Page 54 of Tending the Ache

Indrie's mouth closes. His jaw works, and then the fight goes out of him all at once and he sinks back into the cushions.

Eskil crosses to the door and flags down the first servant he sees, a girl, young, who goes wide-eyed at the sight of the king in the doorway with blood on his shirt. He tells her he needs warm water, clean cloths, and a basin. He tells her to bring them quickly and to tell nobody. She nods frantically and runs.

He returns to the couch. Indrie has drawn his legs up and wrapped his arms around his knees and made himself as compact as he can. The shirt, Eskil's shirt, the one from the ship, the one Indrie has been wearing for weeks as though it belongs to him, is soaked through at the shoulder and the back with blood that is not his. The neck of it has gone dark and stiff. The thin line across his throat where the scalpel sat has stopped bleeding on its own, but the skin around it is angry and red and smeared.

Eskil sits on the edge of the low table across from him and rests his forearms on his knees and looks. Just looks. Catalogues the damage the way he would after a battle. The throat cut is shallow. The bruising on his arm is already darkening, fingerprint-shaped marks pressed into skin that takes a mark easily. There is a scrape on his elbow, probably from being hauled through the clinic doorway.

And the blood. On his neck, his jaw, in his hair where it sprayed when Eskil opened the man's throat from behind.

Eskil's hands are steady. The rest of him is not.

He could have died.

The thought comes through hard and Eskil shoves it down into the place where he keeps the things that will undo him if he lets them surface. Alongside it goes the image of Indrie in the man's grip, barefoot in his sleep clothes with a scalpel at his throat. The torchlight on the blade. His eyes.

The servant returns with the basin and cloths. Eskil takes them at the door and closes it behind her and carries them to the couch.

He sets the basin down and wrings a cloth in the warm water and sits beside Indrie on the couch.

"I need to take the shirt off you," he says.

Indrie's arms tighten around his knees. "You shouldn't — Eskil, you're the king, you shouldn't be doing this. You should call someone. A maid, or —"

"I am not calling a maid."

"You should. It isn't proper for me to let you —"

"Indrie." Eskil holds his gaze. "Let me."

There is a war happening on Indrie's face and Eskil can see every front of it. The shame. The stubbornness. The impulse to refuse. And underneath all of it something rawer that wants to say yes, that is so starved for gentleness that the offer of a warm cloth and clean hands makes his eyes bright and his breath uneven.

Eskil waits, because the one lesson about Indrie that took him too long and cost too much is that pushing makes him retreat.

The war ends. Indrie uncurls his fingers from the hem. He nods, once.

Eskil works the shirt over his head as carefully as he can. The fabric has stiffened where the blood dried and pulling it free takes patience he does not naturally possess. Indrie winces when the collar catches on the cut at his throat, and Eskil murmurs an apology and eases it clear with two fingers and peels the rest off and drops it on the floor.

And then Indrie is bare from the waist up on his couch, and Eskil's brain, treacherous and undisciplined and godforsaken, does not confine itself to the assessment he is trying to conduct.

He sees the blood first. That is what he makes himself see. The streaks across the collarbones. The smear along the left side of the neck. The dark stain running from shoulder to chest. The cut, thin and angry. The bruises blooming on his upper arm.

He also sees the rest. The line of Indrie's collarbones. The shallow dip between them where the skin is thin and unmarked. The narrow chest rising and falling too quickly. The contraction of his stomach when he breathes in, the ridges of his lower ribs just visible, and the dark trail of hair that starts below his navel and disappears into the waist of his —

Gods. Get hold of yourself.

He wrings the cloth again. Focuses on the water, on the warmth of it, on the task. He is cleaning blood off a man who nearly died. That is what is happening. That is the only thing that is happening. The fact that the man in question is half-naked and beautiful and close enough for Eskil to count his eyelashes is irrelevant.

He brings the cloth to Indrie's throat first, pressing gently below the cut, and begins cleaning the blood away. Indrie hisses at the contact and his hand flies up, not to stop him but to grip Eskil's forearm, fingers closing around the tattooed skin with a strength that surprises them both.

Indrie lets go immediately. "Sorry. I'm sorry, I didn't mean to —"

"It's fine." Eskil catches his hand before it can retreat and puts it back on his forearm. "Hold on to me if you need to."

Indrie stares at him. There is something in his face Eskil cannot name and does not want to examine, because examining it will ruin him. Indrie's fingers settle back, lighter this time, tentative, as though he expects the permission to be withdrawn.

Eskil works. Throat and neck, slow strokes, rinsing the cloth when it reddens. The water turns pink. He replaces it from the pitcher the servant left and continues, throat to jaw, to the smear behind Indrie's ear where the blood caught in his hair.

He can feel Indrie watching him. The weight of that gaze presses against his skin and Eskil keeps his eyes on the work and tries not to think about what Indrie sees. A king on his knees, because at some point he shifted off the couch and is kneeling in front of it again, bringing himself down to Indrie's level, scrubbing blood off a healer with a gentleness that has no business belonging to the same hands that opened a man's throat an hour ago.