It felt like a long, long time before Kesst awoke again, blinking into the quiet warm darkness. Into an odd, floaty kind of peacefulness, curling around him, holding him close. Gods, he felt good, and he slowly stretched out on his fur, giving a huge, leisurely yawn, and —
And wait.Wait. Visions of the day before — the night before — were suddenly flooding through his thoughts, stomping down the peacefulness, and hurling out pure, palpable terror instead. What the hell. What in the gods’ names had hedone. Getting off with the healer? Risking Skald finding out about it? Blatantly bringing Eft’s inevitable demise even closer than before?
And speak of the reckless devious menace, Eft was already turning around from Abjorn — one of several new unconscious orcs in the beds — and frowning toward Kesst. And then striding over, like he always did, his hand already reaching, about to touch Kesst’s hair —
“No,” Kesst gasped, flailing his arms, and lurching away in the bed. “No, Eft, damn it!”
Eft’s big body had instantly frozen, his hand held in midair — and curse it, but that was surely hurt in his eyes, in his audibly bobbing throat. But then he curtly nodded, and let his hand fall back to his side, and gave Kesst a brief, wan smile. And then turned and strode away, already reaching to spread his fingers back against Abjorn’s head instead.
Something harsh and bitter plumed behind Kesst’s ribs — gods, was hejealous?! — and he scrubbed at his face, huffed out a long, bracing breath. “We can’t,” he said to Eft’s back, harder than he meant. “It’s just too risky. Too dangerous.”
Eft nodded, but didn’t look back toward Kesst, either. And with the jealousy there was now a bleak, grating misery, clutching too tight in Kesst’s gut. Gods, Eft had been so,sogood to him. He’d given him so much pleasure last night. And now Kesst was returning all that withthis?
Suddenly he couldn’t bear being in this room any longer, he was going to end up rushing over there and begging — so he belatedly leapt out of bed, dragging his hands through his hair. “I need to go get some food and clothes,” he snapped. “When’s the last time you slept? Or ate a proper meal?”
Eft still didn’t turn around, but Kesst could see his shoulder shrugging, could hear his slow exhale. “I honestly don’t remember,” he said. “A day or two ago, maybe?”
Good gods, this healer, and before Kesst could risk betraying anything else, he spun and stalked out of the room. First going back to the baths, spending far too much time trying to dilute Eft’s scent as much as he possibly could, and then up to the otherwise empty little room where he sometimes slept, and kept his few belongings. Skald had carelessly ruined the trousers he’d been wearing yesterday, and Kesst frowned as he pulled on his second-best pair, and then painfully yanked a comb through his wet hair. But not braiding it back, because Skald preferred it down, and maybe — Kesst swallowed, his face foolishly heating — maybe Eft did, too.
He shoved that thought away as he next stalked down to the kitchen, where some thoughtful Bautul hunter had thankfully left a deer carcass, still with some meat on its bones. So Kesst finished cleaning it, eating as he went, and then lit a fire to stew the bones over, preparing some broth for later use. And then he lightly braised the remaining meat, just enough to bring out the best flavour, before tossing it into a clean bowl, and stalking back down to the sickroom again.
“Here,” he said to Eft, without preamble, as he strode over to where he was still working on Abjorn, and thrust the bowl into his chest. “Breakfast.Morgunmatur.”
Eft blinked at Kesst’s face, and then down at the bowl — and then, to Kesst’s distant, perverse satisfaction, his hands instantly abandoned Abjorn, and came up to cradle the bowl with palpable awe. “Really?” he said, sounding genuinely astonished. “For me?”
“Yes, for you,” Kesst shot back. “If you really want to make your best attempt at surviving this ghastly mess, you need to at least take care of yourself. How the hell are you going to deal with all our constant rubbish if you’re down here sleep-deprived and starving? So sit. Eat.Borðaðu.”
Eft kept blinking bemusedly at Kesst, but then he glanced down at the bowl, and that was surely hunger, flashing across his eyes and his scent. And he indeed dropped to sit on the end of Abjorn’s bed, tossing a chunk of meat into his mouth, and exhaling a contented-looking sigh as he chewed.
“Gods, that’s good,” he said sheepishly. “Thanks. I’ve always been terrible at remembering to eat. To…borðaðu?”
Kesst was still standing before him, surely far too close — and he belatedly twitched backwards, and sat down facing Eft, on the foot of a still-unconscious Olarr’s bed. “Að borða,” he corrected him. “To eat. I eat,ég borða. You eat,þú borðar.”
Eft’s mouth was currently too full to speak, but he nodded, his mouth quirking up, his eyes warm and grateful. A look that was doing far too many things in Kesst’s belly, and he looked away, crossing his arms over his chest.
“So how in the gods’ names have you evensurvivedall this time, then?” he asked, again more curtly than he meant. “If you’re running around constantly provoking people, and forgetting to sleep and eat? Did you have an underling or something? Or maybe a besotted human mooning about after you?”
Eft swallowed his mouthful of meat, and gave another sheepish smile. “I did have a very generous family,” he said. “My mother, and stepfather.”
Wait. Kesst’s brows had furrowed, his head tilting, following the implications of that. Eftdid have, past tense. And astepfather? But one who hadn’t been able to teach him Aelakesh?
“Do you mean your stepfather was ahuman?” Kesst demanded. “Why? How? And what happened to him? And your mother?”
There was a brief twist on Eft’s mouth, an unmistakable sadness in his scent. “Age, mostly,” he replied. “My mother was older when my father, ah,mether. And after he died — in battle, I think — my stepfather came along. I’m quite sure the idea was to help my mother get rid of me, but thankfully they couldn’t go through with it, so here I am.”
He gave Kesst another self-deprecating smile as he bit off more meat, but Kesst was still frowning at him, and impatiently tapping his foot on the floor. “So you had no contact with orcs, all that time?” he snapped. “How in the gods’ names did you learn to do all this healing, then?!”
Eft shrugged, gave yet another wry smile. “Uh, with humans?” he said. “And by the end, Grimarr had been coming around for a few years too. We lived near Bulmar — a little village in the south of Salven — but I didn’t feel right about leaving, not until —”
That sadness was coiling through his scent again, his eyes dropped to his bowl. While Kesst just kept staring at him, his mouth agape, while his frantic brain sought to pull all this together. “So you’ve spent all these years swanning around out there healinghumans, in the middle of awar?” he demanded. "How old are you again? And truly, how in the gods’ names have you not gotten yourselfkilledyet?!”
Eft huffed a short laugh, though that was a telltale twitch of stubbornness now, on his scent and his eyes. “I’m thirty-two,” he said. “And I tried to stay well out of the way, and out of the war. But people will overlook a hell of a lot — even an orc — when they or their loved ones are suffering, right? But, believe me” — he gave another brittle laugh, a furtive wave at his scarred face — “there have been alotof killing attempts, too.”
Good gods. So not only had Eft spent his life living with humans, healing humans, but he’d also almost beenkilledby them? Repeatedly? Andthatwas where he’d gotten all these scars? Why he looked the way he did?
Kesst’s stomach was churning and sinking again, his shoulders oddly hunching, his eyes glowering at Eft across from him. “Gods, you’re so noble, it’s fuckingpainful,” he hissed. “How did you not have at least a few women — or men — throwing themselves at you, after you went and so gallantly saved their lives?”
Eft shrugged again, though that was another unmistakable twitch of stubbornness in his scent. “I wasn’t interested,” he said, not quite meeting Kesst’s eyes. “Realizing now that my tastes don’t really run to humans, you know?”
