Chapter 10
Eskil
Eskil has done a piss-poor job of not thinking about Indrie for the past week.
He has, however, done a remarkably good job of avoiding him, which he has convinced himself is for the best. It is for the best because every time he considers walking to the clinic (which is every morning, every afternoon, and every evening, a relentless three-times-daily compulsion that he stamps down with the grim determination of a man smothering a fire that keeps relighting) he runs into the same immovable wall.
He does not know what to say.
That is the entire obstacle. Fourteen years on a throne, wars, famine, and a treasury he built out of nothing, and the thing that has him pacing his own keep like a caged dog is that he cannot work out the first fucking sentence.
He is a king. He has led men into battle.
He has stood before hostile councils and belligerent chieftains and the assembled might of enemy forces and found the words, or the blade, to make his position clear.
He has never once in his life been at a loss for what to say, because what he says has always mattered less than how he says it, and how he says it has always been loudly, with conviction, and with the implicit promise of violence if his point is not received.
None of that works with Indrie. With Indrie, volume is a weapon that wounds the person he is trying to reach.
With Indrie, conviction sounds like command.
With Indrie, every instinct Eskil has built over fourteen years of ruling is wrong, and the right instincts, the gentle ones, the patient ones, the ones that require him to open himself and let another person see what is inside, are instincts he does not have and has never cultivated and does not know how to grow.
So he has avoided the problem. Like a coward. Like exactly the kind of man he has spent his life despising, who sees what needs doing and walks the other way because doing it would cost him something he has decided he cannot spare.
Gutless. There is no better word for it and he has looked.
He is disgusted with himself. The disgust is familiar and almost comfortable, a well-worn garment he has been putting on every morning since the ship, and he wears it through meetings and meals and the interminable hours of governance that fill his days, and no one notices because disgust, on Eskil, looks indistinguishable from his baseline expression.
It is evening. He has spent three hours in council on supply lines and border rotations and whose cousin is owed which stretch of road, which is the kind of governance that makes a man understand why some kings simply start wars.
His head aches and his patience is a thin, frayed thing barely holding, and he is walking through the keep toward his quarters with the single-minded focus of a man who wants nothing more than to sit in a dark room and not be spoken to.
He rounds the corner of the east corridor.
And Indrie is in his arms.
The collision is sudden. A body hitting his, smaller and lighter, momentum arrested by Eskil's reflexes before his mind has caught up.
His hands move on instinct: one to the waist, one to the bicep, gripping and steadying, and the body he is holding is wet and warm and wearing his shirt and not much else.
Indrie's face tilts up toward his.
He is wet. Hair dripping and skin damp, the dark strands plastered to his cheeks and his neck, and Eskil's shirt is clinging to his body, to the curve of his collarbones, the dip of his waist, the line of his thighs where the soaked fabric has gone translucent against his skin.
He is wearing nothing else. His legs are bare beneath the hem of the shirt, water tracking down his shins to pool around his bare feet on the stone floor, and the shirt has ridden up on one side where Eskil's arm is gripping his waist and there is so much skin visible, wet and flushed and close enough that he can feel the heat of the springs still trapped in it, that Eskil's mind goes momentarily and catastrophically blank.
For one reckless, ruinous second, there is only Indrie.
Soft and wide-eyed and startled, bare legs pressed against Eskil's clothed thighs, small hands braced against his chest, dark hair dripping onto Eskil's forearms. And Eskil forgets.
He forgets the week of avoidance and the wall he has been maintaining and the reasons, the good, sound, morally unimpeachable reasons, why Indrie is not his.
He forgets everything except the feeling of this man in his arms and the staggering, bone-deep rightness of it.
Then he sees the blood.
A cut at Indrie's temple. Still oozing, the edges ragged, trailing crimson down the side of his face in a thin line that disappears into the collar of the too-large shirt.
The blood is vivid against his skin, bright and wrong and new, not a healing wound but a fresh one, the kind that is still deciding how much it intends to bleed.
Everything else stops.
The wanting. The aching. The fire in his veins and the voice in his head that was cataloguing the geography of Indrie's wet skin with a specificity that bordered on cartographic.
