Page 42 of Fought it Through the Teeth

The indulgent warmth drops out of it the way light drops out of a room when the lamp is extinguished. What is left is flat and hard and stripped of any pretense at courtesy, and the warchief is looking at Morgan with a cold, appraising stare, kindness offered and thrown back, calculating how much force the correction will require.

He crosses the room in three strides and grabs Morgan's arm.

The cup falls. Ale splashes across the stone floor and the pewter clangs and rolls. Ivan's hand is on his bicep — fingers digging into the muscle, grip so hard that Morgan feels the bruise forming in real time, the blood vessels compressing, the pain radiating up into his shoulder and down to his wrist. Ivan's face is close. His breath is sour with drink and his eyes are flat and his mouth is a thin, hard line.

"Either you do as you're told," Ivan says, "or I'll fuck you myself with the hilt of my sword. Either way, prince, I will have you obedient by morning."

Morgan can't breathe.

It happens all at once — the air goes out of the room, out of his lungs, out of the world. His chest locks. His vision narrows to a tunnel with Ivan's face at the center of it, and there is a ringing in his ears, high and thin and constant, and his heart is hammering, throwing itself against his ribs. He knows what this is. He can identify it with distant, clinical awareness — he has read about panic in medical texts and discussed it with Indrie over herbal tea in the clinic at Valen. He is beginning to panic.

He absolutely cannot afford to. If he panics it is over. If his legs give or his voice breaks or his hands start shaking badly enough for Ivan to see, then the last leverage he has is gone. And Ivan will have him on the floor and there will be no argument that stops what comes next.

He briefly, genuinely considers letting Ivan do it.

The thought surfaces from the drowning dark of his mind — pale, terrible, and horribly rational. He considers letting the man violate him for his own amusement. It would be over at some point. It would end. He would survive it, probably. Men survive worse.

And the thought of touching Bohdi without his consent makes him want to vomit on the floor.

The calculation is instant and absolute. Given the choice between his own violation and Bohdi's, there is no choice. There has never been a choice. He would let Ivan do whatever he wanted to his body before he would put his hands on a man who cannot say yes, and the certainty of that is the one solid thing in the whirlwind of his panic — an anchor, a fixed point, something he can hold onto while everything else spins.

Then something steels inside him.

It comes from a place he doesn't recognize. Not from the diplomat or the scholar or the prince — from somewhere deeper, somewhere older, somewhere that is not about cleverness or composure but about the bare, animal refusal to lie down. He does not have to allow this. Nobody is coming. Eskil is four days away and Bohdi is drugged on a settee and the guards have been dismissed and there is not a single person in this stronghold who will help him, and Morgan does not need them to.

He can save himself.

There is a dagger in his boot.

It is a small blade. Good steel, sharp edge, leather-wrapped grip — a weapon designed for close work, for the kind of fighting that happens in the space between two bodies where a sword is too long and fists are not enough. Bohdi gave it to him in a courtyard in Valen the day before they left, pressing it into his hand with a grin and telling him to practice. Morgan had complained the entire time. "I'm not a fighter, Bohdi. The blade feels wrong in my hand. If Eskil wanted me armed he would have given me a sword." And Bohdi had said, with the patience he always reserves for Morgan's stubbornness, "Eskil gave you me. I'm giving you this. Shut up and learn."

He learned. Not well. Not with any grace or skill or natural talent. But he learned the grip and the angles and the basic motion. Bohdi made him practice it over and over until his arm ached and his fingers were sore and the motion was in his muscles if not in his instincts.

Ivan is still gripping his arm. His other hand is at his side. His body is turned toward Morgan, angled forward, accustomed to using his size to intimidate and not yet registering that the slender prince in his grip is reaching for something other than submission.

Morgan draws the dagger and drives it at the man's chest.

He aims for the center mass. That is what Bohdi taught him — don't aim for the throat, don't aim for the gap in the armor, aim for the biggest target you can find and hit it as hard as you can. Morgan brings the blade up from his boot in a single motion and puts his shoulder behind it and drives it forward with every ounce of force his body can generate. For one breath the blade is traveling and the distance is closing and Morgan thinks I can do this, I can actually do this —

Ivan catches his wrist.

Morgan's heart stops.

The grip is iron. Ivan's hand closes around Morgan's wrist and arrests the blade's momentum six inches from his chest, and the force of the stop jars up Morgan's arm and into his shoulder and his whole body shudders with the impact. Ivan's face is inches from his. The flat, hard expression has been replaced by something worse — surprise, yes, but underneath it a fury so pure and so total that it makes everything Ivan has done before look like patience.

The warchief curses him. The words are Wolfe dialect — guttural, vicious, spat into Morgan's face with a contempt that has no bottom. Morgan doesn't understand all of them. He understands enough.

Ivan's free hand slaps him across the face.

The blow comes from the side and lands with full, unrestrained force — twice Morgan's weight behind it. Morgan's head snaps sideways and his vision explodes — white, then red, then a ringing darkness that fills his skull. His ears ring. His mouth fills with blood — he has bitten through the inside of his cheek, or his lip, or both. The force of it would have put him on the floor if Ivan weren't still holding his wrist, and for a sickening instant he hangs there, held up by the grip and nothing else.

The dagger stays clenched in his fist. His fingers are locked around the grip with a desperation that is not courage — it is the blind, animal refusal to let go of the only thing between him and what comes next.

Ivan shoves him forward and Morgan hits the floor.

The stone is cold and hard and the impact drives the air out of his lungs in a grunt that tastes of blood. He tries to get up. His arms are shaking and his vision is swimming and he gets one hand flat on the stone and pushes, and then a boot catches him in the ribs.

The pain is white. It blanks out everything — thought, fear, strategy, the carefully constructed interior Morgan has built from a life lived in his mind, told his mind is his greatest weapon. The boot drives into the space between his lowest rib and his hip and something shifts inside him with a crack he feels rather than hears, and Morgan cries out. He tries not to. He bites down on the sound and the blood in his mouth and tries to swallow it. The second kick lands before he has finished processing the first — same side, same spot, Ivan's boot driving into cracked ribs with unhurried precision, having done this before and knowing exactly how much damage he is inflicting.