Chapter 17 #2
The shock did not create the wanting. The wanting has been there since before Indrie had a word for it in any language.
But the shock made him brave enough to act on it. And that is what Eskil saw. Not the wanting, but the bravery, and he mistook it for desperation.
And Indrie cannot even be angry about it, because Eskil was right to be careful.
Of course he was right. Indrie knows this.
He is a physician. He knows that consent given under duress is not consent, that a mind clouded by trauma cannot make clear choices, that the correct thing to do when somebody in crisis reaches for you is exactly what Eskil did.
Hold them gently. Name what is happening. Wait.
Eskil did the right thing.
Now, in the light of day, Indrie knows this.
It eases something in him that has been aching, but it doesn't fix it. There's still too much they need to talk about that neither one of them can seem to say at the right time.
He folds the blanket. It is automatic, the habit of a man who has spent years making certain every space he occupies is left cleaner than he found it, because leaving a mess was punished and leaving evidence of his presence was worse.
He folds it into a neat rectangle and puts it on the arm of the couch and smooths the cushions and picks the bloodied shirt up off the floor and folds that too, though it is ruined beyond saving.
He tidies the basin and the cloths and stacks them on the table.
When he is finished the room looks almost as though he was never in it. Almost.
He leaves.
***
The walk from the keep to the clinic takes less than ten minutes and Indrie spends every second of it inside his own head.
The streets are just waking. A cart rattles past him on the main road and a woman hanging washing from an upper window calls a greeting he answers without hearing.
The air is cold enough that his breath mists, and his bare feet, which he forgot to find shoes for, ache against the cobblestones.
Eskil's shirt billows around him in the early breeze and he pulls it tighter across his chest and walks faster.
He rounds the corner onto his street and sees the clinic and stops.
The door has been repaired. Where last night it hung open on one hinge, splintered where the spy forced his way through, there is now a new door, or at least a newly fitted one, the wood lighter than the original, the hinges gleaming with fresh oil.
Somebody has swept the steps. The broken jar he heard shatter in the dark has been cleared away, the shards gone, the floor inside visible through the window and clean.
Indrie stands in the street and looks at his clinic and something complicated and unwieldy moves through him. Somebody did this. Overnight, while he slept on the king's couch.
He pushes through the new door and into the clinic.
It is mostly as he left it. The supply shelf has been righted but the jars that shattered are gone, leaving gaps in the row. The chair that overturned has been set upright. His instruments are where he left them, untouched. The examination table is clear.
He goes into the back room. The cot is rumpled, the blanket thrown aside, exactly as it was when he stumbled out of it at the sound of the spy in the front room. His boots are beside the cot where he kicked them off before bed. His coat hangs on the hook behind the door.
He puts on his boots. Ties the laces. Returns to the front room and opens the windows to let the morning in and begins to take stock of what is damaged and what is not.
Three jars broken. Chamomile, dried yarrow, valerian root. All replaceable. His suturing kit is intact. The antiseptic wash is intact. The steel instruments Morgan brought are all accounted for in their leather roll on the shelf.
All but one.
The scalpel is not in the roll. The gap where it should be is a narrow empty slot in the leather, and Indrie looks at it for a long moment and then closes the roll and puts it back on the shelf and does not think about where it is now, or who is holding it, or whether anybody will think to bring it back.
His satchel, his oldest possession, the one he carried out of Kalkoa, the one he has owned since he was twelve, is on the hook by the door where he always hangs it.
He runs his hands over it. The worn leather is familiar under his fingers, every scratch and stain a map of the years.
He opens it and checks the contents. Bone needle, curved needle, fine thread, a vial of willow bark tincture, two clean bandages, the small folding knife he uses for cutting poultices.
Everything is there. He closes it and hangs it back and takes a breath that goes all the way down.
He can work. The clinic is functional. The patients scheduled for today will come and he will see them and do his job.
He is filling a kettle at the basin when the sound of running footsteps reaches him and then the door bangs open and Dagny is there.
