Chapter 7 #2
"My father arranged it. He's..." Ermin trails off, and the mixture of pride and resentment that crosses his face is something Indrie recognizes intimately.
"Important. He wanted me to distinguish myself.
Fight bravely, contribute meaningfully, prove that his faith was warranted.
" The pestle stills. "Instead, the kingdom fell without a real fight, the spoils were meager, and I've spent most of the voyage chasing rats. "
Indrie sets down the herbs he's been sorting and looks at Ermin carefully. The young man is staring at the mortar in his hands with an expression that's trying very hard to be stoic and not quite managing it.
"Proving yourself," Indrie says, choosing his words with care, aware of how few he has in Ermin's language and how much he wants them to carry, "doesn't always require a sword."
Ermin looks up. His brow furrows.
Indrie presses on, piecing the sentence together from the words Dagny has taught him and the ones Ermin has learned in return.
"The strongest people I've known weren't the ones who could swing the biggest blade.
They were the ones who could sit with someone in pain and not look away.
" He meets Ermin's eyes. "The ones who learned, not because they had to, but because they wanted to understand.
The ones who showed up, again and again, even when no one asked them to. "
Ermin considers this with a seriousness Indrie hasn't seen from him before.
His hands have gone still around the mortar.
He's not performing contemplation. Indrie can tell the difference.
He's genuinely turning the idea over, examining it from angles he hasn't considered.
It's the look of a young man whose definition of worth is being quietly, gently expanded.
After a long pause, Ermin asks, "Do you think you could teach me? Medicine, I mean. Properly."
Indrie lights up.
The feeling is immediate and overwhelming and so bright it almost hurts, a surge of warmth and purpose that rushes through him and fills spaces he'd forgotten were hollow.
He hasn't felt this in, he doesn't know how long.
Years, maybe. Since the old herbalist who first trained him placed a bundle of dried sage in his hands and told him he had a gift.
Since before Kalkoa took that gift and made it an obligation and then a cage.
"I would love to," Indrie says, and the words come out in Ermin's language, not his own, because some things are worth the effort of saying in a tongue the other person can understand fully.
His pronunciation isn't perfect, Dagny would flick his ear at least twice, but Ermin's face breaks into a grin so wide it transforms him, and the two of them sit there smiling at each other, surrounded by herbs and grinding stones, and Indrie thinks, this is what it's supposed to feel like.
Teaching. Sharing. Being useful not because someone owns you and demands your service, but because someone wants to learn and you want to help them.
He starts Ermin's education that evening, there on the floor of the medical bay, beginning with the basics: identification, preparation, dosage.
Ermin takes to it with the same enthusiasm he brings to everything else, which is to say far too much of it, but his energy is infectious, and by the time the lamp burns low enough that they're both squinting, Indrie has covered more ground than he expected and Ermin can correctly identify six plants by sight and three by smell.
It's a start.
That night, lying in his bunk while Ermin snores softly in the berth across the aisle, a gentle, rhythmic sound that has become oddly comforting in its consistency, Indrie stares at the wooden planks above him and tries to reconcile the people he's met with the stories he's heard about the Northmen.
The raping and pillaging and burning. The tales whispered by servants in the castle, passed from traveler to merchant to villager until the details blurred but the terror remained sharp.
Northmen who descended on coastal towns and left nothing standing.
Northmen who took what they wanted, wealth, women, lives, and sailed away on the backs of screaming winds.
Monsters from across the sea, more beast than human, with no mercy and no conscience and no concept of the value of a life that wasn't their own.
These people feed him.
They teach him their words. They sit with him by lamplight and let him teach them in return.
Dagny wraps her arm around his shoulders, and the gesture says he belongs there without a word.
Ermin brings him things, a warmer blanket he found in the stores, a wooden cup to replace the cracked one Indrie had been using, a smooth stone from the beach at Kalkoa that Ermin says is for luck though Indrie suspects he just enjoyed the color.
Gunnar has started saving him a portion of whatever is for breakfast before the crew descends, set aside on a plate near the stove where Indrie will find it when he arrives, without comment, without acknowledgment, feeding the healer before everyone else is simply how things are done now.
Even Sven, the grizzled deckhand Indrie has been teaching to read, left a piece of carved driftwood on Indrie's bunk two days ago.
It's shaped into a bird, roughly, the craftsmanship more earnest than skilled, and Sven had not mentioned it and Indrie had not mentioned it and it now sits on the narrow shelf beside his pillow where he can see it when he wakes.
The worst thing that's happened to him since boarding the ship is Gunnar's stew.
He thinks about Eskil.
He thinks about Eskil more than he should, more than is safe, more than is wise for someone in his position.
He thinks about the king's eyes on him when Eskil doesn't think Indrie is paying attention, across the deck, from the helm, from the doorway of his cabin.
Indrie catches it sometimes, the weight of that gaze, and it's not the calculating assessment of an owner monitoring a possession.
It's warmer than that, and it makes the back of Indrie's neck prickle and his stomach do things he doesn't have words for in either language.
He thinks about the gentle hand on his chin after the spilled stew.
The fingers against his jaw, so light, so careful, handling him with a gentleness that made Indrie feel fragile and precious in the same breath.
About how okay had sounded in Eskil's deep voice, shaped into a question that had no right to undo Indrie as thoroughly as it did.
About the fact that Eskil has never once raised his voice at him.
Not when he spilled the stew. Not when he stood gaping.
Not ever. Eskil raises his voice at his crew, at Bohdi, at the deckhands, at the rigging when it doesn't cooperate, but he has never turned that volume on Indrie.
His voice, when directed at the healer, goes low and careful, aware of the effect his anger has and choosing, deliberately, not to wield it.
Indrie doesn't know what to do with any of it.
He doesn't know what to do with the kindness, which he's still waiting to see the cost of.
He doesn't know what to do with the warmth in his chest that sparks every time the king is nearby and flares every time the king looks at him and threatens to consume him entirely on the rare occasions the king speaks directly to him.
He doesn't know what to do with the way his pulse quickens when Eskil's boots sound on the deck above, or how he has to physically stop himself from looking for the king when he enters a room, or how his body remembers the heat of Eskil's hands on his forearms with a specificity that borders on obsessive.
He pulls his blanket tighter around himself and tries to sleep.
The ship rocks beneath him. The timbers creak. Ermin snores. Somewhere above, the night watch paces the deck, and beyond them the stars wheel slow and bright across a sky Indrie is only just learning to read.
He closes his eyes and presses his face into the pillow and doesn't think about pale eyes and scarred faces and hands large enough to break him that have only ever been gentle.