"Agreed," the medic says, without looking up. He produces a length of linen bandage and begins wrapping the shoulder with brisk efficiency. "The headache will persist for at least two days. Avoid bright light where possible. If the dizziness worsens or his vision blurs, send for me immediately." He ties off the bandage and steps back, examining his work with professional satisfaction. "He can go. Keep him still, keep him fed, and keep him out of trouble."
The medic fixes Evran with a look that saysI am entrusting this to you because you seem the only person here with any sense.Evran nods and does not mention that he has precisely zero ability to keep Vaike out of anything, let alone trouble.
The medic fusses for another few minutes, checking the stitches, applying one more layer of salve, pressing his fingers against various points on Vaike's skull and asking questions about his vision and his balance that Vaike answers through his teeth. Then he releases Vaike into Evran's care with a final pointed look and retreats to the other end of the medical wing,muttering about Warlords and their complete disregard for their own mortality.
Evran helps Vaike off the examination table. Helps is perhaps generous, as it is not as if he can support Vaike's weight. The man is twice his breadth and half again his mass, and if Vaike decided to fall Evran would simply go down with him. But he holds his arm and guides him and provides a steadying presence that is less about physical strength and more about sayingI am here, I am paying attention, lean on me if you need to.
They move down the hallway together. Vaike's stride is not quite his own, there is a hesitance in it, a slight favoring of his left side, and his eyes are half-lidded against the light in a way that speaks of a headache he seems to think he can glower into submission. He is not glowering it into submission, and the headache is winning.
Evran guides him through the corridor, around the corner, past the guards who straighten at the sight of their Warlord and then immediately look worried, and into their room. He eases Vaike toward the bed, and Vaike goes, which tells Evran more about the severity of the headache than any of the Warlord's words have, and allows himself to be settled against the pillows with only a slight grunt of displeasure.
Evran draws the blinds. The room dims, the harsh afternoon light replaced by a softer, filtered glow. He crosses back to the bed and sits on the edge of it, close to Vaike's uninjured side.
Vaike reaches out and takes his hand. The grip is strong, steady, as though the rest of him might be battered but this part, the part that holds onto Evran, is untouched.
He lifts Evran's hand to his mouth and kisses the palm. His lips are dry against the sensitive skin, and the gesture is so tender and so entirely Vaike, this man who expresses devotion in physical acts rather than words, who says I love you with hishands and his mouth and his body rather than his voice, that Evran's throat closes.
"Stop fretting," Vaike says, his lips moving against Evran's palm. "You'll get wrinkles."
"Someone sabotaged the horse and tried to kill you," Evran says.
His voice is flat. He does not soften it, does not dress it up in qualifications or hedge it with it seems or it's possible that. He states it as the fact it is and watches Vaike's face as the words land.
Vaike's eyes open. He is looking at Evran with the steady, assessing gaze of someone not surprised by what he is hearing.
"It does seem that way," he says.
"You're not taking this seriously enough."
"I am taking it exactly as seriously as it warrants."
"Vaike."
"If the world stopped because someone wanted me dead," Vaike says, patient and steady, explaining something he has known for a very long time, "then a day would never pass."
Evran makes an unhappy sound, low and frustrated, caught between a groan and a protest. It is the sound of knowing, intellectually, that his partner is right and being furious about it anyway. Because it does not matter that threats are constant, does not matter that this is normal for a Warlord. What matters is that Vaike was thrown from a horse and trampled and hit his head on a boulder and could have died, and the man responsible for it is sleeping in a bed two corridors away and no one is doing anything about it.
No one except Evran.
Vaike laughs, small and rough and pained, the headache punishing him for the motion, but it is real, and he lifts Evran's hand to his mouth again and kisses it twice, on the knuckles and then the wrist.
"This is part of being a ruling Warlord," he says. "Someone will always want what you have. Someone will always think they can challenge your rule. The measure of a leader is not whether the threats come but how he responds when they do."
"What are you going to do about it?" Evran asks.
Vaike is quiet for a moment. His thumb traces a slow pattern on the back of Evran's hand, and his eyes are half-lidded, from the pain, from the dimness, thinking carefully before he speaks.
"The summit is only two more days," he says. "Then we'll be back in Drakkari lands with our own warriors and our own horses and our own walls around us. The threat is contained to this place and this time."
"What if we don't make it those two days?"
Vaike's thumb stills on his hand. He opens his eyes fully and looks at Evran, and there is something in his expression that is not quite resignation but close, a weary reckoning with limitations he does not enjoy admitting.
"Subterfuge has never been my strong point," Vaike says. "I prefer when the assassins come at me with axes overhead and intentions telegraphed. It's simpler. You see the threat, you meet the threat, and one of you walks away." He pauses. "Poison and sabotage and men who climb through windows, that is a different kind of war. One I was not raised to fight."
The admission costs him something. Evran can see it in the tightening of his jaw, the slight shift in his gaze, the way someone who has spent his entire life being the strongest person in every room reckons with the fact that strength alone is not enough to protect the things he loves. Vaike was raised to fight enemies who announce themselves, who stand across a field and draw their swords and give you the courtesy of seeing the blow before it lands. Torsten is none of those things. Torsten is the poison in the feed bag and the knife through the window and thesmile that hides the blade, and Vaike does not know how to fight someone who will not stand still long enough to be fought.
But Evran does.
