Page 75 of Tending the Ache

Eskil had not been saying I do not want you. He had been saying I will not own you. He had been saying I refuse to be another man who writes your name in a ledger. He had heard that word out of that mouth, weeks off a slaver's floor, and every part of him had recoiled from it, because the king who emptied the slave pens could not accept ownership of the one person he most wanted to keep.

He answered the question Indrie asked. Not the question Indrie meant.

And Indrie heard a refusal where there was a vow.

"Then why did he not explain?" Indrie's voice is frustrated.

Morgan's expression is flat and deeply sympathetic. "Because he is an idiot who does not know how to use his words."

A silence.

It stretches between them, long and heavy, and Indrie can feel something cracking open in him. Something that has been sealed shut since the ship. Since you are not mine. Since the cabin and the stars and the slow devastating education of learning that wanting does not entitle you to having. It cracks open and it hurts, but it hurts the way setting a bone hurts. Sharp. Necessary. The precursor to healing.

He has been carrying a disgrace that does not exist. Across an ocean, through a harbor, into a city, into a clinic, into a library. He carried it while Eskil cleaned blood from his skin. He carried it while Eskil held him on a couch in the dark. He carried it while Eskil had him on a desk and said I wanted you before I ate that fucking fruit, and Indrie believed him, and still, underneath the believing, carried the weight of a rejection that was never made.

Morgan lets him sit with it. Does not push. Does not fill the silence with reassurance. He sits on his stool and watches with the patience of somebody who understands that certain kinds of understanding need room to land.

It is Indrie who breaks it, eventually, because there is a thing he has been wanting to ask since Morgan came through the door and looked like his brother–like he is carrying a weight too heavy to hold.

"I feel like you didn't come here to deliver Eskil's message," he says quietly.

Something happens to Morgan's face. It is not dramatic. The warmth that has been there all afternoon simply withdraws, and what replaces it is smooth and polished and reveals nothing.

"The council and my brother are in talks for an alliance with a southern entity, the Wolfe Clan. It involves my betrothal to their chieftain."

Indrie stares at him, with wide eyes. “A betrothal?”

Morgan examines his own fingernails. "A formal alliance. Southern trade routes, mineral rights, and the finest fighters in the region, in exchange for one lightly used prince. It is an extremely good bargain and I have advised my brother to take it."

"Morgan."

"You should have heard the council. They went through it line by line as though I were a shipment of wool." He smiles. It does not touch his eyes at all. "The tragedy is that I agreed with them."

"You're not being fair to yourself." Indrie says. "You are speaking about yourself as though you are without worth."

"I am speaking about myself as a prince, which is a thing that exists to be spent." Morgan's voice is perfectly light. "It is the most useful I will ever be."

Indrie looks at him. At the twenty-year-old sitting on a stool in his clinic with his legs crossed at the ankle and ink on his fingers, and the mask is good, it is very good, the product of years of practice and a natural aptitude for concealment. But Indrie has spent his life reading people. Reading what they hide. Reading the space between what the body says and what the mouth says.

Morgan is frightened. Under the wit and the composure and the careful diplomatic phrasing, he is a boy who is being handed to a stranger and is trying very hard to be brave about it.

"No," Indrie says.

Morgan blinks. "No?"

"That is not true and I will not sit here and let you say it." Indrie's voice is quiet and it does not waver. "The most useful you will ever be is not being handed to a warlord as a trophy."

"That is not the—"

Indrie leans forward. "I am not talking about what you produce, Morgan. I know what it is to be valued for what you produce. I lived five years inside it, and I promise you it is not the same as being loved, and it does not keep you warm, and the moment you cannot produce anymore you find out exactly what you were worth."

Morgan is very still.

"Your brother would burn that stronghold to the ground for you," Indrie says. "I have known him a matter of weeks and I know that. Do you truly believe he wants the trade routes more than he wants you at his table?"

The mask slips. Just for a moment. A crack in the glaze, a tremor in the steady hand, and what is underneath is young and frightened and trying so hard not to be that it hurts to look at.

"No," Morgan says. Quietly. "No, I know exactly what he wants."