Chapter 3 #3
Indrie sits on the edge of the bed and presses his palms flat against the wood on either side of him and breathes.
He has a home.
He has a place.
It is dusty and empty and there is no medicine on the shelves and the kettle is only barely clean enough not to poison anyone, and it is his.
No one will take it from him. No one will lock the door from the outside.
No one will drag him from it in the middle of the night because a dying king's joints are aching and someone must be blamed.
He closes his eyes and the tears come, silent and hot, sliding down his cheeks in tracks he does not wipe away.
He lets them fall. He sits on the mattress in the back room of his clinic and cries without making a sound, the way he has always cried, because five years of learning to be silent is not undone in a month.
His shoulders shake and his jaw aches from clenching and his hands grip the wooden frame hard enough to whiten his knuckles and he lets it pass through him and out.
When it is done, he wipes his face with the heels of both hands, firmly and deliberately, and stands. He straightens his borrowed shirt, still too large, the sleeves rolled to his elbows, and goes back out to Morgan.
***
They take a break on the front step of the clinic, sharing bread and dried meat that Morgan produced from somewhere.
A pocket, a bag, the aether. Indrie is beginning to suspect the prince simply has everything he needs about his person at all times.
The bread is good. Dense and dark, studded with seeds, nothing like the pale, crumbling loaves of Kalkoa.
Indrie eats and watches the people of Valen move through the intersection outside his door.
It is a busy corner. Two of the city's main roads crossing, foot traffic constant, a woman carrying bolts of cloth on her shoulder, a group of children chasing a dog that wants very much to be chased, a man with a handcart full of turnips navigating around all of them with the weary patience of long practice.
Indrie can see immediately why a physician's building was placed here.
Everyone in the city passes this point eventually.
Everyone who needs help will know where to find it.
"My brother told me about you," Morgan says, tearing his bread in half and handing the larger portion to Indrie without comment. "Before I came this morning."
Indrie accepts the bread and his hand tightens on it. "What did he say?"
"That you were an extremely skilled healer who had kept a terminally ill king alive for five years, which is medically unprecedented. That you had been mistreated. That you were not appreciated where you were." Morgan chews, thoughtful. "He also said, 'He's a good man who deserved better.'"
Indrie looks down at the bread in his hands. There is a knot in his chest that has been there since the dock. Since the ship. Since the first time Eskil's hand touched his face and the world rearranged itself around the point of contact.
"He is very generous," Indrie says.
Morgan makes a small sound, noncommittal, thinking several things at once and choosing carefully which one to set loose.
He takes another bite and settles on: "I mentioned this to him already, but I want to say it to you directly.
Valen has been without a healer for two years.
People here have been doing the best they can with what they know, which in most cases is prayer and determination and whatever folk remedies their grandmothers passed down.
The blacksmith has been treating his own burns.
The mothers boil nettles for fever because no one has told them there's anything better. "
He turns to Indrie. Those pale eyes miss nothing, and they are serious now.
"You are needed here, Indrie. Genuinely. Not as a gift or a transaction. As a person whose skills this city is desperate for."
The words settle in him and go on moving after they land. Needed. Not owned. Not required. Needed, the way a well is needed, the way a hearth is needed, the way warmth in winter is needed. The distinction is everything. An owned man can be replaced or discarded. A needed man is wanted.
"I will do my best," Indrie says, and his voice is steadier than he expects it to be.
Morgan nods, satisfied, and they finish their bread in the kind of companionable silence that usually takes years to build and has somehow arrived between them in a single morning.
***
The afternoon is spent on labor. They scrub the back quarters and the alley and the narrow strip of earth beneath Indrie's window that Morgan confirms was once a garden.
They discover a second room, a storage space little more than a deep nook, accessible through a door in the back that had been blocked by a fallen shelf.
They right the shelf and sweep the room out and Indrie's mind is already racing with possibilities, mentally filling the shelves with dried herbs and tinctures and salves, the hundred small necessities of a working practice.
