Page 32 of Fought it Through the Teeth

Bohdi grins. "That's what the woman who raised me told me. Though she may have been biased."

Ivan chuckles, a low, rolling sound in his chest. "I've enjoyed having you here. More than I expected. Eskil's people are not what I imagined."

"We get that a lot. Most people expect us to eat with our hands and sleep in the snow."

"And do you?"

"Only on campaign."

Ivan laughs again, genuine and warm, and refills both their cups. Bohdi picks his up and holds it and does not drink immediately this time. The fire crackles. The guards stand against the wall. Ivan is looking into his cup, arranging his thoughts.

"I've been thinking about the prince," Ivan says.

Bohdi takes a drink. "How so?"

"He's willful."

"He's Eskil's brother. Willful comes with the blood."

"It's more than that." Ivan swirls the mead in his cup, watching it spin. "He doesn't defer. He doesn't submit. He speaks to me as though we're equals, and we are not, and he doesn't seem to understand the distinction." He drinks. "Or he understands it and doesn't care, which is worse."

Bohdi keeps his face easy and open and his hands around the cup and says nothing, because Ivan wants to be asked to continue, and the silence is the invitation.

"My first wife was compliant," Ivan says. "Too compliant, as it turned out. Compliant enough to spread her legs for the first man who offered." His voice doesn't change. The venom is in the content, not the delivery — flat, factual, entries in a ledger. "My second wife was spirited. I admired it, at first. Then she tried to leave."

The fire pops. Bohdi watches the ember arc and land on the hearthstone and glow there.

"Your prince," Ivan says, "is neither compliant nor spirited. He is something else entirely. He has a mind like a trap and a tongue like a blade and he looks at me as though he is taking my measure and finding me short." He pauses. His eyes come up from the cup and fix on Bohdi with an intensity that has no warmth in it at all. "I need to know whether he can be managed."

"Managed," Bohdi repeats.

"Brought to heel. Made to understand his position." Ivan sets the cup down on the arm of his chair. "I don't want a bride who fights me at every turn. I want a bride who knows his place."

Bohdi grins. The grin is the same one he always wears — broad, easy, a fortress wall hiding the archers on the other side. He says, "Morgan's a talker, chief. All bark, no bite. You let him run his mouth and he's happy. Rein him in too hard and he digs his heels in, but give him the illusion of freedom and he's easy enough to steer."

Ivan considers this. Nods slowly.

"I'll take your word for it," he says. "You know him better than anyone."

I know him better than anyone alive, Bohdi thinks, and the thought arrives with a fierce, possessive heat that he has to breathe through before it shows on his face.

Ivan refills his cup a third time. Bohdi drinks. The mead is settling warm in his belly and the fire is low and the guards haven't moved and the evening has the quality of something winding toward its point — a bowstring being drawn back, the tension building in the wood and the sinew, the arrow not yet released.

Ivan tells him his cock doesn't work.

He does it bluntly, without preamble. "It's been years," he says, staring into the fire. "Something in the body gave out. I've seen healers. Tried herbs. Tinctures. Women who are skilled at coaxing the reluctant." He gestures vaguely at his own lap with the hand holding the cup. "Nothing. The thing is dead."

Bohdi keeps his face steady and makes the right noises — sympathetic, understanding, the blend of masculine solidarity and pragmatic concern that Ivan expects from him.

He commiserates. It requires acting. "That's a cruel thing for the body to do to a man," he says, shaking his head.

He thinks he knows where this is going, but it turns out he's horribly, miserably wrong.

"I want you to fuck the prince for me," Ivan says, with the same flat, practical delivery he would use to tell Bohdi to break a colt or exercise a horse.

Bohdi's mind stops.

The words are in the room. They have been said. They exist in the air between the two chairs in front of the fire. The guards are against the wall and the mead is warm in Bohdi's gut, and his body is sitting in the chair with his face arranged in whatever expression it was wearing before the world ended, because the world has ended and the expression hasn't caught up yet.