Page 52 of Salt in the Wound

He breathes. Again. Again. The counting is mechanical, deliberate, and gradually the rhythm catches and his body follows where his mind leads. The shaking eases. The rushing fades. His heartbeat slows from its frantic hammering to something approaching normal, and the cabin around himresolves from a blur of panic into the familiar wooden planks and the narrow berth and the carved bird on the shelf.

He lies in his bunk and stares at the wall and the shame arrives to take the panic's place.

He ran. He ran from the king, panicked and blind, and the king saw it. Saw the fear in his eyes, the way his body chose flight before his mind could intervene. Saw exactly what Indrie has been trying to hide for weeks: that beneath the smiles and the compliance and the careful composure, there is still a part of him that expects every outstretched hand to become a fist.

He curls tighter. Presses his knuckles against his mouth. Breathes through the shame the way he breathed through the panic, slowly, deliberately, one count at a time.

And then, arriving quietly, slipping in between the louder thoughts: Eskil didn't chase him.

Didn't shout after him. Didn't send Bohdi or Dagny to drag him back. He said Indrie's name, once, and then nothing. Silence. The absence of pursuit. The absence of consequence.

Armond would have sent guards. Armond would have had him brought back by his hair, by his arm, by whatever was closest and easiest to grab, and the punishment for running would have been worse than whatever prompted the flight.

Eskil let him go.

It doesn't fit the framework. It doesn't fit any framework Indrie has for how kings behave when they are disobeyed. And the fact that it doesn't fit, the fact that the expected consequence didn't arrive, is doing something to the fear inside him that the fear doesn't know how to process.

He stares at the wooden wall. The carved bird sits on the shelf beside his head, its rough wooden wings angled mid-flight, and Indrie thinks about Sven carving it. About the old deckhand sitting in his bunk with a knife and a piece of driftwood, making something for the foreign healer who taught him to read. Aboutthe fact that this bird exists because someone on this ship cared enough to make it.

He thinks about Eskil's face when he'd saidstop. Not the sharpness, which was real. The thing beneath it. The thing that looked, now that Indrie replays it with the panic stripped away and the memory cleaned of adrenaline, not like preparation for a strike but closer to anguish, the helpless look of watching someone tear themselves apart and being unable to let it continue.

Stop, Eskil had said. And what he'd meant, maybe, was notstop talking so I can punish you. What he'd meant wasstop hurting yourself with these apologies you don't owe me.

Indrie doesn't know if that's true. He doesn't trust his interpretation, doesn't trust his own ability to read a man whose language he barely speaks and whose motivations he has been wrong about at every turn. He has been wrong about everything. Wrong about the ownership. Wrong about the belonging. Wrong about what Eskil wanted and what Eskil meant and what kind of man Eskil is, and the only consistent truth in all of it is that Indrie keeps expecting violence and Eskil keeps not delivering it.

At some point, the evidence has to mean something.

Chapter 22

Eskil is fucking this up and he doesn't know how to be better at it.

He stands at his desk, one hand braced on the surface, the other picking at the plate of food Indrie left. The stew is cold. The bread is untouched. The whole plate sits in silent judgment, and Eskil ignores all of it the way he's ignoring the voice in his head that sounds like Bohdi and is telling him he handled that about as well as a man trying to put out a fire with lamp oil.

He can't stop seeing the look on Indrie's face when he fled.

Not the fear, though there was fear, vivid and visceral and so deeply ingrained that it moved Indrie's body before his mind could intervene. Eskil has seen fear before. He's caused it before, deliberately, on battlefields and in conquered courts, because it is a weapon and he has never hesitated to use one. He knows its shape. He knows the difference between the fear of facing an enemy and the fear of facing an owner, and what he saw on Indrie's face was the second kind, and it made his stomach turn.

But it wasn't the fear that's eating him. It was the moment before the fear. The moment when Indrie was apologizing, thatpracticed, polished,hollowapology, delivered in the flat tone of someone who has been performing contrition since childhood, and Eskil had watched the young man erase himself word by word. Watched him flatten his own feelings, dismiss his own pain, take responsibility for Eskil's failures and package them up as his own shortcomings, and do it all with the smooth efficiency of someone who has been punished for every honest emotion he's ever shown.

Eskil had saidstopbecause he couldn't bear to hear another word of it. And he'd saidcome herebecause the distance between them was a chasm he needed to close, because he needed Indrie closer, needed to look him in the eye and say the things he'd spent the last hour preparing.

And the boy had run.

Becausecome herein Indrie's world meanscome here and take what I'm about to give you.It meansstand within arm's reach.It meanspresent yourself for punishment.Eskil knows this now. Knows it with a sick, crawling certainty, the realization that he has accidentally spoken a language of violence he didn't know he was fluent in.

He picks up a piece of bread and tears it in half without eating it. Drops both halves back on the plate. Picks up the stew and puts it down again. He's not hungry. He hasn't been hungry since the deck, since the sunset, since Indrie asked him a question in a voice that was barely a breath and Eskil gave him an answer that shattered something behind his eyes.

His hand, reaching absently for something on the plate, closes around a fruit he doesn't recognize.

It's small, slightly larger than a plum, with a deep red skin that's smooth and waxy under his fingers. He doesn't remember seeing it before. It's not one of the standard provisions, not something from Gunnar's stores. It must have come from Armond's larder, part of the miscellaneous foodstuffs they'dtaken alongside the treasury goods. Kalkoan produce. He turns it over in his hand. The skin dimples under his thumb, yielding, ripe.

He takes a bite.

The flesh is red. Vivid, saturated red, the color of fresh blood, and the juice runs down his chin and onto his fingers immediately. The taste is surprising. Sweet, intensely so, but layered, with a warmth beneath the sugar that builds on his tongue. It's unlike anything he's ever eaten. The flavor is complex and deep and almostalive, shifting and intensifying with each bite, the sweetness responding to consumption by becoming more of itself.

He eats the whole thing before he realizes he's done.

He stares at the pit in his palm, small and dark and ridged, and tosses it onto the plate and wipes his fingers on his trousers and turns back to the charts spread across his desk. The heading needs adjusting. The winds have been favorable, but they're approaching the channel between the eastern islands and the current there is unpredictable, and he needs to decide whether to take the direct route or the longer, safer passage around.