Page 59

"Pell," Morgan says, committing it to memory. He is going to have Pell transferred to the sheep pens at the northern farms before the week is out, and he is going to enjoy every word of the requisition.

He is drawing breath to explain this when he hears a horse.

It is coming fast, down the hill from the city side, hooves ringing on the cobbles loud enough that Pell turns around to look. Morgan has perhaps two seconds to register that he knows that shock of red hair before the horse is pulling up hard in the arch, and somebody is coming off it before it has stopped moving.

Then Bohdi has him.

He crosses the space between them in three strides and gets both arms around him and hauls him in, and Morgan makes a noise of pure indignation into his shoulder. They are in the middle of the east gate in broad daylight with a guardsman staring at them and a cart waiting behind and a woman with a basket of turnips standing openly in the road watching, and anybody in Valen could walk around that corner.

Then he feels the way he is being held and stops.

It is too tight. Bohdi has one hand spread flat across his back and the other clamped around the back of his head, and he is holding on hard enough that Morgan's ribs creak. Bohdi's face is pressed into Morgan's wet, disgusting hair. He is breathing badly. Morgan can feel it against his scalp, short and ragged and uneven, and he has known this man his entire life, and he has never once heard him breathe like this.

He was worried, and worried is nowhere near the size of it.

Morgan notices something else as well, standing there. Hands have been closing on him out of nowhere for a month, and every time it happens his body goes cold and his skin crawls and some part of him goes back to a stable yard in the south. Bohdi has just come off a horse at a dead run and seized him from the front without any warning at all, and nothing in him has gone cold. Not one inch of him.

He puts his hands on Bohdi's arms and holds on to them.

"I'm all right," Morgan says, into his coat. "Bohdi. I'm all right. I'm here."

Bohdi pulls back, but only far enough to look at him, and his hands move to Morgan's shoulders and stay there. His face is wrecked. He has not slept since Morgan last saw him, and his eyes go over Morgan's face and down him and back up, the scratch on his cheek, the mud, the water. Morgan recognizes the inventory. It is the one Bohdi takes after a battle.

"You weren't here," Bohdi says. "We got back and you weren't here. The stall was empty. I never should have left you on that road. I should have sent Dagny. I should have put you over my saddle and carried you."

"Bohdi."

"The whole way to the fucking cedars, if I had to. I should never have left you out there."

"Bohdi," Morgan says, more firmly, and puts one hand flat against the middle of his chest. "Stop. I'm perfectly fine. I made it. There were a few detours, and I'll tell you about all of them, and you'll make fun of me, I'm sure. But I made it home on my own, and Eskil needed you, and you went where you were needed."

He has had a day and a half in the dark and the water to decide that he means both halves of it, and he wants Bohdi to hear each one. Eskil needed Bohdi more than Morgan did. And Morgan went a day and a half without him and is standing here in the gate. Neither of those things takes anything away from the other.

Bohdi looks at him for a long moment. His jaw works. Whatever he wants to say, he does not say it.

"Sir," Pell says, faintly. "Do you know this man, sir?"

Morgan turns his head.

He keeps his voice perfectly level. He simply looks at the boy the way he looked at the corporal at the Kettle ford, with every ounce of patience he has ever possessed visibly and permanently exhausted.

"I am the prince of Rengara," Morgan says. "I am going up to the keep. I am going to have a bath, and then I am going to have a great deal to say to a great many people. If you have a problem with any part of that, you may take it up with my brother the king, who I understand has also had a very trying week."

Pell goes the color of old milk.

"Your highness," Pell says. "I didn't. I'm sorry. I didn't know."

"Clearly," Morgan says.

Bohdi makes a sound that is very close to a laugh, and takes the reins out of Morgan's hand, and takes his own horse's in the other, and leads the three of them up the hill.

Inside the keep, in the long cold passage behind the stables where nobody goes unless they have to, Morgan finally stops walking and turns around.

"Tell me," he says.

Bohdi drags a hand down his face.

"Eskil found them," Bohdi says. "They were in the cedar forest after all. He went in and took the camp apart last night. Indrie's alive. He's back. He's up in the keep with Eskil right now and Eskil won't let anybody within a hundred feet of him."