Chapter 30 #2
The room is warm. The flames throw moving shadows across the stone walls and catch the gold in the tapestries and make the room feel close and sheltered, like the inside of a lantern.
Eskil is on the couch with documents spread across the low table, because he has no concept of rest despite the healing wound stitched into his side.
He is leaning forward with his elbows on his knees and his brow furrowed and his hair is loose, unbraided, falling around his face in waves of pale gold, and he looks up when Indrie enters and something in his expression eases.
It is subtle. The furrow smooths by a degree.
The set of his shoulders drops by an inch.
His mouth, which had been pressed into a hard line, softens at its corners.
If Indrie were not looking for it, he would miss it.
He is always looking for it.
"Have you eaten?" Indrie asks, pulling off his coat and draping it over the back of the nearest chair.
Eskil gestures vaguely at the table, where a plate of bread and dried meat sits untouched beside a cup of water. Indrie gives the plate a look, gives the king a look, and crosses to the couch.
"That is not eating. That is arranging food near your person."
Eskil huffs a sound that is not quite a laugh. "I was going to get to it."
"When? Tomorrow?"
Eskil catches his wrist as Indrie reaches for the plate and pulls him down onto the couch beside him.
Indrie goes, not gracefully, because he is tugged off balance by a man who forgets his own strength, and ends up half in Eskil's lap with his legs tangled awkwardly beneath him and his hand braced against the king's chest.
"Careful," Indrie says sharply, righting himself and immediately looking at Eskil's side. "Your stitches—"
"Are fine."
"They are fine because I put them there and I would like them to remain fine.
" He settles himself properly on the couch, close enough that their shoulders touch, and reaches for the plate.
He puts a piece of bread in Eskil's hand with the firm, no-nonsense manner he uses on patients who claim they are not hungry. "Eat."
Eskil eats. He tears the bread with one hand and chews without enthusiasm, his eyes still on the documents, but he eats.
Indrie takes a piece of dried meat for himself and they sit in the warm silence and Indrie lets his gaze drift over the spread of papers.
Maps, mostly. The southern passes marked in charcoal.
Routes and timelines and tiny notations in Morgan's careful hand.
"Let me see the wound," Indrie says, when Eskil has finished the bread.
Eskil lifts his shirt without argument. This, at least, has become routine.
The twice-daily checking that Indrie insists upon and Eskil tolerates with the long-suffering patience of a man who has realized that arguing with his healer is a war he cannot win.
The stitching is neat and clean beneath Indrie's fingertips.
The edges of the wound are pink but not angry, the swelling receding, the skin warm but not hot.
Healing well. He presses gently along the margin and Eskil's stomach muscles tighten under his touch but he does not flinch.
"Better," Indrie says. "Another week, perhaps, before the stitches come out. If you stop pulling at them."
"I'm not pulling at them."
Indrie smooths the shirt back down and pats Eskil's knee once, primly, the way one might pat a large, uncooperative dog. "If you do it again, I will take the stitches out with my teeth."
Eskil's eyes glint. "Is that a promise?"
"It is a threat."
"Mm." His hand finds Indrie's knee and settles there, warm and heavy. "Threats from you are difficult to take seriously when you blush while making them."
Indrie is, in fact, blushing. He ignores this with dignity.
They talk about the departure. Eskil explains the plan, the pieces Indrie already knows and several he does not.
Indrie listens. He can see the tension in Eskil's jaw as he speaks.
The muscles bunching and releasing, the way his hand tightens on Indrie's knee at certain points and loosens at others, the careful, controlled cadence of a man who is saying necessary things and swallowing everything else.
The words Eskil is not saying are louder than the ones he is.
They fill the gaps between his sentences like water filling the spaces between stones.
"Bohdi will keep Morgan safe," Indrie says.
Eskil looks at him. His eyes are very blue in the firelight. "I know."
"You don't sound like you know."
"I know it in here." Eskil taps his temple. "The rest of me has not caught up yet."
"The rest of you will catch up when Morgan comes home."
Eskil's jaw works. He nods once, tightly, the nod of a man accepting a comfort he does not feel he has earned, and then he turns back to the documents.
They settle into quiet.
Eskil reads reports. Indrie reads one of the language books Morgan brought him, the one with Rengaran grammar and verb conjugations that still twist his tongue in knots.
He has been working through the subjunctive tense for three days and is no closer to understanding why Rengaran requires four separate verb forms for things that have not happened yet.
In Kalkoan, the future is the future. In Rengaran, the future is the future, the future that might happen, the future that should happen, and the future that would happen if circumstances were different.
It is maddening. It is also, Indrie suspects, revealing of the people who built the language.
A people who plan for every contingency, who think in possibilities, who are never fully present because part of them is always scanning the horizon for what comes next.
He is puzzling over a convoluted example sentence, when he realizes their shoulders are touching.
They have been touching for some time, actually.
The gradual settling that happens when two people sit close together on a couch for long enough.
The unconscious lean, the slow collapse of the inch of space between them.
Indrie's shoulder is pressed against the curve of Eskil's arm.
His knee has drifted until it rests against Eskil's thigh.
The warmth of Eskil's body seeps through the wool of their clothes and Indrie can feel the steady rise and fall of his breathing.
It is domestic. It is gentle. It is, Indrie realizes with a small inward tremor, the simplest thing in his life.
The most complicated man he has ever known, the most terrifying and extraordinary and handsome man he has ever known, and sitting beside him in silence is the simplest thing in the world.