11. Chapter 11
Indrie is struggling.
After Eskil's visit last night, he wakes feeling lighter than he has the past few days.
The weight is still there, the memory of the whip, the screams, the splash, but it's shifted, redistributed, no longer pressing down on his chest with the suffocating totality it had before.
Something loosened on that deck in the moonlight, some knot inside him that had been tightening since the night of the fire, and though he can't point to the exact moment it gave way, he knows it did.
He knows because he slept. Not well, not deeply, but he slept, and he didn't dream of blood or water or the sound of leather on flesh.
He dreamed of stars.
He dreamed of a warm hand around his, lifting his fingers toward the sky, and a low voice telling him things he only half understood. He dreamed of a thumb against his throat so gentle it made his eyes sting.
He pushes the dream aside before it can settle too deeply and gets out of his bunk.
In the galley, Gunnar is already at the stove, stirring something that smells less offensive than usual, which is either a sign of progress or a warning.
Indrie takes his place at the prep table and picks up a knife and begins dicing onions, and when the familiar sting hits his eyes he's almost grateful for the excuse.
He jokes with Gunnar about the ratio of potatoes to broth in the stew.
The words come haltingly, he has to pause twice to find the right term in Gunnar's language, and resorts to holding up potatoes and making exaggerated drowning gestures to indicate too much broth, but the meaning lands, and Gunnar turns from the stove and stares at him with the deeply offended expression of a cook whose life's work has just been critiqued by someone who was peeling his first potato ten days ago.
"The ratio," Gunnar says, in Indrie's language, enunciating each word with exaggerated precision, "is perfect."
"The ratio," Indrie responds, in Gunnar's language, with considerably less precision, "is soup."
Gunnar's mouth opens. Closes. Opens again.
He points the wooden spoon at Indrie and says something in his own tongue that Indrie doesn't fully catch but that has the cadence and conviction of honor being defended.
Then his eyes crinkle and his beard twitches and the big man laughs, a deep, booming sound that fills the galley and rattles the pots on their hooks, and Indrie feels his own mouth curve upward.
Gunnar seems outwardly pleased to see him smiling and moving with purpose again.
He doesn't say so. He doesn't comment on the past two days, doesn't ask where Indrie has been or why he stopped eating or what happened on the deck in the middle of the night.
He just claps Indrie on the shoulder, gently by Gunnar's standards, which means Indrie only staggers one step instead of two, and turns back to the stove and tells him to chop faster or breakfast will be lunch.
Indrie chops faster. The rhythm of the knife is grounding, the same meditative repetition Eskil had found in his whetstone that morning on the foredeck.
He doesn't know how he knows that comparison, except that he's been watching the king more than he should and cataloguing his habits with an attention that serves no practical purpose and yet refuses to stop.
He doesn't want to feel this way.
He's spent two days on deck, at night, when no one could see, when the ship was sleeping and the sea was dark and the railing was close and the water below was closer, trying to convince himself he'd be better off if he threw himself into the sea.
The argument had been logical, in the cold way that despair is always logical.
He was being carted off to an unknown fate.
The king who held his life in his hands was capable of a brutality Indrie had witnessed firsthand.
The world he was sailing toward was foreign and unknowable and populated by people who, for all their unexpected kindness, could turn on him suddenly, without warning, with an indifference that doesn't care whether you survive.
He'd stood at the railing and he'd looked at the water and he'd thought: this would be easier.
And then in a single night his feelings were upended.
Eskil had come to him. Not sent someone, not Bohdi, not Dagny.
He'd come himself, in the dark, to the railing where Indrie stood, and he'd been gentle.
There isn't another word for it. Careful with his voice, with the open hand he'd held out and waited, waited, for Indrie to decide.
His voice dropping into that low, unhurried register that he only uses when speaking to Indrie, the volume itself a form of tenderness.
He hadn't asked what was wrong. He'd just stood there, offering his hand, and waited for Indrie to take it.
And Indrie had. He'd placed his palm in the king's and let himself be guided toward the sky and for a few minutes, just a few, just enough, the weight had lifted.
