Page 63 of Salt in the Wound

"You'd tell me if something was wrong," she says. It's not a question. It's a line drawn and stood behind.

Indrie nods again. He can't meet her eyes. If he meets her eyes, she'll see what's in his, and what's in his is not something he can name or contain or explain in either of their languages.

She lets him go. He walks to his bunk and climbs inside and pulls the blanket over himself and lies on his side facing the wall.

He tries and fails not to think about what happened.

He shared the effects of the Cara fruit with the king. He knows what this means in his culture. He learned it as a child, the way all children in Kalkoa learn it, whispered stories and reverent warnings, the sacredness of the fruit, the permanence of what it creates. The Cara fruit binds. It seals. It takes two people who choose each other in the most intimate way possible and weaves them together at a level that transcends the physical. In his culture, sharing the Cara fruit is marriage. It is the deepest, most irrevocable vow two people can make, spoken not with words but with bodies, sealed not by ceremony but by the act itself.

The fruit recognized them. The fever broke. The bond is sealed.

But Eskil had not seen it that way.

Eskil had looked him in the eye, those pale, blown, fever-bright eyes, and told him, with a clarity that the fruit could not erode:You do not belong to me. The fruit doesn't change that.

The words have been replaying since the moment Eskil said them, a loop that runs beneath everything that followed. They sat in his chest while Eskil spoke to him in that voice, rough and reverent and continuous against his skin, words and breath and heat tangled together until Indrie couldn't tell where the language ended and the sensation began. They sit in his chest now, immovable, the foundation beneath the earthquake.

You are not mine.

This isn't a vow. This isn't a promise. This is just a use for Indrie that no one had found before. He is a healer. He heals. Tonight, healing required his body instead of his hands, and he gave it, and the king survived, and that is the end of the transaction.

And then, to have him. To have Eskil around him, inside him, kissing him with a thoroughness that dismantled every defense Indrie had ever built. To hear that voice pouring words into his skin that he couldn't translate but that sounded so much like adoration. To feel those hands grip his hips with a restraint that spoke of tenderness rather than ownership, guiding rather than demanding, giving rather than taking. The way Eskil had told him to breathe, one of the few words Indrie understood completely. The way he'd laughed, genuinely laughed, when Indrie said it wouldn't fit, and nothing about the laugh had sounded like use. The way his arms had locked around Indrie afterward and held him, and the way those arms had tightened instead of loosened when Indrie made soft, broken sounds against his shoulder.

Indrie lies in his bunk and presses his face into the pillow and the trembling won't stop, a bone-deep vibration that he cannot reconcile with the cold, clinical fact that he was performing a medical procedure.

Because it didn't feel like a medical procedure. It felt like being loved.

And that's the cruelest part. Eskil had made it feel that way, had held him and moved inside him with a tenderness that redefined what Indrie thought tenderness was, and none of it was real. All of it was the fruit, the fever, the proximity of a warm body to a burning one. Maybe it's possible to treat someone with exquisite care and still not want them. Maybe the gentleness was principle rather than affection. The most incredible nightof Indrie's life, the night that should have been shared with his spouse, the night his culture designed to be the beginning of everything, instead given to a man who looked him in the eye before kissing him and made sure Indrie understood: this changes nothing. You are not mine.

He curls up in his bed and tears stream down his face. They come silently, no sound, no sob, just the steady, relentless fall of something that has been dammed and has finally broken through. They soak into the pillow. They slide across the bridge of his nose and pool in the hollow of his throat, in the same spot where Eskil's mouth pressed against his pulse, and the salt of them stings against the raw skin there and even the stinging is a memory.

He cries for what he was given and what he wasn't. For the vow that was sealed in his heart and nowhere else, the marriage that exists only in the framework of a culture Eskil doesn't share. He cries because of the way Eskil's voice sounded when he said that word, the repeated one, and it was the most beautiful sound Indrie has ever heard and he will carry it in his chest for the rest of his life and he doesn't even know what it means.

Eventually the tears slow. Then stop. Then dry on his face, the residue of something the body can't hold anymore.

He lies in his bunk and stares at the wall and the ship rocks beneath him and the carved bird on the shelf watches him with wooden eyes and the drawing in his pocket presses against his hip and he doesn't sleep.

He doesn't sleep for a very long time.

Chapter 26

Eskil awakens thirsty.

The thirst is monumental, a desert behind his teeth, his tongue thick and dry, his throat scraped raw. He reaches blindly for the side table and his hand finds a cup, and he drains it in three long swallows without opening his eyes. Water. Lukewarm. It tastes like the best thing he's ever drunk.

He sits up. The cabin is bright, morning light filtering through the porthole, the lamp extinguished at some point during the night, and the air is cool against his skin and his skin is normal. Not burning, not sensitized, not crawling with the fever's relentless, maddening awareness. He feels like himself again. Exhausted, wrung out, buthimself.The fruit's grip is gone.

He realizes he's naked.

He looks down at the quilt draped across his waist, at his bare chest, at his bare everything, and the memories arrive in a rush that knocks the breath from him.

Not fragments, not impressions. Complete, vivid, high-resolution memories, preserved with a fidelity that the fever should have blurred but didn't.

Indrie in his lap. Indrie's mouth against his. The way Indrie's breath had caught when Eskil's fingers found the spot inside him. The flush that ran from his cheeks to his navel in a vivid, unbroken streak. The way he'd looked at Eskil, wide-eyed and overwhelmed and so open it hurt, when he sank down and took him in. The sound he made when he came the second time, on Eskil's cock, without a hand between them, a sound that wasn't a gasp or a moan but something between a cry and a prayer.

Eskil rubs a palm over his face and lets out a long exhale that empties his lungs and does nothing to empty his head. Indrie coming apart in his arms, twice, was real. It happened. He was there, and conscious, and despite the fever's best efforts to reduce him to an animal, he'd been present for every second.

He dresses. Pulls on trousers, finds a shirt in the trunk, runs his fingers through his tangled hair without bothering to rebraid it. His body moves with the heavy, slow efficiency of a man who has been through an ordeal and is operating on fumes. His muscles ache, not with the fever's bright, searing pain but with the deep, honest fatigue of overexertion. His legs are unsteady. His hands are a fraction slower than they should be. But he's alive, and the alternative was not alive, and the reason for the distinction is a dark-haired healer who gave him his body to save his life.