Page 27 of Salt in the Wound

Indrie chops faster. The rhythm of the knife is grounding, the same meditative repetition Eskil had found in his whetstone that morning on the foredeck. He doesn't know how he knows that comparison, except that he's been watching the king more than he should and cataloguing his habits with an attention that serves no practical purpose and yet refuses to stop.

He doesn't want to feel this way.

He's spent two days on deck, at night, when no one could see, when the ship was sleeping and the sea was dark and the railing was close and the water below was closer, trying to convince himself he'd be better off if he threw himself into the sea. The argument had been logical, in the cold way that despair is always logical. He was being carted off to an unknown fate. The king who held his life in his hands was capable of a brutality Indrie had witnessed firsthand. The world he was sailing toward was foreign and unknowable and populated by people who, for all their unexpected kindness, could turn on him suddenly, without warning, with an indifference that doesn't care whether you survive.

He'd stood at the railing and he'd looked at the water and he'd thought: this would be easier.

And then in a single night his feelings were upended.

Eskil had come to him. Not sent someone, not Bohdi, not Dagny. He'd come himself, in the dark, to the railing where Indrie stood, and he'd been gentle. There isn't another word for it. Careful with his voice, with the open hand he'd held out and waited, waited, for Indrie to decide. His voice dropping into that low, unhurried register that he only uses when speaking to Indrie, the volume itself a form of tenderness. He hadn't asked what was wrong. He'd just stood there, offering his hand, and waited for Indrie to take it.

And Indrie had. He'd placed his palm in the king's and let himself be guided toward the sky and for a few minutes, just a few, just enough, the weight had lifted.

And then there was the thumb on his throat.

Indrie's hand drifts to his neck without his permission, fingers brushing the bruises the stowaway left, and what he feels isn't the pain of the injury. What he feels is the ghost of Eskil's touch overlaid on top of it, warm, impossibly light, tracing the edge of the damage, trying to undo it with contact alone. The memory makes something hot pulse behind his ribs and his breath shortens and he has to put down the knife and press both hands flat against the prep table and wait for it to pass.

It doesn't pass. It hasn't been passing. It's been building.

He is twenty-two years old, and in all those years, he has never felt this.

He'd thought, for a long time, that the part of him that wants, that aches, that reaches toward another body with something deeper than thought, was broken. Beaten out, maybe. Starved along with the rest of him in that cold little room with the thin mat and the stone floor. He'd recognized beauty before, objectively, distantly, noting it without feeling it, but he'd never looked at another person and felt his body respond. He'd made his peace with that.

And then Eskil had stood in the doorway of Armond's chambers and looked at him, and something dormant had opened its eyes.

He hadn't recognized it at first. The quickening in his chest when the king entered a room, he'd called that fear. The heat in his face when Eskil's gaze found his, embarrassment. How his eyes tracked the movement of the king's hands, cataloguing the breadth of his palms and the length of his fingers, that was vigilance. Years of learning to watch the hands that can hurt him.

Except fear doesn't make his toes curl. Embarrassment doesn't make him lean closer when he should be pulling away. And survival instinct doesn't explain the way his entire body had lit up when Eskil pulled his collar aside in the castle and the pads of his fingers brushed Indrie's collarbone.

He is attracted to Eskil. Physically. Viscerally. In a way that makes his body do things his mind has no control over and that he has absolutely no framework for understanding. And now Eskil exists, and whatever peace Indrie had made with his own emptiness is shattered, and the pieces are everywhere and he doesn't know how to pick them up.

Every interaction is layered with a sensation he can't process. When Eskil speaks to him, his voice, that deep rumble that Indrie can feel in his sternum, does something to the base of Indrie's spine that makes his knees unreliable. When Eskil looks at him with those pale, unreadable eyes, Indrie feels seen in a way that goes beyond observation, beyond scrutiny, into something that touches the parts of him he keeps hidden.

And last night, on the deck, when Eskil held his hand and pointed at the stars, how Eskil's hand had swallowed his entirely and held it with such devastating gentleness, Indrie had felt something so intense it had scared him. A pull, deep in his belly, drawing him toward the larger man with a force that had nothing to do with logic and everything to do with a hunger he'd never known he had.

He'd wanted to step closer. He'd wanted to press himself against Eskil's chest and feel the warmth of him and the breadth of him and the solid, unyielding realness of him. He'd wanted Eskil's hands on his waist, his mouth against his hair, his voice in his ear saying, he doesn't even know what. Anything. Everything. His own name, maybe, in that low register that turns two syllables into something sacred.

He'd wanted, and the wanting had been so enormous and so unfamiliar that he'd had to say I should get to bed and walk away before his body betrayed him entirely.

It's Eskil. That's what makes it impossible. Not just anyone, but the king. The man who commands this ship, who holds power over every soul aboard it, and who ordered a man flogged and thrown overboard while Indrie watched. Indrie is a healer from a dead kingdom. He is no one. He has nothing to offer except the skill in his hands and the knowledge in his head, and those are services, not this. Not the thing that makes him lie awake replaying the pressure of a thumb against his throat and wondering, with a curiosity that burns, what it would feel like if Eskil pressed harder. Not with violence, but with something he doesn't have a name for yet.

But Eskil also knelt and untangled netting from Indrie's boot. Also held out his hand in the moonlight and waited, patiently, for Indrie to take it. Also asked okay? with his fingers on Indrie's chin, the answer mattering more to him than the stew on the floor. He is violence and gentleness braided together, and Indrie's body, his traitorous, newly awakened body, wants both. It wants all of him.

He finishes chopping the onions and wipes his eyes and tells himself, firmly, that this changes nothing.

The dissonance between the man at the mast and the man at the railing is something Indrie cannot resolve, and maybe he doesn't have to. Maybe people contain contradictions, and maybe the measure of a person is not the worst thing they're capable of but the best thing they choose. He has taken a vow that he would hurt no living creature, and he's stood by that all his life. To be with people who take a life so readily is crippling. But it had not been unprovoked. The man had tried to kill them all, had wrapped his hands around Indrie's throat and squeezedwith the intention of ending his life, and the bruises on his neck are proof of how close he came.

He can't make the violence comfortable. He probably never will. But the nausea has faded. The numbness has receded. What's left is something more complicated, not acceptance, but acknowledgment. The sea has rules he doesn't know and the people on it have codes he hasn't learned.

No one on this ship has raised a hand to him. They haven't even threatened it.

Gunnar feeds him. Dagny teaches him. Ermin follows him around with the earnest devotion of a shadow he never asked for. Bohdi punched a man in the face and wrenched him off Indrie's body without hesitation. And Eskil has touched him four times, and each time it has been gentle, and each time Indrie has wanted more.

He's grinding herbs into a sleeping draught for one of the men who has insomnia, a sailor named Kael who can't sleep on still nights and lies awake staring at the ceiling, which is a problem Indrie understands intimately, when Bohdi finds him.

The second-in-command appears in the doorway of the medical bay with casual ease, always exactly where he means to be. He leans against the frame, arms crossed, tattoos shifting across his forearms, and watches Indrie work for a moment before speaking.

"Is that for you?" Bohdi asks, nodding at the mortar in Indrie's hands. His voice is light, conversational, but there's a layer beneath it that Indrie has learned to recognize. Bohdi is checking on him. Bohdi is always checking on him. "Maybe you should take it, if you've been having trouble sleeping."