Chapter 25
Indrie eases himself off the bed.
His legs don't cooperate immediately. They're trembling, his whole body is trembling, a fine, continuous vibration that starts in his core and radiates outward, his bones rung and still resonating.
He stands beside the bed on unsteady feet and grips the edge of the mattress and waits for the room to stop tilting.
It doesn't stop. Not fully. The ship rocks beneath him the way it always does, but there's something else now, a vertigo that lives inside him rather than beneath him, a fundamental reorientation of his internal landscape that has left him standing on ground he doesn't recognize.
His hands are shaking. He looks down at them in the lamplight, slender, stained with salve and other things.
He closes his eyes. Opens them. Breathes.
He is a healer. There is a patient behind him. There is work to do.
He finds a cloth in Eskil's trunk and dampens it with water from the pitcher on the desk. He cleans his own hands first, mechanically, the practiced efficiency of someone who has cleaned up after worse, blood, bile, the slow seepage of Granger's wounds, and then he turns back to the bed.
Eskil is unconscious. Truly, deeply unconscious, not sleeping, and the distinction is one Indrie knows intimately, having spent five years monitoring the sleep of a dying king.
Eskil's breathing has slowed to something deep and even, his chest rising and falling in the long, steady rhythm of a body that has surrendered entirely to exhaustion.
His face is slack, the severe lines smoothed, the scar across his eye less prominent in the lamplight.
He looks younger. Softer. More man than king.
Indrie cleans him up while blushing furiously.
His face burns with a heat that rivals what Eskil's fever produced, a flush so total and so persistent that he can feel it in his ears and his chest and the backs of his hands.
He draws the damp cloth across Eskil's stomach, across his hips, between his thighs, cleaning away the evidence of what they did, and every point of contact is a memory, and by the time he's done he's so red he could light the room without the lamp.
He pulls the quilt over Eskil's waist. Tucks it gently around his hips.
Allows himself, just for a moment, to look at the man sleeping in the bed, the broad chest, the scarred arms, the hand that rests open on the mattress, the hand that held Indrie's hip and cradled his jaw and tangled in his hair, and the ache in his chest is so acute it takes his breath.
He dresses mechanically. The clothes are where they fell, scattered across the cabin floor in a trail that tells the story of the past hour with more clarity than Indrie can bear, and he gathers them piece by piece.
Eskil's trousers first, the ones that are too large and require the rope cinch.
Then the shirt. Eskil's shirt. He pulls it over his head and the fabric settles around him and the scent of cedar and iron is there but it's different now, layered with sweat and heat and the unmistakable smell of what they did, and Indrie has to stand very still for a moment and press the heels of his hands against his eyes and breathe.
His body is still thrumming. Not pain, he expected pain, had braced for it, had filed it away as an acceptable cost, but there is an ache, deep and unfamiliar, that isn't quite pain and isn't quite anything else.
A soreness. A fullness. He can feel where Eskil was.
Can feel the ghost of that impossible stretch, the place inside him that Eskil had found and returned to again and again until Indrie lost the ability to form words in either language.
His neck and throat are still red and sensitive from Eskil's beard against his skin.
He touches the marks absently, fingertips tracing the path Eskil's mouth took, jaw, throat, collarbone, the spot where his neck meets his shoulder that had made him grab fistfuls of Eskil's hair and say the king's name in a voice he didn't recognize.
He can still feel Eskil's hands on his hips.
Can still feel the press of him, inside, and the sound of Eskil's voice, low and rough and wrecked, pouring out a stream of words Indrie couldn't follow but felt in his bones.
One word in particular that Eskil repeated over and over, always in the same tender register, always when his hands were gentlest. Indrie doesn't know what it means but he knows exactly how it sounded and he will hear it in his sleep for the rest of his life.
He presses his knuckles against his mouth and breathes through them.
He gathers his satchel from the table. Checks Eskil's pulse one more time, steady, strong, the beat of recovery, and braces himself.
