Page 9 of Salt in the Wound

She doesn't know every word of his language. Her vocabulary is a scattershot collection of nouns and verbs gathered from who knows where, assembled without much regard for grammar or nuance. But she knows enough to say one word, and she says it carefully, pointing across the camp at the blond man with the scarred face and the shoulders that block out the firelight behind him.

King.

Indrie's entire body goes cold.

The warmth that had been building in his chest over the past few hours, the food, the fire, the unexpected kindness of strangers, freezes solid. He feels it crystallize behind his ribs, sharp and brittle, and then crack.

He's been given from one ruler to another.

He knows how kings work. He knows the limits of their patience, short and arbitrary, enforced with fists and boots and whatever else is within reach. He knows the reach of their power, absolute and unchecked, the way it seeps into every corner of a life until there is no space left that is your own. And he knows the way their eyes settle on him, appraising and indifferent, measuring the worth of a new acquisition. Something kept for its usefulness, displayed when convenient, broken when the mood strikes.

Erlan gave him to a king.

Not a warlord. Not a general. Not a man with a limited scope of authority who might lose interest. A king. With a kingdom. With absolute power over every soul in it. And Indrie is now among those souls.

Dagny sees him tense. She feels it, probably, the way his body goes rigid beside hers, his shoulders drawing up, his hands clenching in his lap. She sees something in his face that shedoesn't care for, he doesn't know what it looks like, but he can feel the blood leaving it, and places her hand on his arm. Her grip is firm but not restraining. An anchor, not a chain.

She tells him something he doesn't understand. The words are soft, earnest, delivered with the kind of conviction that people use when they're trying to make a promise they can't fully articulate. It sounds comforting. Her tone is comforting. The pressure of her hand is comforting.

But he doesn't feel comforted.

He feels his world upending beneath him. The ground has given way and he's falling, and the hands reaching for him might catch him or might push him further down, and he has no way of knowing which until he lands.

Armond was dangerous and angry, but he was also dying and weak enough not to break Indrie in two. Five years under his rule had been a careful, exhausting negotiation: keep the king alive, endure what comes, make yourself useful enough to survive another day. It was miserable and frightening and many nights Indrie had lain on his thin mat and wished for the courage to simply stop, but it was known. It was a suffering he understood, one he'd mapped the edges of, one he knew how to navigate.

This king is large and broad, with hands that could easily wrap around Indrie's entire arm and have strength left over. His arms are thicker than Indrie's thighs. The scar across his eye is a reminder of violence survived, of battles fought, of a life built on the kind of physical power Armond never possessed. And Indrie doesn't want to know what being owned by him means.

But he has nowhere to go.

The castle behind him is being emptied. The kingdom is forfeit. Erlan gave him away without hesitation, without regret, without the decency of looking him in the eye when he did it. There is no one coming for him. There is no one waiting forhis return. The friend he left hiding in the servants' quarters, Senli, with her warm hands and worried eyes, cannot help him. The servants cannot help him. He is alone in a camp of foreign warriors on a shoreline he doesn't recognize, and the only people who have shown him kindness in the last twelve hours are the same people who conquered his home.

Across the camp, Eskil finishes his conversation with Bohdi and turns. For a moment, just a moment, his eyes find Indrie's across the distance. Indrie looks away immediately, drops his gaze to his hands, to the empty bowl still sitting between his feet.

But in that fraction of a second, before he looked away, he noticed something. The king's expression when he looked at him wasn't cold. Wasn't calculating. Wasn't the appraising look of someone measuring the worth of a new acquisition.

It was something else. Something Indrie doesn't have a name for.

He pushes it aside. He pushes everything aside. He has learned, over five years under Armond's rule, that hope is a luxury he cannot afford. It costs too much when it breaks.

Dagny squeezes his arm and Ermin, oblivious to the shift in mood, launches into another elaborate pantomime that might be about a whale or might be about a large dog, and it's impossible to tell. Indrie watches him and manages to twitch his lips into something close to a smile, because Ermin is trying, and it isn't his fault that Indrie's world is ending.

The fire crackles. The stars emerge. The camp settles into the quiet rhythms of evening.

Indrie pulls his satchel tighter against his chest and does not look at the king again.

Chapter 4

After a long night on the shoreline of a wasted venture, Eskil wakes before dawn with grit between his teeth and a crick in his neck that speaks to the quality of the ground he slept on. It’s not like he’s not used to it. A king too good to sleep on the ground with his men is a king too good to bleed beside them and that’s never been him. It doesn’t mean he has to enjoy a night on the hard-packed sand near the dying fire with his cloak bunched beneath his head and his sword within arm's reach. He's slept in worse places. He's slept in better ones too, and he's looking forward to being back in one of those as soon as humanly possible.

The camp stirs around him in the grey predawn light. His crew knows the schedule. They've done this enough times that the process of breaking camp and loading a ship is second nature: tents struck, firepits doused, supplies inventoried and packed in the order they'll be needed on the journey. Eskil rolls his shoulders, buckles his belt, and begins ordering the day into motion.

The vessel is a Rengaran longship built for open ocean, broad in the beam and deep in the hold, with a single square sail and oar ports for when the wind fails them. She's not pretty, but she's seaworthy, and she's carried them through worse than the calm bay they're anchored in now. His men begin ferrying supplies out in longboats, piling on their spoils and provisions as quickly as possible, crate after crate of what little Kalkoa had to offer. The treasury goods are loaded first, locked chests of gold and gems secured in the lowest hold where the weight will keep the ship stable. Then the food stores, the barrels of water and ale, the mundane necessities that keep forty warriors alive and in good spirits on open water.

Eskil oversees it all from the shoreline, arms crossed, mentally cataloguing each load against the manifest Bohdi prepared. The numbers aren't inspiring. He'd hoped for enough to justify the voyage twice over, and instead they're looking at a haul that will barely cover costs. But dwelling on it won't change the numbers, and the sooner they're underway the sooner he can put this miserable kingdom at his back.

He notices the healer standing apart from the activity. He's been told the young man's name is Indrie, courtesy of Dagny, who had reported it with the triumphant air of a woman winning a victory.

The young man is near the waterline, a few paces removed from the organized chaos of loading. He's standing very still, satchel over one shoulder, watching the ship with an expression that Eskil can read even at this distance. Lost. Not confused, he clearly understands what's happening, that they're leaving, that the ship is being loaded, but lost in that particular way of not knowing where he fits in the picture. His dark hair is loose around his shoulders, stirring in the early morning breeze off the water, and he's holding himself with that careful stillness Eskilhas already started to recognize. Shoulders drawn in, chin low, trying to take up as little space as possible.