Page 63 of Tending the Ache

Eskil's hand tightens on the doorframe.

It is such a small thing. Such a nothing of a detail. Except that Kalkoans do not braid their hair and Rengarans do, and Indrie is one of his people now and looks like one of his people now, and Eskil was not prepared for what that would do to him. The dark strands are pulled back from his face in a simple plait and it exposes the line of his jaw and the curve of his ear and the shallow cut at his throat, still healing, a thin red line above the collar of his shirt.

Eskil looks at the cut and his jaw tightens and he makes himself look somewhere else.

Indrie is sitting back on his heels with a book open in his lap, leaning toward Morgan to point at something on the page. He is engaged and animated in a way Eskil has rarely seen. His face open, his posture loose, none of the careful containment he wears around Eskil. He is saying something in Kalkoan that Eskil cannot follow and Morgan is arguing back in the same language, and the combined noise of them fills the library with a warmth it has not had in years.

Eskil watches from the doorway and does not announce himself. He has no excuse for this. He is a grown man standing in a doorway staring at somebody sitting on a library floor, which is precisely the behavior Bohdi was needling him about ten minutes ago, and he does not care.

Indrie has color in his face. Not the flush of embarrassment or the grey-white of shock but healthy color, warm and alive, and his dark eyes are bright with the light they get when he is talking about something he knows well. His hands move when he speaks, not the broad gestures of a man compensating for a language barrier but the specific precise motions of somebody describing something technical. He is pointing at an illustration and explaining something about a root system and Morgan is nodding and making notes, and the two of them look as though they have been friends for years instead of weeks.

"Oh," Morgan says, looking up in surprise. "Were you looking for me?"

Indrie has gone very still.

Not the dangerous stillness of a man bracing for a blow, Eskil has learned to tell the difference, but the charged stillness of somebody who has just become acutely aware of another person in the room. His hands have frozen on the book in his lap. His shoulders have drawn up fractionally. He is looking at the page in front of him with a focus that would be convincing if the page were not upside down.

Eskil sees the upside-down page and has to look at the ceiling for a moment.

"I can come back," he says, directing it at Morgan, who is watching the exchange with the sharpened interest of a man who has just been handed a puzzle. "I didn't know you had company."

"It's—" Indrie starts, and his voice comes out higher than usual. He clears his throat. Tries again. "It's fine. You don't have to leave."

He still has not looked up from the upside-down book.

The flush is beginning. Eskil can see it starting at the base of Indrie's throat above his collar, a pink warmth creeping upward with the inevitability of a tide. It reaches his jaw. Climbs his cheeks. Pinks the tips of his ears where the braid exposes them.

Eskil should leave. He has been given a polite invitation to stay by a man who is plainly mortified by his presence, and the decent thing, the kind thing, is to nod and say he will come back tomorrow and let Indrie have his evening in peace.

"We're cross-referencing the plants of Kalkoa against what grows here," Indrie says. He has picked up the book and turned it the right way around. His voice is steadier now, settling into the rhythm of a subject he is confident in, though the flush has not abated. He does not look at Eskil directly. He looks at a point roughly two inches to the left of Eskil's jaw. "What you told me on the ship, about the mountainside being abundant. It made me want to be certain I knew what to look for before I started foraging."

Eskil looks at the space Indrie is not quite looking at him from and thinks, You are talking to me about root systems while blushing to your collarbones and I would sack a city to keep you in this room.

He finds himself coming further in without having given himself permission. His body is a traitor. His legs carry him across the threshold and into the warm circle of lamplight and books, and he lowers himself to the floor beside them, one knee drawn up and the other leg stretched out, close enough that if he reached he could touch Indrie's hand.

He does not reach.

"Show me what you've found," he says.

Indrie's eyes flicker to his, a quick darting glance, barely a second of contact, and then away again. The flush deepens. But his hands move with purpose, turning pages, finding the section he and Morgan have been working through, and he begins pointing out native flora with the quiet authority of a man who knows his subject intimately, even if his voice is slightly breathless and his finger is not quite steady against the page.

Eskil listens. He leans in to see the illustrations, which puts him closer, close enough to catch chamomile and the faint warmth underneath it that is only him, and his brain supplies, helpfully and without invitation, the memory of that scent pressed against his chest in the dark.

Stop it.

He points at a broad-leafed plant with serrated edges. "This grows wild along the northern ridgeline. Thick patches of it near the watchtower ruins. Morgan and I used to pick it on the way back from the tower."

Morgan makes a face. "You used to throw it at me and tell me it was poisonous."

"I was building character."

"I was six. I thought I was going to die."

Indrie's mouth twitches. It is the smallest motion, the corner of his lip lifting, barely visible, and Eskil catches it.

They fall into a rhythm. Eskil points out plants he knows from campaigns and patrols, where they grow, what conditions they favor, which ones the horses will not touch and which ones the horses eat far too much of. Morgan cross-references between the Kalkoan and Rengaran texts, switching languages with the fluidity that makes him invaluable and insufferable in roughly equal measure. Indrie asks questions, tentative at first and directed mostly at Morgan, and then gradually, by increments so small they might be accidental, turning toward Eskil.

He still will not look at him. Not fully. His gaze touches Eskil's face and bounces off, landing on his hands, his shoulder, the page between them, anywhere that is not direct. But his body is angling toward Eskil despite itself. Eskil can see the lean, the imperceptible tilt of his weight, the way he has shifted on his heels so that his knee is an inch closer than it was a minute ago.