Page 25 of Fought it Through the Teeth

Ivan's eyes are wide. His chest is heaving. He is looking at Bohdi's face from three inches away and for one stretched moment, Bohdi can see the understanding arrive. It isn't that he lost a bout. The person holding a blade to his throat chose not to use it, every hit Ivan landed was a gift, and the grinning northerner has been playing with him.

Bohdi could end him right here with one motion. The practice swords are blunted but the edge would crush a trachea at this range, and even if it didn't the angle is right for a hip throw that would put Ivan's skull on the packed dirt hard enough to crack it. He could do it and be holding the dead man's head up to the stunned yard before the first warrior cleared the fence.

He doesn't.

He steps back. He grins. He says, "Gods, it's hot. Do you people not have winter?"

The tension breaks. Ivan blinks, recovers, and barks out a laugh — too loud, too forced, pretending he wasn't just afraid. He claps Bohdi on the back hard enough to stagger him.

"Northern dogs can't handle southern heat," Ivan says, loud enough for the fence. "That's the real reason your king hides behind his walls."

The warriors laugh and jeer and the yard fills with noise again and the moment passes.

Ivan is flushed and pleased with himself. He genuinely believes the bout was close and that Bohdi got lucky with that last exchange. And Bohdi lets him, because that belief is worth more than a dozen won fights. The men watching from the fence have seen exactly what Bohdi wanted them to see — a warrior who is formidable but beatable, impressive but not threatening, the perfect knife hidden inside a perfect grin.

Meanwhile Bohdi is trying very hard not to watch Morgan.

Morgan is sitting on the low stone wall at the edge of the yard. He has been there since the bout started. Morgan is sitting with his elbows on his knees and his chin resting on one fist, and he is supposed to be watching his husband-to-be. He is supposed to be paying attention to Ivan, assessing the warchief's prowess, playing the role of the admiring bride whose warrior performs for him in the dust.

He is not watching Ivan.

Bohdi can feel Morgan's eyes on him, hot and unwavering on the back of his neck. He has felt them since before the first swing, when he stripped his shirt off, when he rolled his shoulders, when sweat began to run down his chest and collect in the lines of his body. He feels them now, in the aftermath, while Ivan's warriors disperse and the dust settles, and the weight of that gaze is heavier and hotter than anything Ivan managed with a sword.

It makes him sloppy, and that is the unforgivable part. The sloppiness shows in small, ugly ways he isn't proud of — an extra flourish on a parry that didn't need it, a hit landed harder than the demonstration required, a recovery from a block that involved more hip rotation than strictly necessary. That last one was aimed, he can admit to himself in the privacy of his own self-disgust, entirely at the audience of one sitting on the wall. He caught himself doing it in the second exchange — the unnecessary flex of his shoulder after disengaging, the way he rolled his neck — and was so revolted with his own vanity that he nearly let Ivan land a clean hit out of sheer punitive self-loathing.

And then he kept doing it, because Morgan is watching and Bohdi's body knows when Morgan is watching, and every cell in him turns toward that attention whether he wants it to or not.

You're a fucking peacock, he tells himself. You're strutting for a man you can't have in front of a man you're going to kill. Get a hold of yourself.

He does not get a hold of himself.

Chapter 11

Morgan

Morgan watches Bohdi and Ivan spar and tries very hard not to focus on the fact that Bohdi has stripped down to trousers and boots and nothing else.

He fails immediately and completely.

It isn't as though this is new information. Bohdi's body is not a revelation. Morgan has seen him shirtless a thousand times — in the training yards at Valen, on the docks in summer, crossing the courtyard at dawn with a towel slung over his shoulder and his braided hair still dripping from the springs. Bohdi exists in a state of perpetual, unconcerned undress where other men would reach for armor, because he was raised communal and has no concept of personal modesty and seems to genuinely not understand that the rest of the world does not share his comfort with nudity.

Morgan understands it perfectly well. Morgan has been suffering the consequences of it for the better part of a decade.

He has seen Bohdi naked. He knows how far the tattoos go — knows they wrap his thighs and trail down his legs, dark ink over hard muscle. The hot springs beneath the Keep at Valen have made sure of that, and Morgan has done himself physical harm not looking.

But of course he has looked, with full knowledge that looking is all he will ever get, and with the grim understanding that the looking itself is a kind of torment he has volunteered for. He knows the geography of Bohdi's body the way he knows the geography of Rengara: by study, by devotion, by years of close observation conducted from a distance he has never been invited to close. He knows the scar that runs along Bohdi's left hip from a knife fight in their second year of campaigns. He knows the tattoo at the base of his spine — a knotwork wolf, which is what the Rengarans call their god of war. It sits just above the swell of his ass in a location so perfectly calculated to destroy Morgan's concentration that he is half convinced the gods placed it there as a personal punishment. He knows the trail of dark red hair below his navel and where it leads, and he has never seen Bohdi aroused, but the man is impressive enough at rest that Morgan's imagination has had no difficulty filling in the margins.

So it is nothing at all, sitting in the sun in a hostile yard, to imagine exactly where that trail of hair disappears beneath the waistline of those trousers. To watch the sweat run down Bohdi's chest and collect in the hollows of his collarbones and follow the dark channels of ink across his ribs. To see the muscles in his back shift and flex as he swings, the shoulder blades drawing together and apart, the raw animal power of him contained in every controlled motion.

Morgan's want to be taken by him is a visceral, physical thing that sometimes leaves him clenching his thighs together and aching in the middle of a council meeting. He has sat through trade negotiations with a quill in his hand and Bohdi standing behind Eskil's chair and wanted him so badly his handwriting deteriorated. He has gone to his chambers and pressed his face into his pillow and fucked his own fist and come with Bohdi's name bitten into the linen, because that is what passes for coping in Morgan's life and he has no intention of examining whether it qualifies.

And now he is sitting on a stone wall in the Wolfe training yard watching the man he has wanted since before he understood wanting fight another man — the man Morgan is supposedly here to marry. Every swing of Bohdi's practice sword, every shift of his weight, every bead of sweat that catches the light on its way down his bare skin, is a small, precise act of destruction aimed directly at Morgan's ability to function.

He watches the bout with his chin on his fist and his pulse in his throat and absolutely does not think about how those arms would feel pinning him down.

Ivan is, by any reasonable measure, a dangerous opponent, and Bohdi is making him look clumsy.

Morgan doesn't have a warrior's eye. He can't parse footwork or read guard positions or calculate the geometry of a striking angle the way Eskil and Bohdi discuss over maps late into the night, their voices low and technical and full of a shared vocabulary that Morgan has never been invited to learn. But he has spent his life watching Bohdi fight. He has spent years on balconies above the training yard at Valen, ostensibly reading, functionally doing nothing of the kind, and he knows the difference between Bohdi fighting and Bohdi performing — by feel, by instinct, by the quality of attention in the air.