Page 3 of Fought it Through the Teeth

Bohdi looks at him across the fire. He does not disagree.

"I deal in bookwork and trade alliances and grain tallies," Morgan continues. "Eskil keeps me in the dark about military matters as a matter of policy. I don't know the half of what's happening at the borders, and he prefers it that way."

"That's because your brother makes a lot of decisions that would keep you up at night," Bohdi says. His tone is blunt, not unkind. It is fact, not judgment. "And he makes them anyway. And he makes them to better the kingdom."

Morgan bristles. The implication hangs between them: that Morgan is too soft for the truth, too sheltered to be trusted with the uglier machinery of rule. Bohdi seems to think Eskil keeps him in the library and at the ledgers because the things that happen in the war rooms and the cells and the borderlands would crack something in him that Eskil needs intact.

"I'm well aware my brother has to make ugly choices," Morgan says. He hears the edge in his own voice and does not soften it. "Our kingdom is built on conquest and blood, Bohdi. Everyone in Valen eats off that table. Myself included. Knowing about it isn't going to make me wither."

Bohdi watches him and says nothing.

The fire pops. The horses shift at their picket line, a soft shuffling of hooves. And Morgan feels the edge drain out of him as quickly as it came, replaced by something quieter and more honest than he intended.

"I don't question Eskil," he says. The admission comes out lower, stripped of the sharpness that usually armors everything he says. "Because Eskil has always kept me safe. So I'm not questioning him now."

He lets a pause settle.

"Even if that safety has been handed off to you."

He says it looking at the fire rather than at Bohdi, because looking at Bohdi while saying it would cost him something he isn't prepared to spend. The words sit in the air between them, undeniable, and Morgan lets them sit there and does not try to retrieve them.

Bohdi is quiet for a long moment. Then that grin spreads across his face, broad and shameless, the grin that Morgan has been enduring for as long as he can remember, the one that makes other people feel at ease and leaves Morgan off balance.

"Don't worry," Bohdi says. "I've been given strict orders by a very protective older brother not to let the lecherous warchief lay a hand on the precious crown prince."

"I know how to handle men, thank you."

Bohdi raises both eyebrows. The grin spreads. He says absolutely nothing, with tremendous volume.

Morgan rolls his eyes and eats his stew and does not dignify it.

He cannot sleep.

The ground is hard beneath the bedroll, hard in a way that no arrangement of blanket or cloak can mitigate, hard enough to make him long for the modest straw mattress in his quarters at the Keep. He lies on his back and stares up through the canopy at a sky dense with stars and tries to find a position that does not make his thighs shriek in protest, and fails.

He shifts to his side, which is worse, and then to his other side, which is also worse. He settles back on his back and folds his arms across his chest and stares upward and accepts his fate.

Six feet away, Bohdi is breathing.

He isn't asleep. Morgan can tell by the rhythm, which is too even and too controlled for sleep. Bohdi is awake and holding still. He is accustomed to sleeping on hostile ground, to resting with one ear trained on the dark, to constant vigilance, always, always on watch. He sleeps ready to move at a sound.

Morgan lies on his back on the cold ground, thighs screaming, spine aching, listening to Bohdi breathe, and hates every single thing about his life.

It isn't the mission he hates, or even the chieftain waiting at the end of the road with his dead wives and his discarded child and his appetite for young princes. Those are problems with shapes, problems Morgan can map and measure and plan for. What he hates is simpler and more pathetic than any of it.

He hates that Bohdi is six feet away and might as well be six hundred miles away, and that the distance is never going to change.

Chapter 2

Bohdi

It is day four, the Wolfe stronghold is finally coming up out of the tree line, and Bohdi has decided he is a gods-damned saint.

He has spent four days alone with Eskil's little brother, riding through open country with nothing between them but two horses, one mission, and two years of things Bohdi has never said and is not going to start saying now. The whole way, Morgan has been shifting in the saddle and wincing and biting down on sounds he doesn't want Bohdi to hear, his hair catching the light, his jaw clenching against complaint, his sharp tongue keeping itself mostly (mostly) in check. Bohdi has ridden a length behind him with a litany running relentlessly through his skull.

Eskil's brother. The king's brother. The fucking crown prince.

It doesn't work, but it keeps his hands on the reins and his cock in his trousers, which is the only measure of success available to him right now.