Chapter 5
Dagny shows him where he'll be sleeping.
It's a bunk in the lower level of the ship, tucked into a row of identical wooden berths that line both sides of a narrow corridor.
Each one is barely wide enough for a man to lie flat and not much longer than Indrie is tall, with a thin straw mattress and a wool blanket folded at the foot.
They're stacked two high, and Dagny guides him to a lower one near the end of the row, close enough to where Ermin sleeps that Indrie doesn't feel quite so alone.
The proximity is a kindness she doesn't draw attention to, but Indrie notices.
He's spent five years noticing the small mercies, cataloguing them, holding them close because they're all he has.
He sets his satchel on the mattress and runs his hand across the wool blanket.
It's coarse under his fingers, but thick.
Thicker than anything he slept under in Kalkoa.
The mattress, thin as it is, gives slightly under his palm, and when he sits on the edge to test it, there are no stones digging into his spine.
No cold seeping up from a floor that never warmed.
He sits there for a moment longer than necessary, hands in his lap, and breathes.
"Good?" Dagny asks, hovering at the foot of the bunk with her hands on her belt.
Indrie nods. "Good," he says.
She walks him around the ship after that, a guided tour delivered in her increasingly ambitious blend of both their languages, supplemented with generous hand gestures and the occasional full-body demonstration.
The vessel is larger than Indrie realized from shore.
The main deck stretches from a raised platform at the back, the helm, where the wheel and navigation charts are kept, to a narrower point at the front where the bowsprit juts out over the water.
Below, the ship is divided into sections: the sleeping berths, the cargo hold, a small medical area that is currently empty and will apparently become Indrie's domain.
She shows him a few more basic workings of the ship, where the water barrels are kept, how to find the latrine without ending up in the cargo hold, which ladders lead where.
The galley is where Dagny takes him last, and where he meets Gunnar properly.
The cook is enormous. That's the first and most overwhelming observation.
He's wider than the galley doorframe and has to duck to enter his own kitchen, a fact he seems unbothered by, having clearly made peace with his dimensions long ago.
His head is shaved clean, his beard is braided into two thick ropes that hang past his collarbones, and his forearms, currently dusted with flour, are the circumference of small trees.
He looks up from a cutting board when they enter, and his face splits into a grin so wide and warm that it seems to belong to a different, much smaller man.
He claps Indrie on the shoulder in greeting.
The force of it travels through Indrie's entire body, from his shoulder down through his knees and into the soles of his boots, and he staggers forward two full steps and has to catch himself on the edge of the prep table.
Dagny snorts behind him. Gunnar seems entirely unaware that he's nearly put Indrie through the floor and is already turning back to his work, talking over his shoulder in his own language.
Dagny tells Indrie, once she's recovered from laughing, that the best place for him on the ship is probably the galley with Gunnar. She asks if he knows how to cook.
Indrie considers the question. He can prepare basic meals: porridge, simple broths, bread if the ingredients are available.
He cooked for himself in the castle kitchen on the rare occasions he was allowed access, and he'd learned enough from watching the castle cooks to manage passable food.
Nothing elaborate. Nothing inspired. But probably enough to be useful.
"A little," he says.
Dagny relays this to Gunnar, who she promises, with an earnestness that suggests she either genuinely believes it or is a very skilled liar, is a good and patient teacher.
Gunnar turns at this and gives Indrie an appraising look, the kind a craftsman gives a new apprentice, measuring not skill but willingness.
Whatever he sees must satisfy him, because he nods once, firmly, and gestures at a basket of potatoes and a peeling knife with the universal language of get to work.
The work is simple and rhythmic and grounding in a way Indrie hadn't expected.
Peel, turn, peel, turn. The curl of skin falling away from the blade, the pale flesh beneath.
His hands know what to do and his mind is free to wander, but the wandering isn't as terrifying as it was this morning.
The galley is warm. It smells of salt and herbs and the faint smokiness of the iron stove.
