Chapter 11 #2
He investigates. Runs his fingers along the shelf labels, pausing at the bilingual tags, the Kalkoan characters beside the Rengaran ones, Indrie's careful hand on display.
He opens a jar and smells the contents, yarrow, the sharp green scent of it, and replaces the lid.
He picks up one of the steel instruments Morgan brought, turns it in his fingers, sets it down.
He looks at the herb bundles hanging overhead. At the botanical guide on the table, open to a page of illustrated chamomile. At the scarf, the deep blue one, knitted by the woman whose husband Indrie stitched, draped over the back of the chair.
"You've done this in a week," Eskil says. It is not a question.
Indrie nods. He is standing by the examination table with his hands clasped in front of him, watching Eskil move through his space with a nervousness that has nothing to do with fear.
It is the vulnerability of showing somebody a thing you have made, of saying I built this, this is what I can do, and waiting to see whether it is enough.
"This is incredible, Indrie," Eskil tells him, turning to him. His mouth twitches. Almost a smile.
Then he turns away from the shelves and his expression shifts, becomes heavier and more deliberate, the set of his jaw changing as something surfaces from beneath the careful neutrality he has been maintaining.
Things grow quiet. The comfortable ease of the walk evaporates, replaced by something denser.
Eskil leans against the examination table with his arms crossed and his gaze fixed on a point somewhere between the floor and the middle distance, and Indrie can see the words building behind his eyes.
Can see the effort of them, the weight, the reluctance.
"Armond's stores," Eskil says. "The things we took from the castle. The fruit."
Indrie's hands still on the jar he is pretending to adjust.
"Why would he have something like that?" Eskil continues. His voice is careful, measured, testing each step before he commits his weight to it. "The Kalkoans cultivate it. A fruit that poisons you if you don't—"
He stops. Recalibrates. The sentence reorganizes itself in his mouth, the blunt edge filed down.
"Why would anyone keep that in their larder?"
Indrie's heart is hammering. He can feel it in his throat, a rapid insistent pulse that makes swallowing difficult and breathing deliberate. His hands are on the jar and the jar is on the shelf and he is not looking at Eskil. He is looking at the label and the letters are blurring.
He does not want to tell Eskil what the fruit symbolizes.
He does not want to explain the Cara fruit, because explaining the Cara fruit means explaining the marriage rite, and explaining the marriage rite means telling Eskil that by Indrie's customs, by the customs of the kingdom he was born in and the culture that shaped him, Eskil has taken Indrie as his husband.
And he hasn't. By Rengaran customs they are still king and commoner, two men who shared a bed out of medical necessity, and just because they lay together with the fruit between them does not mean Eskil agrees with or understands or is bound by Kalkoan traditions he never consented to.
If Indrie tells him the truth, the full truth, the weight of what the fruit means, the word that has no Rengaran equivalent, Eskil will feel obligated.
Eskil, who jumped into a storm to save a stranger and carried him to his own bed and cannot see somebody suffer without trying to fix it, will feel obligated, and obligation is not the same as wanting, and Indrie would rather carry the silence for the rest of his life than have Eskil's sense of duty be the reason he stays.
He is quiet for too long. The silence becomes its own answer. A shape in the room, visible and heavy, occupying the space where words should be.
Eskil straightens. Something in his expression shifts. A closing. A withdrawal. The recognition of a door that will not open from his side.
"I should not have brought it up," he says. "I apologize."
The apology is genuine. Indrie can hear the weight of it. Not a courtesy, not a performance, but a man who has seen a line and is stepping back from it because the person on the other side has asked him to, even though the asking was silent.
"Good night, Indrie," Eskil says.
He moves toward the door. And he hesitates.
Indrie can feel the hesitation. It fills the room the way a held breath fills a chest, a pressure, a fullness, the weight of words being gathered and held and then, one by one, put back down unspoken.
Eskil stands in the doorway with his hand on the frame and his back to Indrie and he does not turn around and he does not speak and the silence stretches between them.
Then he leaves.
The door closes behind him. Not hard. Not soft. Just closed. The click of the latch is very small and very final.
Indrie watches him go through the window.
