Chapter 5
Indrie
Indrie sleeps in his clinic for the first time and wakes before dawn.
He lay down last night with his hair still damp from washing in the basin and his hands smelling of the chamomile he had been sorting.
The mattress gave beneath him in a way the stone floor of his closet in Kalkoa never did, and he pressed his face into the pillow and breathed and thought: this is mine.
This bed is mine. No one is going to take it from me.
He slept deeply and without dreams, which has not happened in longer than he can remember.
Now, in the grey half-light before sunrise, he lies on his back and stares at the ceiling of the back quarters and listens.
The sounds of Valen waking: a rooster somewhere distant, the creak of a cart on the road outside, footsteps passing his front door.
Heavy boots, a guard on early patrol, the rhythm steady and unhurried.
The building settles around him with small groans and clicks, the wood expanding as the morning chill gives way.
These are the sounds of a place that is alive. These are the sounds of his place.
He gets up, washes his face in the basin, combs his fingers through his hair and ties it back.
He pulls on his clothes, which still includes Eskil's shirt.
The one from the ship. The one that is far too large and falls to mid-thigh and has sleeves he has to roll to find his hands.
He tells himself it is because it is warm, and because the morning is cool, and because the wool is thick and good against the autumn air.
He does not examine the other reasons. He does not have to. They are embers in his chest and he knows exactly where they sit.
He is arranging his meager supplies on the examination table, the dried herbs from the ship, the few tinctures he managed to prepare yesterday, his instruments laid out in order, when the knocking comes.
It is tentative. Barely there. Someone unsure they should be knocking at all, who has perhaps walked past the door once already and worked up the courage to come back.
Indrie crosses the front room, still pulling Eskil's shirt straight, and opens the door.
A woman stands on the step with worry creased into every line of her face.
She is young, perhaps Indrie's age, perhaps a little older, with wind-reddened cheeks and dark circles beneath her eyes that speak of nights without sleep.
In her arms, pressed against her chest, is a small child.
A boy, Indrie thinks, no more than three, with a round flushed face and glassy eyes that do not focus on anything.
The child's head lolls against his mother's shoulder and his small body is limp in the way that makes Indrie's instincts sharpen at once.
Not sleeping. Not resting. Listless. The limpness of a body fighting something it cannot see.
The mother speaks rapidly. Rengaran, tumbling out too fast for Indrie to follow, the words tangling together the way language does when fear is driving it. He catches fever and three days and please, and the last one is the same in any tongue, and he does not need anything else.
"Come in," he says, stepping aside, gesturing. "Come, come."
She hesitates for a moment, long enough for her eyes to dart past him into the clinic, taking in the clean shelves and the examination table and the copper kettle on its hook. Then she is through the door, and Indrie is closing it behind her, and his hands are already reaching for the child.
He guides her to the table and she lays the boy down and the child whimpers but does not cry, which is more concerning than crying would be.
Indrie works quickly, arranging his supplies where he can reach them.
His hands know what to do. They have always known.
Even when the rest of him was frightened and confused and lost, his hands were steady.
His hands were sure. They are steady and sure now.
He presses the back of his fingers to the child's forehead.
Hot. Very hot. The kind of hot that turns the skin dry and papery and makes it feel as though there is a fire burning just beneath the surface.
He checks the boy's throat, red and swollen, the tonsils angry, and his ears, and presses gently on the small rounded abdomen to check for tenderness.
The child flinches but does not scream, and Indrie notes the reaction and files it and keeps moving.
The mother is hovering. She is speaking again, questions, desperate questions about what is wrong and whether her son will be all right, and Indrie wishes fiercely that he had more of her words. He looks up at her and places his hand over hers where it rests on the child's arm and holds her gaze.
"He will be okay," he says, in the best Rengaran he can manage. "I will help."
He does not know if the grammar is right.
He does not know if the words landed in the correct order.
But something in his face or his voice or the steadiness of his hand on hers communicates what the language cannot, because she nods, and her shoulders drop a fraction, and her grip on her son's arm loosens enough to let Indrie work.
The fever is high but not dangerous. He identifies it within minutes as a common childhood illness he treated dozens of times in the Isles, a throat infection that presents with swollen glands and lethargy and exactly this heat.
Left untreated it can worsen and spread.
Caught at this stage it responds well to the right herbs.
He has treated worse. He has treated much worse, with much less, in a castle that begrudged him every leaf and every drop of clean water.
He prepares a tea of willow bark and elderflower, measuring each with a precision that years of practice have made instinctive.
He crushes the dried bark with the flat of a stone and steeps the bark in water heated in the copper kettle.
While the tea brews he soaks a cloth in cool water and lays it across the child's forehead, and the boy sighs at the contact, his small body relaxing beneath the relief of it.
The mother watches everything. She watches Indrie's hands as they move, measuring, steeping, wringing the cloth, and she does not blink.
She is memorizing. Indrie recognizes it because he has done it himself, committing each step in case she needs to do it alone next time, in case there is no healer, in case the door is closed.
When the tea has cooled enough to drink, Indrie measures a careful dose into a small cup.
The child resists, turns his face away, lips pressed shut, the universal stubbornness of small children confronted with medicine, and Indrie smiles and dips his finger into the tea and touches it to the boy's lower lip.
The child's mouth opens in surprise at the warmth and Indrie guides the cup gently to his lips and tips it, just a little, just enough.
The boy drinks. Makes a face. Drinks more.
The mother lets out a breath that sounds as though she has been holding it for three days.
Indrie ties off a small cloth pouch of the willow bark and elderflower mixture and holds it up until he has her eyes.
"Brew it until gold and wait for it to cool," he says, slowly and carefully. "Three times a day. Add honey if he fusses.”
She nods and her eyes are bright with tears she is not allowing to fall.
Indrie checks the boy one more time. His color is already marginally better, or perhaps that is wishful thinking, perhaps it is too soon, but Indrie chooses to believe it is not.
"Tomorrow it will be better," he says, assembling the Rengaran out of Dagny's lessons and the raw necessity of the moment. "If the fever is not gone in a day, come back quickly."
She gathers the boy into her arms. He is more alert now, still flushed, still glassy-eyed, but his head is up instead of lolling, and his small fist has found a handful of his mother's shirt and is holding on. He is fighting. Children fight so fiercely, Indrie thinks. They do not know how not to.
The mother shifts her son to one arm and reaches out and takes both of Indrie's hands in hers and squeezes them.
She says something, a torrent of Rengaran, rapid and thick with emotion, and Indrie catches thank you and gods bless and something that might be good man or kind man or something else entirely, but the fierce, tearful gratitude in it translates perfectly.
The child waves a small, limp hand at him from over his mother's shoulder as they go through the door.
Indrie stands in his empty clinic after the door closes and feels something break open in his chest.
Not break. Bloom.
A burst of happiness he has not felt in years.
Pure and uncomplicated and clean. He did what he was made to do, for someone who was grateful, who looked at him with relief instead of contempt.
No one hit him. No one told him he was worthless.
No one told him the medicine was wrong or that he should have come faster or that his failure to cure an incurable disease was proof of his inadequacy.
The mother thanked him. She held his hands and blessed him and her child waved goodbye and they left through the door of his clinic, and Indrie helped them, and it mattered.
He presses both hands flat against the examination table and leans on it and breathes and smiles at the wood grain and feels, for one bright and suspended moment, exactly like the person he was always supposed to become.
***
He spends the next several hours setting up the clinic as best he can.