Page 23 of Fought it Through the Teeth

The hall blurs at the edges. The firelight smears. Someone is telling a story about a raid that has the men slamming their fists against the table, and the rhythm of it thuds through Morgan's skull alongside his heartbeat. He puts his cup down and picks it up again. He puts it down and picks it up again. At some point someone speaks to him — one of Ivan's men, thick-accented.

"You drink well for a northman, prince. I heard you lot prefer mead."

Morgan answers with a smile that feels attached to his face with pins. "We prefer whatever's put in front of us."

The man laughs and moves on, satisfied.

He is not keeping count of his cups. That is how he knows he is in trouble.

Then Bohdi is beside him. Morgan didn't see him approach, which means either Bohdi is quieter than a man his size has any right to be or Morgan is drunker than he thought, and both are probably true. There is a hand on the back of his neck — warm, firm, knowing exactly how much pressure to apply to steer a body without making it look like steering.

"All right," Bohdi says, loud enough for the nearest table to hear, his voice threaded with easy amusement. "Our prince is a lightweight and the north is ashamed of him. Somebody take his cup before he starts a war."

Laughter breaks out. The nearest warriors guffaw and one of them reaches over and takes Morgan's cup with exaggerated solemnity, and the whole thing is a joke. He's the soft northern prince who can't hold his ale, with the faithful guard hauling him off to bed before he embarrasses the crown. Nobody can make it into a story because Bohdi has already made it into a harmless, funny one, the kind the men will repeat tomorrow over breakfast and forget by lunch.

Morgan lets himself be steered. He doesn't have the coordination to resist and he doesn't have the will. Bohdi's hand stays on the back of his neck as they cross the hall, and the warmth of it seeps through Morgan's skin and settles into his spine. He hates how good it feels, how easily he leans into it, and how Bohdi can touch him so casually and still light up every nerve in his body.

They make it to the stairs. Bohdi's hand shifts from his neck to his waist, steadying him, and Morgan's feet find the steps by memory rather than vision because the torchlight is doing something unhelpful and the walls keep tilting. His room is at the top and down a corridor and through a door that Bohdi opens with his free hand while holding Morgan upright with the other. Then Morgan is inside and the door is closing and the noise of the hall is gone.

Bohdi sits him on the bed. Morgan sits and the room spins and he grips the edge of the mattress with both hands and waits for the world to settle. It doesn't. Bohdi kneels in front of him and pulls his boots off and then puts a hand on his chest and pushes him flat.

Morgan goes down. The mattress receives him and the ceiling is above him and it is the wrong ceiling and for a moment the displacement is so acute he can feel it in his teeth. He is in the wrong place. He is in the wrong country. He is lying in a bed that belongs to a man who wants to own him, in a stronghold full of people who look at him as livestock, and the one person he wants within arm's reach is pulling a blanket over him and getting ready to leave.

Morgan's hand finds Bohdi's shirt.

His fingers close in the fabric and he holds on, not hard, not demanding, too drunk to strategize and too tired to pretend, with nothing left between what he feels and what his hands do about it.

Bohdi stops. His weight shifts. Morgan can feel him looking down at him and doesn't open his eyes, because opening his eyes means seeing Bohdi's face and seeing Bohdi's face means whatever is left of his composure is going to come apart, and he has already lost enough tonight.

The thought surfaces from the murk of his mind — warm and loose and stripped of every defense he owns. He has been in love with Bohdi an embarrassingly long time, long enough that the feeling has outlived its usefulness and settled into his bones, present in every season, impossible to cure, so much a part of him that he can't always distinguish it from the rest of what makes him Morgan.

The first time he noticed Bohdi he was training in the yard at Valen with his shirt off and the tattoos running down his arms. Morgan had stopped on the balcony above and stared with uncomplicated fascination, a child who has seen something beautiful and doesn't yet know what to do with the seeing. That was before the wanting. The wanting came years later when the fascination grew teeth and claws and learned to live in his gut instead of his eyes.

By fourteen he was dreaming about him. By fifteen he was certain. By sixteen he was desperate enough to do something unbelievably stupid about it.

The memory comes uninvited, the way it always does when he is too tired or too drunk to keep the door shut.

He was sixteen. The night guard's name was Conneth, and he was red-haired, broad-shouldered, and twenty years old — old enough to know better and young enough not to care. He didn't have tattoos. He wasn't broad enough or strong enough or hard enough to be the real thing. But he looked at Morgan with want in his eyes, and Morgan was sixteen and starving and certain that he would never have Bohdi.

They were in the stables. It was Morgan's idea. All of it was Morgan's idea — the time, the place, the invitation he'd extended with a boldness that was ninety percent bravado and ten percent blind panic. Conneth had his trousers down and Morgan's hands braced on a stall door, and Morgan was biting his own lip hard enough to draw blood because it hurt more than he'd expected. He was not going to make a sound, he was not, because making a sound meant admitting he didn't know what he was doing and he'd rather have died on the spot.

He'd just begun to think the pain might be tolerable when Conneth was wrenched off him bodily.

Morgan turned around in time to watch Bohdi deck the young man across the face.

The sound of fist on bone, the wet crack of a nose breaking, is still the loudest thing Morgan has ever heard in his life. Conneth went sideways into the stall door and blood sprayed from his face in a dark arc across the straw. Bohdi was standing over him with his chest heaving and his fists clenched and a look on his face that Morgan had never seen before and hopes, with everything in him, to never see again. It wasn't anger but something past it, something that had gone through anger and come out the other side into a place where violence was not a choice but a certainty, held back by nothing but the thinnest thread of control.

Morgan hauled his trousers up with shaking hands and grabbed Bohdi's arm. He was babbling, "Don't hurt him. Please don't hurt him. I asked him to do it, it was my idea, he didn't do anything wrong, I wanted him to —"

And Bohdi turned on him.

"You can't consent to shit, Morgan. You're a fucking child."

The words were a blow. Delivered with a fury so complete and so controlled that Morgan's hand fell away from his arm, recoiling. Bohdi's eyes were dark and his jaw was set and Morgan understood, in that moment, that he had done something wrong.

He never saw Conneth again. The guard was transferred within the week to an outpost on the far edge of Rengara, given, Morgan is certain, explicit instructions to keep his mouth shut and never come within a mile of the crown prince again. Eskil never found out. Morgan is equally certain that was deliberate — that Bohdi swallowed the whole ugly thing — the knowledge and the fury and the sight of his king's younger brother bent over a stall door with a grown man inside him — and carried it alone rather than hand him over to Eskil's temper.

Morgan spent the following year unable to look Bohdi in the eye. He flinched when Bohdi entered a room. And somewhere in that year, in the slow, humiliating process of growing up enough to look back at what he'd done and see it clearly, he came to the grim understanding that perhaps his decision-making faculties were not fully developed. He understood that Bohdi had been right, that sixteen was too young to know what he was giving away, and that the man he'd given it to should have known better, and that the only reason it hadn't been worse was because Bohdi was there.