Gunnar moves around him with surprising grace for a man his size, never bumping into him, never crowding him, always leaving Indrie enough space to work without feeling trapped.
Gunnar knows a little of his language. Surprisingly.
Enough to give him simple instructions, cut here, smaller, that pot, and ask his name and age.
Indrie tells him both and Gunnar repeats his name back with a pronunciation that's closer to correct than Dagny's, which earns him a startled look.
The cook shrugs, unbothered, and tells Indrie a little about his wife.
Her name is Jaheira. Gunnar says it the way some men say prayers, with reverence, with warmth, with the quiet certainty of a life built around a single, unshakeable truth.
He tells Indrie she has dark hair and a laugh that can be heard from across a field.
That she runs their homestead while he's at sea and does a better job of it than he ever could.
That she makes bread so good it could make a grown man weep, and that his own bread is a pale imitation he's been trying to perfect for twelve years without success.
He is so obviously smitten that it makes Indrie smile.
A real smile, small but genuine, directed at the potato in his hands.
The idea that this mountain of a man, who wields a cleaver with the same casual ease he'd wield a quill, goes soft at the mention of a woman's name is something Indrie hasn't encountered before.
The men in Kalkoa didn't talk about their wives that way.
The men in Kalkoa didn't talk about their wives at all, mostly, except to complain.
Gunnar doesn't rush Indrie. Doesn't snap when the potato pieces come out uneven.
Doesn't sigh or click his tongue when Indrie fumbles with the unfamiliar knife.
He just corrects, gently, with his hands rather than his words, here, hold it this way, angle the blade down, there you go, and moves on.
Indrie has been taught by patient people before.
The old herbalist who first trained him on the Isles had been patient, in his way.
But Gunnar's patience is different. It's not resigned.
Not the weary tolerance of an obligation being endured.
It's warm. Genuine. Born from someone who enjoys teaching and enjoys people and sees no reason to separate the two.
The first few days on the ship are simple and easy and don't require Indrie to confront the fact that he's been stolen away on a warrior ship heading to a new land.
He falls into the rhythm of it with a compliance born of years of practice.
Wake before dawn, dress in the dark, make his way to the galley before Gunnar arrives so that the stove is lit and the water is heating.
Prep the morning meal, porridge, mostly, sometimes with dried fruit and honey if the stores allow.
Help serve it. Clean the pots. Begin preparing for the midday meal.
The cycle repeats, predictable and steady, and Indrie lets it carry him the way the current carries the ship: forward, always forward, with no say in the direction.
He doesn't think about the king. He makes a conscious, deliberate effort not to think about the king. About the fact that he is now owned by a new king who is stronger and younger and doesn't waste words on small healers who don't speak his language.
He is owned. That is the fact of it. He was given and he was taken and the transaction is complete.
Indrie is just waiting for the first blow.
He knows it's coming. He just doesn't know when.
The uncertainty is its own kind of torture, one he's intimately familiar with.
Armond had been unpredictable, kind one hour, vicious the next, with no warning and no pattern Indrie could map.
He'd learned to exist in a state of constant readiness, muscles tensed, eyes watchful, a flinch loaded in his spine and ready to fire.
He'd thought, when the Northmen took the castle, that at least there would be a different rhythm to learn.
A new set of triggers. A new map to draw.
But no one has hit him. No one has even come close.
And the absence of violence is, paradoxically, making him more anxious.
Because the longer it takes, the worse it will be when it comes.
That's how it works. Armond's worst nights always followed his best days.
The kindness was bait. The patience was a countdown.
So Indrie tries to do what he's told without hesitating, without questioning, without messing up.
He peels the potatoes perfectly. He scrubs the pots until they shine.
He hauls water without being asked and coils rope without being shown twice.
He makes himself useful, makes himself invisible, makes himself the kind of slave no one has reason to punish.
It's a skill he's honed to a razor's edge, and he deploys it now with quiet desperation, because he knows the cost of failure.
On the third night at sea, Gunnar sends him to the king's quarters with a bowl of stew and a hunk of bread.