Page 99 of Setting the Break

"The council. Will they accept me?"

"The council," Morgan says, and pins a white star in above Indrie's right ear with a steadiness that does not waver, "voted last week, unanimously, near enough, for a formal alliance with the clan whose former chieftain planned to buy me, break me in, and set me on my brother's throne as his puppet king." He tugs a braid tight. His voice is perfectly even. "I think they can manage to accept a healer."

Indrie is quiet for a moment.

"And they'll have to," Morgan adds, very lightly, almost as an afterthought, "because the last time they tried to talk poorly about you, my brother very nearly maimed all nine of them."

Indrie turns his head.

"Hold still."

"What do you mean?"

Morgan does not answer straight away. He goes on working at the braid above Indrie's right temple, his fingers moving in that same steady rhythm, as though the question is not large enough to interrupt him.

"The day after Eskil brought you home," Morgan says. His voice is quieter now, stripped of its edge. "In council. I told them there was somebody in this keep feeding information to the Wolfe. I told them what we knew, and I told them what we suspected, and they talked about it for a while." His fingers do not stop. "And after due deliberation, the council of Valen came up with the brilliant assertion that you were the spy."

Indrie sits in the chair.

He looks at the window. The snow on the sill. The thin gray light that comes through it in winter, weak and pale, the kind of light that makes everything look farther away than it is. He lets it arrive.

He has spent a year in this city. He has set their bones and cleaned their wounds and sat up through the worst hours of their fevers, the hours between midnight and dawn when the body decides whether to fight or give in. He has stitched their sons. He has delivered their grandchildren, has held them slick and wailing in his hands and placed them on their mothers' chests and said he's here, she's here, they're breathing, listen. He has sat by the beds of their mothers and grandmothers while they died, and held their hands through it, and closed their eyes after, and washed them, and stayed. He has put his hands on nearly every family in Valen at one time or another. Some of the people at that council table have been in his clinic. Hallvard's granddaughter had a bad chest last winter, and Indrie sat up with her for two nights, and made the steam tents, and held her while she coughed until she was sick, and did not sleep until her breathing cleared.

And they sat around that table while he was still limping. While his wrists were still wet. While the marks on him were still fresh enough to see. And they decided, reasonably, judiciously, in good faith, that he was the one who had been selling them.

It goes into him very deep.

It finds the old place. The one that has been there since he was standing in an auction yard with a number written on his wrist, learning for the first time what the world thought he was worth. It finds the part of him that has always, in the quiet, in the dark, in the moments when kindness runs out and the truth comes knocking, been waiting. Waiting to be told what he really is. Waiting for the people around him to arrive, at last, at the conclusion that the men in the yard arrived at years ago, that he is something to be used, and when he has been used enough, something to be discarded, and any gentleness in between was only borrowed.

He breathes.

"And Eskil wasn't happy," Indrie says. He is certain, deeply, quietly certain, that this is an understatement of extraordinary proportion.

"You would have been very proud of him, Indrie." Morgan's hands do not stop. His voice is warm and rough and full of something that might be wonder, or might be grief, or might be both. "I've watched him put men through tables for a great deal less. He didn't do it. He wanted to. Every man in that room knew he wanted to. I know why he didn't do it, and so does every single one of them." A pause. A tug. A flower tucked in. "Which is why they are going to accept you. Sooner or later. Because they have seen what you have done to the most dangerous man they know, and it frightens them, and it should."

Indrie closes his eyes.

He breathes in. He breathes out. He does what he has done a thousand times, sitting beside a thousand frightened people in his clinic, holding their hands while their hearts raced, breathe in, breathe out, stay here, I have you, the thing he has spent a year teaching to others and has only lately, haltingly, clumsily, started doing for himself.

It does hurt. He lets it. He does not push it down and he does not push it away. He sits with it the way he would sit with a patient, gently, without flinching, and lets it be what it is. And then, slowly, he lets it go. Not because it does not matter. But because there are far larger things happening in this room this morning, and he will not let the old wound swallow them.

"Thank you," Indrie says. "For telling me."

"I wasn't going to," Morgan admits. "And then I thought you might want to know what sort of impact you've had on the savage barbarian that is my older brother. For the historical record."

Indrie huffs out a laugh. It is small and wet and real.

Morgan finishes the last braid behind Indrie's left ear. He ties it off with steady fingers, and tucks the last small sprig of heather into the plait, and sits back on his heels, and is quiet.

There is a long silence. The kind that fills a room without emptying it.

"It's going to be a little ridiculous," Indrie says, after a moment. His voice is very quiet, and he is looking out the window at the snow. "Standing up there by myself. With no one beside me. I had always thought…"

He stops. He swallows.

"At least, before I was taken, I had always thought…"

He trails off. He cannot finish it. The sentence has a shape, I had always thought my family would be there, I had always thought my mother would stand with me, I had always thought I would be given away by someone who had known me long enough to miss me when I was gone, and the shape of it is too large for his throat.