Page 9 of Tending the Ache

"I trained from twelve," he says. "There was an old woman in my village. She watched me splint a bird's wing and decided I was worth the trouble. She was strict, but knowledgeable." He works the rag into a seam in the floorboards. "King Armond purchased me at seventeen. For his illness."

He uses the word purchased deliberately and watches Morgan's face when he says it, but Morgan does not flinch. His hands slow on the shelf he is wiping, and he turns to face Indrie, and he is listening to all of it, including the parts that are not being said.

"I haven't been outside the castle walls since," Indrie says, wringing his rag into the bucket. The water has gone grey-brown, swirling with the filth of two years' neglect. "Five years."

Morgan is quiet for a moment. Then he says, "That's a long time to spend in one place."

Indrie nods. He does not mention the beatings. He does not mention the closet-sized room or the threadbare mat or the nights without food or the sound of Armond's hand against his face when the pain in the king's joints flared and there was no one else to blame. Morgan does not ask.

Indrie is grateful. The silence between what is said and what is understood is its own kind of language, and Morgan speaks it fluently.

In return, Indrie asks halting questions about Eskil.

He tries to be subtle about it. He fails so thoroughly that if subtlety were a patient it would be dead on his examination table.

"Have you and the king always lived in Valen?" he asks, and thinks it sounds practical.

"Since we were born."

"And how long has your family held the throne?" Historical interest. Perfectly ordinary. The sort of thing anyone would want to know about a country they have washed up in.

"Six generations, give or take a usurper."

"What is Eskil like when he's home?"

There it is, out in the open with no disguise on it whatsoever, and Indrie can see the ghost of amusement tugging at the corner of Morgan's mouth. The prince knows exactly what is happening and is choosing to be kind about it.

“The question you should ask is not how he is at home, because there is no distinction between the man at war and the man at the dinner table,” Morgan explains. “You should ask how he is with his people. With his family. That's how you know a man like Eskil.”

Morgan lowers his rag and leans against the wall, arms folded, and gives Indrie the answer he is actually asking for.

"He raised me," he says. "Since I was six. He's the only parent I remember." He says it without self-pity or performance, a fact so fundamental to the shape of his life that it requires no embellishment. "He's stubborn. Hot-tempered. Much quicker to reach for a sword than to think a thing through, and it has cost him." He turns the rag over in his hands. "And he is a good king. He will do whatever it takes for his people. He keeps advisors who disagree with him and irritate him half to death, because he knows it makes him better at the job." A pause. "He loves fiercely or he does not love at all. There is no middle in him."

He picks his rag back up and resumes his scrubbing with renewed vigor. "He drives me absolutely mad. And I would not trade him for any other man alive."

Indrie smiles down at his bucket. The warmth is growing again, the same warmth that started on the ship and has not stopped, carried cupped in both hands, terrified of the wind, terrified it will go out, terrified of what it means that he cannot bring himself to extinguish it.

"You were six when he became king?" he asks.

Morgan nods without looking up from the shelf. "Yes. He took the crown at nineteen, after our parents passed in the Year of Ohksen. He's been ruling for fourteen years."

Indrie can do the math himself. He has been doing it since yesterday, since he saw them on the dock and thought brother instead of lover and felt that shameful rush of relief that he has not stopped being embarrassed about. But hearing it confirmed aloud makes it settle differently. Heavier. More real.

His hands slow on the rag. He stares at the water in his bucket and tries to keep the thought from forming, but it forms anyway, fully and devastatingly, and settles over him cold.

Morgan is two years younger than Indrie. Two years. Practically the same age. A young man who grew up under Eskil's protection, who Eskil raised and fed and taught and carried through famine and war, who Eskil sees when he looks across a room and thinks mine to keep safe, mine to protect, the child I carried. And Indrie is closer in years to that child than to the man who raised him.

If Eskil has a brother who is Indrie's age, then he would never, could never, see Indrie as anything other than what he is. A boy. A naive, damaged boy from a ruined kingdom who doesn't even speak the language properly. Someone to be helped and housed and treated kindly, the way Eskil treats Morgan, the way a good man treats someone young and lost and in need of guidance. Not a lover. Not a partner. Not an equal.

The whole ship probably saw it. Indrie has been profoundly, achingly foolish, and the worst part is that he has been foolish in front of an entire crew who watched it happen and said nothing.

His heart sinks into his stomach and stays there.

He nods once, a small, tight motion that is mostly for himself, and goes back to scrubbing. He presses harder than necessary and the rag makes a rough sound against the wood and he does not trust himself to speak for a long while after that.

The clinic takes shape over the course of the afternoon.

They scrub the floor until the wood shows its true color, a warm honeyed pine that glows in the light from the windows as though it has been waiting all this time to be seen. They wash the shelves and wipe down the examination table and sweep the hearth clean of ash. The kettle turns out to be copper beneath the tarnish, and after Morgan scrubs it with sand from the alley it shines with a warmth that transforms the entire corner.