“Make him believe that I have taken forty thousand of his forcibles into my possession, and that I’ve put them to good use. Tell him that I will sell . . . five thousand of them back to him. Tell him that he knows the price.”

“Which is?” Borenson asked.

“Don’t name it,” Orden answered. “If he has my son, then he will offer my son. If he does not have my son, then he will think you speak of King Sylvarresta’s family, and he will offer the King.

“No matter what hostage is offered, check on the condition of the hostage before you leave. See if Raj Ahten has forced Gaborn—or King Sylvarresta—into giving an endowment. I suspect he will use the royal family as vectors for major endowments. In fifteen hours, he could easily take hundreds of such endowments. If so, then you know what to do.”

“Pardon me?” Borenson asked.

“You heard right. You know what to do.”

Borenson laughed, almost a coughing sound, but there was no longer a smile on his face, no longer a gleam of delight in his eye. His face had gone all hard, impassive, and his voice carried a tone of disbelief. “You would have me kill King Sylvarresta, or your son?”

Overhead, one of the huge graaks called out, swept low. There was a time in Orden’s life when he had been small enough to ride one of the huge reptiles. When he’d weighed fifty pounds, at the age of six, his father had let him take long journeys on the backs of tamed graaks with the other skyriders, over the mountains to the far kingdom of Dzerlas in Inkarra. Only boys with endowments of strength and wit and stamina and grace could take such journeys.

But when King Orden’s son, Gaborn, became a skyrider in his turn, Mendellas never let Gaborn take a far journey. He’d tried hard to protect his son. He’d loved the boy too much. He’d hoped the lad would have time to grow, gain some maturity—a commodity all too rare among Runelords, who were often forced of necessity to take endowments of metabolism, grow old far before their time. There were things that King Orden still needed to teach his son, arts of diplomacy and strategy and intrigue that could not be learned in the House of Understanding.

Moreover, Orden’s own father had been captured when he was but a boy, and then had been forced to give endowments to a Wolf Lord in the Southern Wastes. His father’s friends had rescued him from his fate—with a sword.

Borenson could never know how much giving this order hurt. King Orden felt determined that his men would never know: Gaborn’s great heart might well have earned him a death sentence.