Page 6 of Tending the Ache

Eskil's jaw sets. He meets his brother's eyes and gives him the bare minimum, because there are things about that ship and that cabin that Morgan does not need and is not getting.

"He was beaten. Regularly. He had bruises on his face and his arms and his chest. No belongings. No freedom. Nothing outside of keeping that bastard breathing." Each word goes down flat and deliberate. "He was a slave. They bought him and worked him and hit him when he wasn't quick enough."

The study is very quiet.

Morgan's hand has stopped on the documents. The skepticism has gone out of his face and what is underneath it does not know what to do with itself.

"He's a good man who deserved better," Eskil says. "I gave him an option to go anywhere and he said he wanted to stay in Valen."

Morgan looks at him for a long moment. It is the kind of look that contains an entire conversation conducted in the private language of two brothers, and what it says is I hear what you are telling me and I hear what you are leaving out and I am putting the difference somewhere safe for later.

"I want to meet him."

Eskil expected that. "There's a language barrier. His Rengaran's come on since we sailed, Dagny's been at him daily, but anything complicated is still a wall. Anything subtle is hopeless."

Morgan gives him a look of such withering condescension it could curdle milk. "I speak six languages, Eskil. Kalkoan is one of them."

Eskil stares at him.

Of course it is. Of course his bookish, brilliant, insufferable brother has been sitting on the one language that would have solved half of what went wrong on that ship.

And then, a beat behind, the rest of it arrives.

Morgan could tell him. Right now, in this room, in the time it takes to set down a stack of grain reports. Eskil could say the word to him, the one that Indrie said to him and has been rattling around in his skull for three days like a stone in a boot, and ask what it carries in Kalkoan. What shades it has. What a man might mean by it that a Rengaran ear would not catch. Morgan would know. Morgan would know instantly and would probably give him three definitions and a note on regional usage and an aside about the eastern dialect.

And to ask, Eskil would have to explain why he needs to know.

He would have to explain a cabin, and a fruit, and a night he has no intention of describing to his twenty-year-old brother for as long as either of them is breathing. He would have to explain a deck at sunset and a small voice asking something Eskil answered wrong, and he would have to sit there while Morgan worked out, in about four seconds, exactly what his brother has been doing with a man who had no power to refuse him.

The answer is two feet away with ink on his fingers, and Eskil cannot reach for it.

He adds it to the long and growing list of ways his brother is more useful than Eskil has ever deserved.

"Of course you do."

"I also speak Western Trade Common, Old Rengaran, and a passable amount of the Wolfe dialect. In case you were wondering."

"I wasn't."

"You should have been. Languages are useful, Eskil."

"Get out of my study, brat."

Morgan gathers his papers slowly, taking his time about it, gloating with every unhurried motion and declining to do it out loud. At the door he stops, and when he speaks the sharpness has gone out of him and what is left is the boy who hit him at a dead run on the dock and held on.

"Get some rest. You look terrible."

"Out.”

The door shuts.

Eskil sits in the quiet and thinks about Indrie.

He never looked at him. Not once, coming down that gangplank. He had three weeks of practice by then. He knew where Indrie would be standing, knew Dagny would have hold of his arm, and he kept his eyes forward and his hands busy and let the crowd close over the space between them.

It had cost him more than the whole failed voyage.

He does not need to have looked. He has the rest of it already, gathered a glance at a time from the far end of a deck. Indrie at the rail in the mornings with his hair whipping loose and his hands wrapped around the rope. Indrie hunching his shoulders in a crowd, making himself into less. Indrie laughing at something Dagny said, and the way he covered his mouth when he did it, as though laughing were something he could still be punished for.