Chapter 28
Indrie
Indrie is asleep in the king's bed, draped over Eskil's bare chest with his ear pressed against the heartbeat he has come to think of as his own personal metronome, when the door opens without fanfare and Bohdi walks in.
Dusty from the road. Still in travel leathers. Axe on his back. Already talking mid-sentence about something Indrie does not catch, as though the briefing began in the corridor and the door was merely an inconvenience in the middle of it.
"—which is why I rode straight through, because if I am right about this then we do not have the—"
Indrie sits up on instinct. The blanket slides off his bare shoulder, exposing the mark Eskil left on his collarbone last night, and his dark hair is a tangled catastrophe around his face, and he is wearing nothing except the king's sheets and an expression of absolute mortification.
Bohdi's gaze lands on him.
His footsteps falter. His mouth, which was open and producing words at considerable speed, snaps shut.
His eyes move from Indrie to the bed to the state of undress to the implications, and the journey takes approximately one and a half seconds, during which his expression cycles through surprise, comprehension, and a delight so vast it threatens the structural integrity of his face.
He turns on his heel and walks back out. The door closes quietly behind him.
Indrie stares at the shut door. Heat floods his face, his neck, his chest, his ears, a full-body blush so comprehensive it probably has its own weather system, and he clutches the blanket to his chest and tries to remember how breathing works.
Eskil's hand settles on his waist. Warm. Unhurried. He is not remotely concerned about what just happened. He pulls Indrie back down against his chest with a low contented hum and presses a kiss to his temple as though the last ten seconds did not occur.
"Bohdi is back," Indrie says. His voice comes out approximately two octaves higher than its natural register. "It seemed urgent."
"Everything is urgent with Bohdi." Eskil's lips move against his hair. "He has no concept of patience."
"He just saw me. In your bed. Without—"
"Indrie."
"And he is going to– People will—"
Eskil chuckles. "I think we've established that people already know, sweetheart."
Indrie buries his face in Eskil's chest and contemplates the merits of never emerging.
The warmth of Eskil's skin against his burning cheek is not helping.
The fingers tracing idle circles on his bare back are aggressively not helping.
The fact that Eskil is clearly amused, and Indrie can feel the silent laughter in the rise and fall of his chest, is the opposite of helping.
He lets himself be held. Presses his face into the hollow of Eskil's throat and breathes and waits for the mortification to subside from lethal to merely catastrophic.
Then he says, muffled against Eskil's skin, "Will you have to leave again?"
The circles on his back slow. They do not stop, but they slow.
"Eventually," Eskil says. "But not soon."
Indrie nods against his chest.
After several moments there is a proper knock. Three deliberate raps, evenly spaced. He has learned.
Eskil rolls his eyes toward the ceiling. "Come in, Bohdi."
The door opens. Bohdi enters for the second time, marginally cleaner, having wiped the worst of the road dust from his face, though his leathers are still travel-stained and his red hair is a matted ruin.
He moves into the room with elaborate theatrical unconcern.
His gaze sweeps the bed, catalogues Indrie's continued presence in it, and then fixes on a point six inches to the left of both of them, where he studies the stonework with enormous interest.
"I'm back," Bohdi says, like they haven't noticed. "From the border. With news you are not going to like."
"That sounds about right," Eskil says.
He eases upright against the pillows, wincing at the pull of his stitches, and reaches for the shirt draped over the bedpost. Indrie watches the motion, the controlled grimace, the favoring of his right side, and he catalogues the stiffness and the pallor and adds it to the running assessment he maintains without effort and cannot switch off.
Eskil pulls the shirt on and swings his legs over the side of the bed, and Indrie starts to rise, reaching for his own clothes, and then stops.
His trousers are on the floor near the foot of the bed.
His shirt is somewhere behind the headboard.
His smallclothes are–actually, he does not actually know where his smallclothes are.
Getting dressed is going to require crossing the room naked in front of Bohdi, which is a thing Indrie would rather do approximately never.
Eskil picks up Indrie's trousers from the floor and tosses them onto the bed without looking at him.
Then he stands and crosses to the couch where Bohdi has settled, and his body angles so that his back blocks Bohdi's line of sight to the bed, and Indrie feels a rush of gratitude sharp enough to sting.
He dresses under the blanket with desperate contortionist efficiency. He has had practice at this. The closet-sized room in Kalkoa, the narrow bunk on the ship. He emerges clothed and still flushed and marginally more composed.
Bohdi does not comment on his presence. Does not suggest the conversation should be private. Does not glance at Eskil for confirmation that the healer is cleared to hear what is about to be said.
Nobody questions it.
Indrie stays where he is, cross-legged on the bed, and listens.
"The Jakadi and the Wolfe are working together," Bohdi says. “Which we suspected, but I have proof.”
Indrie sees the words hit Eskil. Not in his face, because his face is stone, but in his body. A stillness that deepens. Water going still before it freezes. His hands on his knees have not moved. His breathing has not changed. But something behind his eyes goes cold and flat and very quiet.
