Page 29 of Fought it Through the Teeth

Morgan is pleasant to everyone. He learned early that pleasantry is a weapon, and today he deploys it with enthusiasm, knowing exactly how much charm to expend and on whom. He lets himself be seen. He stops at market stalls and admires the leatherwork. He crouches to speak to a child who tugs on his sleeve, and the child stares at his blond hair with enormous eyes and says something in Wolfe dialect that Morgan knows is unflattering.

They stare at him.

Not all of them — some are courteous, some are indifferent, some are busy enough with their own lives that a foreign prince walking their lanes is of no greater interest than a change in the weather. But enough of them stare. They look at his hair first. Always the hair — blond, northern, wrong. Then his hands, which are ink-stained and uncallused and tell anyone who cares to read them that this man has never held a weapon in his life. Then his build, which is lean where their men are broad, slender where their women are sturdy, and does not meet a single standard the Wolfe clan sets for the people it considers worthy.

They do not bother to lower their voices while doing it.

"Thin as a birch sapling," says a woman at a vegetable stall to the woman beside her, in Wolfe dialect that she presumably thinks Morgan can't follow. He follows plenty. "What's the chieftain want with that?"

"Political," the other woman says, with dismissive certainty, the matter already decided and merely being narrated. "Got to be. Doesn't look a bit like the last ones and you know Ivan has a type."

"Can she give the clan anything? She hasn't got the hips for bearing."

"He's a man, Reva."

"You can't be serious."

Morgan smiles at them both as he passes and receives two identically startled expressions in return. He does not break stride. He does not let his pace change or his shoulders drop or his chin lower by a single degree, because he has been performing composure in hostile territory since the day he arrived and he will be damned if a vegetable seller is the thing that cracks it.

He can feel Bohdi behind him. A half-step back, close enough to intervene and far enough to be unobtrusive, and silent — deeply, pointedly, relentlessly silent. Bohdi has not said a word since they entered the civilian quarter. He is walking with his hands loose at his sides and his expression pleasantly neutral and he is saying nothing, and Morgan can feel him not saying it. Can feel the words accumulating behind that easy grin, building pressure.

Ivan made his opinion plain on the tour.

And now the civilians, too. The whole clan in agreement on one point: the northern prince is decorative and useless and will not last.

Morgan moves on to the next stall. He smiles. He asks about the metalwork.

The lane narrows as they move further from the market center, and the stalls give way to workshops — a tanner, a cobbler, a woman working a grinding wheel whose sparks scatter across the dirt path. Fewer people here, and those who are present are occupied with their work and pay Morgan less attention, which is a relief that he will not show on his face. He pauses at the tanner's workshop because the smell of the curing leather reminds him, with an unexpected pang, of the dockside markets at Valen where Jaheira works. The woman inside eyes him with considerably less hostility than the vegetable sellers and answers his questions about the curing process with plain-spoken directness, proud of her craft and willing to talk about it to anyone who asks.

"Not bad," says a man behind them, low and conversational, and Morgan does not need to turn around to know it is directed at him. "For a fancy piece. Shame the chieftain's got first claim."

"The chieftain's welcome to him," another voice answers. "Man like that wouldn't know what to do with a real cock if it slapped him in the face."

Laughter. Coarse, easy, the kind of laughter that requires an audience to be sustained and crumbles the moment its target turns around. Morgan does not turn around. He thanks the tanner for her time and steps back into the lane and walks on.

The sky turns.

It happens fast — faster than Morgan is used to, because weather in Rengara gives you warning, gray rolling in from the north for hours before the first drop falls. Southern weather has no such courtesy. The clouds come over the ridge line and the light changes and then the rain comes down hard enough to empty the lane inside a minute. The torrential, sheeting downpour drives the market vendors under their awnings and sends the children shrieking for cover and turns the packed dirt to mud in the time it takes Morgan to look up and register what is happening.

The nearest open door is a stable at the end of the row.

They duck inside at a run — or Morgan ducks, and Bohdi strides, because the man moves through rain with a total refusal to be inconvenienced by conditions he can't control. The stable is warm and dim and smells of horse and wet straw and there is nobody in it, which is either luck or providence, and Morgan doesn't care which.

They stand in the doorway watching water sheet off the eaves. The lane has become a river. The rain is so dense it blurs the buildings across the street into gray shapes, and the sound of it on the stable roof is a roar that fills the space and makes the world feel small and close. Morgan's shirt is soaked through and clinging to his chest, and his hair has slipped its tie and is plastered to his face and his neck in wet blond strands that drip steadily onto his shoulders.

Bohdi brushes a strand off his face.

The gesture is casual and easy, the back of one knuckle skimming Morgan's cheekbone, pushing the wet hair aside with thoughtless familiarity.

"You look like a drowned rat," Bohdi says, grinning.

Morgan purses his lips. "You always have a way with words, Bohdi."

Bohdi laughs and Morgan feels the sound land in his ribs and stay there. They settle onto a hay bale to wait it out. Morgan sits and the wet fabric of his trousers squelches against the straw and he grimaces and Bohdi drops down beside him close enough that their shoulders nearly touch.

The rain doesn't let up. If anything it intensifies, hammering the roof with a rhythm that makes conversation require actual volume, and neither of them raises their voice. They sit in the doorway of a stable in a hostile town and watch the world drown and do not speak for a while, and the silence is not uncomfortable. It is the silence of two people who have spent enough time in each other's company that the absence of speech has its own texture, its own warmth.

Morgan is cold and doesn't say so.