Page 2 of Fought it Through the Teeth

"All right, pampered prince, I'll trust you've got it." He says it mildly, almost absently, and it comes out so casually affectionate that Morgan feels the heat rise in his face before he can stop it.

That is somehow worse than mockery. Mockery he can meet on its own terms. He has a sharp tongue and an inexhaustible supply of retorts and he has been trading barbs with men twice his age since he was old enough to sit at a council table. But Bohdi's easy warmth is a blade Morgan has never worked out how to parry.

He sinks down beside the pile of wood and begins building a fire.

He builds it badly at first. The kindling won't catch and the arrangement is wrong and for several increasingly frustrating minutes Morgan crouches in the fading light and strikes flint against steel and produces nothing but sparks that die on impact. His thighs burn from the crouch. His pride burns from the failure. He can hear Bohdi somewhere behind him, doing something with the horses. The knowledge that the man is almost certainly aware of Morgan's struggle without acknowledging it is its own specific torture.

Then the kindling catches.

A thin curl of smoke rises with a tentative orange glow, and Morgan cups his hands around it and blows. He does it carefully, the way Gunnar showed him once in the Keep kitchens when Morgan was fourteen and curious and underfoot. The flame spreads, slowly at first and then with conviction, crawling through the arranged wood until the fire is burning properly: steady, warm, casting a ring of light that pushes back the encroaching dark.

At least I'm not entirely fucking useless.

The triumph is small and petty and entirely private, and he holds on to it. By the time Bohdi comes back from the horses there is something edible in a bowl waiting for him, assembled from the rations in the saddlebags with more determination than skill, and Morgan is sitting cross-legged by the fire in a marginally better mood.

Bohdi drops down across from him, accepts the bowl, and looks into it. His expression says it has offended him somehow.

"What's wrong with it?" Morgan asks.

"Have you tried it?"

Morgan takes a bite, chews, and considers. "It tastes like it was boiled in a boot."

"Ah, good, I was worried we might starve." Bohdi takes a large mouthful and speaks around it. "Eat it anyway. Whining is for men who've earned it, and you haven't done a stroke of work since Valen."

"I built the fire."

Bohdi glances at the fire, then back at Morgan. His expression does not change. "I'll be sure to put it in my report to the king."

Morgan opens his mouth to retort and Bohdi chooses that precise moment to ruin everything.

"Some intel for you about Ivan Wolfe."

Morgan's jaw shuts. He has a mouthful of stew and Bohdi's tone has shifted. It is still casual, still conversational, but with a current of something underneath that makes the back of Morgan's neck prickle.

"Forty-four years old," Bohdi says, ticking it off without inflection. "Chieftain for fourteen years. Two prior brides." He pauses. The firelight carves deep shadows under his cheekbones. "First wife died in childbirth. The child was born without a resemblance to the chieftain, and word is he sent him away."

Morgan stops chewing.

"Second wife tried to leave," Bohdi says. "He had her beheaded."

The silence that follows is not the comfortable silence of two men sharing a meal by a fire. It is a silence with weight and edges, pressing down on the campsite.

Morgan turns it over: two wives, one dead and one executed, and a child thrown away.

Morgan swallows the stew with some difficulty. It goes down thick.

"He sounds charming," he says.

Bohdi shrugs, one shoulder lifting and dropping. He has long since stopped being surprised by the behavior of powerful men. "Not sure how high your expectations were of a man courting a prince less than half his age for political gain."

"My expectations were low." Morgan looks into his bowl and finds he has lost his appetite entirely. "Clearly they should have been lower. Subterranean, ideally."

Another silence settles over them. The fire cracks and spits a shower of embers into the dark. In the trees beyond the campsite something moves and Morgan's fingers tighten on the bowl.

He is not afraid. He is something worse than afraid: he is aware. He is aware of the distance between here and Valen and of the distance still to go. At the end of this road is a man who wants Morgan for the same reason men have always wanted things: because it serves him, because it profits him, because the thing is available and the cost is acceptable.

"I can tell how dire things are," Morgan says, and his voice is steadier than he expects it to be, "because Eskil agreed with the council to send me south as a decoy. And Eskil doesn't hand me over to anyone."