And they talk. They talk the way people do when they are working side by side and the labor loosens the tongue, when the rhythm of shared effort creates a safety that sitting across a table does not.
Morgan tells him about the market days and the fishing schedules and the festivals that mark the turning of the seasons.
"The winters are long," he says, sitting back on his heels.
"Snow comes heavy and stays for months and the whole city turns inward.
Fires in every hearth. The hot springs under the keep get so crowded you cannot find the water for the people standing in it.
" He wipes his hands on his knees. "Summer is short and it is the most beautiful thing you will ever see.
The fjord goes a blue that hurts to look at.
The meadows past the walls come up in wildflowers all at once, as though they have been holding their breath since autumn. "
And then, because Morgan seems to be able to read him like a book, he talks about his brother.
"The Year of Ohksen," he says. "Our father fell at the border.
Our mother followed three months later. There was a fever in the keep that winter and it did not stop until it had her.
" He picks at a spot on the shelf that is already clean.
"So Eskil was handed a crown and a child in the same breath at nineteen.
Too young for either, and far too stubborn to be told so. "
"There were advisors who told him to send me away," he goes on, scrubbing at the spot now with a focus that does not quite match the casualness of his tone.
"To the northern holds, to be raised by a willing family.
To be out of the way." He pauses. Something flickers across his face, not pain exactly, but the memory of a time when pain was close enough to touch.
"He refused. Rather colorfully, I'm told.
The phrase has been repeated to me by several council members who were present, and I always choose not to repeat it in mixed company. "
Indrie's mouth twitches.
"He taught me to read," Morgan continues.
"Not because he's a great scholar — he isn't, though he'll never admit it — but because he saw early on that my hands were not meant for swords.
He could have forced it. He could have put a blade in my grip and told me to be a warrior, because that's what princes are supposed to be.
" He shakes his head. "He found me books instead.
He sat up late when he should have been sleeping and sounded out words alongside me because neither of us had a tutor and the ones who remained after my mother died were not inclined to serve a child king. "
He goes quiet. When he speaks again, his voice has dropped, the way voices do when they approach something tender enough to bruise.
"There were famines. Two of them, in the early years of his reign.
He rationed what little we had so that I ate first and regularly.
I didn't know this at the time, of course.
I was a child, I didn't understand why he always told me he'd eaten already, why his portion was always smaller, why he looked thinner even as I felt full.
" A pause. The rag in Morgan's hand has stopped moving.
"I worked it out much later. He never told me himself. He still won't."
Indrie stares at Morgan and the image assembling itself in his mind is luminous and terrible and achingly whole.
A boy of nineteen with a crown on his head and a six-year-old at his side.
Learning to be king and parent in the same breath, with no one to teach him either.
Going hungry so his brother could eat. Teaching a boy to read because he could not teach him to fight, because the boy's hands were made for other things and Eskil loved him enough to see that and was fierce enough to protect it.
He thinks of Eskil on the ship. Eskil in the storm, hitting the water without hesitation.
Eskil in his cabin, drawing a crude picture of Valen with a charcoal stick and pressing it across the desk: you are going home.
Eskil's hands, huge and calloused and capable of terrible violence, cupping Indrie's face with a tenderness that had no business in them.
He does not realize he has gone quiet, truly quiet, his eyes somewhere far away, until Morgan says, "Are you all right?"
Indrie blinks. Comes back to himself. He looks at the prince, sitting on an upturned bucket with dust on his knees and dirt on his jaw, and hears himself say, softly and with more feeling than he intended, "I've never known a man like Eskil before."
The words land between them with weight.
Indrie can hear it, the reverence in his own voice, the ache, the thing he is trying so hard not to name, and his face heats.
He drops his gaze to the floor and adds, quickly, as though he can dilute what he has just revealed by pouring more words on top of it, "He saved my life. I don't know if he told you that."