10. Chapter 10
Two days after the fire, Gunnar comes to his cabin.
The cook doesn't knock, he never does, a habit Eskil has long since stopped trying to correct.
He just opens the door, fills the frame with his considerable bulk, and stands there with his hands on his hips and a look on his face that Eskil has learned to associate with problems that can't be solved with a manifest and a charcoal pencil.
"I'm worried about the stray we've adopted," Gunnar says.
Eskil doesn't look up from the charts spread across his desk. He knows who Gunnar means. There's only one stray on this ship. "What's wrong?"
Gunnar steps inside and closes the door behind him, which is unusual.
Gunnar is not a man who concerns himself with privacy.
His voice carries through bulkheads regardless, and he has never once in the years Eskil has known him modulated his volume for the sake of discretion.
The fact that he's closing the door means he considers this conversation serious enough to warrant it, and that alone makes Eskil's hand still on the chart.
"He's not eating."
Eskil's jaw tightens fractionally. "He's been eating. I've seen him in the galley."
"He's been in the galley," Gunnar corrects.
"He preps the food. He serves the food. He cleans up after the food.
But he's not eating it. Not properly. I've been watching.
" He crosses his arms, and the gesture makes him look less the cook and more the warrior he was before he decided he'd rather feed armies than fight in them.
"He picks at his plate and pushes things around and when he thinks I'm not looking, he scrapes half of it back into the pot.
At this rate he's going to lose what little weight he's gained since he came aboard. "
Eskil leans back in his chair. He rubs a hand across his face and doesn't say what he's thinking, which is that he doesn't need Gunnar's report to know that Indrie has been withdrawn.
He's noticed. He's been trying not to notice, and the whole thing is a tangle he can't cut through with a sword, which is frustrating because that's the solution that comes most naturally.
He hasn't seen Indrie active on deck. The healer used to be everywhere, coiling rope, mending sails, helping Ermin with rigging, carrying bowls of stew to men who'd missed their meal, a quiet, steady presence that moved through the ship and touched everything it passed.
For the past two days, that presence has dried up.
Indrie goes from his bunk to the galley to the medical bay and back to his bunk, and the route is the same every time, a tight circuit that avoids the open deck, avoids the crew's common areas, avoids anywhere that the light and the noise and the people might find him.
He hasn't heard Indrie chattering with Ermin and Dagny in the lower levels.
The language lessons, the herb identification, the laughter that used to carry through the corridor, all of it has gone quiet.
Ermin had come to Dagny two days ago, according to Bohdi, confused and worried, asking why Indrie wouldn't talk to him.
Dagny had told the boy to give Indrie space, and Ermin had complied, but reluctantly, and Bohdi had reported that the young man had taken to hovering near Indrie's bunk at odd hours, not approaching, just being nearby.
Standing guard over something he didn't know how to protect.
And Bohdi has already told him the rest. That there are dark circles under Indrie's eyes that are getting worse, bruised-purple half-moons that stand out against skin that's lost its new warmth and gone back to the pallor it had when Eskil first saw him in Armond's chambers.
That Bohdi has seen him standing on the deck in the middle of the night, not sleeping, not doing anything, just standing at the railing with his hands on the wood and his face turned toward the black water below.
Gazing down at it, not at the horizon, not at the stars, just down.
Bohdi hadn't said what he thought that meant. He hadn't needed to.
Gunnar tells him much of the same, the not eating, the not sleeping, the withdrawal from the routines and relationships the healer had been building, and adds that Indrie flinched away from him this morning when Gunnar reached past him for a pot.
Eskil keeps his voice even. "The boy is homesick. Or seasick. Or both. He'll adjust."
Gunnar looks at him. It's a long look, steady and unimpressed, the look he gives when he knows Eskil is being dismissive and doesn't intend to tolerate it.
But Gunnar is not Bohdi. He doesn't push.
He doesn't argue. He holds the look long enough to make his disagreement clear, and then he nods once and leaves.
