Chapter 27
Indrie is doing his best to avoid the king.
He's good at avoidance. He's had years of practice, mapping the routines of powerful men, learning their schedules, identifying the hours and the corridors and the corners of a space where he's least likely to be seen.
On a ship this size, with a crew this observant, total invisibility is impossible, but Indrie can get close.
He sticks to the hold, the galley, the medical bay.
He keeps his head down. He moves when Eskil is at the helm.
He works when Eskil is in his cabin. He exists in the negative space of the king's presence, occupying the places Eskil isn't.
It works for approximately three hours.
Because it's impossible to avoid someone who is actively looking for him.
Indrie is in the hold, crouched beside a crate of supplies, gathering a basket of oranges for Gunnar.
The cook has decided, in light of Olver's scurvy and the general nutritional deficiencies of a crew that would subsist entirely on meat and bread if left to their own devices, that every meal will now include fruit, and anyone who complains will answer to his wooden spoon.
Indrie had volunteered to restock the galley's supply, partly because Gunnar needed the help and partly because the hold is dim and quiet and below the waterline, about as far from the helm as one can get on a ship without climbing into the bilge.
He's counting oranges, seven, eight, nine, enough for the midday meal if Gunnar stretches them, when the hair on the back of his neck prickles.
He doesn't hear footsteps. Doesn't hear the creak of the ladder or the shift of weight on the floorboards. One moment he's alone in the hold and the next moment the air changes, a presence, a warmth, a displacement of space that his body recognizes before his mind does.
He stands up from the crate and turns around and the king is standing by a barrel three paces away, watching him.
Eskil is dressed. Fully dressed, shirt tucked, belt buckled, hair loose around his shoulders because he apparently hasn't braided it yet.
He looks healthy. The flush of the fever is gone, replaced by his normal color, and his eyes are clear, the pale grey restored to their usual intensity.
He looks like himself. The only evidence of last night is a tiredness around his eyes, a heaviness in his bearing that speaks of a body still recovering from what was done to it.
He's leaning against the barrel with one shoulder, arms at his sides, and the posture is deceptively casual.
Indrie knows what it costs Eskil to appear casual.
He's learned to read the effort behind the ease, the way the king arranges his body to take up less space, to project less threat, when he's approaching someone who might be afraid.
Indrie is afraid.
Not of violence. Not anymore. The fear that lives in him now is of a different species, sharper, more precise, located in a specific place behind his ribs that has everything to do with last night and nothing to do with fists.
He is afraid of what Eskil will say. Afraid of what his face will reveal when Eskil says it.
Afraid that he will crack open in this dim, quiet hold and all the things he's been holding behind his teeth will spill out and he will never get them back.
He manages not to drop the oranges.
He clutches the basket to his chest and directs his gaze to the king's shoulder. Not his face. Not his eyes. The shoulder, the safe territory, the place where looking is not the same as seeing.
"My lord," he says. And waits for whatever is about to happen.
Eskil is quiet for a moment. The hold creaks around them, the timbers groaning with the ship's movement, and the lamplight from the corridor behind Eskil casts his shadow long across the floor.
"Are you alright?" he asks.
The question is surprising. It shouldn't be.
Eskil has asked him this before, after the spilled stew, after the storm, after every incident that has put Indrie on the floor or in the water or in the path of something that could hurt him.
It's the question Eskil defaults to when he doesn't know what else to say, and the consistency of it, the way it's always the first thing out of his mouth, would be comforting if Indrie were capable of being comforted right now.
He nods stiffly. "Yes, my lord."
He hears Eskil move closer. Not much, a step, maybe two, but the distance between them shrinks and the air warms and Indrie's grip on the basket tightens.
"You saved my life," Eskil says.
The words are spoken carefully, slowly, in the way Eskil speaks when he wants Indrie to understand every syllable.
There's a weight to them that goes beyond gratitude, a heaviness in the way they're placed that suggests Eskil has been thinking about what to say and has chosen these specific words for a reason.
Indrie stares at the oranges in his basket. They're round and bright and they don't look back.
"That's what a healer does," he says.
Eskil laughs. The sound is humorless, short, a single exhale through his nose that might be amusement or might be something darker.
"I have never known a healer to give their body for the sake of healing," he says.
The flush hits Indrie so fast the room tilts.
It floods his face and neck and chest, vivid and total, and he clutches the oranges to his chest as though they can protect him from the words and from the man saying them and from the memory of what those words refer to.
He should say something. He should say it was nothing, I was only healing someone in need, the method was different but the principle is the same.
He should say the words that would reduce last night to a clinical procedure, a healer's intervention, nothing more.
He can't.
He can't bring himself to say those words because they are a lie and he has been lying to himself and to Eskil and to everyone on this ship since the moment the cabin door closed behind Bohdi, and the lie is a weight he cannot carry anymore.
Because it was something. It was everything.
Having someone finally treat him with care.
Having someone kiss him with that much intention and hold him with that much tenderness and speak to him in a voice so warm and so reverent that it didn't matter that Indrie couldn't follow the words, because the sound of them, the low, rough, continuous stream of them against his skin, had made every broken thing inside him believe it could be mended.
It was the most important thing that has ever happened to him and he is supposed to call it medicine and he can't.
Indrie doesn't realize he's staring at the floor, eyes burning, until Eskil places a finger under his chin and lifts his face.
He hadn't realized the man had moved forward.
