22. Chapter 22
Indrie
It is past midnight when the beating comes at the door of his clinic.
He had not meant to still be here. He had sat down at the examination table to sort the herbs he had not sorted that afternoon, and at some point his cheek came to rest against a pile of dried rosemary and the lamp burned down and that was the end of the plan.
The pounding on the door jerks him upright with his heart hammering.
For one terrible second he is back in the night of the escape, the broken door, the man in his clinic, the scalpel, and his body floods with adrenaline so violent his vision spots. His hands grip the edge of the table and he cannot breathe.
Then the pounding comes again. And a voice.
"Indrie! Open up!"
Bohdi.
The adrenaline does not leave. It shifts, from terror to urgency, and Indrie is on his feet and crossing the clinic before the echo of Bohdi's voice has faded. He throws the bolt on the new door and pulls it open.
Bohdi fills the frame. He is dusty from the road, still in travel leathers, his axe strapped to his back. There is dried blood across the front of his shirt. There is a gash at his temple, crusted and unattended, and his red hair is half-loose from its braids. His face is drawn.
Bohdi is never drawn. Bohdi fills rooms with warmth and noise and the energy of a man who finds life fundamentally amusing. The absence of it is louder than shouting.
"It's the king," Bohdi says. "I need you. Now."
Indrie does not ask questions.
He takes his coat from the hook behind the door. His satchel, the same one he has carried since Kalkoa, battered and worn and irreplaceable, is on his shoulder before he has finished buttoning the coat. He pulls on his boots and follows Bohdi into the dark street.
Bohdi's stride is long and Indrie has to nearly run to keep pace. The cobblestones are hard beneath his boots and his unbuttoned coat flaps behind him and the night air bites at his throat and none of it registers. His mind has narrowed to a single point.
"What happened?" He is breathless and does not care.
"Ambush. On the road back from the border. Jakadi." Bohdi's jaw is a hard line. "They were waiting for us in the trees. Hit us on both sides."
"How bad?"
"Two dead. Several wounded." A pause. "Eskil took a blade between the ribs."
The words land in the middle of Indrie's chest. He stumbles on a cobblestone, catches himself, does not break stride.
"How deep?"
"Deep enough. Through the leather and into him. I bandaged it in the field but the bleeding hasn't stopped and I don't—" Bohdi's voice tightens. "I don't have the hands for this."
"How long ago?"
"Five hours. Maybe more. He rode the whole way. Wouldn't let us stop. Wouldn't let me send a rider ahead." Bohdi makes a sound that is half frustration and half fear. "Stubborn son of a bitch nearly came off his horse twice and still wouldn't let anybody else take the reins."
Indrie glances up at him as they walk. At the gash, and at the way Bohdi is holding his head very slightly angled, and at the fact that twice now he has put a hand on a wall he did not need to touch.
"You have a head wound, Bohdi."
"My head is fine."
"Bohdi–"
"Later, Indrie," Bohdi says, and there is no argument in it, and Indrie files it under the moment the king is stitched closed and lets it go.
They reach the keep. The guards at the door take one look at Bohdi and step aside.
Through the entrance hall, up the stairs, through the corridors, left at the tapestry, right at the sconces, up the short flight of worn stone steps.
Indrie's feet know the route. His body carries him while his mind runs ahead, cataloguing supplies, planning.
Bohdi pushes open the door to Eskil's quarters and Indrie follows him in and shrugs off his coat near the door and drops it. His boots follow, kicked off without breaking stride, an old habit from a lifetime of sickbeds, bare feet quieter and steadier on stone.
He crosses to the bed.
Eskil is laid on top of the blankets, shirtless. The lamplight catches the planes of his face and they are wrong. The color is wrong, waxy and drawn, the skin pulled tight across the bones in a way that speaks of hours of slow persistent bleeding. Sweat beads at his temples despite the chill.
And the bandaging. Bohdi's work, and Indrie can see the competence in it, the soldier's training, the wrapping done fast and firm under field conditions.
But the linen is soaked through. A bloom of red, darkest at the center, radiating outward, and the pattern tells Indrie the wound has not stopped.
Five hours of steady seep. Five hours on horseback, every movement of the animal pulling at it, undoing whatever clotting tried to form.
A serving maid is standing near the wall, young and white-faced, wringing her hands so hard the knuckles have gone red.
