Page 82

"Do you remember the night on the ship?" Eskil asks.

Bohdi shuts the door.

"What night?" he says. "There were a lot of nights on that ship. There was the night Gunnar tried to make a pudding. There was the night Ermin fell into the bilge chasing that rat. There was the night we lost a barrel of the good ale over the side and you made a speech."

Eskil's eyebrow twitches.

"You know which fucking night, Bohdi."

Bohdi looks at him. Then his face clears.

"Oh," Bohdi says. "Ohhh. Yes. The one where you deflowered our healer."

Eskil closes his eyes. He stands there in the middle of the room with his arms folded and his eyes shut. Bohdi watches him visibly decide not to hit anything, and enjoys it more than is strictly decent.

"That fruit," Eskil says, with his eyes still shut. "The red one I ate out of Armond's stores. It wasn't just a poison. It's a marriage rite in Kalkoa. You share it with somebody you're already promised to. You eat it on your wedding night, the two of you, and then you lie down together, and that's the vow. It's a whole gods damned ceremony." He opens his eyes.

Bohdi stares at him.

"He didn't tell me, of course. I found out in the spring," Eskil says. "It was in a book in the library. I've been chewing on it for three seasons. I have been sitting on it in my own head the whole time, letting him walk around carrying it, because I didn't know how to put it right and I was too much of a coward to try." He unfolds his arms. "I'm done being a coward about it. I'm going to ask him to marry me. Properly. In the hall, in front of everybody."

For one moment the inside of Bohdi's head is entirely blank.

Then it is not blank at all. It is so full of something that it knocks the breath out of him. He has known this man since they were both boys, and he has watched him win battles and bury his parents and crown himself at nineteen with a famine in his throat and a six-year-old hanging onto his leg. He has never once in all that time seen him want something for himself and go and get it.

"Eskil," Bohdi says, and then he is across the room and has him by both shoulders and is hauling him in and hugging him so hard he hears Eskil's back crack. "Eskil. You great stupid bastard. That's fantastic."

Eskil makes an outraged sound into his shoulder and does not pull away.

"When?" Bohdi says. He lets go and grabs him by the shoulders again and shakes him. "When are you asking him? Does he know? Gods, he doesn't know, does he? Look at your fucking face. You're going to make a pig's ass of it. You're going to go in there and say something unforgivably stupid about something mundane and then kiss him and forget the rest."

"I haven't worked it out yet."

Eskil is still looking at him. He has not smiled. He has not laughed. He is standing there with Bohdi's hands on his shoulders, looking straight into his face with an expression Bohdi does not immediately know what to do with. Eskil has clearly come here tonight to say more than he has already said.

Bohdi's hands slide off his shoulders.

"Will you say the rites?" Eskil asks. "At the wedding. Will you be the one who says them over us?"

And Bohdi comes apart.

It does not happen in pieces. It happens all at once and all the way down. One moment he is standing in the middle of his own room with his king in front of him, being asked the one thing in the world he would have sold his right arm to be asked. The next he cannot feel his hands. Something that has been holding in the middle of his chest has simply stopped, and everything behind it is coming, and there is nothing he can do about any of it.

Because Eskil wants the man who has been lying to him to stand up in front of the whole kingdom and say the most honest words there are.

"I'm in love with Morgan," Bohdi blurts.

It comes out of him in one breath and he cannot stop what comes after it.

"I know what he is to you. You can do whatever you think is right. You can take the axe off me. You can send me to the far watch on the northern coast. You can put me out of Valen, if that's what you decide, and I'll go, and I won't argue." It is the most important thing he has ever said to anybody and he is making a total ruin of it. "But I'm not going to stand here and ask you to forgive me for it, because I'm not sorry. I can't be. I have tried. I cannot make myself regret loving him."

He stops, because there is no more breath in him.

The room is completely silent.

Eskil has not moved. He is standing exactly where he was, and his face has gone very still, and Bohdi cannot read one single thing on it, which has not happened in thirty years.

"You love him," Eskil says. "Does he know?"