Page 11 of Salt in the Wound

Bohdi's words come back to him, unwelcome and accurate, and Eskil feels annoyed at having his second-in-command always serve as his conscience. It's an unfair arrangement. Bohdi gets to observe from the outside while Eskil has to live inside his own head with every misstep replaying on a loop. The man could at least have the decency to be wrong occasionally.

"Keep him close on the voyage," Eskil tells Dagny. "Keep him occupied. And see what you can do about the language barrier. He can't live among us if he can't speak to anyone."

Dagny's arm tightens around Indrie's shoulders. "I've already started teaching him. He's quick. Smarter than half this crew."

"That's not a high bar."

"No," she agrees, grinning. "But he clears it with room to spare."

Eskil glances at Indrie, who is studying the deck planks beneath his boots with fixed, desperate attention, willing them to swallow him whole. While he's standing there, he sees Indrie's dark eyes gaze up at him discreetly. It's a careful look, delivered from beneath lowered lashes, quick and furtive. The kind of glance someone steals when they think they're not being watched. But Eskil is watching, has been watching more than he should, more than is wise, and when Indrie catches Eskil looking back at him, he drops his gaze instantly, startled, scorched by the contact.

The pink returns to his cheeks. Just a trace, barely visible, there and gone.

Eskil turns back to Dagny before he can dwell on it. "Get him settled below and find him some supplies to work with. Herbs, clean cloth, whatever he needs. Check what we brought from the stores, and if he has a list of what he requires, have him write it down. Gunnar might know some of the native plants." He pauses, then adds, "If the man truly kept someone alive through five years of Granger's, he has knowledge that could benefit every soul on this ship. There will be injuries and sickness on the journey. There always are."

"I'll handle it," Dagny says, already half-turned to Indrie, already talking to him in her patchwork version of his language, her free hand gesturing toward the hold where the supplies are kept. Indrie is listening, his posture fractionally less rigid than it was a moment ago, his head tilted toward her, clinging to the sound of his own language however mangled it may be.

Eskil leaves them. He turns toward the helm and the open water ahead and the three weeks of sailing that stand between him and home.

Fuck me, he thinks, gripping the railing as the wind fills the sail and the ship begins to cut through the grey water in earnest.This is going to be a long journey home.

Chapter 5

Dagny shows him where he'll be sleeping.

It's a bunk in the lower level of the ship, tucked into a row of identical wooden berths that line both sides of a narrow corridor. Each one is barely wide enough for a man to lie flat and not much longer than Indrie is tall, with a thin straw mattress and a wool blanket folded at the foot. They're stacked two high, and Dagny guides him to a lower one near the end of the row, close enough to where Ermin sleeps that Indrie doesn't feel quite so alone. The proximity is a kindness she doesn't draw attention to, but Indrie notices. He's spent five years noticing the small mercies, cataloguing them, holding them close because they're all he has.

He sets his satchel on the mattress and runs his hand across the wool blanket. It's coarse under his fingers, but thick. Thicker than anything he slept under in Kalkoa. The mattress, thin as it is, gives slightly under his palm, and when he sits on the edge to test it, there are no stones digging into his spine. No cold seeping up from a floor that never warmed. He sits there for a moment longer than necessary, hands in his lap, and breathes.

"Good?" Dagny asks, hovering at the foot of the bunk with her hands on her belt.

Indrie nods. "Good," he says.

She walks him around the ship after that, a guided tour delivered in her increasingly ambitious blend of both their languages, supplemented with generous hand gestures and the occasional full-body demonstration. The vessel is larger than Indrie realized from shore. The main deck stretches from a raised platform at the back, the helm, where the wheel and navigation charts are kept, to a narrower point at the front where the bowsprit juts out over the water. Below, the ship is divided into sections: the sleeping berths, the cargo hold, a small medical area that is currently empty and will apparently become Indrie's domain.

She shows him a few more basic workings of the ship, where the water barrels are kept, how to find the latrine without ending up in the cargo hold, which ladders lead where.

The galley is where Dagny takes him last, and where he meets Gunnar properly.

The cook is enormous. That's the first and most overwhelming observation. He's wider than the galley doorframe and has to duck to enter his own kitchen, a fact he seems unbothered by, having clearly made peace with his dimensions long ago. His head is shaved clean, his beard is braided into two thick ropes that hang past his collarbones, and his forearms, currently dusted with flour, are the circumference of small trees. He looks up from a cutting board when they enter, and his face splits into a grin so wide and warm that it seems to belong to a different, much smaller man.

He claps Indrie on the shoulder in greeting. The force of it travels through Indrie's entire body, from his shoulder down through his knees and into the soles of his boots, and he staggers forward two full steps and has to catch himself on the edge ofthe prep table. Dagny snorts behind him. Gunnar seems entirely unaware that he's nearly put Indrie through the floor and is already turning back to his work, talking over his shoulder in his own language.

Dagny tells Indrie, once she's recovered from laughing, that the best place for him on the ship is probably the galley with Gunnar. She asks if he knows how to cook.

Indrie considers the question. He can prepare basic meals: porridge, simple broths, bread if the ingredients are available. He cooked for himself in the castle kitchen on the rare occasions he was allowed access, and he'd learned enough from watching the castle cooks to manage passable food. Nothing elaborate. Nothing inspired. But probably enough to be useful.

"A little," he says.

Dagny relays this to Gunnar, who she promises, with an earnestness that suggests she either genuinely believes it or is a very skilled liar, is a good and patient teacher. Gunnar turns at this and gives Indrie an appraising look, the kind a craftsman gives a new apprentice, measuring not skill but willingness. Whatever he sees must satisfy him, because he nods once, firmly, and gestures at a basket of potatoes and a peeling knife with the universal language of get to work.

The work is simple and rhythmic and grounding in a way Indrie hadn't expected. Peel, turn, peel, turn. The curl of skin falling away from the blade, the pale flesh beneath. His hands know what to do and his mind is free to wander, but the wandering isn't as terrifying as it was this morning. The galley is warm. It smells of salt and herbs and the faint smokiness of the iron stove. Gunnar moves around him with surprising grace for a man his size, never bumping into him, never crowding him, always leaving Indrie enough space to work without feeling trapped.

Gunnar knows a little of his language. Surprisingly. Enough to give him simple instructions, cut here, smaller, that pot, and ask his name and age. Indrie tells him both and Gunnar repeats his name back with a pronunciation that's closer to correct than Dagny's, which earns him a startled look. The cook shrugs, unbothered, and tells Indrie a little about his wife.

Her name is Jaheira. Gunnar says it the way some men say prayers, with reverence, with warmth, with the quiet certainty of a life built around a single, unshakeable truth. He tells Indrie she has dark hair and a laugh that can be heard from across a field. That she runs their homestead while he's at sea and does a better job of it than he ever could. That she makes bread so good it could make a grown man weep, and that his own bread is a pale imitation he's been trying to perfect for twelve years without success.

He is so obviously smitten that it makes Indrie smile. A real smile, small but genuine, directed at the potato in his hands. The idea that this mountain of a man, who wields a cleaver with the same casual ease he'd wield a quill, goes soft at the mention of a woman's name is something Indrie hasn't encountered before. The men in Kalkoa didn't talk about their wives that way. The men in Kalkoa didn't talk about their wives at all, mostly, except to complain.