Chapter 17
Indrie avoids the king.
It's not a conscious strategy, not at first. It's instinct, the same deep-rooted survival mechanism that kept him alive for five years under Armond's unpredictable temper.
When the king is angry, you make yourself small.
When the king is displeased, you disappear.
You fold yourself into the routines and the corners and the tasks that don't require his attention, and you stay there, quiet and useful and invisible, until the storm passes. Until it's safe.
He keeps his head down. He does his work. He focuses on the tasks at hand.
One of the men has a sprained ankle, Erik again, the same ankle, because the man apparently has a personal vendetta against his own joints.
Indrie unwraps the old bandage, examines the swelling that's returned after what was undoubtedly some reckless activity during the storm, and re-wraps it with fresh poultice and a firmer binding.
Erik winces but holds still and thanks him when it's done, and Indrie nods and moves on.
Another sailor is seasick. Not from the normal rocking, the post-storm swells are gentler than what they've been through, but from something he ate, or something he drank, or some combination of the two that has left him grey-faced and retching over the side of the ship at regular intervals.
Indrie prepares a tincture of ginger root and peppermint, the last of his stores, and coaxes the man to drink it in small sips.
He sits with him while the nausea passes, a quiet presence at his side, because he's learned that sometimes the medicine is less important than the company.
The third is the most frustrating. A grizzled veteran named Olver who has scurvy because he refuses to eat the fruit he's given with breakfast. Indrie has seen the signs building for days, the fatigue, the swollen gums, the small bruises appearing on his arms without cause, and when he examines the man and confirms it, Olver has the audacity to look offended.
"Fruit is not food," Olver tells him, arms crossed, chin set. "Fruit is what food eats. I am a warrior of the north and I will sustain myself on meat and bread and ale as my father did and his father's father did. I will not be reduced to eating berries as though I'm some sort of forest creature."
"Eat the orange, Olver."
Olver eats the orange.
It's while treating this man, sitting across from him in the medical bay, watching him chew each segment with the enthusiasm of a prisoner eating his last meal, that Indrie learns how unprecedented Eskil diving overboard for him was.
Olver calls him sir.
The word catches Indrie off-guard. He's been called boy for as long as he can remember, by Armond, by Erlan, by the castle guards and the kitchen staff and everyone else who outranked him, which was everyone.
The Northern crew calls him by his name, mostly, or healer when they're being formal.
Dagny calls him a word in her language that he's fairly certain is an endearment, though she won't confirm it.
Gunnar calls him little chef, which Indrie suspects is not entirely a compliment.
No one has called him sir.
Olver says it without emphasis, naturally, and follows it with a statement that Indrie has to ask him to repeat twice before he understands it fully.
"I don't want to disrespect someone so important to our king."
Indrie's hands still on the orange peel.
He looks at Olver and finds the man looking back with an expression that is, beneath the gruffness and the resentment about the fruit, entirely sincere.
He's not flattering Indrie. He's not performing.
He's stating what he perceives to be a fact, that Indrie holds a position of importance in Eskil's regard, and that this position warrants a form of respect Olver doesn't extend lightly.
Indrie manages a nod and a quiet thank-you and moves the conversation forward, but the words lodge themselves under his skin and will not leave.
Someone so important to their king.
He tries not to dwell on it. He tries not to dwell on any of it, on the fact that he apparently spent the night naked in the king's bed, pressed against the king's body, surrounded by the king's warmth.
That the king had stripped him down and climbed in beside him and held him through the storm with a tenderness Indrie can only reconstruct from fragments of unconscious memory.
That this morning the king had brushed the hair from his eyes and cupped his face and told him I do not own you with a ferocity that Indrie still doesn't fully understand.
It's impossible to push aside. He's wearing the king's clothes.
The shirt hangs off his shoulder no matter how many times he adjusts it, and the fabric carries the scent of cedar and iron, and every time he moves he's reminded of the body that usually fills these garments, broader, taller, stronger, so warm that Indrie can still feel the ghost of that warmth against his spine if he closes his eyes.
He doesn't close his eyes. He works.
Dagny corners him in the hold while he's sorting through medical supplies.
He's on his knees beside an open crate, pulling out bundles of dried herbs and checking each one for water damage.
The storm soaked some of the stores, and several of his carefully prepared medicines are ruined, the yarrow is black with mold, two of his tinctures have been diluted beyond use, and the sleeping draught he'd made for Kael is gone entirely, the clay vessel shattered somewhere in the hold during the rough seas.
He's cataloguing losses with grim efficiency, unable to afford grieving supplies he might not be able to replace, when Dagny appears.
She sits down across from him, cross-legged on the floor, and the fact that she positions herself at his level rather than standing over him is one of the many small things about her that makes Indrie's chest ache.
"Tell me what's wrong," she says, in her increasingly competent version of his language, the grammar still imperfect, the vocabulary still patchy, but the fluency growing every day.
Indrie keeps his eyes on the herbs. He shakes his head. "Nothing is wrong. I'm fine. I'm just busy. The stores took damage in the storm and I need to assess what's salvageable and what isn't, and..."
"Indrie."
Her voice is quiet. Not sharp. Not demanding. Just his name, weighted with care and the refusal to accept a lie.
He tries to brush her off. Holds up a bundle of ruined chamomile and says, "See? Destroyed. I need to find..."
"If someone has been cruel to you aboard this ship," Dagny says, and her voice has changed now, edged with something hard and bright, "I will go straight to the king."
Indrie doesn't cry.
He comes very close. The pressure builds behind his eyes, sudden, overwhelming, a wave of emotion that rises from somewhere deep in his chest and crashes against the back of his teeth, and his hands still in his work.
