Page 42 of Salt in the Wound

Gunnar looks at him.

It's a knowing look. The kind that sees through the surface-level request to the roiling mess beneath it and decides, with forty years of reading people as carefully as he reads recipes, that the surface-level request is not the one that's going to be honored.

He places the plate in Indrie's hands. The ceramic is warm against his palms. The stew steams. The bread is fresh, the crust golden, and the orange sits beside it with the quiet judgment of something that knows exactly what it's doing there.

"You need to make peace with your demons," Gunnar tells him.

The words are in Indrie's language, spoken carefully, each one placed with deliberate precision, clearly practiced. Indrie stares at him. Gunnar stares back, immovable, inarguable, a mountain in an apron.

Indrie swallows his nerves. He adjusts his grip on the plate. He turns toward the corridor that leads to the captain's quarters and takes the first step.

His feet don't want to cooperate. Each step is a negotiation between his body, which wants to turn and flee, and his mind, which has been told by two people he trusts that the man at the end of this corridor is not the monster his instincts insist he is. The corridor is short. It has never felt longer.

He reaches the door. He stands there. The plate is warm in his hands and the door is closed and behind it is a man who held him through a storm and told him I do not own you and left with anger in his spine and Indrie doesn't know which version he's about to face.

He adjusts the collar of Eskil's shirt where it's slipped off his shoulder. He straightens his back. He takes a breath.

He knocks.

Chapter 18

The knock is quiet. Tentative. Hoping the room is empty.

Eskil knows who it is before the door opens. Gunnar had told him twenty minutes ago, with the diplomatic subtlety of a battering ram, that the healer would be bringing his evening meal and thatEskil should be kind to the boy or so help me I will put things in your stew that you do not want to know about. Eskil had told Gunnar to mind his cooking and leave the diplomacy to people who didn't threaten their king with food poisoning. Gunnar had given him the look, the one that saysI have known you since you were a child and I am not impressed, and left.

So Eskil is prepared. He's been sitting at his desk for twenty minutes, going over charts he's already memorized, waiting, and he's used that time to have a very stern conversation with himself about how this interaction is going to go. He is going to be calm. He is going to be clear. He is going to speak slowly and use simple words and he is not going to lose his temper, because losing his temper is what got him here, standing in his cabin this morning watching Indrie flinch away from him with his eyesshut and his arms crossed over his chest, bracing for a blow that Eskil would cut off his own hand before delivering.

The memory makes his stomach turn. He pushes it down and says, "Come in."

The door opens and Indrie enters with a plate of food and his back straight and his eyes on the ground.

He's wearing Eskil's clothes.

Eskil knew this. He'd left them for the boy deliberately, having nothing else dry to offer. He knew, in the abstract, that Indrie would be walking around the ship in his shirt and his trousers, and he'd thought he'd prepared himself for the sight of it. He had not prepared himself at all. The shirt is enormous on Indrie's slight frame, the collar slipping off one shoulder to expose the pale curve of his collarbone, the sleeves rolled to his elbows, the hem hanging past his hips. The trousers are cinched with rope at his waist and rolled at the ankles and the overall effect is that Indrie looks claimed, marked, wrapped in Eskil from throat to ankle, and the primal, possessive part of Eskil's brain that sees a beautiful man in his clothes and thinksmineis very loud right now and needs to shut the fuck up.

Eskil watches him cross the room. Indrie moves carefully, each step measured, his body held with rigid control, managing his fear through physical discipline. He doesn't look up. His eyes stay fixed on the floor, tracking his path from the door to the desk, and his face is a mask of composure that would be convincing if Eskil couldn't see the white of his knuckles around the plate.

Indrie sets the plate on the desk. His hands are steady, trained for precision under pressure, but the steadiness is costing him. Eskil can see the effort in the set of his shoulders, in the careful way he places the plate without letting the wood clatter.

He turns to leave immediately.

The motion is quick, practiced, the smooth pivot of years spent delivering things to a king and disappearing before the king decides he wants something else. Head down, body already angled toward the door, three steps from escape.

Eskil turns in his seat and catches his wrist.

The grip is loose. Deliberately, consciously loose, his fingers wrapped around the narrow wrist with just enough pressure to communicatestopand not nearly enough to restrain. Indrie could break free with a shift of his weight. Eskil has made sure of that, has calibrated the hold with the same care he'd use handling something that could shatter.

Indrie doesn't break free.

Whether by choice or obligation, Eskil doesn't know, and the not knowing is a specific kind of torture he is learning to live with. But Indrie stiffens, a full-body tension that Eskil feels through the contact of his fingers on skin, and turns back to Eskil, awaiting reprimand. His eyes come up just far enough to reach Eskil's chin and stop there.

Eskil pulls him back a step. The intention is straightforward, to close the distance between them, to have this conversation face to face rather than with Indrie halfway to the door and poised for flight. That's the intention.

What happens is that Eskil is sitting and Indrie is standing and one step back at this angle brings Indrie to the space between Eskil's parted knees, and suddenly the younger man is there, standing in the bracket of Eskil's thighs with barely a hand's width between his hip and Eskil's knee.

Indrie's eyes widen. But he doesn't pull away. He stands there, with Eskil sitting in front of him, and crosses his other arm self-consciously across his chest.

Then his eyes find Eskil's, and the fear in them is layered with something else, a desperate need to understand. He's searchingEskil's face for an answer to a question he can't bring himself to ask.