Chapter 23 #2
The blanket slides off his shoulder. His hair is wild, tangled from sleep, sticking up at angles that defy the natural behaviour of hair.
His eyes are blurry and blinking and confused.
He looks around the room, the fire, the table, the window, the grey morning light, reassembling the world piece by piece.
Then his eyes find Eskil and Bohdi at the table. Watching him.
The flush begins at his collarbones. It rises up his throat, across his jaw, blooming over his cheeks and the tips of his ears, and it is spectacular. An entire body's worth of blood relocating to the face.
He starts to stammer. "I — I'm sorry, I didn't mean to fall asleep, I should not have — I was just checking the stitching and I —"
He was not checking the stitching. They all know he was not checking the stitching. The wound is on Eskil's right side and Indrie was sleeping on his left, curled into the warmest spot in the house, and the fiction that he was conducting a medical evaluation would not survive a strong breeze.
"— and I only meant to rest for a moment, I'm so sorry for the imposition —"
And then he registers what he is looking at. The king. Out of bed. Sitting at a table. Eating.
The colour drains. The stammering stops. The blurry, embarrassed, sleep-soft young man disappears and what snaps into place with a speed that makes Eskil blink is the healer.
Indrie is off the bed in a moment. The blanket is abandoned.
He crosses the room with one foot bare and his hair still wild, and there is nothing soft or flustered about him now.
His eyes are sharp. His jaw is set. His shoulders are square, and his gaze has the focused intensity Eskil has seen him direct at soldiers who disobeyed medical orders and found the experience educational.
"What are you doing out of bed?"
"I'm —"
"You are not healed. You are stitched. That is not the same thing." He reaches Eskil and takes his arm. Not gently. He is accustomed to moving patients who outweigh him and he has no patience for resistance. "You need to be lying down. You need to be resting."
"Indrie —"
"You have a laceration six inches long that goes to the bone, and you have been upright for —" He glances at the food, at the steam still rising from the tea, calculates.
"— at least ten minutes, which is ten minutes longer than you should have been.
The sutures are under tension when you sit up.
If you tear them I will have to redo them and I will not be gentle about it. "
Eskil lets himself be pulled from the chair.
He lets the small, fierce man drag him by the arm across the room toward the bed, and he lets it happen for two reasons.
The first is that Indrie is right. The wound is throbbing and the stitches are pulling and the brief excursion to the table has left him lightheaded in a way he would not admit to anyone except, possibly, the man currently manhandling him.
The second reason is that Indrie fretting over him is the most endearing thing he has ever witnessed.
Dishevelled, hair like a nest, half the size of the man he's hauling. And utterly, completely, unshakeably commanding. Directing the king of Rengara back to bed with the authority of a general marshalling troops and the tolerance for argument of a stone wall.
Eskil lets Indrie push him onto the mattress. Lets him arrange the pillows. Lets him pull the blanket up and tuck it around his chest with brisk, efficient movements that brook no debate. He catches Bohdi's face over Indrie's shoulder.
His second-in-command is biting his lip hard enough to appear to be in physical pain.
His eyes are streaming. One hand is pressed over his mouth.
The other is gripping the arm of the chair with white knuckles.
His whole body vibrates with the suppressed force of it, and the expression on his face is sheer radiant barely-contained delight.
He has waited decades to watch his king herded by somebody and he intends to savor every second of it.
Eskil fixes him with a look. Bohdi does not combust, but it is a near thing.
Indrie straightens up from the bed, apparently satisfied that the king is horizontal again, and turns to survey the situation with his hands on his hips.
His gaze moves from Eskil to the table to the food to Bohdi, and his expression shifts, the sharp authority softening, just slightly, into something still firm with warmth underneath it.
"You can eat in bed," Indrie tells Eskil. "I'll bring the tray. But you are not to get up again until I have checked the stitching and I am satisfied you haven't undone my work."
"I haven't —"
"I will be the judge of that."
