Chapter 3 #2
He hands it back and Dagny sheathes both swords without looking, muscle memory doing the work for her.
He shows her his satchel in return, opening it up and allowing her to sort through the items with a deliberate care that he notices, and she seems overjoyed to discover he knows medicine.
She tells him, in his own language, that he is very useful.
He learns from her that the tattooed man who is kind is Bohdi.
She says his name with obvious respect and then flexes her arms and makes an exaggerated fierce face that Indrie takes to mean very strong, very important.
He files the name away. The cook who made his stew is Gunnar.
Dagny pantomimes stirring a pot and then rubs her stomach and makes a face that is diplomatically ambiguous about the quality.
And the young man peering at him from across the fire with rapt fascination, watching them for the better part of an hour with poorly concealed interest, clearly desperate to come over but not quite having worked up the nerve, is Ermin.
Ermin comes over after he hears his name, apparently deciding that being acknowledged from a distance is as good an invitation as any.
He's young, younger than Indrie, with sandy hair and an open, eager face that hasn't quite finished deciding what it wants to look like.
He knows even less of Indrie's language than Dagny does, essentially nothing, as far as Indrie can tell, but he is very good at hand gestures and charades.
He mimes things with his whole body, throwing himself into each demonstration with a commitment that borders on theatrical.
When he wants to convey big wave he stands on the log and swoops his arms and nearly falls into the fire.
When he wants to say fast horse he gallops in a circle around them until Dagny hooks his belt and yanks him back down.
Indrie is smiling. He's been smiling for a while now and his face aches with it, the muscles unused and protesting the unfamiliar work.
Dagny teaches him the word for friend in her language and then points between the three of them, and Indrie feels something loosen in his chest that he hadn't realized was knotted.
They're becoming familiar and at ease with each other, Dagny naming the constellations she can see appearing in the darkening sky, Ermin acting out what Indrie is fairly certain is a sea monster encounter, Indrie offering words in his own language that Dagny tries and fails to pronounce, when the terrifyingly handsome blond warrior from the king's chambers returns to the camp.
Indrie sees him before the others do. Something about the way the man moves commands attention, even from a distance.
He walks through the camp and the warriors part for him without being asked, stepping aside with an ease that speaks of deep, ingrained respect.
Not out of fear, exactly. Out of recognition.
Out of deference earned rather than demanded.
He stands off to the side and talks in low voices to Bohdi, their heads close together, and Indrie can't hear what they're saying but he can see the way Bohdi nods, the way the blond man's eyes sweep the camp and its occupants with the practiced assessment of a man responsible for every one of them.
Dagny leans in close, her shoulder pressing against his, and tells Indrie the man's name is Eskil.
She doesn't know every word of his language.
Her vocabulary is a scattershot collection of nouns and verbs gathered from who knows where, assembled without much regard for grammar or nuance.
But she knows enough to say one word, and she says it carefully, pointing across the camp at the blond man with the scarred face and the shoulders that block out the firelight behind him.
King.
Indrie's entire body goes cold.
The warmth that had been building in his chest over the past few hours, the food, the fire, the unexpected kindness of strangers, freezes solid. He feels it crystallize behind his ribs, sharp and brittle, and then crack.
He's been given from one ruler to another.
He knows how kings work. He knows the limits of their patience, short and arbitrary, enforced with fists and boots and whatever else is within reach.
He knows the reach of their power, absolute and unchecked, the way it seeps into every corner of a life until there is no space left that is your own.
And he knows the way their eyes settle on him, appraising and indifferent, measuring the worth of a new acquisition.
Something kept for its usefulness, displayed when convenient, broken when the mood strikes.
Erlan gave him to a king.
Not a warlord. Not a general. Not a man with a limited scope of authority who might lose interest. A king. With a kingdom. With absolute power over every soul in it. And Indrie is now among those souls.
Dagny sees him tense. She feels it, probably, the way his body goes rigid beside hers, his shoulders drawing up, his hands clenching in his lap.
She sees something in his face that she doesn't care for, he doesn't know what it looks like, but he can feel the blood leaving it, and places her hand on his arm.
Her grip is firm but not restraining. An anchor, not a chain.
She tells him something he doesn't understand. The words are soft, earnest, delivered with the kind of conviction that people use when they're trying to make a promise they can't fully articulate. It sounds comforting. Her tone is comforting. The pressure of her hand is comforting.
But he doesn't feel comforted.
He feels his world upending beneath him. The ground has given way and he's falling, and the hands reaching for him might catch him or might push him further down, and he has no way of knowing which until he lands.
Armond was dangerous and angry, but he was also dying and weak enough not to break Indrie in two.
Five years under his rule had been a careful, exhausting negotiation: keep the king alive, endure what comes, make yourself useful enough to survive another day.
It was miserable and frightening and many nights Indrie had lain on his thin mat and wished for the courage to simply stop, but it was known.
It was a suffering he understood, one he'd mapped the edges of, one he knew how to navigate.
This king is large and broad, with hands that could easily wrap around Indrie's entire arm and have strength left over.
His arms are thicker than Indrie's thighs.
The scar across his eye is a reminder of violence survived, of battles fought, of a life built on the kind of physical power Armond never possessed.
And Indrie doesn't want to know what being owned by him means.
But he has nowhere to go.
The castle behind him is being emptied. The kingdom is forfeit.
Erlan gave him away without hesitation, without regret, without the decency of looking him in the eye when he did it.
There is no one coming for him. There is no one waiting for his return.
The friend he left hiding in the servants' quarters, Senli, with her warm hands and worried eyes, cannot help him.
The servants cannot help him. He is alone in a camp of foreign warriors on a shoreline he doesn't recognize, and the only people who have shown him kindness in the last twelve hours are the same people who conquered his home.
Across the camp, Eskil finishes his conversation with Bohdi and turns. For a moment, just a moment, his eyes find Indrie's across the distance. Indrie looks away immediately, drops his gaze to his hands, to the empty bowl still sitting between his feet.
But in that fraction of a second, before he looked away, he noticed something. The king's expression when he looked at him wasn't cold. Wasn't calculating. Wasn't the appraising look of someone measuring the worth of a new acquisition.
It was something else. Something Indrie doesn't have a name for.
He pushes it aside. He pushes everything aside. He has learned, over five years under Armond's rule, that hope is a luxury he cannot afford. It costs too much when it breaks.
Dagny squeezes his arm and Ermin, oblivious to the shift in mood, launches into another elaborate pantomime that might be about a whale or might be about a large dog, and it's impossible to tell.
Indrie watches him and manages to twitch his lips into something close to a smile, because Ermin is trying, and it isn't his fault that Indrie's world is ending.
The fire crackles. The stars emerge. The camp settles into the quiet rhythms of evening.
Indrie pulls his satchel tighter against his chest and does not look at the king again.