Page 7 of Tending the Ache

Eskil presses both palms into his eyes.

Three days ago he sat in a cabin with a broken piece of charcoal in his hand and finally saw the shape of what he had missed.

Were you asking if I wanted you?

He has carried the question from open water to the harbor mouth to this chair, and he has not asked it. There was opportunity where he could have crossed twenty feet of planking and said the other night, when you asked me, and started from there. He did not. He told himself the timing was wrong, and that Indrie needed rest, and that a man who has just been freed should not be cornered in his bunk by the man who freed him.

Some of that was even true. It is remarkable how much of a coward can be built out of true things.

Because if that was the question, then the answer he gave was not merely clumsy. It was a refusal. Indrie had gathered himself up and offered the only thing he had never been forced to give, and Eskil had looked him in the face and said no, never, with the conviction of a man being kind.

And if that was the question, then Eskil has to answer the real one, and he does not know how. I will not own you is a thing he can say. He has said it in council chambers and on battlefields and to men with chains in their hands. I want you is a different sentence entirely, and one he is not certain Indrie would be grateful to hear after a night he was forced to spend in the king’s bed due to a poisoned fruit.

Eskil drops his hands and looks at the documents without reading a word of them. The ink has crusted at the rim of the pot. Through the open window, Valen carries on without him: voices, the blacksmith's hammer, a child shrieking with laughter somewhere down the hill.

What a fucking mess you've made.

He could go down there. He knows the street Dagny's house is on. It is a ten-minute walk and he has invented worse excuses for less.

He stays where he is and tells himself it's discipline.

Chapter 3

Indrie

The blond-haired young man Indrie saw with Eskil comes to Dagny's house the next morning.

Indrie is at the kitchen table with a cup of tea going cold between his hands, staring at the wood grain and trying to quiet his thoughts, when the knock comes. Three raps, evenly spaced. Courtesy taught early and worn as armor. Dagny left for the training yards at dawn and Ingrid has gone to the market, so Indrie sets his tea down and crosses to the door. The young man from the dock is standing on the step with a small bow already in motion.

"I'm Morgan," he says. "Brother of the king."

And then he says, in perfect Kalkoan, "It's a pleasure to meet you, Indrie."

Indrie's mouth falls open.

He has not heard his own language spoken by someone other than himself since he left Kalkoa. The sound of it now, fluid and unhesitating and correct in this golden stranger's mouth, is so familiar that his eyes prick with tears he has to blink back.

"You speak —" He stops. Swallows around the tightness in his throat. Tries again. "You speak my language."

Morgan's sharp features soften at whatever he sees on Indrie's face. "I do. Among others." He tilts his head, studying Indrie. "I've heard a great deal about you. I'm here to get you settled." He switches to Rengaran for half a beat, smooth and effortless, the languages almost like rooms he moves between without thinking about the doors, and then back to Kalkoan. "My brother is many things, but an organizer is not one of them. That's my department."

Indrie lets out a breath that shakes more than he wants it to and steps aside to let Morgan in. He thinks he should offer tea, because Ingrid left the kettle warm and it seems like the sort of thing one does when a prince appears on one's borrowed doorstep. But Morgan is already glancing around the modest front room, cataloguing, taking inventory, and he waves off the offer before Indrie can voice it.

"We have somewhere to be," Morgan tells him, and there is a brightness in it that borders on conspiratorial. "Come on."

Indrie grabs his coat, the only one he owns, a worn thing Dagny found for him on the ship, and follows Morgan out into the morning.

He studies Morgan's face as they walk. The resemblance to Eskil is there in the strong jaw and the stubborn set of the mouth, in the way Morgan holds himself: spine straight, chin up, the world a room he has every right to enter. But the differences are equally striking. Where Eskil is broad and battle-hewn, all hard muscle and scarred knuckles and tattoos, Morgan is slender and pale and unmarked. His hands are ink-stained at the fingertips, not calloused at the palms. His build is that of a scholar, not a soldier, and he moves through the streets of Valen with the quiet authority of a man known and respected and not feared.

People greet him as they pass. A woman selling bread from a cart calls out to him and Morgan raises a hand in acknowledgement without breaking stride. A pair of children chasing each other around a well stop to stare, wide-eyed, and Morgan gives them a look of mock severity that sends them scattering with delighted shrieks. He is relaxed here in a way that Eskil, for all his power, had not seemed to be on the dock.

The difference, perhaps, between carrying the weight of a kingdom and only holding it while someone else is away.

Morgan talks as they walk, filling the air with information about Valen that Indrie absorbs hungrily: the layout of the city, the location of the gates and the market square, which streets to take when the northern road floods in autumn, where to buy candles.

"And never buy fish on this side of the square," Morgan says, steering him around a puddle. "It comes off the boats at the eastern gate at dawn and everything that reaches here has spent the morning in the sun. The men selling it know that. They are counting on you not to."

He delivers all of it in Kalkoan, switching to Rengaran only when he reaches a word that has no equivalent, and each time he does he pauses and explains the Rengaran term with a patience that undoes Indrie a little.