Page 62 of Fought it Through the Teeth

"I can't have you have that conversation with the king," Bohdi says. Low and rough and certain. "Not about me."

Morgan looks at their joined hands.

The dark ink and the pale flesh and the mud and the blood and the river and the dead men and the morning light falling across all of it, and the sight of it hurts in a way that goes all the way down. Down past the ribs and the bruise and the years of wanting, into the deepest structures of who Morgan is and who Bohdi is and what they are to each other and to the man who sits between them on the throne at Valen.

Bohdi has never once said he doesn't want him.

"Okay," Morgan says. And his voice almost holds. The crack is small, a hairline fracture in the last syllable, barely audible over the sound of the river, but it's there, and Bohdi hears it, and his hand tightens on Morgan's. "Okay. I promise I won't."

Bohdi squeezes his hand.

He doesn't let go for a long time.

They sit on the riverbank with the bodies of four men around them and the morning light warming the water and their hands laced together between them, and the river runs on, and neither of them speaks, and the silence between them is not empty. It is full. It is full of everything they have said and everything they haven't and everything they might never say, and it sits between them, patient, heavy, alive.

Eventually Morgan lets go. He flexes his fingers, stiff from the grip, from the cold, from the binding that kept them numb for hours, and stands. His ribs protest. His face throbs. His body is a catalog of damage that he hasn't had time to assess and doesn't intend to until they're somewhere safe, if such a place exists.

He offers Bohdi his hand.

Bohdi takes it and Morgan pulls him up, bearing the weight, bracing his legs against the mud, and Bohdi gets his good leg under him and stands. He sways. Morgan steadies him. They stand face to face in the mud with their hands still clasped and Morgan's arm under Bohdi's elbow, and Morgan says, "Can you ride?"

"Can you?" Bohdi asks.

"I asked first."

Bohdi's mouth twitches. Not the grin, something smaller, quieter, private. "Yeah," he says. "I can ride."

Chapter 32

Bohdi

They ride for Valen.

Bohdi's thigh has stopped bleeding, which is either the bandage doing its job or the wound clotting on its own, and he'll take either. His shoulder is stiffening in a way that says it's going to be a real problem for weeks, the kind of deep, grinding damage that heals slow and heals wrong if you don't let it rest. Resting is not on the itinerary today or tomorrow or any day until they're behind the walls of Valen with Indrie's hands on it and the healer's quiet fury directed at the idiot who let it get this bad.

He rides behind Morgan on a single horse, though the dead men left them plenty to choose from. There was a brief, perfunctory argument about this at the riverbank. Morgan insisted Bohdi take the front because he was more injured. Bohdi told him the man with the bad arm and the bad leg was not the man who should be holding the reins. Morgan opened his mouth to counter, and Bohdi physically lifted him into the front of the saddle with his one working arm before Morgan could finish the sentence. "You absolute bastard," Morgan said. Bohdi grinned for the first time that day. "Shut up and ride," he said.

He keeps his arm around the prince's waist.

Not for balance. Not for practicality. Not because the terrain requires it or the horse requires it or any tactical consideration in Bohdi's extensive repertoire of tactical considerations calls for a man to ride with his arm wrapped around another man's middle and his chest pressed against another man's back. He does it because he watched Morgan be taken from him that morning and he is not capable of letting go right now. Possibly not ever again. The arm around Morgan's waist is the arm that dragged Ivan off him in the study. The arm that held him in the mud by the stream. The arm that cut the bindings off his wrists at the river crossing. It knows where it belongs and it is not moving.

Morgan leans into him.

Not gradually. Not by degrees. He settles back against Bohdi's chest all at once, with his full weight. His blond head rests against Bohdi's collarbone and his shoulders press against Bohdi's chest and the warmth of him seeps through both their shirts. Bohdi can feel the rise and fall of his breathing and the steady rhythm of his heartbeat transmitted through the points where their bodies meet.

Morgan's fingers rest on Bohdi's forearm. They trace idle patterns over the tattoos, following the lines, mapping the ink, moving along the knotwork with the devoted attention Morgan gives to things he considers worth studying. His touch is light. Absent. The unconscious wandering of fingers that have wanted to do this for years and have finally been given permission, and the feel of it is so acute that Bohdi thinks he may be losing his mind.

Neither of them pretends there's a tactical reason for the closeness.

There's no discussion of it at all. There's no negotiation, no acknowledgment, no careful delineation of what this is and what it isn't and where the boundary falls. Morgan leans back and Bohdi holds him and they ride, and the silence between them is not the silence of the last two days, not the pressurized, agonizing silence of two people circling each other in the wreckage of everything they can't say. This silence is different. It has weight and texture and warmth, and it sits between them, a living thing that has been curled up waiting for a long time and has finally been allowed to stretch.

That's worse and better than talking.

Worse because the fullness of it is doing things to Bohdi that he has no defense against and no desire to defend against. Better because talking would require them to name what this is, and naming it would require them to decide what to do with it, and deciding would bring them back to the conversation on the riverbank.

So they don't talk. They ride. The road winds north through the foothills and into the lowlands, and the landscape changes around them by degrees, the dense southern pine giving way to sparser growth, the air cooling, the light shifting from the bright, hard southern sun to something softer and grayer that smells of the sea. They're getting closer. Bohdi can feel it in the terrain and the temperature and the wind that carries the faintest trace of salt from the northern fjords.

When they stop to water the horse the next afternoon, after a cold night camped off the road, Bohdi eases himself out of the saddle and discovers that his leg has stiffened to the point where standing is a negotiation rather than an assumption. He leans against the horse and waits for the muscles to unclench and watches Morgan walk down to the stream's edge and crouch and drink from his cupped hands.