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Bohdi nods. He turns to go.

And Morgan looks at him for the first time since the gate. The coat is black at the hem and stiff with something that is not mud. There is a cut across the back of one hand that nobody has cleaned. He has been awake for most of three days, and it shows in the gray of his face and the overbright set of his eyes, and he has spent every hour of it holding up everybody around him without once letting anybody see him do it.

Morgan has just ridden a day and a half through a creek to avoid being murdered in his own country. And the only thing in the world he wants, the only thing, is a single moment with this man before the rest of it starts.

He reaches out and hooks one finger through the side of Bohdi's belt, and pulls.

Bohdi stops.

"The council can wait, Bohdi," Morgan says.

He watches Bohdi's eyes go dark.

Then he lets go of the belt and walks off down the passage toward his rooms without looking back. He does not have to look back, because he can hear the footsteps following him all the way.

21

ESKIL

Eskil has a bath being drawn before Indrie is through the door.

He gives the order to the first attendant he passes in the corridor and does not break stride doing it. She takes one look at the two of them, the king in leathers gone stiff with other men's blood and a man half his size tucked under his arm, both of them stinking of smoke and cedar and three days of everything else. She goes without a word. By the time Eskil gets Indrie into their chambers and kicks the door shut, he can already hear water being hauled into the next room.

Indrie is standing in the middle of the room looking at it. His shoulders are up near his ears and his hands are loose at his sides, and the raw bands around both wrists are an angry wet red in the firelight. Eskil looks at them and thinks, with total calm, that he would like very much to go back to that forest and kill everybody in it a second time, and take longer doing it.

The attendants bring the water in. Eskil stands between them and Indrie the entire time they are in the room. It is not because any of them are a threat. He simply cannot make himself step out of the way, and he knows how it looks and does not give a shit how it looks. They fill the tub and lay out soap and oil and towels on the stool and go, and he bolts the inner door behind them. The pair of them will be the talk of the keep by supper. They have been talking about the king and his healer since the spring and not one of them has had the balls to say any of it to his face.

When he turns around, Indrie still has not moved. He is watching Eskil with those dark eyes, and there is so much going on in his face that Eskil cannot pick it apart. Relief. Exhaustion. Something that is trying very hard to hold still and not quite managing it.

Eskil goes to him. He takes the hem of Indrie's dirty shirt between his fingers and lifts it, slowly, slowly enough that Indrie could stop him or step back or say no. Indrie does none of those things. He lifts his arms.

The bruises are worse here than they were in the dark.

Eskil makes himself look at every single one. The older ones on his upper arms, yellow going green at the edges, where somebody's fingers dug in on the road. The long dark one across his ribs. The one on his jaw. The scrapes all down both knees. He looks at them in order and he maps them, first with his eyes and then with the tips of his fingers, not pressing, and he wants the name of every hand that put every one of them there. The names are in a cell under this keep and he is not going down there tonight. That is going to have to be enough.

Indrie's breath catches when Eskil's fingers find the one on his ribs. It is too light a touch to hurt. Indrie's hands come up and settle on Eskil's forearms and stay there.

"They're just bruises," Indrie says. His voice is hoarse and he is doing his best to make it reassuring. "I've had worse."

"I know you have," Eskil says.

That is the fucking problem. He has had worse. He has had much worse, for years, and every inch of it was put there by men Eskil cannot reach anymore. This time around Eskil was a six hour ride away drilling shield formations in the yard and thinking about what they would have for supper.

He unties the laces on Indrie's trousers. Indrie's grip tightens on his arms and the pink comes up across his cheekbones, the same pink as always, and Eskil is so fucking glad to see it that his throat closes. The trousers drop. Indrie is bare underneath, cock soft against his thigh, and Eskil has to stop and swallow before he can look at the rest of him. The insides of his thighs. The jut of his hipbones. The dark thatch of hair at the base of his cock, matted with three days of sweat and dirt. Eskil wants his mouth on all of it. He wants to get him clean first so he can get him filthy again.

He gets him into the tub. Indrie hisses at the heat and every muscle in him pulls up at once, and then all at once he goes slack, the whole of him at once, and sinks until the water is at his collarbones. He puts his head back against the rim and shuts his eyes.

Eskil kneels down on the stone beside him.

He starts with the left hand. He lifts it out of the water and turns it over, and the band around the wrist is weeping in two places where the cord went in deepest. He cleans it. He has cleaned more field wounds than he could count and he has never once in his life cared whether any of them stung, and he cares about this one so much his hands go clumsy. He cleans between the fingers. He works the dirt out from around the nails. Then the other hand, the same way.

He is not good at this part. He never has been. He is good at everything that comes before it, the horses and the blades and the orders, and he is good at everything after, the maps and the reckonings and the lists of who gets quartered. This is the part in the middle where you are supposed to open your mouth and put something honest into the air with nothing in your other hand, and every word Eskil can find is either too small to bother with or too big to get out.

He wrings the cloth and draws it along Indrie's shoulder, down his arm, across his chest. Gentle over the bruises. Thorough everywhere else. The hollow of his throat. The side of his neck, where a Jakadi hand closed and left four dark marks in a row.

His fingers slow there. His jaw goes tight.

"Eskil," Indrie says softly.