Chapter 2
Eskil
Morgan will not shut up.
This is not a complaint. Eskil has spent six weeks at sea with men who communicate in grunts and creative obscenity, and that included a stint in the saddest excuse for a kingdom he has ever had the displeasure of raiding.
It also included two days listening to Gunnar sing the same four verses about a fisherman's wife until Bohdi threatened to put the entire spice stores over the rail.
Morgan's voice is the sound of home. Eskil would sooner gut himself than say so out loud.
But the boy has not drawn breath since the dock.
"—the herring tariffs alone took eleven days, and I use the word negotiate generously, because what actually occurred was that I sat in a room with a man who smelled aggressively of fish while he explained, at length and with visual aids, why his herring was superior to all other herring in the northern waters.
I told him all herring tastes the same. He was offended, Eskil.
You'd have thought I insulted his mother. "
"Did you fix it?"
"Of course I fixed it. Five percent off his dock fees for the season. Cost us nothing and he left feeling like a conqueror. I left eleven days older and knowing more about herring than any man should."
They climb through the keep. Dark timber and grey stone built back into the rock face, so that half of it is mountain and the other half only pretends not to be.
Eskil could walk it blind. The floor is right under his boots in a way the deck of the Valkyr never managed, and the smell of the place, woodsmoke and pine resin and the mineral tang of the springs below, gets into his lungs and loosens something that has been clenched since they sailed.
Morgan keeps pace at his shoulder with a sheaf of documents already under his arm. He had a briefing prepared on the dock. He has an agenda, itemized, ordered by urgency, and Eskil would bet his sword arm there is a summary page.
Morgan is exactly what he was when Eskil left, slender and sharp and built for a library, hair accented with a single braid and so unlike his own. There's a smear of charcoal on his jaw he has not noticed and would be annoyed to learn about.
"Western wall came down," Morgan says, flipping a page without breaking stride. "Section twelve, by the granary. Mortar gave out after the rain. Repaired within the week. Torben's crew did the stonework and I pulled the lumber from the north gate, which was ahead of schedule anyway."
"Good."
"The dignitary from the northern fishing villages arrived expecting the king and got the prince for three weeks instead."
Eskil glances sideways. "How'd that go?"
Morgan's face goes magnificently flat. "He was deeply offended you weren't here. I told him you were on urgent business. He asked what could possibly be more urgent than his tariffs. I told him I'd let him know when I found out."
Eskil almost laughs, which surprises him, because he has not wanted to laugh in what feels like an eternity.
"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."
Eskil's jaw sets. He meets his brother's eyes and gives him the bare minimum, because there are things about that ship and that cabin that Morgan does not need and is not getting.
"He was beaten. Regularly. He had bruises on his face and his arms and his chest. No belongings. No freedom. Nothing outside of keeping that bastard breathing." Each word goes down flat and deliberate. "He was a slave. They bought him and worked him and hit him when he wasn't quick enough."
The study is very quiet.
Morgan's hand has stopped on the documents. The skepticism has gone out of his face and what is underneath it does not know what to do with itself.
"He's a good man who deserved better," Eskil says. "I gave him an option to go anywhere and he said he wanted to stay in Valen."
Morgan looks at him for a long moment. It is the kind of look that contains an entire conversation conducted in the private language of two brothers, and what it says is I hear what you are telling me and I hear what you are leaving out and I am putting the difference somewhere safe for later.
"I want to meet him."
Eskil expected that. "There's a language barrier. His Rengaran's come on since we sailed, Dagny's been at him daily, but anything complicated is still a wall. Anything subtle is hopeless."
Morgan gives him a look of such withering condescension it could curdle milk. "I speak six languages, Eskil. Kalkoan is one of them."
Eskil stares at him.
Of course it is. Of course his bookish, brilliant, insufferable brother has been sitting on the one language that would have solved half of what went wrong on that ship.
And then, a beat behind, the rest of it arrives.
Morgan could tell him. Right now, in this room, in the time it takes to set down a stack of grain reports.
Eskil could say the word to him, the one that Indrie said to him and has been rattling around in his skull for three days like a stone in a boot, and ask what it carries in Kalkoan.
What shades it has. What a man might mean by it that a Rengaran ear would not catch.
Morgan would know. Morgan would know instantly and would probably give him three definitions and a note on regional usage and an aside about the eastern dialect.
And to ask, Eskil would have to explain why he needs to know.
He would have to explain a cabin, and a fruit, and a night he has no intention of describing to his twenty-year-old brother for as long as either of them is breathing.
He would have to explain a deck at sunset and a small voice asking something Eskil answered wrong, and he would have to sit there while Morgan worked out, in about four seconds, exactly what his brother has been doing with a man who had no power to refuse him.
The answer is two feet away with ink on his fingers, and Eskil cannot reach for it.
He adds it to the long and growing list of ways his brother is more useful than Eskil has ever deserved.
"Of course you do."
"I also speak Western Trade Common, Old Rengaran, and a passable amount of the Wolfe dialect. In case you were wondering."
"I wasn't."
"You should have been. Languages are useful, Eskil."
"Get out of my study, brat."
Morgan gathers his papers slowly, taking his time about it, gloating with every unhurried motion and declining to do it out loud. At the door he stops, and when he speaks the sharpness has gone out of him and what is left is the boy who hit him at a dead run on the dock and held on.
"Get some rest. You look terrible."
"Out.”
The door shuts.
Eskil sits in the quiet and thinks about Indrie.
He never looked at him. Not once, coming down that gangplank. He had three weeks of practice by then. He knew where Indrie would be standing, knew Dagny would have hold of his arm, and he kept his eyes forward and his hands busy and let the crowd close over the space between them.
It had cost him more than the whole failed voyage.
He does not need to have looked. He has the rest of it already, gathered a glance at a time from the far end of a deck.
Indrie at the rail in the mornings with his hair whipping loose and his hands wrapped around the rope.
Indrie hunching his shoulders in a crowd, making himself into less.
Indrie laughing at something Dagny said, and the way he covered his mouth when he did it, as though laughing were something he could still be punished for.
Eskil presses both palms into his eyes.
Three days ago he sat in a cabin with a broken piece of charcoal in his hand and finally saw the shape of what he had missed.
Were you asking if I wanted you?
He has carried the question from open water to the harbor mouth to this chair, and he has not asked it.
There was opportunity where he could have crossed twenty feet of planking and said the other night, when you asked me, and started from there.
He did not. He told himself the timing was wrong, and that Indrie needed rest, and that a man who has just been freed should not be cornered in his bunk by the man who freed him.
Some of that was even true. It is remarkable how much of a coward can be built out of true things.
Because if that was the question, then the answer he gave was not merely clumsy. It was a refusal. Indrie had gathered himself up and offered the only thing he had never been forced to give, and Eskil had looked him in the face and said no, never, with the conviction of a man being kind.
And if that was the question, then Eskil has to answer the real one, and he does not know how.
I will not own you is a thing he can say.
He has said it in council chambers and on battlefields and to men with chains in their hands.
I want you is a different sentence entirely, and one he is not certain Indrie would be grateful to hear after a night he was forced to spend in the king’s bed due to a poisoned fruit.
Eskil drops his hands and looks at the documents without reading a word of them. The ink has crusted at the rim of the pot. Through the open window, Valen carries on without him: voices, the blacksmith's hammer, a child shrieking with laughter somewhere down the hill.
What a fucking mess you've made.
He could go down there. He knows the street Dagny's house is on. It is a ten-minute walk and he has invented worse excuses for less.
He stays where he is and tells himself it's discipline.