Chapter 25
Eskil
Bohdi has been gone for two days. Morgan has been busy running things while Eskil heals. And Eskil is fucking done lying around doing nothing while he rots from boredom.
He has read every document on the table in his chambers.
He has read several of them twice. He has read Morgan's notes on the herring tariffs from the northern fishing village and found them so tediously thorough that he considered reopening his wound just to have something more interesting to focus on.
He has sharpened his short swords, in bed, because Indrie told him to stay in bed and Eskil is not yet stupid enough to disobey a direct medical order from the man who controls his access to pain relief.
He has sharpened them until they could split a hair and then sharpened them some more, and now there is nothing left to sharpen and he is going to lose his mind.
He has not seen Indrie in two days and he is grumpy. These two facts are not unrelated, though he would sooner impale himself on his own longsword than admit the connection out loud.
It is not that Indrie has been avoiding him.
Indrie has been busy. The clinic is overrun.
Morgan mentioned it in passing, with the deliberate casualness that means he is delivering intelligence he knows Eskil wants and has not asked for.
Patients from dawn to dark. Ermin's training.
House calls to patients who cannot make the walk.
Indrie has been doing his job. Being a healer.
Being the person Eskil brought him here to be.
And Eskil is lying in his bed staring at the ceiling being completely useless and thinking about him every waking minute, and it is making him mean.
He gets out of bed on the third day and goes to his study, because if he stays horizontal one more hour he will destroy something.
He is careful about it. He is not an idiot, whatever Bohdi says.
He eases upright in stages, tests the wound, confirms the stitches hold before he puts weight on his feet.
The pain is present and constant, a deep pulling ache that wraps from his ribs to his hip, but it is manageable.
He can stand. He can walk. That is enough.
The study is as he left it. The desk is buried under paperwork. Morgan has been depositing it in increasingly tall stacks, which is either an organizational system or a punishment, and with Morgan it could be either. Eskil sits and begins working through the mess.
The problems with the Jakadi and the proposal from the Wolfe clan have been a pain in his ass, but they have also sidetracked the council from hounding him about the resources wasted on the Kalkoa voyage. He will take the blessing in whatever disguise it chooses to wear.
He is making it a point not to look at the Wolfe clan documents on his desk.
The ones that are essentially a bartering agreement for his younger brother, the boy he raised from an infant, to be given as a consort to a power hungry chieftain who has already been through two wives.
Just the sight of the parchment makes his blood go hot and his jaw go tight.
He works through the rest. Trade reports, supply manifests, patrol schedules, a dispute about fishing rights in the northern bay that has been going on since before Eskil was born and will probably outlast him.
The mechanical labor of governance. It is not stimulating, but it is necessary, and necessity has always been the leash that keeps him at the desk when his body wants to be elsewhere.
There is a knock at the study door. He grunts a welcome and one of the attendants pops her head in.
"The healer is here to see you, your majesty."
Eskil's pulse kicks up. He does not stand, having learned that lesson the first time, when the wound reminded him that sudden vertical movement is not in the current contract, but he straightens in his chair and sets down his quill and says, "Send him in."
The attendant withdraws. Indrie comes through the door.
He is wearing clothes that fit, the Rengaran wool and leather Morgan arranged, dark and well-tailored, cut close to his slight frame in a way that makes Eskil's mouth go dry every time he sees it.
His hair is braided. He is carrying a small cloth bag that he sets on the edge of the desk with a quiet thud, and his mouth is set in a firm unhappy line, and his eyes are blazing with the righteous fury of a physician whose patient has disobeyed orders.
Indrie stands in front of him and looks up at him, all of him radiating displeasure, and gods, Eskil wants him badly enough to break something.
"You're supposed to be resting."
Eskil gestures at the desk. "I was sitting at a desk. Hardly an exertion."
"Leaning over a desk for hours pulling at your stitches is not rest."
"I have been resting for days, Indrie. If I have to lie in that bed one minute longer I will gouge out my own eyes to have something new to complain about."
