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The fire burns down. The snow keeps coming.

Eskil holds on, and does not let go, and somewhere in the small hours, with Indrie's heart going slow and steady against his ribs, he sleeps.

22

BOHDI

Morgan is filthy and exhausted and running entirely on spite, and Bohdi has never wanted him more.

He follows him down the corridor toward his chambers and watches him walk, and the walk tells him everything. There is a hitch in Morgan's stride where his left hip is sore from the saddle. His shoulders are up too high and held too tight, carrying a day and a half of looking over them with nowhere to put it down. There is mud caked up the backs of both calves and a stiff crusted line across his cloak where the creek dried on it. He is filthier than Bohdi has ever seen him, and he moves through the keep daring anybody in it to say so.

Nobody says so. The two attendants they pass take one look at the prince and find urgent business in the other direction. Bohdi would laugh if he were not so busy working out, in detail, how he is going to take Morgan apart the moment there is a door shut behind them.

Morgan's rooms are warm. Somebody has drawn a bath in the accompanying chamber, and the steam off the copper tub catches the light from the lamps and turns the whole room hazy and gold. Morgan drops his cloak on the floor. It lands with a wet slap. He reaches for the hem of his shirt, then stops and turns around to look at Bohdi, who is still standing just inside the door.

"Are you waiting for a written invitation?" Morgan asks, raising an eyebrow.

Bohdi crosses the room. He catches the hem before Morgan can lift it and does it himself, peeling the stiff shirt up and off over his head in one pull. Underneath, Morgan's skin is grimy and pink with cold and marked all over with the road. The bruise on his hip from the saddle is a spectacular sunset of purple and yellow. There is a shallow scrape along his ribs. The scratch Bohdi noticed at the gate is longer than he thought, a thin red line that runs from the cheekbone all the way down to the jaw.

Bohdi traces it with his thumb. Morgan holds still and watches his face.

"Bramble," Morgan says. "On the creek bank. Which is where any reasonable person would choose to be."

"What were you doing in a creek when there was a perfectly good road?"

"I obviously forged a new path that outshone the one you left me on." Morgan gives him a wry look. "Also, there's a story that goes along with it that I'm sure you're dying to hear."

"You're going to tell me regardless," Bohdi says, and pulls him in by the waist of his trousers and kisses him.

Morgan makes a sound against his mouth, surprised and hungry, and his hands come up and grab two fistfuls of Bohdi's shirt. Bohdi kisses him slow. He did not get to on the road, standing in an open gate with a guardsman gaping at them, and he takes his time about it now. He learns the shape of Morgan's mouth all over again, how his lips part and how his tongue moves and the little hitch in his breathing when Bohdi's teeth catch his lower lip and tug.

"Bath first," Bohdi says against his mouth.

"Bath first," Morgan agrees, and pulls him closer and kisses him harder.

Bohdi laughs into it and pries Morgan's hands out of his shirt and walks him backward toward the tub, unlacing his trousers as they go. Morgan steps out of them and out of his smallclothes and stands there naked in the steam, and Bohdi looks at him and feels the same kick in the gut he has been feeling since a midwinter feast two years ago.

Morgan is lean and long where Bohdi is broad. He is pale where Bohdi is inked. There is not a tattoo or a blade scar anywhere on him. Bohdi knows from close personal experience exactly how strong that slim body actually is, how Morgan's thighs lock around his waist, how his fingers grip, how his back arches.

Morgan's eyes go to his chest and then travel down with no shame whatsoever. It is the same frank, openly greedy look he has been giving Bohdi since he was old enough to know what it meant. Years of looking and wanting and never once getting to keep, and all of them are right there on his face. He still does not quite believe he is allowed.

Bohdi strips the rest of the way. Morgan watches every piece hit the floor. The firelight picks out the ink that covers Bohdi from his throat to his toes, every line and whorl of it, a battle or a vow or a year in service to the king. Morgan has traced every one of them. He has learned Bohdi's body the way he learns trade routes and cipher keys, with an attention that borders on obsessive.

Bohdi gets in first. The water is hot enough to sting and he sinks into it with a groan that comes up from somewhere around his heels. Days of riding and fighting and not sleeping are all making their arguments at once. His shoulder aches from the swing that put down the Jakadi at the eastern tree line. His knees have opinions. Every muscle from his jaw to his calves is making pointed remarks about retirement.

Morgan climbs in after him and settles between his thighs with his back to Bohdi's chest. The water comes up around them both. Morgan tips his head back onto Bohdi's shoulder and lets out a long, slow breath, the first honest breath Bohdi has heard out of him since they split on the road.

"Tell me everything," Bohdi says.

Morgan does. His voice is low and tired and dry, and he tells it the way he tells anything he is still working through, in order, with his own editorial remarks attached. The ride home from where they split. The night on the road with every hedge making noises at him. The farmland at the edge of the holdings in the morning, and four Wolfe riders in war paint in a lane, talking to a farmer with a hayfork. The girl behind the barn, and her brother, who told him about the creek.

Bohdi snorts. "She called you a chicken?"

"She told me I was not a chicken. She was ten. She looked at me and her first instinct was to rule out poultry." Morgan's mouth twitches. "In her defense, I was sitting in her hen yard."

Bohdi laughs, loose and real, and it shakes both of them in the water. He picks a cloth up off the rim and wets it and starts on Morgan's hair, working his fingers through the long blond tangle of it, loosening the grime and the dried creek. Morgan leans into it and shuts his eyes, and his shoulders come down a little at a time.

"They knew we were looking for Fenris," Morgan says, quieter. "The riders on that lane. Which means somebody in this keep told them where to look."