Chapter 21 #2
He's never resisted before. Never hidden from his owner, never refused a summons, never turned his back on the man who held his life in his hands.
He learned early that resistance was futile and expensive, that the only thing standing between him and the next blow was compliance, and compliance was the one skill he had in abundance.
But for the first time he can't bear it.
He knows there's nowhere to run on a ship.
He knows this. The ocean is on every side and the vessel is finite and there is no corridor long enough, no hold deep enough, no bunk small enough to hide him from a king on his own vessel.
The knowledge is there, rational and geometric, and it doesn't matter, doesn't matter because he isn't thinking straight, isn't thinking at all, is nothing but animal urgency, his heart opened for the first time and told to come closer to the thing that opened it, and he can't.
He turns and runs out of the cabin.
He hears Eskil call his name and the sound of it chases him down the corridor, but he doesn't stop.
His feet hit the planks and his hands hit the walls as he ricochets around the corner, off-balance, graceless, his shoulder catching the frame as he goes.
Down the corridor. Past the galley. Past the hold.
Through the sleeping quarters where someone looks up and he doesn't see who because his vision is blurred and his chest is a cage and the air won't come.
He reaches his bunk. Climbs in. Pulls the blanket over himself and presses his back against the wall and curls his knees to his chest and tries to even out his breathing.
He can't manage it. His lungs are working too fast, too shallow, pulling in air that doesn't seem to contain enough of whatever he needs, and his hands are shaking and his teeth are chattering even though he's not cold and there is a rushing sound in his ears that isn't there.
He presses his face into the pillow and counts.
Inhale for four. Hold for four. Out for four.
The way he would tell a patient to breathe.
The way he has guided others through this, sat beside them, hand on their shoulder, voice steady, breathe with me, just breathe with me, but there is no one here to sit beside him and no hand on his shoulder and his own voice is trapped behind clenched teeth.
He breathes. Again. Again. The counting is mechanical, deliberate, and gradually the rhythm catches and his body follows where his mind leads.
The shaking eases. The rushing fades. His heartbeat slows from its frantic hammering to something approaching normal, and the cabin around him resolves from a blur of panic into the familiar wooden planks and the narrow berth and the carved bird on the shelf.
He lies in his bunk and stares at the wall and the shame arrives to take the panic's place.
He ran. He ran from the king, panicked and blind, and the king saw it.
Saw the fear in his eyes, the way his body chose flight before his mind could intervene.
Saw exactly what Indrie has been trying to hide for weeks: that beneath the smiles and the compliance and the careful composure, there is still a part of him that expects every outstretched hand to become a fist.
He curls tighter. Presses his knuckles against his mouth. Breathes through the shame the way he breathed through the panic, slowly, deliberately, one count at a time.
And then, arriving quietly, slipping in between the louder thoughts: Eskil didn't chase him.
Didn't shout after him. Didn't send Bohdi or Dagny to drag him back. He said Indrie's name, once, and then nothing. Silence. The absence of pursuit. The absence of consequence.
Armond would have sent guards. Armond would have had him brought back by his hair, by his arm, by whatever was closest and easiest to grab, and the punishment for running would have been worse than whatever prompted the flight.
Eskil let him go.
It doesn't fit the framework. It doesn't fit any framework Indrie has for how kings behave when they are disobeyed. And the fact that it doesn't fit, the fact that the expected consequence didn't arrive, is doing something to the fear inside him that the fear doesn't know how to process.
He stares at the wooden wall. The carved bird sits on the shelf beside his head, its rough wooden wings angled mid-flight, and Indrie thinks about Sven carving it.
About the old deckhand sitting in his bunk with a knife and a piece of driftwood, making something for the foreign healer who taught him to read.
About the fact that this bird exists because someone on this ship cared enough to make it.
He thinks about Eskil's face when he'd said stop.
Not the sharpness, which was real. The thing beneath it.
The thing that looked, now that Indrie replays it with the panic stripped away and the memory cleaned of adrenaline, not like preparation for a strike but closer to anguish, the helpless look of watching someone tear themselves apart and being unable to let it continue.
Stop, Eskil had said. And what he'd meant, maybe, was not stop talking so I can punish you. What he'd meant was stop hurting yourself with these apologies you don't owe me.
Indrie doesn't know if that's true. He doesn't trust his interpretation, doesn't trust his own ability to read a man whose language he barely speaks and whose motivations he has been wrong about at every turn.
He has been wrong about everything. Wrong about the ownership.
Wrong about the belonging. Wrong about what Eskil wanted and what Eskil meant and what kind of man Eskil is, and the only consistent truth in all of it is that Indrie keeps expecting violence and Eskil keeps not delivering it.
At some point, the evidence has to mean something.