Page 5 of Tending the Ache

"You handled it."

"I always handle it."

That is not modesty and it is not a boast. It is just true.

There are thirteen years between them and the shape of what passes between them has never been only brotherly, but something bordering on the relationship between siblings and the relationship between a parent and child. Their father went down in a border skirmish against raiders who took a young kingdom for an easy mark. Their mother followed three months later, burned out by fever in the same bed where she had nursed Morgan through his first winter. Eskil was nineteen. Too young to take the crown and too old to refuse it.

The title came with a child attached. He took both.

"There was a skirmish at the border," Morgan says, in the same measured tone as everything else. "Small engagement at Askarte. Handled."

"Well done."

Morgan dips his chin and moves on to a supply problem with the northern lumber camps. The moment passes. Eskil thinks nothing else of it.

The study is on the second level, broad enough to plan a war in, with a cold fireplace and a window Morgan has propped open to the autumn air. The desk is stacked in neat piles, each with a cover sheet in Morgan's cramped precise hand. The chair is pushed back at an angle, as though somebody had been sitting in it and got up fast when word came the ship was sighted.

Eskil drops into it. The leather creaks. He tips his head back against the rest and stares at the beams and lets himself be still for three breaths.

Morgan hovers. He pretends to square off the document stacks, which do not need squaring, and he keeps glancing over as though checking his brother is solid and not about to evaporate.

"How was the excursion?" Morgan asks, propping his hip against the desk with studied unconcern.

Eskil closes his eyes.

"A fucking disaster."

"That bad?"

"Kalkoa is a corpse that hasn't stopped twitching. Mines are gutted. Roads are shit. The king is a withered old tyrant bleeding what's left of his people for the pleasure of it. The intelligence was garbage, the metals aren't worth what it'd cost to refine them, and we brought back barely enough out of the treasury to cover the sailing."

"So we gained nothing."

Eskil hesitates.

It is a fraction of a second. Morgan has spent twenty years reading his brother's silences and this one goes off like a dropped coin in an empty room.

"Not nothing," Eskil concedes.

Morgan's brow creases. "Not nothing?"

Eskil sits forward, elbows on the desk. He picks his way through it, careful, and knows the care itself is telling. "I found a healer. An extremely skilled young man who had been keeping the Kalkoan king alive with meager supplies and no support. The man suffered from Granger's and the healer kept him alive for five years."

Morgan's eyes widen. He knows what Granger's does. Anyone who has read a page of medicine knows what Granger's does.

"Five years. You're certain?"

"The king's own advisor confirmed it." Eskil keeps his voice level. "He was mistreated and wasted there. He's talented beyond anything I've seen and we've had no physician since Sverre died."

Morgan is quiet. His fingers tap the stack. Then, slowly, working visibly at giving his brother the benefit of the doubt: "Brother, did you literally steal a person from their home?"

"It's not like that."

"It sounds exactly like that."

"Morgan—"

"You went to a foreign kingdom, found a healer you liked, and brought him home on your ship. That's theft. Of a person."