Page 29 of Salt in the Wound

He moves between crewmates without shrinking from the contact. Passes behind Dagny and she hands him a length of rope without looking, and he takes it without breaking stride, and the exchange is so seamless, so natural, that Eskil has to remind himself these two people did not know each other three weeks ago. He crouches beside the supply crates and works the lashing with Ermin, their shoulders nearly touching, and neither of them tenses at the proximity. When one of the larger deckhands, a man named Erik who is twice Indrie's width, steps past him in the narrow space between the barrels, Indrie shifts to make room without the full-body recoil that would have seized him days ago. He moves. Erik moves. The work continues.

There's an ease to him that is new and fragile and utterly disarming, and Eskil recognizes it for what it is because he's seen it before, in horses that have been broken badly and gentled back, in soldiers who've come home from campaigns that nearly unmade them. It's the first tentative unfurling of a creature that has been clenched against pain for so long it had forgotten that unclenching was an option. It will retreat at the first sign of danger. It will snap shut again if the world gives it reason to. But for right now, in this moment, on this deck, the healer is open. Moving freely. Working beside people who have given him no cause to be afraid.

Gunnar's cooking, for all its sins, is doing its job, and if Eskil told the cook that, Gunnar would be unbearable, so he doesn't.

Below on the deck, Indrie finishes the barrel lashing and stands, pushing his hair out of his face with the back of his wrist. The wind has picked up, the first advance scouts of the storm gusting across the deck in unpredictable bursts, and it catches his hair and throws it across his eyes, and he pushes it back again with an expression of mild irritation that is so ordinary, so human, so far removed from the terrified young man clutching a satchel in Armond's chambers, that something in Eskil's chest clenches.

Bohdi appears at his side.

Eskil doesn't look at him. He keeps his eyes on the deck, on the crew, on the preparations. He can feel Bohdi's gaze, though. Can feel it track from Eskil's face to the deck below, following the same line of sight to the slender figure currently helping Ermin wrestle a tarpaulin over a stack of supply crates.

Bohdi looks at Eskil. Raises his eyebrows. Says nothing.

He doesn't need to. The eyebrows say everything. They say: I see what you're looking at. They say: I see how you're looking at it. They say: You're standing at the helm of your ship in the hours before a storm watching a man tie down barrels with an expression on your face that I have never seen in thirty years of knowing you, and if you think I'm not going to have an opinion about that, you are delusional.

"The next time you give me that look," Eskil tells him, without looking away from the deck below, "you're going over the railing."

Bohdi's expression doesn't change. "I don't know what you're talking about, my lord."

"The eyebrows, Bohdi."

"These are my normal eyebrows. I can't help their position. It's genetic."

Eskil finally turns his head and fixes his second-in-command with a look that should, by all rights, strip flesh from bone. Bohdi meets it with serene indifference, having weathered that look a thousand times and never once lost a layer of skin.

Then Bohdi claps him on the shoulder, a firm, grounding pressure that lingers a beat longer than casual, and says nothing, and turns, and goes to oversee the lower hold.

Eskil stays at the helm.

He is not watching Indrie. He is watching the storm.

He's watching the clouds advance across the northern sky, eating the blue ahead of them, the leading edge a roiling wall of dark grey that's moving faster than he'd like. He's watching the sea change beneath it, the surface losing its gloss, the swells lengthening, the water shifting from deep blue to the flat, metallic grey that means the pressure is dropping. He's watching the wind indicators at the masthead, the pennants snapping and shifting as the gusts increase in frequency and force.

He is watching the storm. Specifically the storm. Only the storm.

He tells himself this. He tells himself this while his eyes drift, without his permission, back to the main deck where Indrie is now helping Dagny secure the last of the spare rigging. The wind catches Indrie's hair again and this time he doesn't bother pushing it back, just works through it, fingers moving deftly despite the hair whipping across his face, and Eskil thinks, absurdly, that someone should give the man a tie for his hair before the storm hits.

He tells himself this until the clouds swallow the last of the light and the sea begins to heave.

The transition is faster than he expected. One moment the horizon is visible, a thin line of amber where the setting sun is making its last stand against the advancing front, and the next the clouds close over it and the world goes dark. Not the gradualdark of evening, but the sudden, oppressive dark of a sky that has decided to press down, to smother, to reduce the world to the ship and the sea and nothing else.

The first real gust hits the ship broadside and she heels, hard, the deck tilting to starboard with a groan that runs through the timbers. Eskil braces at the helm, feet spread, hands locked on the wheel, and feels the resistance in the rudder as the sea begins to push.

"All hands!" he shouts, and his voice carries across the deck and down the hatches and into the belly of the ship where his crew is already moving, already coming, already answering the call of the storm.

This is going to be a bad one. He can feel it in the wheel, in the way the ship fights him, in the weight of the wind and the height of the swells and the speed at which the temperature is dropping. He sets his jaw, adjusts the heading to take the waves at an angle rather than broadside, and holds.

Below him, the crew emerges onto the deck, and among them, visible even in the growing dark, even in the chaos, Indrie, wide-eyed but moving, ready.

Eskil turns his face into the wind and prepares.

Chapter 13

The storm hits hard.

One moment the ship is heeling in the gusting wind, the crew scrambling across the tilting deck in the organized urgency Indrie has come to recognize as preparation, and the next the sky opens and the world becomes water. Rain comes down not in drops but in sheets, horizontal, driven by a wind that screams across the deck, shrill and metallic. It hits Indrie's face and he gasps, blinded, the force of it stinging his skin and filling his mouth before he can close it.

He grabs the nearest rope and holds on.