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"Yes. He knows. We've been—" He pauses, because he would like to say this tactfully, and he can already see Eskil's eye twitch at the pause. "—seeing each other."

"How long?" Eskil's voice is very quiet. "How long have you been in my brother's bed and not said one word to me about it?"

Bohdi swallows.

"A month," Bohdi says. "A bit more."

"A month."

And there it is.

Bohdi has been bracing for it. He has had the whole thing planned out in his head, what Eskil's face would do, where his fist would land, what he would say about his brother and what he would say about trust, and what it would sound like when he said get out.

None of it is what happens.

"A month," Eskil says again, and his voice is climbing. "A month, Bohdi. You've sat at my table every night of it. You've stood at my shoulder in council. You've planned a war with me. You rode flat out to a Jakadi camp for me. And not once in all of it did you think you could come into my study and shut the door and tell me?"

"I didn't know what you'd do."

"You didn't know what I'd do?"

"No," Bohdi says, and his own voice is climbing now, because he has never been able to not shout back at this man, not since they were boys. "No, I didn't. He's your brother, Eskil. He's the one thing in this world you'd burn everything down for. I've watched you with him since the day he was born. You nearly put a man through a wall in the hot springs for looking at him too long when he was sixteen. What did you think I thought you'd do?"

"I thought you'd tell me!"

"I couldn't."

"Why not?"

"Because I thought I'd lose everything," Bohdi says.

It comes out much louder than he means it to. It rings off the stone and sits there in the air between them, and he hears it, and he cannot take it back.

"That's why," Bohdi says, quieter. "I thought I'd lose all of it. My place. My home. Him. You." His throat has gone thick. "I thought I'd come in and tell you and it would all be gone by morning, the only two people I've ever had. So I didn't tell you. I thought if I just never said it out loud, I could keep all of it a little longer."

Eskil looks at him.

Bohdi watches the anger go out of his face. For a second he thinks that is a good sign. Then he sees what comes up in its place.

"You thought," Eskil says, "that I would throw you out."

"I thought you might."

"You thought I would throw you out." Eskil takes a step toward him. "You have been at my shoulder since you were five years old. We were raised in the same rooms. We learned to hold a sword in the same yard." His voice drops. "You have been the one thing in my entire life that I could count on. I have given you blood and war and ugly work and every decision I have ever been ashamed of, and you have never once, not once, asked me to explain myself."

"Eskil."

"There is no version of any of this where I lose you." Eskil's voice has gone flat and hard. "There isn't one. There is nothing you could do, nothing, that would make me let you go. And you've stood in my house for thirty years quietly deciding that you're a thing that can be spent. That I'd set you down and walk off without you the first time you were inconvenient." He is close enough now that Bohdi can feel the heat coming off him. "Do you understand what you've just said to me? That's the single most insulting thing anyone has ever done to me in my life. And I've been stabbed by better men than you."

Bohdi cannot say anything at all.

"I would give up the throne," Eskil says, "before I gave up either one of the two people who've spent the last month keeping this from me. Do you hear me? I'd walk out of that hall and hand the crown to Vigdis before I gave up either one of you." He stabs one finger into the middle of Bohdi's chest, hard. "And if you ever, ever think otherwise again, I am going to knock you through that fucking wall."

Bohdi stares at him.

His eyes are burning. He notices it from a very long way off, as something happening to somebody else. He does not remember the last time his eyes did this. He thinks it was the morning he was five years old and stood in the doorway of his mother's empty room, looking at the bed she had not slept in. Eskil's mother found him there. She picked him up without a word, and carried him down to the kitchens on her hip, and did not put him down for the rest of the day.

Eskil takes one look at his face and pulls him in.