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"Yours is the one that's under me."

"Then we'll sleep on the cloak."

"On the ground. Like animals."

"You just let me fuck you in the dirt and now you're worried about sleeping on it?"

Morgan opens his mouth to argue, realizes he has no ground to stand on, and closes it again. Bohdi laughs against the back of his neck, low and warm, and Morgan feels the vibration of it all the way through his chest.

The fire is burning low. The trees creak above them. Somewhere in the dark one of the horses stamps and settles. Morgan is sore and filthy and lying on the ground in the middle of nowhere with a day's ride still ahead of him and a mission that could get them both killed, and Bohdi's arm is around his waist and Bohdi's heartbeat is steady against his back, and Morgan is so stupidly, terrifyingly happy that he does not trust it.

7

INDRIE

The baby comes at the grey edge of morning, after a night Indrie will remember only in pieces: the mother's hand crushing his fingers white, the midwife's steady voice counting her through each wave of it, the lamp guttering twice and being trimmed twice. The worst of it was the long, terrible stretch near the end when the head would not turn and Indrie's stomach went cold and tight and he had to remind himself to be steady. It is not often these days that he has to remind himself of that. Then again, it is not every day that he delivers a baby.

He has delivered two in his lifetime before the one born on the outskirts of Valen. The first had been in Armond's castle, when one of the scullery maids went into labour four weeks early and everyone turned to him immediately, as the only medical professional of any real worth in the household, expecting him to know what to do about contractions. He had been eighteen years old, and he had learned very, very quickly. The second had been half a season ago, when the blacksmith's wife was expecting, and that one had gone so perfectly to plan that the mother probably hadn't needed him for much beyond cutting the cord and handing her a properly cleaned baby.

This one was not so much his responsibility. The midwife had turned the child herself, with Indrie's palms flat on the taut drum of the mother's belly and his voice murmuring soothingly that she was doing beautifully, which was true without being any use at all to the actual mechanics of the birthing process. The midwife is much better at this than he is. She has been catching babies from these farmlands since before he was born, and she had only sent for him because she knew he had two deliveries under his belt and she felt a third was crucial to his learning.

The boy came out squalling and purple, furious at everything he'd been brought into, and the mother laughed and cried at the same time, and the sound she made was not quite either one. Indrie had stood at the foot of the bed with blood to his elbows and felt the kind of joy that can only come at that exact moment. He doesn't pretend to know what a mother feels when she holds her child for the first time, but he knows what he feels watching it, and that is its own special kind of holy.

The family had insisted upon feeding him afterward. They had nearly nothing, and they made him sit and eat regardless, with a firmness that did not allow for polite refusal. They made him barley porridge with butter melting golden into it and a cup of milk still warm from the surliest goat he had ever seen in his life, and he had thanked them profusely and eaten every last bit. Then he had slept for three hours in their hayloft under a rough horse blanket, curled on his side in the sweet-smelling hay, and woken up stiff and happy and blinking at the rafters.

Now the sun is a flat white coin behind the cloud and the frost is going off the fields in slow threads of steam, and Indrie is riding home.

He is riding badly, which is nothing new. The mare the stablemaster gave him is incredibly patient with him. She is more patient, frankly, than he deserves. He keeps one hand on the pommel at all times, a habit Dagny has tried and failed to break him of on no fewer than six occasions. He posts half a beat behind the trot, and he gives up on the trot entirely whenever he thinks the guardsman is not looking.

The guardsman is always looking, but he is too polite to say so.

"You could shorten your reins, sir," Jorund says, for the third time since they left the farm.

"Yes, I know."

"Begging your pardon. It's only that she'll do more of the work if you let her know you're there."

"I know she will." Indrie shortens his reins. The mare's ears flick back toward him, mildly encouraged. "You'll make a good teacher one day, Jorund. You explain the same thing four different ways without once calling me an idiot."

Jorund goes red to the ears. He is nineteen years old and he has been on Indrie's escort rotation for a month and he has not yet worked out that the king's healer can be joked with, which is its own small sadness. The boy is dutiful and earnest and utterly incapable of recognising a tease until it has already landed, and Indrie tries not to use that knowledge too much.

So he talks instead about Runa, which is the surest way to put him at ease.

Indrie has heard a great deal about Runa over the last month. She works for her uncle, who keeps a dye house in the lower city. Her hands are stained blue to the second knuckle and she is embarrassed by this, and Jorund thinks it is incredibly endearing. She has a laugh that carries clean across a crowded room. She can do sums faster than the uncle can. Jorund is putting coin aside out of every pay, careful and deliberate, and in the spring he is going to speak to her father. In the meantime he has been spending quite a lot of time at the dye house, finding increasingly transparent excuses to be there.

"She said she'd think about it," Jorund says. "That's not a no."

"It's certainly not a no," Indrie says.

"Her father's a cooper. He doesn't think much of the guard." Jorund shifts in the saddle and squints ahead at the road, his jaw working around the worry he's too proud to show plainly. "I'm going to ask him at midwinter. After the drink's been out a while."

"That seems wise."

"You think?"

"I think every father in Rengara is more agreeable at midwinter than he is in autumn," Indrie says. "Ask Ingrid what she did with Dagny's mother. I'm told the strategy was legendary."

The track bends north around a stand of alder and drops toward the ford, and the water is loud and white over the stones, and Indrie is thinking about the clinic. He is thinking that Ermin will have the fire banked and the kettle on and will pretend he was not worried, even though he always worries when Indrie is out overnight. He is thinking about the wet cough in the miller's youngest, which he does not like the sound of, and whether the steam treatment is drawing enough of the congestion loose or if he needs to try something stronger. He is thinking that if he is quick he can wash and change before Eskil comes down from the training grounds. Eskil will grab him around the waist with both hands and press his face into his hair and breathe him in because he has missed him, and Indrie will pretend to be embarrassed at being handled as such in the middle of his own clinic by the king.