Page 55 of Tending the Ache

He moves to the collarbones. Draws the cloth along the ridge of bone and Indrie's breath catches audibly. The fingers on Eskil's forearm tighten.

Eskil pauses. Indrie's chest is rising and falling too fast and there is a flush beginning beneath the blood, pink warming the grey-white of shock, spreading across his cheeks and down his neck, and Eskil knows that flush. He saw it on the ship, in his cabin, when he pulled Indrie into his lap and the man went scarlet from hairline to navel.

Not now. Not tonight. Not while he is shaking.

He continues. Down the chest, following the stain, careful around the ribs, and across the flat of his stomach where a spray of red has dried in a pattern that makes something in Eskil go cold when he works out the proximity required to produce it.

Indrie is staring at his hands. At the wringing and the rinsing, at the other hand bracketing the skin to steady it. He stares as though he cannot comprehend what they are doing.

"You shouldn't —" Indrie starts again, and his voice cracks.

Eskil does not look up. "What shouldn't I do?"

"This. Any of this. You're the king. And I'm just a servant of the kingdom. You shouldn't be on your knees cleaning blood off someone who —"

Indrie does not finish. His mouth works around the words and nothing comes out, and then he presses his lips together and looks away, and the war on his face is no longer about accepting care. It is about something older, and Eskil knows better than to name it out loud.

Indrie is quiet for a long moment. His fingers have not moved from Eskil's forearm.

"I said something to you," he says. "In the study."

"You said a great many things in the study. Most of them were right."

"You have been ruling for more than half my life and I've been here a week and I presumed to tell you what you did wrong while you were protecting your people." He is not looking at Eskil now. He is looking at the basin, at the water gone pink. "While you were protecting me."

Eskil says nothing, because he has no idea what to say.

"You carry a great burden and I cannot possibly comprehend it," Indrie says. He swallows. "I am sorry. For what I said, and for how I said it. The asking was right. That part I will not take back. But the rest of it was cruel, and I chose it, and I would take it back if I could."

Something in Eskil's chest turns over.

He reaches forward and pulls Indrie into his arms.

Not gently. Not tentatively. He gathers him, one arm across his back with his hand splayed between the shoulder blades, the other curling around his waist, and pulls him forward off the couch and into his chest, and Indrie comes with a startled sound, a sharp intake of breath, bare skin against Eskil's clothed chest.

He is so slight. The thought ambushes Eskil every time they are this close. The way he fits. The way his head tucks under Eskil's chin. He smells of blood and copper and underneath it, faintly, of chamomile, and Eskil holds him and does not let go.

Indrie resists. Not physically, he does not push or struggle, but his body is rigid, locked tight, every muscle braced. He is holding himself together the way he has always held himself together. Alone. Contained. Folded inward.

Then, by degrees so small Eskil can count them, Indrie softens.

The shoulders unlock first. Then the arms, clamped across his own chest, ease outward, and his hands find the fabric of Eskil's shirt and close around fistfuls of it. Then his weight shifts, leaning in instead of bracing against, and the rigid line of his spine begins to curve, to give, settling into Eskil until there is no space left anywhere between them.

Indrie presses his face into Eskil's chest. And he breathes. Hard and ragged, the kind of breathing that comes before tears or instead of them, lungs working to process what the rest of the body cannot, and Eskil holds him through it. Holds him and does not move and does not speak, because the speaking is done and what is left is only this. The weight of him. The sound of his breathing evening out. The tremor running down and down until it stops.

Then Indrie pulls back.

Not far. Just far enough to look at him, and his face is not the calm of someone coming through to the other side. It is raw and open and wrecked, and his eyes are bright with something that is not quite tears, and there is a crease between his brows that Eskil wants to press his thumb against until it smooths.

"You killed a man because of me," Indrie says.

His voice is quiet. Devastated. Not horror at the violence, Eskil has learned to read the difference, but horror at the cost. At the idea that someone died for him. That his life was weighed against another's and found heavier, and that the weighing was done by the man in front of him without hesitation.

Eskil shakes his head. "Not because of you."

"He's dead because I —"

"He is dead because he was a spy who killed one of my men and escaped custody and took a hostage." Eskil keeps his voice level. The voice he uses when he needs someone to hear the words and not the feeling behind them. "His death is on his own choices, Indrie. Not yours."