18. Chapter 18
Eskil
Eskil has a weakness and it is apparently the slow blossoming of a nervous, terrified young man into a physician who knows exactly what he is worth.
He is overseeing drills in the training yard, or attempting to, because his mind has been a fractured useless thing all day, when one of his men shows up at the fence with a bandaged arm and a sheepish expression that Eskil has seen on soldiers dressed down by their commanding officers but never by somebody who weighs as much as a wet coat.
The man reports, in the resigned tone of a soldier delivering news he expects to be doubted, that he has been given strict orders by the healer not to aggravate the damage.
"He said if I so much as lift a shield before the stitches are out, he'll strap me bodily to his examination table and I won't see daylight for a week."
For a long moment Eskil does not register who the man is talking about.
The idea of Indrie, who comes to his chin, who is gentle and soft-spoken, giving a battle hardened soldier a tongue lashing takes a moment to land.
He pictures it. The dark eyes blazing. The jaw set.
The slim hands on narrow hips, or more likely crossed over his chest. The voice that is usually quiet and careful and apologetic going firm and brooking no argument, because when it comes to the wellbeing of his patients Indrie does not hedge and does not bend and does not give a single solitary damn whether the man in front of him carries a sword or a crown.
That is going to be a problem, is it not?
He dismisses the soldier and tries not to grin and fails entirely.
Bohdi joins him at the fence and they fall into the rhythm of review.
Border patrols, supply lines, the aftermath of the escape.
The northern lumber shipments are delayed, weather and road conditions rather than enemy action, but it needs watching.
Two watchtowers on the eastern road need repair before winter, and the passes will close in six weeks if the frost comes early.
Eskil listens and nods and files the information.
He has been thinking about the kiss since approximately three seconds after it happened and has not stopped.
He thought about it while sitting on the floor of his quarters holding Indrie's hand in the dark.
He thought about it while watching the moonlight move across the stone.
He thought about it when he eased his fingers free at dawn and stood and looked down at Indrie sleeping and his hand curled around the ghost of Eskil's grip.
He thought about it through his morning briefing and through the council session and through a lunch he did not eat and through the drills he is not actually overseeing.
He is a thirty-three-year-old king who has fought wars and killed men and held a crown together with his bare hands for fourteen years and he has been reduced to a lovesick adolescent by three seconds.
Fuck.
Bohdi is still talking. Something about the Wolfe correspondence. Eskil makes himself focus.
"The tone has shifted," Bohdi says, leaning on the fence.
"What started as an invitation has acquired an edge.
Less we would be honored and more we expect.
The phrasing in the latest letter is pointed.
They lay out the strategic advantages of the match as though we have not already done the math ourselves. "
"They're getting impatient."
"They're getting aggressively impatient."
Eskil files that too. The information slots into a pattern he does not like.
The Jakadi feeding them a fiction, the attack on Askarte, the spy in Valen, and now the Wolfe pressing harder for a marriage that may not be what it appears to be.
The pieces are not connected yet, or they are and he cannot see the shape of it, and the not-seeing makes his skin itch.
"Watch their communications," he tells Bohdi. "Everything that comes in. I want to see it before the council does."
Bohdi nods. Then he tilts his head and studies Eskil with the leisurely assessment of a man who has known him since they were boys and has no use whatsoever for the mask Eskil wears for everybody else.
"You look like shit," Bohdi says conversationally. "When did you last sleep?"
"I'm fine."
"So not recently, then." Bohdi picks at something on the axe haft. "Heard you spent the night in your quarters with the door shut and word out not to disturb you."
"I was dealing with Indrie."
"Was that what that was called?"
"Bohdi."
"Because the way you deal with Indrie is historically—"
"Bohdi."
His second holds up both hands, palms out, the picture of innocence, and the grin splitting his face is the one that has been getting him punched since they were sixteen. "As you say, my king. Dealing with Indrie. Very official."
He stands, swings the axe onto his back, and claps Eskil on the shoulder hard enough to rattle his teeth.
