Page 22 of Tending the Ache

"That's your brother's heart. Yours does it too."

A brief but intense negotiation follows regarding whose turn it is, which Indrie mediates with the patience of a man who has arbitrated far worse disputes.

A young girl with a broken finger. The ring finger of her left hand, snapped clean at the first joint from a fall off a fence she had been told repeatedly not to climb. Indrie sets it with steady hands while she cries, her small face crumpled and red, her father holding her other hand and looking greener than she does. The father, a tall man with a thick beard and kind eyes, watches Indrie splint and wrap the finger with a focus that suggests he is fighting the dual urges to be sick and to pick up his daughter and run.

"She'll be fine," Indrie tells him, tying off the splint wrapping. "Keep the splint dry and don't let her use the hand for two weeks. And perhaps." He pauses, looking at the girl, who has stopped crying and is now inspecting her splinted finger with the morbid fascination of a child who has discovered something new about her own body. "Perhaps a lower fence next time."

The father laughs, a startled, relieved sound, and picks his daughter up and settles her on his hip and thanks Indrie three times before leaving.

Indrie is busy. And he is happy.

He is doing what he loves, for people who appreciate him, and the appreciation arrives in forms he did not expect and does not know how to receive. They bring him things. A loaf of bread, still warm from the oven, wrapped in cloth and left on the examination table by the mother of the twins. A bundle of herbs from someone's garden, tied with twine, with a note in such a scrawl of Rengaran that Indrie has to ask Morgan to read to him.

"For the healer, with thanks. From the family of Rolf the carpenter, whose thumb you saved," Morgan reads, and then looks up. "You saved a thumb?"

"I reattached the nail bed and drained the blood underneath it."

"I'm going to keep saying you saved a thumb."

A jar of honey, dark and rich, delivered by a boy of about ten who announces that his grandmother sent it and then runs away before Indrie can thank him.

One woman, whose husband's infected wound Indrie cleaned and stitched the day before, comes back with a hand-knitted scarf. It is deep blue wool, dense and soft and warm enough to ward off the mountain cold that is beginning to creep into the mornings. She presses it into his hands and says something that Indrie does not fully understand, the words coming too fast and layered with emotion, but her eyes are bright with tears and her hands are steady on his and the meaning is as clear as anything he has ever been told.

Thank you for saving him.

Indrie wears the scarf every day.

He wears it to the clinic in the morning and home in the evening and wrapped around his neck while he grinds herbs at the examination table, the soft wool brushing against his chin, and every time he touches it he thinks about the woman's face and the tears in her eyes and the way she had held his hands as though they were holy.

In Kalkoa, he was paid for his services with silence. With the absence of a beating. With being allowed to sleep on his mat for another night without being thrown out or sold to someone worse. His value was measured in the continued breathing of a king who despised him, and the closest he ever came to gratitude was Armond not hitting him on the days the medicine worked.

Here, they bring him bread. They bring him honey. They knit him scarves.

He does not know what to do with any of it except wear the scarf and eat the bread and use the honey in his tea and stand in his clinic at the end of each day and look at the gifts accumulating on the shelf by the door.

Ermin shows up mid-morning on a day when Indrie has already seen three patients and is grinding a poultice for a fourth. He appears in the doorway practically vibrating, hair messy, cheeks flushed from running, slightly out of breath, which suggests he ran the entire way from wherever he is staying to the clinic door.

"Morgan said you need help?" Ermin asks, gripping the doorframe with both hands and leaning in.

He asks this in a rush with the exaggeration of someone who has been practicing the sentence the whole way here. Then, before Indrie can answer, he adds the question he actually came to ask, and it is more entreaty than inquiry.

"Does that mean you've had time to think about continuing my training?"

Indrie smiles at him. Genuinely, warmly, with the full force of the affection he has developed for this earnest, eager boy who followed him around the ship asking questions and took notes in a leather-bound journal and once attempted to bandage his own ankle to practice wrapping technique and had to be cut free by Dagny.

"I would love to have you as an apprentice, Ermin."

Ermin's face splits into a grin so wide it looks like it might hurt. His whole body seems to lift, shoulders up, chin up, chest expanding with a breath that is half relief and half unbridled joy, and for a moment Indrie thinks the boy might actually levitate off the threshold.

"Really?"

"Really."

"Starting now?"

Indrie laughs. "I can't think of a better time."

They spend the morning going over the basics. Indrie begins where his mentor began with him, with the hands. He teaches Ermin proper hand-washing technique, which sounds rudimentary but is the foundation everything else is built on. He shows him how to scrub each finger individually, how to clean beneath the nails, how to rinse and dry without recontaminating.