Page 26 of Tending the Ache

Bohdi nods slowly. His fingers have stopped drumming. "What did the council say?"

"The council was useless, as expected."

"The council is always useless. That's what you keep me around for."

Eskil almost smiles. Almost. The muscles in his face make the attempt and are overruled by the tension in his jaw. He picks up one of his short swords and begins cleaning it, not because it needs cleaning, but because his hands need something to do that isn't reaching for a drink or punching the wall.

Then he tells Bohdi about the Wolfe clan.

Bohdi's face lights up. The change is immediate and unguarded: his eyes sharpen, his posture shifts forward, and there is a hunger in his expression that Eskil recognizes from every strategic conversation they've ever had in which the odds suddenly tipped in their favor.

Bohdi is already listing the strategic advantages, ticking them off on his tattooed fingers with enthusiasm. "Southern trade alone would offset two years of poor harvests. Their mineral output is—"

"Bohdi."

"—and if we could station even a small contingent at the southern pass, the Jakadi would have to think twice about—"

"Bohdi."

His second-in-command stops. Looks at him. Reads his face.

The enthusiasm dies. The change in Bohdi's demeanor is immediate.

"What's it going to cost us?" He asks, and his voice is flat.

Eskil holds his gaze. "The chieftain wants Morgan."

Silence. The armory seems to close in around them, the walls tightening, the flickering torchlight suddenly inadequate. Bohdi does not move. He does not blink. The muscles in his jaw work once, hard, and then he is still again.

"He wants Morgan," Bohdi repeats carefully, as though he hasn't heard correctly.

"As a bride. A consort. The price of the alliance is a marriage between their chieftain and the prince of Rengara."

Bohdi's mouth shuts, and his face closes off, and he is quiet for a very long time.

Eskil knows Bohdi the way he knows his own weapons. The weight, the reach, the points of weakness. He has fought beside this man for fifteen years and known him for thirty. He has watched Bohdi take a warhammer to the ribs and get back up laughing. He has seen him drink a man twice his size under a table and carry the unconscious body home over one shoulder while singing. He has never, not once in all those years, seen Bohdi at a loss for words.

Bohdi is never quiet. Bohdi fills silence instinctively and completely, as though emptiness were a personal affront. His voice is the first thing Eskil hears in the morning and the last thing he hears at night and the constant, steady undercurrent of every day between. And now he is silent, and the silence is not comfortable. It is not the silence of a man thinking. It is loaded and heavy, words held behind the teeth with an effort that shows in the tension of his shoulders, the stillness of his hands, the way his gaze has hardened like stone.

It is deeply, profoundly unusual.

And Eskil knows why, or believes he does.

Because Bohdi knows exactly who Ivan Wolfe is. Of course he does. Bohdi has been collecting what comes north out of those passes for as long as Eskil has, and half of what Eskil knows arrived by way of Bohdi in the first place, and neither of them needs to say first wife or second wife out loud.

So that is what this is. Bohdi has run the same calculations Eskil ran at the council table and arrived at the same place, which is that they are being asked to hand someone they both watched grow into a capable young man over to someone twice his age with a body count.

It is a neat explanation. It accounts for everything Eskil has just seen on his second-in-command's face.

He does not look at it any harder than that.

"What are you thinking?" Eskil asks.

Bohdi's jaw works again. A beat. Another. He lifts his head and there is something in his eyes that Eskil cannot quite name, something raw and bright and dangerous that flickers and is gone so fast it might have been imagined.

"I think," Bohdi says, and his voice is measured in a way it never is, each word placed with deliberate care, "it would be very quiet around the keep without the prince mouthing off to the king."

The words are light. The tone is not.