Page 23 of Salt in the Wound

Indrie's hands tighten on Dagny and he has to bite his own knuckles to keep from making a sound. The taste of his own skin is sharp and grounding and he bites harder, teeth pressing white crescents into his flesh, because if he makes a sound it will be a scream or a sob and he can't afford either.

He hears the man being dragged across the deck. Hears the scuffle of boots and the dead weight of a body being hauled toward the gunwale. Hears Bohdi say something short and final. And then he hears the splash.

The crew cheers.

The sound rises around him, a rough, triumphant roar from the men and women who almost burned alive tonight because of the man now sinking into the black water behind them, and it washes over Indrie and he feels nothing. He feels impossibly, completely, profoundly numb.

Dagny's arm is still around him. She's stopped whispering. Her hand moves slowly up and down his back, a soothing rhythm that his body registers but his mind can't process. He's shaking, he can feel it, the tremors running through his frame, his teeth chattering despite the warm night air, and he can't stop.

He doesn't look at the water. He doesn't look at the mast. He doesn't look at Eskil.

He keeps his face pressed against Dagny's shoulder and he bites his knuckles and he shakes.

The cheering fades. The crew disperses. Someone begins cleaning the blood from the deck.

Dagny guides him below, one arm around his waist, and deposits him in his bunk. She sits on the edge of the mattress and holds his hand and says nothing, because there is nothing tosay, and Indrie lies on his side with his knees drawn to his chest and stares at the wooden wall and doesn't sleep.

Chapter 10

Two days after the fire, Gunnar comes to his cabin.

The cook doesn't knock, he never does, a habit Eskil has long since stopped trying to correct. He just opens the door, fills the frame with his considerable bulk, and stands there with his hands on his hips and a look on his face that Eskil has learned to associate with problems that can't be solved with a manifest and a charcoal pencil.

"I'm worried about the stray we've adopted," Gunnar says.

Eskil doesn't look up from the charts spread across his desk. He knows who Gunnar means. There's only one stray on this ship. "What's wrong?"

Gunnar steps inside and closes the door behind him, which is unusual. Gunnar is not a man who concerns himself with privacy. His voice carries through bulkheads regardless, and he has never once in the years Eskil has known him modulated his volume for the sake of discretion. The fact that he's closing the door means he considers this conversation serious enough to warrant it, and that alone makes Eskil's hand still on the chart.

"He's not eating."

Eskil's jaw tightens fractionally. "He's been eating. I've seen him in the galley."

"He's been in the galley," Gunnar corrects. "He preps the food. He serves the food. He cleans up after the food. But he's not eating it. Not properly. I've been watching." He crosses his arms, and the gesture makes him look less the cook and more the warrior he was before he decided he'd rather feed armies than fight in them. "He picks at his plate and pushes things around and when he thinks I'm not looking, he scrapes half of it back into the pot. At this rate he's going to lose what little weight he's gained since he came aboard."

Eskil leans back in his chair. He rubs a hand across his face and doesn't say what he's thinking, which is that he doesn't need Gunnar's report to know that Indrie has been withdrawn. He's noticed. He's been trying not to notice, and the whole thing is a tangle he can't cut through with a sword, which is frustrating because that's the solution that comes most naturally.

He hasn't seen Indrie active on deck. The healer used to be everywhere, coiling rope, mending sails, helping Ermin with rigging, carrying bowls of stew to men who'd missed their meal, a quiet, steady presence that moved through the ship and touched everything it passed. For the past two days, that presence has dried up. Indrie goes from his bunk to the galley to the medical bay and back to his bunk, and the route is the same every time, a tight circuit that avoids the open deck, avoids the crew's common areas, avoids anywhere that the light and the noise and the people might find him.

He hasn't heard Indrie chattering with Ermin and Dagny in the lower levels. The language lessons, the herb identification, the laughter that used to carry through the corridor, all of it has gone quiet. Ermin had come to Dagny two days ago, according to Bohdi, confused and worried, asking why Indrie wouldn't talk to him. Dagny had told the boy to give Indrie space, and Erminhad complied, but reluctantly, and Bohdi had reported that the young man had taken to hovering near Indrie's bunk at odd hours, not approaching, just being nearby. Standing guard over something he didn't know how to protect.

And Bohdi has already told him the rest. That there are dark circles under Indrie's eyes that are getting worse, bruised-purple half-moons that stand out against skin that's lost its new warmth and gone back to the pallor it had when Eskil first saw him in Armond's chambers. That Bohdi has seen him standing on the deck in the middle of the night, not sleeping, not doing anything, just standing at the railing with his hands on the wood and his face turned toward the black water below. Gazing down at it, not at the horizon, not at the stars, just down.

Bohdi hadn't said what he thought that meant. He hadn't needed to.

Gunnar tells him much of the same, the not eating, the not sleeping, the withdrawal from the routines and relationships the healer had been building, and adds that Indrie flinched away from him this morning when Gunnar reached past him for a pot.

Eskil keeps his voice even. "The boy is homesick. Or seasick. Or both. He'll adjust."

Gunnar looks at him. It's a long look, steady and unimpressed, the look he gives when he knows Eskil is being dismissive and doesn't intend to tolerate it. But Gunnar is not Bohdi. He doesn't push. He doesn't argue. He holds the look long enough to make his disagreement clear, and then he nods once and leaves.

The door closes and Eskil sits alone in his cabin and stares at the charts he's no longer seeing.

In truth, he knows it's neither of those things.

A beaten dog doesn't long for its abusive owner. Homesickness implies a home worth missing, and what Indrie left behind in Kalkoa was not a home. It was a cage with a thin mat and a king who broke bones for sport and an advisor who threw him at thefeet of conquerors to be discarded. Whatever Indrie is feeling right now, it's not longing for what he left.

And despite never having been at sea, Indrie has been surprisingly energetic aboard the ship, or was, until two nights ago. He'd taken to the water with a resilience that had surprised everyone, Eskil included. No nausea, no green-gilled misery at the railing. He'd moved across the deck with increasing confidence, found his sea legs within a week, and hadn't shown the slightest bit of sickness since they left shore.