Page 22 of Salt in the Wound

Eskil steps forward. He crouches, bringing himself to the stowaway's level, and the stillness in him is terrifying. When he speaks, his voice is low, dangerously level, the kind of calm that Indrie has learned to fear more than shouting because shouting is an expenditure and calm is a decision.

"Did you start the fire?"

Indrie understands every word. Fire he learned from Dagny on his first day. Start and you came in the days after. The sentence is simple, short, spoken with deliberate clarity, and Indrie wonders if Eskil chose those words knowing he was listening, or if he always speaks to the condemned in language they can understand.

The man doesn't answer. He rears up against Bohdi's grip and yells, and the words that come pouring out of him are in Indrie's native tongue, and Indrie understands them with perfect, horrible clarity.

"Savages! You're all savages, every one of you! Animals, barbarians, heathens who are going to rot in the deepest hell for what you've done! You came to our kingdom and took what wasn't yours and destroyed what was left and I hope your ship sinks and every last one of you drowns in the cold dark sea!"

The crew doesn't understand the words, but they understand the tone. The deck goes taut with it, bodies shifting, handsfinding weapons. Indrie can feel Dagny's arm tighten around him.

Eskil grabs his face. One hand, fingers digging into the man's jaw, wrenching his head up so their eyes meet. The stowaway's tirade cuts off mid-word, swallowed by the grip and the proximity and the look on Eskil's face, which is not anger, Indrie realizes. It's worse than anger. It's certainty.

Eskil says something to the man, quiet enough that only those closest can hear. Indrie catches two words. Only two. But he knows them both, learned them from Dagny in a lesson about directions and locations, and together they form a sentence that needs no context.

See you there.

The king's voice is low and deep and final, and the stowaway's defiance crumbles behind his eyes.

Eskil releases the man's jaw and straightens. He turns to the crew and gives an order, a full sentence that moves too fast for Indrie to follow, but the meaning becomes clear when two of the crew come forward and drag the stowaway to his feet and haul him toward the mast.

They tie him there. Arms wrenched around the thick wooden column, rope binding his wrists, his chest pressed against the mast with his back exposed. Someone tears his shirt open. Someone else produces a whip, a nine-tailed lash, the leather strands knotted at the ends, the kind of weapon Indrie has seen hanging on the walls of Armond's punishment room but has never seen used because Armond preferred his fists.

Indrie's hand goes to his mouth.

The first strike lands and the sound is not what he expected. It's wet. Heavy. A thick, meaty crack that echoes across the deck and is followed, a heartbeat later, by a scream that tears from the stowaway's throat, raw and wrenched free. The man's bodyconvulses against the mast, his fingers clawing at the wood, and the second strike follows before the echo of the first has faded.

Indrie watches in horror. His hand is pressed over his mouth, his eyes are wide, and he cannot look away. He wants to. Every part of him wants to turn, to close his eyes, to block out the sound and the sight and the smell of blood that's beginning to mist the air. But he can't. His body won't obey him. He stands on the deck of the ship and watches the whip rise and fall, rise and fall, and the screams blend together into a continuous sound that he will hear in his sleep for weeks.

It lasts no more than a minute, though it feels longer, feels endless, before he starts forward.

He doesn't make a decision to move. His body moves for him, the same way it moved in the hold when the fire was burning and the smoke was thick and his hands were needed. He is a healer. There is a person in pain. The equation is simple and absolute and overrides everything else, the fear, the logic, the certain knowledge that stepping between a king's punishment and the man receiving it is the kind of decision that gets you tied to the mast next.

He starts forward and Dagny grabs him by the arm.

She drags him back, wrapping her arm around his chest and holding him close, and he struggles against her, not hard, not with any real strength, because his strength is spent and his hands are burned and his throat is so swollen each breath is a labor, but he tries. He tries to move toward the screaming man because he took a vow, he took a vow, that he would hurt no living creature and that he would ease suffering wherever he found it, and the sound of the whip against flesh is suffering he can hear and feel and he cannot stand here and do nothing.

Dagny holds him. She is stronger than she looks, or he is weaker than he thinks, and her arm is an iron band across his chest, keeping him against her, keeping him from the mast.She's whispering frantically, her mouth close to his ear, her breath hot against his skin.

"No, Indrie. No."

And Indrie hears the words. He hears them in his language, not hers, she's chosen the words he'll understand, the simplest, most direct command she can give, and the terror in her voice is not for the stowaway. It's for him. She's terrified of what will happen to Indrie if he interferes, if he steps into the path of the king's justice, if he makes himself a problem.

He knows that terror. He's lived inside it for five years.

He stops struggling. The fight goes out of him all at once, sudden and total, and he sags against Dagny's hold and she takes his weight without complaint. He clings to her, his burned hands fisting in her shirt, face buried against her shoulder, but he cannot block out the sound of the man's screams.

Indrie has heard of stowaways being put to work or chained in a cell, punished with labor or confinement, measured responses to measured crimes. But never this. Never the sound of leather on flesh and the sight of blood running down a man's back and the crew standing by watching with faces that range from grim satisfaction to indifference.

It lasts too long. Far too long. Long enough that the screams thin and weaken and eventually stop, not because the whip has stopped but because the man's voice has given out, and the silence where the screams were is somehow worse.

When they're done, the man cannot stand on his own. His back is a ruin, Indrie sees it when they cut him loose and he slumps against the mast, the flesh laid open in overlapping stripes, blood sheeting down and pooling on the deck, and his legs buckle beneath him and he drops to his knees.

Bohdi hauls him back up. Grabs him by the arm and the remnant of his shirt and drags him upright with the same easehe dragged him out of the hold, and the stowaway's head lolls, barely conscious, his feet dragging on the blood-slicked planks.

Eskil looks at the man. Looks at Bohdi.

"Get rid of him."