Page 53 of Setting the Break

Bohdi breathes out through his nose in a gesture that is equal parts exhaustion and frustration. He looks across the camp at the four Jakadi tied to the picket. Surely one of them knows how many men were here. They might even have names and descriptions, and that is a conversation Bohdi intends to have at length and at leisure, and it is going to have to wait. What he needs to do first is get his face in order and take hold of the chaos his king has left lying around.

By the time Indrie looks up, Bohdi is grinning at him with all his teeth.

"There he is," Bohdi says. "Three days with the Jakadi and you've come back with a new haircut and completely undermined my entire mission to find the Wolfe heir. You have been busy."

Indrie's whole face changes. He gets up off his knees far too fast and sways, and Bohdi is there and gets an arm around him and lifts him clean off the ground, and Indrie laughs into his shoulder and hangs on with both fists in his coat.

"You're freezing," Bohdi says into his ear. "You are freezing, you little idiot, where is your cloak?"

"I took it off. I was working."

"Of course you were."

Bohdi sets him down. Indrie is looking up at him and his eyes are wet and he is still smiling. He opens his mouth to say something, and then Dagny arrives, and Bohdi knows immediately that he is second fiddle.

She makes a noise he would not want repeated under penalty of death and crosses the last of the ground at a run. She almost takes Indrie off his feet, wrapping herself around him completely, and Indrie makes a small sound into her shoulder and holds on. Dagny stands there in the middle of a burned camp with her swords still on her hips and her friend in her arms and cries in a way she will deny furiously when Bohdi goads her about it at a later date.

"Indrie, I've been worried sick," Dagny says, eventually, still streaming at the eyes. "I should have taught you to fight. I wasted all that time teaching you knots on the ship. What good is a bowline going to do you when you get kidnapped?"

"Dagny," Indrie says, warm and incredulous. "I would have been a disastrous student. I cannot fight someone."

"I suppose that's true," she allows, wiping at her eyes. "You're not much of a sailor either, to be honest, even with the knots. You went right over the side."

"Yes, I remember," Indrie says. "The whole city of Valen remembers, Dagny."

Dagny laughs, wet and happy, and does not let go of him.

Bohdi leaves them to it and goes back across the camp to Eskil with a sentence in his mouth that he has been assembling since yesterday afternoon.

He has the wording. He settled on it somewhere in the middle of the night with the heath going by underneath him. Dagny found us a day out from Valen. Your brother gave me an order in the middle of the road and I took it, and he rode the last day home on his own. Flat, no excuses in it, nothing asked for. He has said worse things to this man and been forgiven for them. Just tell the king you sent his heir and his only living blood off alone, knowing there are hostile forces in the south looking for him. Easy.

Eskil, praise all of the gods, does not ask about Morgan. He watches Dagny accost Indrie, and he gives an order to a passing warrior, and not once does he question how the two of them arrived this fast without the prince in tow. Bohdi waits for it. Eskil claps him on the shoulder as he passes and goes to his healer.

Bohdi stands where he is in the middle of a burned clearing and lets it arrive.

His king did not ask because it did not occur to him to ask. That is what thirty years of loyalty buys a man. Eskil hands Bohdi a thing and stops thinking about the thing, because if Bohdi has it then it is handled. He has never once had to ask. There has never been a reason to.

He tells himself, standing there, that saying nothing is not necessarily a lie.

He could still do it. Eskil is eight feet away with his hand on the back of Indrie's neck and it would take four seconds. Bohdi has the wording, and he stands there with his mouth shut and lets the moment go past him the way he has been letting moments go past him since the midwinter feast.

Across the camp, Dagny is looking at him, and the look is extremely pointed and would be invisible to anybody who does not know her as well as he does. Her eyebrows do not even move this time. She simply looks at him for a second and a half and then goes back to what she was doing. Bohdi understands that there are now two separate damning things about him that this woman is declining to say out loud, and that she has made no promises whatsoever about how long that will continue.

This is going to cost him money, is what this is.

He goes over to the eastern side after that, because he wants a proper look at the two men standing by the smoldering hut, and because he has questions.

Garrik is grayer than Bohdi has ever seen a conscious man get. Indrie has him strapped up tight across the chest and the man is still on his feet. He watches Bohdi come, flat and patient, braced for harassment and with nowhere to go to escape it. Bohdi finds himself feeling considerably more charitable about the Wolfe ward's continued existence than he was the last time they spoke.

"You're upright," Bohdi says cheerfully.

"Barely." Garrik eyes him warily. "When I gave you directions to find Fenris, I promise you I did not know he was six hours outside your door."

"I believe both that you didn't know and that you'd have sent me anyway for the hell of it," Bohdi tells him evenly. "I'd thank you for dragging your half-dead corpse out here for my king's sake if I didn't think you were buying yourself into his good graces with it."

"I would think considerably less of you if you did," Garrik says. "But whatever my motives, Indrie saved my life and went against his own king to do it. I owed it to him to come."

"That, at least, we can agree on." Bohdi holds his hand out.