Page 14 of Tending the Ache

Eskil's blood goes cold.

Not the slow chill of a season turning. Not anger cooling into patience. This is immediate, and it is total, and every nerve in him pulls taut at once.

"What do you mean," he says, very quietly, "he wants Morgan?"

Seren does not flinch. She has held this council through two kings and more crises than most people survive, and she meets his eyes without moving hers.

"As a bride."

The silence in the war room is absolute.

It has mass. It presses on the walls and the windows and on everyone breathing under it. Nobody blinks. Eskil can hear the blood in his own ears, a low rolling tide that has nothing to do with his heartbeat.

He clenches his jaw until he can hear his teeth creak, a small private destruction his body performs because his hands are not permitted to perform a larger one. His fist has not moved since the first blow. The knuckles are white. The tattoos on his forearm pull taut over muscle doing everything in its power to stay still.

A bride.

His brother. The six-year-old who clung to his leg and cried for their mother. The boy who played at his feet while he held council at nineteen. The young man who handles the books and the diplomacy and every other thing that requires patience and literacy and a temperament Eskil was not issued. The prince who held the kingdom upright while Eskil was an ocean away chasing a fiction, who mobilized a defense and repelled an invasion and reported it as one sentence between tariffs. A soft heart and a mouth that argues the way other men fight.

And Ivan Wolfe, who kills the people who try to leave him, has sent an envoy north to ask for him. As though he were negotiating for a trade of timber.

Someone is talking. Alrik, on his left, the young one with the unfortunate beard and a compulsion to fill silences that do not need him.

"The strategic merit alone, your majesty, is unprecedented. An offer of this nature, in this hour, with the borders as they stand—"

"Shut up."

Alrik’s mouth snaps closed.

"Is there anything else," he asks the room at large, "or have I had the full measure of your counsel for today?"

"The matter will require a formal response," Seren says, mildly.

Absolutely fucking not.

Eskil stands. The chair grinds back over the stone and two people flinch.

He puts both hands flat on the table and leans in.

"I will respond. On my own terms. And this council will not send a single word south without my seal on it. Is that understood?"

A murmur of assent. The kind that is given because the alternative is not assent, and the man asking has a sword at his hip and a documented history of using it.

Eskil straightens, turns and walks out.

The door slams shut behind him, and the council lets out a collective breath that not one of them will admit to afterward.

Chapter 5

Indrie

Indrie sleeps in his clinic for the first time and wakes before dawn.

He lay down last night with his hair still damp from washing in the basin and his hands smelling of the chamomile he had been sorting. The mattress gave beneath him in a way the stone floor of his closet in Kalkoa never did, and he pressed his face into the pillow and breathed and thought: this is mine. This bed is mine. No one is going to take it from me.

He slept deeply and without dreams, which has not happened in longer than he can remember.

Now, in the grey half-light before sunrise, he lies on his back and stares at the ceiling of the back quarters and listens. The sounds of Valen waking: a rooster somewhere distant, the creak of a cart on the road outside, footsteps passing his front door. Heavy boots, a guard on early patrol, the rhythm steady and unhurried. The building settles around him with small groans and clicks, the wood expanding as the morning chill gives way. These are the sounds of a place that is alive. These are the sounds of his place.