Page 31 of Fought it Through the Teeth

"Eskil's not the only one who chose you," Morgan says, quiet, like he doesn't trust the words. "You've been part of our lives for as long as I can remember and I wouldn't have it any other way."

The look in Bohdi's eyes is going to burn him alive. A tattooed hand reaches up, pressing against his jaw, and Morgan's breath catches in his throat.

The stable door bangs open.

A boy comes in soaked to the skin, leading two muddy ponies, cursing in Wolfe dialect at the rain and the horses and the state of the world in general. He is twelve or thirteen, dripping wet, and he doesn't see them immediately — rounds the corner into the main aisle and startles so badly one of the ponies shies sideways and clips the stall door with its hip.

Bohdi is on his feet before the door has finished swinging. Up, two steps forward, hand nowhere near a weapon but body positioned between the boy and Morgan automatically. The movement is fluid and instantaneous and entirely disproportionate to the threat, which is a soaking wet child and two annoyed ponies. Morgan watches it happen and feels the loss of the moment so acutely it registers as physical pain — a sharp, bright thing under his ribs.

The boy stares at them. Bohdi gives him a broad, easy grin and says something about the weather in a passable approximation of Wolfe dialect that makes the boy relax and go about his business, and just like that the space between them has been rebuilt. Distance where there was none. Air where there was warmth. Two men standing in a stable an appropriate distance apart, one of them smiling and the other wearing the cloak of the first and trying to remember how to breathe.

They walk back through the last of the drizzle without speaking.

The rain has tapered to a fine mist that beads on their clothes and their hair and turns the lane into a glistening mirror of mud and sky. The civilian quarter is coming back to life — vendors dragging their wares out from under awnings, children emerging from doorways, the steady rhythm of a settlement that has endured a thousand rains and will endure a thousand more. Morgan walks beside Bohdi through the mist and is still wearing the cloak, and neither of them mentions it.

At the door to the Keep he stops. The threshold is ahead of them and beyond it the hall and the eyes and the performance, and Morgan unclasps the cloak from around his shoulders and holds it out. Bohdi takes it.

"Thank you," Morgan says.

Bohdi nods. He does not say you're welcome. He does not grin. He holds the cloak in one hand and looks at Morgan with the last remnants of whatever was in his eyes in the stable, and then he drapes the cloak over his own shoulder and opens the door and they go inside.

Ivan is in the hall. He is seated in his customary position at the head of the table with a cup in front of him and his steward beside him, and he looks up when they enter and takes in Morgan's appearance with an expression that falls somewhere between amusement and contempt.

"My bride looks as though he's been swimming," Ivan says, loud enough for the hall to hear.

Morgan smooths his wet hair behind one ear with two fingers. He meets Ivan's eyes and says, with the precise, glittering courtesy that he deploys when he is one insult away from saying something unforgivable, "The southern rain is more enthusiastic than what we're accustomed to in the north. I'm sure I'll adapt. As I understand it, adaptability is a quality you prize in a bride."

Ivan studies him. The beat stretches. Then the warchief grunts and waves a hand in dismissal and turns back to his steward. Morgan walks past the table and up the stairs and into the corridor with his jaw aching from how hard he is clenching it, and his clothes dripping a trail on the stone floor.

He lets himself into his room. He closes the door. He stands in the middle of the floor in his wet clothes and presses both hands flat against his face and breathes and waits for the ache in his chest to subside.

It doesn't, but he's gotten pretty good at waiting.

Chapter 14

Bohdi

Ivan invites Bohdi to his study late that night, and it would be the best opportunity of the entire trip if there weren't two guards standing inside the door with him.

Bohdi clocks them the moment he crosses the threshold. Left side, right side, positioned against the wall in the standard configuration of men who have been told to be present and unobtrusive and are managing the first and failing at the second. Both armed — short swords, belted, not drawn but accessible. Both watching him with flat, incurious attention, men who do this every night and find it tedious.

Bide your time, Bohdi tells himself, and reflects that he has never once in his life been good at waiting.

Ivan's study is a warm, cluttered room on the second floor of the Keep, lit by a fire in the hearth and half a dozen oil lamps that give the space a close, amber quality. There are maps on the walls — southern territories, trade routes, a large one that Bohdi's eyes go to immediately and that shows the Wolfe lands in relation to the Jakadi settlements, the distances between them marked in what looks like Ivan's own hand. There is a desk buried under correspondence. There are weapons mounted above the hearth — a pair of crossed swords and an old battle-axe that Bohdi's fingers itch toward out of sheer professional longing.

His axe is in his room, two corridors away. His belt knife was left at the door. Ivan requires him to disarm in private — the only space in the stronghold where the rule applies, and Bohdi accepted the condition with a grin and filed it as another data point about the man's paranoia. He is entirely, completely unarmed, sitting across a fire from a warchief flanked by two swords, and the knowledge of it sits between his shoulder blades and stays there.

Ivan is in his chair by the fire, two cups already poured, and he waves Bohdi toward the other seat with expansive generosity. Bohdi sits. The chair is comfortable. The fire is warm. The study smells of leather and smoke and the sweet, heavy mead that Ivan drinks in the evenings, and under other circumstances Bohdi might have enjoyed this.

Ivan pours heavy. The cup is full and the mead is strong and Bohdi picks it up and calculates. The guards are the problem. Two men between him and Ivan, positioned to intervene inside two seconds. He could close the distance bare-handed — get across the gap and put Ivan on the floor and crush his windpipe before the man understood what was happening. Maybe. The guards would be on him before he finished. Even if he got Ivan's throat in his hands, the odds of getting out of this room and down the corridor to his axe and then to Morgan's quarters without being cut down are poor odds for anyone who intends to see the sunrise.

Not tonight.

He drinks his mead.

Ivan drinks slower. He watches Bohdi over the rim of his cup with an evaluative, half-lidded gaze, working up to something, and Bohdi recognizes the preamble because he has sat through it before — the deliberate silence, the comfortable setting, the shared drink. Men like Ivan don't invite you to their study to talk about the weather. They invite you because they want something, and the study and the mead and the fire are the stage dressing that makes the asking feel generous.

"You're a good man, Bohdi," Ivan says.