Page 45 of Fought it Through the Teeth

He is working with what he has.

He goes to Morgan.

He kneels in front of him. The stone is cold and tacky with dried blood and his knees press into it and he doesn't care. He puts his hands on Morgan's knees and he waits.

Morgan's head comes up. Slowly. The blond hair falls away from his face and his eyes find Bohdi's and they are wide and glassy and somewhere very far away, and Bohdi gives him the most genuine smile he can dredge up under the circumstances.

It is not his best work. His face hurts and his head hurts and his body is still processing whatever Ivan put in that cup, and the smile that arrives on his mouth is lopsided and strained and probably reads as a grimace more than anything reassuring. But it is real. It is the real one — not the performance, not the charm, not the grin he deploys. It is the smile he gives Eskil when they have survived something that should have killed them. The one he gave Morgan in the courtyard at Valen when the prince finally landed a strike with the practice dagger and looked so shocked at his own success that Bohdi had to bite his lip to keep from laughing.

"Time to go, your highness," he says.

He takes Morgan's hands. They are cold and stiff and crusted with dried blood and Bohdi wraps his own hands around them and pulls.

Morgan comes up. He unfolds from the wall, body locked in one position for hours and having forgotten how to be anything else, and Bohdi gets him vertical and holds his forearms until he is sure Morgan's legs are going to keep him there. Morgan sways. His eyes are still distant. He is looking past Bohdi at the room behind him — at the body, the blood, the firelight on the dead man's face — and Bohdi tips his face away with a finger under his chin.

The gesture is small and precise and it works. Morgan's eyes come to his. Focus arrives, not all at once but in stages — the glassiness clearing, the pupil contracting, the sharp intelligence that lives behind Morgan's eyes surfacing through the shock, breaking through. He blinks. He looks at Bohdi's face and then at Bohdi's hand on his chin and then at the rope hanging from the window, and something clicks into place behind his expression.

"Right," Morgan says. His voice is hoarse. Raw. He screamed and then didn't speak for hours. "We're leaving."

Bohdi leads him to the window. He can see the stable block across the yard. He can see the gatehouse at the far end. He can see the shapes of two guards at the gate, dark against the pale wood, and he counts them and adds them to the list.

Morgan is injured and Bohdi knows it. He is holding his left side — arm pressed tight against his ribs, shoulder hunched, unconsciously protecting damage he can't afford to aggravate. Ivan cracked ribs, at minimum. Possibly worse. The bruise on Morgan's face is livid even in the low light — a dark stain spreading from his cheekbone to his jaw, and there is dried blood on his lip and his chin and the collar of his shirt. He looks like he has been beaten, because he was, and Bohdi catalogs every mark and stores it in the place where he keeps the things he is going to make people pay for, and the ledger for this night is long.

Morgan steels himself. Bohdi can see it happen — the spine straightening, the jaw setting, the stubborn rearrangement of being broken down to his foundations and building himself back up from the floor in real time. Morgan steps to the window, looks down, looks at the rope, and puts his hands on the sill.

He doesn't hesitate. He swings his legs over the ledge and grips the knotted fabric and lowers himself out, teeth clenched. Bohdi watches his face and sees the pain hit — the ribs, the bruised muscles, the full weight of his body on arms that are shaking with exhaustion and shock. Morgan's lips pull back from his teeth and his eyes clench shut and a sound comes out of him that is not a cry but wants to be, and he goes down anyway. Hand over hand, knot by knot, the rope swaying and his knuckles white against the fabric.

Bohdi leans out the window and watches him descend. Morgan reaches the end of the rope and hangs there for a moment, swinging. Bohdi's heart is in his throat because six feet is nothing for a healthy man and a long way for one with cracked ribs who has been beaten and shocked and is running on nothing but adrenaline and will.

Morgan lets go.

He hits the ground and Bohdi hears the impact and then Morgan is on his feet and looking up at him and Bohdi can breathe.

He follows. Over the sill, down the rope, hand over hand, the knots rough against his palms and his arms doing the work because his legs still aren't entirely reliable. The drug is out of his system but the aftermath lingers — a heaviness in his limbs, a lag in his reactions, a slight delay between intent and execution that he doesn't trust and can't afford. He reaches the end of the rope and drops and lands in a crouch and his legs protest and he ignores them and stands.

Then he hears Morgan cry out.

The sound comes from his left — a sharp, startled yelp that Morgan cuts off almost immediately, biting down on it, but it is already in the air. Bohdi turns and sees the guard — one man, Wolfe leather and short sword, his hands on the prince. One hand on Morgan's shoulder, one reaching for his arm, and the man's face is confused rather than hostile — he isn't attacking, he is intercepting, a guard who heard a noise and found two men at the base of a wall and is trying to work out what is happening.

Bohdi doesn't give him time to work it out. He gets both hands on the guard's head and breaks his neck in one clean twist. The motion is fast and mechanical and produces a sound that Bohdi has heard before and will hear again, and the man drops out of his hands and hits the ground and does not move.

Morgan stares at him. White-faced in the moonlight, eyes wide, and Bohdi takes his wrist and pulls him toward the stables.

Chapter 21

Morgan

There are guards in the stables and Morgan has barely registered them before Bohdi is shoving him behind his own body and going at them.

It happens fast. Everything is fast now, the world accelerated into a blur of movement and noise and the nauseating adrenaline that turns seconds into hours and hours into nothing. Morgan's back hits the stable wall and Bohdi is in front of him. Then Bohdi is past him, moving with a speed that shouldn't be possible for someone drugged and horizontal two hours ago, and the first guard sees him coming and has time to draw his sword and nothing else.

Bohdi takes the sword out of his hand. Not with his own blade — with his hands, catching the man's wrist and twisting it in a way that wrenches the weapon free and sends its owner staggering sideways. Then Ivan's sword clears its scabbard and Bohdi drives it into the man's chest and the guard drops and Bohdi turns to the second one, who is scrambling off a hay bale and reaching for the axe on his belt.

The second guard gets the axe up. He's faster than the first, younger maybe, or more alert, and the axe comes around in a short, vicious arc that forces Bohdi to step back. Bohdi gives ground and the guard presses the advantage, which is a mistake, because giving ground is not the same as retreating and the difference is what Bohdi does with the space. He lets the next swing pass, steps inside the arc, and opens the man's throat with a backhand stroke that sprays blood across the straw and the stable wall and the side of Morgan's face.

Morgan flinches. The blood is hot and wet on his cheek and he doesn't wipe it off because his hands are shaking and his whole body is screaming and he's pressed flat against the wall. Bohdi held him in a bathhouse hours ago, and now Bohdi is killing people with a competence so absolute it barely looks like violence. It looks like work. Efficient, unhesitating, without wasted motion or unnecessary force.

The sounds are worse than the sight. The wet, meaty impact of steel entering flesh. The choked gurgle of a man trying to breathe through a severed windpipe. The thud of a body hitting straw-covered stone. Morgan will remember the sounds longer than the images. He knows this already. He knows it with the detached clarity of a mind that has stepped outside the moment to observe itself from a distance, because being inside the moment is not survivable right now.