Page 28 of Fought it Through the Teeth

"For the wedding, say," Ivan says. He is looking at the road ahead, not at Bohdi, the way men look at nothing when they are asking something important. "A small honor guard. To see his brother married properly."

Bohdi hears the question inside the question.

Would the king of Rengara ride into my territory with a handful of men and put himself inside my walls?

He answers it lightly. He says Eskil doesn't travel well — too stubborn, too impatient, hates being away from his own bed. He says Eskil would send representatives, probably Morgan's friends, maybe a dignitary or two, nobody who would cause a fuss. He wraps it in a joke about Eskil's temperament and Ivan laughs, and the moment passes, and the question hangs in the air between them, shown but not yet answered.

They ride the rest of the way in companionable silence. Ivan seems satisfied. Bohdi rides beside him and keeps the grin on his face and his hands loose on the reins, and behind the grin his stomach is cold, and behind the cold his mind is running numbers.

Distance from the Wolfe stronghold to Valen: four days at the pace a saddle-sore prince can manage. Three at a hard ride. Two and a half if you pushed the horses past what was kind.

Messenger bird: half a day, if the winds were right.

Time between now and the earliest Ivan could reasonably set a wedding date: three weeks, maybe four. Enough time to assemble the forces he has been staging. Enough time to send word to the Jakadi. Enough time to close the trap.

Time between now and the moment Bohdi needs to put a blade in this man's neck: considerably less than that.

He runs the numbers again. He runs the routes. He runs the scenarios — how many men, how many horses, how many days, and whether any configuration of those numbers gets a warning to Eskil fast enough to matter if something goes wrong inside these walls. The answer is the same each time and it isn't one he likes.

They are on a shorter clock than anyone in Valen believes.

Ivan dismounts in the stable yard and hands his reins to a waiting groom and claps Bohdi on the shoulder one last time.

"We drink tonight," Ivan says. "I want to hear about the northern passes."

"Looking forward to it, chief."

Ivan goes inside.

Bohdi stands in the yard with the horse stamping beside him and the evening light fading over the palisade walls and looks up at the stronghold. It is a big building. Strong walls. Good gates. Designed by generations of chieftains who understood that the best way to survive was to make yourself very hard to leave.

He is going to have to get Morgan out of here.

That is the cold, clean fact of it — the equation stripped of everything that doesn't matter. Whatever happens to Ivan, whatever happens to the alliance, whatever happens to the staging ground and the Jakadi iron and the grand vision of a unified south, none of it means a thing if Morgan is still inside these walls when it goes wrong. And it will go wrong. Bohdi has been in enough strongholds and enough wars and enough rooms with enough dangerous men to know that no plan survives contact with the enemy. The enemy in this case is a warchief with five hundred men's worth of infrastructure and a wounded bear's temperament.

He hands the horse off and goes inside and climbs the stairs to the corridor where his room sits, too far from Morgan's. He thinks about the prince alone in his quarters in a building full of men who want to own him, and the distance between their doors feels more dangerous than anything else in the stronghold.

He stops at his own door. He doesn't go in. He stands in the corridor with his hand on the latch and thinks about Morgan on the wall in the training yard — the flush on his cheeks, the parted lips, the heat in his eyes that Morgan didn't bother to hide and that Bohdi felt across thirty feet of dust, warm on his skin.

Bohdi presses his forehead against the door and closes his eyes and breathes and tells himself to focus.

The prince is a complication he cannot afford. And every day they spend inside these walls the complication gets worse. Every day Morgan says something sharp or brave or impossibly clever, and every day Bohdi watches him hold his composure in front of a man who wants to break it, and every day the thing Bohdi has spent two years ignoring gets louder and harder to pretend he can't hear.

He pushes off the door. He opens it. He goes inside and changes his sweat-stained shirt and washes his face in the basin and rebraids his hair with steady hands that do exactly what he tells them. His hands are the one part of him he can still control, and he is going to need them steady for what comes next.

Shorter clock. Fewer options. More risk.

He can work with that. He has always worked with that. Eskil didn't train him to need favorable odds. Eskil trained him to win with whatever he was given, and what he has been given is his axe, a hostile stronghold, a warchief who trusts him, and the most important person in his world sleeping down the hall behind a door that doesn't lock.

He sits on the edge of the bed and plans.

Chapter 13

Morgan

The day after, Ivan has Morgan walking the civilian quarter to be seen, because a bride the clan hasn't laid eyes on is a bride the clan won't accept, and Bohdi goes with him because Bohdi goes everywhere.

It is a long afternoon. The civilian quarter sits outside the inner walls of the stronghold, a sprawling collection of timber houses and workshops and market stalls built along a series of packed-dirt lanes that follow the contour of the hill. It is busier than Morgan expected. There are children, which he hadn't accounted for, small scraggly-haired urchins chasing each other through the legs of market vendors. There are women hanging laundry between the eaves, and old men sitting on benches in the thin autumn sun. From a distance it is simply a village, a place where people live and eat and raise their children and do not think overmuch about the war general in the Keep above them whose plans for the future involve gutting the northern kingdom and propping its prince up on a shelf.