All of it drops away, displaced by something colder and more immediate: Indrie is hurt.
Indrie is running through the keep half-dressed and bleeding and visibly upset, and the wanting does not matter because nothing matters except why.
Eskil moves a hand to Indrie's temple. He tilts Indrie's head to see the wound. It is a gash, not deep but ugly, the skin split against what looks like a hard edge. A stone. The rim of something.
"What happened?" he asks. His voice is low and even and does not betray the thing that is building in him.
Indrie flinches back. The motion is small but unmistakable, a pulling away, a retreat, and his eyes are wide and bright with something that is not quite tears and not quite panic but lives in the space between them.
"It was an accident," Indrie says. His voice is rapid and thin and he is not looking at Eskil's face, he is looking at his chest, at the hand that is still on his waist. "It was a misunderstanding. He didn't mean to—"
Eskil hears he.
He hears it and nothing else. The word drops into his mind and the fury rolls through him.
Cold first, the initial shock of it, the crystalline clarity that comes before the heat, and then hot, so hot it sears the inside of his skull, and then everywhere, filling every limb and every joint and every clenched and rigid muscle in his body.
He. Someone did this. Some man did this.
Some man in his own keep, under his own roof, put hands on Indrie and split his head open and sent him running through the corridors half-naked and bleeding, and Eskil is going to find out who and he is going to take him apart at the joints.
"He?" Eskil says, and his voice has dropped into a register that his soldiers would recognize as the sound that precedes someone losing something vital. A hand. A career. An ability to eat solid food.
Indrie blanches. The blood is still trickling down his face and his bare legs are shaking, from cold or shock or both, and he pulls out of Eskil's grasp with a jerky, graceless motion that tugs the shirt down and wraps his arms around himself.
"Who hurt you?" Eskil asks.
"No one," Indrie says, and the word is too fast, too emphatic, pushed out of him with the desperate energy of a man trying to close a door he has accidentally opened.
"I slipped in the hot springs. I slipped and hit my head on the edge of the pool.
That's all. It was my own fault. If I wasn't so stupid that I can't even speak the language of my new home properly—"
"Stop," Eskil says.
It comes out sharper than he wants it to. The word cracks through the corridor and Indrie's mouth snaps shut and his shoulders hunch and Eskil can see, physically see, in the curl of his spine and the drop of his gaze, the flinch traveling through him.
Eskil breathes. Forces himself to breathe. The fury is a living thing inside him, clawing at his ribs, demanding to be let out, but he cannot let it out here. Not with Indrie shrinking in front of him.
He cannot unhear he didn't mean to. The implication sits in him like a blade turned sideways.
Someone touched Indrie. Someone put hands on him.
Someone did something that required the qualifier he didn't mean to, and the qualifier exists because Indrie has been trained, by years of bruises and boots on stone floors, to excuse the people who hurt him.
To explain them. To take their cruelty into his own body and call it his fault.
If I wasn't so stupid—
Eskil is going to find whoever did this and he is going to remove their hands from their wrists with a dull blade. But first, the man in front of him.
He bends down and picks up Indrie's scattered belongings from the floor, the bundled clothes that went flying when they collided, and gathers them into a pile.
When he straightens, Indrie is still standing with his arms wrapped around himself, head bowed, blood dripping steadily down the side of his face.
He looks so small. He looks so impossibly, heartbreakingly small standing barefoot in the corridor of a keep that is not his home, bleeding from a wound he is calling his own fault, wearing the shirt of a man who has spent a week avoiding him.
"You're bleeding from a head injury and you need to sit down," Eskil says. He says it quietly this time. Carefully. The sharpness filed away.
Indrie bites his lip. He is a healer. He knows Eskil is right. But the hesitation in his body, the reluctance to be led, to be touched, to be anywhere near the man he has been avoiding as diligently as Eskil has been avoiding him, is written in every taut line of his posture.
Eskil does not ask again. He tucks Indrie's scattered belongings under one arm and presses his free hand to the small of Indrie's back, light, barely there, a suggestion rather than a command, and guides him down the hall.