Chapter 21
When Gunnar gives him a plate of food to take to the king, Indrie doesn't beg off this time.
He's resigned. Not defeated, not broken, just the quiet, flat acceptance that comes from running out of ways to avoid the inevitable and deciding to walk toward it instead of away.
He takes the plate from Gunnar's hands without protest, without pleading, without the desperate look that made Gunnar soften two days ago and nearly give in before placing the plate back in his hands.
He takes the plate and he goes.
The corridor to the king's cabin is the same corridor it's always been.
The same length, the same dim lamplight, the same smell of timber and salt.
Indrie's feet know the path. They've walked it enough times now that the journey has become muscle memory, a route his body can navigate while his mind occupies itself with more pressing concerns, such as the comprehensive catalogue of everything he's said and done wrong in the past two days and the various ways he might make it worse tonight.
He doesn't knock. The door is ajar, not fully open, but not latched, the gap wide enough to see lamplight within, and he pushes it with his shoulder and enters.
Eskil is sitting on his bed.
Not at the desk. He's on the bed, legs crossed, a leather-bound book open in his hands, and the posture is so unexpected, so domestic, that Indrie falters in the doorway for a half-step before his feet remember their assignment and carry him forward.
The king's hair is half-unbraided, the close plaits loosened on one side where he's been running a hand through them.
His boots are off, placed neatly by the trunk.
The book is worn, the leather soft from handling, and Eskil holds it with the easy grip of something frequently read.
He looks up when Indrie enters, and his eyes, those pale, impossible eyes, track Indrie across the room with an attention that has weight and warmth and a quality Indrie still can't name.
Indrie walks carefully. He crosses the cabin with his back straight and his eyes on the ground, the plate held in front of him.
He places it on the desk with care, and it doesn't make a sound against the wood.
The stew doesn't slosh. A perfect delivery, flawless in its execution, the kind of small competence that used to be the margin between a quiet night and a bruised one.
He thinks about turning and leaving. The door is behind him, still ajar, and the corridor beyond it is empty and the ship is quiet and he could be back in his bunk in under a minute.
He could leave and not have to stand in this room and see the king's face while the king says whatever he's been preparing to say, the gentle let-down, the careful clarification, the kind and measured explanation of why Indrie's heart is not something Eskil has any use for.
But instead he looks at the king.
He doesn't plan to. His eyes move on their own, pulled by the same gravity that has been pulling him since the first day in Armond's chambers, and he finds Eskil watching him.
The book is lowered, forgotten, and the king's expression is something Indrie doesn't have a word for.
It's not the careful neutrality he usually wears.
It's not anger, not frustration, not the controlled displeasure that Indrie has learned to read as Eskil fighting his own tongue.
It's something open, something unfinished, something that carries the weight of having waited in this room and not knowing what the waiting has brought.
Indrie swallows. The sound is audible in the quiet cabin. He stays.
Eskil sets the book aside. He places it on the mattress beside him, spine up, pages spread, and swings his legs over the side of the bed.
His feet hit the floor and he sits on the edge, forearms resting on his knees, and the posture brings him lower, closer to Indrie's height, and the deliberateness of it, the way the king has arranged himself to be less imposing, less towering, is something Indrie notices and files away in the growing collection of evidence that he doesn't know what to do with.
"I need to speak with you," Eskil says.
Indrie nods. The motion is stiff and mechanical, his body performing compliance while his mind braces for impact. He can do this. He can stand here and have this conversation. He can hear whatever Eskil has to say and nod and accept it and walk out with his dignity, if not his heart, intact.
Eskil opens his mouth to speak.
It turns out Indrie can not do this.
He speaks first.
He can't help it. The alternative, standing in silence while the king assembles his careful, measured words, each one a stepping stone toward the conclusion Indrie already knows is coming, is worse than speaking.
At least if he speaks first he controls the shape of it.
At least if he apologizes before being dismissed, he can pretend the dismissal was his idea.
