Page 32 of Tending the Ache

Then he sees the blood.

A cut at Indrie's temple. Still oozing, the edges ragged, trailing crimson down the side of his face in a thin line that disappears into the collar of the too-large shirt. The blood is vivid against his skin, bright and wrong and new, not a healing wound but a fresh one, the kind that is still deciding how much it intends to bleed.

Everything else stops.

The wanting. The aching. The fire in his veins and the voice in his head that was cataloguing the geography of Indrie's wet skin with a specificity that bordered on cartographic. All of it drops away, displaced by something colder and more immediate: Indrie is hurt. Indrie is running through the keep half-dressed and bleeding and visibly upset, and the wanting does not matter because nothing matters except why.

Eskil moves a hand to Indrie's temple. He tilts Indrie's head to see the wound. It is a gash, not deep but ugly, the skin split against what looks like a hard edge. A stone. The rim of something.

"What happened?" he asks. His voice is low and even and does not betray the thing that is building in him.

Indrie flinches back. The motion is small but unmistakable, a pulling away, a retreat, and his eyes are wide and bright with something that is not quite tears and not quite panic but lives in the space between them.

"It was an accident," Indrie says. His voice is rapid and thin and he is not looking at Eskil's face, he is looking at his chest, at the hand that is still on his waist. "It was a misunderstanding. He didn't mean to—"

Eskil hears he.

He hears it and nothing else. The word drops into his mind and the fury rolls through him. Cold first, the initial shock of it, the crystalline clarity that comes before the heat, and then hot, so hot it sears the inside of his skull, and then everywhere, filling every limb and every joint and every clenched and rigid muscle in his body.

He. Someone did this. Some man did this.

Some man in his own keep, under his own roof, put hands on Indrie and split his head open and sent him running through the corridors half-naked and bleeding, and Eskil is going to find out who and he is going to take him apart at the joints.

"He?" Eskil says, and his voice has dropped into a register that his soldiers would recognize as the sound that precedes someone losing something vital. A hand. A career. An ability to eat solid food.

Indrie blanches. The blood is still trickling down his face and his bare legs are shaking, from cold or shock or both, and he pulls out of Eskil's grasp with a jerky, graceless motion that tugs the shirt down and wraps his arms around himself.

"Who hurt you?" Eskil asks.

"No one," Indrie says, and the word is too fast, too emphatic, pushed out of him with the desperate energy of a man trying to close a door he has accidentally opened. "I slipped in the hot springs. I slipped and hit my head on the edge of the pool. That's all. It was my own fault. If I wasn't so stupid that I can't even speak the language of my new home properly—"

"Stop," Eskil says.

It comes out sharper than he wants it to. The word cracks through the corridor and Indrie's mouth snaps shut and his shoulders hunch and Eskil can see, physically see, in the curl of his spine and the drop of his gaze, the flinch traveling through him.

Eskil breathes. Forces himself to breathe. The fury is a living thing inside him, clawing at his ribs, demanding to be let out, but he cannot let it out here. Not with Indrie shrinking in front of him.

He cannot unhear he didn't mean to. The implication sits in him like a blade turned sideways. Someone touched Indrie. Someone put hands on him. Someone did something that required the qualifier he didn't mean to, and the qualifier exists because Indrie has been trained, by years of bruises and boots on stone floors, to excuse the people who hurt him. To explain them. To take their cruelty into his own body and call it his fault.

If I wasn't so stupid—

Eskil is going to find whoever did this and he is going to remove their hands from their wrists with a dull blade. But first, the man in front of him.

He bends down and picks up Indrie's scattered belongings from the floor, the bundled clothes that went flying when they collided, and gathers them into a pile. When he straightens, Indrie is still standing with his arms wrapped around himself, head bowed, blood dripping steadily down the side of his face. He looks so small. He looks so impossibly, heartbreakingly small standing barefoot in the corridor of a keep that is not his home, bleeding from a wound he is calling his own fault, wearing the shirt of a man who has spent a week avoiding him.

"You're bleeding from a head injury and you need to sit down," Eskil says. He says it quietly this time. Carefully. The sharpness filed away.

Indrie bites his lip. He is a healer. He knows Eskil is right. But the hesitation in his body, the reluctance to be led, to be touched, to be anywhere near the man he has been avoiding as diligently as Eskil has been avoiding him, is written in every taut line of his posture.

Eskil does not ask again. He tucks Indrie's scattered belongings under one arm and presses his free hand to the small of Indrie's back, light, barely there, a suggestion rather than a command, and guides him down the hall.

He tells himself he does not mean to take Indrie to his own chambers. That it is close. That it is discreet. That it is the logical choice when you have an injured man in a hallway and the nearest attendant is two corridors away.

The truth is he cannot bear to hand Indrie over to someone else. Not like this. Not bleeding and frightened and half-dressed in Eskil's clothes, smelling of mineral water and something sweet beneath the steam, his dark hair dripping a trail of water on the stone floor. The thought of calling a servant, of placing Indrie in the hands of someone who does not know the geography of his fear, who would not understand why a raised hand makes him flinch or why a closed door makes his breathing change, is intolerable.

They reach Eskil's quarters. Indrie's footsteps hesitate at the threshold. Just a beat. Just long enough for Eskil to feel the hesitation through the hand on his back, a fractional stiffening of the spine beneath his palm.

Then Indrie moves into the space without encouragement. He crosses the room with his arms still wrapped around himself and sits on one of the couches by the unlit fireplace. Awkwardly. Knees pressed together. Hands clasped in his lap. Dripping water onto the upholstery with the expression of a man who is acutely, agonizingly aware that he is ruining the king's furniture and cannot stop.