Page 45 of Tending the Ache

The words come out quieter than he intended, but they land with force. He sees it in the way Eskil's expression shifts, a flicker, barely there, behind the stone.

"I saw what was left of the man at the mast when your men were finished with him." Indrie's hands have curled at his sides, fingers pressing into his palms. "He could not stand. And then you had him thrown into the sea."

The silence after this is different. It is not weighted. It is hollow.

Indrie's heart is hammering, but he does not look away. "So tell me what I would find down there. Tell me whether there is anything left of him worth treating, or whether I should simply wait to see him buried."

Something moves through Eskil's face, dark and complicated and gone before Indrie can read it. What replaces it is worse. The openness, the softness, even the careful patience, all of it withdraws.

What remains is the king.

Eskil stands. The motion is slow and deliberate, and the full height of him, the breadth of his shoulders, the weight of his presence, fills the space between them in a way it never has before. He has always been careful around Indrie. Careful to kneel, to sit, to bring himself level.

He is not bringing himself level now.

"He would let you get close." Eskil's voice is a different instrument than it was a moment ago. Lower. Harder. The edge no longer filed but honed. "That is what a man like that does. You would come down those stairs with your satchel and he would be slumped in the chair, and you would forget everything else, because that is what you are."

He steps around the desk, and Indrie has to tilt his head back to hold his gaze.

"You would kneel down in front of him with your back to the door and your hands full of bandages. Three seconds of you thinking about his injuries instead of about him. Three seconds is all a man needs."

"He is restrained—"

"You are half his size," Eskil says. His voice has dropped, not in volume but in register, each word placed with the deliberation of a man building a wall. "You have never held a blade. You do not know what a cornered man is capable of, and I will not educate you by letting you find out."

Indrie cannot get a full breath. Something in him is recoiling, is shrinking, is providing a response it has learned down in his bones.

"He would kill you before you could kneel at his side," Eskil says. "And I will not allow it."

“Eskil–”

"You are not to go near the prisoner," Eskil says. "You are not to go near the cells. Is that clear?"

It is not a question. It is a command, the first Eskil has ever given him, hard and unyielding and delivered in the tone of a king addressing a subject and not a man speaking to somebody he cares for.

The shift is instantaneous.

The confident young healer who walked into this room, who stood his ground and spoke his mind and challenged the most powerful man in the kingdom, disappears. In his place is the boy who knelt on a stone floor in Kalkoa and did as he was told.

The straightening in his spine reverses. His shoulders draw inward. His chin drops. His hands uncurl from their fists and come to rest at his sides, open and empty, the way they always were when Armond spoke and Indrie listened.

He cannot breathe. His lungs have gone shallow and quick and will not fill. There is a high thin ringing somewhere behind his ears.

"Yes, your majesty," Indrie says.

His voice is very small. The title comes out of him like something dredged up from deep water, an old reflex, a shape his mouth remembers from years of practice. He has not called Eskil that since the ship. He has called him by name, has teased him gently, but your majesty belongs to a different version of him. The version that lived in a closet-sized room and flinched at footsteps and did not have a clinic or friends or a choice.

Above him, and far away, he hears Eskil make a sound.

It is not a word. It is the sound a man makes when he has put his hand on a stove.

"Indrie." The voice has changed completely. Every hard edge gone out of it, low and careful and almost pleading, and Eskil has come around the side of the desk, and Indrie can see his boots at the edge of his vision. "Indrie. Look at me."

He can't. He can't.

He turns on the ball of his foot and goes out of the study with his coat catching on the door frame and his breath coming in short useless pulls that give him nothing, and behind him he hears his name once more and does not stop.

He ran from Eskil once before, in a cabin on a ship, when he thought a raised voice meant a raised hand. He knows better now. He has known better for weeks. He runs anyway, because knowing better lives in his head and the running lives somewhere else entirely, somewhere older, somewhere that has never once been wrong about what comes after that tone.