Chapter 10 #2
He tells himself he does not mean to take Indrie to his own chambers. That it is close. That it is discreet. That it is the logical choice when you have an injured man in a hallway and the nearest attendant is two corridors away.
The truth is he cannot bear to hand Indrie over to someone else.
Not like this. Not bleeding and frightened and half-dressed in Eskil's clothes, smelling of mineral water and something sweet beneath the steam, his dark hair dripping a trail of water on the stone floor.
The thought of calling a servant, of placing Indrie in the hands of someone who does not know the geography of his fear, who would not understand why a raised hand makes him flinch or why a closed door makes his breathing change, is intolerable.
They reach Eskil's quarters. Indrie's footsteps hesitate at the threshold. Just a beat. Just long enough for Eskil to feel the hesitation through the hand on his back, a fractional stiffening of the spine beneath his palm.
Then Indrie moves into the space without encouragement.
He crosses the room with his arms still wrapped around himself and sits on one of the couches by the unlit fireplace.
Awkwardly. Knees pressed together. Hands clasped in his lap.
Dripping water onto the upholstery with the expression of a man who is acutely, agonizingly aware that he is ruining the king's furniture and cannot stop.
Eskil sets Indrie's bundled clothes on the table. He goes to the cupboard beside the washbasin and retrieves two towels, one large, one small, and brings them to the couch.
He hands Indrie the large towel. Indrie takes it with both hands and presses it to his dripping hair, blotting the water with the mechanical, unfocused motions of somebody doing something with his hands because his hands need something to do.
His eyes are cast downward, tracking the trail of water he has left across Eskil's floor and the growing damp spot on the couch, and his expression is the blend of mortification and guilt that Eskil has come to recognize as Indrie's default state when he believes he has caused an inconvenience.
Eskil huffs out a laugh. Endeared despite everything. Despite the fury still simmering in him and the blood on Indrie's face and the word he circling in his skull.
"Don't worry about the furniture, Indrie," he says.
Indrie's gaze flicks up, startled, as though being told not to worry is itself a cause for worry, and then drops again.
Eskil kneels beside the couch.
The motion brings him to Indrie's level.
Eye to eye. Close enough to see the drops of water on Indrie's eyelashes and the rapid flutter of his pulse at the hollow of his throat and the thin red line of blood still tracking down the side of his face.
Close enough that his knee brushes Indrie's bare shin and the contact sends a current through him that he has to pretend does not exist.
He presses the small towel to the wound at Indrie's temple.
Gently. The way he was taught to handle injuries in the field, steady pressure, no sudden movements, the patient's comfort above the healer's urgency.
Indrie winces at the contact but does not move away.
His legs are touching Eskil's clothed chest, the side of his knee against Eskil's ribs, the curve of his calf against Eskil's thigh, and Eskil is trying not to think about it.
He is trying not to think about the expanse of Indrie that is laid out before him.
The wet shirt clinging to his collarbones.
The dark hair curling at his temples where the steam has coaxed it into spirals.
The flush that is still dusted across his cheeks, vivid and warm.
About how he looks sitting on Eskil's couch in Eskil's shirt with Eskil's hands on his skin. About how he tastes.
The man is bleeding. He is bleeding, and shaking, and Eskil is kneeling on his own floor with a bloody towel in his hand thinking about his mouth like some rutting boy who has never been told no. There is a word for men like that and Eskil has used it about other people.
Eskil focuses on the wound. Dabs at it. Cleans the blood from the surrounding skin with careful, even strokes.
"Stop calling yourself stupid," he says. Quieter now. The edge gone. The anger redirected, not at Indrie, never at Indrie, but at every person who ever taught this man that failure to perform perfectly was a sin deserving punishment.
Indrie's eyes are fixed on Eskil's hands. Watching them the way he watched them on the ship, trying to reconcile the gentleness with the hands capable of delivering it.
"You are not stupid because you struggle with our language," Eskil says, dabbing carefully at the wound.
The bleeding is slowing. The gash is shallow, more bloody than dangerous, the kind of cut that looks worse than it is but will leave a bruise.
