Page 28 of Tending the Ache

"And Morgan told their envoy he would consider it three weeks before I set foot back in this city. The council is unanimous. My no is currently the only one in the room."

"The council will push."

"The council can push whatever they'd like. They can push it directly into the fucking fjord."

Bohdi is quiet for a moment. Then: "And Morgan?"

Eskil's jaw tightens. He thinks about his brother. Young, sharp-tongued, too clever for his own good and too willing to sacrifice himself for a kingdom that has not earned the right to ask. He thinks about Morgan saying it would be the most useful I could ever be to you in my lifetime, and the wrongness of it, the fundamental miscalculation at the heart of it, the idea that Morgan's worth is something that can be weighed out and traded.

Eskil sheathes the longsword. "I'm not going to argue about Morgan. I'm going to argue about the Wolfe clan. They have never offered alliance before. Not once in forty years. And the offer arrived days after the Jakadi emptied this kingdom of its king."

Bohdi nods slowly. "You think they're connected."

"I think I don't believe in coincidences."

"That's unusually cautious of you."

"Don't get used to it."

Bohdi retrieves the practice sword from where it fell and drops it back on the rack. He stretches his neck, and Eskil hears the crack of it and files that under things to feel mildly guilty about later, and rolls his shoulders and says, in a tone so deliberately casual it fools no one, "How's the healer?"

Eskil's hand, which was in the process of adjusting his belt, stops. A fraction of a second. A hitch so small it would be invisible to anyone who hasn't spent a lifetime learning to read him, and Bohdi has spent exactly that long.

Eskil refuses to break. He sheathes his short swords, adjusts his belt again, and says, "Do you want to negotiate grain tariffs with the outer villages all day tomorrow or do you want to find somewhere to be that is out of my sight?"

Bohdi's grin returns. Not the reckless one from the spar. Something softer, more knowing, edged with a warmth he would deny under torture. "Have a good evening, Eskil."

Eskil fixes him with a withering look. Bohdi is, as always, completely immune. He claps Eskil on the shoulder one more time, lighter, a parting gesture, almost affectionate, and walks off toward the barracks with his axe on his back and a whistle on his lips.

Eskil watches him go. He stands in the training yard in the late afternoon light, sweat cooling on his skin, muscles aching in the good way that comes from honest exertion, and thinks about the things he saw in Bohdi's face in the armory. The silence. The stillness. The look that was there and gone before Eskil could read it.

He thinks about Bohdi saying it would be very quiet around the keep without the prince mouthing off to the king, and the weight that lived inside those words, the thing Bohdi was carrying that he would not set down.

He turns away from the yard and heads back to the keep.

Chapter 9

Indrie

The afternoon sun is slanting low through the windows when Ermin declares, with the unshakeable authority of an eighteen-year-old who has decided something and will not be argued with, that Indrie is overworked and needs to come see the hot springs beneath the keep.

"I'm not overworked," Indrie says. He is grinding a poultice for a rash that the tanner's wife has been suffering from for weeks and his back aches and his hands are stained green from herb preparation and there is a smudge of something on his cheek that he cannot identify and has given up trying to remove.

"You've been on your feet since before dawn. Your shoulders are up around your ears. And you're talking to the mortar like it's a person."

Indrie looks down at the mortar. He has, in fact, been muttering to it, encouraging words, as though the dried yarrow will grind itself more cooperatively if he is kind to it. He does not recall starting this conversation. He sets the pestle down.

"The hot springs," Ermin repeats. "Under the keep. They're heated by vents in the rock and the water is perfect and everyone goes after a long day and you need this, Indrie. You're wound tighter than a bowstring."

"I am not wound—"

"You're wound extremely tight."

Indrie opens his mouth to argue and then closes it, because Ermin is right. He has been on his feet since dawn. His back aches and his hands are cramped from grinding and his neck is stiff from bending over the examination table and the idea of hot water, truly hot, the kind of heat that seeps into muscles and unravels them, is so appealing that his body makes the decision before his mind can intervene.

"Fine," he says. "Let me finish this poultice."

Ermin pumps his fist in a gesture of victory so youthful it makes Indrie feel approximately a hundred years old, and they close up the clinic together, herbs put away, instruments cleaned, the fire banked in the hearth, and head up the hill toward the keep as the light turns amber around them.