And then there was the thumb on his throat.
Indrie's hand drifts to his neck without his permission, fingers brushing the bruises the stowaway left, and what he feels isn't the pain of the injury.
What he feels is the ghost of Eskil's touch overlaid on top of it, warm, impossibly light, tracing the edge of the damage, trying to undo it with contact alone.
The memory makes something hot pulse behind his ribs and his breath shortens and he has to put down the knife and press both hands flat against the prep table and wait for it to pass.
It doesn't pass. It hasn't been passing. It's been building.
He is twenty-two years old, and in all those years, he has never felt this.
He'd thought, for a long time, that the part of him that wants, that aches, that reaches toward another body with something deeper than thought, was broken.
Beaten out, maybe. Starved along with the rest of him in that cold little room with the thin mat and the stone floor.
He'd recognized beauty before, objectively, distantly, noting it without feeling it, but he'd never looked at another person and felt his body respond. He'd made his peace with that.
And then Eskil had stood in the doorway of Armond's chambers and looked at him, and something dormant had opened its eyes.
He hadn't recognized it at first. The quickening in his chest when the king entered a room, he'd called that fear.
The heat in his face when Eskil's gaze found his, embarrassment.
How his eyes tracked the movement of the king's hands, cataloguing the breadth of his palms and the length of his fingers, that was vigilance.
Years of learning to watch the hands that can hurt him.
Except fear doesn't make his toes curl. Embarrassment doesn't make him lean closer when he should be pulling away. And survival instinct doesn't explain the way his entire body had lit up when Eskil pulled his collar aside in the castle and the pads of his fingers brushed Indrie's collarbone.
He is attracted to Eskil. Physically. Viscerally.
In a way that makes his body do things his mind has no control over and that he has absolutely no framework for understanding.
And now Eskil exists, and whatever peace Indrie had made with his own emptiness is shattered, and the pieces are everywhere and he doesn't know how to pick them up.
Every interaction is layered with a sensation he can't process.
When Eskil speaks to him, his voice, that deep rumble that Indrie can feel in his sternum, does something to the base of Indrie's spine that makes his knees unreliable.
When Eskil looks at him with those pale, unreadable eyes, Indrie feels seen in a way that goes beyond observation, beyond scrutiny, into something that touches the parts of him he keeps hidden.
And last night, on the deck, when Eskil held his hand and pointed at the stars, how Eskil's hand had swallowed his entirely and held it with such devastating gentleness, Indrie had felt something so intense it had scared him.
A pull, deep in his belly, drawing him toward the larger man with a force that had nothing to do with logic and everything to do with a hunger he'd never known he had.
He'd wanted to step closer. He'd wanted to press himself against Eskil's chest and feel the warmth of him and the breadth of him and the solid, unyielding realness of him.
He'd wanted Eskil's hands on his waist, his mouth against his hair, his voice in his ear saying, he doesn't even know what.
Anything. Everything. His own name, maybe, in that low register that turns two syllables into something sacred.
He'd wanted, and the wanting had been so enormous and so unfamiliar that he'd had to say I should get to bed and walk away before his body betrayed him entirely.
It's Eskil. That's what makes it impossible.
Not just anyone, but the king. The man who commands this ship, who holds power over every soul aboard it, and who ordered a man flogged and thrown overboard while Indrie watched.
Indrie is a healer from a dead kingdom. He is no one.
He has nothing to offer except the skill in his hands and the knowledge in his head, and those are services, not this.
Not the thing that makes him lie awake replaying the pressure of a thumb against his throat and wondering, with a curiosity that burns, what it would feel like if Eskil pressed harder.
Not with violence, but with something he doesn't have a name for yet.
But Eskil also knelt and untangled netting from Indrie's boot.
Also held out his hand in the moonlight and waited, patiently, for Indrie to take it.
Also asked okay? with his fingers on Indrie's chin, the answer mattering more to him than the stew on the floor.
He is violence and gentleness braided together, and Indrie's body, his traitorous, newly awakened body, wants both. It wants all of him.