Chapter 24
Indrie
When Indrie gets back to the clinic there is a mountain of work waiting and Ermin is already there.
The boy has opened the doors himself, Indrie gave him a key two nights ago, a gesture of trust that Ermin received with the solemnity of a knight being handed a sword, and triaged three patients who arrived at dawn.
He is standing in the center of the clinic with his leather journal open and a charcoal pencil behind his ear and the expression of focused determination that means he has been making decisions in Indrie's absence and is either proud of them or terrified of them.
"The Halverson child is the most urgent," Ermin says, before Indrie has finished closing the door.
"Ear infection, right side. She has been crying since her mother brought her in.
I cleaned the outer ear with warm water and checked for discharge.
There is some, yellowish, no blood. I didn't put anything in it because you told me not to put things in ears without supervision. "
Indrie hangs his coat on the hook and sets his satchel on the examination table and looks at the three patients arranged around the room.
The child is in her mother's lap near the hearth, whimpering quietly, her head against her mother's shoulder.
An elderly woman with swollen knuckles sits patiently on the bench by the window with a poultice already laid across her hands, comfrey and willow bark from the smell of it.
And a young soldier with a non-healing wound on his forearm is seated at the far end with a clean dressing he did not arrive with.
Indrie looks at Ermin. Looks at the patients. Looks at the dressing on the soldier's arm.
"You did that?" he asks, nodding toward the soldier.
Ermin straightens. "The old dressing was soiled and the wound was weeping. I cleaned it with the antiseptic wash, applied a calendula salve, and re-dressed it with clean linen. The way you showed me."
Indrie crosses to the soldier and lifts the edge of the dressing. The wound beneath is clean. The edges are pink but not angry. The salve has been applied evenly, not too thick and not too thin, and the wrapping is snug without being constrictive.
It is good work.
"The tension is even," Indrie says, pressing gently at the edges. He looks up. "This is well done."
Ermin's face splits into a grin wide enough to be a structural concern. He ducks his head and scribbles something in his journal, and Indrie suspects it is the words well done in large letters, possibly underlined.
Indrie works through the patients with Ermin at his side, using each case as a teaching moment.
When they're all seen, Ermin turns and says, with the intensity of somebody who has been waiting all morning to ask it, "How is the king?"
"Healing." Indrie washes his hands in the basin and does not look at him. "The wound was deep but the stitching will hold."
"You were there all night."
"The laceration took over forty sutures."
Ermin makes a small noise of profound dissatisfaction and returns to the shelf.
The morning continues. Word has spread through Valen that the healer is back from the keep, and the people come with their ailments and their injuries and their small daily sufferings, and Indrie tends to each of them with the steady unhurried attention that has become his signature.
A carpenter arrives with a splinter so deeply embedded in his palm that removing it requires minor surgery.
Ermin watches, fascinated, while Indrie numbs the area with ice wrapped in cloth and extracts it with his finest tweezers.
The carpenter looks at the splinter, nearly two inches of it, and says something in rapid Rengaran that makes Ermin burst out laughing.
Indrie does not catch all of it, but from context and from the man's sheepish expression, it concerned his wife having been right.
A boy of about ten arrives alone, without a parent, holding a bloody rag to his knee.
He has been climbing the harbor wall on a dare and fell.
The cut is shallow but dirty, packed with grit and harbor sediment, and Indrie cleans it thoroughly, picking out every fragment with his tweezers while the boy watches with morbid fascination and asks whether Indrie has ever seen a bone sticking out of somebody.
"Yes," Indrie says. "And you don't want to."
"Was there a lot of blood?"
"Quite a lot."
Indrie bandages the knee, delivers a stern lecture about harbor walls, and sends him off with instructions to return if the wound shows any redness or heat.
The boy makes it approximately four steps out the door before breaking into a run, apparently unimpeded by the injury.
Indrie watches him go and shakes his head and smiles.
It is nearly midday when he turns from the supply shelf and finds Harrak standing in the doorway.
The guard is in uniform, holding his helmet against his chest in both hands like a shield. His expression is equal parts nervous and earnest and he is standing on the threshold as though uncertain whether he is permitted to cross it.
Indrie's stomach drops. The hot springs come back at once, the misunderstanding, the kiss, the crack of his temple against the stone, the wet mortifying scramble out of the water, and the flush that rises in his cheeks is immediate.
But before he can stammer out an apology, Harrak speaks first.
"I came to apologize," Harrak says. His voice is steady, his Rengaran slow and deliberate, as though he has rehearsed it.
"For what happened in the springs. I'm sorry it took me so long to come, but I did not want to alarm you further.
I overstepped. I misread the situation and I made you uncomfortable and I am sorry for it. "
Indrie blinks. "Harrak—"
"I should have asked more clearly. I should have made certain you understood what I was saying before I acted. That was my failing and not yours, and I take the whole of it."
The sincerity is disarming. Harrak is not performing contrition. There is no calculation in his face, no angling after forgiveness. He is a man who did a thing he regrets and has come to say so plainly and without embellishment, and the straightforwardness of it makes Indrie's throat tight.
"It was not your fault," Indrie says. "Truly. I am still learning the words and the misunderstanding was mutual. You did nothing wrong."
The relief on Harrak's face is visible. His broad shoulders drop as the tension goes out of them and the rigid nervous posture eases into something more natural. He nods once and some of the color comes back into his face.
"I'm glad," Harrak says. "And I am grateful that you did not tell the king about my transgression."
Indrie's mouth opens. Then closes.
He is suddenly, vividly aware of Ermin behind him at the supply shelf, who has gone extremely quiet in the way that means he is listening to every word.
Harrak continues, oblivious to the change in the room.
"I was in the wrong regardless. But if I had known you had the king's favor, I would not have looked at you twice.
" He holds up a hand. "Our king can be very protective. I once knew a guardsman who made an…untoward comment about the king’s brother and he was… err…reassigned, as it were."
Indrie feels the ground shift under him. "I'm not–I am honestly not certain where I stand with the king. We haven't discussed it."
Harrak looks at him. His expression is uncomplicated, the plain clear certainty of a man who sees the world in simple terms and does not understand why other people insist on complicating it.
"The king has only two constants in his life," Harrak says. He holds up two fingers. "His brother, Morgan. And his right hand, Bohdi. He has never let anybody else in." He pauses. Holds Indrie's gaze. "Until now."
Indrie stares at him.
Harrak clasps his arm in farewell, forearm to forearm, firm and brief, and leaves. The door closes behind him.
Indrie stands in the middle of his clinic. The ground that shifted has not settled back. He is staring at a closed door with his hands at his sides and his mind gone very quiet.
He has never let anybody else in. Until now.
From behind him, Ermin says, "So when you said you weren't certain where you stand with the king…"
"Ermin."
"It does seem as though everybody else is quite certain."
"Ermin."
"I am going to reorganize the chamomile."
Indrie stands in the quiet of his clinic.
The morning light falls through the windows and across the clean floor and the stocked shelves and the examination table and the door that locks and all the rest of the space that is his, and he thinks about constants.
About the people a man keeps closest to him.
About the ones he lets inside the walls.
He presses a hand over his sternum, above the place where his heart is doing something no medical text has ever adequately described, and breathes.