Page 10 of Tending the Ache

Indrie discovers a set of iron hooks mounted in the ceiling beams, meant for hanging herbs, and runs his fingers along them and feels the ghost of the physician who put them there. The man who worked in this space, who cared for the people of Valen, who hung his drying bundles from these hooks and boiled water in this kettle and laid his instruments on this table. There is a reverence in standing where someone else once stood and doing the same work. A lineage that has nothing to do with blood.

By late afternoon the front room is transformed. Still bare, no supplies, no medicines, no patients, but clean, the bones of the space visible now and good. A table strong enough to hold a man's weight. A hearth that will warm whoever needs warming.

Morgan shows him the back quarters properly. There is a bed against one wall, real, with a wooden frame and slats, not a mat on the floor. A washbasin on a stand in the corner, chipped but functional. A window, small and square, overlooking the narrow alley behind the building, and through it he can see a patch of bare earth that might, in time, become a garden. Late afternoon light falls through the glass in a square of gold across the cot, and dust motes drift through it lazily, and the room smells of soap and clean wood and possibility.

Indrie runs his hand along the frame of the bed. Smooth. Well-made. Built for someone, once, by hands that cared enough to sand the splinters down.

"I'll leave you to it," Morgan says from the doorway, and steps back into the front room before Indrie has to answer.

Indrie sits on the edge of the bed and presses his palms flat against the wood on either side of him and breathes.

He has a home.

He has a place.

It is dusty and empty and there is no medicine on the shelves and the kettle is only barely clean enough not to poison anyone, and it is his. No one will take it from him. No one will lock the door from the outside. No one will drag him from it in the middle of the night because a dying king's joints are aching and someone must be blamed.

He closes his eyes and the tears come, silent and hot, sliding down his cheeks in tracks he does not wipe away. He lets them fall. He sits on the mattress in the back room of his clinic and cries without making a sound, the way he has always cried, because five years of learning to be silent is not undone in a month. His shoulders shake and his jaw aches from clenching and his hands grip the wooden frame hard enough to whiten his knuckles and he lets it pass through him and out.

When it is done, he wipes his face with the heels of both hands, firmly and deliberately, and stands. He straightens his borrowed shirt, still too large, the sleeves rolled to his elbows, and goes back out to Morgan.

***

They take a break on the front step of the clinic, sharing bread and dried meat that Morgan produced from somewhere. A pocket, a bag, the aether. Indrie is beginning to suspect the prince simply has everything he needs about his person at all times. The bread is good. Dense and dark, studded with seeds, nothing like the pale, crumbling loaves of Kalkoa. Indrie eats and watches the people of Valen move through the intersection outside his door.

It is a busy corner. Two of the city's main roads crossing, foot traffic constant, a woman carrying bolts of cloth on her shoulder, a group of children chasing a dog that wants very much to be chased, a man with a handcart full of turnips navigating around all of them with the weary patience of long practice. Indrie can see immediately why a physician's building was placed here. Everyone in the city passes this point eventually. Everyone who needs help will know where to find it.

"My brother told me about you," Morgan says, tearing his bread in half and handing the larger portion to Indrie without comment. "Before I came this morning."

Indrie accepts the bread and his hand tightens on it. "What did he say?"

"That you were an extremely skilled healer who had kept a terminally ill king alive for five years, which is medically unprecedented. That you had been mistreated. That you were not appreciated where you were." Morgan chews, thoughtful. "He also said, 'He's a good man who deserved better.'"

Indrie looks down at the bread in his hands. There is a knot in his chest that has been there since the dock. Since the ship. Since the first time Eskil's hand touched his face and the world rearranged itself around the point of contact.

"He is very generous," Indrie says.

Morgan makes a small sound, noncommittal, thinking several things at once and choosing carefully which one to set loose. He takes another bite and settles on: "I mentioned this to him already, but I want to say it to you directly. Valen has been without a healer for two years. People here have been doing the best they can with what they know, which in most cases is prayer and determination and whatever folk remedies their grandmothers passed down. The blacksmith has been treating his own burns. The mothers boil nettles for fever because no one has told them there's anything better."

He turns to Indrie. Those pale eyes miss nothing, and they are serious now.

"You are needed here, Indrie. Genuinely. Not as a gift or a transaction. As a person whose skills this city is desperate for."

The words settle in him and go on moving after they land. Needed. Not owned. Not required. Needed, the way a well is needed, the way a hearth is needed, the way warmth in winter is needed. The distinction is everything. An owned man can be replaced or discarded. A needed man is wanted.

"I will do my best," Indrie says, and his voice is steadier than he expects it to be.

Morgan nods, satisfied, and they finish their bread in the kind of companionable silence that usually takes years to build and has somehow arrived between them in a single morning.

***

The afternoon is spent on labor. They scrub the back quarters and the alley and the narrow strip of earth beneath Indrie's window that Morgan confirms was once a garden. They discover a second room, a storage space little more than a deep nook, accessible through a door in the back that had been blocked by a fallen shelf. They right the shelf and sweep the room out and Indrie's mind is already racing with possibilities, mentally filling the shelves with dried herbs and tinctures and salves, the hundred small necessities of a working practice.

And they talk. They talk the way people do when they are working side by side and the labor loosens the tongue, when the rhythm of shared effort creates a safety that sitting across a table does not. Morgan tells him about the market days and the fishing schedules and the festivals that mark the turning of the seasons.

"The winters are long," he says, sitting back on his heels. "Snow comes heavy and stays for months and the whole city turns inward. Fires in every hearth. The hot springs under the keep get so crowded you cannot find the water for the people standing in it." He wipes his hands on his knees. "Summer is short and it is the most beautiful thing you will ever see. The fjord goes a blue that hurts to look at. The meadows past the walls come up in wildflowers all at once, as though they have been holding their breath since autumn."

And then, because Morgan seems to be able to read him like a book, he talks about his brother.