Page 13 of Salt in the Wound

Helping him.

Indrie stands on unsteady legs, pulled upright by the strength of the king's hold, and he doesn't mean to look the larger man in the eye, but he can't help himself. His gaze travels up, past the stew-stained trousers, past the broad chest, past the scarred jaw, and meets Eskil's.

He's still expecting a strike. His body is still braced for it, every muscle locked, his breath held behind clenched teeth. But there's no fury in Eskil's face. His brows are pinched, drawn together over those pale eyes in a way that could be anger or could be something else entirely, but he doesn't look prepared to punish. He looks concerned.

Eskil reaches down, one hand still on Indrie's arm, and untangles Indrie's boot from the netting. His fingers work the twisted cord free with a patience that Indrie can't reconcile with the urgency still screaming through his own nervous system. The netting falls away and Eskil straightens and looks at Indrie's face.

"Okay?" he asks.

Indrie stares back. The word is simple, one of the first Dagny taught him, and he understands it perfectly. But the fact of it,the fact that a king is asking him if he's okay after Indrie just dumped food on him, is so foreign that for a moment the word loses all meaning and becomes just a sound.

Eskil's brow pinches further, reading Indrie's silence as something it might not be, and he lifts his hand and touches Indrie's chin. Just the tip of his finger, light against the underside of Indrie's jaw, and Indrie realizes with no small amount of mortification that his mouth is hanging open.

He's gaping. At the king. In the king's cabin. With stew on the floor and bread in a puddle and his own dignity somewhere in the wreckage of it. His mouth is open and his eyes are wide and he probably looks ridiculous and the king of the Northmen has his fingers on Indrie's chin and is looking at him with something that might be bewilderment and Indrie's face is on fire.

His mouth snaps shut. He nods once, twice, quick, jerky movements that he hopes communicateyes, fine, absolutely fine, please stop touching me before I expire, and he should step back. He should step out of the king's space and out of his strong, warm hands and put distance between them because distance is safe and proximity is not. But he's apparently incapable of doing that.

He tries and fails to remember the last time someone put their hands on him without the intention of causing him harm. Dagny's arm around his shoulders. Gunnar's devastating clap on the back. Bohdi's careful grip when he'd put Indrie back on his feet, a touch that had been firm but never rough. Those are all recent, all new, all belonging to this strange new world he's been pulled into. Before that? Before these people?

He can't remember. He genuinely cannot remember.

Eskil surveys him for a long moment, eyes moving across his face with an attention that makes Indrie's skin prickle. Checking for damage. Checkinghim, specifically, as if he's something worth the effort. The scrutiny lasts long enough that Indrie'sflush deepens and his heart rate does something complicated and entirely unhelpful, and then Eskil seems to reach some internal conclusion. He releases Indrie's arm and steps back.

The absence of his hands is immediate and acute. Indrie's forearms feel cold where the warmth was.

Eskil returns to his seat, stepping over the puddle of stew without comment, and settles back in front of his charts, already dismissing the last two minutes. He picks up his charcoal. Looks at the mess on the floor. Looks at Indrie.

"Get me another bowl," he says. The words are slow, deliberate, spoken for Indrie's benefit, paced so he can follow. Then, with the faintest twitch at the corner of his mouth that might be amusement: "And bring a mop."

Indrie understands almost all of it. Another bowl. Mop. Simple instructions. A task. Not a punishment. Not a threat. A task, delivered in the same tone Gunnar uses when he asks Indrie to fetch more potatoes.

He stands there a moment too long, processing, and Eskil looks at him and raises an eyebrow, a single, eloquent arch that communicateswhy are you still heremore effectively than any words could, and Indrie nods fervently and turns on his heel and heads out the door without tripping over anything.

He closes the door behind him and stands there for a moment. The corridor is dim and empty and the ship rocks gently beneath him and the muffled sounds of the crew filter down from the deck above. His hand presses against his chest, over his heart, which is beating so hard he can feel it against his palm. His face is still hot. His knees ache from hitting the floor. His arms are still warm where Eskil's hands were.

He stood in a king's cabin. He destroyed the king's meal. He spilled stew on the king's trousers. And the king asked him if he was okay, and touched his chin, and told him to bring a mop.

Indrie breathes.

Then he goes to find a mop.

Chapter 6

The healer is growing in competence.

It's been just over a week since they left Kalkoa's sorry excuse for a shoreline, and in that time the young man has gone from wide-eyed and nervous to something approaching useful. More than useful, if Eskil is being honest, which he tries to be, at least with himself, even when the honesty is inconvenient.

Indrie set his first sprained ankle on only the second day at sea. One of the men, a deckhand named Erik who has more enthusiasm than sense, had caught his foot in a coil of anchor chain while hauling it up and twisted it badly enough that the joint swelled to twice its size within the hour. Bohdi had sent for Indrie, already, by that point, the default response to any injury on board, which said something about how quickly the crew had accepted his presence. Eskil had watched from the helm as the healer crossed the deck with his satchel and knelt beside the groaning Erik without hesitation.

He'd been confident in a way Eskil hadn’t seen from him yet. Calm and focused. His hands had moved over the swollen joint with a sureness that belied his prior nervousness, pressinghere, testing there, his brow furrowed in concentration. He'd spoken to Erik in a low voice, knowing enough words by that point to at least communicate comfort, but it was the tone that was unmistakably soothing, and Erik had quieted. Indrie had wrapped the ankle with strips of cloth and some kind of poultice that smelled sharp and herbal, and within two days Erik was putting weight on it again, albeit carefully.

The second injury was a pulled shoulder that came three days later. Then came the fever.

One of his younger warriors, a broad-shouldered northerner named Halvar, had woken up shaking and drenched in sweat, skin burning to the touch. The kind of sudden onset that makes men nervous on a ship, because fever spreads fast in close quarters and there's nowhere to quarantine anyone to that isn't already occupied. Indrie had appeared at Halvar's bunk with a cup of something that steamed and smelled of the underside of a boot and had coaxed the man to drink it with unmatched patience. He'd stayed by Halvar's side through the worst of it, replacing wet cloths on his forehead, monitoring his temperature with the back of his hand, and when the fever broke on the second day, Indrie had looked as exhausted as his patient but considerably more satisfied.

The healer is earning his place on this ship in the most practical way possible, and the crew has accepted him without issue, because a ship without a medic is a dangerous place to be. They've all sailed without one before. They sailed to Kalkoa without one because the alternative was not sailing at all. They know the risks.

And then there is the other thing. The thing Eskil is trying and failing to ignore.