Page 8 of Fought it Through the Teeth

It starts small, with a comment on Morgan's coloring — pale, fine-skinned, someone who clearly spends his days indoors. Ivan delivers it as observation rather than insult, the tone light, almost curious.

"Do you spend all your time within the walls of the castle while your men fight your battles?"

Bohdi feels more than sees Morgan's spine stiffen. But the prince's voice, when it comes, is perfectly even.

"I spend my time on the tallies that pay for other men's swords." Morgan turns his head and meets Ivan's gaze with pleasant, steady directness. "And you should hope I keep doing it, chieftain. The alliance you're proposing runs on northern gold, and that gold runs through my ledgers."

Ivan blinks. It is a small reaction but Bohdi catches it. The chieftain expected deference, or embarrassment, or flustered silence. What he got was a reminder that the blond prince standing in his hall controls the treasury of the most powerful kingdom in the north, and that whatever Ivan thinks he is purchasing, the price tag is attached to a man who knows exactly what it says.

Ivan recovers. He moves on.

But the next comment is sharper. They are in a corridor between the armory and the stables, and Ivan gestures at a tapestry depicting a woman on horseback — thick-limbed, fierce-faced, a spear raised above her head — and says, with casual cruelty he has clearly been saving:

"As you can see, we breed them hardy in the south. My late wife had a nursemaid from the eastern shoals about your size. Good for throwing over my bed and not much else."

The two guards behind them snicker.

Morgan does not flinch.

He regards the tapestry for a moment, as though considering the artistry. Then he turns to Ivan with an expression of mild, scholarly interest.

"Do you talk to any of the people you bed?"

Ivan frowns. "What?"

"Conversation, chieftain. Do you hold a conversation with the company you keep?" Morgan pauses, as though the answer genuinely matters to him. "If you focused more on substance over sturdiness you'd have far fewer vacancies in your bed."

The silence that follows could go either way. Bohdi watches Ivan's face cycle through three distinct phases — surprise, a flash of something dark and dangerous, and then, slowly, a reassessment that settles into something that looks, from certain angles, like amusement.

Ivan laughs, though not warmly. He expected to put his hand in a basket and find a rabbit and found something with teeth instead. But it is a laugh, and the tension in the corridor eases by a fraction, and the tour continues.

Bohdi keeps his hands loose and his mouth shut and lets Morgan answer for himself.

Morgan can answer for himself. Bohdi has watched him do it across council tables and trade negotiations and the long, tedious disputes with harbor merchants who thought the crown prince was a soft touch because he was young and pretty and spoke politely. But watching him do it with Ivan Wolfe, who is twice his size and twice his age and who has already made clear what he thinks Morgan is worth, is different. Morgan is not flustered. Morgan is not cowed. Morgan is dry and precise and mean. It is the cold-edged competence that surfaces over a manifest when someone has tried to cheat the crown, when Morgan stops being pleasant and starts showing his brother's ruthlessness, and it has ended the careers of more ambitious traders than Bohdi can count.

The morning wears on. Ivan takes them through the civilian quarter and the training yard and a long gallery hung with pelts and antlers. At each stop he prods, and at each stop Morgan meets him. He doesn't meet him with aggression, because Morgan is not aggressive. He is something more dangerous than that: he is composed, and his composure has an edge, and the edge draws blood only when it is tested.

Ivan wanted soft and biddable. What he got was a man who knows exactly what he is capable of and can account for it to the last copper, and who is not remotely intimidated by a bull of a warchief with a talent for menace and a dead wife he uses as a punchline.

By the end of the morning, Ivan is still testing, still probing, but the quality of the attention has shifted from dismissal to engagement. He is looking at Morgan not with respect but with something worse: interest.

A light kindles in Ivan's eyes that isn't exactly desire. It is curiosity. He has found something unexpected in his possession and is turning it over, trying to decide whether it is more valuable than he initially assessed, and Bohdi hates it.

He hates it with a purity that surprises him. It isn't the dull, background resentment he has been carrying since Valen — the knowledge that Morgan is being offered up to a man who doesn't deserve to share a room with him, let alone a bed. This is sharper and hotter, a fierce, specific hatred that Bohdi reserves for very few men, and that has nothing to do with the mission and everything to do with the proprietary gleam in Ivan's eye as he looks at the prince.

He's not yours. He will never be yours. He's —

Bohdi shuts the thought down before it can finish itself.

He is not in a position to complete that sentence. Completing it requires a claim he has no right to make and has never made, and making it now would be the most spectacular act of self-sabotage he has ever committed in a career that includes several noteworthy entries.

He is here to kill the chieftain, not to stake a claim on the prince.

He repeats this to himself. It doesn't help.

Meanwhile, Morgan is holding court in Ivan's own gallery, and Bohdi is doing his absolute level best not to watch.

This is its own private hell. Morgan in diplomat mode is Morgan at his most attractive, and for the last two years, from across a council room, with other people and other things to look at, Bohdi has been able to manage it. Here, there is nothing to look at but Morgan. He watches Morgan dress down a war general with sentences so clean they could draw blood. Morgan stands with his shoulders back and his chin lifted and his blue eyes sharp and utterly unintimidated, the whole lean line of him radiating a confidence that should be impossible for a twenty-year-old who has never held a sword and is standing in enemy territory without backup.