Page 24 of Tending the Ache

Ingrid flushes, a soft pink across her pale cheeks, and the way her eyes soften and her mouth curves into a smile that is half memory and half present joy tells Indrie everything he needs to know before she opens her mouth.

"I saw her come off the ship from an excursion. Five years ago now." She is holding a sprig of chamomile and turning it between her fingers, not looking at Indrie but at the flower, as though the memory is easier to tell if she speaks to something small and golden. "She came down the gangplank with her red hair wild and her swords at her hips and a grin on her face, and I–"

She laughs. A soft, private sound.

"I was at the dock to deliver documents for Morgan. I was seventeen and I had never seen anyone like her in my life. She looked like she had swallowed the sun."

Indrie smiles. The image is vivid and perfect. Dagny in her element, blazing and bold, striding down the gangplank with the confidence of a woman who knows exactly who she is and has never once apologized for it.

"I brought her fresh-baked pastries the next morning," Ingrid says, still smiling at the chamomile. "And flowers. She didn't know what to do with either." Her smile widens, crinkling the corners of her eyes. "She ate all the pastries in one sitting and put the flowers in a mug because she didn't own a vase and then she asked me if I wanted to see her swords and I said yes and she showed me every blade she owned and I thought, Oh. I'm going to love this woman for the rest of my life."

Indrie's throat tightens. Ingrid with her flowers and her pastries, Dagny with her swords and her bewildered grin, two women finding each other in the chaos of a dock.

"Dagny courted me until I was of age and then we married in the spring," Ingrid continues. "She gave me her grandmother's ring and I gave her a book of poems and she cried and told everyone she didn't."

"That sounds beautiful," Indrie says, and means it with his entire heart. Every bruised and battered corner of it.

And then, because he cannot stop himself, “How did you marry?"

Ingrid looks up, mildly puzzled by the question. "What do you mean? The king married us in a ceremony in the long hall."

Indrie goes back to the chamomile so that his face has somewhere to be.

Because in Kalkoa this story does not exist. Not the version with pastries on a dock in daylight, not the ring, not the poems, not a wedding in a hall with the doors standing open and half a city invited to watch. Two women could love each other in Kalkoa. He knew of some who did. But they did it the way you keep a fire in a closed room, carefully and quietly and with the windows shut, and if the smoke ever got out they were finished.

Here it is a thing that happened in the spring. Not only did the king know, but he oversaw it. Ingrid is puzzled that he asked.

He turns the thought over and finds he cannot get all the way to the end of it. That it is permitted. That nothing in this kingdom stands between two people who want each other except whether they want each other.

Ingrid is watching him. Not the smile of a woman lost in a happy memory now. Something present and knowing and warm.

"What about your king?" she asks, gently.

Indrie's flush is immediate. It erupts from his collar and races up his neck and floods his cheeks, and there is no stream deep enough to throw himself into.

"He is not my king, Ingrid."

Ingrid laughs, light and musical and entirely without malice, and the sound carries out across the meadow. "He could be. The king is very handsome. And has no one on his arm."

Indrie looks down at the herbs in his basket. At his own green-stained hands. At the chamomile and the yarrow, and he thinks about a night on a ship when sleep was the furthest thing from his mind and the arms around him were strong and warm and belonged to a man who told him it meant nothing.

"He could have anyone," Indrie says, quietly. "Why would he want me?"

The question is out before he can stop it, and once it is in the air he cannot take it back. It hangs between them, bare and raw, and Indrie stares at the herbs in his basket and wishes he could disappear into the tall grass.

Ingrid's smile softens. The knowing look gentles into something deeper and more maternal than a woman his own age has any business managing, and she reaches over and takes his hand and squeezes it.

"He would be lucky to have you, Indrie."

Her hand is warm. Her grip is firm. She holds on long enough for the words to settle, long enough for Indrie to feel that she means them, and then she releases him and picks up her basket and stands.

Indrie looks up at her. The sun is behind her head, turning her blonde hair to gold, and she looks certain of things Indrie cannot yet see.

"Thank you, Ingrid."

She holds out her hand. He takes it and lets her pull him to his feet, and the tightness eases. Just slightly. Just enough to breathe.

They walk back to the clinic arm in arm, baskets full of herbs, the late afternoon sun warm on their backs and the city of Valen rising before them on its green hillside. Ingrid wants to plant a tree near the clinic garden, something with white blossoms in spring, because every healing place should have flowers, and Indrie doesn't argue.