Chapter 13 #3
"But I can't —" Eskil pauses. His jaw shifts against the top of Indrie's head. "I can't see you hurt. Do you understand? I can't. It's the one thing I —"
He does not finish. The arms around Indrie say the rest.
Indrie swallows.
"I understand," he says.
His voice is small and hoarse and unsteady, and it is his own. It is not the thing that said yes, your majesty.
Eskil's breath goes out of him in a long slow exhale. He holds on a moment longer, two, three, and then his arms loosen. Not all at once. By degrees, giving room, letting Indrie decide whether to stay or go.
Indrie pulls back. Not far. Just enough to see him.
He dares to look up, and the looking is its own small straightening, because something in him newer than the fear and younger than the flinching already knows what he will find there, and it is not what his body expects.
Eskil's face is open in a way Indrie has never seen it.
The stone is gone. The kingship is gone.
What is left is grey under his eyes and a tightness around his mouth and an expression Indrie recognizes, because he has seen it in his own mirror on the mornings after the bad nights. Harm done, and known, and past undoing.
"Promise me," Eskil says. His voice is steadier now. "Promise me you won't go near the prisoner. I'll send someone to see to his wounds. Properly. A guard with field training, someone who can work under watch. He'll be treated and I'll see to it myself. But not you."
Indrie's eyes burn. The pressure rises behind his sternum with nowhere to go and he blinks against it and nods. The nod is small and unsteady. A promise given for a promise, and he believes both will be kept.
He finds his voice. It takes a moment. It is there underneath the tightness, waiting.
"Thank you," Indrie says.
Eskil looks at him for longer than is comfortable, and there is something in it that neither of them has language for yet, not in Rengaran, not in Kalkoan, not in any tongue Indrie has studied. His hand is still on Indrie's arm. His thumb moves once across the fabric of the coat.
Then he lets go.
He steps back and the space between them opens and the corridor is only stone again, cold and slatted with light, and below them the keep settles into its evening.
Indrie turns and walks back to the clinic.
He does not remember the walk. The streets, the turns, the people he may or may not have passed. He moves through the front room without seeing it, past the shelves of labeled jars and the examination table and the herbs hanging from their iron hooks, into the small back room.
He sits on the edge of his bed.
The shaking has stopped. His hands are still when he holds them out in front of him, and his breathing has evened, and the ringing behind his ears has gone quiet.
What is left is not calm. It is the exhausted stillness that comes after weather, when the air is clean and the ground is soaked and nobody has gone out yet to count what was lost.
He brews tea. Chamomile, for calm. The ritual grounds him, measuring the dried flowers, heating the water, pouring. He wraps both hands around the warm cup and drinks slowly.
He thinks about what he said.
Tell me whether there is anything left of him worth treating, or whether I should simply wait to see him buried.
He said that. He stood in front of a man who has not slept, who has spent a night and a day doing something that leaves a mark on whoever does it, and he threw a drowned man on a ship at him and watched it go in.
He looked at Eskil and saw the king and forgot, or decided to forget, that there was anyone else in the room.
Someone with the world on his shoulders and blood under his nails, who came home off the sea and put himself between Indrie and everything that has happened since.
Who knelt on a deck to make himself smaller.
Who stood in a corridor and apologized and meant it enough that saying it hurt him.
Indrie did not mean to make it hurt. He knows a wound when he opens one, though, and he saw that one land.
He sets the tea down. He changes into his sleep clothes. He lies down and pulls the blanket to his chin and stares at the ceiling.
Both things are true. Both things are Eskil.
The one who held him in the corridor and the one who gave the command.
The tenderness and the authority. Indrie does not know how to hold both at once, how to reconcile the hands that heal with the hands that hurt, but he has known since the first day on that ship that they are the same hands.
He will not go to the cells. Not because he was ordered. Because Eskil asked him, and because someone will go in his place, and the prisoner will be tended, and the vow will be kept even if Indrie is not the one to keep it.
Tomorrow he will apologize. Not for the asking. He will never apologize for the asking, which is the bedrock of him and does not bend. For the rest of it. For the stowaway and the sea and standing in front of a man who was already bleeding and pressing his thumb into it.