Page 20 of Fought it Through the Teeth

"You're strange, for a northman."

"I've been told."

"The chieftain said you were Eskil's best. I expected someone… rougher."

"Oh, I can be plenty rough," Bohdi says, and grins wickedly at her expression. "But where's the fun in being predictable?"

She shakes her head, a bemused half-smile on her mouth, and drinks.

He keeps her talking. It isn't difficult. Sera is sharp and lonely and has clearly not had a conversation with someone who treated her as a person rather than a fixture in months. Once the tension of the failed seduction dissipates, she opens up with slow relief, setting down a weight she has been carrying alone. She tells him about the Jakadi settlement she came from — a river town on the far southern edge of the territory, known for its ironwork and its leather trade. She tells him about the trade delegation that brought her to the Wolfe stronghold, which was not, strictly speaking, a trade delegation at all.

"The chieftain and the Jakadi council have an understanding," she says. She says it as though the alliance between the Wolfe clan and the faction that has been biting at Rengara's borders the last few months is old news. "Women and supplies go back and forth. It's been that way for a year. Maybe longer. Before I arrived, certainly."

He refills her cup. She lets him. "So the Jakadi supply the Wolfe clan. What does the Wolfe clan supply in return?"

"Shelter, mostly. Training ground. Access to the southern passes." She shrugs again. "Men, when they're needed. The chieftain has no issue lending warriors for the right cause."

Bohdi's smile does not change. His breathing does not change. Nothing about him changes, because he has been sitting across from people and charming information out of them since before Sera knew what a spy looked like. And she doesn't seem to realize she has just given him the skeleton of the Jakadi-Wolfe arrangement, laid out in plain speech and waiting to be read.

Halfway through their third cup she pauses mid-sentence and looks at him with an expression that has shed its performance entirely. It is curiosity now, real curiosity.

"Am I not your type?" she asks, and there is something under the question that isn't vanity. It is closer to offense. She was sent to do a job and can't work out why the job isn't getting done.

Bohdi laughs, genuine and warm. "I imagine you're everyone's type, Sera."

She seems placated by that, her shoulders settling. She studies him a moment longer and then asks, "You don't favor women?"

"I favor men, women, and everything in between," Bohdi tells her, easily and without an ounce of shame. "I am a man of tremendously broad appetites and very few principles where the bedroom is concerned."

"Then why —"

"I've got a lot on my plate right now." He sets his cup down and meets her eyes and lets some of the truth show, because Sera is smart enough to catch a lie and honest enough to be offended by one. "I wouldn't be good company tonight. Not the kind you came here to provide."

She watches him for a long moment, dark eyes steady and appraising. Then something in her face softens, not with the bedroom softness but with the other kind, the kind that means she is looking at him as a person and deciding she likes what she sees.

"You're the best company I've had in a season," she says. "Maybe two."

Bohdi's grin goes warm and real. "I'll take that. Thank you."

He refills her cup one more time and they sit together in the quiet, drinking, while the fire burns low and the stronghold settles around them.

After a while, the hour has gone deep and the ale is finished and Sera yawns with an unselfconsciousness that tells him she has forgotten he is supposed to be a mark. He stands and offers her his hand and she takes it, rising from the bed in the oversized robe with her dark hair mussed and her bare feet padding on the cold stone. He walks her to the door.

She pauses in the frame, one hand on the wood, and looks up at him with something almost fond. "Whoever is on your mind," she says. "They're very lucky."

The words lodge somewhere in his chest and stick. He keeps his face steady and his grin easy. "I'll pass that along."

She smiles. "Discretion is my trade. I won't say a word."

"I appreciate that."

She leaves with a backward glance that is warmer than anything she arrived with, and Bohdi shuts the door behind her and stands in the empty room and breathes through the ache in his chest until it settles into something he can carry.

In the morning Ivan asks after his night.

He does it loudly, in the middle of the hall, in front of forty people and Morgan. The warchief is seated at the head of the long table with a cup of ale in his meaty fist and a grin splitting his painted face. The question comes out the way everything comes out of Ivan's mouth — as an announcement, a performance, something designed to bounce off the stone walls and land on every ear in the room.

"Well?" Ivan bellows. "Did the girl ride you as hard as she promised? She's got the thighs for it, I'll say that much."