Page 41 of Setting the Break

"Askarte." Bohdi repeats the word as though tasting it and finding it has gone off. "The village that was attacked, in recent memory, in very recent memory, in memory so recent that the scorch marks are still on the gate, by the very Jakadi we are now riding out to fight."

"I mean," Dagny says, with the brand of cheerful optimism she deploys when she knows she is losing an argument and has decided to continue it regardless, "what are the odds of it happening twice?"

"Stop," Morgan says. "Both of you. Stop it."

They both look at him as though they have forgotten he is there, which is an impressive thing to manage while in the middle of arguing about where to put him.

"We are one day out from Valen, on the main road, through my brother's lands." Morgan makes himself keep his voice level. It costs him. The levelness is a performance and not a natural state, and underneath it his pulse is doing something fast and unhelpful, and his hands are still numb and his chest is still hollow. Every part of him not currently occupied with sounding calm is occupied with not thinking about what three days in a Jakadi camp means for a man like Indrie. "I can ride home by myself. I have a dagger in my boot and a horse that knows the way. I am not a parcel that needs delivering to my own front door."

"Your road home goes past the Tarn turn," Bohdi says. "In the dark. Four miles from where they are sitting."

"I know what my road home goes past." Morgan does not raise his voice and he does not look away from him, which costs him more than the level tone did. "It also goes to my brother's gate. I am the only one of the three of us with nowhere else to be tonight, and every minute the two of you spend standing in this road arguing about me is a minute nobody is spending on him."

"Morgan–" Bohdi starts.

"If what Dagny says is right, then Indrie has been in a Jakadi camp for three days," Morgan says through his teeth. The words come out harder than he intends and harder than he is able to control, and the calm he has been holding cracks along the edges, and what comes through it sounds a great deal like his brother. "Three days, Bohdi. If you spend one more moment arguing about what to do with me, about which village to drop me in, about how many men I need to walk me down a road, I will ride there myself and get him, and then we will all find out together how that goes."

Dagny looks at Bohdi.

Bohdi does not look at anybody. He is sitting very still in the saddle with his eyes on the middle of the road, on the point where the track narrows between the trees and bends east and disappears. His hands are quiet on the reins. His face is quiet too, but Morgan can see precisely what is happening on it and behind it and underneath the stillness, because he has known that face his whole life. He has grown up beside it. He has looked at it across breakfast tables and training yards and campfires and the narrow space between two pillows. And because on this one subject, on this one single subject out of all the subjects in the world, Bohdi has lately stopped being able to hide anything at all.

He is thinking about last night. Morgan can see him thinking about it, can watch the thought turn over behind his eyes. He is thinking about Morgan sitting by the fire and admitting it slowly and with great difficulty, with his hands gripped together between his knees and his voice so quiet it barely carried past the flames, that he has not slept through a night since the stronghold. That he wakes at the same hour every night and the room is dark, with his heart going so hard he can hear it in his skull. That a child took hold of his sleeve in the market in Helde and his entire body broke into a cold sweat so suddenly that his vision went gray.

Morgan can watch Bohdi think about all of it. Can watch him weigh it against what Morgan is asking, not in the abstract and not as a policy matter but specifically and personally, with the full weight of everything he knows about the man in front of him. The fact that Morgan is not fine. The fact that Morgan has not been fine for a long time, and is holding himself together along seams that have already started to come apart. And Morgan is now asking to be trusted. To be let go. To ride a day alone through country that is probably safe on a road that is probably empty, and to arrive at the other end of it in one piece, and to do it without the man who has become the only thing between Morgan and the dark.

And Morgan cannot say one word about any of it, because Dagny is eight feet away and has eyes.

So he does the other thing instead.

He walks his horse in close, close enough that the animals' flanks brush and he can feel the warmth of Bohdi's leg against his own, and he reaches across and takes the back of Bohdi's neck in his hand. He grips it firmly and pulls Bohdi down until their foreheads are pressed together.

It is his brother's gesture. Eskil does it to Bohdi and Bohdi does it back, and it has meant one thing in this family since before Morgan was born, since before Eskil was born, probably, since before any of them. It is a gesture passed down in a language with only one word in it, and the word means I trust you with my life and I am sending you out the door. Warriors do it. Brothers do it. Kings do it with the men they cannot do without. Morgan has never in his life had the standing to use it. He has watched it from across rooms and across courtyards, watched his brother and this man press their heads together and close their eyes and stand in a silence that belonged to the two of them and nobody else, and Morgan has never been part of it. Morgan has always been the younger brother, the one who stays behind, the one who is kept safe rather than the one who does the keeping.

He is using it now.

"Go to Eskil," Morgan says. His voice comes out low and rough and steady, and his hand on the back of Bohdi's neck does not shake. "He needs you more than I do tonight. This is an order from your prince."

Bohdi's hand comes up and closes hard around Morgan's wrist. Not gently and not carefully. Hard enough to feel the bones shift and hard enough to hurt, which makes it very clearly not a gesture of tenderness but of something rawer and less controlled, the grip of somebody holding on to a thing he has not decided to let go of yet. He holds it there for two seconds, three, with his eyes shut. The muscle in his jaw is moving. His breathing has changed.

"As you say," Bohdi says, low enough that it does not travel a foot, low enough that it belongs to the two of them and the space between their faces and nothing beyond it.

Then he presses a kiss to Morgan's forehead, brief and firm and unmistakable, and he is out of reach before Morgan can do a single thing about it, wheeling his horse and pulling it around hard and shouting at Dagny that they are burning daylight. His voice when he shouts it is the voice of the king's hand and not the voice of the man who kissed him, and the transition is instantaneous and total, and Morgan's forehead is still warm.

Dagny's eyebrows have climbed into her hairline. They have climbed past her hairline. They have achieved an altitude that Morgan was not previously aware eyebrows were capable of reaching. And she says nothing whatsoever, which from Dagny is a statement in its own right. The silence is louder than anything she could have said. Her expression makes it entirely clear that she intends to have questions at a later date and that not one of them is going to be polite.

"Your highness." Dagny gathers her reins. Her voice is perfectly even and perfectly professional, and her eyes are alive with something Morgan is going to have to deal with eventually. "It's a straight shot from here if you stay on the road. Don't leave it."

"I'll be at the gate by dawn."

"You had better be. I've no interest in hearing about it from my wife." She gives him a steadier look then, a different one, underneath the amusement and underneath the questions she is saving. "I'm not coming home without him. Don't spend the ride worrying about that part."

"I never do," Morgan says. It is a lie and they both know it, and it sits between them for a moment, warm and small, the kind of lie that people who love each other tell because the truth is too heavy to hand over on a road with the light going sideways. "Watch each other."

Dagny grins at him, wide and sharp and full of teeth, and puts her heels in.

They go. Morgan sits in the middle of the road and watches until the bend takes them, two riders flat out on the track with the low sun amber and slant in their faces and their shadows coming back down the road toward him, longer and then longer, and then the road is empty and the dust they raised hangs in the air for a minute and then settles, and there is nothing left to look at.

Then he puts his horse into a walk and follows them down the same road.