Eskil closes his mouth. Indrie retrieves the tray from the table and carries it to the bed and sets it on Eskil's lap, positioning it with the care of somebody who has managed infirm patients for years and knows exactly how high a tray must sit so that eating does not require the man to fold in the middle.
Bohdi stands. He has gotten himself under control, mostly, though his eyes are still bright and the ghost of the grin lurks at the corners of his mouth.
"I'll leave you in capable hands," Bohdi says, and his voice is almost level.
He heads for the door. As he passes Indrie, something in his face changes. Eskil catches the edge of it, the amusement going out and something quieter coming in, and he knows Bohdi and he knows what that face is doing.
Thank you. For coming. For fixing him. For being here.
The door closes. The room is quiet.
Indrie stands beside the bed with his arms folded across his chest. He is watching Eskil eat, vigilant, ensuring compliance, and Eskil is eating because he is hungry and because Indrie is watching and he will not give the man cause to scold him again.
Although….
The scolding had been — well. Eskil tears off a piece of bread and chews it and does not think about how attractive it is when Indrie is angry on his behalf.
He does not think about the flush or the wild hair or the way Indrie's voice drops half an octave when he is issuing medical directives, acquiring a firmness that sits in Eskil's chest and does things that cannot possibly be good for six inches of fresh stitching.
He does not think about any of it.
He eats his bread and his porridge and drinks his tea and Indrie stands beside him like a sentry, and the quiet between them is not uncomfortable. It is the quiet of two men who have survived the night and are still here, still breathing, and do not need words to confirm it.
When Eskil finishes, Indrie takes the tray and sets it aside and then sits on the edge of the bed, carefully, on the left side, the unwounded side.
"I need to check the wound now."
"It's fine."
He gives Eskil a look.
Eskil pulls the blanket down to his waist and Indrie leans in close, his eyes on the wound with the intensity that means the healer is in full possession of the body and the man who lives in it has temporarily vacated.
His fingers touch the skin around the sutures.
Featherlight. Barely there. Mapping the edges for heat or swelling, pressing gently to check the tension of each one.
His hands are cool and precise and Eskil can feel each individual fingertip, four points of sensation tracking along the line of the wound.
"No inflammation," Indrie murmurs, more to himself than to Eskil.
"The edges are holding. Good apposition.
No seepage." He presses a spot near the lower end of the laceration and Eskil hisses and Indrie's eyes flick to his face and then back down.
"Tender here. That is where the blade went deepest. The periosteum is bruised. You are going to feel that for weeks."
"I have felt worse."
"That is not the reassurance you think it is."
Eskil almost laughs. The motion pulls his side and he catches it between his teeth and turns it into a grunt instead.
Indrie's hand flattens against his stomach, a steadying pressure, warm and grounding, and the clinical detachment in his expression flickers.
Just for a moment. Just long enough for Eskil to see behind it, to the man who slept curled against his side all night and reached for him when he left.
Indrie pulls his hand away. Straightens. The healer clicks back into place.
"You'll live," he says. "But you are not to engage in any physical exertion for at least two weeks. No training. No riding. No —" His cheeks pink. "— no strenuous activity of any kind."
"Define strenuous."
"Eskil."
"I'm asking a question."
"You are not asking a medical question." The colour is spreading down his neck.
"You are confined to this bed until I say otherwise.
Bohdi can handle whatever needs handling.
Morgan can run things from the study. You are going to rest and heal and eat whatever food is brought to you and you are not going to argue with me about it. "
Eskil looks at him. At this small, fierce, beautiful man sitting on the edge of his bed with his cheeks red and his jaw set.
"Yes, my lord," Eskil says, low and rough.
Indrie's face goes scarlet from hairline to collarbone. He stands up from the bed so fast he nearly knocks the tray off the side table, and he busies himself with tidying instruments that are already tidy, and Eskil watches him and grins wider than he has in years.