Page 20 of Salt in the Wound

"I said I'd figure it out. That's still the plan." He scratches his chin thoughtfully. "Dagny's knife is looking less and less like it belongs to her, the more I think about it."

"Get out of my sight."

Bohdi's laugh carries across the foredeck as he goes, warm and easy and entirely unbothered by the dismissal. Eskil hears him greet someone on the main deck below, probably Dagny, given the responding voice, and then the sound fades into the general noise of the ship waking up around him.

Eskil sits alone on the foredeck. The sun crests the horizon to the east, painting the water in shades of copper and gold, and the longsword lies across his knees with an edge sharp enough to split a hair. He runs his thumb along the flat of the blade, not testing the edge, just feeling the weight of it. The steel is cool beneath his skin.

Bohdi is right. He's been avoiding Indrie, and the reasons are sound, the power imbalance, the language barrier, the inconvenient and increasingly undeniable fact that he wants the young man with an intensity that compromises his judgment, but the outcome is not. Avoidance protects Eskil. It does nothing for Indrie. And Eskil is not in the business of protecting himself at the expense of someone in his care.

He sheathes the longsword, gathers the whetstone, and stands.

He'll handle it.

He doesn't know how, exactly. He doesn't have Dagny's patience for language instruction, or Gunnar's ease with quiet companionship, or Bohdi's gift for making people feel safe. He has a sharp tongue, a shorter temper, and a face that he's been told, more than once, by more than one person, looks carved from something that was already angry. He is not, by nature or by habit, a gentle man.

But he can try. For this, for Indrie, he can try.

He heads below deck, deposits his sword and whetstone in his cabin, and goes to find something useful to do that puts him inproximity to the healer without it looking like he's engineering proximity to the healer.

Bohdi would see through it instantly. Everyone else, Eskil hopes, will not.

Chapter 9

Indrie smells smoke in his sleep.

It's faint at first, woven into a dream he won't remember, something about the herb garden in Kalkoa, the purple sage, a warmth that doesn't belong, and then it sharpens, acrid and real, and his eyes snap open in the dark.

He's out of his bunk immediately. His feet hit the floor and the wood is warm beneath them, warmer than it should be, and the air in the sleeping quarters has a haze to it that catches the faint glow of the single lamp left burning at the end of the corridor. It's not thick yet. Not choking. But it's there, a grey veil that shouldn't exist on a ship in the middle of the night, and the smell beneath it is unmistakable. Not cooking smoke. Not lamp oil. Something deeper, something feeding on wood and tar and moving fast.

Indrie crosses to Ermin's bunk in two strides and shakes him awake. Ermin comes up swinging, disoriented, and Indrie grabs his arm and says, as clearly as he can manage with his heart already slamming against his ribs, "Fire."

The word works. Ermin's eyes go wide and then he's moving, rolling out of his bunk and grabbing his boots, and the two of them rush toward the lower level.

The hold is worse. The haze here is thicker, heavier, rolling along the ceiling with a life of its own, and Indrie can see the glow before he sees the flames, a flickering orange light coming from the aft section where the dry stores and spare canvas are kept. When they round the corner, the fire is there. It's taken hold of a stack of crates and is climbing the canvas draped over them, hungry and bright, the flames licking upward toward the overhead beams with a speed that makes Indrie's stomach drop.

Ermin shouts the alarm. His voice is enormous for his frame, cutting through the lower levels, sharp and piercing, and Indrie hears it echoed above, voices relaying the call, boots hitting the deck, the ship lurching into wakefulness around them.

They don't wait. Indrie grabs a blanket from a nearby storage shelf and throws it over the nearest burning crate, smothering the flames beneath it while Ermin kicks a bucket into position and begins hauling water from the emergency barrel at the base of the ladder. The water hisses when it hits the fire, steam joining the smoke, and for a long, terrible moment the flames don't seem to care. They rear up around the blanket, find new fuel in the crate beside it, and Indrie feels the heat against his face, blistering and close.

Others arrive. Men and women pouring down the ladder, some half-dressed, some still pulling on boots, all of them moving with the practiced urgency of people who understand what fire means on a ship at sea. There is nowhere to go. There is no shore to swim to. If the fire reaches the hull or the mast supports, they are all dead.

They form a chain. Bucket after bucket passed from hand to hand, from the water barrels to the fire line, Indrie in the thick of it because he can't bring himself to stand back and watch.The smoke is in his lungs now, heavy and harsh, and his eyes are streaming and every breath is a fight but he doesn't stop. He throws water, stamps out embers that have scattered across the floor, uses his bare hands to beat out a flame that's caught on a coil of rope near the wall. The pain is distant, secondary, filed away for later when his body can afford to process it.

For a long, horrible moment, Indrie thinks this is how they're going to die. On a ship, on fire, in the middle of the ocean, with nowhere to run and nothing beneath them but black water and nothing above them but smoke-choked sky. The thought is calm, almost clinical, his body already committed to action and his mind just along for the observation. He keeps passing buckets. He keeps stamping embers. He keeps moving.

And then, gradually, the fire begins to lose. The flames shrink. The water overwhelms what the fire has claimed, and the embers hiss and die, and the smoke thins enough that Indrie can see the far wall of the hold again. The canvas is destroyed. Several crates are charred ruins. The overhead beams are blackened but intact, the wood too thick and too damp from the sea air to have caught fully. There are char marks etched into the floor and walls, dark and raw, and the air reeks of burnt tar and scorched grain, but they're alive. The ship is still afloat.

The chain breaks apart. Men lean against walls, coughing, wiping their faces. Someone laughs, the strained, disbelieving laugh of barely surviving, and it spreads, a thin ripple of relief that moves through the group. There are murmurs about how it could have happened. A lamp left unattended. Someone warming tea below deck and forgetting the flame. A candle too close to the stores. Theories traded in low voices, none of them satisfying, all of them underscored by the unspoken understanding that they were lucky.

The men begin to disperse, heading back to their bunks or up to the deck for air. Indrie stays. He's bent over, hands onhis knees, trying to cough the smoke out of his lungs, and his palms are singing with pain where he'd beaten out the flames barehanded. He'll need to treat those. Salve and bandages. Later. In a moment. When the world stops tilting.

He straightens and blinks through the residual haze, taking stock of the damage. The destroyed crates, the ruined canvas, the blackened beams. His eyes travel across the hold, cataloguing, and then land on something that doesn't fit.

At the back of the hold, near the aft wall, there's a crate that's askew. It's larger than the others, a storage chest used for bulk dry goods, and it's been pushed out from its position against the wall. Indrie knows it wasn't like that before. He's been in this hold every day for the past week, sorting through stores for Gunnar and gathering supplies for his medical work, and that crate was flush against the wall the last time he was here. It's been moved. Recently. The scratch marks on the floor where it was dragged are fresh, pale lines in the soot-darkened wood.

Indrie glances behind him. The last of the crew members are disappearing up the ladder, their voices fading. He's alone in the hold, or thinks he is, and curiosity, or an impulse less wise than curiosity, one that doesn't know when to leave well enough alone, pulls him toward the crate.

He picks his way across the debris, stepping over charred timber and sodden canvas, and reaches the crate. It's large enough for a person to fit inside, and the lid is slightly ajar, propped up at one corner, closed in a hurry. There's a smell coming from it that isn't smoke. Something organic, something human.