Page 60 of Setting the Break

Morgan puts a hand on the wall.

"He's all right?"

"He's a little worse for wear, but nothing he won't get through." Bohdi pauses. "They did cut his hair, though. Maybe pretend you don't notice when you see him."

Morgan does not say anything for a moment.

He is thinking about the library floor, the morning before he rode east. Indrie sitting cross-legged on the rug in front of him with his back very straight, patiently letting Morgan braid his hair, while Eskil stood in the doorway pretending to look for a book and fooled absolutely no one. Indrie told him once, quiet and late in the evening and only the one time, that wearing it the Rengaran way made him feel as though he belonged with them. Morgan had told him he did not need a braid to belong to anybody, and that was true then and it is true now and it is not the point. He said it out loud. He admitted to wanting it. And then somebody in a cedar forest took hold of it and cut it off his head.

"Right," Morgan says. His voice does not come out quite the way he means it to. "I'll be discreet, of course. And it will grow back."

"Yes, it will," Bohdi agrees quietly.

"And the rest?"

"Fenris." Bohdi's mouth goes crooked. "Fenris was in the camp. He's been in the Jakadi camps since the night they took him out of that farmhouse. Indrie found him in there, or Fenris found Indrie. From what I can tell they've been keeping each other alive for three days. He's upstairs as well. So's Garrik, who's torn himself open again and is going to be unconscious by supper. The cedars are routed. The ones who aren't dead are running east, apart from four we're keeping."

Morgan stares at him.

"We rode two days east to a farm," Morgan says, "and he was six hours away the entire time."

"Yes."

"In a tent."

"Yes."

"That," Morgan says, "is the most irritating thing that has ever happened to me, and I include the man who tried to make me wear a woman's tunic."

Bohdi laughs. It is short and tired and completely genuine and it comes out of him before he can stop it, and something in Morgan's chest loosens at the sound of it.

"And now," Bohdi says, "I have got to go and stand in front of the council, because Eskil has said he doesn't want one word about any of it until his healer's been fed and slept, and somebody has to tell nine people to go away, and Vigdis has been breathing on the back of my neck since I came through the gate."

"Let them wait," Morgan says.

"Morgan."

"Let them stew. It's good for them. It keeps them humble." He considers. "Well. It keeps them less arrogant than they would otherwise be, which is as close to humble as anybody on that council has come in a decade."

Bohdi laughs again, and scrubs a hand through his hair, and does not move.

"Does Eskil know?" Morgan asks. "That I was late?"

Bohdi goes quiet.

"No," Bohdi says. "I thought it best he didn't know, with everything else going on. And because I was going to find you. And, look, now I have."

Morgan looks at him. He looks at his face for a long moment, and he sees a great deal there. He decides, standing in a cold passage behind the stables, that he is not going to pull on that thread today.

"Yes," Morgan says. "You're a spectacular tracker, Bohdi. Found me right on your doorstep, where I said I'd be."

Bohdi's lips quirk, but he does not comment.

"I am not seeing anyone," Morgan says, "until I have had a bath and changed into something that has not been in a creek. Not the council, not my brother, not the gods themselves should they happen to be passing through."

"I'll tell them the prince is occupied."

"Tell them whatever you like."