Page 80 of Tending the Ache

He reaches up with his left hand, careful not to shift his arm where it lies across Indrie's back, and brushes a strand of hair from Indrie's cheek. It is soft. His fingertips graze the skin beneath it and Indrie does not stir.

He should let him sleep. The man is exhausted. The shadows beneath his eyes are visible even in the grey morning light, and the quality of his unconsciousness, deep and unmoving and boneless, is the sleep of someone who has gone past tiredness into collapse. Indrie has not been sleeping well. Or enough. Or at all.

He should let him sleep, and he should not be in this bed himself, because he has a kingdom to run and a border situation that is actively deteriorating and a council that will want answers and a war party that lost two men who need to be mourned and honoured.

He does not move. Not yet. He gives himself this, sixty seconds, maybe ninety, an unconscionable luxury for a king in wartime, and looks at the man beside him and breathes.

Then he eases himself upright.

The process is not graceful. The wound screams at him in a language that requires no translation, and he has to brace his left hand on the mattress and lever himself up in stages, each stage accompanied by a hiss of breath that he contains through clenched teeth. The room swims briefly at the edges, the grey tilt of low blood pressure, and he sits on the edge of the bed and waits for it to pass.

Indrie does not wake. He stirs. A small sound, his hand reaching across the warm space Eskil has vacated, finding nothing, pulling back. Then he settles deeper into the pillow and is still.

Eskil watches this and feels something give way behind his sternum. The reaching. The hand searching for him in sleep and not finding him and retreating. Such a small thing. Such a nothing of a gesture, unconscious and involuntary, and it carves a hole in him that is wider and deeper than the wound at his ribs.

He gets to his feet. The room tilts again and he braces a hand against the bedpost and waits it out and then walks, slowly and with considerably less dignity than a king should possess, to the washbasin across the room. He splashes water on his face. It is cold and it helps. He drinks from the cup on the table, which someone left there, probably Indrie, probably while he was cleaning up, and drains it and refills it and drinks again.

He crosses to the door and opens it and there is an attendant in the hallway who is visibly horrified to see the king standing upright.

"I need Bohdi," Eskil says. "And food. In that order."

She opens her mouth to argue, probably, to tell him he should be in bed, the same instruction he has been ignoring from concerned servants for fourteen years, and then thinks better of it and runs.

He closes the door. Crosses to the small table by the window. Manages to sit in the chair without tearing anything, though the effort brings a fine sheen of sweat to his forehead. He props his elbows on the table and rests his head in his hands and breathes.

Bohdi arrives quickly. He was probably sleeping in the hallway, or more likely, given the head wound, sitting in the hallway refusing to sleep and radiating concern through the door.

He lets himself in without knocking, which is standard, and immediately launches into a combination of concern and complaint that is also standard.

"I almost had to explain to your younger brother," Bohdi says, dropping into the opposite chair with the careful movements of somebody whose skull is unhappy with him, "that our valiant and fearless king had gotten himself skewered to death saving his reckless second-in-command. Do you have any idea what Morgan would have done to me?"

"Keep your voice down," Eskil says. He nods toward the bed.

Bohdi raises an eyebrow. He leans sideways in his chair, just far enough to see past Eskil's shoulder to the bed. He sees the dark hair. The small curled form. The hand still gripping the edge of the blanket.

His eyebrow climbs higher.

He sits back and does not comment. The restraint is, by Bohdi's standards, heroic, and Eskil is distantly grateful even though the look on Bohdi's face suggests the commentary has been deferred rather than cancelled.

"The ambush," Eskil says. "Talk."

"They knew the road." Bohdi's fingers spread flat on the table. "That is the whole of it. The border trouble was a feint and we bought it, and they had men in position on the return route before we ever reached the settlement. They were not waiting to see if we came. They knew we were coming."

"And the withdrawal?"

"Was not a rout. They broke off because they had decided to break off." Bohdi's mouth thins. "Nobody disengages that clean from a fight they are losing. They came for something specific and when they had done as much of it as they were going to do, they left."

Eskil sits with that.

"They could not have known I would ride with the war party."

"Could they not?" Bohdi looks at him. "You have gone out personally to every border engagement for three years. That is not a habit, Eskil. That is a schedule. They read it off you the same way I would read it off them."

The implication settles on him and does not lift. He has been predictable. The Jakadi studied him and found the rhythm and used it, and the ambush was not an opportunistic strike but a planned attempt on his life, or at the very least a calculated effort to put the king out of the field.

"What is their endgame?" Eskil asks. "They do not have the numbers for a direct assault on Valen. They cannot take this kingdom by force."

"No." Bohdi drums the table. "So either they are softening us for somebody who can —"