21. Chapter 21
Indrie
Indrie is not concentrating.
He has re-labeled the same jar twice, once as chamomile and once as comfrey, and it is neither.
It is yarrow. He has been staring at the yarrow for the better part of a minute with the charcoal pencil poised above the label and his mind somewhere in the eastern mountains with a man who carries three swords and left without saying goodbye.
He peels the incorrect label off, writes yarrow in careful bilingual script, affixes it to the jar, and tells himself to focus.
He cannot focus.
It has been a day since Eskil rode out with the war party.
One day since Indrie walked home from the library on legs that trembled, with a tenderness between his thighs that made him flush every time he shifted, and found the city buzzing with news of the mobilization.
One day of seeing patients and teaching Ermin and grinding herbs and labeling jars and pretending that the hollow pit in his stomach is concern for the kingdom's security and not the anxiety of a man whose–
His what? His lover? His king? The man who held him in the air and whispered filthy beautiful things into his ear and then rode off to fight before the sweat had dried?
He does not have a word for what Eskil is to him. Not in Rengaran. Not in Kalkoan that anyone here would understand. The word he needs is a gap in his vocabulary that aches like a missing tooth.
He puts the yarrow on the shelf. Picks up the next jar. Stares at it.
Elderflower. He knows it is elderflower. He can smell it. He labels it correctly on the first try and this small victory does nothing for the knot in his chest.
The door opens and Morgan enters.
There is something different in his bearing today. A tightness around the eyes. A set to his jaw that Indrie recognizes, because he has seen it on the face of the other brother, the one who wears it like mail.
"Eskil said to tell you he will be back," Morgan says.
The words land with weight. The idea that Eskil thought of him before leaving, that he paused in the chaos of a mobilization and sought out his brother and said tell Indrie, sits in the middle of Indrie's chest and glows.
He turns away to compose himself, busying his hands with the elderflower jar, adjusting its position on the shelf with a precision the jar does not require.
"Thank you," he says. His voice is steady. The rest of him is not.
Morgan settles onto the stool beside the examination table, the one that has become, through repetition, his stool. He folds his hands in his lap and watches Indrie with those light sharp eyes, and Indrie can feel the weight of the gaze between his shoulder blades.
"I also wanted to talk to you about the library," Morgan says. "When Eskil sent me out of the room."
Indrie's hands still on the jar.
"I'm not asking for details," Morgan adds quickly, reading the flush already climbing Indrie's neck. "What happened between you and my brother is between you and my brother, and I have no desire whatsoever to know more than I already—" He pauses. Recalibrates. "—suspect."
Indrie's flush deepens. He keeps his back to Morgan and adjusts the elderflower jar again, moving it approximately one quarter of an inch to the left, and then one quarter of an inch back to where it was.
"What I'm asking," Morgan says, "is whether you are all right."
"Yes," Indrie says. Too fast.
Morgan does not accept it. He sits on his stool with his hands folded and his legs crossed at the ankle and waits, with the patience of somebody accustomed to waiting out diplomats and council members and a brother who communicates primarily through silence and violence.
"I'm not asking as the prince," Morgan says quietly.
"I know." Indrie picks up another jar. "I've been working on a tincture for the winter coughs.
Thyme and marshmallow root and a little honey, though the honey is really only for the children, it does nothing medically.
Ingrid's comfrey has taken. The valerian is spreading faster than I expected and I may have to move it before spring or it will take the whole bed. "
"Indrie."
"Ermin's splint wrapping is much better. His tension is even now. I let him do a wrist unsupervised on Tuesday and it held."
"Indrie."
Indrie sets the jar down and does not turn around.
Morgan waits.
The waiting is patient and relentless and Indrie recognizes the technique because he uses it himself, on patients who insist their wound is nothing while the blood seeps through the bandage.
What finally cracks him open is practical. Embarrassingly, mundanely practical.
He needs a word.
He has needed it for six weeks. Since the cabin on the ship, since Eskil's mouth on his and Eskil's hands on his skin and Eskil's voice in the dark saying you are not mine.
He has needed it through every conversation and every silence and every sleepless night.
He needs it now more than ever, because something changed in the library and Indrie does not have the language to name what he is to the man who changed it.
He turns from the shelf. His cheeks are still warm but his voice is level.
"I need you to help me with a word."
Morgan tilts his head. "What word?"
"I don't know how to say it in Rengaran. That is the problem." Indrie folds his arms across his chest. Unfolds them. Folds them again. "In Kalkoan we say we belong to each other. But I asked Eskil to belong to him and he told me…" He falters, tries again. “He told me no.”
Morgan is quiet for a long moment. His expression has not changed, but something behind his eyes is moving. Wheels turning, pieces assembling, the quick sharp mind working through implications that extend well beyond vocabulary.
And then the mortification arrives, all at once. He presses both hands over his face.
"I'm sorry," he says through his fingers. "I should not have. You shouldn't have to hear. I am so sorry, Morgan, this is incredibly—"
"Indrie."
He peels his hands away from his face. Morgan is looking at him with an expression that is not amused, which is not the right word for it.
Steady. The sharp edges of his features have softened into something warm and unshakeable, and he does not look appalled or disgusted or any of the things Indrie braced himself for.
"Sit down," Morgan says, in the voice of a man managing a diplomatic incident, which, Indrie supposes, in a sense he is.
Indrie sits. Morgan pours him a cup of water from the pitcher on the shelf and puts it in his hands, and Indrie drinks and tries to stop blushing and accomplishes only the first.
"I need to explain something to you."
Indrie waits.
"When you asked Eskil, do I belong to you?" Morgan speaks slowly, choosing his words with the same care Indrie uses when explaining a diagnosis. "The word you reached for in Rengaran. The closest word your vocabulary could produce. Do you remember what it was?"