"It has barely been a month since you started learning.
And already you can have conversations. Already you are caring for our people. "
He pauses. Cleans a fresh trickle of blood that has escaped the towel's pressure.
Continues, because Morgan told him and because Indrie deserves to hear it, because someone should have been saying these things to him every day since he arrived and Eskil is only now realizing that the person who should have been saying them was him.
"Morgan says you are already reading our texts and writing your requisitions in Rengaran."
Indrie's eyes flicker to his. Surprised. The dark gaze lifts from Eskil's hands to his face and the surprise in it is genuine, not the surprise of hearing a compliment but the surprise of hearing that someone has been paying attention when he thought he was invisible.
"Morgan is reporting to you about my progress?" Indrie asks, tentatively.
Eskil hears the question beneath the question.
It is there in the slight tightening of Indrie's voice, the faint narrowing of his eyes, the way his clasped hands grip each other a fraction harder.
Are you evaluating me? Judging whether I've earned my place?
Deciding whether I am useful enough to keep?
Indrie has spent five years being evaluated. His value was his usefulness and his usefulness was the only thing between him and the street or the grave, and now he is hearing that the king has been receiving reports about his work and the first place his mind goes is am I passing the test?
Eskil realizes he is going to have to give Indrie something he has kept close to his chest for the past week. Something honest. Something that costs him.
He has been collecting costs since the ship.
Storing them. Hoarding them, because spending them, opening his mouth and letting the truth out, means being seen, and being seen means being vulnerable, and being vulnerable means giving someone the power to hurt him, and Eskil has spent his entire adult life ensuring that no one has that power.
Indrie already has that power. He has had it since the night on the deck under the stars, when he looked up at Eskil with their hands joined and smiled.
He has been falling since. Slowly. The ground has not arrived yet.
"No," Eskil says. He meets Indrie's eyes. Holds them. Does not look away, because looking away would be easier and he does not deserve easier. "I asked after you because I was too much of a coward to see you myself."
The words land in the space between them and lie there, exposed and raw, and Eskil watches them land and does not try to pick them back up.
Indrie is quiet.
The fire is unlit. The room is dim, the only light coming from the lanterns in the corridor through the half-open door and the last pale remnants of evening through the window.
In the dimness, Indrie's eyes are very dark, almost black, the irises indistinguishable from the pupils, and they are searching Eskil's face with an intensity that makes his skin feel thin.
"I don't understand," Indrie admits.
It is not an accusation. It is not a demand. It is the simple, honest statement of somebody who has been given a piece that does not fit into the puzzle he has been assembling, and he is holding it up and looking at it and cannot find where it goes.
Eskil cleans the wound. He clenches his jaw and forces himself through it, through the sensation of flaying himself open in a room with a man who is sitting on his couch in his shirt and bleeding from a wound someone else gave him.
"I have been a coward since you—"
He hesitates. Because naming what happened between them on the ship makes it inescapable, and escaping is all he has been trying to do since.
If he says it, then it becomes real in this room in a way that it was not real while it lived only in his memory and Indrie's memory and the silent space between them where neither of them had dared to put it into words.
"—since you saved my life," he finishes. The words are rough, dragged out of him. "I didn't even bother to ask if I hurt you."
Indrie startles. The flush comes back, that beautiful, devastating bloom of color across his cheekbones, spreading down his neck and into the collar of the shirt, and his hand comes up and lands on Eskil's wrist. The one holding the towel to his temple.
His fingers are delicate against Eskil's scarred skin.
They curl around the thick of his wrist and hold, not pulling, not pushing, just holding, and the touch is electric.
It travels from the point of contact up Eskil's arm and lodges somewhere under his sternum.
"You did not hurt me," Indrie says. Adamantly. His voice is firm in a way it rarely is, the voice of a man who is certain of what he is saying and will not be moved from it. "Eskil, you were kind. And patient. And—"
The flush deepens. He looks away and does not finish the sentence, but the unfinished end of it hangs in the air between them, heavy with everything the words would have contained if he had let them out.