Chapter 18
The knock is quiet. Tentative. Hoping the room is empty.
Eskil knows who it is before the door opens.
Gunnar had told him twenty minutes ago, with the diplomatic subtlety of a battering ram, that the healer would be bringing his evening meal and that Eskil should be kind to the boy or so help me I will put things in your stew that you do not want to know about.
Eskil had told Gunnar to mind his cooking and leave the diplomacy to people who didn't threaten their king with food poisoning.
Gunnar had given him the look, the one that says I have known you since you were a child and I am not impressed, and left.
So Eskil is prepared. He's been sitting at his desk for twenty minutes, going over charts he's already memorized, waiting, and he's used that time to have a very stern conversation with himself about how this interaction is going to go.
He is going to be calm. He is going to be clear.
He is going to speak slowly and use simple words and he is not going to lose his temper, because losing his temper is what got him here, standing in his cabin this morning watching Indrie flinch away from him with his eyes shut and his arms crossed over his chest, bracing for a blow that Eskil would cut off his own hand before delivering.
The memory makes his stomach turn. He pushes it down and says, "Come in."
The door opens and Indrie enters with a plate of food and his back straight and his eyes on the ground.
He's wearing Eskil's clothes.
Eskil knew this. He'd left them for the boy deliberately, having nothing else dry to offer.
He knew, in the abstract, that Indrie would be walking around the ship in his shirt and his trousers, and he'd thought he'd prepared himself for the sight of it.
He had not prepared himself at all. The shirt is enormous on Indrie's slight frame, the collar slipping off one shoulder to expose the pale curve of his collarbone, the sleeves rolled to his elbows, the hem hanging past his hips.
The trousers are cinched with rope at his waist and rolled at the ankles and the overall effect is that Indrie looks claimed, marked, wrapped in Eskil from throat to ankle, and the primal, possessive part of Eskil's brain that sees a beautiful man in his clothes and thinks mine is very loud right now and needs to shut the fuck up.
Eskil watches him cross the room. Indrie moves carefully, each step measured, his body held with rigid control, managing his fear through physical discipline.
He doesn't look up. His eyes stay fixed on the floor, tracking his path from the door to the desk, and his face is a mask of composure that would be convincing if Eskil couldn't see the white of his knuckles around the plate.
Indrie sets the plate on the desk. His hands are steady, trained for precision under pressure, but the steadiness is costing him. Eskil can see the effort in the set of his shoulders, in the careful way he places the plate without letting the wood clatter.
He turns to leave immediately.
The motion is quick, practiced, the smooth pivot of years spent delivering things to a king and disappearing before the king decides he wants something else. Head down, body already angled toward the door, three steps from escape.
Eskil turns in his seat and catches his wrist.
The grip is loose. Deliberately, consciously loose, his fingers wrapped around the narrow wrist with just enough pressure to communicate stop and not nearly enough to restrain.
Indrie could break free with a shift of his weight.
Eskil has made sure of that, has calibrated the hold with the same care he'd use handling something that could shatter.
Indrie doesn't break free.
Whether by choice or obligation, Eskil doesn't know, and the not knowing is a specific kind of torture he is learning to live with.
But Indrie stiffens, a full-body tension that Eskil feels through the contact of his fingers on skin, and turns back to Eskil, awaiting reprimand.
His eyes come up just far enough to reach Eskil's chin and stop there.
Eskil pulls him back a step. The intention is straightforward, to close the distance between them, to have this conversation face to face rather than with Indrie halfway to the door and poised for flight. That's the intention.
What happens is that Eskil is sitting and Indrie is standing and one step back at this angle brings Indrie to the space between Eskil's parted knees, and suddenly the younger man is there, standing in the bracket of Eskil's thighs with barely a hand's width between his hip and Eskil's knee.
Indrie's eyes widen. But he doesn't pull away. He stands there, with Eskil sitting in front of him, and crosses his other arm self-consciously across his chest.
Then his eyes find Eskil's, and the fear in them is layered with something else, a desperate need to understand. He's searching Eskil's face for an answer to a question he can't bring himself to ask.
Eskil will take it.
