Page 9

Garrik staggers and presses a hand to his chest, where there are bandages visible under a shirt that is also not his own. The wince is real and deep and he does not try to hide it. He straightens against the wall and meets Bohdi's eyes with a steadiness that would be admirable in someone Bohdi had not already decided to hate.

"You must be soft in the skull," Bohdi tells him, "to walk into the fucking keep of Valen after what happened in the south."

Garrik's jaw tightens. He is pale and breathing through his teeth and his hand is still pressed flat to the bandaging on his chest, and he does not look away. "I'm unarmed," he says. "And freshly stitched. And I seek an audience with the king." His mouth twitches. "Not his lapdog."

Bohdi's temper flares white. His grip shifts from the back of Garrik's neck to the front of his shirt and tightens, knuckles against the man's collarbone, close enough to feel the heat of the wound through the linen. Garrik's jaw clenches against the pressure but his eyes stay level, which is either courage or stupidity and Bohdi has always found the two to be indistinguishable.

"You're going to get an audience with my fist," Bohdi promises him.

"Bohdi." Morgan's voice behind him, steady and sharp. "I've spoken with him. We need to see Eskil."

Bohdi does not turn around. His hand stays on Garrik's shirt and his blood stays hot and the part of him that makes measured decisions is being outpaced by the part that remembers what happened in a Wolfe stronghold. He breathes in through his nose and asks, through clenched teeth, "Did he touch either of you?"

The pause behind him runs a beat too long. Bohdi can feel the hesitation in it, Morgan wavering, the fraction of a second where the answer is being assembled rather than given, and every nerve in his body pulls tight.

Indrie answers for both of them, calm and clear. "He didn't hurt either of us, no."

Which is not the same as he didn't touch us, and Bohdi has known these two long enough to recognize a sentence that has been built rather than spoken. There is a story sitting behind all of this and he is not certain he has the patience or the empathy to sit through it. It would be so much cleaner to kill the man and throw his body back out the gates.

But Morgan continues, and his voice is firm and final. "What Garrik has to say is worth hearing. And Eskil needs to hear it."

Bohdi stands there a long moment. He can feel the tension in his jaw and the heat in his chest and Morgan's eyes on the back of his neck, and three things pulling against one another at once: the soldier evaluating a threat, the man protecting the people he loves, and the king's hand who has just been handed an unmistakable order by the prince. He unclenches his fist from Garrik's shirt one finger at a time and steps back.

"Fine," he says. "The king it is."

He leads them through the keep, putting himself at the front where he can control the pace and the direction and where nobody walking behind him is out of earshot. Morgan falls into step beside him, and it takes effort not to ask whether he is all right.

He wants to pull him aside and put his hands on his face and look at him properly, the way he looked at him on the road home from the stronghold, checking for the kind of damage that sits under the skin where no one else can see it. But there are people in this corridor and a Wolfe warrior behind them and Indrie beside the warrior with a hand on Garrik's elbow to steady him, and none of this is the time or the place.

He glances at Morgan sidelong and Morgan glances back, and the look that passes between them says everything the corridor won't allow. It will have to be enough for now.

Eskil is in his study, behind the desk that is always covered in paper and never organized to anyone's satisfaction, including Morgan's, who has attempted it four times and given up four times and declared the whole endeavor a lost cause. Eskil looks up when the door opens and his expression goes from mildly annoyed to entirely closed off, which is always a bad sign. He has never met Garrik and does not recognize him. His eyes move from the southern clothes to Morgan, then to Indrie, then to Bohdi, and his face stays perfectly, dangerously flat.

Bohdi closes the door behind them. "My king," he says, and the forced ease in his voice is deliberate, because he is in a mood now. "Allow me to introduce Garrik, ward of the late chieftain Ivan Wolfe. He was so graciously accompanying our healer and your brother through the halls of your keep."

Eskil's jaw sets. The anger arrives not in his face but in his hands, in the way his fingers curl on the desk's edge, the way his weight shifts forward in his chair. His eyes cut to Indrie.

Indrie looks back at him without blinking.

Bohdi watches the two of them hold each other's gaze and is silently and profoundly grateful that he does not have to be present for whatever conversation is going to happen between them tonight. He has been present for many of Eskil's arguments over the years and has no desire whatsoever to witness one in which the king's opponent is the one person in the world he cannot bring himself to overpower. That is going to be a spectacular fight and Bohdi plans to be at least three corridors away when it begins.

Morgan breaks the standoff by taking one of the open seats without being invited, because Morgan has never waited for an invitation to sit in his own brother's study. He pulls a sheaf of parchment toward him and picks up a quill, because Morgan does not sit through anything without preparing to take notes on it.

Garrik is grey and wavering on his feet. The walk from the clinic has cost him more than he is showing. Bohdi can see it in the way Garrik's weight lists toward his good side, in the hitch in his breathing that means the stitches are pulling.

"He needs to sit down," Indrie says, quiet but carrying the firmness that means he is not asking. "He's lost a great deal of blood and he's been on his feet too long."

Eskil's gaze shifts to Indrie. Something moves behind his eyes, fast and involuntary, that Bohdi has begun to recognize over the last few months. It is the look Eskil gets when he has walked into a room with a clear idea of what is going to happen in it and finds himself overridden by a force more stubborn than he is.

Eskil inclines his head toward the remaining chair. "Sit," he tells Garrik. The word carries nothing friendly in it.

Garrik sits. His knees give slightly on the way down and he catches the armrest to stop himself from dropping, and the grunt he swallows tells Bohdi the wound is worse than the man has been letting on.

Bohdi watches it happen and finds it deeply funny that his king has been brought to heel so thoroughly by his tiny healer that he just offered a chair to a man from the clan that tried to overthrow him, because Indrie told him to. Then he replays the last five minutes and registers that he himself backed down from putting Garrik through a wall because Morgan told him to, and the amusement curdles into something uncomfortably self-aware.

At least the king is in good company, he thinks.

He stations himself at the door, arms crossed, weight even on both feet, in the posture that says the exit is not available and should not be tested.