Page 51 of Salt in the Wound

Indrie nods. The motion is stiff and mechanical, his body performing compliance while his mind braces for impact. He can do this. He can stand here and have this conversation. He can hear whatever Eskil has to say and nod and accept it and walk out with his dignity, if not his heart, intact.

Eskil opens his mouth to speak.

It turns out Indrie can not do this.

He speaks first.

He can't help it. The alternative, standing in silence while the king assembles his careful, measured words, each one a stepping stone toward the conclusion Indrie already knows is coming, is worse than speaking. At least if he speaks first he controls theshape of it. At least if he apologizes before being dismissed, he can pretend the dismissal was his idea.

"I am sorry for insulting you," he says. His voice is level. Composed. The voice he perfected over five years of apologizing to men who held power over him, stripped of emotion, stripped of self, offering nothing that could be used as ammunition. "I spoke out of turn. I did not understand, and I should not have presumed. If I have offended your customs, or your..." He searches for the word. Doesn't find it. Settles for: "...your ways. I apologize."

He watches Eskil's face as he talks.

He watches it become more displeased with every word.

The openness that was there a moment ago contracts. Eskil's brow furrows, the line between his eyes deepening, and his jaw sets, the muscle at the hinge flexing, and his hands, resting on his knees, curl inward by a fraction.

Indrie presses on, because stopping is not something he knows how to do once he's started apologizing. The words come faster, tumbling over each other, filling the silence before the silence can fill with something worse. "I should not have, on the deck, what I said, I know it was presumptuous, I know a king would not, that you would not want," and the word catches in his throat because what he means isme, what he means is that the insult of it, the sheer gall of a foreign slave suggesting that a king might look at him and want, that Eskil might want a man at all, and not just any man but this one, too thin, too weak, too marked by another man's ownership, it must have been staggering, "I know my place, and I—"

Eskil's expression darkens further. He's messing this up. He can see it happening in real time, can see each apology landing wrong, each self-deprecation carving the king's displeasure deeper, and he doesn't know what to do. He doesn't know what Eskil wants. Apology is all he has. Apology and submission andthe willingness to take the blame. These are the tools he was given, the only tools, and they are failing him and his chest is tightening and his voice is getting thinner and—

"Indrie, stop."

Eskil's voice is sharp. Not raised, he doesn't shout, doesn't break the low register he always uses with Indrie, but the edge on it is keen and clean and it cuts through Indrie's spiraling monologue without effort. The word hangs in the air. Indrie's mouth snaps shut. The sound of his teeth clicking is loud in the sudden quiet.

He stands very still, lips pressed together, hands clasped in front of him, waiting.

"You ‘know your place’?” Eskil repeats, almost through his teeth, disbelieving, and Indrie knows he's said the wrong thing. If he knew his place he wouldn't have messed up to start. He obviously does not know his place. And his fear that Eskil is going to show him his place is magnified when the king says, “Come here.”

Simple. Low. Spoken from the edge of the bed where Eskil sits with his forearms on his knees and his eyes on Indrie and the space between them, six feet, seven, is a distance that Indrie has crossed a hundred times and that now feels impossible.

The fear washes over him.

It's sudden and total, flooding his chest and his throat and his limbs, hot and electric, his whole body preparing for something it can't survive. His heart slams against his ribs. His vision narrows.

He's going to be punished. The apology didn't work, nothing works, it never works, he's been apologizing his whole life and it has never once stopped what comes after, and the king wants him closer because that's how it's done, that's how it's always done, you come when you're called and you stand within arm's reach and you take what's given. And of course the apologydidn't work, because the offense was too large. He looked at a king and let the wanting show on his face and that is a thing that cannot be walked back with words.

And the thought of Eskil, who held his hand under the stars, who drew him a picture of home, who told himyou are yourswith a ferocity that changed him, the thought of this man, this specific man, the one Indrie has fallen for so completely and so helplessly, being the one to hurt him–

He has endured Armond. He has endured the fists and the boots and the shouted insults and the nights on the cold floor with his ribs cracked and his mouth bloody. He endured it because there was nothing else, because Armond was all he knew, because the pain was familiar and therefore survivable. But this, the thought of Eskil's hand connecting with his face, of those gentle, careful fingers becoming fists, of the voice that saidyou are yoursturning sharp and mean.

He doesn't know how he'll recover. He doesn't know if he can. Armond was a cage he'd mapped the dimensions of. Eskil is a door he walked through willingly, and if there is violence on the other side of it, the betrayal will break something in him that the cage never touched.

He's never resisted before. Never hidden from his owner, never refused a summons, never turned his back on the man who held his life in his hands. He learned early that resistance was futile and expensive, that the only thing standing between him and the next blow was compliance, and compliance was the one skill he had in abundance.

But for the first time he can't bear it.

He knows there's nowhere to run on a ship. He knows this. The ocean is on every side and the vessel is finite and there is no corridor long enough, no hold deep enough, no bunk small enough to hide him from a king on his own vessel. The knowledge is there, rational and geometric, and it doesn'tmatter, doesn't matter because he isn't thinking straight, isn't thinking at all, is nothing but animal urgency, his heart opened for the first time and told to come closer to the thing that opened it, and he can't.

He turns and runs out of the cabin.

He hears Eskil call his name and the sound of it chases him down the corridor, but he doesn't stop. His feet hit the planks and his hands hit the walls as he ricochets around the corner, off-balance, graceless, his shoulder catching the frame as he goes. Down the corridor. Past the galley. Past the hold. Through the sleeping quarters where someone looks up and he doesn't see who because his vision is blurred and his chest is a cage and the air won't come.

He reaches his bunk. Climbs in. Pulls the blanket over himself and presses his back against the wall and curls his knees to his chest and tries to even out his breathing.

He can't manage it. His lungs are working too fast, too shallow, pulling in air that doesn't seem to contain enough of whatever he needs, and his hands are shaking and his teeth are chattering even though he's not cold and there is a rushing sound in his ears that isn't there.

He presses his face into the pillow and counts. Inhale for four. Hold for four. Out for four. The way he would tell a patient to breathe. The way he has guided others through this, sat beside them, hand on their shoulder, voice steady,breathe with me, just breathe with me, but there is no one here to sit beside him and no hand on his shoulder and his own voice is trapped behind clenched teeth.