Page 12 of Tending the Ache

"Can we talk about anything else?" Indrie asks, and his voice is very small. "Please?"

Morgan takes pity on him. The pivot is graceful, the practiced redirect of a born diplomat.

"Then settle an argument for me," he says, tapping the shelving nearest the examination table. "High-use supplies. Frequency of use, or category?"

"Frequency." Indrie does not even have to think about it. "Always frequency. You do not want to be crossing a room for something you need in an emergency."

"Category creates consistency. When you are not here, someone else has to be able to find things."

"Then I will teach them the order I use."

"And if you are unconscious on your own floor?"

"Then whoever is standing over me can read the labels."

Morgan considers this for a moment. "That is annoyingly sound."

The back-and-forth is so absorbing and so normal that Indrie's chest loosens by degrees. He is so grateful he could weep.

He does not weep. He has done enough of that today. He argues for his shelving system instead, at length and with more passion than the subject strictly requires, and Morgan concedes the point with a graciousness that is almost certainly tactical, and they spend the last light of the afternoon arranging invisible supplies on bare shelves, planning for a future that Indrie is only just beginning to believe might belong to him.

Chapter 4

Eskil

Eskil assembles the council without Morgan present.

This is a bad idea. He knows it is a bad idea the same way he knows when a storm is coming or when the man across the table is lying to him, by instinct honed on years of being right about things he would rather have been wrong about. Morgan is the buffer. Morgan is the thin and indispensable membrane that keeps the assembled elders of Rengara from receiving exactly what Eskil thinks of their opinions, delivered at volume, with embellishments that would make the gods wince. Without him there is nothing between Eskil's paper-thin patience and the end of it except his own self-control, which on a generous day he would rate as middling.

This meeting has to happen without his brother anyway. He knew it from Vigdis's face when she asked to convene, and from three other faces when she did. The weighted, sideways looks people give each other when they are about to hand you something heavy and want to be certain you are the one holding it, and not the boy it concerns.

The war room is unchanged from the last time he sat at its head, which was before the voyage, before Kalkoa, before a slim dark-haired healer took his entire fucking life apart with two steady hands and a request he couldn't grant. The long oak table still dominates the room, scarred by decades of fists and daggers and goblets slammed down mid-argument. The banners on the stone need replacing. The hearth is cold because nobody thought to light it. The windows are narrow and set high and let in a thin grey light that does no favors for anyone sitting under it.

A dozen men and women arrange themselves around the table with the unhurried self-importance of people who believe their presence is a gift. Eskil takes the head, stretches his legs out under the oak, folds his arms, and lets them talk.

The first order of business is what he expected.

Irritation. The polite, measured, insufferable kind these people have spent decades perfecting, in which a king is told what he has done wrong in a tone that does not technically constitute treason. The voyage was a waste of time and resources. The treasury disbursement barely covers the cost of the journey, a pittance of coin, and a handful of metals that need extensive refining before they are worth anything at all.

"And the intelligence we acted on," Vigdis says, and pauses to select her word with visible care, "was unreliable."

Eskil could offer a more precise term.

The intelligence was horseshit. Pure, uncut, steaming horseshit of the highest order, and he knew it the moment he set foot on Kalkoan soil and saw the state of the place. A kingdom rotting from the crown down. Mines picked clean, fields ruined by neglect, people too starved and too beaten to do anything but bow their heads and wait for the next boot. No precious metals. No strategic advantage. A dying king propped up by a healer too good at his work and too trapped to stop doing it, and a court of sycophants feeding off the carcass.

He says none of this. Morgan would be proud.

"I am aware the expedition did not yield what we anticipated. I was there.” His voice is even, which is how it always starts during these sorts of meetings. “What else?"

The what else lands the way he intends it: an invitation and a warning in the same breath. I know you are not here to tell me things I already know. Get to it.

A beat of silence. They glance at one another. The weighted looks again. His patience is slipping through his fingers like sand.

"The intelligence was fabricated," Vigdis finally says. "Deliberately. The Jakadi wanted us to have it."

She lays it out for him. Not bad information born of incompetence. Not stale reports that failed to account for Kalkoa's decline. A fabrication, engineered with care and precision and the kind of strategic patience that sets Eskil's teeth on edge, built to draw the king and a large part of his fighting force out of Rengara. While he was four hundred leagues away playing conqueror and rescuer and every other role he had no business performing, the Jakadi attacked the eastern reaches. The mining village at Askarte.

Eskil's fist hits the table.