Page 66 of Salt in the Wound

It works for approximately three hours.

Because it's impossible to avoid someone who is actively looking for him.

Indrie is in the hold, crouched beside a crate of supplies, gathering a basket of oranges for Gunnar. The cook has decided, in light of Olver's scurvy and the general nutritional deficiencies of a crew that would subsist entirely on meat and bread if left to their own devices, that every meal will now include fruit, and anyone who complains will answer to his wooden spoon. Indriehad volunteered to restock the galley's supply, partly because Gunnar needed the help and partly because the hold is dim and quiet and below the waterline, about as far from the helm as one can get on a ship without climbing into the bilge.

He's counting oranges, seven, eight, nine, enough for the midday meal if Gunnar stretches them, when the hair on the back of his neck prickles.

He doesn't hear footsteps. Doesn't hear the creak of the ladder or the shift of weight on the floorboards. One moment he's alone in the hold and the next moment the air changes, a presence, a warmth, a displacement of space that his body recognizes before his mind does.

He stands up from the crate and turns around and the king is standing by a barrel three paces away, watching him.

Eskil is dressed. Fully dressed, shirt tucked, belt buckled, hair loose around his shoulders because he apparently hasn't braided it yet. He looks healthy. The flush of the fever is gone, replaced by his normal color, and his eyes are clear, the pale grey restored to their usual intensity. He looks like himself. The only evidence of last night is a tiredness around his eyes, a heaviness in his bearing that speaks of a body still recovering from what was done to it.

He's leaning against the barrel with one shoulder, arms at his sides, and the posture is deceptively casual. Indrie knows what it costs Eskil to appear casual. He's learned to read the effort behind the ease, the way the king arranges his body to take up less space, to project less threat, when he's approaching someone who might be afraid.

Indrie is afraid.

Not of violence. Not anymore. The fear that lives in him now is of a different species, sharper, more precise, located in a specific place behind his ribs that has everything to do with last night and nothing to do with fists. He is afraid of what Eskil will say.Afraid of what his face will reveal when Eskil says it. Afraid that he will crack open in this dim, quiet hold and all the things he's been holding behind his teeth will spill out and he will never get them back.

He manages not to drop the oranges.

He clutches the basket to his chest and directs his gaze to the king's shoulder. Not his face. Not his eyes. The shoulder, the safe territory, the place where looking is not the same as seeing.

"My lord," he says. And waits for whatever is about to happen.

Eskil is quiet for a moment. The hold creaks around them, the timbers groaning with the ship's movement, and the lamplight from the corridor behind Eskil casts his shadow long across the floor.

"Are you alright?" he asks.

The question is surprising. It shouldn't be. Eskil has asked him this before, after the spilled stew, after the storm, after every incident that has put Indrie on the floor or in the water or in the path of something that could hurt him. It's the question Eskil defaults to when he doesn't know what else to say, and the consistency of it, the way it's always the first thing out of his mouth, would be comforting if Indrie were capable of being comforted right now.

He nods stiffly. "Yes, my lord."

He hears Eskil move closer. Not much, a step, maybe two, but the distance between them shrinks and the air warms and Indrie's grip on the basket tightens.

"You saved my life," Eskil says.

The words are spoken carefully, slowly, in the way Eskil speaks when he wants Indrie to understand every syllable. There's a weight to them that goes beyond gratitude, a heaviness in the way they're placed that suggests Eskil has been thinking about what to say and has chosen these specific words for a reason.

Indrie stares at the oranges in his basket. They're round and bright and they don't look back.

"That's what a healer does," he says.

Eskil laughs. The sound is humorless, short, a single exhale through his nose that might be amusement or might be something darker.

"I have never known a healer to give their body for the sake of healing," he says.

The flush hits Indrie so fast the room tilts. It floods his face and neck and chest, vivid and total, and he clutches the oranges to his chest as though they can protect him from the words and from the man saying them and from the memory of what those words refer to. He should say something. He should sayit was nothing, I was only healing someone in need, the method was different but the principle is the same.He should say the words that would reduce last night to a clinical procedure, a healer's intervention, nothing more.

He can't.

He can't bring himself to say those words because they are a lie and he has been lying to himself and to Eskil and to everyone on this ship since the moment the cabin door closed behind Bohdi, and the lie is a weight he cannot carry anymore.

Because it was something. It was everything. Having someone finally treat him with care. Having someone kiss him with that much intention and hold him with that much tenderness and speak to him in a voice so warm and so reverent that it didn't matter that Indrie couldn't follow the words, because the sound of them, the low, rough, continuous stream of them against his skin, had made every broken thing inside him believe it could be mended. It was the most important thing that has ever happened to him and he is supposed to call it medicine and hecan't.

Indrie doesn't realize he's staring at the floor, eyes burning, until Eskil places a finger under his chin and lifts his face.

He hadn't realized the man had moved forward. Eskil is right there, close, closer than he was a moment ago, close enough that Indrie can see the individual threads in his shirt and the faint shadow of stubble along his jaw and the pale, clear grey of his eyes looking down at him with an expression that is not anger and not pity and not the careful neutrality Eskil usually wears but something raw and unfinished and searching.