1. Chapter 1 #4
Indrie is on his feet and the man is right there, close enough that Indrie has to tilt his head back to see his face. Close enough that Indrie can see the exact color of his eyes. Blue, he decides. Pale blue, the color of river water in winter light.
Those eyes don’t meet his. They're lower, fixed on Indrie's cheek. On the bruise.
Indrie knows what it looks like without seeing it.
He felt it darken overnight, the dull ache deepening as the blood settled beneath the skin.
By now it will be a vivid purple, spreading from the crest of his cheekbone down to his jaw.
Armond's hand had connected with his face, a sharp, backhanded strike that had snapped Indrie's head to the side and sent him stumbling into the doorframe.
Because he'd been slow. Because he'd been sleeping and hadn't heard the first summons and by the time he arrived, the king was already furious.
The man looks at the bruise for a long moment. Then his hand moves.
It's slow. Deliberate. Indrie can see it coming, the large hand rising toward his face, and some animal part of him wants to flinch, to pull back, to brace for impact.
But the hand doesn't strike him, which is a first. The man's thumb hooks into the collar of Indrie's shirt, thin and worn and stretched loose at the neck from years of rough washing, and pulls the fabric aside.
His fingers brush across Indrie's collarbone and Indrie’s breath catches.
The touch is incidental, a byproduct of moving fabric, not intentional contact, but it doesn't matter.
The rough pad of a calloused finger drags across the ridge of Indrie's collarbone and heat floods up his neck.
His skin prickles. Something low in his belly tightens in a way he has never, never felt before, not from a touch so brief and unintentional, and he feels the flush rising before he can stop it.
Spreading across the bridge of his nose, staining his cheeks, probably visible even beneath the purple of the bruise.
The man's eyes follow the trail of mottled purple that the shifted fabric reveals.
The bruise winds from Indrie's shoulder down toward his ribs, three days old and deep, the kind that hurts when he breathes, when he lifts, when he does anything at all. It disappears beneath the remaining fabric of his shirt, continuing down across his chest and side. It happened when Erlan pushed him down the stairs, because he’d been exhausted and taking too longer and Erlan has no patience for him.
The man looks up. Meets his gaze.
Indrie stares back. His lips are parted.
His face is burning. He is acutely, painfully aware of the rough fingertips still resting against his collarbone, warm and calloused and there, a point of contact that his entire body seems to be organizing itself around.
He should step back. He should look down.
He should be terrified, he is terrified, but beneath the terror is something else.
Something he has no name for, no precedent for, no framework to understand.
A pull, low and insistent, deep enough to feel in his bones.
The man's eyes hold his. They're unreadable still, that same intent, searching quality, but there's something at the edges now. A slight narrowing. A tension in his jaw that might be anger, but isn't directed at Indrie. It's directed at the purple beneath his fingertips.
Then the man releases his collar. The fabric settles back into place, covering the bruise, breaking the contact. Indrie can still feel the ghost of those fingers against his skin, an afterimage of warmth.
The man turns his attention to Erlan.
He speaks. A single sentence, low, even, unhurried. His voice is deeper than Indrie expected, carrying the same rolling cadence as the red-haired warrior's language but with something else beneath it. Authority. The absolute, bone-deep certainty of never having had to repeat himself.
Erlan goes white. Not pale. White. The color drains from his face so completely and so rapidly that for a moment Indrie thinks the man might collapse.
His mouth opens, closes, opens again. A stammered response emerges, halting and high and bearing no resemblance to the smooth condescension he'd used moments ago.
His hands rise in a gesture Indrie recognizes: placation. Surrender.
The blond man doesn't wait for the response to finish. He turns back to Indrie, and the weight of his attention settles against Indrie's chest. He gives Indrie a nod, short and deliberate and somehow reassuring in its simplicity. It's all right. Come with me.
Then a hand lands on Indrie's shoulder. Warm. Heavy. Impossibly careful for its size. The man turns and guides him forward, out of the doorway, past Erlan's ashen face, and into the corridor beyond.
Indrie goes.
He goes because there is nothing else to do. Because his feet are moving and the hand on his shoulder is steady and Erlan is behind him and whoever this man is, he's taking Indrie away from Erlan, and that alone is enough.
He goes because some part of him, small and quiet and buried deep beneath five years of learned fear, believes whatever he’s being led to cannot be worse than what he’s leaving.