Page 18 of Salt in the Wound

The ship rocks beneath him. The timbers creak. Ermin snores. Somewhere above, the night watch paces the deck, and beyond them the stars wheel slow and bright across a sky Indrie is only just learning to read.

He closes his eyes and presses his face into the pillow and doesn't think about pale eyes and scarred faces and hands large enough to break him that have only ever been gentle.

Chapter 8

Bohdi finds him sharpening his blades on the foredeck.

It's early, the sky still grey and heavy with the last weight of night, and Eskil has been at it since before the dawn watch changed. His longsword is laid across his knees, the whetstone moving in long, measured strokes along the edge, the sound of it a steady rasp, grounding, almost devotional. Back and forth. Steel against stone. The rhythm is meditative, mindless, and it frees up the rest of his brain to chew on the things he'd rather not be chewing on.

Which is the problem, because Bohdi knows this.

Bohdi knows everything about him. They've been at each other's sides since before Bohdi could walk. Eskil had been three years old when Bohdi was born to his father's second-in-command, and the story goes that the infant wouldn't stop screaming until Eskil toddled over to the bassinet and rocked it with both hands, small and solemn and determined, and Bohdi had gone quiet. Eskil's mother had looked at the two of them and said they were brothers born without blood, and she'd been right. Bohdi knows how Eskil takes his ale, how he sleeps, whathis face looks like before he loses his temper and what it looks like after. He knows that Eskil sharpens his blades when he's restless, and he knows, because he has functioning eyes and an annoying amount of emotional intelligence, exactly what's making him restless.

He sits down beside Eskil without invitation, settling onto the deck with his back against the railing and his legs stretched out in front of him. He doesn't say anything immediately. Just sits. Watches the whetstone move. Waits.

Eskil gives him three full passes of the stone before acknowledging his presence. "What."

"Nothing." Bohdi picks at a splinter on the deck planking with his thumbnail. "Nice morning."

"Is it."

"Could be nicer. You could be sleeping, for instance. Like a normal person. At a normal hour."

"I slept."

Bohdi tilts his head and watches the blade catch the first thin light of dawn along its edge. "The last time you went at your longsword this aggressively was the week before the raid on Kalkoa. And that sword could already split a hair."

"Stop being dramatic."

"Just an observation." Bohdi waits a beat, and when Eskil doesn't respond, he shifts, a subtle straightening of his posture that Eskil recognizes as the transition from casual to serious. The humor doesn't leave his face entirely, but it recedes, making room for the sharper mind beneath it.

"What's eating you, Eskil?"

"Nothing is eating me."

Bohdi looks at him. Just looks. Patient and unblinking, with that particular expression he wears when he knows Eskil is lying and is willing to wait as long as it takes for him to stop. It's infuriating. It's always been infuriating. Bohdi's greatest weaponhas never been the axe on his back. It's the silence he deploys when a lesser man would fill it with noise.

Eskil drags the stone along the blade with more force than necessary. The rasp is louder, harsher, and the sound grates even his own ears. He doesn't stop.

Bohdi drops the humor entirely.

"How do you plan to handle the situation with Indrie when we reach Valen?"

The name drops between them and the air changes. Eskil's hand doesn't falter on the whetstone, but his jaw tightens, a fractional clench that Bohdi will have caught because Bohdi catches everything.

"What situation," Eskil says. It's not a question.

Bohdi doesn't dignify it with the obvious answer immediately. He lets the silence sit for a moment, lets Eskil hear the insufficiency of his own deflection, and then says, evenly, "The situation where a foreign healer who doesn't speak our language is being taken to a kingdom that desperately needs a healer and needs to ask him to stay."

There it is. Laid out in plain language, stripped of all the peripheral complications Eskil has been dressing it in, the attraction, the power imbalance, Indrie's eyes on him and his own inability to look away, and reduced to its most practical core. They need a healer. They have a healer. They need that healer to not leave Valen the moment they get there.

Eskil sets his jaw and says, "I'll explain it to him."

"How?"

"With words, Bohdi. The usual method."

"Whose words? Given that you can barely have a conversation."