Page 11 of Tending the Ache

"The Year of Ohksen," he says. "Our father fell at the border. Our mother followed three months later. There was a fever in the keep that winter and it did not stop until it had her." He picks at a spot on the shelf that is already clean. "So Eskil was handed a crown and a child in the same breath at nineteen. Too young for either, and far too stubborn to be told so."

"There were advisors who told him to send me away," he goes on, scrubbing at the spot now with a focus that does not quite match the casualness of his tone. "To the northern holds, to be raised by a willing family. To be out of the way." He pauses. Something flickers across his face, not pain exactly, but the memory of a time when pain was close enough to touch. "He refused. Rather colorfully, I'm told. The phrase has been repeated to me by several council members who were present, and I always choose not to repeat it in mixed company."

Indrie's mouth twitches.

"He taught me to read," Morgan continues. "Not because he's a great scholar — he isn't, though he'll never admit it — but because he saw early on that my hands were not meant for swords. He could have forced it. He could have put a blade in my grip and told me to be a warrior, because that's what princes are supposed to be." He shakes his head. "He found me books instead. He sat up late when he should have been sleeping and sounded out words alongside me because neither of us had a tutor and the ones who remained after my mother died were not inclined to serve a child king."

He goes quiet. When he speaks again, his voice has dropped, the way voices do when they approach something tender enough to bruise.

"There were famines. Two of them, in the early years of his reign. He rationed what little we had so that I ate first and regularly. I didn't know this at the time, of course. I was a child, I didn't understand why he always told me he'd eaten already, why his portion was always smaller, why he looked thinner even as I felt full." A pause. The rag in Morgan's hand has stopped moving. "I worked it out much later. He never told me himself. He still won't."

Indrie stares at Morgan and the image assembling itself in his mind is luminous and terrible and achingly whole.

A boy of nineteen with a crown on his head and a six-year-old at his side. Learning to be king and parent in the same breath, with no one to teach him either. Going hungry so his brother could eat. Teaching a boy to read because he could not teach him to fight, because the boy's hands were made for other things and Eskil loved him enough to see that and was fierce enough to protect it.

He thinks of Eskil on the ship. Eskil in the storm, hitting the water without hesitation. Eskil in his cabin, drawing a crude picture of Valen with a charcoal stick and pressing it across the desk: you are going home. Eskil's hands, huge and calloused and capable of terrible violence, cupping Indrie's face with a tenderness that had no business in them.

He does not realize he has gone quiet, truly quiet, his eyes somewhere far away, until Morgan says, "Are you all right?"

Indrie blinks. Comes back to himself. He looks at the prince, sitting on an upturned bucket with dust on his knees and dirt on his jaw, and hears himself say, softly and with more feeling than he intended, "I've never known a man like Eskil before."

The words land between them with weight. Indrie can hear it, the reverence in his own voice, the ache, the thing he is trying so hard not to name, and his face heats. He drops his gaze to the floor and adds, quickly, as though he can dilute what he has just revealed by pouring more words on top of it, "He saved my life. I don't know if he told you that."

Morgan hums. It is a thoughtful sound, measured, a man filing information away. "I've heard talk among the town about the king who dove into the ocean in the middle of a storm."

Indrie's flush deepens terribly. Heat climbs from his collar to his cheekbones to the tips of his ears, and he is suddenly and acutely aware that every crew member who disembarked the Valkyr has apparently been telling this story. He ducks his head. "I wasn't even talking about that."

Morgan's eyebrows rise. Both of them, slowly, in an expression of such theatrical surprise that it cannot be anything other than deliberate. "There's more to the life-saving?"

Indrie opens his mouth. Closes it. Opens it again. Several sentences present themselves, each worse than the last. He cannot say your brother kissed my knuckles and told me I could have anything I desired. He cannot say he held my face in both hands and told me I was not his and it broke something in me I don't know how to mend. He absolutely and under no circumstances can say anything about what happened in the cabin.

Morgan watches him. When he speaks again, his tone has shifted, still warm but more measured, careful, stepping around a threshold he is not certain he has been invited to cross.

"Many of the crew who departed the Valkyr speak of the attention the king gave to their new healer," he says. "That it has not gone unnoticed."

Something in Indrie pulls tight.

He remembers Eskil on the deck, voice firm: you'll never belong to me. He remembers the cabin, and the fire in Eskil's skin, and the way Eskil had held him and touched him and taken him apart with hands that shook with restraint, and then looked him in the eyes and told him it didn't mean anything. You are not mine. The fruit doesn't change that.

He finds himself incapable of speech. The words are there, lodged in his throat, but if he lets them out they will bring everything else with them and he cannot do that. Not here. Not with Morgan, who is Eskil's brother, who should not have to be the repository for this devastation. Who has spent his morning on his hands and knees helping Indrie scrub floors and deserves better than to watch a stranger fall apart on him.

Morgan touches his arm. The contact is light, just his fingertips, a brush of attention, and Indrie does not flinch. He is grateful he does not flinch. Morgan's tone drops again, threaded through with protectiveness.

"If that attention has made you uncomfortable…if he has overstepped or if you are wary of the king in any way —"

"No!" Indrie says, and the word comes out with a sharpness that startles them both. He turns to Morgan and shakes his head, hard enough that his loose hair swings against his jaw. "Eskil has not overstepped. It's not — it's not like that. I trust him. Implicitly. He has never —"

He swallows. The sentence resists him, as though finishing it requires admitting something he is not prepared to admit, and the effort of holding it back while also trying to reassure Morgan is pulling him in two directions at once.

"He has been nothing but kind to me," Indrie finishes, and his voice is quieter now, fraying at the edges.

Morgan's brow creases. The confusion is real. Indrie can see him working through it, turning the pieces in that relentless mind, trying to reconcile Indrie's flushed face and constricted voice with the assurance that nothing is wrong. Something is clearly wrong. The pieces are there, the healer who blushes at the mention of the king's name, the king who dove off a ship to save him, the crew who noticed, the attention that cannot be denied, but they do not fit the shape Morgan was expecting.

If the attention was unwanted, Indrie would be frightened. He is not frightened. If the attention was welcome, Indrie would be happy. He is not happy. He is something else entirely, something that lives in the space between those two things, and Morgan is visibly trying to identify it.

Indrie wrings his hands. He looks down at them, at the reddened knuckles and the clean nails and the fingers that are still trembling faintly, and does not know how to explain what is happening inside him. How does one explain, to the king's own brother, that Indrie threw himself at Eskil and was refused? That he bared his heart and Eskil said no? That he lay with the king and the king told him it meant nothing, and that Indrie has been carrying that refusal ever since, turning it over and over, wearing himself smooth against its edges?

How does one explain that, and then continue to stand in the clinic that the king's brother helped him clean, wearing the king's shirt, in the king's city, and not die of shame?