Page 17

They eat. The provisions are simple, bread and hard cheese and dried venison from the keep's stores, and Morgan tears off pieces of each and eats them without tasting them because his body needs fuel and his mind is elsewhere. Bohdi eats beside him, close enough that their elbows knock when they reach for the waterskin at the same time, and neither of them moves apart.

The privacy settles over them with the dark. The fire crackles and the trees shift overhead and the horses stamp softly where they are picketed at the edge of the clearing. There is no corridor to check, no footsteps to listen for, no door that might open at the wrong moment. Morgan watches the vigilance loosen out of Bohdi's shoulders by degrees, the way his movements get bigger and easier, the way his laugh comes without the fraction of a second where he checks who might be listening. Bohdi's hand rests on his own knee, six inches from Morgan's thigh, and the six inches is not strategic. It is just distance, the distance between two people sitting close together by a fire, and Morgan is acutely aware of how rare that is and how temporary it will be.

"Do we need to keep a watch?" Morgan asks.

Bohdi shakes his head. "We're fine tonight. Inside the border, good cover, no tracks behind us. We'll start watches tomorrow once we're closer to the village. It's only a day from the border and the Jakadi have been scouting that stretch."

Morgan nods. He chews a piece of dried venison and watches the fire, and the silence between them is comfortable, the kind of silence that has texture and warmth.

Bohdi tells him about walking Garrik to his room. He tells it laughing, leaning back on one hand, the firelight catching the tattoos on his forearms and the red of his braids. Bohdi tells it as a joke. His voice has the bright easy cadence of a good story well told and his grin is wide and shameless.

Morgan listens and hears something underneath the joke that Bohdi does not seem to hear in his own voice. He hears that Bohdi went to Garrik's room and made a point of asking. He hears that Bohdi framed the question as tactical, as due diligence, as the king's second vetting a potential threat, and that the question he actually asked was whether this man intended to try for his lover. He hears the possessiveness Bohdi wrapped in a grin and a shrug and offered as humor, and the words are out of his mouth before he can decide whether saying them is wise.

"You were worried he might still be interested in me?"

Bohdi waves a hand. "Just doing my job. Making sure the Wolfe warrior we've invited into the keep isn't planning to seduce the prince on top of everything else."

"That's not what I asked."

Bohdi's hand drops. The easy grin stays in place, but something behind it shifts, a minute adjustment that Morgan would not notice if he had not spent years studying this face in all its configurations. He looks at Morgan across the fire and the look is not joking anymore.

Morgan holds it. The fire pops between them and sends a spray of sparks into the dark, and neither of them flinches.

"Is this something we're going to do?" Morgan asks. His voice is quiet and steady and it costs him to keep it that way. "Being together. Is this something you want?"

Bohdi snorts. "What kind of question is that?"

"A serious one."

Bohdi is quiet for a moment. The fire shifts and his face moves through shadow and light, and when he speaks the joke is still there but it is thinner, stretched over something raw.

"You're a great lay, Morgan, but nobody is good enough in bed to justify stakes this high. I wouldn't be doing any of this if I weren't committed." He pauses. The grin fades. "Is that what you want to hear?"

Morgan scoffs. "You already know how I feel."

"Maybe I want to hear it."

Morgan stares at him. The firelight moves on Bohdi's face and his expression is stripped in a way Morgan has seen only a handful of times, on a riverbank with blood on his hands, in a rented room with a towel around his waist, in Morgan's bed in the dark with his voice cracked open on the words I want you despite the fact that you're the prince. This is Bohdi without the armor, asking for something. Bohdi never asks for anything.

Morgan's chest is doing something unmanageable and his mouth is dry. The smart move would be to deflect, to say something cutting and funny and let the moment pass with his defenses intact, because that is what he does and he is very good at it.

He opens his mouth to deflect. What comes out is not a deflection.

"I love you," he says. "I've been in love with you since before I knew what it meant and I'll love you still until my body turns to ash."

He hears the words leave him and feels the specific horror of having just said the truest thing he has ever said with no plan and no preparation and absolutely no way to take any of it back. His heart is hammering and some distant hysterical part of his brain notes that this is the least composed he has been since the alcove this morning, and at least then he had the excuse of Bohdi's mouth.

Bohdi's face goes still. The grin is gone. The charm is gone. What is left is a man who is looking at Morgan as though Morgan has handed him something he does not know how to hold.

Bohdi comes to him, moving low and fast, and gets a hand around the back of Morgan's neck and brings him in, and his eyes are very close and very bright.

"Say it again," Bohdi says against his mouth.

"I love you, Bohdi," Morgan says. He would be embarrassed by how unsteady his voice is if he had any capacity left for embarrassment, which he does not, because he has apparently spent all of it on the most graceless declaration of love in the history of the kingdom.

Bohdi kisses him.

It is not a gentle kiss. Bohdi's hand is spread wide at the back of his skull, holding him where he wants him, and his mouth is hot and certain and tastes of smoke from their fire, and Morgan's hands come up to fist in the front of Bohdi's shirt because his balance has gone somewhere he cannot retrieve it. The sound of the woods drops away until there is nothing but the pressure of Bohdi's mouth and the rough pad of his thumb against Morgan's cheekbone and the hammering of his own treacherous heart.