Chapter 5 #3
"You should think about an apprentice," Morgan says, dropping onto a stool by the examination table, done with standing. "Ermin has been asking whether you might take him on and I've told him repeatedly to just ask you."
"Ermin." Indrie smiles. He remembers the boy's bright eyes and relentless curiosity, the way he sat beside Indrie on the ship and asked question after question about herbs and healing, scribbling in his leather-bound journal with fervor.
"He has a good mind. Quick. He just needs to learn to slow down. "
"Sounds like someone I know," Morgan says dryly. Indrie looks at him quizzically and Morgan tilts his head. "My brother. All instinct, no patience. It drove our weapon-master into an early retirement."
Indrie laughs, a small, surprised sound, and Morgan looks pleased, having felt the room going heavy and done something about it.
They settle into an easy rhythm as Morgan helps him reorganize a shelf that is already organized but that Indrie has decided could be better.
"Tell me about what you do," Indrie says, while they're working. “You've wasted so much time the last two days with me. I'm sure you have better things to do.”
Morgan scoffs at him. “Please. You're a breath of fresh air, Indrie. I will never take for granted having more men in this city who do not feel the need to posture and flex to impress me.”
Indrie laughs, smiling wide, and Morgan grins at him.
"But when I'm not among the citizens, I take care of the books.
Diplomacy. The trade negotiations. Everything that requires patience and literacy and a willingness to sit in very boring meetings until the other side gives up.
" He hands over another jar. "Eskil handles everything that requires hitting something or glaring at it until it gives up.
Which, to be fair, is a surprising amount of governance. "
"Surely not everything requires hitting."
"You would think. And yet here we are, a kingdom sustained in large part by the king's ability to intimidate people into agreement." Morgan pauses, considering. "Although he prefers the term aggressive negotiation."
Indrie's smile widens. He can picture it perfectly.
Eskil at a negotiating table, all broad shoulders and tattooed arms and that look he gets when his patience is thinning, the one that makes the air go still around him.
He imagines the other party seated across from him, watching the king's hand rest idly on the pommel of his longsword, and deciding very quickly that the trade terms were actually quite reasonable after all.
"He is lucky to have you," Indrie says, and means it. The two of them, the sword and the quill, the force and the finesse, make a whole that neither could be alone. Indrie understands balance. A body needs both its hands.
Morgan looks at him with something that might be surprise, or gratitude, or the plain pleasure of being seen clearly by someone new enough to still be looking.
"He would say the same, though getting him to actually voice it requires a specific alignment of stars that occurs roughly once per decade."
They work in quiet for a stretch after that, the kind of silence that does not need filling, and then Indrie finds himself in a conversation he did not plan.
He says, carefully, "Morgan. On the ship. The crew saw things. Between me and your brother."
He does not look at Morgan when he says it. He looks at the jar in his hands, at his own fingers curled around the clay, and feels the heat start to climb his neck.
Morgan is silent for a beat. Then: "Yes."
"You said they've spoken about it."
"People talk, Indrie. It's what people do."
"I don't want —" He stops. Starts again. "I don't want anyone to have the wrong idea. About Eskil. He has not done anything improper. Whatever people think they saw, it was — he was — kind to me. That's all."
The words are a lie and the truth at once. Eskil was kind to him. Eskil was the kindest person Indrie has ever met. And that is the whole of it and also not remotely the whole of it, and Indrie is standing in the gap between those two truths and cannot figure out how to close it.
Morgan is quiet for long enough that Indrie risks a glance at him. The prince is watching him with those pale eyes, his expression unreadable. Not cold. Not clinical. Careful. He is reading several layers of the conversation at once and choosing which one to answer.
"Indrie," he says, gently. "You don't owe me an explanation for anything that did or didn't happen on that ship."
Indrie swallows. "I know. I just — I don't want you to think less of him."
Something shifts in Morgan's face. A softening. A flicker of understanding deeper than the words warrant.
"I could never think less of my brother for being kind to someone who needed kindness."
The sentence lands in Indrie's chest and sits there, warm and aching.
He nods. He does not trust his voice for more, so he goes back to the comfrey, and Morgan goes back to the shelf he is straightening, and neither of them says what is actually being said, which is: I am in love with your brother and I am terrified of what that means and I do not know what to do with it.