Page 24 of Fought it Through the Teeth

He has had sex since. He is twenty, of course he has. His partners have been men his own age, mostly — careful choices, vetted by his own sharpened instincts, conducted in private and cleaned up after and kept well away from Bohdi's sight.

Now he's in Ivan's stronghold with his fist in Bohdi's shirt.

"Did you fuck her?" Morgan asks.

The words come out bleary and graceless and entirely without strategy, which is what happens when you strip a diplomat of his defenses and leave him lying on a bed with his hand in another man's clothes. He can hear himself and he doesn't care. The wanting has been sitting on his chest all day and the ale has dissolved the lock he keeps on it and the question is out before he has decided to ask it.

Bohdi blows out a long, slow breath with a fondness in it that Morgan can feel even without looking — exasperated, familiar. He has been managing his prince for years and is both extremely tired of it and also wouldn't trade the job for anything in the world.

Then Bohdi's hands are on his, not pulling but prying, one finger at a time, gently. Morgan's grip loosens by degrees and Bohdi eases his hand free and the fabric falls away and the loss of it is so acute that Morgan's breath catches.

Bohdi pulls the blankets up around him. The gesture is careful and unhurried and impossibly tender, and Morgan keeps his eyes closed because he can feel the tenderness and it is going to kill him.

"I don't usually put my dick in members of enemy clans," Bohdi says, low and conspiratorial.

The words settle over him in the dark and Morgan feels them spread through him as relief first, enormous and shameful and so overwhelming that his eyes sting behind his closed lids. Then the secondary wave, the one that arrives on the heels of relief and is made of the same material: he didn't. He didn't sleep with her. She was in his bed and he didn't —

"Is that a policy or a preference?" Morgan manages.

"Sleep it off, Morgan."

And Morgan relaxes. His body goes loose and heavy against the mattress and the room stops spinning and the ceiling settles into place above him. The last thing he is aware of is the sound of Bohdi's breathing and the weight of the blankets around him that Bohdi pulled up with his own hands.

Chapter 10

Bohdi

Bohdi and Ivan spar in the training yard and it is not even remotely a fair fight.

The morning is bright and sharp, the kind of southern sunshine that has no business being this warm this late in the season and that makes Bohdi sweat through his shirt inside of ten minutes. The yard is packed dirt ringed by a low wooden fence, and Ivan's warriors have gathered along it, spectators at a blood sport — which, to be fair, is precisely what this is. Two men with blunted practice swords are circling each other in the dust while eighty armed soldiers watch and decide which one they'd rather follow into battle.

Ivan stripped to the waist before they started, which is apparently customary, and Bohdi followed suit because refusing would have been read as either cowardice or prudishness and he can't afford either. Ivan is broad and thick-shouldered and tanned, a bull running slightly to fat at the middle but with enough muscle beneath it to kill most men in a straight fight. Bohdi is leaner than him, harder, his bare torso covered in ink that draws the eye of every man along the fence and holds it there.

Ivan opens with a lunge that has real weight behind it — a test shot, the kind a fighter throws to gauge distance and reaction speed. Bohdi reads it before it arrives, as he has read attacks since he was seven, when a ten-year-old Eskil put a wooden sword in his hand and told him to hit back or get hit. He lets it come close. He sidesteps just enough to clear the edge, brings his own blade up in a block that stops the follow-through dead, and pushes Ivan off without extending into a counter.

Ivan resets, grins, and comes again.

The warchief is good. Bohdi will give him that freely and without reservation. Ivan has been fighting since before Bohdi was born. His footwork is solid, his guard is disciplined, and he has the hard-earned instinct of real combat, lessons carried in the body rather than the mind. He reads angles well. He recovers quickly. He hits hard enough to rattle bones.

And he is not in the same room as Bohdi.

The gap between them is the gap between a man who has fought well his whole life and a man who was forged in Rengara's crucible — raised on frozen ground and blunted steel. He was trained by a king who showed no mercy in the yard because showing mercy in the yard meant showing it on the battlefield, and Eskil does not lose men to sentiment. Bohdi has fought men bigger than Ivan. He has fought men faster than Ivan. He has fought men in blizzards and on cliffsides and in the pitch dark with nothing but the sound of breathing to guide his blade. Every single one of those men is dead, and Bohdi is standing in a southern training yard sweating and deliberately fighting at half his capacity.

He chooses to lose exchanges. Ivan throws a combination and Bohdi blocks the overhead and lets the sweep catch him across the ribs, pulling his body with the impact so it looks harder than it is, and grunts for the audience. The warriors along the fence shout approval. Ivan's eyes light up.

Bohdi answers with something restrained, a single counterstrike aimed at Ivan's lead shoulder, fast enough to put the warchief on his back foot and hard enough to make his arm ring, and then he disengages, steps back, and grins.

The watching warriors go quiet.

That is the trick of it. Give enough to be impressive. Give enough so the men along the fence understand that the northerner is not soft, that Eskil's second is not a man to be dismissed. But don't give so much that Ivan feels outclassed in his own yard, in front of his own people, because a humiliated warchief is a dangerous warchief and Bohdi needs this man's trust more than he needs his respect.

So he sells it, exchange after exchange. Ivan is beaming. Ivan thinks he is winning. Ivan is having the best morning of his life, trading blows with a northern warrior in front of his men, and the fact that every single exchange has been managed down to the inch is entirely invisible to him.

Then Ivan comes in hard and Bohdi moves.

He moves on instinct, because his body is faster than his judgment and always has been. He slips the strike by a hand's width, steps inside Ivan's guard, hooks the man's lead ankle with his heel, and has the edge of his practice sword pressed against Ivan's throat before either of them has finished breathing.

The yard goes silent, an absolute, ringing silence of eighty men holding their breath.