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It is hard, and it is close, and it has nothing whatsoever of a king in it. Eskil has both arms around him and one hand locked in the back of his hair, and he is holding on with everything he has and showing no sign of letting go. Bohdi grabs him back. He gets his arms around him and his fists in the back of Eskil's shirt and holds on, and there are tears coming down his face now, a great many of them. Eskil can certainly feel them soaking through his shirt, and he graciously does not say a single word about it.

They stand there a long time.

"You fucking idiot," Eskil says, eventually, into the side of his head. His voice is rough. "You thick, stubborn, stupid idiot."

"I know."

"A month."

"Thereabouts."

When he finally lets go, it is only far enough to get one hand around the back of Bohdi's neck. He grips it, hard, and pulls Bohdi's forehead down against his own, and holds it there, the way he has done a thousand times, in a thousand yards and on a thousand decks and in the middle of a burned clearing a few days ago with the smoke still going up.

Bohdi manages to ask, still flayed open, "Do you still want me to say the rites?"

"Of course I want you to say the rites," Eskil says roughly. "Who the fuck else would I ask? Are you going to or aren't you?"

Bohdi laughs.

It comes up out of him wet and broken and cracked straight down the middle, and he cannot stop it, and he does not try. He stands there in the middle of his room at one in the morning with his forehead against his king's and his face soaked, laughing, and the thing that has been stuck in the middle of his chest finally, finally comes loose.

"Yes," Bohdi says, when he can. "Yes. Gods. Yes, I'll say them."

27

MORGAN

Morgan has been in the library since a little after dawn, and he has written the first clause of the treaty eleven times.

It is not a difficult clause. It is the one that says who the parties are. He could have written it in his sleep at fourteen. He has gotten as far as Fenris, son of Ivan, rightful chieftain of the Wolfe on four separate occasions and then sat looking at the words until they stopped meaning anything, and scratched them out, and started again on a clean sheet. There is now a small pile of ruined paper at his elbow that Ingrid would scold him for.

He did not sleep. Bohdi did not come last night. He does not come every night, and Morgan has told himself very firmly that there is nothing in that. But Bohdi has been strange ever since he made him a promise in the dark, strange in a way Morgan has not been able to put a name to. Morgan lay awake last night until the fire was nothing but a red eye in the grate, doing sums about what might be wrong. None of the sums came out anywhere he liked.

So. The twelfth attempt. Fenris, son of Ivan.

The door opens.

Morgan looks up, and it is his brother, and the back of Morgan's neck goes tight all at once.

He has had that feeling since he was about four years old. It arrives before his head knows anything, the small cold prickle under the hair at his nape, and every single time it has meant exactly the same thing. He is in trouble. He is in real trouble, the kind with a door shut behind it, and the correct response is to be somewhere else as fast as possible.

He cannot be somewhere else. He is behind a desk in a room with one door, and his brother is standing in it.

Eskil comes in and shuts the door behind him.

That is bad. Eskil only shuts a door when he means to say something he does not want the corridor to hear. He shut it when Morgan was twelve and had forged the quartermaster's hand on a requisition for a pony. He shut it when Morgan was seventeen and came in at dawn with straw in his hair. He shut it in the spring, in this same library, when he took Morgan by the arm and hauled him in here and demanded to know why Morgan had not mentioned a betrothal.

He crosses the room and stops in front of the desk. He does not sit.

"I spoke with Bohdi," Eskil says.

It does not land.

Morgan hears the words. He understands every one of them separately. But they will not go together into anything, because Bohdi swore to him that he would tell Eskil, has been swearing it for the better part of a month. Half of Morgan certainly believed him. The other half never did. The other half has been quietly planning the rest of his life around the fact that it was never going to happen.

And here is his brother. The man who taught him his letters on a kitchen table with a stick of charcoal. Who carried him through two winters of famine. Who sat up with him through a fever when he was eight and slept in the chair beside the bed for four nights. Here he is on the other side of a desk, and his face says, as plainly as it has ever said anything, I know.

Morgan cannot breathe.