He opens the cabin door and steps into the corridor and almost immediately collides with Bohdi.
The second-in-command is standing right outside, close enough that he must have been there the entire time.
His back is against the opposite wall, his arms crossed, his face a mask of carefully maintained composure that cracks the instant he sees Indrie.
His hands drop to his sides. He steps forward and grips Indrie's forearm, not gently, not roughly, needing to hold onto something real after hours in the dark.
"The king," Bohdi says. "How is he?"
"He's fine." Indrie's voice comes out steadier than he feels, the healer's voice, the one that delivers diagnoses regardless of what's happening behind his ribs. "He'll make it through the night. He's sleeping. He just needs rest."
The relief that moves through Bohdi is visible, a full-body release, his shoulders dropping, his grip loosening, his eyes closing for a moment. When he opens them, the composure is back, but what's beneath it is rawer than Indrie has ever seen from the man. Gratitude. Pure, unfiltered, devastating.
Bohdi takes Indrie's face in both hands, gently, and presses his forehead against Indrie's.
The contact is warm and firm and holds for the space of several heartbeats, and Indrie stands very still and doesn't breathe because the gesture is so foreign, so intimate in its platonic way, that he doesn't know what to do with it.
No one has ever thanked him this way. No one has ever pressed their forehead to his and breathed their relief against his face and held him as though what he'd done was not expected servitude but a gift freely given.
Indrie doesn't feel deserving of it. Bohdi is thanking him for saving the king's life, and Indrie did save the king's life, but the method, the intimacy, the shattering beauty of what happened in that room, doesn't feel like healing.
It feels stolen. Something sacred that was meant for two people who chose each other and was instead deployed as medicine by a healer who had no right to want it as badly as he did.
Bohdi pulls back. His hands linger on Indrie's face for a moment, thumbs resting against his cheekbones, and then his eyes flicker.
Down. To Indrie's throat. To the redness there, not bruises this time, not the marks of violence, but the raw, abraded pink of skin that has been scraped by stubble and sucked by a mouth that couldn't get enough.
His gaze lingers on the marks for a beat. Two. His expression doesn't change. Whatever he's thinking, he keeps it behind his teeth, and the restraint costs him something, Indrie can see the effort, but he doesn't say anything.
"Get some rest," Bohdi tells him. His voice is quiet. "I'll watch him. If anything changes, I'll come find you."
Indrie nods. The motion is numb, automatic. He turns and walks down the corridor on legs that don't feel entirely attached to his body and makes it approximately eight steps before Dagny materializes from the shadows, a redheaded apparition.
She grabs his arm and pulls him to a stop and her face is a landscape of worry, brows drawn, mouth tight, eyes searching his with the frantic attention of someone who has been pacing in the dark for hours.
"What is going on?" she demands. "Bohdi told me the king is ill. I heard — there were —" She falters. Her eyes move across his face, cataloguing, and then drop to his throat, to the same marks Bohdi saw, and her mouth opens.
"The king is ill," Indrie says, before she can ask the question forming behind her eyes. His voice is flat. Controlled. The healer's voice. "He'll pull through by morning."
"Are you okay?"
Indrie nods. The motion is too stiff, too sharp, and Dagny's worry doesn't diminish. She steps closer, ducking her head to catch his downcast eyes.
"You look —" She searches for the word in his language. "— wrong. You look wrong, Indrie. Are you sick too?"
"I'm not sick. I'm just tired. I need to rest."
She's not convinced. Her hand is still on his arm, her thumb making small, unconscious circles against his sleeve, and Indrie can see the war between her instinct to press and her respect for his boundaries. The boundaries win, barely.
"You'd tell me if something was wrong," she says. It's not a question. It's a line drawn and stood behind.
Indrie nods again. He can't meet her eyes. If he meets her eyes, she'll see what's in his, and what's in his is not something he can name or contain or explain in either of their languages.
She lets him go. He walks to his bunk and climbs inside and pulls the blanket over himself and lies on his side facing the wall.
