Page 50 of Fought it Through the Teeth

The fire burns low. The forest settles around them. The horse shifts in its sleep somewhere nearby, the creak of leather and the soft huff of breath, and the sounds blend with the stream and the wind and the small, persistent rustling of the canopy overhead.

Slowly, they both fall asleep.

Morgan is awake a few minutes longer than Bohdi. He can tell because Bohdi's breathing changes, the deliberate, measured rhythm of holding himself together giving way to the slower, deeper cadence of sleep. Bohdi's hand on his waist relaxes. Not letting go — loosening. The fingers going slack, the grip becoming weight, the intentional hold becoming the unconscious hold of a body that has decided, without permission, that the thing it's touching is where it belongs.

Morgan lies in the dark and feels the weight of that hand and thinks that this is the closest he has ever been to happy in the worst week of his life, and understands exactly how pathetic that is.

He closes his eyes. Ivan's face is there. He opens them. The canopy is above him, dark branches against the pale morning sky, and Bohdi's breathing is beside him, and the hand on his waist is warm.

He closes his eyes again. He keeps them closed. He breathes in time with Bohdi and the rhythm of it carries him under, and he goes.

Chapter 24

Bohdi

They travel on once they wake, with Bohdi keeping them off the main road because the clan will absolutely be sending men after them, and the knowledge of it sits at the back of his skull, steady and insistent and impossible to ignore.

He's done some guesswork. Ten hours since Ivan's body was found, give or take. Two hours for the stronghold to organize, to confirm what happened, to identify who did it, to determine which direction they went. Another hour to assemble riders, arm them, get them mounted and moving. That means the Wolfe clan has had roughly seven hours of hard riding to close the gap between the stronghold and wherever Bohdi and Morgan are now. Seven hours of hard riding on rested horses versus the single exhausted animal carrying two men at a cautious trot on a winding forest path is not a calculation that favors the fugitives.

So Bohdi keeps them off the road. He navigates by the sun and the slope of the terrain and the deep instinct he's developed over fifteen years of moving through hostile territory, the instinct that reads the landscape and says this way, not that way, this ridge offers cover and that valley is a killing ground. Their indirect route costs them time but buys them invisibility, and invisibility is worth more than speed when the men behind you know the land better than you do and have eight times your number.

Morgan rides in silence. He's holding himself upright in the saddle with the rigid, careful posture of cracked ribs that will not let him slouch, and his face is a mask of composure that Bohdi recognizes because he's been watching Morgan build and maintain it for a decade. The bruise on his cheekbone has darkened overnight into a livid purple-black stain that extends from his eye socket to his jaw. The split on his lip has scabbed over. The marks on his throat, four finger-shaped bruises, evenly spaced, the precise imprint of Ivan's hand, are visible above his collar.

Bohdi looks at those marks and thinks about killing Ivan again. It's not productive. The man is dead. But the impulse arrives every time he sees the bruises, a cold, clean fury that doesn't diminish with repetition, and he lets it come and lets it pass and focuses on the road.

Their indirect route brings them through a village around midday.

It's a small place, a crossroads settlement, a dozen buildings clustered around a muddy square with a well at the center and a stable at the west end and a two-story timber building with a painted sign that might once have been legible and now reads as a vaguely ale-colored smear. An inn. The kind of establishment that exists to serve the people passing through rather than the people living here, which means strangers are expected and questions are not.

They have no money. They have almost no supplies. They have a horse that needs rest and feed, a prince who needs food and medical attention, and a warrior who needs a good night's sleep. Bohdi has none of these things and no means of acquiring any of them through legitimate commerce.

So Bohdi does what Bohdi does. He takes a job.

The innkeeper is a broad, weathered woman with arms built for labor and an expression that suggests she is unimpressed by everything. He asks what work is available. She eyes him with frank appraisal, calculating what he's worth, and tells him there's a bear.

A bear. Raiding the outlying farms out of the nearby cave system, coming down at night, killing sheep. Two lambs last week. A milking goat the week before. The farmers are in a state. The last man who went after it came back missing three fingers and most of his dignity, and nobody else has volunteered since.

Bohdi offers to trade its death for coin, a night's stay, and a hot meal. The innkeeper looks at him, at the tattoos, at the sword, and agrees.

He leaves Morgan in the village with instructions to lie low, keep his hood up, and not talk to anyone. Morgan gives him a look that communicates that he is well aware of Bohdi's assessment of his ability to follow simple instructions and would like Bohdi to know that he finds it insulting.

"Stay," Bohdi says, pointing at him.

"I'm not a dog," Morgan says.

"That's true. Dogs listen."

He takes the horse because the cave system is an hour's ride and because the horse needs to move to keep from stiffening, and he follows the innkeeper's directions east along a farm track that cuts through open meadow and then climbs into the foothills. The caves are where she said they'd be, a series of low openings in a limestone ridge, dark and wet and stinking of animal.

Bohdi finds the cave. The bear is inside. He knows this because the smell is overwhelming, the rank, musky, concentrated stench of a large predator living in an enclosed space, and because there are claw marks on the rock at the entrance that are fresh enough to show pale stone beneath the lichen. He draws Ivan's sword and ducks inside and the darkness closes around him.

The cave narrows. The ceiling drops. The floor is slick with water and something worse, and Bohdi moves by touch and smell and the awareness that comes from fighting in the dark before, from learning that hearing is worth more than sight when you can't see your own hand. He finds the bear by sound, the deep, rhythmic breathing of something very large and very asleep, and he makes a decision that would horrify any hunter with actual experience. Bohdi is not a hunter, but he is very good at killing things, and he has identified a problem and selected the most direct solution.

He wakes it up.

The next several minutes are the worst of his recent life that don't involve a drugged cup of ale and a dead warchief. The bear is enormous, the biggest he has ever faced, a wall of muscle and fur and fury that fills the narrow passage and comes at him with the concentrated rage of an animal woken from a nap by an idiot with a sword. Bohdi fights it in a space too tight to swing properly, using the narrow passage to keep the animal from flanking him, using the torch he lit at the entrance and jammed into a crack in the wall to keep it from advancing, using Ivan's unfamiliar sword to slash and thrust and open wounds that bleed but don't slow it.

It gets a paw on him. The claws rake across his shoulder and down his arm, and the pain is white-hot and immediate. Bohdi snarls and drives the sword into its neck, and the animal roars, a sound that fills the cave and bounces off the walls and is louder than anything has a right to be in an enclosed space, and it lunges. Bohdi drops flat and the jaws close on air above his head and he rolls and comes up inside its guard and puts the sword through its chest.