18. Chapter 18 #3
He realizes this is the thing he's been trying to understand for weeks. And he is learning it from a textbook. That he stood in a cabin in the middle of the ocean and took the only wedding night this man will ever have and told him it meant nothing.
You are not mine. The fruit doesn't change that.
He said those words. He remembers saying them.
He remembers the way Indrie's face changed, the light going out of his eyes, and he had not understood why.
He had thought he was freeing him. Thought he was being generous, telling a man who had just agreed to give his body to save a stranger's life that the act did not chain him to that stranger.
That it was not an obligation. That Indrie was free.
And Indrie had heard: I do not want you. I refuse you. In the oldest and most binding tradition of your people, on the only night of its kind you will ever have, I am telling you that you are nothing to me.
The nausea that goes through him is sudden and vicious and he has to press his hand flat against his thigh to keep from moving.
He registers that Morgan is saying his name. That Indrie has stopped talking. He looks up and finds Indrie frozen.
Indrie's eyes are on the page. On the illustration, on the entry Eskil has been staring at, and his face has gone white.
Bloodless. The color that was warm and alive in his cheeks a moment ago is simply gone, and what is left is ash and terror.
His dark eyes are wide and fixed on the drawing with the horrified stillness of a man watching an oncoming disaster he cannot stop.
He does not run. Eskil notes this distantly, from behind the wall of his own shock. Indrie does not bolt from the room the way he did before. He stays where he is, on the floor, hands white-knuckled on the book in his lap.
Morgan follows Eskil's gaze to the page, reads the entry, and does not react immediately, but Eskil can see the gears turning behind his brother's eyes, the pieces assembling at the speed of a mind built for exactly this.
Morgan looks at Indrie. Looks at Eskil. Looks at the illustration between them. His expression sharpens.
"What's going on?" he asks, and there is an edge of protectiveness in it that Eskil would find touching under any other circumstances.
Eskil stands. The motion is abrupt enough that both of them flinch, and he does not have the room in him to care about that right now, because if he stays on this floor one more second he is going to put his fist through it.
"I need you to leave the room," he tells Morgan.
Morgan stares. His gaze cuts to Indrie, a quick assessing look, checking for danger, checking whether Indrie is all right, and then back to Eskil. "What is going on?"
"That is not a request, Morgan. Leave us."
Morgan's back straightens. He is not afraid of his brother and never has been, and for a moment the stubbornness that runs through their blood rises in his face and Eskil thinks he is going to refuse.
But Morgan is also the prince, and he knows the difference between the voice his brother uses and the one his king uses.
He looks at Indrie. The look says, clearly and without ambiguity, I am right outside if you need me.
Then he steps over the books and goes. The door closes behind him.
The library is silent.
Indrie has stood. Eskil does not know when, sometime during the exchange with Morgan, but he is on his feet with his back against the reading desk and his hip pressed to the edge of it and his hands gripping the wood behind him. He is braced. Not against the desk. Against what is coming.
"I understand that you are angry," Indrie says. His voice is small but steady, and the steadiness costs him. Eskil can see the effort of it in the set of his jaw and the white of his knuckles.
Eskil crosses the room. He watches Indrie track his approach, watches the dark eyes follow him with an alertness that is not quite fear but lives in the same country, and he stops close enough to touch and does not touch.
"I am not angry at you," he says.
He reaches up and cups Indrie's cheek. His hand is large enough that his fingers curve past Indrie's ear and into the hair at his temple.
He is gentler than he has ever been in his life, gentler than he knew he was capable of, because the man in front of him has been carrying something for a month that Eskil put on his shoulders without knowing, and the weight of it is visible in every line of him.
Indrie does not pull away. He looks up at Eskil and the fear in his eyes is not of the man in front of him.
It is of the conversation. Of the words about to be said.
Of the thing that has been sitting between them since the cabin on the ship, unnamed and enormous, the shape of it bending everything they have tried to build around it.
Eskil's thumb traces the curve of his cheekbone. He feels the warmth of his skin.
"I am furious," Eskil says, his voice rough and low and scraped down to something that barely qualifies as language, "because you have never been given a choice in anything.
Everything has been taken from you." His jaw tightens until the muscles in his temples ache.
"And I wanted to take you out of that life. Not take more from you."