Page 47 of Fought it Through the Teeth

The sword comes down where he was standing. It bites into the mechanism housing and sticks, and the fourth guard wrenches at it and Morgan scrambles away, putting distance between them, his back against the gate post and his hands empty and his heart hammering.

The guard frees his sword. He raises it. Morgan tenses for it and Bohdi throws his sword.

The blade crosses the yard end over end and buries itself in the guard's back. The man's body arches. His sword arm drops. He takes one step forward and then his legs give and he falls, face-first, at Morgan's feet.

Morgan looks up. Bohdi is in the center of the yard without a weapon. The third guard is still moving, trying to rise, and Bohdi hits him. A bare-fisted strike to the temple that snaps the man's head sideways and puts him down for good, and then Bohdi is moving, crossing the yard toward Morgan with his hands empty and his face set and his eyes burning.

Bohdi pulls Ivan's sword free and helps Morgan back onto the horse. His hands at Morgan's waist are steadier now — the urgency has burned through whatever the drug left behind and what remains is pure function, pure purpose, the Bohdi who operates in crisis the way other men operate in comfort. Morgan gets into the saddle and grips the reins and his horse is sidling and tossing at the smell of blood and Morgan holds it, barely.

Bohdi's horse has bolted. The animal took off during the fighting and is somewhere in the dark beyond the yard, and there is no time to find it and no time to wait.

Bohdi pulls himself up behind Morgan.

The horse shifts under the additional weight and then Bohdi's arms are around him and they drive through the open gate.

The road opens ahead of them. Dark. Empty. The stronghold behind them lit by torches and filling with the sound of alarm, voices and horns, the organized chaos of a military compound that has just discovered its chieftain is dead and its prisoners have escaped.

Morgan has one brief moment to notice the feeling of Bohdi at his back. The warmth of him. The solidity. Both arms around Morgan, bracketing him, and the steady rhythm of Bohdi's breathing against his spine.

Then the adrenaline drags his attention forward into the dark, and they ride.

Chapter 22

Bohdi

They've ridden four hours when Bohdi finally calls a halt.

The horse is blowing hard beneath them, laboring, head low, sides heaving with the kind of deep, exhausted breathing that says the animal has given everything it has and is running on stubbornness and nothing else. Bohdi knows the feeling. He's been riding with his arms around Morgan and his chin set against the cold and his mind running calculations that get uglier by the mile. The only thing that has kept him upright in the saddle is the warm weight of the prince against his chest and the absolute, non-negotiable refusal to fall off a horse while Morgan is on it.

He pulls the reins and the horse slows and stops and stands with its head hanging, and Bohdi swings down first and reaches up for Morgan.

Morgan comes off the horse stiffly. His face is gray in the predawn light, the bruise livid across his cheekbone, the dried blood dark on his lip and chin, and his body moves carefully, holding something broken together by not bending it. Bohdi gets his hands under Morgan's arms and takes his weight as he dismounts and feels the tremor running through him. Exhaustion, cold, pain, the accumulated shock of a night that would have flattened men twice his size.

He sets Morgan on his feet and keeps a hand on his arm until he's sure the prince isn't going to fold, and then he leads them off the road.

The treeline is twenty yards to the east, dense pine, the kind of forest that swallows sound and light and provides the deep, muffled darkness you need when you're being hunted. Bohdi picks a path through the undergrowth, horse in one hand and Morgan's sleeve in the other, until the road is invisible behind them and the only light is what filters down through the canopy from the graying sky.

He knows Morgan is crashing. He's seen it before, on battlefields, in the aftermath of ambushes. Men who held themselves together through the fighting and came apart in the silence that followed. The adrenaline is gone. It burned through Morgan's system during the escape and now it's spent, and everything it was holding back is arriving all at once. And Morgan has no experience with any of it.

They need water, food, and rest. In roughly that order and none of it is available in any meaningful quantity.

Bohdi decides he's going to be practical. He's going to be practical to avoid being anything else, because the anything else is a roaring, formless thing that lives in his chest. It has been growing since he came back to consciousness on Ivan's settee and saw Morgan on the floor with blood on his face and a savage man's hand around his throat. The anything else is not useful right now. Practical is useful. So Bohdi is practical.

He finds a stream. A clear, shallow stream running over stones, a few strides across, the kind you find by listening for it in the silence between the trees. He lets the horse drink first, because a dead horse means walking. The animal drops its muzzle to the water and drinks in long, shuddering pulls, and Bohdi stands beside it and goes through the saddlebags.

The stableboy packed what he could. A waterskin. No food. The boy grabbed oats for the horses but nothing a man could eat, and Bohdi can't fault a child in a panic for prioritizing the animals over the riders. The boy did well. The boy did better than most soldiers Bohdi has commanded.

A blanket. A bedroll. Flint and steel. The hunting knife that Morgan passed to him in the stable, good steel, sharp edge, adequate for field work. Bohdi lays it all out on the ground in a neat row and takes stock.

Add the filthy, bloodstained clothes on their backs, one horse, and Ivan's sword, and that is everything. No food. No map. No money.

It's enough. It has to be enough, because it's what they have, and Bohdi has survived on less.

He ties the horse to a low branch where it can reach the stream and the grass and turns to Morgan, who is still standing exactly where Bohdi left him.

Morgan is upright. His arms are at his sides and his face is pointed in the direction of the stream but his eyes aren't seeing it. He's looking at the water and the trees and the gray light filtering through the canopy, and none of it is registering. He's somewhere else. He's in a room with a dead man on the floor and blood on his hands, and he hasn't left yet, and standing here in the forest with the birds beginning to wake and the stream running over stones hasn't brought him back.

There are ten things Bohdi should be doing. He should be setting up a perimeter. He should be calculating their position relative to the road and the stronghold and estimating how long before the Wolfe riders come after them. He should be building a shelter, starting a fire, finding food, tending the horse, planning the route north. He should be doing his job.