Chapter 16 #2
The medic fusses for another few minutes, checking the stitches, applying one more layer of salve, pressing his fingers against various points on Vaike's skull and asking questions about his vision and his balance that Vaike answers through his teeth.
Then he releases Vaike into Evran's care with a final pointed look and retreats to the other end of the medical wing, muttering about Warlords and their complete disregard for their own mortality.
Evran helps Vaike off the examination table.
Helps is perhaps generous, as it is not as if he can support Vaike's weight.
The man is twice his breadth and half again his mass, and if Vaike decided to fall Evran would simply go down with him.
But he holds his arm and guides him and provides a steadying presence that is less about physical strength and more about saying I am here, I am paying attention, lean on me if you need to.
They move down the hallway together. Vaike's stride is not quite his own, there is a hesitance in it, a slight favoring of his left side, and his eyes are half-lidded against the light in a way that speaks of a headache he seems to think he can glower into submission.
He is not glowering it into submission, and the headache is winning.
Evran guides him through the corridor, around the corner, past the guards who straighten at the sight of their Warlord and then immediately look worried, and into their room.
He eases Vaike toward the bed, and Vaike goes, which tells Evran more about the severity of the headache than any of the Warlord's words have, and allows himself to be settled against the pillows with only a slight grunt of displeasure.
Evran draws the blinds. The room dims, the harsh afternoon light replaced by a softer, filtered glow. He crosses back to the bed and sits on the edge of it, close to Vaike's uninjured side.
Vaike reaches out and takes his hand. The grip is strong, steady, as though the rest of him might be battered but this part, the part that holds onto Evran, is untouched.
He lifts Evran's hand to his mouth and kisses the palm.
His lips are dry against the sensitive skin, and the gesture is so tender and so entirely Vaike, this man who expresses devotion in physical acts rather than words, who says I love you with his hands and his mouth and his body rather than his voice, that Evran's throat closes.
"Stop fretting," Vaike says, his lips moving against Evran's palm. "You'll get wrinkles."
"Someone sabotaged the horse and tried to kill you," Evran says.
His voice is flat. He does not soften it, does not dress it up in qualifications or hedge it with it seems or it's possible that. He states it as the fact it is and watches Vaike's face as the words land.
Vaike's eyes open. He is looking at Evran with the steady, assessing gaze of someone not surprised by what he is hearing.
"It does seem that way," he says.
"You're not taking this seriously enough."
"I am taking it exactly as seriously as it warrants."
"Vaike."
"If the world stopped because someone wanted me dead," Vaike says, patient and steady, explaining something he has known for a very long time, "then a day would never pass."
Evran makes an unhappy sound, low and frustrated, caught between a groan and a protest. It is the sound of knowing, intellectually, that his partner is right and being furious about it anyway.
Because it does not matter that threats are constant, does not matter that this is normal for a Warlord.
What matters is that Vaike was thrown from a horse and trampled and hit his head on a boulder and could have died, and the man responsible for it is sleeping in a bed two corridors away and no one is doing anything about it.
No one except Evran.
Vaike laughs, small and rough and pained, the headache punishing him for the motion, but it is real, and he lifts Evran's hand to his mouth again and kisses it twice, on the knuckles and then the wrist.
"This is part of being a ruling Warlord," he says. "Someone will always want what you have. Someone will always think they can challenge your rule. The measure of a leader is not whether the threats come but how he responds when they do."
"What are you going to do about it?" Evran asks.
Vaike is quiet for a moment. His thumb traces a slow pattern on the back of Evran's hand, and his eyes are half-lidded, from the pain, from the dimness, thinking carefully before he speaks.
"The summit is only two more days," he says. "Then we'll be back in Drakkari lands with our own warriors and our own horses and our own walls around us. The threat is contained to this place and this time."
"What if we don't make it those two days?"
Vaike's thumb stills on his hand. He opens his eyes fully and looks at Evran, and there is something in his expression that is not quite resignation but close, a weary reckoning with limitations he does not enjoy admitting.
"Subterfuge has never been my strong point," Vaike says.
"I prefer when the assassins come at me with axes overhead and intentions telegraphed.
It's simpler. You see the threat, you meet the threat, and one of you walks away.
" He pauses. "Poison and sabotage and men who climb through windows, that is a different kind of war. One I was not raised to fight."
The admission costs him something. Evran can see it in the tightening of his jaw, the slight shift in his gaze, the way someone who has spent his entire life being the strongest person in every room reckons with the fact that strength alone is not enough to protect the things he loves.
Vaike was raised to fight enemies who announce themselves, who stand across a field and draw their swords and give you the courtesy of seeing the blow before it lands.
Torsten is none of those things. Torsten is the poison in the feed bag and the knife through the window and the smile that hides the blade, and Vaike does not know how to fight someone who will not stand still long enough to be fought.
But Evran does.
He leans forward and presses his lips to Vaike's forehead, gently, carefully, mindful of the stitches and the swelling, and feels the warmth of his husband's skin and the slow throb of his pulse beneath it. Alive. Still alive.
"Rest," Evran says. "Please."
Vaike's hand tightens on his, one last squeeze, and then his grip loosens and his eyes close and the pain pulls him under. Not sleep exactly, the tension in his jaw says he is not fully gone, but something close, a surrender to the stillness that his body needs even if his pride resists.
Evran sits on the edge of the bed and watches him.
He watches the slow rise and fall of Vaike's chest, the slight furrow between his brows that says the headache has not relented, the way his injured shoulder is held at a careful angle even in rest. The bandage is bright white against his dark skin, and the bruise extends beyond its edges, purple and green, a map of violence written on his body.
Maybe you're not good at subterfuge, Evran thinks, looking at Vaike's face, the strong jaw, the straight nose, the dark lashes against his cheeks.
The face of the man who saved him, who loves him, who carved beads from stone and wove them into his hair and asked nothing in return except that Evran stay.
But I can be.