Page 36 of Tending the Ache

But Eskil does not stiffen. Does not retreat. He walks beside Indrie with his hands at his sides and his stride shortened to match Indrie's and his face turned slightly toward him, listening.

"He said you let him be who he wanted to be without making him be like you," Indrie continues, softer now. "That you saw what he was good at and made room for it."

Eskil is quiet for a moment. The cobblestones pass beneath their feet, Indrie's bare, because he never did put his boots back on, and the stone is cold but he barely feels it.

"My brother does not have the hands or the temperament for battle," Eskil says. "I would never call him gentle where he could hear me, but the word suits him." A pause. "I tried to teach him sword work once. He was eight. He held the practice sword like it was going to bite him and then cried when he dropped it on his foot. I never made him pick one up again."

Indrie smiles. The image is achingly tender. A boy of eight with a practice sword too heavy for his small hands, and a brother of twenty-one watching him cry and making a decision that would shape both their lives.

"And your language studies?" Eskil asks. "Morgan says the progress has been remarkable."

"Morgan is generous. I still can't manage a complex sentence without tripping over myself."

"You're managing now."

Indrie blinks. He is, he realizes. They have been speaking in Rengaran, entirely in Rengaran, for the past several minutes, and while his grammar is imperfect and his vocabulary forces him to circle around the words he does not have, the conversation has flowed. Not effortlessly. Not the way it flows with Morgan in Kalkoan, where the words are water and he is the river. But the current is there. He is swimming, not drowning.

"I suppose I am," he says, and is startled by the small bloom of pride in him.

He tells Eskil about the patients. The blacksmith with the infected burn who is healing cleanly now. The twins with the ear infections whose mother brought him apples. The old woman with joint pain who patted his cheek and said something he could not understand but felt in his bones. The young girl with the broken finger who inspected her splint with morbid fascination and whose father looked greener than she did.

Eskil listens. He asks questions, how long does a burn like that take to heal, did the ear infections respond to the first treatment, what do you use for joint pain, and Indrie is startled to realize the king is genuinely interested. Not performing interest. Not nodding politely while his mind works on other things. He is asking follow-up questions. He is asking good follow-up questions, the kind that come from actual engagement with the subject rather than courtesy.

Indrie finds himself explaining more than he intended. The properties of willow bark and how it reduces fever and inflammation. The difference between a clean wound and an infected one, how to read the color of the skin, the warmth of the tissue, the way the body signals its distress in a language that does not require translation. He talks about Ermin and the progress the boy is making, about the leather-bound journal and the notes taken with the dedication of a scribe, about the moment this morning when Ermin correctly identified the signs of a subsurface infection without prompting and Indrie felt a pride so fierce it nearly knocked him sideways.

He is mid-sentence when he realizes they have arrived.

The clinic stands before them in the lamplight, its tall windows dark, the faded sign above the door barely visible. Indrie feels the shift that always accompanies returning to this place, the small warm pulse of mine, this is mine, no one can take this from me, and he pushes open the door and steps inside.

He lights the lamp by the door. The flame catches and steadies and the room fills with golden light, and Indrie turns to see Eskil standing in the doorway, silhouetted against the dark street, looking in.

"Come in," Indrie says. "Please."

Eskil steps over the threshold. His presence changes the room. Not because he is too large for it, though he is, his shoulders taking up a significant portion of the aisle between the shelves. The room changes because Eskil is in it, and the clinic, Indrie's place, Indrie's first thing, the space he has built with his own hands, now contains the person he most wants to share it with.

Eskil surveys the space. Indrie watches him take it in, the clean shelves stocked with labeled jars, the examination table scrubbed and ready, the herbs hanging from the iron ceiling hooks the blacksmith forged for him, the small back room visible through the open door with its neatly made cot and folded blanket. The king's eyes move slowly and methodically, assessing, finding what is valuable.

He investigates. Runs his fingers along the shelf labels, pausing at the bilingual tags, the Kalkoan characters beside the Rengaran ones, Indrie's careful hand on display. He opens a jar and smells the contents, yarrow, the sharp green scent of it, and replaces the lid. He picks up one of the steel instruments Morgan brought, turns it in his fingers, sets it down.

He looks at the herb bundles hanging overhead. At the botanical guide on the table, open to a page of illustrated chamomile. At the scarf, the deep blue one, knitted by the woman whose husband Indrie stitched, draped over the back of the chair.

"You've done this in a week," Eskil says. It is not a question.

Indrie nods. He is standing by the examination table with his hands clasped in front of him, watching Eskil move through his space with a nervousness that has nothing to do with fear. It is the vulnerability of showing somebody a thing you have made, of saying I built this, this is what I can do, and waiting to see whether it is enough.

"This is incredible, Indrie," Eskil tells him, turning to him. His mouth twitches. Almost a smile.

Then he turns away from the shelves and his expression shifts, becomes heavier and more deliberate, the set of his jaw changing as something surfaces from beneath the careful neutrality he has been maintaining.

Things grow quiet. The comfortable ease of the walk evaporates, replaced by something denser. Eskil leans against the examination table with his arms crossed and his gaze fixed on a point somewhere between the floor and the middle distance, and Indrie can see the words building behind his eyes. Can see the effort of them, the weight, the reluctance.

"Armond's stores," Eskil says. "The things we took from the castle. The fruit."

Indrie's hands still on the jar he is pretending to adjust.

"Why would he have something like that?" Eskil continues. His voice is careful, measured, testing each step before he commits his weight to it. "The Kalkoans cultivate it. A fruit that poisons you if you don't—"

He stops. Recalibrates. The sentence reorganizes itself in his mouth, the blunt edge filed down.