Page 74 of Tending the Ache

What finally cracks him open is practical. Embarrassingly, mundanely practical.

He needs a word.

He has needed it for six weeks. Since the cabin on the ship, since Eskil's mouth on his and Eskil's hands on his skin and Eskil's voice in the dark saying you are not mine. He has needed it through every conversation and every silence and every sleepless night. He needs it now more than ever, because something changed in the library and Indrie does not have the language to name what he is to the man who changed it.

He turns from the shelf. His cheeks are still warm but his voice is level.

"I need you to help me with a word."

Morgan tilts his head. "What word?"

"I don't know how to say it in Rengaran. That is the problem." Indrie folds his arms across his chest. Unfolds them. Folds them again. "In Kalkoan we say we belong to each other. But I asked Eskil to belong to him and he told me…" He falters, tries again. “He told me no.”

Morgan is quiet for a long moment. His expression has not changed, but something behind his eyes is moving. Wheels turning, pieces assembling, the quick sharp mind working through implications that extend well beyond vocabulary.

And then the mortification arrives, all at once. He presses both hands over his face.

"I'm sorry," he says through his fingers. "I should not have. You shouldn't have to hear. I am so sorry, Morgan, this is incredibly—"

"Indrie."

He peels his hands away from his face. Morgan is looking at him with an expression that is not amused, which is not the right word for it. Steady. The sharp edges of his features have softened into something warm and unshakeable, and he does not look appalled or disgusted or any of the things Indrie braced himself for.

"Sit down," Morgan says, in the voice of a man managing a diplomatic incident, which, Indrie supposes, in a sense he is.

Indrie sits. Morgan pours him a cup of water from the pitcher on the shelf and puts it in his hands, and Indrie drinks and tries to stop blushing and accomplishes only the first.

"I need to explain something to you."

Indrie waits.

"When you asked Eskil, do I belong to you?" Morgan speaks slowly, choosing his words with the same care Indrie uses when explaining a diagnosis. "The word you reached for in Rengaran. The closest word your vocabulary could produce. Do you remember what it was?"

Indrie remembers. It is the word he chose carefully, or as carefully as his vocabulary allowed, reaching for the idea the way his own language holds it. As connection. As bond. As the joining of one person to another that is chosen and cherished.

"Do you know what that word means to us?" Morgan asks.

"Belonging. Being joined to."

"No." Morgan opens his eyes. "It means owned."

Indrie does not move.

"It means ownership." Morgan's voice stays level, and that is somehow worse than if it did not. "It is a bill-of-sale word. It is what a slaver writes in a ledger. It is the word Armond would have used about you to anybody who asked whose you were."

Something is happening in Indrie's chest and he cannot name it yet.

"Eskil freed every slave in this kingdom the year he took the throne," Morgan says. "He was nineteen. Half the council told him it would ruin us and he did it anyway, and he has fought over it since, and he has killed over it since. He didn't hear what you were asking."

The understanding arrives all at once.

It starts at the top of Indrie's skull and moves down through his chest and his stomach and into his legs, and it takes his balance with it. The room tilts. He grips the table.

You'll never belong to me.

Not a refusal.

A promise.