The door closes and Eskil sits alone in his cabin and stares at the charts he's no longer seeing.
In truth, he knows it's neither of those things.
A beaten dog doesn't long for its abusive owner.
Homesickness implies a home worth missing, and what Indrie left behind in Kalkoa was not a home.
It was a cage with a thin mat and a king who broke bones for sport and an advisor who threw him at the feet of conquerors to be discarded.
Whatever Indrie is feeling right now, it's not longing for what he left.
And despite never having been at sea, Indrie has been surprisingly energetic aboard the ship, or was, until two nights ago.
He'd taken to the water with a resilience that had surprised everyone, Eskil included.
No nausea, no green-gilled misery at the railing.
He'd moved across the deck with increasing confidence, found his sea legs within a week, and hadn't shown the slightest bit of sickness since they left shore.
So it's not homesickness and it's not seasickness and Eskil knows exactly what it is.
It's the blood that's been washed from the deck. It's the sound of a man being thrown overboard.
Eskil would do it again. He wouldn't change a single stroke.
The stowaway had nearly killed them all, set a fire in the hold of a wooden ship in the middle of the ocean, endangering every soul on board, and had then tried to strangle the one person who could heal their wounded if things went worse.
The punishment was proportional. The punishment was just. By the laws of his people and the customs of the sea, Eskil had been well within his rights.
But Indrie doesn't know his laws. Doesn't know his customs. Doesn't know the rules that govern life and death on a ship at sea, where mercy is a luxury the waves don't care about.
All Indrie knows is what he saw: a man beaten until he couldn't stand and then thrown into the sea to drown.
And the man who ordered it is the same man who touched Indrie's chin gently after spilled stew and helped him to his feet and made the healer's eyes go soft.
No wonder the boy is standing on the deck at night staring at the water. He doesn't know which version of Eskil to trust.
Eskil pushes away from the desk and stands.
The chair scrapes against the floor, loud in the silent cabin.
He paces, two strides to the wall, two strides back, the cabin too small for a man his size and his agitation, and then stops himself because pacing is what he does when he doesn't have a plan and he needs a fucking plan.
He waits. He tells himself he's waiting for the right moment, but what he's really doing is working up the nerve, which is a thing he will never admit to anyone, least of all Bohdi.
He goes through the motions of the evening: checks the heading, reviews the watch schedule, eats the meal Gunnar sends to his cabin without tasting it.
He waits until the lamplight has burned low across the ship and the crew has settled into the settled rhythms of night.
He waits until the moon is high, a bright crescent hanging in a clear sky, and the only sounds are the creak of the hull and the murmur of the night watch.
Then he goes to the deck.
What he sees is this: Indrie standing at the railing, gazing off into the sea with a look that could only be described as conflicted.
He's positioned near the bow, away from the night watch, away from the lamplight, in a pocket of shadow where the moonlight finds him anyway.
One hand is curled around a rope that runs from the railing to the rigging above, his fingers wrapped tight enough that the tendons stand out in the back of his hand.
The other rests on the railing, palm down, fingertips just reaching the edge.
His dark hair is loose, stirring in the night breeze, and his face in profile is pale and still and very far away.
He looks to be deciding whether or not to jump.
The thought hits Eskil in the chest and he has to physically stop himself from crossing the deck at a run.
That would startle him. That might be the thing that tips the balance.
He doesn't know how close Indrie is to the edge, not the physical edge, the railing is still between him and the water, but the internal one, where the weight of living exceeds the ability to carry it and the sea below starts to look restful.
Eskil approaches quietly. He controls his footsteps, softening the weight of his tread on the deck planks, moving with a care he usually reserves for stalking prey in the forests of home.
He doesn't want to startle the boy. He doesn't want to be the sudden sound that makes him flinch, that tips the scales, that sends him over.
But he announces himself before he's too close. Close enough to reach him if he needs to, far enough that Indrie has space. He keeps his voice low, even, conversational. A chance meeting. Not a deliberate intervention.
"Very late to be stargazing."
Indrie startles regardless.