Chapter 3
Indrie
The blond-haired young man Indrie saw with Eskil comes to Dagny's house the next morning.
Indrie is at the kitchen table with a cup of tea going cold between his hands, staring at the wood grain and trying to quiet his thoughts, when the knock comes.
Three raps, evenly spaced. Courtesy taught early and worn as armor.
Dagny left for the training yards at dawn and Ingrid has gone to the market, so Indrie sets his tea down and crosses to the door.
The young man from the dock is standing on the step with a small bow already in motion.
"I'm Morgan," he says. "Brother of the king."
And then he says, in perfect Kalkoan, "It's a pleasure to meet you, Indrie."
Indrie's mouth falls open.
He has not heard his own language spoken by someone other than himself since he left Kalkoa. The sound of it now, fluid and unhesitating and correct in this golden stranger's mouth, is so familiar that his eyes prick with tears he has to blink back.
"You speak —" He stops. Swallows around the tightness in his throat. Tries again. "You speak my language."
Morgan's sharp features soften at whatever he sees on Indrie's face.
"I do. Among others." He tilts his head, studying Indrie.
"I've heard a great deal about you. I'm here to get you settled.
" He switches to Rengaran for half a beat, smooth and effortless, the languages almost like rooms he moves between without thinking about the doors, and then back to Kalkoan.
"My brother is many things, but an organizer is not one of them. That's my department."
Indrie lets out a breath that shakes more than he wants it to and steps aside to let Morgan in.
He thinks he should offer tea, because Ingrid left the kettle warm and it seems like the sort of thing one does when a prince appears on one's borrowed doorstep.
But Morgan is already glancing around the modest front room, cataloguing, taking inventory, and he waves off the offer before Indrie can voice it.
"We have somewhere to be," Morgan tells him, and there is a brightness in it that borders on conspiratorial. "Come on."
Indrie grabs his coat, the only one he owns, a worn thing Dagny found for him on the ship, and follows Morgan out into the morning.
He studies Morgan's face as they walk. The resemblance to Eskil is there in the strong jaw and the stubborn set of the mouth, in the way Morgan holds himself: spine straight, chin up, the world a room he has every right to enter.
But the differences are equally striking.
Where Eskil is broad and battle-hewn, all hard muscle and scarred knuckles and tattoos, Morgan is slender and pale and unmarked.
His hands are ink-stained at the fingertips, not calloused at the palms. His build is that of a scholar, not a soldier, and he moves through the streets of Valen with the quiet authority of a man known and respected and not feared.
People greet him as they pass. A woman selling bread from a cart calls out to him and Morgan raises a hand in acknowledgement without breaking stride.
A pair of children chasing each other around a well stop to stare, wide-eyed, and Morgan gives them a look of mock severity that sends them scattering with delighted shrieks.
He is relaxed here in a way that Eskil, for all his power, had not seemed to be on the dock.
The difference, perhaps, between carrying the weight of a kingdom and only holding it while someone else is away.
Morgan talks as they walk, filling the air with information about Valen that Indrie absorbs hungrily: the layout of the city, the location of the gates and the market square, which streets to take when the northern road floods in autumn, where to buy candles.
"And never buy fish on this side of the square," Morgan says, steering him around a puddle. "It comes off the boats at the eastern gate at dawn and everything that reaches here has spent the morning in the sun. The men selling it know that. They are counting on you not to."
He delivers all of it in Kalkoan, switching to Rengaran only when he reaches a word that has no equivalent, and each time he does he pauses and explains the Rengaran term with a patience that undoes Indrie a little.
He has not been taught like this before.
Dagny's lessons on the ship were exuberant and chaotic, full of laughter and wild gestures and mispronunciations that became running jokes between them.
Morgan's instruction is different. It is structured.
Considered. He knows how language works at its bones and exactly which bones to show first.
They turn off the main road and Morgan leads him down a wider street to a dusty, abandoned building near the center of the city.
It sits at the intersection of two main roads, with a wide front room and tall windows facing the road, and a faded painted sign hangs above the door, letters Indrie cannot read yet, in a script he is only beginning to recognize.
"The last physician's," Morgan says, nodding up at the sign. "He passed of old age two winters ago. No one has touched it since."
He pushes the door open and Indrie follows him inside.
Dust coats every surface. Cobwebs hang from the rafters in elaborate, undisturbed curtains.
The air is thick with the smell of disuse, old wood and dead herbs and the staleness of a room sealed up and waiting, patiently, for someone to need it.
There is a long wooden table in the center of the room that could serve as an examination surface, scratched and worn but solid beneath the grime.
Shelves line the walls, bare but sturdy, their surfaces furred grey with dust. A hearth sits in the far corner with a blackened kettle still hanging on its hook, as though the last physician had put water on to boil and never come back for it.
Indrie stands in the doorway and cannot move.
Morgan gestures at the space with one hand, encompassing the grime and the cobwebs and the sad little kettle. "It will need a little elbow grease, of course."
Indrie does not hear him. Or rather, he hears him, but the words land somewhere far away, muffled by the roaring in his ears.
He is looking at the shelves. At the windows.
At the table and the hearth and the wide front room with its good light.
At the space, a space with a door that closes and windows that open and room enough to work and breathe and exist.
A space that is not a closet. A space that is not someone else's.
The generosity of it, of having his own place, his own domain, something that is his, crashes into him.
He has been given a room before. In Kalkoa, when he was first purchased and brought to the castle, they had shown him to a space barely larger than a cupboard and told him it was his.
It was never his. It was a place they kept him, a tool in a drawer, close at hand and out of sight and easy to retrieve.
He slept on a mat on the stone floor and kept his satchel under his head because it was the only thing he owned and he was afraid it would be taken if he closed his eyes for too long.
This is not that. No one has told him he must stay here. No one has told him he must earn it. Morgan has brought him here and stood back–look what I found for you–and the unspoken assumption that Indrie will make something good of it steals his breath.
His throat constricts. He has to press his hand against his mouth, fingers hard against his lips, because if he opens his mouth right now what comes out will not be words.
He breathes through it, in through his nose, held, released, the way he has trained himself to breathe through every moment when his body threatens to betray the thing his face is trying to hide.
"It's perfect," he manages. His voice is thick and cracked and mortifying and he does not care.
Morgan looks at him and something in his face gives.
He does not comment on the tears Indrie is fighting.
He does not look away from them either. He holds Indrie's gaze steadily, and then, in the same practical tone he has used all morning: "There are quarters in the back.
A cot, a washbasin, a window onto the alley.
It isn't much to look at." He shrugs. "We can always add on if you need more room. "
"Thank you," Indrie says. "Thank you. I have never been given —"
The sentence goes out from under him. He starts again in Rengaran, which is worse, and then back in Kalkoan, which does not help either, and somewhere in the middle of it he is trying to explain that no one has ever handed him anything he was allowed to keep, and it comes out sideways, and he is making an absolute mess of it.
Morgan laughs, a bright, surprised sound, and holds up both hands. "We haven't even cleaned and filled the space yet. Save the gratitude."
Indrie is taken aback. "We?"
Morgan gives him a look that suggests the question is absurd. "I hardly expect you to do it all on your own."
He rolls his sleeves to the elbow, and together they set to work.
They find buckets at a well two streets over, filling them until the water sloshes over the rims on the walk back.
Morgan locates a block of hard yellow soap in the back quarters that the previous physician must have left behind, dry and cracked but still usable, and Indrie grates shavings of it into the warm water until it foams. They start at opposite ends of the front room and work toward the center.