at the palace.” Those words felt like a rehearsed joke, but there wasn’t so much as a glimmer of humor in Sebald’s eyes. “As such,” he went on, “Avenel and I have prepared the two cottages on either side of the one we’ve been living in for use during the meeting. One for Magnus and his contingent and one for Jorgen and his people.”
Jorgen snorted. “I wouldn’t be caught dead staying in any cottage, or inside this city at all.”
