Page 101 of Tending the Ache

He marvels at it. At the reduction of all that complexity to this. Two people on a couch, reading, in a warm room, with their shoulders touching. He has lived through slavery and starvation and the cold deck of a ship and a storm that nearly killed him and a man with a knife at his throat. He has carried the weight of other people's lives in his hands since he was twelve years old. And the thing that undoes him, the thing that cracks him open and fills him with something so large he cannot breathe around it, is this. This quiet. This ease. This man's hand in his.

Eskil reaches over without looking up from his documents and takes Indrie's hand. He threads their fingers together, a gesture that has become as natural as breathing and as unremarkable as the fire in the hearth and as essential as both, and keeps reading.

Indrie stares at their joined hands.

The firelight catches the scars on Eskil's knuckles. The roughness of his palm against Indrie's smooth one. The difference in their skin, Eskil's tanned and marked, Indrie's soft and unmarred. The size of Eskil's hand, which engulfs Indrie's completely, the way it always does, the way Indrie has stopped being startled by and started being steadied by.

His vision blurs. He blinks several times. The text in his lap swims and refocuses and swims again, and he realizes he is crying. Not dramatically, not with sound, just a slow welling that spills over his lashes and tracks down his cheeks in silence.

He turns his face away so Eskil will not see. But Eskil's thumb moves across his knuckles, once, twice, a slow sweep, and the gentleness of it tells Indrie that Eskil already knows, and that he is not going to say anything.

Indrie breathes. He wipes his eyes with his free hand and stares at the incomprehensible subjunctive tense and does not let go.

The fire burns low. The room grows warmer and closer. At some point the documents slip from Eskil's other hand and settle on the table and neither of them picks them up. Indrie's book has closed on his thumb and he has stopped pretending to read. The silence is whole and unhurried and it asks nothing of either of them.

"I used to imagine this," Indrie says, very quietly. He is not sure the words are loud enough to carry.

Eskil's thumb pauses on his knuckles. Then resumes.

"In Kalkoa," Indrie continues. "In my room." He does not call it a closet out loud, though that is what it was. He has started allowing himself precision in some things and mercy in others. "I would lie there in the dark and imagine what it would be like to sit beside someone. Just, sit. Without being needed. Without being summoned or dismissed or waiting for the next thing to hurt."

He swallows. His throat is tight and his voice is thin but he keeps going because he has learned, in these weeks, that keeping things inside does not make them smaller. It makes them sharper.

"I could never imagine the person. I tried, but they were always blurred. Featureless. I knew what the feeling would be but I didn't know who would give it to me." He looks down at their hands. "I didn't know it would be you."

Eskil is watching him.

"I didn't know it would be any of this," Indrie says. "Morgan. Dagny. Ingrid. Ermin. This city. The clinic." He takes a breath and it catches and he pushes through it. "I didn't know people could be like this. I didn't know that someone would teach me to braid my hair, or bring me books, or—" His voice breaks. He presses his lips together and waits until he can trust it again. "Or hold my hand while reading. As though it were nothing. As though it were the easiest thing in the world."

Eskil huffs out a disgruntled sound.

"It has not been easy," he says. His voice is low and rough and the words come out like they cost him something. "Indrie, it has been the hardest thing I've ever done and I've conquered kingdoms."

Indrie turns to look at him. Eskil is not looking at the documents or the fire or the far wall. He is looking at Indrie. His blue eyes are very bright and very steady and there is something in them that Indrie has seen before, in the hallway, on the couch, in the dark of the keep while he cleaned blood from Indrie's skin, but never this clearly. Never this unguarded.

It is the look of a man who is not reaching for his armor.

"But it was worth it," Eskil says clearly. "It is the most worthwhile thing I have ever fought for."

Indrie's heart swells. He lifts their joined hands and presses his lips to Eskil's scarred knuckles. The gesture is a mirror. The same thing Eskil has done for him. A promise returned. A language they have built between them, word by careful word, in the spaces where the real languages fail.

Although, he thinks with some humor, maybe they had to fail to get them where they are.

Chapter 31

Eskil

Dawn breaks the color of a wound, red and swollen at the horizon, bruising to purple where it meets the retreating dark. Eskil has not slept. He has been sitting in the chair by the window since early morning, fully dressed, watching the sky bleed itself open over the mountains while the fire dies behind him and the man in his bed breathes soft and even and unaware.

He has sent men to die before. He has held their hands and looked them in the eyes and told them what they were riding toward and watched them go anyway, because that is what kings do. Kings spend people. They spend them like coin and call it duty and sleep well enough most nights because the reasoning of it, the ones saved against the ones spent, usually comes out in favor of the living.

This is his brother. The reasoning can go fuck itself.

Morgan has never used a blade. He speaks six languages and reads more than that and writes in a hand so precise it looks printed, and he cannot throw a punch without breaking his own thumb. Eskil knows this because Morgan tried once, at sixteen, during an argument about import tariffs that escalated beyond the bounds of diplomatic discourse, and Eskil had to set the bone himself while Morgan sat white-faced and furious and refused to admit he was crying.

That is the man Eskil is sending into a stronghold full of warriors who want to use him like a chess piece and discard him when the game is won.

He has gone over the contingencies so many times they have worn grooves in his skull. If communication is cut off. If Bohdi signals the abort. If Bohdi does not signal anything at all and the silence stretches past the window and into the territory of the unthinkable. He has a plan for every version of this that ends badly, and not one of those plans will bring his brother back if the worst has already happened.