Chapter 8 #3
But Bohdi is distracted. Eskil can feel it in the rhythm of the fight, the half-beat delays, the moments where Bohdi's eyes lose focus, where his body performs the motions correctly but his mind is somewhere else.
His blade connects with Eskil's and the power behind the strike is good but the precision is off, landing a finger's width from where it should, and for Bohdi that margin is unusual enough to be noticeable.
Eskil presses the advantage. He drives Bohdi back with a series of strikes designed to overwhelm, not to win, but to force his opponent to engage fully, to be here, in the yard, with the steel and the sweat and the dirt, and Bohdi responds but his feet are wrong, his weight is shifted too far back, his guard has a gap that shouldn't be there.
Eskil steps into it and puts Bohdi on his back.
The impact sends a cloud of dust billowing around Bohdi's prone form. His sword clatters away. He lies on the packed earth, breathing hard, staring up at the sky with an expression more exhausted than a five-round spar warrants.
Eskil stands over him and holds out his hand. Bohdi takes it and Eskil hauls him to his feet. They stand close, both breathing hard, and the watching soldiers are suddenly very interested in the condition of the fence posts.
"Your head is not in it," Eskil says.
Bohdi meets his eyes. There is a beat, one in which whatever Bohdi is holding behind his teeth pushes forward, straining, nearly breaking loose, and then Bohdi dismisses him with an obscene gesture so creative in its specificity that two of the watching soldiers look away sharply and one appears to be memorizing it for future use.
Eskil snorts. He claps Bohdi on the shoulder, hard, the way they've always done, the impact a language of its own, carrying everything that cannot be said between men who do not say things.
Bohdi claps him back, and for a moment they are just two men standing in a dusty yard with the autumn light going gold around them and the weight of the kingdom pressing down on both their shoulders.
"The Wolfe proposal," Bohdi says, and his voice is careful again. Controlled. "What are you going to do about it?"
"I've told the council no. I told Morgan no yesterday, in the library, at some volume."
"And?"
"And Morgan told their envoy he would consider it three weeks before I set foot back in this city. The council is unanimous. My no is currently the only one in the room."
"The council will push."
"The council can push whatever they'd like. They can push it directly into the fucking fjord."
Bohdi is quiet for a moment. Then: "And Morgan?"
Eskil's jaw tightens. He thinks about his brother.
Young, sharp-tongued, too clever for his own good and too willing to sacrifice himself for a kingdom that has not earned the right to ask.
He thinks about Morgan saying it would be the most useful I could ever be to you in my lifetime, and the wrongness of it, the fundamental miscalculation at the heart of it, the idea that Morgan's worth is something that can be weighed out and traded.
Eskil sheathes the longsword. "I'm not going to argue about Morgan. I'm going to argue about the Wolfe clan. They have never offered alliance before. Not once in forty years. And the offer arrived days after the Jakadi emptied this kingdom of its king."
Bohdi nods slowly. "You think they're connected."
"I think I don't believe in coincidences."
"That's unusually cautious of you."
"Don't get used to it."
Bohdi retrieves the practice sword from where it fell and drops it back on the rack.
He stretches his neck, and Eskil hears the crack of it and files that under things to feel mildly guilty about later, and rolls his shoulders and says, in a tone so deliberately casual it fools no one, "How's the healer? "
Eskil's hand, which was in the process of adjusting his belt, stops. A fraction of a second. A hitch so small it would be invisible to anyone who hasn't spent a lifetime learning to read him, and Bohdi has spent exactly that long.
Eskil refuses to break. He sheathes his short swords, adjusts his belt again, and says, "Do you want to negotiate grain tariffs with the outer villages all day tomorrow or do you want to find somewhere to be that is out of my sight?"
Bohdi's grin returns. Not the reckless one from the spar. Something softer, more knowing, edged with a warmth he would deny under torture. "Have a good evening, Eskil."
Eskil fixes him with a withering look. Bohdi is, as always, completely immune. He claps Eskil on the shoulder one more time, lighter, a parting gesture, almost affectionate, and walks off toward the barracks with his axe on his back and a whistle on his lips.
Eskil watches him go. He stands in the training yard in the late afternoon light, sweat cooling on his skin, muscles aching in the good way that comes from honest exertion, and thinks about the things he saw in Bohdi's face in the armory.
The silence. The stillness. The look that was there and gone before Eskil could read it.
He thinks about Bohdi saying it would be very quiet around the keep without the prince mouthing off to the king, and the weight that lived inside those words, the thing Bohdi was carrying that he would not set down.
He turns away from the yard and heads back to the keep.