Page 1 of Tending the Ache

Chapter 1

Indrie

The ship rounds the final headland and Valen opens in front of them. Indrie stands at the prow with his hands curled around the railing, fingers white-knuckled against salt-bleached wood, and watches the harbor unfold from behind the cliffs. Everything Dagny described to him during the long weeks at sea is here, and more besides.

The harbor sits in the curved palm of a wide fjord. The water is a deep blue-green, clear enough that he can see the shadows of rocks beneath the surface, nothing like the grey silted harbors of Kalkoa where the water was the color of old iron and smelled of rot. Beyond the docks the city climbs the hillside in tiers of timber and stone, the rooftops patched with turf and wildflowers, so that the buildings look as though they have grown up out of the ground.

Behind the city the land opens into a vast sweep of green. Meadows. Dense pine forest. Farmland stitched together by rivers that flash silver in the afternoon light. Past all of it, distant and enormous, snow-capped mountains saw across the sky.

More greenery than Indrie has ever seen in his life. More life in a single hillside than in the whole of Kalkoa's withered countryside.

He has seen drawings of places like this in the margins of old texts, lush kingdoms rendered in faded ink by scholars who had traveled farther than Indrie ever dreamed he would. He used to trace those illustrations with one fingertip, late at night in his closet-sized room, and try to imagine standing somewhere green and growing and alive.

Now he is here. It is better than any drawing.

There is a host of people waiting on the dock.

Dozens of families and friends and children, pressing forward and calling out names as the ship glides into the harbor. The noise is overwhelming after weeks of ocean silence. Indrie can hear laughter and weeping and someone playing a hand drum, the thump of it carrying across the water, and the sheer volume of joy makes his throat tight. These people have been waiting. These people have been missed. Women run along the dock edge to keep pace with the ship, waving scarves above their heads. Children bounce on their toes to see over the crowd.

Indrie has never been waited for in his life.

"Ready?" Dagny says at his elbow.

He turns to find her practically vibrating beside him, red hair wild around her face, her grin wide enough to split her in two.

"I think so," he says, and is surprised to find that it's mostly true.

The ship shudders against the dock. The gangplank drops. The noise swells.

Indrie leaves the ship with Dagny's arm linked firmly in his, her grip warm and steadying as they navigate the gangplank together. She is bouncing on the balls of her feet, her chatter devolving into a stream of Rengaran too fast for him to follow. He catches the words home and Ingrid and finally, and holds onto her arm and lets himself be carried along by her happiness, because it is large enough for both of them and he has none of his own to spare.

They make it approximately four steps onto the dock before they are separated.

A slight woman with long blonde hair breaks through the crowd at a dead run, shoving past a fisherman, ducking under someone's outstretched arm, and Dagny releases Indrie and catches her with both hands. She spins her around, one full revolution, boots leaving the dock, laughing so loudly it echoes off the harbor walls. The blonde woman is crying. Openly, unashamedly, her face crumpled with weeks of worry dissolving all at once, and she clings to Dagny's neck with both arms and will not let go. Dagny murmurs into her hair and presses kisses against her temple, her cheekbone, the corner of her mouth. The blonde pulls back just enough to cup Dagny's face in both hands and say something fierce and tearful that Indrie cannot hear over the crowd.

He watches them. Something in him goes tight and small.

Then the woman's eyes find Indrie over Dagny's shoulder. She blinks, startled, tear tracks still wet on her cheeks. Dagny follows her gaze and grins.

"This is my dear friend, Indrie," she says, in the slow, careful Rengaran she uses when she wants him to follow. "Indrie, this is Ingrid."

Friend. He knows that word now. Dagny taught it to him on the ship, and hearing it spoken about him in an introduction makes his eyes sting.

Ingrid releases Dagny and crosses to him and embraces him as though they have known each other for years.

She is soft and warm and smells of lavender and bread flour, and she holds him properly, with both arms, the way you hold family.

"Welcome home," Ingrid says, in Rengaran. Then something else, slower, watching his face to see whether it lands. “I’m so happy to meet you.”

He gets perhaps half of it. He does not need the other half.

"Thank you," he says carefully, in Rengaran, and her whole face lights up at the effort.

He hugs her back and feels warm.

Over Ingrid's shoulder, through the press of bodies and the chaos of reunion, Indrie sees Eskil come down the gangplank.

The crowd parts for him without being asked. People step aside. They clap his arms and call greetings that Eskil answers with nods and brief clasps of hands, his blond hair catching the pale sunlight, the tattoos on his bare forearms dark against sun-browned skin. He is taller than almost everyone around him and broader than all of them, and he moves through the joy of the homecoming solid and unhurried while the current of it breaks around him.