Chapter 3 #4
Morgan hums. It is a thoughtful sound, measured, a man filing information away. "I've heard talk among the town about the king who dove into the ocean in the middle of a storm."
Indrie's flush deepens terribly. Heat climbs from his collar to his cheekbones to the tips of his ears, and he is suddenly and acutely aware that every crew member who disembarked the Valkyr has apparently been telling this story. He ducks his head. "I wasn't even talking about that."
Morgan's eyebrows rise. Both of them, slowly, in an expression of such theatrical surprise that it cannot be anything other than deliberate. "There's more to the life-saving?"
Indrie opens his mouth. Closes it. Opens it again.
Several sentences present themselves, each worse than the last. He cannot say your brother kissed my knuckles and told me I could have anything I desired.
He cannot say he held my face in both hands and told me I was not his and it broke something in me I don't know how to mend.
He absolutely and under no circumstances can say anything about what happened in the cabin.
Morgan watches him. When he speaks again, his tone has shifted, still warm but more measured, careful, stepping around a threshold he is not certain he has been invited to cross.
"Many of the crew who departed the Valkyr speak of the attention the king gave to their new healer," he says. "That it has not gone unnoticed."
Something in Indrie pulls tight.
He remembers Eskil on the deck, voice firm: you'll never belong to me.
He remembers the cabin, and the fire in Eskil's skin, and the way Eskil had held him and touched him and taken him apart with hands that shook with restraint, and then looked him in the eyes and told him it didn't mean anything.
You are not mine. The fruit doesn't change that.
He finds himself incapable of speech. The words are there, lodged in his throat, but if he lets them out they will bring everything else with them and he cannot do that.
Not here. Not with Morgan, who is Eskil's brother, who should not have to be the repository for this devastation.
Who has spent his morning on his hands and knees helping Indrie scrub floors and deserves better than to watch a stranger fall apart on him.
Morgan touches his arm. The contact is light, just his fingertips, a brush of attention, and Indrie does not flinch. He is grateful he does not flinch. Morgan's tone drops again, threaded through with protectiveness.
"If that attention has made you uncomfortable…if he has overstepped or if you are wary of the king in any way —"
"No!" Indrie says, and the word comes out with a sharpness that startles them both. He turns to Morgan and shakes his head, hard enough that his loose hair swings against his jaw. "Eskil has not overstepped. It's not — it's not like that. I trust him. Implicitly. He has never —"
He swallows. The sentence resists him, as though finishing it requires admitting something he is not prepared to admit, and the effort of holding it back while also trying to reassure Morgan is pulling him in two directions at once.
"He has been nothing but kind to me," Indrie finishes, and his voice is quieter now, fraying at the edges.
Morgan's brow creases. The confusion is real.
Indrie can see him working through it, turning the pieces in that relentless mind, trying to reconcile Indrie's flushed face and constricted voice with the assurance that nothing is wrong.
Something is clearly wrong. The pieces are there, the healer who blushes at the mention of the king's name, the king who dove off a ship to save him, the crew who noticed, the attention that cannot be denied, but they do not fit the shape Morgan was expecting.
If the attention was unwanted, Indrie would be frightened. He is not frightened. If the attention was welcome, Indrie would be happy. He is not happy. He is something else entirely, something that lives in the space between those two things, and Morgan is visibly trying to identify it.
Indrie wrings his hands. He looks down at them, at the reddened knuckles and the clean nails and the fingers that are still trembling faintly, and does not know how to explain what is happening inside him.
How does one explain, to the king's own brother, that Indrie threw himself at Eskil and was refused?
That he bared his heart and Eskil said no?
That he lay with the king and the king told him it meant nothing, and that Indrie has been carrying that refusal ever since, turning it over and over, wearing himself smooth against its edges?
How does one explain that, and then continue to stand in the clinic that the king's brother helped him clean, wearing the king's shirt, in the king's city, and not die of shame?
"Can we talk about anything else?" Indrie asks, and his voice is very small. "Please?"
Morgan takes pity on him. The pivot is graceful, the practiced redirect of a born diplomat.
"Then settle an argument for me," he says, tapping the shelving nearest the examination table. "High-use supplies. Frequency of use, or category?"
"Frequency." Indrie does not even have to think about it. "Always frequency. You do not want to be crossing a room for something you need in an emergency."
"Category creates consistency. When you are not here, someone else has to be able to find things."
"Then I will teach them the order I use."
"And if you are unconscious on your own floor?"
"Then whoever is standing over me can read the labels."
Morgan considers this for a moment. "That is annoyingly sound."
The back-and-forth is so absorbing and so normal that Indrie's chest loosens by degrees. He is so grateful he could weep.
He does not weep. He has done enough of that today.
He argues for his shelving system instead, at length and with more passion than the subject strictly requires, and Morgan concedes the point with a graciousness that is almost certainly tactical, and they spend the last light of the afternoon arranging invisible supplies on bare shelves, planning for a future that Indrie is only just beginning to believe might belong to him.