Page 33 of Salt in the Wound

Gently. More gently than he's ever handled anything in his life. He eases Indrie's head onto the pillow and straightens his limbs and steps back and looks at him, and the sight undoes something in his chest that he didn't know could be undone.

He'd wanted Indrie in his bed.

But not like this.

Not soaked and shaking and half-conscious, lips tinged blue with cold, skin so pale it's nearly translucent, the bruises on his throat stark and dark against it. Not with seawater pooling beneath him on the mattress and his chest rising and falling in shallow, stuttered breaths that sound as if they might stop at any moment. Not with the lamplight catching the shadows under his eyes and the hollows of his cheeks and the fragile architecture ofhis collarbones visible through the soaked fabric clinging to his frame.

Eskil stands over the bed and drips seawater onto the floor and stares at the man lying in his sheets and accepts, with the clarity that only comes from nearly dying, that he is in very serious trouble.

The wet clothes have to come off.

He knows this. He's seen men die of cold on winter campaigns, strong men, men with more meat on their bones than Indrie has. The progression is simple and merciless: the shaking, then the confusion, then the shaking stops and the body goes quiet and the quiet is not peace, it's the beginning of the end. Every second Indrie stays in these soaked clothes is a second his body is losing a fight it can't afford to lose.

Eskil crouches beside the bed. His hands are shaking, from the cold, from the exertion, from something else he doesn't examine, and he steadies them through force of will. He starts with the boots. They're waterlogged, the leather swollen tight, and he has to work them off carefully, easing the left one free and then the right, and what's left of the netting is still tangled around Indrie's ankle, the rope embedded in the leather. Eskil cuts it free with the knife from his desk and drops the boots to the floor.

Indrie's feet are pale. Bloodless. Cold to the touch in a way that makes Eskil's stomach clench.

He moves to the shirt. It's plastered to Indrie's skin, clinging to every line and hollow of his torso, and Eskil has to peel it away, working the fabric up from the waistband, lifting Indrie's unresisting body just enough to pull it over his head. Indrie makes a sound, faint, barely audible, a murmur that might be protest or might be nothing, but he doesn't wake. His head lolls when Eskil lifts him and settles back against the pillow when Eskil lays him down and his eyes stay closed.

The trousers next. Eskil's jaw is set so tight his teeth ache. He works the wet fabric down over narrow hips and slender legs. The trousers join the shirt on the floor and Indrie is bare and the lamplight finds him and Eskil doesn't look.

He doesn't look. He keeps his eyes on the task, on the practical necessity, on the clinical reality of a body that needs to be dry and warm. He grabs a blanket from the trunk, dry wool, the heaviest one he has, and spreads it over Indrie's body, tucking it around his shoulders, his arms, his feet.

He steps back. Breathes. Waits.

Indrie keeps shaking.

Minutes pass. Eskil peels off his own soaked shirt and uses it to mop his face and neck, then drops it on the growing pile of wet clothing. The cabin is warm compared to the deck, but warm is relative, and Indrie's body has been in the ocean and the cold has settled deep, deeper than a blanket can reach. The shaking should be slowing. It should be diminishing as his core temperature stabilizes, as the dry wool traps what heat his body is generating and reflects it back.

It's not diminishing. If anything, it's getting worse. Indrie's teeth are chattering, a rapid staccato click that Eskil can hear from across the cabin, and his body is curling in on itself beneath the blanket, knees drawing up, arms crossing over his chest, every instinct directing him to conserve heat that he doesn't have. His lips are still blue. His fingers, curled against his sternum, are white.

Eskil presses the back of his hand against Indrie's cheek and the skin is cold. Not cool. Cold. The kind of cold that isn't coming back on its own.

He drops his hand and stares at the shaking body in his bed and arrives at the obvious conclusion and swears.

"Fuck."

He paces two steps. Turns. Paces back.

"Fucking,shit."

The solution is simple. Body heat. Skin to skin. It's what his people have done for centuries when someone comes out of the water too cold to warm themselves, you strip them down, you strip yourself down, you get in beside them and you give them your heat because the body is a furnace and a furnace works better when you press something cold against it. It's not intimate. It's survival. Every warrior in the north knows this. Eskil has done it before, for men pulled from frozen rivers and children who fell through ice. It is practical and it is necessary and it means nothing.

Except the body in his bed is not a warrior pulled from a frozen river. The body in his bed is Indrie.

"Gods-damned, fucking..." He scrubs both hands over his face and glares at the ceiling, certain the gods themselves are up there, watching, enjoying this. "Of all the...fine."

He strips.

His trousers are soaked and they hit the floor with a wet slap. He's down to nothing and the cabin air is cool against his skin but he's been in cold water and his body is generating heat in response, blood pumping, muscles firing, the furnace stoked by exertion and adrenaline. He's warm. He's probably the warmest thing on this ship right now. And Indrie is the coldest.

He lifts the blanket and gets into the bed.

The bunk is not designed for two men, particularly not when one of them is Eskil's size. He has to angle himself, pressing his back against the wall, and even then there's barely enough room for both of them. But barely is enough. He reaches for Indrie and pulls the smaller body against his chest, and the cold of Indrie's skin against his own is shocking, a full-body flinch, every nerve protesting the contact, his skin recoiling from the chill the way a hand recoils from ice.

He overrides it. He pulls Indrie closer, fitting the smaller man against him, Indrie's back to his chest, and wraps his arms around him and holds on. The shaking is violent this close, Eskil can feel every tremor, every convulsive shudder, transferred directly through the contact between their bodies. He tucks Indrie's head beneath his chin, presses his chest flat against Indrie's spine, and winds his legs through the younger man's to maximize the surface contact.

He wills his body to do what it does best. Burn. Generate. Give.