Chapter 13 #2
"My work includes tending anyone who is injured and in pain.
" Indrie's voice is steady, but something is building in him.
A pressure. A rising tide. He has spent his entire life bending.
Bending to Armond, to the advisors, to every person who told him to be smaller and quieter and less.
He is learning, has been learning since the day he stepped off that ship, that he does not have to bend anymore.
But the learning is hard and the straightening is harder and sometimes, like now, standing tall feels like standing in a gale.
He speaks before he can stop himself.
"I was on that ship," he says.
The words come out quieter than he intended, but they land with force. He sees it in the way Eskil's expression shifts, a flicker, barely there, behind the stone.
"I saw what was left of the man at the mast when your men were finished with him." Indrie's hands have curled at his sides, fingers pressing into his palms. "He could not stand. And then you had him thrown into the sea."
The silence after this is different. It is not weighted. It is hollow.
Indrie's heart is hammering, but he does not look away. "So tell me what I would find down there. Tell me whether there is anything left of him worth treating, or whether I should simply wait to see him buried."
Something moves through Eskil's face, dark and complicated and gone before Indrie can read it. What replaces it is worse. The openness, the softness, even the careful patience, all of it withdraws.
What remains is the king.
Eskil stands. The motion is slow and deliberate, and the full height of him, the breadth of his shoulders, the weight of his presence, fills the space between them in a way it never has before. He has always been careful around Indrie. Careful to kneel, to sit, to bring himself level.
He is not bringing himself level now.
"He would let you get close." Eskil's voice is a different instrument than it was a moment ago.
Lower. Harder. The edge no longer filed but honed.
"That is what a man like that does. You would come down those stairs with your satchel and he would be slumped in the chair, and you would forget everything else, because that is what you are. "
He steps around the desk, and Indrie has to tilt his head back to hold his gaze.
"You would kneel down in front of him with your back to the door and your hands full of bandages. Three seconds of you thinking about his injuries instead of about him. Three seconds is all a man needs."
"He is restrained—"
"You are half his size," Eskil says. His voice has dropped, not in volume but in register, each word placed with the deliberation of a man building a wall. "You have never held a blade. You do not know what a cornered man is capable of, and I will not educate you by letting you find out."
Indrie cannot get a full breath. Something in him is recoiling, is shrinking, is providing a response it has learned down in his bones.
"He would kill you before you could kneel at his side," Eskil says. "And I will not allow it."
“Eskil–”
"You are not to go near the prisoner," Eskil says. "You are not to go near the cells. Is that clear?"
It is not a question. It is a command, the first Eskil has ever given him, hard and unyielding and delivered in the tone of a king addressing a subject and not a man speaking to somebody he cares for.
The shift is instantaneous.
The confident young healer who walked into this room, who stood his ground and spoke his mind and challenged the most powerful man in the kingdom, disappears. In his place is the boy who knelt on a stone floor in Kalkoa and did as he was told.
The straightening in his spine reverses. His shoulders draw inward. His chin drops. His hands uncurl from their fists and come to rest at his sides, open and empty, the way they always were when Armond spoke and Indrie listened.
He cannot breathe. His lungs have gone shallow and quick and will not fill. There is a high thin ringing somewhere behind his ears.
"Yes, your majesty," Indrie says.
His voice is very small. The title comes out of him like something dredged up from deep water, an old reflex, a shape his mouth remembers from years of practice.
He has not called Eskil that since the ship.
He has called him by name, has teased him gently, but your majesty belongs to a different version of him.
The version that lived in a closet-sized room and flinched at footsteps and did not have a clinic or friends or a choice.
Above him, and far away, he hears Eskil make a sound.
It is not a word. It is the sound a man makes when he has put his hand on a stove.
"Indrie." The voice has changed completely. Every hard edge gone out of it, low and careful and almost pleading, and Eskil has come around the side of the desk, and Indrie can see his boots at the edge of his vision. "Indrie. Look at me."
He can't. He can't.
He turns on the ball of his foot and goes out of the study with his coat catching on the door frame and his breath coming in short useless pulls that give him nothing, and behind him he hears his name once more and does not stop.
He ran from Eskil once before, in a cabin on a ship, when he thought a raised voice meant a raised hand.
He knows better now. He has known better for weeks.
He runs anyway, because knowing better lives in his head and the running lives somewhere else entirely, somewhere older, somewhere that has never once been wrong about what comes after that tone.
The corridor narrows around him, stone on both sides, and his breath is a thin ragged thing that comes back off the vaulted ceiling.
His hands are shaking. All of him is shaking, the fine clinical tremor of adrenaline flooding a system that learned through years of repetition that the sound of authority comes before pain.
Then he hears the footsteps.
Heavy and fast, a stride twice the length of his own closing the distance in half the steps, boots striking stone with purpose, and the fear goes through him white and cold and total.
Every lesson his body ever learned fires at once.
Run faster. Find a door. Make yourself small. Do not let him catch you in the open.
A hand closes around his arm.
Indrie locks. The grip is careful but firm, fingers wrapped just above his elbow, holding without crushing, and he flinches hard enough that his teeth click together and his whole frame jerks sideways.
Then Eskil pulls him against his chest.
Both arms come around him, one across his shoulders and one at his back, and Indrie is pressed into the broad solid warmth of him and held there, enclosed. He can feel the heat through the tunic. The rise and fall of breathing. A heartbeat against his temple, going too fast.
Indrie freezes.
He stands in Eskil's arms and he cannot breathe.
His lungs have locked with the rest of him.
His hands hang at his sides, fingers splayed, not pushing away and not holding on.
Evening light falls through the high narrow windows in pale slats across the floor.
Somewhere in the keep a door closes and someone's steps fade, and then there is nothing but two people breathing, one steady and one not.
"I'm sorry."
Eskil's voice is low and scraped raw, pulled taut over something it costs him to say, and the words come from directly above Indrie's head, spoken into his hair. "I'm sorry. That was — I shouldn't have —"
He stops. Draws a breath Indrie feels expand against his own chest. Tries again.
"I can't let you run from me again."
Indrie has never heard him say anything in that register.
"Last time I was too proud to follow." His arms tighten a fraction, a reflex, and then hold where they are. "On the ship. I stood in that cabin and let you go and told myself it was the right thing. Giving you space. Instead of admitting I don't know what the fuck I'm doing."
His voice catches, a small sound, barely there. Indrie has spent his life listening for exactly that kind of sound and knowing where to look for what is underneath it.
"It was a mistake I won't make again," Eskil says, muffled against Indrie's hair.
Indrie stands very still. The shaking has not stopped, but it has changed. The rigid frozen quality is going out of him, the locked muscles releasing one at a time. Eskil's arms are warm and steady and they do not tighten further. They do not demand. They hold.
Slowly, so slowly it is almost nothing, Indrie's shoulders drop.
His spine uncurls a fraction. His forehead settles against Eskil's collarbone and he lets it rest there, lets the weight of his head be held by something other than his own neck.
His fingers have unclenched. The breath that comes into him next is deeper than the ones before it, shaking but full.
"I am shit at this." Eskil says it plainly, without self-pity. He has spent his whole life learning to lead armies and hold borders and no one ever taught him this. "Morgan will tell you the same. Ask him. He'll give you a list."
A sound escapes Indrie. Not quite a laugh, not quite a sob, and it catches in his throat and stays there.