Page 46 of Fought it Through the Teeth

A third guard comes through the back entrance of the stable. He's older, heavyset, and he takes in the scene and he roars and comes at them. Bohdi meets him in the center aisle and it's ugly and close and the stable is too narrow for proper sword work. The guard has a mace and he swings it in a short, brutal arc that Bohdi ducks under, and the mace head crunches into the post behind him and sends splinters flying. Bohdi comes up inside the man's reach and drives the pommel of Ivan's sword into his face, and the guard's head snaps back and Bohdi follows with a thrust that puts the blade through his gut and drops him.

The stable is quiet. Three men dead in the straw, blood soaking into the packed earth. The horses are stamping and snorting in their stalls, agitated by the noise and the smell. A lantern swings on its hook from the ceiling, casting the whole scene in lurching, unsteady light.

There's a stablehand cowering in a corner.

Morgan sees him before Bohdi does. A boy — fourteen, maybe fifteen, small-framed and dark-haired, pressed against the far wall of the last stall with his arms wrapped around his knees and his eyes enormous and white in the lamplight. He's not armed. He's not a warrior. He's a child who was sleeping in the stable when two men covered in blood burst through the door and killed three people in front of him.

Bohdi turns and the boy makes a sound. Bohdi's hand tightens on the sword grip and his body shifts into the stance Morgan has seen a hundred times in the training yard at Valen. Coiled readiness, threat assessed, elimination pending.

Morgan surges forward.

He moves before the thought completes — his body deciding ahead of his mind, the way it did when he drove the dagger into Ivan's neck, the way it did when he threw himself out of a window on a rope made of curtains. He puts his hand flat on Bohdi's sword arm and the contact stops him dead. Every muscle in Bohdi's body goes still under Morgan's palm, arrested mid-motion by a touch that should not have the power to arrest anything and does.

Morgan steps past him.

He walks to the boy. Slowly, carefully, with deliberate, measured steps. His ribs are burning and his face is throbbing and there is blood on his cheek that isn't his, and he is not, by any reasonable measure, a reassuring sight. But he crouches in front of the boy and he speaks to him.

He uses the Wolfe dialect.

"We need horses," Morgan says. "Will you help us?"

The boy stares at him. His eyes flick to Bohdi and his breathing is shallow and rapid and his hands are clenched in the fabric of his trousers.

"No one is going to hurt you," Morgan says. "I promise. We just need horses and supplies. Can you help?"

The boy swallows. He looks at Morgan's face and something in his expression changes. Not trust, exactly. Recognition, maybe. The recognition of one person in distress looking at another person in distress and understanding, at some basic, animal level, that they are on the same side of whatever is happening.

The boy nods.

He moves quickly once he moves. He readies two horses from the nearest occupied stalls, pulling tack from the wall hooks and saddling with a speed that speaks of years of repetition. He packs saddlebags from the stable's stores — oats for the horses, a waterskin that he fills from the barrel by the door, a rolled blanket, a bedroll. He adds a flint and steel from the shelf above the tack station and a hunting knife from the workbench, handling it by the blade and holding it out to Morgan grip-first with a look that says he doesn't want to be holding it any longer than necessary.

Morgan takes it and passes it to Bohdi, who sheathes it without taking his eyes off the stable entrance.

Then there's shouting. Distant but closing, voices from deeper in the stronghold, the urgent quality of men who have discovered something wrong. Someone has found the guard under the window. Or the curtain rope hanging from the study window. Or the door to Ivan's study that Bohdi didn't bother to lock because there was nothing to lock it with and no time to try.

The boy's eyes widen. He looks at the stable entrance, then at Morgan. "Go," he says, the words rapid and breathless. "Go now — the gate⁠—"

Bohdi helps Morgan mount. His hands find Morgan's waist and boost him into the saddle, and the motion sends a spike of pain through his chest that grays his vision at the edges, but he's up, he's seated, his hands find the reins. Bohdi swings onto the second horse with a fluidity that belies the drug still lingering in his system, and they are moving, out of the stable and into the yard, and the cold night air hits Morgan's face and the shouting is louder now.

The gate is ahead of them. A hundred yards, maybe less. The yard is dark except for the torches burning at the gate posts, and in their light Morgan can see the gate and the guards in front of it. Four of them. Armed, alert, turning toward the noise from the stronghold with weapons half-drawn and faces set in the hard, focused expressions of men who know something has gone wrong and are waiting to find out what.

Bohdi comes off his horse.

He's dismounting before the horse has fully stopped — boots hitting the ground at a run, Ivan's sword drawn, and Morgan watches him cover the distance to the nearest guard in three strides and take the man down before the guard has properly settled into his stance. The strike is fast and clean and the guard folds and Bohdi is past him, engaging the second, and the yard fills with the clash of steel and the shouts of men.

The second guard falls, and the third peels off from the gate and runs at Bohdi's flank. The fourth stays at the mechanism — the gate mechanism, Morgan realizes, a gear-operated system of chains and pulleys that raises the heavy timber bar. If that guard stays where he is, the gate stays closed, and it doesn't matter how many men Bohdi kills in the yard because they will not be leaving through it.

Morgan gets himself down off the horse.

The dismount is graceless and the landing sends a jolt of pain through his chest that makes him stagger, but he's on his feet, he's moving. He skirts the edge of the fighting and makes for the gate mechanism. His path takes him along the wall, in the shadow of the palisade, and he moves as fast as his broken ribs allow, which is not fast enough and has to be.

The fourth guard sees him coming. The man turns from the mechanism and draws his sword and Morgan's heart drops into his stomach, because the man is armored and armed and Morgan is neither, and the distance between them is ten feet and closing.

Morgan doesn't stop. He doesn't have a weapon and he doesn't have a plan and he doesn't have time to acquire either. He grabs the nearest thing his hand finds — a crate stacked against the wall, rough wood, heavy enough to require effort — and drags it down between himself and the guard. The crate crashes to the ground and the guard has to step around it, which costs him a second, and that second is all Morgan needs.

He gets past. He reaches the mechanism. It's gear-operated, a system of interlocking wheels and chains that he can see and understand because Morgan understands systems, because his mind works in gears and pulleys and the logic of things that fit together. He hits the lever and the chain catches and the bar begins to rise.

He hears something behind him and jerks aside.