"Go and find your healer," Bohdi says. "You're useless out here."
He saunters off before Eskil can answer, which is fortunate, because the answer forming in Eskil's mouth would have scandalized every soldier within earshot.
***
He goes to the library to find Morgan.
He has questions about the Wolfe correspondence that want his brother's diplomatic eye, and Morgan spends his evenings in the library the way other men spend theirs in a tavern.
This is the reason and the only reason and Eskil is not checking whether Morgan has company tonight, because that would imply he is keeping track of Indrie's whereabouts, which he is not, because he is a king and not a stalker and there is a difference, even if the difference is getting thinner by the day.
He reaches the library door, which is ajar, and stops.
Morgan is on the floor, as is his custom, surrounded by the usual chaos of open books arranged in a semicircle around him. A charcoal pencil behind his ear. Ink on his fingers. He is talking, rapid and animated, gesturing at something on the page in front of him.
And sitting next to him, in the middle of the chaos, is Indrie.
He is in clothes that fit him. Rengaran in cut, dark wool and soft leather, tailored close to his slight frame. Not Eskil's for once. His own.
And his hair is braided.
Eskil's hand tightens on the doorframe.
It is such a small thing. Such a nothing of a detail.
Except that Kalkoans do not braid their hair and Rengarans do, and Indrie is one of his people now and looks like one of his people now, and Eskil was not prepared for what that would do to him.
The dark strands are pulled back from his face in a simple plait and it exposes the line of his jaw and the curve of his ear and the shallow cut at his throat, still healing, a thin red line above the collar of his shirt.
Eskil looks at the cut and his jaw tightens and he makes himself look somewhere else.
Indrie is sitting back on his heels with a book open in his lap, leaning toward Morgan to point at something on the page.
He is engaged and animated in a way Eskil has rarely seen.
His face open, his posture loose, none of the careful containment he wears around Eskil.
He is saying something in Kalkoan that Eskil cannot follow and Morgan is arguing back in the same language, and the combined noise of them fills the library with a warmth it has not had in years.
Eskil watches from the doorway and does not announce himself. He has no excuse for this. He is a grown man standing in a doorway staring at somebody sitting on a library floor, which is precisely the behavior Bohdi was needling him about ten minutes ago, and he does not care.
Indrie has color in his face. Not the flush of embarrassment or the grey-white of shock but healthy color, warm and alive, and his dark eyes are bright with the light they get when he is talking about something he knows well.
His hands move when he speaks, not the broad gestures of a man compensating for a language barrier but the specific precise motions of somebody describing something technical.
He is pointing at an illustration and explaining something about a root system and Morgan is nodding and making notes, and the two of them look as though they have been friends for years instead of weeks.
"Oh," Morgan says, looking up in surprise. "Were you looking for me?"
Indrie has gone very still.
Not the dangerous stillness of a man bracing for a blow, Eskil has learned to tell the difference, but the charged stillness of somebody who has just become acutely aware of another person in the room.
His hands have frozen on the book in his lap.
His shoulders have drawn up fractionally.
He is looking at the page in front of him with a focus that would be convincing if the page were not upside down.
Eskil sees the upside-down page and has to look at the ceiling for a moment.
"I can come back," he says, directing it at Morgan, who is watching the exchange with the sharpened interest of a man who has just been handed a puzzle. "I didn't know you had company."
"It's—" Indrie starts, and his voice comes out higher than usual. He clears his throat. Tries again. "It's fine. You don't have to leave."
He still has not looked up from the upside-down book.
The flush is beginning. Eskil can see it starting at the base of Indrie's throat above his collar, a pink warmth creeping upward with the inevitability of a tide. It reaches his jaw. Climbs his cheeks. Pinks the tips of his ears where the braid exposes them.
Eskil should leave. He has been given a polite invitation to stay by a man who is plainly mortified by his presence, and the decent thing, the kind thing, is to nod and say he will come back tomorrow and let Indrie have his evening in peace.