Page 64 of Tending the Ache

Eskil wants to take his face in both hands and tilt it up and say look at me.

He does not do this.

Morgan says something about snaproot, whether it wants direct sun or partial shade, and Indrie contradicts him. Not tentatively. With the flat confident authority of a man who has grown the thing himself and knows exactly what it requires.

"It needs partial shade in the first season," Indrie says, and his Rengaran is noticeably improved, the words coming more fluidly. "Full sun scorches the root system before it establishes. Morgan, the text you're reading is from the southern provinces. The light is completely different at this latitude."

"The text," Morgan says, with the precise enunciation of a man about to be pedantic, "is the authoritative reference on northern botany and has been in this library for forty years."

"Then it has been wrong for forty years."

Morgan's eyebrows rise. Indrie's chin lifts, just slightly, and for a moment the uncertainty and the embarrassment and the careful avoidance of eye contact fall away entirely, and what is left is the physician.

Eskil is grinning. He can feel it on his face, a wide stupid helpless grin that he would be mortified by if he could bring himself to care, and at some point he realizes he is sitting on a library floor watching two people he loves argue about a weed and has no idea what has happened to his life.

Morgan catches his expression and gives him a look that communicates, with eloquent brevity, I see what is happening here and I am choosing not to comment, and you owe me.

Eskil ignores him.

The argument resolves itself, or rather Morgan concedes with the grudging grace of a man who has checked two further sources and found them both in agreement with Indrie, and they move on to the next page.

And Eskil sees the illustration.

Lower right of the page Indrie has just turned to. A fruit, drawn in careful detail. The red flesh. The dark seeds. The distinctive teardrop shape, the one that sat on a plate in his cabin and looked like nothing at all.

Above the drawing, in the plain block hand the guide uses for its headings, is a single word.

Cara.

Eskil knows that word. He has heard it exactly once, in the dark, out of a mouth that could barely get the sentence out. The entry beneath it is sixteen lines long, but three words stand out among them. Eskil reads them.

He reads them again.

Betrothal via consummation.

The room goes very quiet inside his skull.

He stares at the entry and the words rearrange themselves and rearrange themselves and will not settle into any order he can accept. The fruit he ate in his cabin on the ship. The one that set his blood on fire and nearly killed him. The one Indrie named the moment he came through the door, because Indrie knew exactly what it was, because it was from his country, because–

Because it is a marriage rite.

Everything good about the afternoon drains out of him and what is left is cold and still and sick.

He realizes this is the thing he's been trying to understand for weeks. And he is learning it from a textbook. That he stood in a cabin in the middle of the ocean and took the only wedding night this man will ever have and told him it meant nothing.

You are not mine. The fruit doesn't change that.

He said those words. He remembers saying them. He remembers the way Indrie's face changed, the light going out of his eyes, and he had not understood why. He had thought he was freeing him. Thought he was being generous, telling a man who had just agreed to give his body to save a stranger's life that the act did not chain him to that stranger. That it was not an obligation. That Indrie was free.

And Indrie had heard: I do not want you. I refuse you. In the oldest and most binding tradition of your people, on the only night of its kind you will ever have, I am telling you that you are nothing to me.

The nausea that goes through him is sudden and vicious and he has to press his hand flat against his thigh to keep from moving.

He registers that Morgan is saying his name. That Indrie has stopped talking. He looks up and finds Indrie frozen.

Indrie's eyes are on the page. On the illustration, on the entry Eskil has been staring at, and his face has gone white. Bloodless. The color that was warm and alive in his cheeks a moment ago is simply gone, and what is left is ash and terror. His dark eyes are wide and fixed on the drawing with the horrified stillness of a man watching an oncoming disaster he cannot stop.

He does not run. Eskil notes this distantly, from behind the wall of his own shock. Indrie does not bolt from the room the way he did before. He stays where he is, on the floor, hands white-knuckled on the book in his lap.