"I am not angry with you," he says, choosing his words carefully, speaking as clearly as he can. Slowly. Simply. Each word a stone laid in a path he needs Indrie to be able to follow. "You have done nothing wrong."
Indrie's expression remains wary. But something shifts, a fractional easing, his shoulders dropping a quarter of an inch, his crossed arm loosening against his chest. He doesn't step back, but the urge to visibly drains from him.
Eskil should let go of his wrist. He's made his point. He's stopped the retreat. The responsible thing to do is release him and create space, not sit here with Indrie between his legs and his pulse fluttering against Eskil's thumb.
But he's half afraid if he lets go his hand will find Indrie's hip instead, and down that path madness lies. At least the wrist is safe.
He keeps his grip where it is.
"I am..." Eskil pauses. The next words are there, formed and ready, but they require something from him that doesn't come naturally.
Honesty about his own failings is not a skill he's cultivated.
Kings project certainty, decisiveness, unshakeable confidence.
Kings don't make mistakes and wouldn't admit to them if they did.
But Indrie is standing in front of him with fear in his eyes that Eskil put there, and the cost of maintaining his pride is measured in the younger man's suffering, and the numbers don't balance.
He purposely chooses to flay himself open instead of causing Indrie another moment of distress.
"I am easily angered," he says. "Easily frustrated. Quick to react and," he meets Indrie's eyes, makes sure the younger man sees his intent, sees that this is not an excuse but an admission, "slow to apologize."
Indrie doesn't understand all of it. Maybe. Eskil can see him parsing, the slight furrow between his brows as he works through the sentence, matching sounds to meanings. But he understands enough, because something changes in his face, the wariness rearranging, making room for something else.
The sweetest smile Eskil has ever seen.
It's tentative. Fragile. The kind of smile that doesn't know if it's allowed and is bracing for the possibility that it isn't. It starts at the corners of Indrie's mouth and spreads slowly, uncertainly, and it transforms his face entirely.
The fear is still there, underneath, visible in the slight tremor at the edge of his lips.
But the smile is real. It's his. Not performed, not practiced, not the careful pleasantness of a slave who has learned to reflect whatever expression his master wants to see.
This is Indrie's own smile, given freely, directed at Eskil, and it hits him in the sternum with the force of a gods-damned arrow.
Eskil has to physically remind himself to behave.
"You don't have to apologize to me, your majesty," Indrie says, and the smile playing at the edges of the sentence says he finds the concept ludicrous. A king, apologizing to a healer.
His smile dips then, into something ashamed. The warmth recedes and what's left is smaller, quieter, turned inward.
"If I have angered you, then I should be the one to beg your forgiveness, not..." He falters. His eyes drop from Eskil's. "Hide from you."
Eskil shakes his head. "You did not anger me, Indrie. And even if you did, you owe me nothing."
Indrie's brow furrows. "But you were upset at what I said."
"Yes."
"Then..."
"Not at you." Eskil can see they're going in circles.
The same words, the same circular misunderstanding, the gap between what he means and what Indrie hears unbridgeable by repetition alone.
There's a barrier they can't get around, a wall built from different languages and different worlds and different understandings of what a person can be to another person.
He needs a different approach.
Eskil reaches out with his free hand and pushes the plate aside. He pulls a sheet of parchment to the center and grabs a piece of charcoal from the cup at the desk's edge.
He reluctantly lets go of Indrie and begins to sketch.
The shapes that emerge are rudimentary at best and outright crude if he's being honest. He's not an artist, that's where Morgan has always excelled, his brother with his steady hand and his eye for proportion, who can render a face in charcoal so realistically it seems to breathe.
Eskil's talents lie elsewhere. What comes out of his charcoal is functional: blocky shapes, rough outlines, proportions that suggest rather than depict.
But he can do a decent enough job to get the point across.
He draws land first. A coastline, curving, with mountains behind it.
Trees, represented by vertical lines with scribbled circles at the top.
A river, winding from the mountains to the coast. Buildings clustered near the shore, squares with peaked roofs, a larger one that could be a hall, smaller ones around it.
He draws it quickly, without pausing to refine, and the charcoal smudges under his hand as he works.