Page 51 of Fought it Through the Teeth

It takes a long time to die. Bohdi holds the blade in place and braces his feet and waits, and the bear's breathing goes from rage to confusion to a wet, labored rattling, and then it stops. He pulls the sword free and sits on the cave floor in the dark with blood running down his arm and his lungs burning. Of all the ways he imagined dying, he thinks, mauled by a bear in a hole in the ground while the prince of Rengara waits at an inn was not among them.

He skins it. The work is messy and his shoulder is screaming but the hide is the proof and the proof is the payment. He rolls the heavy pelt and slings it over his good shoulder and walks out of the cave into the daylight, squinting at the sky and judges by the sun that he's been gone four hours.

He hauls the hide back to the village and slaps it wet on the innkeeper's counter.

The woman looks at the hide. She looks at the blood on his arm and the claw marks through his shirt and the expression on his face, which is probably not his most charming. She puts a palmful of coin on the counter and a room key beside it and tells him dinner is in an hour.

Bohdi pockets both. He buys them both a second set of clothes because traveling in their blood stained ones is bad practice for keeping hidden. He also buys rations for the road: dried meat, hard cheese, twice-baked bread that will keep for days.

Then he goes to find his charge.

He finds Morgan in the stables, and he is not alone.

There's an armed man in a leather jerkin standing very close to him. Bohdi's hand goes to the hilt of his sword, the motion involuntary, the hand deciding before the brain engages, and for a half-second he thinks Wolfe and the calculation runs: draw, close, kill, grab the prince, assess.

Then he reads the angle of the man's body and the calculation dissolves.

It isn't aggressive at all. It's interested. The man is turned toward Morgan, grin low and easy, one hip cocked, one hand braced on the stall post above Morgan's shoulder. The posture is unmistakable. He has spotted something attractive and is applying himself to it with hopeful confidence that his chances are good.

His chances are not good. His chances have never been worse.

And Morgan, travel-worn, bruised, blood still on his clothes, working his way through something that would have flattened lesser men, is looking at the stranger with an expression so quintessentially, perfectly Morgan that Bohdi's heart swells stupidly in his chest.

He looks utterly unimpressed. He looks offended at sharing air with the man. His chin is tilted at the angle that means he has evaluated the person in front of him and found them wanting. The set of his mouth says that whatever proposition is being offered, the answer was no before it was asked and will remain no regardless of how it's repackaged.

And it tells Bohdi a great deal about how much stronger the prince is than he believes himself to be. Because this man was beaten and choked and dragged through a gate and fell apart in the mud beside a stream not twelve hours ago. And yet here he is, standing in a stable, spine straight, chin up, giving a stranger the full force of his disdain because Morgan does not know how to be diminished. He can be hurt. He can be frightened. He can be shaken to pieces and put back together by someone else's hands. But he cannot be made less, and Bohdi is looking at the proof of it and the feeling in his chest is so large it barely fits.

Bohdi strides up and inserts himself into their space with no effort at all. The man is average height, average build, armed with a short sword he clearly knows how to use and a grin he clearly knows how to deploy, and the grin falters the instant Bohdi enters his field of vision. Because Bohdi is six feet and change of northern warrior, tattooed to the cheekbones, blood still drying on his sleeve, smiling with all his teeth.

"Bear problem sorted," Bohdi tells Morgan. Then he turns the smile on the stranger. "If you're done here."

The man gives him a look. It's a game try. Squared shoulders, lifted chin, determined not to be intimidated by size alone. It is markedly less effective than he presumably hopes. Bohdi watches him take stock. The height, the breadth, the tattoos, the sword, the bear blood. Comfortable with violence and currently deciding whether this situation requires any.

The man withers in real time. His shoulders drop. His chin comes down. The grin transitions through several stages of recalculation and arrives at acceptance.

"Ah," the man says. "I see."

"I did tell you I was waiting for someone," Morgan says, and raises an eyebrow.

The man looks between them, Bohdi's bloody grin, Morgan's raised eyebrow, and makes one final attempt. He turns to Bohdi with resigned hopefulness, a gambler throwing his last coin at a long shot.

"Don't suppose you'd be interested in some sort of arrangement," the man says.

Bohdi laughs harder than he has in days. The sound bursts out of him, genuine and startled, and the stranger blinks at him in confusion.

"You think I have ownership over him?" Bohdi says, and the notion is genuinely absurd, and the laughter in his voice says so. "Trust me, if the young man has said he's uninterested then it's out of my hands, friend."

The man bristles at the dismissal, or at the realization that whatever he thought was happening here is not happening and never was, and steps aside. Morgan brushes past him, catching Bohdi's sleeve as he goes, two fingers hooked in the fabric, pulling him along. Bohdi grins wickedly at the man over his shoulder and turns to follow his prince.

Morgan doesn't let go of his sleeve until they're out of the stable.

Bohdi notes this. He notes the two fingers and the tug. The casual, unconscious possessiveness. Morgan has decided that Bohdi belongs to him and is communicating it to the world through the medium of fabric. He notes the warmth that blooms in his chest at the touch and the way his body leans toward it, and he notes, uneasily, exactly how much he enjoyed that.

Not the man's discomfort. Not the dominance display. The claiming. Morgan's hand on his sleeve and Morgan's eyebrow raised and the unspoken, absolute certainty in every line of Morgan's body that says this one is mine. The sick, sweet thrill that runs through Bohdi when he sees it, because no one has ever claimed him before.

Bohdi puts it away. He puts it in the place that is too full and too warm and too dangerous to look at directly, the place he has no idea what to do with.

Chapter 25