Ooh, interesting questions.

Brede must have felt awful when Egelric was found. He thought he was helping him by giving him a chance to get away and hide himself, and instead he was delivering him into a trap.

Brede felt a little weird about the situation to begin with. He's young, yet he's "the boss" of this mission. Eadred and Egelric are under his orders, even though Eadred is an older man he always looked up to, and Egelric just seems ancient and unknowable. But he's a nobleman and does outrank them both so he could always reassure himself with that thought.

But after Egelric was attacked, Brede was put in a very uncomfortable position. Finn touched on this in "Egelric becomes the big man on the bed":

“Brede says, we must be polite with Diarmait, because that is why we are here. But I don’t want to.”

So Finn was already outright hostile to Diarmait, Egelric can't have liked to see him, and Eadred... if nothing else, Eadred would have been horrified by what Diarmait did to Egelric.

But Brede's orders are to help Diarmait, so he must stay on friendly terms with Diarmait...

Then, of course, Diarmait just keeps bumping up the barbarity level with every raid. I can't believe Brede is going along with that, which means that Brede is trying and failing to convince Diarmait to tone it down. He probably feels like the situation is totally out of his control by this time.

I figure he is either faking friendship with Diarmait and feeling like a total fraud, or else he has "officially registered his protest" and stopped speaking to Diarmait, which means our four guys are probably prisoners of some sort, even if their lodgings haven't changed.

The main problem for Brede's mission is that there are two men -- Muirgius and mac Nuada -- who believe they are the rightful chieftain of Ramsaa. Muirgius had previously won that contest, but mac Nuada has just been waiting for his chance. Now, Muirgius is getting very friendly with Egelric, and because he is a popular leader, he is turning public opinion to make Egelric look like an unfortunate victim, and Diarmait look like a big meanie. And meanwhile mac Nuada is sucking up to Diarmait, hoping that Diarmait will get sick of Muirgius and kill him or something.

So between Muirgius and mac Nuada, our four Lotherians are being craftily split apart -- Egelric and Finn for Muirgius, Brede for Diarmait and mac Nuada, and poor Eadred probably doesn't know what to do.

(I had a whole Ramsaa-based storyline in the works, but I decided not to do it, to keep time moving faster. But it means I do know a lot about the political side of what's happening there at the moment.)

Anyway, back to Brede. He went into this thinking that he was going to quit drinking for the duration of this trip. I don't know whether he knows he has a problem, or whether it was just because Sigefrith advised him to keep his wits about him. I suspect he knows he has a problem, though, since for years he didn't drink because he was afraid of turning into a vicious drunk like his dad. Or at least he probably disgusts himself at the moment, because he recognizes that he is getting like his dad.

But by now, after more than a month in Ramsaa, with things getting so tense, I can't believe he hasn't started drinking again. Especially if he sees that nothing he does seems to help with Diarmait.

I think I know now how I am going to get those four out of Ramsaa. (Not how I will get Egelric back to Lothere, but at least how I will get Eadred and Brede back.) I know more or less what will be happening to Brede in the next 2-3 months. What I don't know is how Brede is going to handle it.

This is going to be a very bad year for him, and he doesn't seem to know how to deal with problems in a healthy way any more. So I am not optimistic that he is going to get better soon. Some of my "what if?" daydreams have involved Brede's death, to be honest. But... others not. I guess that is what you mean by "go with the flow." I will have to see how he handles things, and then write about the consequences of that, and so on and so forth forever...