"I am sorry for insulting you," he says.
His voice is level. Composed. The voice he perfected over five years of apologizing to men who held power over him, stripped of emotion, stripped of self, offering nothing that could be used as ammunition.
"I spoke out of turn. I did not understand, and I should not have presumed.
If I have offended your customs, or your...
" He searches for the word. Doesn't find it.
Settles for: "...your ways. I apologize. "
He watches Eskil's face as he talks.
He watches it become more displeased with every word.
The openness that was there a moment ago contracts. Eskil's brow furrows, the line between his eyes deepening, and his jaw sets, the muscle at the hinge flexing, and his hands, resting on his knees, curl inward by a fraction.
Indrie presses on, because stopping is not something he knows how to do once he's started apologizing.
The words come faster, tumbling over each other, filling the silence before the silence can fill with something worse.
"I should not have, on the deck, what I said, I know it was presumptuous, I know a king would not, that you would not want," and the word catches in his throat because what he means is me, what he means is that the insult of it, the sheer gall of a foreign slave suggesting that a king might look at him and want, that Eskil might want a man at all, and not just any man but this one, too thin, too weak, too marked by another man's ownership, it must have been staggering, "I know my place, and I—"
Eskil's expression darkens further. He's messing this up.
He can see it happening in real time, can see each apology landing wrong, each self-deprecation carving the king's displeasure deeper, and he doesn't know what to do.
He doesn't know what Eskil wants. Apology is all he has.
Apology and submission and the willingness to take the blame.
These are the tools he was given, the only tools, and they are failing him and his chest is tightening and his voice is getting thinner and—
"Indrie, stop."
Eskil's voice is sharp. Not raised, he doesn't shout, doesn't break the low register he always uses with Indrie, but the edge on it is keen and clean and it cuts through Indrie's spiraling monologue without effort.
The word hangs in the air. Indrie's mouth snaps shut.
The sound of his teeth clicking is loud in the sudden quiet.
He stands very still, lips pressed together, hands clasped in front of him, waiting.
"You ‘know your place’?” Eskil repeats, almost through his teeth, disbelieving, and Indrie knows he's said the wrong thing.
If he knew his place he wouldn't have messed up to start.
He obviously does not know his place. And his fear that Eskil is going to show him his place is magnified when the king says, “Come here.”
Simple. Low. Spoken from the edge of the bed where Eskil sits with his forearms on his knees and his eyes on Indrie and the space between them, six feet, seven, is a distance that Indrie has crossed a hundred times and that now feels impossible.
The fear washes over him.
It's sudden and total, flooding his chest and his throat and his limbs, hot and electric, his whole body preparing for something it can't survive. His heart slams against his ribs. His vision narrows.
He's going to be punished. The apology didn't work, nothing works, it never works, he's been apologizing his whole life and it has never once stopped what comes after, and the king wants him closer because that's how it's done, that's how it's always done, you come when you're called and you stand within arm's reach and you take what's given.
And of course the apology didn't work, because the offense was too large.
He looked at a king and let the wanting show on his face and that is a thing that cannot be walked back with words.
And the thought of Eskil, who held his hand under the stars, who drew him a picture of home, who told him you are yours with a ferocity that changed him, the thought of this man, this specific man, the one Indrie has fallen for so completely and so helplessly, being the one to hurt him–
He has endured Armond. He has endured the fists and the boots and the shouted insults and the nights on the cold floor with his ribs cracked and his mouth bloody.
He endured it because there was nothing else, because Armond was all he knew, because the pain was familiar and therefore survivable.
But this, the thought of Eskil's hand connecting with his face, of those gentle, careful fingers becoming fists, of the voice that said you are yours turning sharp and mean.
He doesn't know how he'll recover. He doesn't know if he can. Armond was a cage he'd mapped the dimensions of. Eskil is a door he walked through willingly, and if there is violence on the other side of it, the betrayal will break something in him that the cage never touched.