Chapter 31 #2
Eskil goes to Bohdi next. He has his axe strapped to his back, braided red hair bright against the dark leather of his riding cloak.
He looks at his second-in-command, his oldest friend, the man who has fought beside him for fifteen years and has never once failed him, and says nothing for a long moment.
Bohdi finds his voice first, all humor gone from his face.
"I will bring him back to you," he promises.
Eskil touches his forehead to Bohdi's. Their heads press together for a beat, and Bohdi's hand comes up and grips the back of Eskil's neck, hard and brief.
"Bring both of you back," Eskil says. "I did not give you a choice about the first part and I am not giving you one about the second."
"As you say, my king."
Bohdi mounts his horse with ease. Then he pulls back, settles his reins, and kicks his horse into motion. Morgan falls in behind and they move through the courtyard and toward the gates.
Eskil watches them go.
Morgan does not look back. Bohdi does, once, a glance over his shoulder, brief and sharp, and then faces forward.
The gates open. The column passes through.
The sound of hoofbeats on stone gives way to the softer thud of hoofbeats on earth, diminishing, diminishing, and then the gates close and the courtyard is empty and the silence that fills it is immense.
Eskil stands in it.
The keep has never been quiet. Not truly.
There have always been people in it, servants and guards and counselors and the constant background hum of governance, but it has never felt empty the way it does now, with Morgan's absence pressing against the walls like something physical.
The absence has weight. It has edges. It occupies the space Morgan left the way water occupies a vessel, filling every corner, and Eskil is drowning in it already and his brother has been gone for less than a minute.
He is aware, distantly, that people are watching him.
The guards on the steps. The attendants in the doorway.
They are waiting for the king to turn around and go inside and do whatever kings do after they send people away.
They are waiting for him to be steady, because that is what he does. That is what he is for.
He stares at the closed gates and cannot make his feet move.
Fucking useless, he thinks, with the vicious self-directed contempt that lives in the cavity where softer men keep their grace. You can kill a man with your bare hands but you cannot watch your brother ride away without falling apart like a—
A hand slides into his.
Small. Warm. The fingers threading between his own with a sureness that has no hesitation in it, no deference, no may I or if you please. Just a hand, finding his, and holding on.
Eskil looks down.
Indrie is standing a step behind him, close enough that his shoulder nearly touches Eskil's arm.
He is looking up at Eskil with those dark eyes, the ones that see everything, that see through the armor and the anger and the carefully maintained edifice of a man who cannot afford to crack, and his expression is not pitying.
It is not worried. It is not the careful, measured concern of someone handling a dangerous animal.
It is simply present.
He is simply here. Eskil registers, very clearly and without deserving to, that he has now been on both ends of this.
In the hallway outside the south gate, Indrie threw himself into Eskil's arms and clung to him and held on.
On the couch in his chambers, Indrie pressed his face into Eskil's chest and let himself be gathered up and anchored.
In the clinic, on the ship, in every room they have shared, Indrie has come to him, reaching for him, reaching into him, and Eskil has held on because that was what was needed, because he was the strong one, because he was the wall and Indrie was the man who needed one.
Now Eskil is the one who needs the wall. And Indrie is standing beside him with a hand in his and he is not asking permission and he is not offering comfort in words and he is not trying to fix anything. He is just here. He is just holding on.
And Eskil does not know how to do this.
He has never done this. He has never been the one held instead of the one holding. He has never needed to be, because needing was a luxury he traded for a crown at nineteen and has not had the currency for since. He carries. He fights. He kills. He sends. He does not lean.
But Indrie's hand is in his, small and steady and impossibly warm, and the pressure of those fingers threaded through his own is the only thing keeping him upright on these steps, and Eskil thinks maybe it is time to learn.
He thinks maybe it has been time for a long while and he has been too fucking stubborn to see it.
He looks down at Indrie. At the man who walked out of a closet-sized room in a dying kingdom and across an ocean and into Eskil's city and into Eskil's bed and into the place behind Eskil's ribs that he thought was sealed shut and has found, to his fury and his wonder, is not.
Has never been. Was waiting, this whole time, for somebody small and brave and impossibly kind to walk in and sit down and refuse to leave.
Indrie squeezes his hand. "It's okay. I've got you."
Eskil holds on. He holds the hand of a man who has never held a weapon and would rather die than harm another living thing, and the hand is enough.
It is more than enough. It is an anchor and a hearth and a promise, and Eskil holds it the way he has held everything that matters.
Too tightly, with too much force, with the desperate grip of a man who has lost too many things to hold anything gently.
But Indrie does not pull away. He holds on right back, with the quiet, immovable certainty of someone who has decided where he belongs and will not be moved from it.
The courtyard is empty. The gates are closed.
The dawn light is strengthening, burning off the frost, turning the stone from grey to gold.
Somewhere below the keep the city is waking.
The clatter of the market opening, the smell of bread from the baker's ovens, the distant sound of the harbor bells.
Life continuing. As it does. As it always does, indifferent to the grief and terror of kings.
He thinks, standing there with the cold coming up through his boots, about a small red fruit.
He has been circling it for days and has not let himself land on it. He knows what the Cara is now. He read the entry in Morgan's library with Indrie white-faced beside him and he has known ever since that somewhere in the middle of an ocean he consummated a marriage and did not notice.
And Indrie has never once mentioned it.
That is the part that will not leave him alone.
Not the fruit. Not the rite. The fact that this man has been carrying the whole weight of it for two months, in silence, in a language he was still learning, and has never asked Eskil for a single thing on account of it.
Not acknowledgment. Not a ceremony. Not so much as an explanation.
He has slept in Eskil's bed and folded the blankets in the morning and gone to his clinic and said nothing, because asking would be presuming, and presuming would be the worst thing he could imagine doing.
He is never going to raise it. Eskil understands that with total clarity. Indrie will go to his grave with it folded up small and put away somewhere, because that is what he does with everything he wants and does not believe he is permitted to have.
Which means it has to be Eskil.
Eskil, who has never said a useful thing at the correct moment.
Eskil, who told a man on the deck of a ship that he would never belong to him and watched the light go out of his face and did not understand why for six weeks.
He is going to have to open his mouth and put words in the right order and get them out, on purpose, out loud, and he is going to have to do it soon, because the man beside him has been married to him since a cabin at sea and does not know whether he is allowed to say so.
Not today. Today his brother is on a road going south and there is nothing left in Eskil to spend on anything else.
But soon.
He looks at Indrie one more time. The dark eyes look back at him without flinching.
He turns his hand in Indrie's to interlace their fingers together. His hand, which has held swords and throats and the weight of a dying kingdom, wrapped around the hand that has saved his life twice and asked for nothing in return.
And he holds on.