She is breathing hard. She is in yesterday's clothes, her red hair half-loose, and there is a wild look in her eyes that Indrie has seen only once before, on the ship, in the seconds before the sea took him under.
Behind her, moving faster than her composure usually allows, is Ingrid, one hand pressed over her mouth, tears already tracking down her cheeks.
Dagny crosses the clinic in three strides and has him by the shoulders.
"Are you hurt," she says, and it is not a question.
It is a demand. Her eyes rake over him, the bandaged throat, the bruises on his arm where the too-large shirt has slipped, the scrape on his elbow, and her hands are trembling with a fury she is barely containing.
"Are you hurt, Indrie, tell me right now, because I swear on every blade I have ever—"
"I'm all right," Indrie says. "Dagny, I'm all right."
"You are not all right, you have a cut on your throat—"
"It's shallow. It doesn't even need stitching. I'm fine."
Dagny's jaw works. She looks as though she wants to argue, and then as though she wants to hit something, and then she pulls him into a hug tight enough that his ribs creak.
He lets her. He wraps his arms around her and holds on and breathes in leather and weapon oil and Dagny, and the tightness in him eases, fractionally.
Ingrid is beside them then, her hand finding Indrie's arm, and when Dagny releases him Ingrid takes her place, softer, gentler, her arms around his neck and her wet cheek against his temple.
She does not say anything. She holds him, and the lavender in her hair and the warmth of her and the quiet steady sound of her breathing are a kindness so simple and so complete that Indrie has to blink very hard.
Ingrid makes him sit leaves briefly to return with a basket.
She unpacks bread and cheese and a jar of preserves and a small pot of tea wrapped in cloth to keep it warm.
She pours him a cup and puts it in his hands and tells him to drink.
Indrie drinks. The tea is mint and honey and it is the best thing he has ever tasted.
"We heard the horns," Dagny says. "And then we heard what happened. Harrak told us."
"Harrak?"
"He was at the gate. He saw all of it." Dagny's voice goes tight. "He told us the king killed the man himself."
The silence that follows has a quality to it.
Dagny is watching him closely and Indrie can feel the shape of the question she is not asking.
Not are you all right, because she has already asked.
Not what happened, because Harrak has already told her.
The question she is not asking is where did you go afterward, and the answer is written across Indrie in a shirt that hangs to his thighs and smells of somebody else.
Dagny does not ask. Indrie is grateful beyond measure.
He eats. The bread is fresh and still slightly warm and the cheese is sharp and good and the preserves are blackberry, his favorite, and he does not know whether this is coincidence or whether Ingrid noticed.
He eats and the food settles and the tea warms him from the inside, and by the time he has finished the cup and Ingrid has refilled it, the last of the tremor in his hands has gone.
"This is why you can't save everyone," Dagny says. Her voice is tight with anger. Not at him. At the situation, at the man who came through his door, at a world that keeps putting her gentle friend in the path of sharp things. "Some people are not worth the risk."
Indrie shakes his head. "It's not that simple, Dagny. I don't regret wanting to help him."
Dagny opens her mouth to argue, eyes blazing, and Ingrid catches her gaze and holds it, and something passes between them, the silent calibrated communication of two people who have loved each other long enough to speak without words.
Dagny subsides. Her mouth presses into a thin line and her arm tightens around Indrie's shoulders instead, and the force of it says everything her voice does not.
Morgan arrives later in the morning.
He comes through the new door wearing quiet concern under the veneer of his usual composure.
He takes in the clinic, the repaired door, the missing jars, the scrubbed floor, and then his gaze finds Indrie and moves over him with the careful directness Morgan employs when he is worried and does not want to overwhelm.
He sits with them. Cross-legged on the clinic floor, because all the chairs are occupied.
He does not fuss. He does not exclaim or grasp Indrie's arms or demand details.
He asks after him with a gentleness so controlled it must be costing him something, and Indrie holds his hand and squeezes and watches the tension in Morgan's jaw ease.
Morgan gets a smile out of him. A small unexpected thing, drawn out by a dry observation about the state of the clinic's defenses.