Page 4 of Fought it Through the Teeth

The thing is that Morgan is not subtle.

He has never been remotely subtle, not once since he first took an interest in other people. Morgan has been looking at Bohdi for so many years that tuning it out has become second nature for Bohdi. It's a skill, honestly, that he should be able to list alongside axework and horsemanship and the ability to drink any man in Rengara under a table and walk home upright. Specialties: close combat, scouting, ignoring the crown prince's enormous and painfully obvious infatuation. He could carve it on a plaque, frame it, and hang it in the barracks.

He ignores Morgan. He has always ignored him. He ignored him when he was a mouthy child with an infatuation and a cowlick that stuck up at the back of his head no matter how many times Ingrid tried to flatten it. He ignored it every year as Morgan grew up, through the scrawny limbs filling out and the jaw sharpening and the face losing its boyish softness. The rest of the court decided the prince was pretty, and Bohdi thought of him, when he thought of him at all, as Eskil's little brother.

He ignored it when the cowlick turned into long blond hair that Morgan tied back with leather cords and let fall across his face when he was reading. He ignored catching him sneaking back into the Keep after dark with marks on his neck and straw in his hair, looking flushed and rumpled and quietly pleased with himself, and dealt with it the way an exasperated older brother would. He kept him out of trouble because it was his job, and in the years since Morgan came of age, he has never once touched him.

But fuck, he has wanted to.

He has wanted to for two years now, ever since the night the wanting became the central, wretched fact of his existence.

Before that, Morgan had been a problem Bohdi could manage. He'd known, in the abstract, that the prince was beautiful, a fact that existed, required no action, and could be acknowledged and set aside. He was aware of it. He was not moved by it. The distinction had never needed defending, and he'd been stupid enough to believe it never would.

And then the midwinter feast had ruined him.

It was two years ago. The great hall was strung with lights, the air thick with the smell of pine boughs and roast fat and spilled ale. Music came from the gallery, fiddle and drum and the low drone of the northern pipes that made the stones vibrate. The long tables had been pushed back against the walls to clear the floor, the floor was packed with dancers, and the whole hall was alive with the kind of raucous, full-bellied joy that Valen does better than anywhere else in the world.

Bohdi had been three ales in, not drunk but warm with it, soft around the edges, his usual good humor loosened into something wider and lazier. He'd had enough ale to be stupid, was the thing, but not enough to be useless. Useless would have kept him flat on a bench while other men made bad decisions around him. Stupid left him with just enough brain to notice the prince across the room.

Morgan had been in a corner, not lounging casually but deliberately withdrawn, trying very hard to disappear. He'd been sitting on a bench with a cup in his hand, watching the dancing without seeing it, and even from across the hall Bohdi had been able to read the set of his shoulders.

So Bohdi had gone over, because cheering people up is what he does. It is his gift, or his curse, or some combination of the two: the inability to leave unhappiness alone, to walk past a clenched jaw or a lowered gaze without prodding at it until he understands the shape of the thing underneath. It makes him good at his work and bad at minding his own business. That night it had carried him across the hall with his ale in his hand and his grin firmly in place before he'd given a single thought to what he was walking into.

He'd needled. He'd prodded. He'd bullied it out of Morgan with the cheerful, relentless persistence that he deploys on men twice his size in the training yard, and eventually Morgan had told him.

"A trader I invited to the feast. I've been sitting here for an hour and he hasn't come. He isn't coming."

Bohdi had seen the flush of humiliation on Morgan's face, the rigid way he held himself together, the stubborn refusal to show that it hurt, and something had shifted in Bohdi's chest, something tectonic that should have served as a warning.

He'd bowed right there in the corner, in front of anyone who cared to look, a full, formal, slightly theatrical bow with one hand extended and the other pressed to his chest.

"Then you might as well dance with me."

Morgan had spluttered. "You're mocking me."

"I never mock a man about dancing," Bohdi had said, which was a lie, since he mocks everyone about everything, and then, to prove he meant it, he'd linked their arms and bodily hauled Morgan into the middle of the floor.

Morgan had fought him for the first three steps, stiff and furious and whispering threats through his teeth that Bohdi had cheerfully ignored. And then the music had caught them and Bohdi had spun him, and Morgan had stumbled, and Bohdi had caught him, and something in the rigid line of the prince's spine had given way.

They'd danced.

And Morgan had been solid in his arms.

That was the thing. That was the hinge, the pin, the axle the whole miserable wheel turned on. Morgan had been solid and stable, smaller than Bohdi but in the best possible way. He didn't have the breadth and slab-muscle of a warrior. He was lean and agile, carrying his strength in his spine and his jaw and the iron composure he kept wrapped around himself. He was not a boy, not in the slightest. He was eighteen, a man, an adult, with a man's weight and a man's warmth and a man's hand gripping Bohdi's shoulder to steady himself through a turn.

And for the first time in his life, Bohdi had noticed him.

It was Morgan's hand tight on his shoulder and Morgan laughing despite himself and the heat of Morgan's body through two layers of wool. It was the sudden, devastating understanding that the person in his arms was not Eskil's little brother, not the crown prince, not any of the categories Bohdi had spent their lives sorting him into. He was just Morgan. And Bohdi wanted him.

The song had ended. They'd stepped apart. Morgan had been flushed and bright-eyed and trying very hard to look unaffected, and Bohdi had bowed again. Then he'd retreated to the ale barrels and spent the rest of the evening getting deliberately, systematically drunk, which was the only appropriate response to the realization that he'd just been undone by a two-minute dance.

He hasn't been able to stop noticing him since.

That is, obviously, a fucking problem. The prince is off limits and has been since the day Bohdi first understood what limits were. Eskil is more protective of his younger brother than any mother bear Bohdi has met in the flesh, and he's met a few of those: actual bears, in the deep woods north of Valen, close enough to smell the rank animal heat of them. Eskil's protectiveness is not the reasoned caution of a diplomat. It is immediate, violent, instinctive and it applies to every man, woman, and passing stranger who shows anything more than polite interest in the prince.

The man gives Bohdi enormous leeway in every other corner of his life. In blood, war, and the ugly work that keeps the kingdom standing, Bohdi has authority and trust and a rope so long it has no visible end. Whoever Bohdi drags into his bed, Eskil does not comment on. Whatever Bohdi does in the field, Eskil backs. The trust between them is the ground Bohdi has stood on his entire adult life, and it is absolute, and it comes with precisely one boundary.

That boundary is Morgan.