Page 16 of Setting the Break

"A good contingency."

Indrie hums and leans his head against Eskil's shoulder. Eskil turns his head and presses his nose into the long dark hair and breathes him in.

There are things he needs to do. He has already decided to send Morgan and Bohdi east to bring Fenris back, and he hates the decision and cannot argue with the reason. A farming village well inside his own border is not a stronghold. It is within his boundaries, and the prince is the obvious man to barter for someone's allegiance, and Bohdi will be at his side.

He will send them in the morning. Tonight he will brief them and review the route and make sure Bohdi has everything he needs. That is for later.

Eskil is aware, in the distant way he is aware of everything involving Indrie, that Indrie still does not sleep in the clinic after dark. That he still comes up to the keep every evening. That the rooms Eskil offered him months ago are still empty. Meanwhile Indrie's belongings have migrated into Eskil's chambers one piece at a time, slowly enough that no single piece ever required a conversation. A change of clothes folded in the chest at the foot of the bed. A Rengaran herbology book with Morgan's notes in the margins that lives on the windowsill. The comb Morgan gave him, which now sits on Eskil's washstand beside his own.

The fiction that Indrie does not live in the keep has worn through.

Eskil has not pointed this out. He has not pointed it out because pointing it out would require Indrie to either acknowledge what he is doing or stop doing it, and Eskil does not want either. He wants Indrie's comb on his washstand. He wants the herbology book on the windowsill. He wants to fall asleep with Indrie's head on his chest and wake with Indrie's cold feet pressed against his calves, and he wants it every night for the rest of his life. If getting that requires pretending he has not noticed that his lover has moved into his quarters, then Eskil is prepared to pretend for as long as it takes.

Indrie's breathing has evened out against his shoulder. Not asleep, but close. It is the drowsy boneless relaxation that only comes when he feels completely safe, and Eskil is not going to move a single muscle until it passes on its own.

He holds him. The study is warm and quiet and the correspondence can wait and the council can wait and the kingdom can, for one hour on one late autumn afternoon, run itself.

6

MORGAN

Morgan is a better rider than he was on the road south.

This is not a high bar. On the road south he was a disaster on horseback, a diplomat strapped to a saddle and pointed at a hostile kingdom with nothing between him and death but Bohdi's axe and his own sharp tongue. He did not so much ride as get carried. He ached in places he did not know he had places. He complained about it incessantly to a man who was simultaneously trying not to look at him and trying not to let him die. The memory of his own gracelessness in the saddle still irritates him, because he hates being bad at things and he was very publicly bad at that one.

He has been out to the near villages a handful of times since he came home. Partly for the grain audit, which required physically visiting three outlying settlements to verify their stores against the numbers in his ledger, because Morgan trusts paperwork but he trusts his own eyes more. Partly because he refused to let a horse get the better of him twice. He rode to the eastern farms with Sigrid to inspect the watchtower repairs. He rode to the northern fishing villages for the trade dispute arbitration, and the fishermen's representatives looked considerably less combative when the prince showed up on horseback rather than in a wagon. He rode out to the farmstead on the east road with Indrie because the healer needed someone to carry supplies, and because the midwife's husband brews the best cider Morgan has ever tasted and he wanted more of it.

He sits deeper now. He knows how to move with the animal instead of against it, to let his hips follow the rhythm of the gait rather than fighting the motion at every stride. His thighs have developed the lean strength that comes from repetition rather than intention.

None of that stops the ache from settling into the insides of his legs by midmorning and then sinking its teeth in. None of it makes him enjoy a single minute of the experience. He hates riding. He hates the cold, which has sharpened overnight into something with genuine malice, the kind of autumn cold that finds the gaps in clothing and burrows into them with enthusiasm. He hates how a saddle always finds the one bruise he forgot he had. He has a bruise on his inner thigh he is absolutely not going to explain to anyone, and the saddle found it within the first mile and has been grinding against it with vindictive precision ever since.

He does not say any of it out loud. That is his plan for this journey. He is going to be dignified. He is going to ride beside Bohdi in composed silence and give no indication that his legs are on fire and his back is stiffening and the cold is finding its way through his cloak and his shirt and his undershirt to settle against his skin with an intimacy he did not invite.

He is going to be dignified.

He lasts until nearly noon.

"You're awfully quiet," Bohdi says, drawing level with him on the track.

Morgan keeps his eyes forward. The track winds ahead through amber grassland, the hills rising on either side, dotted with stands of birch that have gone gold and are shedding their leaves in lazy spirals. It is, objectively, beautiful. Morgan does not care about beautiful. Morgan cares about the fact that his inner thighs feel as though they are being slowly separated from his pelvis.

"I'm enjoying the scenery," Morgan says.

"You hate scenery."

"I've changed. I love dusty roads and aggressive pollen and the saddle halfway up my ass. I wish I could do this every day."

Bohdi laughs. The sound is loud and delighted and it rolls across the open track, and it lands where Bohdi's laugh always lands, which is directly in the center of Morgan's chest. The man's whole face changes when he laughs. The careful watchfulness drops away and what is left is open and bright and young, younger than thirty, younger than he has any right to look given how many men he has killed and how long he has been carrying other people's survival. When Bohdi laughs without checking who is in earshot and without measuring the volume against the people nearby, Morgan can see the boy he must have been before the world got its hands on him.

They are alone on the track. The last farmstead fell behind them an hour ago and the next settlement is a day's ride east, and there is nobody to hear them and nobody to see them, and the privacy goes straight to Morgan's head.

They make camp off the road as the sun drops behind the western hills. Bohdi picks a spot in a stand of trees where the ground is level and the canopy breaks the wind, and Morgan dismounts and has to lock his knees against the jellied protest of his legs to keep from staggering. He walks it off while Bohdi tends to the horses, circling the clearing with deliberate strides that slowly restore blood flow to the parts of him that have been compressed against leather for the better part of a day.

Bohdi goes for wood. Morgan builds the fire.

He is good at this now. He is not expert, and it is not the easy practiced competence that comes from growing up making camp in the wild, but it is functional and it is fast. The flames catch on his second attempt rather than his fifth. By the time Bohdi comes back through the trees with an armload of dry branches, the fire is burning steadily and Morgan is sitting beside it with his legs stretched toward the warmth and his face set in grim triumph.

Bohdi drops the wood and looks at the fire and looks at Morgan and says nothing about either, which is its own form of praise.