Page 62 of Tending the Ache

He has been thinking about the kiss since approximately three seconds after it happened and has not stopped. He thought about it while sitting on the floor of his quarters holding Indrie's hand in the dark. He thought about it while watching the moonlight move across the stone. He thought about it when he eased his fingers free at dawn and stood and looked down at Indrie sleeping and his hand curled around the ghost of Eskil's grip. He thought about it through his morning briefing and through the council session and through a lunch he did not eat and through the drills he is not actually overseeing.

He is a thirty-three-year-old king who has fought wars and killed men and held a crown together with his bare hands for fourteen years and he has been reduced to a lovesick adolescent by three seconds.

Fuck.

Bohdi is still talking. Something about the Wolfe correspondence. Eskil makes himself focus.

"The tone has shifted," Bohdi says, leaning on the fence. "What started as an invitation has acquired an edge. Less we would be honored and more we expect. The phrasing in the latest letter is pointed. They lay out the strategic advantages of the match as though we have not already done the math ourselves."

"They're getting impatient."

"They're getting aggressively impatient."

Eskil files that too. The information slots into a pattern he does not like. The Jakadi feeding them a fiction, the attack on Askarte, the spy in Valen, and now the Wolfe pressing harder for a marriage that may not be what it appears to be. The pieces are not connected yet, or they are and he cannot see the shape of it, and the not-seeing makes his skin itch.

"Watch their communications," he tells Bohdi. "Everything that comes in. I want to see it before the council does."

Bohdi nods. Then he tilts his head and studies Eskil with the leisurely assessment of a man who has known him since they were boys and has no use whatsoever for the mask Eskil wears for everybody else.

"You look like shit," Bohdi says conversationally. "When did you last sleep?"

"I'm fine."

"So not recently, then." Bohdi picks at something on the axe haft. "Heard you spent the night in your quarters with the door shut and word out not to disturb you."

"I was dealing with Indrie."

"Was that what that was called?"

"Bohdi."

"Because the way you deal with Indrie is historically—"

"Bohdi."

His second holds up both hands, palms out, the picture of innocence, and the grin splitting his face is the one that has been getting him punched since they were sixteen. "As you say, my king. Dealing with Indrie. Very official."

He stands, swings the axe onto his back, and claps Eskil on the shoulder hard enough to rattle his teeth.

"Go and find your healer," Bohdi says. "You're useless out here."

He saunters off before Eskil can answer, which is fortunate, because the answer forming in Eskil's mouth would have scandalized every soldier within earshot.

***

He goes to the library to find Morgan.

He has questions about the Wolfe correspondence that want his brother's diplomatic eye, and Morgan spends his evenings in the library the way other men spend theirs in a tavern. This is the reason and the only reason and Eskil is not checking whether Morgan has company tonight, because that would imply he is keeping track of Indrie's whereabouts, which he is not, because he is a king and not a stalker and there is a difference, even if the difference is getting thinner by the day.

He reaches the library door, which is ajar, and stops.

Morgan is on the floor, as is his custom, surrounded by the usual chaos of open books arranged in a semicircle around him. A charcoal pencil behind his ear. Ink on his fingers. He is talking, rapid and animated, gesturing at something on the page in front of him.

And sitting next to him, in the middle of the chaos, is Indrie.

He is in clothes that fit him. Rengaran in cut, dark wool and soft leather, tailored close to his slight frame. Not Eskil's for once. His own.

And his hair is braided.