Chapter 19 #2
He doesn't know if that syllable exists in Eskil's tongue. And he can't ask, because the asking would require the very vocabulary he doesn't have.
He is baring himself in a way he never has before.
He is laying himself out at his most vulnerable, standing on the deck of a ship in the orange light of sunset with his hands twisting in front of him and his heart so far out of his chest it might as well be sitting on the railing between them.
And he knows he has nothing to offer. He's a broken healer from a broken kingdom, unwanted even by the king he kept alive, and he's no one.
Eskil is a king. The distance between them is immeasurable and fixed.
But Eskil looks at him.
Eskil has looked at him this way since the beginning.
His eyes tracking Indrie across a room. His voice dropping to something careful and warm when he speaks to Indrie directly.
The touch on Indrie's face this morning, cupping his cheek, thumb brushing the bruises on Indrie's throat in the moonlight with a tenderness that made Indrie's breath stop.
Eskil looks at him and he matters. And Indrie wants, desperately, to matter to him.
"If I stay," Indrie says, and his voice is quiet, assembled from fragments, imperfect, the meaning he intends and the meaning it carries possibly not the same, "do I belong to you?"
The word belong drops between them and Indrie can feel it land wrong.
Eskil doesn't flinch. Doesn't grip the wheel or clench his jaw or do any of the sharp, visible things Indrie has learned to brace for.
What he does is worse. He goes still. The warmth that had been in his voice moments ago, the softness that came with describing his homeland, drains away, quiet, total, and what's left is closed and careful.
The openness in his expression folds inward, not with anger but with a sadness Indrie wasn't expecting, and when Eskil speaks, his voice is low and even and unbearably gentle.
"No," Eskil says. "You'll never belong to me, Indrie."
The words are simple. Slow. Spoken with the same deliberate care Eskil always uses when he wants Indrie to understand every syllable. And Indrie does. He understands every syllable. He understands them so completely they carve through him and leave nothing behind.
You'll never belong to me.
Never. Not now. Not in Valen. Not ever.
Indrie hears: that's not something I want. That's not something you are to me.
The gentleness of the rejection is somehow worse than sharpness would have been, because sharpness he could flinch from and forget, but gentleness he will remember. He will remember the low voice and the careful words and the sadness in Eskil's eyes for the rest of his life.
Of course. Of course.
He is a fool. He confused kindness for desire and rescue for devotion and a warm hand in the dark for something it was never meant to be.
Eskil was doing what any decent man would do for someone in his care, feeding him, teaching him, saving his life when it was in danger, and Indrie, starved of affection for so long that any scrap of it became a feast, had gorged himself on crumbs and called it love.
The warmth in his chest goes out. Not gradually. Not a slow fade. It extinguishes, snuffed between one heartbeat and the next, and what's left is the smoke of its absence curling through the hollow space behind his ribs.
Indrie can't look at him.
He can feel his expression collapsing, the hope draining out of it, the openness shuttering, the soft, vulnerable thing he'd allowed himself to show retreating behind walls it never should have left.
He nods. Jerkily. Once. The motion is mechanical.
"I understand," he says, and his voice is steady, which is a miracle, because inside he is coming apart. "I, forgive me. I didn't mean to, I should not have..."
He can't finish. If he finishes he's going to say something that reveals the full scope of his humiliation, and he has just enough pride left, a thin, brittle layer, to keep that from happening.
He turns and leaves before he says anything worse.
Before the burning in his eyes becomes something visible.
Before he leaves his heart on the deck for Eskil to see, open and beating and unwanted.
He makes it to the hatch. Down the steps.
Into the corridor. Past the galley where Gunnar is cleaning up, past the hold where the supplies are stacked, past Ermin's bunk where the boy is sleeping, to his own bunk at the end of the row.
He climbs in and pulls the blanket over himself and turns his face to the wall.
The drawing is still in his pocket. He can feel the edge of the parchment against his hip.
He should throw it away. It means nothing now. A picture of a place where he'll live as a healer and nothing more, surrounded by people who are kind to him because their king told them to be, serving a man who saved his life and doesn't want what Indrie offered in return.
He doesn't throw it away. He presses his hand against it through the fabric of Eskil's trousers, and holds it there, and the parchment is warm from his body and the charcoal smudge of the smallest figure is probably transferring to his skin and he doesn't care.
He hasn't cried in a long time. Not through the beatings, not through the nights without food, not through the shouted insults and the cold floor and the hands that grabbed and shoved and struck.
He learned to hold it in, to swallow it down, to let the pain pass through him without leaving a mark on his face.
Crying was a weakness Armond punished. Crying was proof that the blow had landed.
So Indrie stopped. Years ago. He stopped and the stopping became permanent, the tears drying up at their source, and he'd thought maybe that part of him was dead.
It's not dead.
He curls up in his bed and bites his knuckles and tears stream down his face. They come silently, no sound, no sob, just the steady, relentless fall of water from eyes that have been dry for years, and they soak into the pillow and they don't stop.
He bites harder. His teeth press white crescents into the skin of his hand, the same hand that held Eskil's in the moonlight, and the pain is grounding and insufficient.
It doesn't touch the thing inside him that's breaking.
Nothing touches it. It breaks alone, in the dark, in a bunk on a ship heading toward a home that won't be his the way he wanted it to be.
He cries until he can't. Until the well runs dry and the silence is just silence and the ship rocks beneath him with the patient, indifferent rhythm of the sea.