Page 25 of Salt in the Wound

His hand is cool, the fingers slender, the skin softer than Eskil expected for a man who's been hauling rope and scrubbing potsfor a week. He can feel the bandages on Indrie's palms, the burns from the fire, treated and wrapped with the care Indrie gives everyone else, and the touch is tentative, barely any weight behind it, Indrie prepared to pull away at the first sign that this was a mistake.

Eskil closes his fingers around Indrie's hand. Gently. Carefully. The way he's been told he needs to be and is trying, gods damn it, to actually manage. He lifts their joined hands and uses Indrie's finger to point to the north star, the brightest fixed point in the sky, unwavering while everything else wheels around it.

"There," he says. "That one. Do you see it?"

Indrie follows the line of his own finger, his body shifting to align with the direction, and Eskil feels him lean slightly closer. Not intentionally, probably. Just the physics of the gesture, the natural tilt of a body following a pointed hand. But the result is that Indrie's shoulder is nearly touching Eskil's arm and his hair smells of salt and dried herbs and something underneath that is just him, warm and clean, and Eskil grips the railing with his free hand and tells himself to focus.

"It sits at the tip of this constellation here." He traces the shape with their hands, drawing the outline against the dark sky. "See the shape? Follow it down. That star at the bottom, and the one beside it, they form the base. And the north star is always at the top. Always." He draws the shape again, slower. "It never moves. Not visibly. Not in a lifetime. Everything else in the sky wheels around it, but that one stays fixed."

Indrie's eyes follow the path of their joined fingers. He's listening, his head tilted, his body still.

"Sailors use it to guide their way on the open sea," Eskil continues, and he can hear himself talking more than he needs to, saying things that go beyond the lesson, but something about the dark and the stillness and Indrie leaning into the sound ofhis voice makes it difficult to stop. "When everything else is dark and unfamiliar, you find that star. You know which way is north. And from north you can find everything else."

He knows a lot of what he's saying is probably lost in translation. The vocabulary is beyond what Dagny has taught, the concepts more abstract than rope and fish and stew. But he notices the more he speaks, the more tension drains from Indrie's shoulders. The rigid set of them softens, degree by degree, as Eskil talks, not at the words, maybe, but at the sound. The low, steady rumble of his voice in the quiet night, saying things that aren't orders, aren't demands, aren't sharp or urgent or dangerous. Just a man talking about stars.

"Do you know others?" Eskil asks. "Other constellations?"

Indrie hesitates. His hand is still in Eskil's, and his eyes move across the sky, careful, searching for something familiar. Then, slowly, he lifts their joined hands and points.

"That one," Indrie says quietly. "We call it..." He says the name in his own language, a word Eskil doesn't know, and traces the shape with their fingers. A cluster near the horizon that Eskil recognizes, a formation his people call the Serpent's Tail.

"The Serpent's Tail," Eskil says, nodding. "We call it differently, but it's the same."

Indrie's eyes brighten fractionally at the confirmation. He points again, higher. "And there."

"The Broken Crown." Eskil traces it with him. "Good."

Indrie points to a third cluster, one that spreads wide across the eastern sky, and Eskil shakes his head.

"That's two," he says. "Not one. They overlap here, see?" He separates them with their hands, tracing each constellation individually, and Indrie watches their fingers move against the sky and nods, absorbing the correction without defensiveness. His brow furrows in concentration and his lips move silently, committing the distinction to memory.

Then Indrie lifts their hands again and points at a formation near the north star. He says its name in his own language, a soft, lilting word, and Eskil frowns.

"No," Eskil says automatically. "That's the Watchman's Eye. The anchor stars are..." He traces the shape he knows, the one his father taught him, and stops.

He looks at the formation again. Traces it. Looks at the stars Indrie is pointing to, and then at the stars he was about to indicate, and realizes with a slow, dawning certainty that they are not the same. The formation he's been calling the Watchman's Eye shares two anchor stars with the constellation Indrie has identified, and Eskil has been connecting them wrong. For years. Confusing it with a neighboring formation, drawing the wrong lines between the wrong points, because his father had drawn them that way and Eskil had never questioned it.

He's been confidently wrong about this specific constellation since he was twelve years old. And a healer from a broken kingdom who has never sailed before this voyage has just, quietly and without fanfare, corrected him.

Eskil gives him a startled look.

"No," Indrie says, and his voice is soft but certain, the steadiest Eskil has heard it. He guides their joined hands through the shape again, connecting the correct stars. "Here. And here. Not there."

It's the most direct thing Indrie has ever said to him. Not an apology, not a stammer, not a question hedged with deference. A correction, delivered simply, because it's right, and for a moment the young man standing beside him isn't a frightened healer trying to survive. He's a man who knows he's correct and isn't afraid to say it.

Indrie's mouth twitches. It's small, a barely perceptible movement, the corners of his lips pulling upward by a fraction,but it's there. The first smile Eskil has seen directed at him. Not at Dagny, not at Ermin, not at a joke he overheard or a word he mispronounced, but at him. A smile meant for Eskil, offered tentatively, uncertain whether it's allowed.

Eskil concedes. "You're right," he says, and the admission comes easier than it should, pulled out of him by the warmth in that smile. One, because Indrie is right. And two, because the smile is worth it, worth the dent in his pride, worth every wrong star he's ever followed. He'd concede a hundred constellations for that smile.

Indrie is looking up at him and Eskil is looking down and the moonlight is on the younger man's face. It catches in his dark hair and traces the line of his jaw and pools in his eyes, and Eskil does nothing for a long moment but look at him and think about how every last one of them pales in comparison, the entire sky in all its breadth and brilliance unable to compete with the quiet, tentative light in this young man's eyes.

There is a bruise on Indrie's neck. In the shape of hands.

Eskil's gaze drops to it and the warmth in his chest curdles into something dark and vicious. The bruises are stark in the moonlight, four finger marks on one side, thumb on the other, a perfect map of the violence done to Indrie's throat two nights ago. The swelling has gone down but the discoloration is deep, purple-black at the center and green at the edges, and it will be days yet before it fades. Every time Indrie swallows, every time he turns his head, the bruises move with him. A collar he can't take off.

Eskil reaches out and brushes his thumb across the bruise without thinking it through.

His skin against the damaged skin of Indrie's throat. Barely a touch. The lightest pressure, his thumb tracing the edge of the darkest mark, and he can feel Indrie's pulse beneath it, fast,faster than it should be, a frantic beat that speaks of fear or something adjacent to it.