Page 31

"I'm not doing well," Morgan says.

Bohdi does not say anything. He waits.

"I haven't slept properly since the stronghold. Not one night through. I get three or four hours and then I'm awake, and once I'm awake that's the end of it, and I lie there and it's all still going on." Morgan is looking at the fire. His voice is perfectly level and perfectly dry and he might be reporting a discrepancy in the livestock rolls. "And I can't hold anything. I read the same column four times last week and put the wrong total on a requisition and Seren caught it, which was humiliating, and it was a simple sum. I do simple sums for a living."

"Morgan."

"And you saw today. The child." He laughs, once, and there is nothing in it at all. "You saw it. Don't pretend you didn't. You've never missed anything in your life."

Bohdi sits with that.

He has seen Morgan struggling. He is not blind and he has been in and out of that man's rooms for a month. He saw it in the first fortnight and he watched it get better, and then somewhere along the way he decided that it had gotten better. He is now looking directly at what that decision was actually made of, which was that Bohdi wanted it to be true.

And underneath that, sitting in the middle of his chest and taking up a great deal more room than he would like, is the uglier little fact, which is that he does not know how to help.

He knows how to get a man out of a stronghold. He knows that cold. He knows how to break a neck in one motion and sit down to a meal afterward with an appetite, and he knows forty ways to make a frightened boy laugh, and he knows how to carry a wounded man three miles over broken ground. Not one single piece of any of that is the slightest use to him here.

They are two entirely different creatures, him and Morgan, built out of different material for different weather. Bohdi has been doing terrible things on other people's behalf since he was fifteen and he has never once let any of it settle into his bones. It goes in, and it goes through, and it comes out the other side, and he sleeps.

Except that is not quite the truth, and he knows it is not, and he has known it for a month.

He does think about what happened. He thinks about it more than he has ever thought about anything in his life. He does not think about the warchief, who is dead and dealt with and has earned no further hours. He does not think about what almost happened and only didn't because Morgan is a great deal more capable than he has any idea.

He thinks about the stable yard at dawn.

He thinks about the riders, and the sound of Morgan screaming his name, and the shape of him bent over the back of the rearmost horse with his hands tied behind him, getting smaller down the road, while Bohdi stood in the mud and watched him go.

He has that one at three in the morning. He has it regularly.

So he is not over it either. He has simply never said so, because saying so is not a thing he does and never has been. And because it has never once occurred to him, not in two months, that his own carrying of it might be of any use at all to the person sitting next to him.

"I could stay the night," Bohdi says. "When we get back. All of it, not half of it. I'd be there when you woke up."

Morgan snorts.

"We tried that," he says. "My brother knocked on the door and you spent four minutes behind it holding your boots."

Bohdi opens his mouth.

The thing he could say is that it does not matter, that he will take the risk, that Eskil can knock on every door in Valen and find him behind any one of them. It would even be true. He would say it and he would mean it and it would cost him nothing, which is exactly the problem. Because the thing underneath it, the only thing that would actually fix this, is a sentence about telling Eskil. He has promised to say that sentence twice now. He has not said it either time. And Morgan has never once pushed him on it, which is somehow very much worse than being pushed.

So he does not argue.

He reaches over and takes Morgan's hand out of his lap and threads their fingers together, and Morgan's grip closes around his without any hesitation at all, no pause, no question. It has been waiting there all evening for somebody to come and get it.

That is the part that does it. That is the part that goes in under the ribs and stays.

The fire pops. Morgan puts his head on Bohdi's shoulder and is asleep inside ten minutes, heavy and entirely trusting. Bohdi sits up with him until the sky goes gray, holding on to his hand, and lets the guilt come all the way in and take its boots off and settle.

10

INDRIE

The blind man comes back in the gray before dawn, when the camp is quiet except for the horses, and he brings bread and water.

Indrie has slept, which surprises him. Not well and not for long, sitting up against the post with his arms tied loosely enough behind it that he could shift his weight, but he slept. He decides to be pleased about it. A body that will still lie down in a place like this is a body that intends to go on. He woke twice in the dark, once certain he was in the cart and once certain he was in Eskil's bed, and he isn't at all sure which of the two was worse.

The man finds the post with one hand and kneels and has the rope loose in less time than it took the first night.