Page 56 of Salt in the Wound

Indrie nods. His throat is tight.

"Can you heal him?"

A pause. A long one. Long enough that Bohdi's expression shifts, the fear cracking through the composure, and Indrie can see the man bracing himself for the worst.

Indrie nods again. "Yes."

Bohdi breathes. The exhale is long and shuddering and carries the weight of a terror he'd been holding behind his teeth, and his hand goes to Indrie's shoulder and grips it, hard, grateful, the grip of a man who has just been told his world is not ending.

"What do you need?"

"I need," Indrie swallows, "some time with him to get him through the fever. You should, I mean, there's no need for you to be here too, and I'm sure you should be at the helm. And I need, I will see him through the night. I'll stay with him. He'll, he'll be alright by morning."

Bohdi's eyes search his face. Indrie can see the questions forming, but Bohdi reads people, and whatever he sees in Indrie's face must tell him enough, because the questions don't come.

"Let me know if you need anything," Bohdi says.

Indrie nods. Bohdi squeezes his shoulder once more, then releases him and walks out and shuts the door behind him, and the soft click of the latch is the loneliest sound Indrie has ever heard.

He stands in the cabin. The lamp swings. The king breathes on the bed behind him, each exhale a ragged sound that scrapes against the quiet. Indrie's satchel is on his shoulder and his hands are at his sides and he is shaking.

He is a virgin.

The thought arrives with the flat, clinical precision of a diagnosis. He is twenty-two years old and he has never been touched and he has never touched anyone and the sum total of his sexual experience is the newly discovered ache he feels whenEskil is near, the flush that consumes him when those pale eyes find his, the desire he only learned to name days ago.

And this is a ritual meant to marry two people together.

And he is out of his mind.

He sets the satchel on the table. He doesn't need it, there's nothing in it that will help with this, no herb, no draught, no salve. Well. He pauses. Opens the satchel. Retrieves a small clay pot of healing salve, a thick, slippery compound he uses for burns and chafing, made from rendered fat and aloe and calendula. It's safe for skin. It's safe for other things. His face burns at the thought and he sets the pot on the table beside the satchel and closes his eyes and breathes.

He can do this. He has to do this. Eskil will die if he doesn't, and Indrie has let one king die slowly for five years and he will not let another die in a single night, not this one, not him.

He approaches the bed.

Eskil is worse. The flush has spread across his entire torso, vivid and angry, and the sweat is sheeting now, not beading. His hands are fisted in the sheets so tightly the fabric has torn near his hip. His breathing has deteriorated into harsh, open-mouthed panting, and when Indrie gets close enough to see his face properly, his eyes are squeezed shut and the expression he's wearing is one of acute, concentrated suffering.

Indrie lowers himself to sit on the edge of the bed. He hesitates with his hands on his own thighs, fingers curling into the fabric of his trousers, Eskil's trousers, still too large, still cinched with rope, and then he places his palms on Eskil's chest.

The reaction is immediate.

Eskil moans.

The sound is low and deep and torn from somewhere primal, a vibration that Indrie feels through his palms and into his arms and down into the pit of his stomach where it detonates. It is the most devastating sound Indrie has ever heard. It reverberatesthrough him, settling in his bones, and the flush that blooms across his face and down his neck is so violent and so total that his vision briefly whites out.

Eskil's hands leave the sheets and curl around Indrie's wrists. His grip is strong, the fever hasn't diminished his strength, if anything it's heightened it, the muscles in his forearms standing taut, but he's not pulling Indrie's hands away. He's holding them there. Pressing them harder against his chest, the contact the only thing between him and something worse.

His eyes open. Those blown, dark pupils find Indrie's face, and the recognition in them is sluggish but present. He knows who Indrie is. He knows whose hands are on his chest. And even through the fever and the haze and the fruit's relentless assault on his system, something in his expression shifts when he sees Indrie above him.

"You need to leave," Eskil says. "Right now."

His voice is wrecked. Rough and low and scraped raw, the words forced through a throat that is clearly working against him. And the fact that he's saying them, that the first coherent sentence out of his mouth, while his body is burning and his hands are locked around the wrists of the one person who can save him, is leave, makes something crack behind Indrie's ribs.

He doesn't want Indrie. Even now. Even burning and barely coherent, his first instinct is to send Indrie away.

Indrie swallows thickly around the lump in his throat that might be his broken heart.

"I can't leave," he says. His voice is steadier than he feels. The healer in him has taken the helm, the part of him that is sure and focused when everything else is chaos. "The fruit, the fruit is poison. If you don't–"