Page 8 of Tending the Ache

He has not been taught like this before. Dagny's lessons on the ship were exuberant and chaotic, full of laughter and wild gestures and mispronunciations that became running jokes between them. Morgan's instruction is different. It is structured. Considered. He knows how language works at its bones and exactly which bones to show first.

They turn off the main road and Morgan leads him down a wider street to a dusty, abandoned building near the center of the city. It sits at the intersection of two main roads, with a wide front room and tall windows facing the road, and a faded painted sign hangs above the door, letters Indrie cannot read yet, in a script he is only beginning to recognize.

"The last physician's," Morgan says, nodding up at the sign. "He passed of old age two winters ago. No one has touched it since."

He pushes the door open and Indrie follows him inside.

Dust coats every surface. Cobwebs hang from the rafters in elaborate, undisturbed curtains. The air is thick with the smell of disuse, old wood and dead herbs and the staleness of a room sealed up and waiting, patiently, for someone to need it. There is a long wooden table in the center of the room that could serve as an examination surface, scratched and worn but solid beneath the grime. Shelves line the walls, bare but sturdy, their surfaces furred grey with dust. A hearth sits in the far corner with a blackened kettle still hanging on its hook, as though the last physician had put water on to boil and never come back for it.

Indrie stands in the doorway and cannot move.

Morgan gestures at the space with one hand, encompassing the grime and the cobwebs and the sad little kettle. "It will need a little elbow grease, of course."

Indrie does not hear him. Or rather, he hears him, but the words land somewhere far away, muffled by the roaring in his ears. He is looking at the shelves. At the windows. At the table and the hearth and the wide front room with its good light. At the space, a space with a door that closes and windows that open and room enough to work and breathe and exist.

A space that is not a closet. A space that is not someone else's.

The generosity of it, of having his own place, his own domain, something that is his, crashes into him.

He has been given a room before. In Kalkoa, when he was first purchased and brought to the castle, they had shown him to a space barely larger than a cupboard and told him it was his. It was never his. It was a place they kept him, a tool in a drawer, close at hand and out of sight and easy to retrieve. He slept on a mat on the stone floor and kept his satchel under his head because it was the only thing he owned and he was afraid it would be taken if he closed his eyes for too long.

This is not that. No one has told him he must stay here. No one has told him he must earn it. Morgan has brought him here and stood back–look what I found for you–and the unspoken assumption that Indrie will make something good of it steals his breath.

His throat constricts. He has to press his hand against his mouth, fingers hard against his lips, because if he opens his mouth right now what comes out will not be words. He breathes through it, in through his nose, held, released, the way he has trained himself to breathe through every moment when his body threatens to betray the thing his face is trying to hide.

"It's perfect," he manages. His voice is thick and cracked and mortifying and he does not care.

Morgan looks at him and something in his face gives. He does not comment on the tears Indrie is fighting. He does not look away from them either. He holds Indrie's gaze steadily, and then, in the same practical tone he has used all morning: "There are quarters in the back. A cot, a washbasin, a window onto the alley. It isn't much to look at." He shrugs. "We can always add on if you need more room."

"Thank you," Indrie says. "Thank you. I have never been given —"

The sentence goes out from under him. He starts again in Rengaran, which is worse, and then back in Kalkoan, which does not help either, and somewhere in the middle of it he is trying to explain that no one has ever handed him anything he was allowed to keep, and it comes out sideways, and he is making an absolute mess of it.

Morgan laughs, a bright, surprised sound, and holds up both hands. "We haven't even cleaned and filled the space yet. Save the gratitude."

Indrie is taken aback. "We?"

Morgan gives him a look that suggests the question is absurd. "I hardly expect you to do it all on your own."

He rolls his sleeves to the elbow, and together they set to work.

They find buckets at a well two streets over, filling them until the water sloshes over the rims on the walk back. Morgan locates a block of hard yellow soap in the back quarters that the previous physician must have left behind, dry and cracked but still usable, and Indrie grates shavings of it into the warm water until it foams. They start at opposite ends of the front room and work toward the center.

Morgan is surprisingly efficient for a prince, although Indrie has noted he has not once referred to himself by such a title. He attacks the cobwebs with a broom as though they have personally offended him, swatting at them with short hard strokes that send clouds of dust billowing through the shafts of light from the windows. When a large web clings stubbornly to the highest rafter, well beyond Morgan's reach, the prince drags a stool from the corner and climbs onto it and wages a brief, undignified war with the broom. It ends with the cobweb draped across his hair. Morgan looks so genuinely affronted that Indrie has to press his lips together very hard to keep from laughing.

Morgan catches his expression. He points the broom at Indrie. "Not a word."

"I didn't say anything."

"You're thinking it so loudly I can hear it."

Indrie ducks his head and scrubs harder at the floor, biting the inside of his cheek. The smile stays on his face for a long time after. It feels strange there. Good strange. The kind of strange that makes his cheekbones ache because the muscles have not been used this way in so long.

They fall into a rhythm without trying. Morgan scrubs the shelves and Indrie scrubs the floor and the table, and the dust gives way in stages, first the surfaces, then the corners, then the grime that has embedded itself into the grain of the wood over two years and requires real effort to shift. Indrie works with the steady patience of years spent cleaning spaces that were never his own. The motion is familiar. Hands and knees, rag and water, small circles wearing away at what does not want to leave. The difference, this time, is that when the wood comes clean beneath his hands, it is his.

They talk while they work. Morgan asks questions about Indrie's life before Rengara, gently, carefully, leaving the door for Indrie to open from the inside. He does not pry. He does not press. He asks the way a good diplomat asks, with space left for silence, with an acceptance that the silence itself is an answer worth hearing.

Indrie tells him what he is comfortable telling.