Page 41 of Salt in the Wound

She sits down across from him, cross-legged on the floor, and the fact that she positions herself at his level rather than standing over him is one of the many small things about her that makes Indrie's chest ache.

"Tell me what's wrong," she says, in her increasingly competent version of his language, the grammar still imperfect, the vocabulary still patchy, but the fluency growing every day.

Indrie keeps his eyes on the herbs. He shakes his head. "Nothing is wrong. I'm fine. I'm just busy. The stores took damage in the storm and I need to assess what's salvageable and what isn't, and..."

"Indrie."

Her voice is quiet. Not sharp. Not demanding. Just his name, weighted with care and the refusal to accept a lie.

He tries to brush her off. Holds up a bundle of ruined chamomile and says, "See? Destroyed. I need to find..."

"If someone has been cruel to you aboard this ship," Dagny says, and her voice has changed now, edged with something hard and bright, "I will go straight to the king."

Indrie doesn't cry.

He comes very close. The pressure builds behind his eyes, sudden, overwhelming, a wave of emotion that rises from somewhere deep in his chest and crashes against the back of his teeth, and his hands still in his work. The ruined chamomile hangs between his fingers, shedding black petals, and he stares at the dried herbs and the stain they leave on his skin and fights the burning in his eyes with everything he has.

He says, very quietly, "The king is the problem."

Dagny goes still. The hardness in her expression shifts, not softening, exactly, but recalibrating, reassessing now that the threat has revealed itself to be different from what she expected. She doesn't speak. She waits. She gives him the space to say more, and the silence is a gift she gives deliberately, because Dagny is rarely silent and when she is, it means she's listening with her whole self.

Indrie doesn't look at her. He looks at the herbs. He says, "I don't know how to not be afraid."

The admission costs him something. He can feel it leave, a piece of the carefully constructed composure he's been maintaining since he woke up in Eskil's bed, cracking loose and falling away. He's been afraid since the moment Dagny told him the blond man was a king. He's been afraid through every kindness and every gentle touch and every moment where the fear should have faded but didn't, because fear doesn't respond to evidence. Fear responds to experience. And his experience, his five years of it, tells him that kindness is bait.

Dagny moves to sit beside him. She doesn't ask permission. She settles against his side, presses her shoulder to his, and puts her arm around his shoulders with the firm, unhesitating warmth that he's come to associate with her specifically and safety generally. She holds him.

"Being afraid is reasonable," she says, her arm tightening around him. "No one expects you to trust overnight, and no one is going to rush you through it. No one is going to punish you for the pace of it. And if anyone tries, I will personally ensure they regret it."

She says this with the calm certainty of a woman who means every word and has the dual short swords to back them up.

Then her voice shifts into something more serious than he's ever heard from her.

"Eskil would never hurt you."

Indrie is quiet. Dagny's arm is warm around his shoulders and her voice is steady and she is not done.

"He is many things," she says. "Some of them frustrating and some of them infuriating." She pauses, searching for the right words in his language, and settles on: "He is stubborn, and sometimes made of stone. He speaks when he should listen and he acts when he should wait and he has the emotional grace of a man who was raised by soldiers, which he was."

Despite everything, despite the tightness in his chest and the burn behind his eyes, the corner of Indrie's mouth twitches.

"But cruel is not one of them." She squeezes his shoulder. "Not to those under his protection. And you, Indrie, are under his protection. Whether you know it or not."

Indrie leans into her shoulder and lets himself be held and doesn't say anything for a long while. The ship rocks gently beneath them. The hold is dim and cool and quiet, a pocket of stillness in the middle of the sea. Dagny doesn't rush him. She sits with him, her arm around him, her presence steady and grounding, and she hums something under her breath, a melody he doesn't recognize, slow and tuneless, the kind of thing someone does without thinking when they're comforting someone they care about.

He thinks about what she said. He turns it over, examining it from every angle, looking for the thing that doesn't fit. Eskil would never hurt him. It should be impossible to believe. It contradicts everything he knows, everything he's learned, every lesson his body has absorbed about what kings do and who they do it to.

But Dagny isn't lying. He knows her well enough now to know that she wouldn't. She'd tell him a hard truth before she'd offer a comforting lie, because that's who she is, blunt, honest, occasionally tactless, always real. If she believed Eskil was capable of hurting him, she'd say so. She'd say so and then she'd put herself between them, swords drawn, and dare the king to get through her.

She means it. And the fact that she means it doesn't make the fear go away, but it puts a crack in its foundation.

He stays leaned against her shoulder until the ache in his chest settles into something manageable. Then he straightens, wipes his eyes with the back of his hand, not tears, not quite, but close, and goes back to sorting herbs. Dagny helps. She doesn't know what any of them are, but she can follow his system, and they work together in companionable quiet until the hold is organized and the losses are catalogued.

Later, when the light through the hatch has shifted from morning gold to afternoon white, Gunnar gives Indrie a plate of food to take to the king.

Indrie looks at the plate, stew, bread, and an orange that Gunnar has placed there with a pointed look in Indrie's direction, and then looks Gunnar in the eye and begs him to do it instead.

The word begs is not an exaggeration. Indrie can hear it in his own voice, the desperation, the plea beneath the politeness. He is not above begging. He spent five years begging, for meals andmercy and one more night without being summoned, and the skill hasn't left him even if the context has changed.