Page 58 of Fought it Through the Teeth

Morgan

Morgan is face-down over the back of a horse, wrists bound with leather cord tight enough that his fingers are going numb and tingling, and every stride drives a spike of pain through his cracked ribs that grays out his vision at the edges.

His hair hangs in his face. It's come loose from whatever half-hearted arrangement he managed this morning, and the blond strands are tangled across his eyes and his mouth and plastered to the blood on his cheek. He cannot get them out of his eyes because his hands are bound behind his back and his arms are wrenched at an angle that makes his shoulders scream.

That stupid detail is somehow the thing that makes him want to weep.

Not the binding. Not the ribs. Not the blood or the pain or the fact that he is being hauled back to the stronghold he escaped two nights ago, back to the dead man's hall, back to the people who will want someone to bleed for what he did. The hair. The single wet strand stuck to his eyelash that he cannot brush away, that tickles and clings and is so small and so unbearable that it collapses the distance between endurance and despair in a way the larger horrors cannot.

He bites down on it. He bites down on the strand of hair caught at the corner of his mouth and on the urge to weep and on the panic building in his chest. Panicking gets him nothing and weeping gets him less, and he has already learned, in the last forty-eight hours, exactly how useless both of those things are when the world is determined to destroy you.

He listens.

The horse beneath him is moving at a hard canter, hooves drumming on packed earth, and he can hear the other horses around him — four or five, he counts the rhythm, the overlapping percussion of a group riding in loose formation. He can hear voices. Men speaking in Wolfe dialect, guttural and fast, the clipped exchanges of warriors executing a task and not wasting breath on conversation.

He catches fragments. His Wolfe dialect has been sharpened by a week and a half of immersion, honed by the necessity of understanding people who did not want to be understood, and even face-down over a horse with blood in his eyes he can pick the words out of the rushing air.

Morgan pieces it together. They are bringing him back. Dade sent them. Ivan is dead and the clan wants answers and wants somebody to bleed for it, and the blond prince of Rengara is going to provide both.

He notes, in the cold analytical part of his mind that never fully shuts off no matter what is happening to his body, that they do not mention Garrik.

Not once. Not as a rival claimant, not as the man who should be leading in Ivan's absence, not as the ward whose authority they're operating under. The men speak of Dade and of the clan, and of the dead chieftain, and of the justice they intend to extract from the prince who killed him. But Garrik's name does not enter the conversation.

Morgan files it. He has no idea yet what it means, but he files it, because that is what he is for. That is what he has always been for. His weapon has always been information, and even bound and bleeding and draped over a horse he is still doing his job, still listening, still sorting the useful from the useless and storing it in the place where it can be reached when it matters.

The filing takes a moment. The moment passes.

And then he is left with the rhythm of hooves and the taste of blood in his mouth and the echoing weight of everything Bohdi said to him in that bed and everything Morgan didn't say back.

I want you on my arm. I want you waiting for me on the docks. I want you in my bed.

He heard it. He heard all of it and the hearing of it was the happiest and cruelest moment of Morgan's life. Better than the bath. Better than the kiss. Because the bath was bodies and the kiss was hunger and this was truth, laid out before him in the gray morning light by a man who has never once lied to him about anything that mattered.

Bohdi wants him. Bohdi has wanted him, and the wanting is not small and is not the casual, easily managed attraction Morgan would have guessed at, if he had ever let himself guess. It is big. It is the kind of big that makes a man pin another man to a mattress and confess with his whole body shaking and his voice wrecked and his eyes burning with the cost of saying it out loud.

And then he said I can't have you.

Then men on horses came and took Morgan away from him before he could do a single thing about any of it.

The horse lurches over a rut and Morgan's ribs compress against the saddle and the pain whites out his vision and he bites through the inside of his cheek to keep from crying out. He will not give them the sound. He will not give these men a single thing they can use — not his pain, not his fear, not the tears that are burning behind his closed eyes and that he is holding back by the same stubborn, vicious will that has been holding him together since he left Valen.

He thinks about Bohdi in the stable yard. The image is seared into his memory — Bohdi rounding the corner at a dead run, the sword in his hand, the look on his face when he saw Morgan over the back of the horse. The look was something Morgan has never seen on a human face before — not fury, not terror, but both at once, fused together into a single expression so raw and so absolute that it barely registered as an expression at all. It was a man watching his own heart being torn from his chest and carried away at a gallop.

He fought. Morgan heard it and then he was around the bend and the sounds were gone and Bohdi was gone and there was nothing left but hooves and blood and the road unwinding behind him.

He doesn't know if Bohdi is alive.

Please, he thinks, and doesn't know who he's thinking it to. He has never been devout. He has never prayed to the god of war the way Eskil does, or left offerings at the shrines the way the soldiers do, or believed in anything larger than the evidence in front of him. But he is face-down over a horse with his hands bound and the man he loves might be dead in a stable yard behind him, and the word comes without theology or ritual or faith.

Please. Please let him be alive. Please let him come.

Chapter 30

Bohdi

Bohdi tracks them by the road. Four riders with a prisoner are not subtle — the hoofprints are deep in the soft ground, the earth churned and scarred by iron shoes driven hard, and the trail is embarrassingly easy to follow. A child could follow it. A blind man could follow it by feel, running his hand along the gouged ruts and the clods of thrown mud. The Wolfe warriors are not trying to hide their passage, because they don't expect to be followed. They are armed men on fresh horses and the only man who would come after them is a northerner with a dead arm and a borrowed sword, and they have already, in their estimation, dealt with him.

They have not dealt with him.