He tries and fails not to think about what happened.
He shared the effects of the Cara fruit with the king.
He knows what this means in his culture.
He learned it as a child, the way all children in Kalkoa learn it, whispered stories and reverent warnings, the sacredness of the fruit, the permanence of what it creates.
The Cara fruit binds. It seals. It takes two people who choose each other in the most intimate way possible and weaves them together at a level that transcends the physical.
In his culture, sharing the Cara fruit is marriage.
It is the deepest, most irrevocable vow two people can make, spoken not with words but with bodies, sealed not by ceremony but by the act itself.
The fruit recognized them. The fever broke. The bond is sealed.
But Eskil had not seen it that way.
Eskil had looked him in the eye, those pale, blown, fever-bright eyes, and told him, with a clarity that the fruit could not erode: You do not belong to me. The fruit doesn't change that.
The words have been replaying since the moment Eskil said them, a loop that runs beneath everything that followed.
They sat in his chest while Eskil spoke to him in that voice, rough and reverent and continuous against his skin, words and breath and heat tangled together until Indrie couldn't tell where the language ended and the sensation began.
They sit in his chest now, immovable, the foundation beneath the earthquake.
You are not mine.
This isn't a vow. This isn't a promise. This is just a use for Indrie that no one had found before. He is a healer. He heals. Tonight, healing required his body instead of his hands, and he gave it, and the king survived, and that is the end of the transaction.
And then, to have him. To have Eskil around him, inside him, kissing him with a thoroughness that dismantled every defense Indrie had ever built.
To hear that voice pouring words into his skin that he couldn't translate but that sounded so much like adoration.
To feel those hands grip his hips with a restraint that spoke of tenderness rather than ownership, guiding rather than demanding, giving rather than taking.
The way Eskil had told him to breathe, one of the few words Indrie understood completely.
The way he'd laughed, genuinely laughed, when Indrie said it wouldn't fit, and nothing about the laugh had sounded like use.
The way his arms had locked around Indrie afterward and held him, and the way those arms had tightened instead of loosened when Indrie made soft, broken sounds against his shoulder.
Indrie lies in his bunk and presses his face into the pillow and the trembling won't stop, a bone-deep vibration that he cannot reconcile with the cold, clinical fact that he was performing a medical procedure.
Because it didn't feel like a medical procedure. It felt like being loved.
And that's the cruelest part. Eskil had made it feel that way, had held him and moved inside him with a tenderness that redefined what Indrie thought tenderness was, and none of it was real.
All of it was the fruit, the fever, the proximity of a warm body to a burning one.
Maybe it's possible to treat someone with exquisite care and still not want them.
Maybe the gentleness was principle rather than affection.
The most incredible night of Indrie's life, the night that should have been shared with his spouse, the night his culture designed to be the beginning of everything, instead given to a man who looked him in the eye before kissing him and made sure Indrie understood: this changes nothing. You are not mine.
He curls up in his bed and tears stream down his face.
They come silently, no sound, no sob, just the steady, relentless fall of something that has been dammed and has finally broken through.
They soak into the pillow. They slide across the bridge of his nose and pool in the hollow of his throat, in the same spot where Eskil's mouth pressed against his pulse, and the salt of them stings against the raw skin there and even the stinging is a memory.
He cries for what he was given and what he wasn't. For the vow that was sealed in his heart and nowhere else, the marriage that exists only in the framework of a culture Eskil doesn't share.
He cries because of the way Eskil's voice sounded when he said that word, the repeated one, and it was the most beautiful sound Indrie has ever heard and he will carry it in his chest for the rest of his life and he doesn't even know what it means.
Eventually the tears slow. Then stop. Then dry on his face, the residue of something the body can't hold anymore.
He lies in his bunk and stares at the wall and the ship rocks beneath him and the carved bird on the shelf watches him with wooden eyes and the drawing in his pocket presses against his hip and he doesn't sleep.
He doesn't sleep for a very long time.