Page 48 of Fought it Through the Teeth

Instead he crosses over to him and pulls Morgan against his chest.

Morgan goes rigid. For one terrible second his whole body locks — every muscle braced, every joint tight, the involuntary response of a body that has been grabbed and hit and held tonight and has not yet learned to distinguish between the hands that hurt and the hands that won't. Bohdi feels the rigidity and holds still. He doesn't tighten his arms. He doesn't pull. He just stays and waits.

Morgan breaks.

It doesn't happen all at once. It starts with a sound, small and strangled, wrenched out of a throat that has been holding its breath for hours and can't hold it any longer. Then a shudder that runs through his body from his shoulders to his knees. Then his hands come up and grip the front of Bohdi's shirt and Morgan shakes apart in his arms.

He doesn't cry. Not exactly. There are no sobs, no wailing, no tears that Bohdi can feel. There's just the shaking — deep, convulsive tremors that roll through Morgan's body in waves, each one followed by a ragged intake of breath and then another tremor and then another breath. It is the most terrible thing Bohdi has heard in a life that has included a great deal of terrible things. Morgan held himself together through sheer, stubborn will for hours and hours and performed composure through every second of it. And now, in the mud beside a stream in the middle of a forest with nobody watching except the one person he trusts, he has let the performance go.

Bohdi holds on.

He doesn't rush him. He doesn't tell him he's fine, because Morgan is not fine and they both know it. He doesn't offer comfort he doesn't believe — doesn't say it's over, because it isn't, or you're safe, because they're being hunted, or everything will be all right, because Bohdi has no way of knowing that and Morgan is too smart to believe it even if he did.

His arms are around Morgan's shoulders, his face pressed to the side of Morgan's head, and the stream running beside them and the horse stamping softly in the trees. He stays like that while Morgan shakes and breathes and grips his shirt with both fists, and he does not let go, and he does not speak, and he does not look away from the top of Morgan's blond head.

His own hands are shaking.

He can feel them doing it — the fine tremor running through his fingers where they're pressed against Morgan's back, invisible under the fabric of Morgan's shirt but present, undeniable. His hands are shaking the way they haven't shaken since the night Eskil got skewered saving his life.

He keeps them where Morgan can't see.

The shaking subsides. Not all at once — in stages, the waves getting smaller, the intervals between them getting longer, until Morgan is still against his chest and breathing in long, slow pulls that sound like they're being drawn up from somewhere very deep. His hands are still fisted in Bohdi's shirt. His forehead is pressed against Bohdi's collarbone. He's warm against Bohdi's chest despite the cold, and the weight of him is the only thing keeping Bohdi's hands from shaking hard enough to give him away.

Morgan exhales. Long and slow and deliberate, putting himself back together.

He doesn't pull away. Bohdi doesn't make him.

Chapter 23

Morgan

Morgan builds a fire and puts together a meager camp while Bohdi goes to find them food, and there's a thin thread of self-respect in being useful.

It's the same thread he held onto the first night on the road south from Valen, when Bohdi dumped an armload of wood at his feet and went off to see to the horses and Morgan got a fire going by himself. That was a week and a half ago, and it feels a year old. The man who sat by that first campfire and complained about his sore thighs seems a different person entirely, someone who existed before Ivan's study and Ivan's hands and the sound a dagger makes entering a neck. Morgan cannot get back to that person and is not sure he wants to.

But he can build a fire.

He gathers what he needs from the area around the camp — dry pine needles for tinder, small branches for kindling, larger deadfall for fuel. His ribs protest every time he bends and his face throbs in time with his heartbeat and his hands are still not entirely steady. The work gives his body something to do that isn't shaking and his mind something to do that isn't remembering, and he takes both gifts without complaint. The flint and steel from the saddlebag are good quality, better than what they had on the road south, and Morgan gets a spark on the third strike and nurses it into flame with careful, patient attention, because fire is the one thing in the wilderness he is qualified to provide.

By the time the flames are steady and the deadfall is catching, Bohdi comes back from the water.

He's carrying an armload of crustaceans — freshwater crayfish, dark-shelled and mud-caked, dug out of the stream bank with his bare hands. He drops them at Morgan's feet without ceremony and they scatter across the ground, legs clicking, and one of them makes a break for freedom that Morgan intercepts with his boot.

"Is this what passes for courtship in the north?" Morgan says.

His voice sounds wrong. Hoarse and thin, scraped raw by the night and the silence and the hours he spent not speaking before the stream. But the words are there and the act of saying something sharp and dry and so much like himself.

Bohdi drops down beside the fire. He hits the ground boneless and heavy, eight hours of fumes finally spent, and stretches his legs toward the heat and tips his head back against the log behind him and closes his eyes.

"I brought my prince a feast," he says. His voice is equally rough, sandpaper and gravel, wrecked by the drug and the fighting and the ride and no sleep. "And got no thanks for it."

Morgan looks at the pile of mud-covered crustaceans and then at Bohdi, sprawled by the fire with his eyes closed and blood still on his shirt and the sword belt riding up over his hip. Something cracks in Morgan's chest that is not grief and not pain and not fear but something else entirely — something warm and terrible and dangerously close to hope.

He gets to work cooking them. Badly, but adequately. He has no pot, so he builds a flat stone arrangement at the edge of the fire. He lays the crayfish on the heated stone and watches them turn from dark gray to red. The smell is good. Rich and mineral and faintly sweet, the smell of fresh food over a fire, and his stomach clenches with a hunger he hadn't registered until this moment.

They've barely spoken since the stronghold.

They are both wrung out and reeling, and Morgan knows perfectly well that it is only Bohdi's strength holding the two of them upright and breathing. Bohdi carried him out of that room and through everything that came after, and Bohdi has not once, through any of it, let the mask drop far enough for Morgan to see what's underneath. He's been the wall. He's been the weapon. He's been the thing that stands between Morgan and the dark and does not move.