Page 85 of Setting the Break

He stares up at him. His hands are flat on the desk and he realizes, distantly, that he is gripping the edge of it, and his knuckles have gone white.

"Oh?" Morgan says.

His mouth has gone completely dry. It comes out very small.

Eskil gives him a long look that Morgan cannot read at all. Then he does something Morgan does not expect. He turns and sits himself down on the edge of the desk, half on and half off it, with his arms folded across his chest, and he looks at the door.

Not at Morgan. At the door.

Morgan stares at the side of his face.

Eskil always looks at him whenever Morgan is in trouble. That is the worst part of it and has been since he was small. His brother has never once in twenty years raised a hand to him and has very rarely raised his voice. What he does instead is look at him. He stands there and lets Morgan see every bit of the disappointment on his face until Morgan would rather have been beaten.

He is not doing it now. He is sitting on the corner of the desk with his arms folded, looking at a door with nothing on it, and his jaw is working.

Morgan does not know what that means. He has no reference for it.

"Never once in your whole life," Eskil says, to the door, "has me telling you no stopped you from doing a single thing."

Morgan does not say anything.

Eskil turns his head at last and looks down at him, and his face is very hard to read. "You have been doing exactly as you pleased and telling me afterward since you could walk. So I would like to know why it mattered this time."

Morgan's heart is going so hard it hurts.

"Are you saying no?" he asks.

Eskil lets out a long, heavy breath through his nose. It is a noise Morgan knows very well. It is the noise his brother makes when he has asked a perfectly simple question and has been handed something stupid instead.

"No," Eskil says. "I'm asking why you didn't tell me."

Morgan shoves his chair back and stands up.

He does not mean to. His legs do it. The chair scrapes on the stone and he is on his feet with both hands still flat on the desk and the ruined sheets of treaty sliding off the pile.

"Wait," Morgan says. "You're not saying no?"

Eskil looks at him. The look is withering. He speaks very slowly now, to somebody who has just proved he cannot follow a conversation.

"I am not saying no," Eskil says. "Not that it has ever fucking mattered."

Morgan goes over the desk.

He does not go around it. There is not time to go around it. He puts one knee up on the edge and goes straight across the top, over the treaty and the ink and the pile of ruined drafts, and the ink pot goes over for the second time this week and he does not care in the slightest, and he gets both arms around his brother's neck and hangs on.

Eskil catches him.

He makes a disgruntled noise about it, deep in his chest, but he catches him. He has always caught him. He caught him when he was a baby and when he was falling out of trees at seven and when he came staggering off a horse in the courtyard a month ago with his ribs cracked and blood on his hands, and he catches him now, one arm hard around his back and the other hand coming up to cup the back of his head.

Morgan puts his face in his brother's shoulder and breathes.

"It mattered this time," Morgan says. His voice has gone thick and small and he cannot do anything about it. "It did. It really did matter. Every other time, I knew you'd forgive me. I knew you'd shout and then you'd forgive me, and I could live with the shouting." He swallows. "I couldn't have you tell me no. Not about him. I couldn't have borne it. Not about him, Eskil."

Eskil's arm tightens around his back.

It is a very small movement. It is barely anything. But it goes through Morgan all the way down to his feet, because for a moment there is no king in the room at all. There is only his brother. There is only the man who took a throne at nineteen with a six-year-old hanging off his leg, and never once let that six-year-old feel like a weight. The man who raised him, badly and stubbornly and with enormous love, and got most of it right.

Morgan holds on. He does not let go. He is not sure he could if he tried.