Page 77 of Tending the Ache

Indrie glances up at him as they walk. At the gash, and at the way Bohdi is holding his head very slightly angled, and at the fact that twice now he has put a hand on a wall he did not need to touch.

"You have a head wound, Bohdi."

"My head is fine."

"Bohdi–"

"Later, Indrie," Bohdi says, and there is no argument in it, and Indrie files it under the moment the king is stitched closed and lets it go.

They reach the keep. The guards at the door take one look at Bohdi and step aside. Through the entrance hall, up the stairs, through the corridors, left at the tapestry, right at the sconces, up the short flight of worn stone steps. Indrie's feet know the route. His body carries him while his mind runs ahead, cataloguing supplies, planning.

Bohdi pushes open the door to Eskil's quarters and Indrie follows him in and shrugs off his coat near the door and drops it. His boots follow, kicked off without breaking stride, an old habit from a lifetime of sickbeds, bare feet quieter and steadier on stone.

He crosses to the bed.

Eskil is laid on top of the blankets, shirtless. The lamplight catches the planes of his face and they are wrong. The color is wrong, waxy and drawn, the skin pulled tight across the bones in a way that speaks of hours of slow persistent bleeding. Sweat beads at his temples despite the chill.

And the bandaging. Bohdi's work, and Indrie can see the competence in it, the soldier's training, the wrapping done fast and firm under field conditions. But the linen is soaked through. A bloom of red, darkest at the center, radiating outward, and the pattern tells Indrie the wound has not stopped. Five hours of steady seep. Five hours on horseback, every movement of the animal pulling at it, undoing whatever clotting tried to form.

A serving maid is standing near the wall, young and white-faced, wringing her hands so hard the knuckles have gone red.

Indrie sets his satchel on the bedside table and opens it. His hands move automatically. Suturing needles, thread, the antiseptic wash, shears, clean linen, laid out in the order he will need them, each item placed where his fingers can find it without looking.

The instrument roll goes down last. He opens it flat and the narrow empty slot is still there, third from the left, where the fine scalpel should be.

He does not look at it for longer than it takes to see it. He has a curved needle and a straight one and a lancet and steady hands, and the thing that is missing from this roll is on a shelf in an evidence chest somewhere beneath this keep, and it is not what he needs tonight.

He turns to the maid.

"I need clean water," he says, and his voice is calm and clear and carries the authority of a man with no time for uncertainty. "As hot as you can manage. And towels. Every clean one you can find. Bring them here now."

She runs.

Indrie turns back to the bed and begins cutting the bandages away. The shears slide along the edge of the wrapping and the linen parts and peels back and the wound comes into view and his breath catches behind his teeth.

The laceration runs from below Eskil's ribs nearly to his hip. Long and deep and ugly, ragged at the edges, the mark of a serrated blade that caught and dragged rather than cut clean. The tissue beneath is swollen and angry, the flesh torn in layers, and Indrie can see the glint of bone at the deepest point.

He catalogues it in two heartbeats. Depth, through skin and muscle to the bone. Contamination, significant, given the hours and the field conditions. Bleeding, ongoing, slow and persistent, the kind of steady weep that drains a man by degrees. Infection risk, very high.

He can fix this. He has fixed worse. He kept a man with Granger's alive for five years on a fraction of the supplies laid out on this bedside table.

He is aware, as he measures thread against his forearm, that Eskil is watching him. Through half-lidded eyes, brow dotted with sweat, breathing labored, face ashen. But conscious. Those blue eyes track his movements with a lucidity that has no business existing in a man who has been bleeding for five hours.

Eskil's mouth curves. Barely. The ghost of something that wants to be a smile.

"This isn't how I'd hoped to see you again," he says.

His voice is rough and thin and stripped of everything but the words. And underneath the roughness there is something that makes Indrie's hands falter for half a beat. A tenderness, bruised and rueful, the voice of a man who has been thinking about this reunion and had imagined it going very differently.

Indrie huffs out a breath with no humor in it. He does not look up from threading the needle.

"No," he says. "The situation is not ideal."

He gives Eskil a look. The look he gives patients who are trying to be brave when they should be frightened, the one that says I see you, and I am not impressed, and you are going to do exactly what I tell you.

Eskil's eyes soften. And the fondness in them, the thing he cannot swallow, the thing that shows through no matter how hard he tries to hide it, is written across his face as plainly as text on a page.

Indrie has to look away. He looks at the wound instead, which is easier.