Watches the king's silhouette move down the street, broad-shouldered and long-strided, until the lamplight releases him into the dark.
He stands at the window with one hand pressed against the glass and the other pressed over his sternum, where the ache lives, and watches until there is nothing left to watch.
He turns away. The clinic is quiet. The herbs sway gently from their hooks in the draft from the chimney. The lamp flickers.
He checks his head wound in the small mirror Morgan gave him, a square of polished steel, just large enough to see his face.
There will be a bruise. It will be purple by morning and he will have to explain it, and the explanation will be I hit my head on a rock in the hot springs and no one will ask further and the truth, the misunderstanding, the kiss he did not want, the violent graceless recoil of a body that only wants one mouth against it, will stay where it is, buried beneath the simpler story.
He brews tea. Chamomile, for the headache that has settled behind his eyes, a dull persistent throb that the steam and the warmth help soften. He sits on the edge of his cot in the back room and drinks it slowly, the cup warming his palms, and thinks.
Cowardice is the word he keeps coming back to. The pieces he's holding contradict each other. A man who does not want him would not need courage to face him. A man who does not want him would not call himself a coward for staying away.
Unless the cowardice is about something else entirely. Unless it is about guilt, or obligation, or the discomfort of a man who took something he should not have taken and does not want to confront the person he took it from.
Indrie sets down his cup. He lies back on the cot and stares at the ceiling and the thoughts circle and circle and do not resolve.
He is almost ready to surrender to the headache and the exhaustion and the unquiet of his mind when there is a knock on the door.
He sits up. It is late, late enough that the street outside should be empty, late enough that anyone knocking at his door at this hour is either in need of urgent care or in need of a boundary lesson. He crosses through the clinic on bare feet and opens the door.
Ermin all but throws himself at him.
The collision is less a hug and more an impact–one that almost takes them both to the floor. Ermin's arms going around his shoulders, Ermin's momentum carrying them both half a step backward, Ermin's voice already running at full speed before his body has finished arriving.
"Are you alright? I saw you leave, you were bleeding, I came as fast as I could but you'd already gone and I couldn't find you in the keep and I asked three guards and one of them said you'd gone toward the east wing with the king and I—"
"Ermin." Indrie gently disengages himself from the embrace and holds the younger man at arm's length. "I'm fine. Breathe."
Ermin does not breathe. Ermin does the opposite of breathing. He inhales sharply and launches into a second volley, his face flushed and his eyes wide and his hands gripping Indrie's sleeves as though afraid he will evaporate.
"What happened? Is it bad? Let me see." He reaches for Indrie's temple.
"Can we come inside?" Indrie says, dodging his hand. "I'm standing barefoot on a cold street."
They go inside. Ermin continues talking. He tells Indrie he should never have left his side in the springs. That he saw Indrie leaving, and blood on the pool edge and Harrak was standing waist-deep in the water looking like he had accidentally committed a murder.
"I didn't know Harrak would show an interest in you," Ermin says, pacing the length of the clinic. "I didn't think. I should have stayed closer. And when I found out what happened I went straight to Harrak and told the man, in no uncertain terms, that you were being courted by the king—"
Every thought in Indrie's head goes out at once.
It is not gradual. It is a shutter coming down. Everything in motion, his breath, his pulse, the sentence he had been assembling, lurches forward and hangs there, suspended.
"Hold on," he says. "Wait. You told him what?"
Ermin blinks. The pacing stops. He turns to Indrie with the expression of somebody who has said something perfectly obvious and does not understand why it is being questioned.
"I told him you were spoken for," Ermin says.
"Spoken for?" Indrie repeats. His voice sounds strange to his own ears, thin and high and breathless, as though the words are being squeezed out of him.
"Yes. I told him he needs to know about you and the king."
Indrie feels lightheaded. Actually, physically lightheaded, the room tilting slightly, the lamplight smearing at the edges of his vision.
He lowers himself onto the edge of the examination table because his legs have apparently decided they no longer wish to support his weight, and presses a hand over his heart, which is doing something alarming and fluttery that he would diagnose in a patient as arrhythmia and recognizes in himself as pure distilled panic.