"Let's have it then," Eskil says.
"The betrothal offer came nine days after Askarte.
A clan that has refused every approach for forty years suddenly wants an alliance, and the week they decide it is the week we take our first real hit in a decade.
" Bohdi leans forward, elbows on his knees, his axe propped against the armrest. "I thought it was opportunism.
I thought they smelled blood and came to bargain. It is not that."
"Go on."
"The Jakadi are not fighting a war. They do not have the men for a war and they have never once behaved like a faction that wants ground.
They have been mapping us. Every engagement since spring has been a measurement.
How fast we respond, how many we send, which gate we come out of, how long the king is away from his own walls.
" Bohdi's jaw tightens. "The man in your cells was not gathering intelligence for the Jakadi.
He was gathering it for somebody who intends to use it, and the Jakadi cannot use it. They have nothing to use it with."
"The Wolfe can."
"The Wolfe have four thousand fighters who have never lost on their own ground and a stronghold that has never been taken." Bohdi says it flatly. "The Jakadi are the eyes. The Wolfe are the hand."
Eskil does not answer for a long moment.
"The prince's movements," he says.
"That is where it stopped being a theory for me.
" Bohdi meets his eyes. "That spy wrote down guard rotations and civilian patterns and the location of a physician's clinic.
Fine. That is what a spy does. But he also wrote down where the prince goes and when and with whom, for weeks, in detail.
Nobody plans an invasion around a twenty-year-old's walking habits. "
"They take Morgan south. Not as a husband, whatever the letters call it.
As a hostage behind walls we cannot breach.
" Bohdi does not look away while he says it.
"Then they come for you, holding the person you value most. And when you are gone they put your brother on the throne with a ring on his hand and a Wolfe chieftain standing behind the chair, and the people of Rengara accept it, because it is Morgan, and everybody in this city loves Morgan.
" His voice roughens. "A puppet with a crown on his head and a chain around his throat. "
The silence stretches.
And Indrie watches something cross Eskil's face. A recognition. The almost imperceptible shift of a piece turning the right way up.
"He told menas much," Eskil says.
Bohdi frowns. "Who did?"
"The spy. In the cells, near the end, when he had stopped caring what came out of him." Eskil's voice is very level. "He said I would not sit on the throne another winter. I thought it was defiance. A man tied to a chair with nothing left, running his mouth to feel like he still had something."
The fire crackles. Indrie sits on the bed and listens to the shape of a conspiracy designed to destroy the man he loves and imprison the man he has come to think of as a brother, and the fear that moves through him is not the sharp panicked fear of the clinic or the gate.
It is slower. Colder. He is understanding for the first time the scale of the thing he is standing in the middle of.
Eskil's hand is on his knee. It has been there the whole time, resting, still, the knuckles white, and as Indrie watches it unclenches. The fingers spread. He lays his palm flat on his own thigh and the motion is deliberate. He has absorbed a killing blow and he is choosing his response.
"This goes to the council immediately," Eskil says. His voice is steady.
"I'll have them assembled within the hour," Bohdi says. "All of them. I will drag Seren out of her bath if I have to."
He stands, retrieves his axe, and slings it onto his back, the motion practiced past thought.
On his way to the door, he turns. His eyes find Indrie on the bed.
He waves. A small cheeky motion, fingers waggling, accompanied by a grin that manages to communicate, in the span of two seconds: I am glad you are here, I am glad he has you, I am never going to let either of you forget that I walked in on this, and you are both welcome.
Indrie smiles into the blanket.
The door closes. The room settles.
Indrie unfolds himself from the bed. He pulls on his boots, finds his missing shirt, and crosses to the couch where Eskil is still sitting, staring at the cold hearth with an expression that would make most men take a step back.
Indrie does not take a step back. He sits beside him.
Close enough that their arms touch. He does not ask whether Eskil is all right, because the answer is obvious and asking would be an insult to both of them.
Instead he says, "I need to get back to the clinic.
Ermin is bringing in a man with an infected toenail he has been treating with ale and bergamot, and if we wait any longer I will be performing an amputation. "
The corner of Eskil's mouth twitches. Not a smile, not yet, but the ghost of one. The hairline fracture in the stone.
"You should go then," Eskil says.
Indrie does not go. He settles deeper into the couch, pressing his arm against Eskil's, and the warmth of him is a counterweight against the cold that came into the room with Bohdi. They sit together for a moment, one breath, two, three, and the quiet between them is not empty.
Then Indrie says, and he is aware while he says it that he is rumpled and flushed and sitting on the king's couch in the king's quarters after spending the night in the king's bed, "Can I stay again tonight?"
Eskil turns his head and looks at him.
He leans forward and kisses both his cheeks. Then his mouth. Soft. Unhurried. The kind of kiss that has no urgency in it, that exists only to say yes in a language that does not require translation.
"You can stay every night," Eskil says.
Indrie smiles. Ducks his head. Pulls away reluctantly and lets himself out.