Page 57 of Fought it Through the Teeth

Bohdi is downstairs settling things with the innkeeper while Morgan takes their supplies out to the stables.

He's trying to negotiate a blade for Morgan, a proper weapon that sits in a proper sheath on a proper belt and gives the prince something between himself and the next man who decides to put hands on him. The innkeeper has a modest armory behind the bar, short swords, a pair of hatchets, a crossbow that's seen better decades. Bohdi is examining a blade with a grip small enough for Morgan's hand and knowing full well Morgan won't carry it, and getting absolutely nowhere with this stingy merchant who wants twice what the blade is worth and won't budge.

"It's not worth eight," Bohdi says, turning the blade in the lamplight and noting the nick near the hilt that the innkeeper has conveniently angled away from the light. "There's damage on the edge here. I'll give you four."

"Seven," the innkeeper says, arms folded, unmoved.

"Four, and I won't mention to your guests that the ale you're serving is watered down enough to baptize a child in."

The innkeeper opens her mouth to respond.

Then Morgan screams his name.

The sound rips through the dawn air and Bohdi's blood goes cold. The kind of cold that starts in the spine and radiates outward and turns every nerve ending into a wire pulled taut and humming. He is running before the echo dies.

He is out the front door in two strides. He rounds the corner of the building and the stable yard opens up in front of him, the packed dirt, the trough, the stable doors standing open, and he sees them.

Six riders. Wolfe leathers and insignia, the boiled leather he's been looking at for a week and a half, the painted faces and the short swords and the heavy-shouldered bearing of warriors who have been riding hard and have arrived at their destination. They're in the yard.

Morgan is thrown across the back of a horse.

His hands are being bound behind him, leather cord, cinched tight, wound around his wrists with practiced speed, no wasted motion. One of the warriors has a fistful of Morgan's blond hair and is wrenching his head down, forcing his face against the horse's flank, and Morgan is fighting. He's thrashing and kicking and twisting against the grip with a ferocity that is completely useless against a man three times his strength on horseback, and the sound he's making comes again.

Raw. Cracked. Desperate.

"Bohdi!"

Two of the warriors see him. They peel off from the group and come at him, and Bohdi meets the first rider at a run.

The man swings from the saddle, a downward stroke, the natural advantage of height, and Bohdi sidesteps and gets inside the arc and drags the blade across the horse's flank. The animal screams and rears and the rider loses his seat and hits the ground and Bohdi is on him before he's stopped rolling. Two strokes. The man is down.

The second rider is smarter. He comes in slower, circling, keeping distance, and the mace in his hand describes a lazy arc at the end of his arm. He's waiting for Bohdi to commit. Bohdi doesn't give him the satisfaction. He feints left, draws the swing, ducks under it, and gets a hand on the rider's belt and pulls. The man comes off the horse sideways and the mace catches Bohdi on the shoulder on the way down.

The impact sends fire straight down his arm. His hand goes numb, the fingers open without his permission and the sword clatters onto the packed earth. He staggers sideways with white sparking across his vision. The rider is scrambling up. Bohdi's hand isn't working. His right arm is hanging at his side, the shoulder screaming, and the man is up and the mace is up and Bohdi has approximately one second before the next swing arrives.

He picks up the sword with his left hand. The grip is wrong, the balance off, the angle unfamiliar, everything about it working against the muscle memory of a lifetime of right-handed fighting, and he drives the blade into the man's gut before the mace finishes its arc. The man folds. Bohdi wrenches the sword free and turns.

The yard is empty. The remaining riders, four of them with Morgan, have gone through the yard and onto the road at a gallop, and the sound of hooves is fading into the morning and Bohdi is standing in the churned mud with two dead men.

He watches them ride away with Morgan and he cannot catch them on foot.

He has perhaps thirty seconds before they're out of sight entirely. Perhaps less. The hoofbeats are fading. The dust is settling. The innkeeper is standing in her doorway with her mouth open and her hand on the frame and the other guests are beginning to emerge, drawn by the screaming and the sound of fighting, and every second Bohdi stands here is a second Morgan gets further away.

He spends fifteen of them standing perfectly still.

Every muscle locked. Every breath held. His feet planted in the mud and his left hand white-knuckled around a borrowed sword and his right arm aching at his side and his eyes fixed on the bend in the road where Morgan disappeared.

Something inside him that has been holding for two years finally, completely breaks.

It doesn't look anything like what happened to Morgan, no tears, no shaking, no collapse. It breaks quietly, at first. A crack in the structure that has been there since the midwinter feast, widening by degrees, held together by will and duty and relentless, grinding discipline, two years spent keeping the wall intact. And then the crack reaches the point the wall can't bear and the wall goes and what comes through is something older and hotter and infinitely more dangerous.

The wall is falling.

He moves without hesitation, without deliberation, the body executing what the mind has already decided. He crosses the yard in four strides and takes the reins of the nearest horse, his own, saddled, the supplies still strapped to the back where Morgan was loading them when they took him. He mounts with his left hand because his right arm won't take the weight, and the motion is ugly and graceless and it gets him into the saddle and that's all that matters.

He puts his heels to the horse and rides.

Chapter 29