Chapter 6
The healer is growing in competence.
It's been just over a week since they left Kalkoa's sorry excuse for a shoreline, and in that time the young man has gone from wide-eyed and nervous to something approaching useful.
More than useful, if Eskil is being honest, which he tries to be, at least with himself, even when the honesty is inconvenient.
Indrie set his first sprained ankle on only the second day at sea.
One of the men, a deckhand named Erik who has more enthusiasm than sense, had caught his foot in a coil of anchor chain while hauling it up and twisted it badly enough that the joint swelled to twice its size within the hour.
Bohdi had sent for Indrie, already, by that point, the default response to any injury on board, which said something about how quickly the crew had accepted his presence.
Eskil had watched from the helm as the healer crossed the deck with his satchel and knelt beside the groaning Erik without hesitation.
He'd been confident in a way Eskil hadn’t seen from him yet.
Calm and focused. His hands had moved over the swollen joint with a sureness that belied his prior nervousness, pressing here, testing there, his brow furrowed in concentration.
He'd spoken to Erik in a low voice, knowing enough words by that point to at least communicate comfort, but it was the tone that was unmistakably soothing, and Erik had quieted.
Indrie had wrapped the ankle with strips of cloth and some kind of poultice that smelled sharp and herbal, and within two days Erik was putting weight on it again, albeit carefully.
The second injury was a pulled shoulder that came three days later. Then came the fever.
One of his younger warriors, a broad-shouldered northerner named Halvar, had woken up shaking and drenched in sweat, skin burning to the touch.
The kind of sudden onset that makes men nervous on a ship, because fever spreads fast in close quarters and there's nowhere to quarantine anyone to that isn't already occupied.
Indrie had appeared at Halvar's bunk with a cup of something that steamed and smelled of the underside of a boot and had coaxed the man to drink it with unmatched patience.
He'd stayed by Halvar's side through the worst of it, replacing wet cloths on his forehead, monitoring his temperature with the back of his hand, and when the fever broke on the second day, Indrie had looked as exhausted as his patient but considerably more satisfied.
The healer is earning his place on this ship in the most practical way possible, and the crew has accepted him without issue, because a ship without a medic is a dangerous place to be.
They've all sailed without one before. They sailed to Kalkoa without one because the alternative was not sailing at all. They know the risks.
And then there is the other thing. The thing Eskil is trying and failing to ignore.
Indrie is exceptionally beautiful in a way that Eskil has taken notice of.
He's noticed before. He noticed in the king's chambers in Kalkoa, when those dark eyes met his and held, and he noticed on the shoreline when the morning light caught in Indrie's hair, and he noticed in his own cabin when the young man stood before him flushed and gaping with stew on the floor between them.
He's been noticing, is the problem. Consistently, persistently, against his better judgment and despite every rational argument his mind has constructed against it.
Indrie is short and slender, but surprisingly capable.
His arms, still thin, have started to show the faint definition that comes from days of hauling rope and carrying water barrels and scrubbing pots under Gunnar's supervision.
His face has filled out slightly, the hollows beneath his cheekbones less severe, the shadows under his eyes less dark, and there's a color in his skin that wasn't there when Eskil first saw him.
Not tan, exactly. More the return of something that had been missing. Life, maybe. Warmth.
Eskil has been with men before, but none of them looked anything close to Indrie.
Rengaran men are tall and broad and built for a hard life of cold and stone.
None of them were as strong-willed and yet distractingly small as Indrie is, and whatever part of him had briefly thought at the start he wouldn't be interested in that has been so thoroughly silenced by the heat in his blood when he imagines how the younger man would look underneath him.
It's easy for Eskil to imagine that narrow frame pressed into the mattress, dark hair fanned across the pillow, face flushed and lips parted and those impossible eyes staring up at him while his thighs spread to accommodate the width of Eskil's body between them.
And, oh, the sounds he would make. Eskil is certain of it, soft and startled and gorgeous, the kind of sounds a man makes when he's being touched for the first time by someone who knows what they're doing, and Eskil knows what he's doing...
No.
Eskil's hand tightens on the railing hard enough to make the wood creak.
He drags a breath through his teeth and slams that door in his mind shut, violent, final.
This is not the fucking time. This has never been the fucking time.
The young man is a healer in his care, freshly removed from a life of violence, and Eskil is standing on the deck of his ship in broad daylight with his blood running south because he can't stop looking.
Quit thinking with your cock. You're a king, not a rutting animal.
He forces his attention elsewhere and lets the shift happen deliberately, the way he redirects his mind during battle when a stray thought threatens to cost him his head.
Even though Indrie flinches when someone slams a tankard down on a table or claps their hand against their knee, the sound of sudden impact still enough to make his shoulders jolt and his eyes go wide for a fraction of a second, he doesn't wither.
He doesn't run. He registers the sound, processes it, realizes it isn't directed at him, and continues what he was doing.
The recovery is getting faster. The flinches are getting smaller.
Eskil notices this too, and wishes he didn't, because noticing means caring and caring means something he doesn't have the mind power to examine right now.
Indrie does what he's told. He asks questions when he can, stumbling through the words in Eskil's language with a determination that's visible in the set of his jaw and the furrow between his brows.
And it's only been a week and he already knows enough of their language that Eskil is told, by Bohdi, who is told by Dagny, who overheard it herself, that he and Gunnar are having full conversations about what should and should not go into stew.
Apparently, Indrie has opinions about Gunnar's use of salt. Strong ones. Gunnar, according to Dagny's gleeful report, had looked personally victimized but had also, notably, reduced the salt in the following evening's meal. Eskil hadn't mentioned it. The stew had been better.
The thing is, Eskil keeps catching him integrating himself where no one has asked him to be.
He catches Indrie teaching a man to read by lamplight.
It's late, well past the hour most of the crew has turned in, and Eskil is on his way to the helm to check their heading when he passes the open hatch to the lower level and hears a quiet voice.
He pauses. Looks down. And there is Indrie, seated cross-legged on the floor of the sleeping quarters with a piece of charcoal and a scrap of parchment, tracing letters while one of the older deckhands, a grizzled man named Sven who has sailed with Eskil for six years and has never once mentioned being illiterate, watches with rapt attention and tries to copy the shapes with a blunt finger.
Indrie guides his hand, corrects the strokes, and says something encouraging that makes Sven huff out a sound that might be a laugh.
Eskil watches for longer than he should and then moves on.
He catches Indrie taking stew to men who are sick or busy.
Not because he's been asked to. Not because Gunnar has sent him.
Because he sees a man who hasn't come for his meal and he gathers a bowl and he goes and finds him and puts food in his hands.
Eskil sees him do it for Halvar, still recovering from his fever.
Sees him do it for a deckhand who pulled a muscle in his back and can't make it down the ladder.
Sees him do it for Bohdi, who is so buried in inventory reports one evening that he's missed dinner entirely and looks up in surprise when a bowl appears at his elbow, delivered by a dark-haired healer who gives him a tentative smile and disappears before Bohdi can thank him.
He catches Indrie on deck braiding ropes and helping out where a week ago he had no knowledge of what to do.
His fingers are quick and deft, trained for fine work, and he picks up the patterns faster than most new recruits.
He helps Ermin with rigging adjustments.
He helps one of the older women patch a tear in a spare sail, sitting cross-legged on the deck with a needle and thread, and does a neater job of it than she does.
He fills gaps. Sees what needs doing and does it, quietly, without fanfare, without drawing attention.