Page 47 of Salt in the Wound

Indrie pauses. The next words are the ones that matter, the ones that cost him something, the ones he has to force past the part of himself that has spent twenty-two years believing he isn't worth choosing and therefore shouldn't ask to be chosen.

"Even if that means staying with you," he says.

Not with Valen. Not with the crew. Not with Dagny or Gunnar or Ermin or the settlement on the coast. With you. The specificity is intentional. He's not asking about geography. He's not asking about employment.

"Yes," Eskil says. "Whatever you choose."

His voice is even. Controlled. Giving nothing away. But Indrie, who has spent two weeks learning to read this man through tension and temperature and the small tells the body reveals when the mouth won't, can see the set of his shoulders. The slight forward lean. The way his hand shifts on the wheel.

Indrie remembers Eskil saying you are yours, and the words had been a gift, a key, a door opened in a wall Indrie didn't know had a door. But that's not what he wants.

He wants to be Eskil's.

Not as a slave. Not as property. Not in the way he was Armond's, a thing to be used and broken and discarded. He wants to be Eskil's with devotion, with choice, with the warm and willing surrender of finding the person you want to belong to and deciding, freely, to stay.

But he doesn't have all of the words in Eskil's language. The vocabulary Dagny has given him is practical. She has not taught him the words for I want to be yours. She has not taught him how to say I have never wanted anything the way I want you. These are not the words you learn for survival on a ship. These are the words you learn for survival of a different kind.

He doesn't know if that syllable exists in Eskil's tongue. And he can't ask, because the asking would require the very vocabulary he doesn't have.

He is baring himself in a way he never has before. He is laying himself out at his most vulnerable, standing on the deck of a ship in the orange light of sunset with his hands twisting in front of him and his heart so far out of his chest it might as well be sitting on the railing between them. And he knows he has nothing to offer. He's a broken healer from a broken kingdom, unwanted even by the king he kept alive, and he's no one. Eskil is a king. The distance between them is immeasurable and fixed.

But Eskil looks at him.

Eskil has looked at him this way since the beginning. His eyes tracking Indrie across a room. His voice dropping to something careful and warm when he speaks to Indrie directly. The touch on Indrie's face this morning, cupping his cheek, thumb brushing the bruises on Indrie's throat in the moonlight with a tenderness that made Indrie's breath stop.

Eskil looks at him and he matters. And Indrie wants, desperately, to matter to him.

"If I stay," Indrie says, and his voice is quiet, assembled from fragments, imperfect, the meaning he intends and the meaning it carries possibly not the same, "do I belong to you?"

The word belong drops between them and Indrie can feel it land wrong.

Eskil doesn't flinch. Doesn't grip the wheel or clench his jaw or do any of the sharp, visible things Indrie has learned to brace for. What he does is worse. He goes still. The warmth that had been in his voice moments ago, the softness that came with describing his homeland, drains away, quiet, total, and what's left is closed and careful. The openness in his expression folds inward, not with anger but with a sadness Indrie wasn't expecting, and when Eskil speaks, his voice is low and even and unbearably gentle.

"No," Eskil says. "You'll never belong to me, Indrie."

The words are simple. Slow. Spoken with the same deliberate care Eskil always uses when he wants Indrie to understand every syllable. And Indrie does. He understands every syllable. He understands them so completely they carve through him and leave nothing behind.

You'll never belong to me.

Never. Not now. Not in Valen. Not ever.

Indrie hears:that's not something I want. That's not something you are to me.

The gentleness of the rejection is somehow worse than sharpness would have been, because sharpness he could flinchfrom and forget, but gentleness he will remember. He will remember the low voice and the careful words and the sadness in Eskil's eyes for the rest of his life.

Of course. Of course.

He is a fool. He confused kindness for desire and rescue for devotion and a warm hand in the dark for something it was never meant to be. Eskil was doing what any decent man would do for someone in his care, feeding him, teaching him, saving his life when it was in danger, and Indrie, starved of affection for so long that any scrap of it became a feast, had gorged himself on crumbs and called it love.

The warmth in his chest goes out. Not gradually. Not a slow fade. It extinguishes, snuffed between one heartbeat and the next, and what's left is the smoke of its absence curling through the hollow space behind his ribs.

Indrie can't look at him.

He can feel his expression collapsing, the hope draining out of it, the openness shuttering, the soft, vulnerable thing he'd allowed himself to show retreating behind walls it never should have left.

He nods. Jerkily. Once. The motion is mechanical.

"I understand," he says, and his voice is steady, which is a miracle, because inside he is coming apart. "I, forgive me. I didn't mean to, I should not have..."