Eskil is right there, close, closer than he was a moment ago, close enough that Indrie can see the individual threads in his shirt and the faint shadow of stubble along his jaw and the pale, clear grey of his eyes looking down at him with an expression that is not anger and not pity and not the careful neutrality Eskil usually wears but something raw and unfinished and searching.
His finger under Indrie's chin is light.
The barest pressure, just enough to tilt his face upward, and the touch sends a cascade of sense memory through Indrie's body, that hand on his jaw, that hand in his hair, that hand on his hip guiding him down, and he has to lock his knees to keep them from buckling.
He swallows his feelings. It takes effort. They're too large and too numerous and they fill his throat and press against the backs of his eyes and the best he can do is shove them down far enough to speak.
"I know we come from different cultures," Indrie says. His voice is quiet but steady, the healer's voice, the one that delivers hard truths without flinching. "I know last night was necessary. For your survival. And I do not expect you to —"
He can't say it.
The words keep me catch in his throat, barbed and immovable, and he knows, he knows, that if he says it he will cry.
He will cry in front of this man, in this hold, surrounded by oranges and crates and the smell of salt and timber, and he refuses.
He refuses to give Eskil the full weight of what last night meant to him, because the king already carries the weight of a kingdom and a crew and a three-week voyage and he doesn't need the addition of Indrie's broken heart.
He shuts his mouth on the words and the silence where they should be is louder than anything he's ever said.
Eskil's face is conflicted. The raw, unfinished expression has deepened into something more complex, frustration layered over concern layered over something Indrie can't name.
But it's not anger. Indrie has learned this distinction the way he's learned everything else about the king: slowly, painfully, through observation and error and the gradual dismantling of assumptions he didn't know he was making.
"Indrie, I need you to understand me," Eskil says.
The frustration is not at Indrie. It's at the gap, at the language, at the wall between them that neither of them can see over.
He steps closer. His hand moves from Indrie's chin to his cheek, cupping it the way he did last night, the way he's done before, the gesture that has become as familiar as it is heartbreaking.
"You are free," Eskil tells him. "To do whatever you want when we dock in Valen. You do not have to be our healer. You do not have to stay. If it is not what you wish —"
"Where would I go?" The words come out before Indrie can stop them, small and bare and honest in a way he didn't intend. "If not with you?"
Eskil brings Indrie's hand to his face and kisses his knuckles.
The press of his lips against Indrie's skin is soft and warm and deliberate and it sends a flush cascading down Indrie's neck and into the collar of his shirt, Eskil's shirt, still, he hasn't changed, hasn't had the chance, and the intimacy of the gesture, the tenderness of it, is so at odds with you do not belong to me that Indrie's vision blurs.
"Wherever you desire," Eskil says against his knuckles. "And if that desire is back in Kalkoa, then I will return you there. If that is what you wish. I would not see you harmed again, but if it is what you wish, I will take you back."
Indrie shakes his head. Frantically. The motion dislodges two oranges from the basket and they roll across the floor and neither of them cares.
"I don't want to go back," Indrie says. The words are fierce, fiery, more emphatic than anything he's said in weeks. "I want to stay. I just —"
He pauses.
He doesn't know how to say what he needs to say.
Doesn't know how to put into words, in his language or Eskil's, the thing that lives in the center of him and grows larger by the hour.
He doesn't know how to say I don't know how to serve you without loving you because the words, laid out plainly, are too much and too honest and too damning.
He doesn't know how to explain that serving Eskil was supposed to be simple, cook his meals, heal his crew, stay out of his way, and instead it became the most complicated thing Indrie has ever done because somewhere between the spilled stew and the starlit deck and the storm-tossed ocean, he fell in love with the man he was supposed to be afraid of.
He shuts his mouth. Nods firmly. Swallows the rest.
"I will stay," he repeats.
Eskil opens his mouth to say something else, Indrie can see it forming, the words gathering behind his eyes, something he's been trying to say for days, but they're interrupted by the sound of boots on the ladder and a deckhand's voice, breathless and excited, calling down into the hold.
"My lord! Land, my lord — we've spotted land!"
The words echo through the hold and Indrie watches their impact cross Eskil's face, the shift from personal to professional, from the man in the hold to the king on the ship, the instantaneous recalibration of a leader whose responsibilities do not pause for matters of the heart.
Eskil lets go of Indrie's hand. The release is slow, reluctant, his fingers trailing across Indrie's palm before falling away, and the absence of his touch is a cold that has nothing to do with the temperature of the hold.
"Whatever you need," Eskil tells him. His voice has changed, still low, still careful, but with an urgency beneath it that the approaching shoreline has put there. "Whatever you desire. I will make it so. You need only ask."
He holds Indrie's gaze for a moment longer, one breath, two, and whatever he sees in Indrie's face makes something in his own tighten and then release. He nods, once, to himself, confirming something.
Then he turns on his heel and heads back toward the ladder, his stride lengthening as the king reasserts himself over the man, and his boots hit the rungs and he's gone.
Indrie stands in the hold.
The oranges have rolled. Two of them are against the far wall, stopped by a crate. The basket is clutched against his chest. His hand, the one Eskil kissed, hangs at his side, the knuckles still warm.
His knees give out.
He sinks to the floor, the basket settling in his lap, and he sits among the crates and the barrels and the oranges and the dim lamplight and presses the knuckles Eskil kissed against his own lips and closes his eyes.
You, he thinks. The word is quiet. Enormous.
The only word he needs, the only word that matters, the word that contains everything he couldn't say and everything he meant and the full, devastating scope of what he feels for the man who just walked away from him and toward a shoreline that will change everything.
I only want you.