Indrie remembers. It is the word he chose carefully, or as carefully as his vocabulary allowed, reaching for the idea the way his own language holds it. As connection. As bond. As the joining of one person to another that is chosen and cherished.
"Do you know what that word means to us?" Morgan asks.
"Belonging. Being joined to."
"No." Morgan opens his eyes. "It means owned."
Indrie does not move.
"It means ownership." Morgan's voice stays level, and that is somehow worse than if it did not. "It is a bill-of-sale word. It is what a slaver writes in a ledger. It is the word Armond would have used about you to anybody who asked whose you were."
Something is happening in Indrie's chest and he cannot name it yet.
"Eskil freed every slave in this kingdom the year he took the throne," Morgan says. "He was nineteen. Half the council told him it would ruin us and he did it anyway, and he has fought over it since, and he has killed over it since. He didn't hear what you were asking."
The understanding arrives all at once.
It starts at the top of Indrie's skull and moves down through his chest and his stomach and into his legs, and it takes his balance with it. The room tilts. He grips the table.
You'll never belong to me.
Not a refusal.
A promise.
Eskil had not been saying I do not want you.
He had been saying I will not own you. He had been saying I refuse to be another man who writes your name in a ledger.
He had heard that word out of that mouth, weeks off a slaver's floor, and every part of him had recoiled from it, because the king who emptied the slave pens could not accept ownership of the one person he most wanted to keep.
He answered the question Indrie asked. Not the question Indrie meant.
And Indrie heard a refusal where there was a vow.
"Then why did he not explain?" Indrie's voice is frustrated.
Morgan's expression is flat and deeply sympathetic. "Because he is an idiot who does not know how to use his words."
A silence.
It stretches between them, long and heavy, and Indrie can feel something cracking open in him.
Something that has been sealed shut since the ship.
Since you are not mine. Since the cabin and the stars and the slow devastating education of learning that wanting does not entitle you to having.
It cracks open and it hurts, but it hurts the way setting a bone hurts.
Sharp. Necessary. The precursor to healing.
He has been carrying a disgrace that does not exist. Across an ocean, through a harbor, into a city, into a clinic, into a library.
He carried it while Eskil cleaned blood from his skin.
He carried it while Eskil held him on a couch in the dark.
He carried it while Eskil had him on a desk and said I wanted you before I ate that fucking fruit, and Indrie believed him, and still, underneath the believing, carried the weight of a rejection that was never made.
Morgan lets him sit with it. Does not push. Does not fill the silence with reassurance. He sits on his stool and watches with the patience of somebody who understands that certain kinds of understanding need room to land.
It is Indrie who breaks it, eventually, because there is a thing he has been wanting to ask since Morgan came through the door and looked like his brother–like he is carrying a weight too heavy to hold.
"I feel like you didn't come here to deliver Eskil's message," he says quietly.
Something happens to Morgan's face. It is not dramatic. The warmth that has been there all afternoon simply withdraws, and what replaces it is smooth and polished and reveals nothing.
"The council and my brother are in talks for an alliance with a southern entity, the Wolfe Clan. It involves my betrothal to their chieftain."
Indrie stares at him, with wide eyes. “A betrothal?”
Morgan examines his own fingernails. "A formal alliance. Southern trade routes, mineral rights, and the finest fighters in the region, in exchange for one lightly used prince. It is an extremely good bargain and I have advised my brother to take it."
"Morgan."
"You should have heard the council. They went through it line by line as though I were a shipment of wool." He smiles. It does not touch his eyes at all. "The tragedy is that I agreed with them."
"You're not being fair to yourself." Indrie says. "You are speaking about yourself as though you are without worth."
"I am speaking about myself as a prince, which is a thing that exists to be spent." Morgan's voice is perfectly light. "It is the most useful I will ever be."
Indrie looks at him. At the twenty-year-old sitting on a stool in his clinic with his legs crossed at the ankle and ink on his fingers, and the mask is good, it is very good, the product of years of practice and a natural aptitude for concealment.
But Indrie has spent his life reading people.
Reading what they hide. Reading the space between what the body says and what the mouth says.
Morgan is frightened. Under the wit and the composure and the careful diplomatic phrasing, he is a boy who is being handed to a stranger and is trying very hard to be brave about it.
"No," Indrie says.
Morgan blinks. "No?"
"That is not true and I will not sit here and let you say it." Indrie's voice is quiet and it does not waver. "The most useful you will ever be is not being handed to a warlord as a trophy."
"That is not the—"
Indrie leans forward. "I am not talking about what you produce, Morgan.
I know what it is to be valued for what you produce.
I lived five years inside it, and I promise you it is not the same as being loved, and it does not keep you warm, and the moment you cannot produce anymore you find out exactly what you were worth. "
Morgan is very still.
"Your brother would burn that stronghold to the ground for you," Indrie says. "I have known him a matter of weeks and I know that. Do you truly believe he wants the trade routes more than he wants you at his table?"
The mask slips. Just for a moment. A crack in the glaze, a tremor in the steady hand, and what is underneath is young and frightened and trying so hard not to be that it hurts to look at.
"No," Morgan says. Quietly. "No, I know exactly what he wants."
He breathes in a deep breath.
"That is rather the problem," Morgan says.
"He would burn it down. He has told me so.
And if I refuse this, the Jakadi come again in the spring, and they come with the passes open and our southern flank naked, and my brother will meet them in a field because that is the only answer he has ever had.
" He looks up. "I can prevent that. I am the only person alive who can prevent that, and I can do it by getting on a horse. "
"And what happens to you?"
Morgan doesn't answer, and Indrie doesn't push any further.
They sit in the same room with the weight of it between them, two people who have had their choices made for them by men with more power and less care.