Page 31 of Salt in the Wound

He thinks of Eskil.

He thinks of pale eyes in the moonlight and a hand held out, palm up, waiting.

Stay a moment.

The last of the air leaves his lungs in a stream of silver and the dark closes in and Indrie stops fighting.

Chapter 14

Eskil sees Indrie's face.

It's a flash, a fraction of a second lit by lightning, frozen in white, and in that fraction he sees everything. The wide dark eyes. The mouth open on a sound the storm swallows. The hand reaching for something that isn't there. The terror, absolute and total, of knowing he's going to die and not having time to be anything but afraid.

And then the healer disappears over the side and into the black water and the image burns itself into Eskil's retinas.

He doesn't hesitate.

His hands leave the wheel. His boots are moving before his mind has finished processing what his eyes just saw, and the sequence of what happens next is not a decision, it's a reflex, a chain of actions executed by a body that has already committed to a course his brain hasn't approved. He shucks his boots as he runs. Left foot, right foot, kicked free without breaking stride, the leather tumbling across the wet deck behind him. His belt goes next, fingers finding the buckle, wrenching it open, the weight of his sword and scabbard dropping to the planks with aclatter he doesn't hear over the storm. A trail of him, shed as he goes, everything that will drag him down in the water stripped away in the span of seconds.

Someone shouts his name. Bohdi, probably. The voice is distant, irrelevant, drowned by the wind and the singular focus that has narrowed Eskil's world to a point the size of a broken railing and the dark water beyond it.

He reaches the gap where the railing was and doesn't pause. Doesn't look. Doesn't calculate the height or the temperature or the odds. He plants his foot on the splintered edge of the remaining wood and dives.

The fall is longer than he expects. Long enough for the wind to tear at his shirt. Long enough for the rain to hit his face at a new angle. Long enough for a single, crystalline thought to form in the space between the ship and the sea:if he's already gone, I'm not coming back up either.

He hits the water.

The cold is a violence. It slams into every nerve in his body simultaneously, a full-system shock that would lock a lesser man's muscles and send him straight to the bottom. Eskil has swum in northern waters since he was a boy, has broken ice with his fists to bathe in winter rivers, has trained in the frigid harbors of Valen where the water can stop a heart if you're not prepared for it, and even so, the cold of the open ocean in a storm is something else entirely. It's not cold. It'shostile.The water doesn't want him here and it makes that clear immediately, pressing against his chest, stealing the warmth from his skin, dragging at his clothes with fingers that are patient and strong and have all the time in the world.

He surfaces. Gasps. The air is barely better than the water, rain and spray and wind that stings his face raw, and his lungs take it and his body responds, years of training overriding the shock, forcing his muscles to move.

He can see nothing.

The ship is, somewhere. Behind him, he thinks, but the waves are high enough to block it from view and the darkness is total between lightning strikes. The sea around him is a churning, heaving chaos of black water and white foam, and somewhere in it, somewhere below or beside or already beyond reach, Indrie is drowning.

Eskil dives.

Below the surface the world is silent and black. His eyes are open and they see nothing. His hands sweep through the water, reaching, grasping, finding nothing but cold and dark and the current that's trying to pull him sideways. He kicks deeper. The pressure builds against his ears. His lungs, already taxed from the impact, begin their protest early. He ignores them. He sweeps his arms wider, changes direction, dives again.

Nothing. Nothing.Nothing.

He surfaces, drags in air, and dives again. And again. Each time the cold takes more from him. Each time his muscles respond a fraction slower. Each time the dark feels heavier, more final, more certain that it's already won.

He refuses to admit defeat.

He will not surface and tread water and scan the waves and accept that the sea has taken what it wants. He will not climb back aboard his ship and stand at the helm and carry the image of Indrie's terrified face for the rest of his life. He will not go back to Valen and explain to his brother that he found a healer with merciful hands and midnight eyes and he let the ocean have him because the waves were too high and the water was too cold and the dark was too deep.

He finds the cluster of fallen crates.

His hand connects with wood, a sharp edge, a corner, the unmistakable shape of a crate tumbling slowly through the water, and he follows it down. The crates are still connected bythe netting, a tangle of rope and wood sinking into the deep, and Eskil dives below them, into the darker dark beneath, hands outstretched, reaching with everything he has left.

His lungs are beyond protest now. They're in revolt, the pressure in his chest a living thing that's trying to claw its way up his throat and force his mouth open. His vision, useless as it is in the blackness, is narrowing at the edges. He has seconds. Less than seconds. He has the space between one heartbeat and the next and then the sea will take him too.

His hand closes around unmistakable fabric.

Thin. Wet. Wrapped around a body that isn't moving.

Eskil clenches his fists in it andwrenches. He pulls with everything, arms, shoulders, back, the core strength of a life spent hauling lines and swinging steel, and the body comes free from whatever held it. The netting, the crates, the dark. He drags it upward, kicking for the surface with legs that are going numb, and the weight in his arms is slight, too light, terrifyingly still.