1. Chapter 1 #3
The face is all angles. A jaw cut sharp enough to throw shadows.
Cheekbones high and prominent beneath skin that's been weathered by sun and salt and wind. A scar runs across his left eye, not fresh, long healed into a pale silver line that bisects his brow and skips over the lid and continues down onto his cheek. It should make him less handsome, more savage, but it doesn’t.
His arms are bare from the shoulders down, emerging from a sleeveless tunic of dark, well-worn leather, and they are, gods, corded with muscle in a way that Indrie has no frame of reference for.
The men he's known are soft nobles or starving servants.
This man could pick up the settee Indrie just retrieved his satchel from and break it over his knee without effort.
At his hip, a blade. Long and broad, its pommel wrapped in leather, its sheath scarred from use. It probably weighs more than Indrie.
And he is staring. Directly at Indrie. His pale eyes, blue or gray, Indrie can't tell from here, fixed on him with an expression that Indrie cannot read. Not angry. Not amused. Not hungry in the way that some men look at him, the way that makes his skin crawl. Just... intent. Studying him like he’s a puzzle he’s stumbled in upon.
Indrie's fingers tighten on his satchel until the leather creaks.
His heart is in his throat, beating so hard it chokes him, but his feet are rooted to the stone.
He doesn't run. He doesn't look away. He meets the man's gaze because something in him, something braver or stupider than the rest of him, refuses to look down.
They stare at each other across the length of the king's empty chambers.
Then a second figure appears behind the blond man's shoulder, and the breath Indrie didn't know he was holding leaves him in a rush, because this one he knows.
Lord Erlan.
The advisor is shorter than the Northman by nearly a head, narrow-shouldered and sharp-featured, with graying hair swept back from a high forehead.
He's clearly been roused from sleep, his usual formal robes replaced by a hastily belted tunic, but his face carries the same expression it always does when he looks at Indrie. Mild contempt. Impatience. The look of someone who is annoyed he’s taking up space, but doesn’t want to admit it’s his fault Indrie is even here.
Erlan speaks to the Northman in the same rolling language Indrie heard from the red-haired warrior.
His pronunciation is accented, stiffer than the way the warriors themselves speak, but clearly decent enough to get the point across.
He gestures into the room as he talks, toward the bed, toward the medicine on the table, and then his hand extends, one long finger pointing directly at Indrie.
Indrie goes rigid.
Erlan's eyes find his across the room. The mild contempt deepens into irritation, the familiar look that means Indrie is being slow, is being difficult, is wasting a lord's valuable time with his existence.
"Come here, boy."
The command is flat. Bored, even. Summoning Indrie towards the armed barbarian in the room is apparently unremarkable.
Indrie swallows and the sound of it is loud in his own ears. His hands clutch the satchel against his chest, useless, pathetic, a healer's bag against a blade the length of his leg, and his feet do not move.
He should move. When a lord tells you to come, you come.
That's been beaten into him often enough that his body should respond without his mind's permission.
But there's something about the blond man's presence in the doorway, the sheer size of him, the weight of his attention, the blade at his hip, that has locked every joint in Indrie's body into place.
Erlan's lips thin. The impatience sharpens into anger, a quick, hot thing that Indrie recognizes before it fully forms.
"Did you hear me?" Erlan strides into the room. Three steps, four, and then his hand closes around Indrie's upper arm, the same spot it always finds, the spot that's been bruised so many times the nerves are dulled, and wrenches. "When I tell you to come..."
He doesn't finish the sentence. He doesn't need to.
Indrie stumbles forward, dragged by the arm, his boots catching on the rug's edge.
Erlan hauls him across the room with the ease of long practice, and when they reach the doorway he says something else to the Northman, something quick and dismissive, with a gesture that Indrie doesn't need translated, and then shoves him forward.
Indrie pitches.
His knees hit the stone first, a sharp crack of bone against floor that sends pain lancing up through his thighs.
His satchel presses hard into his stomach where he's curled around it.
He's at the man's feet. The worn leather of his boots fills Indrie's vision, salt-stained and stained, sturdy and enormous, and he cannot look up.
He clenches his hands around his satchel. His knees ache against the cold stone. His arm throbs where Erlan grabbed him. And he stays where he is, head bowed, breathing fast and shallow, because that's what you do. When you're on the ground before a man with a sword, you stay on the ground.
The silence stretches. Indrie can feel the man's presence above him, the heat of a body, the faint smell of leather and sea air and steel. He waits for whatever comes. The strike, the kick, the command to look up so whatever blow falls can land on his face. He waits.
A hand closes around his arm.
Indrie tenses, bracing, but the grip doesn't tighten.
It doesn't twist. The fingers wrap around his upper arm, encompassing it almost entirely, gods, the size of this man's hands, and the pressure is firm but so careful it makes something in Indrie's chest stutter.
The hand lifts, and Indrie rises with it, pulled to his feet with no effort.
He stands. The man's hand stays a moment, stabilizing, the same way the red-haired one had done, and then releases.