Chapter 11
Indrie
Indrie walks through the keep with the king at his side and tries to ignore the passing glances they receive.
It is, as it turns out, impossible to ignore them.
A servant pressing herself against the wall as they pass, not out of fear, Indrie realizes, but out of a kind of startled deference, the way one steps aside for something unexpected rather than something frightening.
Her eyes flick from the king to Indrie to the king's hand hovering at the small of Indrie's back, and then she drops her gaze so quickly she might have given herself a neck injury.
A guard straightening at the end of the corridor, his spine snapping to attention.
A woman carrying a stack of folded linens rounds the corner and does a visible double-take, her gaze landing on Eskil, then traveling down to Indrie, then tracking the space between them, the not-quite-touching, the almost, and she nearly drops the linens before recovering and pressing herself against the wall with a fixed, determinedly blank expression that says she is seeing nothing and thinking everything.
Indrie is acutely aware of what this looks like.
The king. Walking a still-damp young man through the keep at night.
His hand hovering at the small of Indrie's back, not touching, not quite, but close enough that Indrie can feel the warmth of his palm through the thin linen of the shirt.
Close enough that any observer would see the intention in it, the protectiveness, the nearness that does not exist between a king and a subject.
His face does not stop burning.
It has been burning since the corridor, since the collision, since Eskil knelt beside him and pressed a towel to his wound and looked at him with those blue eyes and said I was too much of a coward to see you myself, and Indrie does not think it is going to stop burning anytime soon.
Possibly ever. He may simply live the rest of his life in a permanent state of flushed mortification, a walking testament to the devastating combination of a language barrier and a beautiful man on his knees.
He is still processing the corridor. Still turning the words over in his mind, examining them from every angle, pressing on them the way he presses on a wound to check its depth.
I was too much of a coward to see you myself.
The words do not fit the understanding he built on the ship and has been maintaining ever since.
In that understanding, Eskil does not want him.
Eskil was kind to him because Eskil is kind, and lay with him because the fruit required it, and told him the fruit changed nothing because the fruit did change nothing, and the avoidance of the past week was the natural distance a king maintains from a foreign commoner who embarrassed himself by asking to belong.
But coward does not fit.
Coward implies something to be afraid of. And what would Eskil–ruthless and decisive and unflinching, who dives into storms and kills men at war and carries kingdoms on his shoulders– be afraid of?
Indrie does not let himself answer the question. The answer that suggests itself is too large and too dangerous and too close to hope, and hope is a luxury he has learned to ration.
They walk. The keep gives way to the city, the stone floors becoming cobblestones, the torchlit corridors becoming lamplit streets, the close walls opening into the cool night air of Valen in autumn.
The city is quieter at this hour but not silent.
Tavern light spills from doorways and windows, warm and amber.
Somewhere nearby, someone is playing a stringed instrument, a low meandering melody that drifts between the buildings.
A cat crosses their path, sleek and unhurried, and disappears under a fence.
While they walk, they talk. Indrie steers them toward safe waters.
"Morgan speaks Kalkoan," he says, and the steadiness of his own voice surprises him. "Fluently. Did you know?"
"I found out when he told me." There is a dry edge to Eskil's voice, self-directed and wry. "Apparently he speaks six languages. Kalkoan among them."
"He's been invaluable. The clinic, the supplies, the books. I don't think I could have managed any of it without him."
Eskil nods. The pride that crosses his face is brief but unmistakable, a softening at the corners of his eyes, a loosening of his jaw. "Morgan is more capable than I deserve. He has been since he was old enough to hold a quill."
"He told me about how you raised him," Indrie says, and then worries he has overstepped, that the intimacy of this knowledge, given by Morgan in the warm privacy of a shared afternoon, does not belong in a nighttime street between a king and a healer who cannot define what they are to each other.
But Eskil does not stiffen. Does not retreat. He walks beside Indrie with his hands at his sides and his stride shortened to match Indrie's and his face turned slightly toward him, listening.
"He said you let him be who he wanted to be without making him be like you," Indrie continues, softer now. "That you saw what he was good at and made room for it."
Eskil is quiet for a moment. The cobblestones pass beneath their feet, Indrie's bare, because he never did put his boots back on, and the stone is cold but he barely feels it.
"My brother does not have the hands or the temperament for battle," Eskil says.
"I would never call him gentle where he could hear me, but the word suits him.
" A pause. "I tried to teach him sword work once.
He was eight. He held the practice sword like it was going to bite him and then cried when he dropped it on his foot. I never made him pick one up again."
Indrie smiles. The image is achingly tender. A boy of eight with a practice sword too heavy for his small hands, and a brother of twenty-one watching him cry and making a decision that would shape both their lives.
"And your language studies?" Eskil asks. "Morgan says the progress has been remarkable."
"Morgan is generous. I still can't manage a complex sentence without tripping over myself."
"You're managing now."
Indrie blinks. He is, he realizes. They have been speaking in Rengaran, entirely in Rengaran, for the past several minutes, and while his grammar is imperfect and his vocabulary forces him to circle around the words he does not have, the conversation has flowed.
Not effortlessly. Not the way it flows with Morgan in Kalkoan, where the words are water and he is the river.
But the current is there. He is swimming, not drowning.
"I suppose I am," he says, and is startled by the small bloom of pride in him.
He tells Eskil about the patients. The blacksmith with the infected burn who is healing cleanly now.
The twins with the ear infections whose mother brought him apples.
The old woman with joint pain who patted his cheek and said something he could not understand but felt in his bones.
The young girl with the broken finger who inspected her splint with morbid fascination and whose father looked greener than she did.
Eskil listens. He asks questions, how long does a burn like that take to heal, did the ear infections respond to the first treatment, what do you use for joint pain, and Indrie is startled to realize the king is genuinely interested.
Not performing interest. Not nodding politely while his mind works on other things.
He is asking follow-up questions. He is asking good follow-up questions, the kind that come from actual engagement with the subject rather than courtesy.
Indrie finds himself explaining more than he intended.
The properties of willow bark and how it reduces fever and inflammation.
The difference between a clean wound and an infected one, how to read the color of the skin, the warmth of the tissue, the way the body signals its distress in a language that does not require translation.
He talks about Ermin and the progress the boy is making, about the leather-bound journal and the notes taken with the dedication of a scribe, about the moment this morning when Ermin correctly identified the signs of a subsurface infection without prompting and Indrie felt a pride so fierce it nearly knocked him sideways.
He is mid-sentence when he realizes they have arrived.
The clinic stands before them in the lamplight, its tall windows dark, the faded sign above the door barely visible.
Indrie feels the shift that always accompanies returning to this place, the small warm pulse of mine, this is mine, no one can take this from me, and he pushes open the door and steps inside.
He lights the lamp by the door. The flame catches and steadies and the room fills with golden light, and Indrie turns to see Eskil standing in the doorway, silhouetted against the dark street, looking in.
"Come in," Indrie says. "Please."
Eskil steps over the threshold. His presence changes the room.
Not because he is too large for it, though he is, his shoulders taking up a significant portion of the aisle between the shelves.
The room changes because Eskil is in it, and the clinic, Indrie's place, Indrie's first thing, the space he has built with his own hands, now contains the person he most wants to share it with.
Eskil surveys the space. Indrie watches him take it in, the clean shelves stocked with labeled jars, the examination table scrubbed and ready, the herbs hanging from the iron ceiling hooks the blacksmith forged for him, the small back room visible through the open door with its neatly made cot and folded blanket.
The king's eyes move slowly and methodically, assessing, finding what is valuable.