Salt in the Wound (Rengara #1)

1. Chapter 1

The sound is what wakes him.

Indrie sleeps the way all light sleepers do, with one ear open and waiting and the other in his dreams. His mat is thin enough that every uneven stone on the floor has worn a corresponding ache into his spine, and the room itself is barely wide enough to extend both arms out.

A converted storage closet, tucked between the kitchen and the outer wall, with no window and a threadbare curtain on hooks instead of a proper door.

He sleeps in his clothes more often than not, because the cold creeps through the gaps in the stone and because it's faster to be dressed when someone calls for him in the night.

Last night had been long. Armond's cough had worsened after sundown, the wet rattle of it echoing through the king's chambers while Indrie mixed tincture after tincture, trying to ease the inflammation before it settled deeper into already rotting lungs.

Five years of Granger's Disease. Five years of watching a body fight against its own slow undoing, and five years of Indrie fighting alongside it-not because he wants to, though he tries not to think about that, but because it's what he was purchased for.

He'd crawled back to his room sometime in the small hours, fingers stained with herb paste, a headache pulsing behind his eyes. He'd been asleep before his body fully settled against the mat.

Now something is pulling him back to the surface. A sound, distant, muffled by walls, that doesn't belong to the normal rhythms he knows. Not the kitchen staff beginning their morning prep. Not the changing of the guard. Not the low tolling of the chapel bell that marks the fifth hour.

The sound of metal clanking, of shouting in the halls, of the concussive sound of something large hitting something solid and breaking through.

Indrie's eyes open.

He lies still for three heartbeats, staring up at the cobwebs on the dark ceiling above him. Then a scream cuts through the walls, high and raw, and he is on his feet before the echo fades.

His hands move without thought. Hair first. His fingers find the leather tie on the floor beside his mat and pull the dark length of it back from his face, securing it at the nape of his neck.

His boots are by the door. He steps into them, but doesn't bother lacing them. He’s already wearing the same shirt from yesterday, wrinkled and carrying the faint smell of the eucalyptus he'd been crushing, but he's presentable enough. No one looks closely enough to care.

The sounds are growing. More shouting, but not the Kalkoan tongue, he realizes.

Something else. Something guttural and rolling, consonants that tumble and crack against one another.

And beneath it, closer, the panicked cries of people he recognizes.

Servants. Guards. The high, thin wail of someone either in pain or in terror.

His first thought is: Armond is dead.

It surges, immediate and unwanted, this terrible, giddy, shameful hope. The king is dead. Someone found the body cold in the sheets, lungs finally surrendered, and now the castle is in uproar because the throne is empty and the succession is unclear and...

Stop it.

Indrie presses his palms flat against the wall and forces the thought down, sick with himself.

He shouldn't want that. He doesn't want that.

He is a healer. He took vows before the apothecary guild in Renneth, years ago, when he was still young enough to believe that vows meant something.

Do no harm. Wish no harm. The preservation of life is sacred.

He believes that. He has to believe that, because if he doesn't, then what has he been doing for five years?

Preserving something sacred, or prolonging something monstrous?

But then the fear comes, quick on the heels of guilt, and it's the fear that straightens his spine.

If Armond is gone, Indrie's usefulness goes with him.

He's been keeping the king alive. That is his function.

That is the reason they feed him, house him, allow him to continue existing within these walls.

Without that purpose, he's just another body.

Worse, he's a body they paid for, one that hasn't returned its investment, one that the advisor never tires of reminding the court cost more than it was worth.

Don't think about that now. Think about what's in front of you.

Indrie pushes the curtain open and steps into the kitchen.

Empty.

The hearth is cold. The long wooden prep table, usually dusted with flour and crowded with rising bread by this hour, is bare.

The water basin sits full and untouched.

The drying rack above the hearth still holds yesterday's herbs, mint and thyme and the bitter nettle root Indrie uses for Armond's chest compresses, and a single overturned bowl lies on the flagstones near the pantry, knocked from the counter's edge by someone fleeing mid-task.