Indrie sets his satchel on the bedside table and opens it. His hands move automatically. Suturing needles, thread, the antiseptic wash, shears, clean linen, laid out in the order he will need them, each item placed where his fingers can find it without looking.
The instrument roll goes down last. He opens it flat and the narrow empty slot is still there, third from the left, where the fine scalpel should be.
He does not look at it for longer than it takes to see it. He has a curved needle and a straight one and a lancet and steady hands, and the thing that is missing from this roll is on a shelf in an evidence chest somewhere beneath this keep, and it is not what he needs tonight.
He turns to the maid.
"I need clean water," he says, and his voice is calm and clear and carries the authority of a man with no time for uncertainty. "As hot as you can manage. And towels. Every clean one you can find. Bring them here now."
She runs.
Indrie turns back to the bed and begins cutting the bandages away. The shears slide along the edge of the wrapping and the linen parts and peels back and the wound comes into view and his breath catches behind his teeth.
The laceration runs from below Eskil's ribs nearly to his hip.
Long and deep and ugly, ragged at the edges, the mark of a serrated blade that caught and dragged rather than cut clean.
The tissue beneath is swollen and angry, the flesh torn in layers, and Indrie can see the glint of bone at the deepest point.
He catalogues it in two heartbeats. Depth, through skin and muscle to the bone. Contamination, significant, given the hours and the field conditions. Bleeding, ongoing, slow and persistent, the kind of steady weep that drains a man by degrees. Infection risk, very high.
He can fix this. He has fixed worse. He kept a man with Granger's alive for five years on a fraction of the supplies laid out on this bedside table.
He is aware, as he measures thread against his forearm, that Eskil is watching him.
Through half-lidded eyes, brow dotted with sweat, breathing labored, face ashen.
But conscious. Those blue eyes track his movements with a lucidity that has no business existing in a man who has been bleeding for five hours.
Eskil's mouth curves. Barely. The ghost of something that wants to be a smile.
"This isn't how I'd hoped to see you again," he says.
His voice is rough and thin and stripped of everything but the words.
And underneath the roughness there is something that makes Indrie's hands falter for half a beat.
A tenderness, bruised and rueful, the voice of a man who has been thinking about this reunion and had imagined it going very differently.
Indrie huffs out a breath with no humor in it. He does not look up from threading the needle.
"No," he says. "The situation is not ideal."
He gives Eskil a look. The look he gives patients who are trying to be brave when they should be frightened, the one that says I see you, and I am not impressed, and you are going to do exactly what I tell you.
Eskil's eyes soften. And the fondness in them, the thing he cannot swallow, the thing that shows through no matter how hard he tries to hide it, is written across his face as plainly as text on a page.
Indrie has to look away. He looks at the wound instead, which is easier.
The maid returns with the water and the towels and Indrie gets to work.
He cleans the wound first, irrigating the ragged edges with hot water and then the antiseptic wash, flushing out dirt and debris and dried blood.
Eskil hisses at the sting and does not move.
His hand grips the edge of the mattress and his jaw tightens and he breathes through it with the control of someone who is long accustomed to pain.
Bohdi is hovering. He is at Indrie's shoulder, shifting his weight, craning his neck, radiating the useless energy of somebody who cares a great deal and can do nothing at all.
He keeps reaching, for the towels, for the bandaging, for anything, and at one point his arm crosses into Indrie's line of sight while Indrie is positioning the needle, and Indrie catches his wrist without looking up.
"He is not dying," Indrie says, from the bedrock of his own competence. "So please get out of the bedroom until I call you back in."
The silence that follows is profound. Bohdi, who takes orders from nobody except the king and then only when it suits him, withdraws his hand. Steps back.
"Call if you need anything," Bohdi says, and there is a roughness in his voice that was not there before. The door opens and closes.
The room is quieter. The fire crackles low in the grate. The only sounds are Indrie's breathing and Eskil's and the soft splash of water when Indrie rinses his hands.
He picks up the curved needle. Threads it. Positions it at the lower edge of the wound where the bleeding is worst.
"Bohdi listens to you better than he listens to me," Eskil says.
Indrie smiles at Eskil's stomach and not his face. "Your second-in-command is worried about you."
"Bohdi always worries too much. But I'm not dead yet." A breath that costs him something. "Although that's mostly thanks to you."