Page 79 of Tending the Ache

The king sleeps. His face is softer than Indrie has ever seen it, the tension gone, the furrow between his brows smoothed, the hard set of his mouth eased into something younger. The tattoos on his arms are dark against skin that is still too pale, but his color is better than it was. The bleeding has stopped. The stitching will hold.

He will live.

The knowledge arrives with a force that buckles something in Indrie. He has been holding it together, through Bohdi's fist on the door and the run through the dark streets and the careful precise work of closing a wound that could have killed the man he cares for. Now it is finished, and Eskil will live, and the holding-together has no purpose anymore. What is left is the exhaustion and the fear and the vast shaking relief that fills him up and leaves no room for composure.

He should go. He should cross to the couch and put his boots on and walk to Dagny's and sleep and leave the king to rest. He should be professional about this. He should be measured and composed and appropriate and all the things a healer is supposed to be when the patient is also the man who had him on a desk two days ago and said filthy, tender things into his ear while he did it.

Eskil's arm rests on the blanket and there is space. Enough space for somebody small. Somebody who takes up very little room. Somebody who knows how to make himself compact and unobtrusive.

He is so tired.

He eases onto the bed. Carefully. So carefully that he barely depresses the mattress, distributing his weight in slow increments, watching Eskil's face for any sign of pain. There is none. The king's breathing does not change. The steady rhythm continues, in and out, and Indrie settles onto the left side and curls into the space that is there.

He fits. Of course he fits. He has always fit against Eskil, his body finding the hollows and angles of the larger frame and filling them as though they were made to be filled. He presses his back against Eskil's left arm and draws his knees up and makes himself small, a habit, a reflex, the instinct of a man who spent years making himself invisible. But here, in this bed, with this man, the smallness does not feel like hiding.

The heat of Eskil's body comes through the blanket and into Indrie's spine. He can feel the rise and fall of his ribs against his back, the slow expansion of breath, the proof of living. He can hear the heartbeat, not with his ear but through his body, the deep rhythmic thrum of it carried through mattress and blanket and skin, a percussion that says alive, alive, alive.

His eyes burn. He blinks and the burning does not stop and he lets it happen, lets the tears slip from the corners of his eyes into the pillow, because nobody is awake to see and he has earned this. He earned the tears the way he earned the right to be in this bed. Through care and skill and the stubborn refusal to let this man die.

This isn't how I'd hoped to see you again.

Indrie curls closer. His hand finds the edge of the blanket and grips it and he pulls it around himself, wrapping the warmth tighter, and in his sleep Eskil's arm shifts. Not much. A slight bending of the elbow, the forearm settling heavier against Indrie's back, and the motion is unconscious but the effect is not. The weight of it pins Indrie gently against the king's side like a bar dropped across a door, and the message, even out of the depths of sleep, is unmistakable.

Stay.

He closes his eyes and listens to Eskil breathe, and the exhaustion takes him down gently, and he does not fight it.

He sleeps with his body curved into the unwounded side of the king and his hand curled in the blanket and his face against a pillow that smells of woodsmoke and iron and warm skin, and for the first time since the night of the escape, he does not dream of anything at all.

Chapter 23

Eskil

Eskil wakes sore and irritable, which is not unusual.

What is unusual is the warmth along his left side. Not the banked heat of the fire, not the residual temperature of a body running a low fever. This is pressed against him from shoulder to hip, radiating through the blanket with the steady output of a low burning fire.

The gash at his right side announces itself with a deep pulling ache that runs from his ribs to his hip. The stitching is tight and precise. He can feel each individual suture when he breathes, a faint tug at the edges of the wound that tells him how expertly he's been seen to. The pain is significant but manageable. He has had worse. He also has a spectacular bruise on his left shoulder from a shield impact he does not remember taking, and his right knee is stiff, and his lower back aches from five hours in a saddle with a hole in his side. Nothing fatal. Nothing that would prevent him from standing, if he clenched his teeth hard enough and did not mind the swearing.

He's in his quarters. His bed. He knows the mattress beneath him and the smell of the room, stone walls and heavy curtains, and the quality of the light against his eyelids says early morning, grey, probably overcast.

He opens his eyes.

The ceiling greets him first. Familiar beams, familiar shadows. Then he turns his head, slowly, because even his neck is stiff, and looks to his left, and his chest does something the stitching is entirely unprepared for.

Indrie is asleep beside him.

He is curled into Eskil's unwounded side with his knees drawn up and his back pressed against Eskil's arm. He is still fully clothed and his hair has come loose from whatever arrangement it was in and is fanned across the pillow in a tangle Eskil wants to put his hands in. His face is turned toward Eskil, half-buried in the pillow, and in sleep the lines of worry that have taken up permanent residence between his brows are smoothed away. He looks peaceful in a way Eskil has never seen him look while awake, as though sleep is the only place he has permission to set the weight down.

Eskil's left arm is draped across Indrie's back. He does not remember putting it there. It must have happened in his sleep, his body reaching for the nearest warmth and finding it, the animal reflex of wrapping around what is precious and holding on.

He does not move the arm.

He lies there. Breathing hurts. Looking at Indrie does not hurt, or rather it does, but in a way he has stopped trying to resist. He looks at the lashes against pale cheeks and the small nose and the mouth slightly parted in sleep. He looks at the hand curled in the edge of the blanket near Eskil's chest, the fingers loose and gripping anyway, holding onto something even in unconsciousness.

He stayed.

The thought is simple but meaningful. Indrie stitched him up and cleaned the mess and could have left. Should have left, probably, by any reasonable standard of professional conduct. And instead he climbed into Eskil's bed and curled against his side and slept there. He chose this. He chose Eskil, even in the aftermath, even with the blood barely dry, even knowing what this bed means and what being in it means.