18. Chapter 18 #2
"We're cross-referencing the plants of Kalkoa against what grows here," Indrie says.
He has picked up the book and turned it the right way around.
His voice is steadier now, settling into the rhythm of a subject he is confident in, though the flush has not abated.
He does not look at Eskil directly. He looks at a point roughly two inches to the left of Eskil's jaw.
"What you told me on the ship, about the mountainside being abundant.
It made me want to be certain I knew what to look for before I started foraging. "
Eskil looks at the space Indrie is not quite looking at him from and thinks, You are talking to me about root systems while blushing to your collarbones and I would sack a city to keep you in this room.
He finds himself coming further in without having given himself permission.
His body is a traitor. His legs carry him across the threshold and into the warm circle of lamplight and books, and he lowers himself to the floor beside them, one knee drawn up and the other leg stretched out, close enough that if he reached he could touch Indrie's hand.
He does not reach.
"Show me what you've found," he says.
Indrie's eyes flicker to his, a quick darting glance, barely a second of contact, and then away again.
The flush deepens. But his hands move with purpose, turning pages, finding the section he and Morgan have been working through, and he begins pointing out native flora with the quiet authority of a man who knows his subject intimately, even if his voice is slightly breathless and his finger is not quite steady against the page.
Eskil listens. He leans in to see the illustrations, which puts him closer, close enough to catch chamomile and the faint warmth underneath it that is only him, and his brain supplies, helpfully and without invitation, the memory of that scent pressed against his chest in the dark.
Stop it.
He points at a broad-leafed plant with serrated edges. "This grows wild along the northern ridgeline. Thick patches of it near the watchtower ruins. Morgan and I used to pick it on the way back from the tower."
Morgan makes a face. "You used to throw it at me and tell me it was poisonous."
"I was building character."
"I was six. I thought I was going to die."
Indrie's mouth twitches. It is the smallest motion, the corner of his lip lifting, barely visible, and Eskil catches it.
They fall into a rhythm. Eskil points out plants he knows from campaigns and patrols, where they grow, what conditions they favor, which ones the horses will not touch and which ones the horses eat far too much of.
Morgan cross-references between the Kalkoan and Rengaran texts, switching languages with the fluidity that makes him invaluable and insufferable in roughly equal measure.
Indrie asks questions, tentative at first and directed mostly at Morgan, and then gradually, by increments so small they might be accidental, turning toward Eskil.
He still will not look at him. Not fully.
His gaze touches Eskil's face and bounces off, landing on his hands, his shoulder, the page between them, anywhere that is not direct.
But his body is angling toward Eskil despite itself.
Eskil can see the lean, the imperceptible tilt of his weight, the way he has shifted on his heels so that his knee is an inch closer than it was a minute ago.
Eskil wants to take his face in both hands and tilt it up and say look at me.
He does not do this.
Morgan says something about snaproot, whether it wants direct sun or partial shade, and Indrie contradicts him. Not tentatively. With the flat confident authority of a man who has grown the thing himself and knows exactly what it requires.
"It needs partial shade in the first season," Indrie says, and his Rengaran is noticeably improved, the words coming more fluidly.
"Full sun scorches the root system before it establishes.
Morgan, the text you're reading is from the southern provinces.
The light is completely different at this latitude. "
"The text," Morgan says, with the precise enunciation of a man about to be pedantic, "is the authoritative reference on northern botany and has been in this library for forty years."
"Then it has been wrong for forty years."
Morgan's eyebrows rise. Indrie's chin lifts, just slightly, and for a moment the uncertainty and the embarrassment and the careful avoidance of eye contact fall away entirely, and what is left is the physician.
Eskil is grinning. He can feel it on his face, a wide stupid helpless grin that he would be mortified by if he could bring himself to care, and at some point he realizes he is sitting on a library floor watching two people he loves argue about a weed and has no idea what has happened to his life.
Morgan catches his expression and gives him a look that communicates, with eloquent brevity, I see what is happening here and I am choosing not to comment, and you owe me.
Eskil ignores him.
The argument resolves itself, or rather Morgan concedes with the grudging grace of a man who has checked two further sources and found them both in agreement with Indrie, and they move on to the next page.
And Eskil sees the illustration.
Lower right of the page Indrie has just turned to. A fruit, drawn in careful detail. The red flesh. The dark seeds. The distinctive teardrop shape, the one that sat on a plate in his cabin and looked like nothing at all.
Above the drawing, in the plain block hand the guide uses for its headings, is a single word.
Cara.
Eskil knows that word. He has heard it exactly once, in the dark, out of a mouth that could barely get the sentence out. The entry beneath it is sixteen lines long, but three words stand out among them. Eskil reads them.
He reads them again.
Betrothal via consummation.
The room goes very quiet inside his skull.
He stares at the entry and the words rearrange themselves and rearrange themselves and will not settle into any order he can accept.
The fruit he ate in his cabin on the ship.
The one that set his blood on fire and nearly killed him.
The one Indrie named the moment he came through the door, because Indrie knew exactly what it was, because it was from his country, because–
Because it is a marriage rite.
Everything good about the afternoon drains out of him and what is left is cold and still and sick.