The ruined chamomile hangs between his fingers, shedding black petals, and he stares at the dried herbs and the stain they leave on his skin and fights the burning in his eyes with everything he has.
He says, very quietly, "The king is the problem."
Dagny goes still. The hardness in her expression shifts, not softening, exactly, but recalibrating, reassessing now that the threat has revealed itself to be different from what she expected.
She doesn't speak. She waits. She gives him the space to say more, and the silence is a gift she gives deliberately, because Dagny is rarely silent and when she is, it means she's listening with her whole self.
Indrie doesn't look at her. He looks at the herbs. He says, "I don't know how to not be afraid."
The admission costs him something. He can feel it leave, a piece of the carefully constructed composure he's been maintaining since he woke up in Eskil's bed, cracking loose and falling away.
He's been afraid since the moment Dagny told him the blond man was a king.
He's been afraid through every kindness and every gentle touch and every moment where the fear should have faded but didn't, because fear doesn't respond to evidence.
Fear responds to experience. And his experience, his five years of it, tells him that kindness is bait.
Dagny moves to sit beside him. She doesn't ask permission. She settles against his side, presses her shoulder to his, and puts her arm around his shoulders with the firm, unhesitating warmth that he's come to associate with her specifically and safety generally. She holds him.
"Being afraid is reasonable," she says, her arm tightening around him. "No one expects you to trust overnight, and no one is going to rush you through it. No one is going to punish you for the pace of it. And if anyone tries, I will personally ensure they regret it."
She says this with the calm certainty of a woman who means every word and has the dual short swords to back them up.
Then her voice shifts into something more serious than he's ever heard from her.
"Eskil would never hurt you."
Indrie is quiet. Dagny's arm is warm around his shoulders and her voice is steady and she is not done.
"He is many things," she says. "Some of them frustrating and some of them infuriating.
" She pauses, searching for the right words in his language, and settles on: "He is stubborn, and sometimes made of stone.
He speaks when he should listen and he acts when he should wait and he has the emotional grace of a man who was raised by soldiers, which he was. "
Despite everything, despite the tightness in his chest and the burn behind his eyes, the corner of Indrie's mouth twitches.
"But cruel is not one of them." She squeezes his shoulder. "Not to those under his protection. And you, Indrie, are under his protection. Whether you know it or not."
Indrie leans into her shoulder and lets himself be held and doesn't say anything for a long while.
The ship rocks gently beneath them. The hold is dim and cool and quiet, a pocket of stillness in the middle of the sea.
Dagny doesn't rush him. She sits with him, her arm around him, her presence steady and grounding, and she hums something under her breath, a melody he doesn't recognize, slow and tuneless, the kind of thing someone does without thinking when they're comforting someone they care about.
He thinks about what she said. He turns it over, examining it from every angle, looking for the thing that doesn't fit.
Eskil would never hurt him. It should be impossible to believe.
It contradicts everything he knows, everything he's learned, every lesson his body has absorbed about what kings do and who they do it to.
But Dagny isn't lying. He knows her well enough now to know that she wouldn't. She'd tell him a hard truth before she'd offer a comforting lie, because that's who she is, blunt, honest, occasionally tactless, always real.
If she believed Eskil was capable of hurting him, she'd say so.
She'd say so and then she'd put herself between them, swords drawn, and dare the king to get through her.
She means it. And the fact that she means it doesn't make the fear go away, but it puts a crack in its foundation.
He stays leaned against her shoulder until the ache in his chest settles into something manageable.
Then he straightens, wipes his eyes with the back of his hand, not tears, not quite, but close, and goes back to sorting herbs.
Dagny helps. She doesn't know what any of them are, but she can follow his system, and they work together in companionable quiet until the hold is organized and the losses are catalogued.
Later, when the light through the hatch has shifted from morning gold to afternoon white, Gunnar gives Indrie a plate of food to take to the king.
Indrie looks at the plate, stew, bread, and an orange that Gunnar has placed there with a pointed look in Indrie's direction, and then looks Gunnar in the eye and begs him to do it instead.
The word begs is not an exaggeration. Indrie can hear it in his own voice, the desperation, the plea beneath the politeness.
He is not above begging. He spent five years begging, for meals and mercy and one more night without being summoned, and the skill hasn't left him even if the context has changed.
Gunnar looks at him.
It's a knowing look. The kind that sees through the surface-level request to the roiling mess beneath it and decides, with forty years of reading people as carefully as he reads recipes, that the surface-level request is not the one that's going to be honored.
He places the plate in Indrie's hands. The ceramic is warm against his palms. The stew steams. The bread is fresh, the crust golden, and the orange sits beside it with the quiet judgment of something that knows exactly what it's doing there.
"You need to make peace with your demons," Gunnar tells him.
The words are in Indrie's language, spoken carefully, each one placed with deliberate precision, clearly practiced. Indrie stares at him. Gunnar stares back, immovable, inarguable, a mountain in an apron.
Indrie swallows his nerves. He adjusts his grip on the plate. He turns toward the corridor that leads to the captain's quarters and takes the first step.
His feet don't want to cooperate. Each step is a negotiation between his body, which wants to turn and flee, and his mind, which has been told by two people he trusts that the man at the end of this corridor is not the monster his instincts insist he is.
The corridor is short. It has never felt longer.
He reaches the door. He stands there. The plate is warm in his hands and the door is closed and behind it is a man who held him through a storm and told him I do not own you and left with anger in his spine and Indrie doesn't know which version he's about to face.
He adjusts the collar of Eskil's shirt where it's slipped off his shoulder. He straightens his back. He takes a breath.
He knocks.