Page 48 of Salt in the Wound

He can't finish. If he finishes he's going to say something that reveals the full scope of his humiliation, and he has just enough pride left, a thin, brittle layer, to keep that from happening. He turns and leaves before he says anything worse. Before the burning in his eyes becomes something visible. Before he leaves his heart on the deck for Eskil to see, open and beating and unwanted.

He makes it to the hatch. Down the steps. Into the corridor. Past the galley where Gunnar is cleaning up, past the hold wherethe supplies are stacked, past Ermin's bunk where the boy is sleeping, to his own bunk at the end of the row. He climbs in and pulls the blanket over himself and turns his face to the wall.

The drawing is still in his pocket. He can feel the edge of the parchment against his hip.

He should throw it away. It means nothing now. A picture of a place where he'll live as a healer and nothing more, surrounded by people who are kind to him because their king told them to be, serving a man who saved his life and doesn't want what Indrie offered in return.

He doesn't throw it away. He presses his hand against it through the fabric of Eskil's trousers, and holds it there, and the parchment is warm from his body and the charcoal smudge of the smallest figure is probably transferring to his skin and he doesn't care.

He hasn't cried in a long time. Not through the beatings, not through the nights without food, not through the shouted insults and the cold floor and the hands that grabbed and shoved and struck. He learned to hold it in, to swallow it down, to let the pain pass through him without leaving a mark on his face. Crying was a weakness Armond punished. Crying was proof that the blow had landed. So Indrie stopped. Years ago. He stopped and the stopping became permanent, the tears drying up at their source, and he'd thought maybe that part of him was dead.

It's not dead.

He curls up in his bed and bites his knuckles and tears stream down his face. They come silently, no sound, no sob, just the steady, relentless fall of water from eyes that have been dry for years, and they soak into the pillow and they don't stop.

He bites harder. His teeth press white crescents into the skin of his hand, the same hand that held Eskil's in the moonlight, and the pain is grounding and insufficient. It doesn't touch the thing inside him that's breaking. Nothing touches it. It breaksalone, in the dark, in a bunk on a ship heading toward a home that won't be his the way he wanted it to be.

He cries until he can't. Until the well runs dry and the silence is just silence and the ship rocks beneath him with the patient, indifferent rhythm of the sea.

Chapter 20

Eskil is at his desk going over their heading and trying not to think about the broken look on Indrie's face.

He's failing. The charts are spread before him, familiar coordinates and current lines and wind patterns he could navigate in his sleep, and none of it is registering because every time he looks at the parchment he sees a different piece of paper, a drawing, crude and smudged, that he'd watched Indrie fold carefully and slip into his pocket before leaving the helm. Before his face collapsed into something Eskil doesn't have a word for and he turned and walked away.

He doesn't understand what he said.

He knows it was wrong. The evidence is irrefutable, how Indrie's entire body had changed in the space between one breath and the next, the warmth draining from his expression, the careful hope in his eyes extinguishing so completely it was as though it had never been there. Eskil has seen men take blows to the gut that produced less visible impact than whatever his words did to Indrie on that deck.

But he doesn't understand how it was wrong.

Indrie had asked if he would belong to Eskil. And Eskil had said no. You'll never belong to me, Indrie. Six words. He'd meant them as a liberation, as the final, definitive answer to the question that has been between them since the beginning: you are free.

And Indrie's face had collapsed.

Eskil replays the conversation. Replays it again. He picks apart each word, each expression, each shift in Indrie's posture, looking for the moment it went wrong, and he keeps arriving at the same point: if I stay, do I belong to you?

He'd heard belong to and translated it as ownership. As possession. As the dynamic Indrie was raised in and Eskil is trying to dismantle. The answer had been obvious, immediate, delivered with the conviction of a man who means exactly what he says: no.

But Indrie's reaction makes no sense if that's what he was asking.

It makes no sense for Indrie to want to be a slave still. The boy has spent two and a half weeks watching his bruises fade and his body strengthen and his world expand from a closet-sized room to an ocean. He's laughed with Dagny, learned from Gunnar, taught Ermin, braided ropes and named stars and argued about stew. He's not pining for his cage. He's not asking to be put back in chains.

And Eskil knows, somehow, with the inarticulate certainty of a man who reads people better than he reads himself, that he's been misunderstood. That what he tried to say did not come across. That there was a meaning in Indrie's words that Eskil failed to catch, and his answer, however correct it was to the question he thought he was being asked, was catastrophically wrong for the question Indrie was actually asking.

But he can't see it. The language barrier that has been between them since the beginning is a wall he can't see over, andwhatever Indrie meant by belong, whatever shade of meaning the word carries in his tongue that Eskil's tongue doesn't have, it's on the other side of that wall and Eskil is standing here with his forehead against the stone and his fists at his sides and no way through.

He stares at the charts and the question circles him without resolution.

What were you asking me?

The frustration is a living thing in his chest, coiled and hot, and it's not directed at Indrie, it's directed at himself, at his own limitations, at the fact that he can command a ship through a storm and conquer a kingdom in a morning but he cannot have a simple conversation with a man who makes his pulse quicken without destroying something fragile in the process.

He pushes back from the desk and drops his head into his hands. The heels of his palms dig into his eye sockets and the darkness behind his closed lids offers no counsel and no reprieve.

Bohdi enters and drops into a chair without invitation, which is his custom. The chair creaks under his weight and his boots hit the desk a moment later and Eskil doesn't look up from behind his hands because if he looks at Bohdi right now, Bohdi will see what's in his face, and then there will be a conversation Eskil is not prepared to have.

Bohdi is quiet for a moment. Which is not his custom.