Page 47 of Tending the Ache

"Promise me," Eskil says. His voice is steadier now. "Promise me you won't go near the prisoner. I'll send someone to see to his wounds. Properly. A guard with field training, someone who can work under watch. He'll be treated and I'll see to it myself. But not you."

Indrie's eyes burn. The pressure rises behind his sternum with nowhere to go and he blinks against it and nods. The nod is small and unsteady. A promise given for a promise, and he believes both will be kept.

He finds his voice. It takes a moment. It is there underneath the tightness, waiting.

"Thank you," Indrie says.

Eskil looks at him for longer than is comfortable, and there is something in it that neither of them has language for yet, not in Rengaran, not in Kalkoan, not in any tongue Indrie has studied. His hand is still on Indrie's arm. His thumb moves once across the fabric of the coat.

Then he lets go.

He steps back and the space between them opens and the corridor is only stone again, cold and slatted with light, and below them the keep settles into its evening.

Indrie turns and walks back to the clinic.

He does not remember the walk. The streets, the turns, the people he may or may not have passed. He moves through the front room without seeing it, past the shelves of labeled jars and the examination table and the herbs hanging from their iron hooks, into the small back room.

He sits on the edge of his bed.

The shaking has stopped. His hands are still when he holds them out in front of him, and his breathing has evened, and the ringing behind his ears has gone quiet. What is left is not calm. It is the exhausted stillness that comes after weather, when the air is clean and the ground is soaked and nobody has gone out yet to count what was lost.

He brews tea. Chamomile, for calm. The ritual grounds him, measuring the dried flowers, heating the water, pouring. He wraps both hands around the warm cup and drinks slowly.

He thinks about what he said.

Tell me whether there is anything left of him worth treating, or whether I should simply wait to see him buried.

He said that. He stood in front of a man who has not slept, who has spent a night and a day doing something that leaves a mark on whoever does it, and he threw a drowned man on a ship at him and watched it go in. He looked at Eskil and saw the king and forgot, or decided to forget, that there was anyone else in the room. Someone with the world on his shoulders and blood under his nails, who came home off the sea and put himself between Indrie and everything that has happened since. Who knelt on a deck to make himself smaller. Who stood in a corridor and apologized and meant it enough that saying it hurt him.

Indrie did not mean to make it hurt. He knows a wound when he opens one, though, and he saw that one land.

He sets the tea down. He changes into his sleep clothes. He lies down and pulls the blanket to his chin and stares at the ceiling.

Both things are true. Both things are Eskil. The one who held him in the corridor and the one who gave the command. The tenderness and the authority. Indrie does not know how to hold both at once, how to reconcile the hands that heal with the hands that hurt, but he has known since the first day on that ship that they are the same hands.

He will not go to the cells. Not because he was ordered. Because Eskil asked him, and because someone will go in his place, and the prisoner will be tended, and the vow will be kept even if Indrie is not the one to keep it.

Tomorrow he will apologize. Not for the asking. He will never apologize for the asking, which is the bedrock of him and does not bend. For the rest of it. For the stowaway and the sea and standing in front of a man who was already bleeding and pressing his thumb into it.

Chapter 14

Eskil

Eskil has to put both hands flat on his desk and breathe. In through the nose, out through the mouth, the way the old weaponmaster taught him when he was fifteen and too angry to hold a sword without shaking. The technique is built for battle rage, for the red-misted fury that comes down in close combat and makes a man swing wild instead of precise.

It has no business being used by a king standing in his own study because he made a healer flinch.

But here he is. Breathing. Counting. Doing the exercise for controlling a killing temper because he cannot otherwise get his hands to stop.

There were two of them and he cannot decide which is worse.

The first was here, at this desk. The shoulders drawing inward, the chin dropping, the whole man folding back down into something smaller and older and trained.

The second he did not see. He felt it. His hand closed around Indrie's arm in the hallway and every muscle in that body locked at once, braced, teeth clicking together, the recoil travelling up through Eskil's own arm and into his chest. That is a body that has been grabbed before by hands that did not stop at grabbing.

He pulled Indrie against his chest and Indrie froze. Stood there with his hands splayed at his sides and his breathing gone to nothing. Eskil held on and spoke into his hair and felt the exact moment the ice began to crack, the shoulders coming down by degrees, the forehead settling against his collarbone with a trust so fragile it closed his throat.

And before that. Yes, your majesty. Quiet and hollow and obedient, out of a mouth that has called him by his name.