Page 35 of Tending the Ache

"That's not necessary," Eskil cuts him off.

He says it evenly. Calmly. As though the words are simple and the sentiment behind them is equally simple and his heart is not trying to claw its way out of him.

Gods, what he does to me.

He does not say that the sight of Indrie in his shirt makes his skin feel tight, makes his fingers itch, makes something possessive and raw coil in him. He does not say that if he could, he would dress Indrie in his clothes every day for the rest of his life, would wrap him in wool and linen and leather that smelled of Eskil's skin and marked him, to every eye that saw him, as his.

He does not say any of this.

"Let me walk you home," he says instead.

Indrie hesitates. Long enough that Eskil thinks he is trying to formulate a tactful refusal, trying to find the polite words that will decline the offer without offending his king, the verbal dance of a man who has spent years navigating the moods of powerful men and knows that a wrong step can cost him.

Then Indrie nods.

"I'd like to show you the clinic," he says. The words are shy. The tilt of his voice is shy. The way he looks up at Eskil through his damp eyelashes is shy, and Eskil is a grown man and a king and a killer of men and he is completely, irrevocably undone by it.

"Lead the way," Eskil says.

Chapter 11

Indrie

Indrie walks through the keep with the king at his side and tries to ignore the passing glances they receive.

It is, as it turns out, impossible to ignore them.

A servant pressing herself against the wall as they pass, not out of fear, Indrie realizes, but out of a kind of startled deference, the way one steps aside for something unexpected rather than something frightening. Her eyes flick from the king to Indrie to the king's hand hovering at the small of Indrie's back, and then she drops her gaze so quickly she might have given herself a neck injury. A guard straightening at the end of the corridor, his spine snapping to attention. A woman carrying a stack of folded linens rounds the corner and does a visible double-take, her gaze landing on Eskil, then traveling down to Indrie, then tracking the space between them, the not-quite-touching, the almost, and she nearly drops the linens before recovering and pressing herself against the wall with a fixed, determinedly blank expression that says she is seeing nothing and thinking everything.

Indrie is acutely aware of what this looks like.

The king. Walking a still-damp young man through the keep at night. His hand hovering at the small of Indrie's back, not touching, not quite, but close enough that Indrie can feel the warmth of his palm through the thin linen of the shirt. Close enough that any observer would see the intention in it, the protectiveness, the nearness that does not exist between a king and a subject.

His face does not stop burning.

It has been burning since the corridor, since the collision, since Eskil knelt beside him and pressed a towel to his wound and looked at him with those blue eyes and said I was too much of a coward to see you myself, and Indrie does not think it is going to stop burning anytime soon. Possibly ever. He may simply live the rest of his life in a permanent state of flushed mortification, a walking testament to the devastating combination of a language barrier and a beautiful man on his knees.

He is still processing the corridor. Still turning the words over in his mind, examining them from every angle, pressing on them the way he presses on a wound to check its depth. I was too much of a coward to see you myself. The words do not fit the understanding he built on the ship and has been maintaining ever since. In that understanding, Eskil does not want him. Eskil was kind to him because Eskil is kind, and lay with him because the fruit required it, and told him the fruit changed nothing because the fruit did change nothing, and the avoidance of the past week was the natural distance a king maintains from a foreign commoner who embarrassed himself by asking to belong.

But coward does not fit.

Coward implies something to be afraid of. And what would Eskil–ruthless and decisive and unflinching, who dives into storms and kills men at war and carries kingdoms on his shoulders– be afraid of?

Indrie does not let himself answer the question. The answer that suggests itself is too large and too dangerous and too close to hope, and hope is a luxury he has learned to ration.

They walk. The keep gives way to the city, the stone floors becoming cobblestones, the torchlit corridors becoming lamplit streets, the close walls opening into the cool night air of Valen in autumn. The city is quieter at this hour but not silent. Tavern light spills from doorways and windows, warm and amber. Somewhere nearby, someone is playing a stringed instrument, a low meandering melody that drifts between the buildings. A cat crosses their path, sleek and unhurried, and disappears under a fence.

While they walk, they talk. Indrie steers them toward safe waters.

"Morgan speaks Kalkoan," he says, and the steadiness of his own voice surprises him. "Fluently. Did you know?"

"I found out when he told me." There is a dry edge to Eskil's voice, self-directed and wry. "Apparently he speaks six languages. Kalkoan among them."

"He's been invaluable. The clinic, the supplies, the books. I don't think I could have managed any of it without him."

Eskil nods. The pride that crosses his face is brief but unmistakable, a softening at the corners of his eyes, a loosening of his jaw. "Morgan is more capable than I deserve. He has been since he was old enough to hold a quill."

"He told me about how you raised him," Indrie says, and then worries he has overstepped, that the intimacy of this knowledge, given by Morgan in the warm privacy of a shared afternoon, does not belong in a nighttime street between a king and a healer who cannot define what they are to each other.