Page 48 of Tending the Ache

He spoke to Indrie the way Armond must have spoken to him. Same tone. Same authority. Same flat assumption that his word was the end of it and the person receiving it had no right to a second sentence.

He watched someone who had finally started standing up straight fold back into the shape of a servant, and he was the one who did the folding.

At least he followed. That is the one thing. The one thing he did tonight that he does not have to hate himself for. He heard the footsteps going away down the hallway and his body moved before his pride could stop it, and he ran, and he caught him, and he held on.

And Indrie stayed. Shaking, barely breathing, frightened, and he stayed. He looked up and Eskil saw it in his face: the fear, and underneath the fear, the decision to stay anyway. The choice. The one thing Armond never gave him, and the thing Eskil has been trying to give him every day since the ship, clumsily, with hands better suited to breaking than to building.

In through the nose. Out through the mouth.

He followed this time. He said the words. He held on. But the damage was done before the holding, and no apology in a hallway undoes the sound of yes, your majesty out of a mouth that had finally stopped saying it.

So he tries to work.

The documents are the same documents that were there an hour ago and they have not improved. The requisitions blur. The patrol schedules swim. The quill is wrong in his hand, too light, too delicate, an instrument for making things, and his hands spent a night and a day taking a man apart in a stone room and have not been properly washed since.

He thinks about sending someone to the clinic. Not himself. He made a promise in that hallway, an unspoken one, when he loosened his arms and let Indrie choose to walk away. The choosing was the point. But he could send someone. A guard to check. A maid with food. Morgan, who would know what to say, who always knows what to say, who has never once put that look on anybody's face.

He doesn't. Sending someone would be another version of arriving. Another version of Eskil deciding what Indrie needs and when he needs it and who brings it to his door. He took Indrie's say in the matter once tonight and he is not taking it twice.

But gods, he wants to be standing in that clinic right now. He wants it so badly his teeth ache.

The evening goes. The last of the light drains out of the window and the room fills up with dark. Eskil grinds through the patrol schedules by force of will, giving them the same mechanical attention he gives anything that must be done regardless of whether he is fit to do it. He signs things. He reads Bohdi's preliminary plan for Greyhollow. He reads Morgan's trade summary, wool and timber and a fishing dispute in the northern villages that his brother has resolved with his usual appalling competence, and absorbs not one word of it.

He keeps thinking about the weight of Indrie's forehead against his collarbone. The smallness of it. Something carried a very long way and finally set down.

He does not eat. The tray the kitchen maid left is still on the corner of the desk, the bread going hard, a skin of grease setting on the broth. He looks at it once. It looks back. Neither of them is interested.

He thinks about what Indrie said to him. Tell me whether there is anything left of him worth treating, or whether I should simply wait to see him buried. The words landed where they were aimed and they are still in him. The cut was clean and it has not closed. He cannot even be angry about it. Indrie was not wrong. The man in the cell is a ruin and Eskil made him one, and the healer looked at the king who did the ruining and asked him to account for it, and Eskil answered with a crown instead of an answer.

He has to send someone to tend the prisoner. He promised. Standing in that hallway with Indrie's hair against his mouth he said I'll send someone and he'll be treated and I'll see to it myself. He said it and Indrie believed him and walked away believing him, and Eskil will keep the promise if it kills him, because it is the only clean thing that came out of tonight.

He writes the order. A guard with field training, under arms, the cell door open, the prisoner restrained, a second man posted on the stair. He writes it in his own hand and seals it and sends it down with a runner and does not let himself think about how much less it is than what Indrie would have done.

He should light a lamp. He does not light a lamp, because lighting a lamp would be an admission that he intends to be awake in it, so he sits in the gloom reading by whatever is left of the day until there is nothing left of the day and the documents are only shapes and his eyes have been burning for an hour.

At some point, without deciding to, he puts his head down on the desk.

The trade report is unreasonably comfortable. The parchment is cool against his cheek and the ink dried weeks ago and the curve of the desk edge fits under his temple better than any pillow he has ever paid for. He tells himself he will shut his eyes for a moment. Just long enough for the burning to stop.

He sleeps.

***

The alarm horns wake him.

The sound is enormous, a deep resonant bellow that goes through stone and timber and straight through the fog of sleep, and it fills the study and fills his skull and fills the space between two heartbeats with something older than thought. The horns mean danger.

Eskil is on his feet before the sound has finished, moving for the door with his cheek still bearing the reversed print of a wool tally. His hand goes to his hip. His sword is not there, it is on the rack by the door, and he takes it without breaking stride, and the weight of the hilt in his palm is the first thing that has felt right in eight hours.

The keep is awake. Torchlight jumping, voices calling, boots hammering on stone as men and women who were asleep a minute ago come up moving, because this garrison drills for exactly this. A servant flattens herself against the wall as he passes with a water pitcher clutched to her chest.

Bohdi comes around the far corner at a dead run.

Axe already in his hand. Not on his back, in his fist, head angled forward, the way he carries it when he expects to be swinging inside the minute. His braids are loose, his tunic is unlaced, and he is barefoot, which means he was asleep and did not stop for boots.

"The prisoner," Bohdi says, hauling up in front of him, breathing hard. "He killed the guard you sent to tend his wounds. Took the man's keys and his knife and went up the stairs through the second post. He's loose in the city."

Eskil does not move.