Indrie rolls his eyes. And then he smiles, in spite of himself, the irritation cracking just enough to let the warmth through, and the smile does something to Eskil's chest that the wound has no claim on.
Indrie takes him by the elbow. Confident. Commanding. No hesitation. He has spent years moving patients larger than himself and he does not entertain resistance. He pulls Eskil out of the chair and steers him through the study doorway and into the bedroom.
Eskil goes willingly, because fighting Indrie on medical orders is pointless, and because the hand on his elbow is warm and sure. Also because being herded by a man half his size who is not remotely intimidated by him any longer is, if Eskil is being honest, deeply and unreasonably attractive.
Indrie deposits him on the couch by the fireplace.
Not the bed. The couch, which is a concession to the fact that Eskil has been in the bed for three days and will gnaw through the bedpost if confined to it any longer.
Eskil sits. Indrie stands over him a moment with his hands on his hips, evaluating whether the king is going to stay where he has been put or whether further measures are required.
Eskil stays. He's never taken orders from anyone in his life and yet if Indrie told him to bark like a fucking dog he'd do his damnedest. He can't even find it in himself to be cross about it, because Indrie wears confidence so seductively that Eskil feels fortunate to be on the receiving end of his attention.
Indrie nods, apparently satisfied, and turns to the hearth. The fire has died to embers, the morning's logs burned through and nobody has rebuilt it, and Indrie crouches and busies himself building it back up.
"I can have someone do that," Eskil says.
"I am perfectly capable of lighting a fire."
Several minutes pass during which it becomes slowly, quietly, and painfully clear that Indrie is not perfectly capable of lighting a fire.
He strikes the flint. Nothing. Strikes it again.
A spark leaps and dies against the kindling without catching.
He rearranges the wood, the logs, the smaller sticks, the bundle of dried tinder, and tries again.
A thin wisp of smoke rises, curls promisingly, and vanishes.
Indrie leans in and blows. Nothing. He blows harder.
The tinder disintegrates into ash and scatters across the hearthstone.
He rebuilds. Repositions. Tries again. The flint throws a spark that lands on the fresh tinder and glows, a tiny orange bead of potential, and Indrie cups both hands around it and breathes on it with the whole of his training bent on the task, careful and precise and unhurried, and the glow brightens and for one hopeful second a small flame licks upward.
And goes out.
Indrie sits back on his heels. Stares at the hearth. His shoulders are set in a rigid line. He has been defeated by an inanimate object and he is not taking it well.
Eskil laughs. Hard enough to feel it in his side, hard enough that the stitches protest and he has to press his hand against the wound, and he does not care, because the sight of Indrie being outmatched by a fireplace is the funniest thing he has witnessed in months.
"I can keep you warm if you're cold," he offers with his lips curling.
The color climbs from Indrie's collar to his hairline in a wave that Eskil tracks with open, shameless appreciation.
Indrie stands, brushing soot from his hands, and does not meet his eyes.
He hesitates, the offer hanging between them in the dim ember-lit room, and Eskil watches him weigh it.
Watches the war play out across his features, the push and pull of wanting and uncertainty that Eskil has come to know as intimately as his own heartbeat.
Then Indrie crosses to the couch and sits beside him.
Close. Not at the far end, not at a careful professional distance.
Their legs press together from knee to hip, Eskil's thigh solid against Indrie's slighter one.
The contact is small and electric and entirely deliberate, and Indrie does not move away from it.
He settles into it. Lets his weight lean, fractionally, toward Eskil rather than away, and the shift is so slight that anybody watching might miss it and Eskil does not miss it.
He has spent weeks cataloguing every millimeter Indrie closes and every millimeter he holds, and he does not miss a single thing.
"I came to check the wound," Indrie says.
His voice is steady. Professional. The healer's voice, measured and calm. But his hands, resting on his own thighs, are not quite still. There is a fine tension in the fingers, the tremor of somebody holding himself in check.