Indrie crosses the kitchen in silence, steps quiet against the stone despite the unlaced boots.

The adjoining corridor stretches before him, lit by torches that gutter and spit, untended for hours by the looks of it.

The sounds are louder here. Fighting, undeniably fighting, and it's coming from the direction of the main hall, from the front of the castle where the great doors open onto the courtyard.

It is, quite honestly, the worst direction to go. But he’s in the kitchens, and there’s only one door out, and he can’t stay here and wait for whatever’s coming.

Three steps into the corridor and he’s already regretting his choice.

He doesn't see the man. Doesn't hear him either, not until the thunder of running boots is directly on top of him, and by then it's far too late. A body rounds the corner at full speed, leather and fur and the smell of salt air, and collides with Indrie hard enough to take him off his feet.

A sound leaves him. Later, he'll be embarrassed about it, a high, startled, entirely undignified yelp that no grown man should make. But in the moment there's nothing but impact and weightlessness and then the slam of his back against stone as the floor comes up to meet him.

The air rushes out of his lungs. His vision sparks white at the edges. He is flat on his back, the cold floor pressing into every ache and bruise he carries, and looming above him is the largest man he has ever seen.

The man is enormous. Not just tall, although he is that, but large in a way that Kalkoan men are probably not capable of reaching.

Indrie is not Kalkoan, he was brought here from the Isles, but even at five foot six there aren’t many men in Kalkoa that tower over him like this man does.

His hair is a deep, burnished copper, in waves down his back and around his shoulders, and there are dark markings on his face.

Tattoos cover every visible inch of his skin, intricate lines winding down his throat, across his collarbones, down both arms to the knuckles of his hands.

He wears furs over tanned leather, layered and salt-stained, and in his right hand he carries the most absurd axe Indrie has ever seen.

It’s large even for the man wielding it, its head broader than Indrie’s chest, its handle wrapped in leather strips that are darkened with use. It gleams dully in the torchlight and there is blood on the steel and Indrie’s stomach sinks in horror.

For one crystalline, suspended moment, Indrie stares up at this man and his axe and the ceiling beyond and thinks: This is how it ends. On my back. On the floor. From a foreign invader I never saw coming.

He doesn't close his eyes. He should, he should close his eyes and let it be quick, but he can't stop looking at the man's face. At the dark eyes beneath heavy brows, at the broad jaw and the flared nostrils and the way his lips are parted from exertion.

The axe doesn't rise.

Instead, the man's brow furrows. He looks down at Indrie in surprise, like he’s as shocked to find Indrie in his path as Indrie was to be there and says something in a language Indrie has never heard.

The words are thick and lilting, full of vowels that roll into each other, warm and unhurried.

Indrie doesn't understand a single one of them.

But he understands the furrowed brow. The slight downward tilt of the man's head. The way his free hand extends, palm open.

Are you all right?

Which is, to Indrie's knowledge, a profoundly strange thing for a foreign invading barbarian to ask the man he's just flattened.

He stares. The hand stays extended. The man says something else, shorter, a questioning lilt at the end, and his brow furrows deeper, concern creasing the lines around his mouth.

Despite being in the middle of pillaging Armond’s castle, he seems in no hurry to get back to it until he’s assured Indrie is unharmed.

"Yes," Indrie hears himself say. His voice comes out thin and breathless and approximately an octave higher than normal. "I'm... yes. I’m fine."

The man seems to get his intent. He leans down and grabs Indrie by both shoulders, hands so large they nearly span the width of him, and lifts him back onto his feet without visible effort.

Indrie sways when his boots find the floor and the man's hands stay a moment, steadying him, before releasing him with a short nod.

Then he's gone. Past Indrie, around the corner, heading deeper into the castle with long, ground-eating strides and his impossible axe held easy at his side.