Chapter 19
Indrie tries to reconcile what Eskil has told him.
He sits on his bunk with his knees drawn to his chest and the drawing in his hands, the parchment slightly crumpled from where it slid across the desk during his graceless exit from the king's lap, a memory that sends a fresh wave of heat across his face every time it surfaces, and he stares at the charcoal shapes and tries to understand what they mean.
Not what they depict. He understood that immediately, the moment his eyes found the page.
The coastline, the mountains, the settlement.
The circle of crude figures with one smaller one in the center.
He didn't need labels or explanations or awkward pantomime.
The drawing said what Eskil's words couldn't, in a language that doesn't require translation: this is where you're going.
These are the people who will be around you.
You are in the middle of them, not behind them, not beneath them, not outside the circle looking in.
You are going home.
He understood the picture. It's the implications he can't parse.
That he's free. That Eskil does not own him.
That the transaction in Armond's chambers, the advisor's hand on his arm, the shove, the stumble, the king's boots beneath his knees, was not what Indrie thought it was.
Or rather, it was exactly what Indrie thought it was, but Eskil didn't see it that way.
Eskil saw a beaten man in a dying kingdom and took him out of it, not as property but as a person.
A person worth saving, worth feeding, worth jumping into a storm-black ocean for.
Indrie traces the small figure in the center of the circle with his fingertip. The charcoal smudges under his touch.
He knows exactly how he feels. He feels a warmth in his chest he's never felt before, a brightness, a fullness, something that started as a spark the first time Eskil helped him to his feet in Armond's chambers and has been building ever since, fed by every gentle hand and every careful word and every moment where the king treated him with the weight of mattering.
It grows and it grows and it's growing now, filling the spaces between his ribs, pressing against the inside of his chest until his breathing changes to accommodate it.
And that warmth is directed at Eskil. It's been directed at Eskil since the beginning, since before Indrie had a name for it.
Every interaction, every glance, every moment of proximity has fed it, and the revelations of the past day, the rescue, the bed, the arms around him in the dark, the drawing, the words you are yours spoken with such fierce care, have taken the spark and turned it into something he can no longer contain.
Because Eskil took him from a man who hurt him.
Dove overboard to save his life. Cradled his face gently and looked at him with an anger that was for him, not at him.
Gave him his freedom with a piece of charcoal and a sheet of parchment and the worst drawing Indrie has ever seen, and it is the most precious thing anyone has ever given him, and he is going to keep it until the parchment falls apart in his hands.
And he's been drawn to Eskil since the first day they met, even as the fear festered, because Eskil is magnetic.
He is enormous and scarred and sharp-edged and carries himself with the weight of a crown he never sets down, and he is also the man who untangled netting from Indrie's boot and asked okay?
and pointed at stars and held his hand open and waited.
He is violence and tenderness in the same breath, and Indrie has stopped trying to reconcile the two because they are not contradictions.
They are both him. The sword and the hand that sheathes it.
Indrie gathers his nerves.
It takes a while. He sits on his bunk through the shift from afternoon to evening, the drawing in his hands, and he lets himself feel the warmth and the fear and the wanting, all of it, without trying to push any of it away.
He lets it exist. He lets himself exist inside it.
And when the sun drops low enough that the light through the hatch turns amber and the shadows lengthen and the ship settles into the quiet rhythms of evening, he gathers his courage and he stands up and he goes to find the king.
He finds Eskil at the helm.
The king is alone, Bohdi elsewhere, the nearest crew member the night watch posted at the bow, far enough away that their conversation will be private.
Eskil stands at the wheel with one hand on the spokes and the other resting on the railing, his face turned toward the sunset, and the orange light catches in his hair and along the line of his jaw and the scar across his eye, and Indrie's heart does something painful and complicated and entirely involuntary.
He approaches. His footsteps on the deck are quiet but Eskil hears them and turns his head. His expression when he sees Indrie is carefully neutral, guarded composure, trying very hard not to reveal anything, and Indrie recognizes it because he's been wearing the same expression for two weeks.
"The drawing," Indrie says. "The place you showed me. Valen." He stumbles over the name, unsure of the emphasis. "What is it... what does it look like?"
The question comes out clumsy, half in Eskil's language and half in gestures, his hand waving vaguely at the horizon as though Valen might be hiding just beyond it.
But the drawing has made him curious in a way he hasn't allowed himself to be before.
If this is where he's going, if this is home, then he wants to know about it.
Eskil's expression shifts. The guarded neutrality loosens, just slightly, and when he speaks his voice warms in a way Indrie hasn't heard before.
"Green," Eskil says. "Very green. Forests from the mountains to the coast, so thick you can walk for days and never see the sky.
" His hand leaves the wheel and sweeps wide, painting the landscape in the air between them.
"Rivers, clear, cold. You can see the bottom.
And the mountains..." He trails off, searching, then gestures upward with his fingers splayed.
"Snow. Even in summer. Always snow at the top. "
Indrie catches fragments and fills in the rest from the light in Eskil's eyes.
The responses are longer than he can fully follow, but the meaning comes through.
Green, he gathers, and lush, and loved. Eskil's voice softens when he talks about the rivers.
His hands move faster when he describes the forests.
There is an appreciation for his homeland in every word, a passion Indrie has never seen him direct at anything other than his crew.
It makes him braver. The love in Eskil's voice for his home makes Indrie braver, because it is proof that this man feels things deeply, even if he buries those feelings under scar tissue and sharp edges.
"What grows there?" Indrie asks. "For medicine."
Eskil looks at him. A small smile, barely there, tugs at one corner of his mouth. "I don't know the names. Dagny would know. But there are many herbs in the forests." The smile deepens a fraction. "Our herbalists would be glad to show you."
The words settle into Indrie's chest and glow.
A silence falls between them, not uncomfortable, and Eskil watches him for a long moment before asking, "What is on your mind, Indrie?"
The question is direct. Eskil is always direct. He asks and he waits and his pale eyes are steady on Indrie's face.
Indrie cannot look at him.
He looks at his hands, twisting in front of him, fingers lacing and unlacing in a nervous rhythm he can't seem to stop.
The drawing is folded in his pocket. The warmth in his chest is so bright it's almost unbearable, pressing against his ribs, pressing against his throat, pressing against the words he's been building since he sat on his bunk and decided to come here.
Indrie takes a breath. "You are taking me to Valen."
"Yes."
"And I am free." He says the word carefully, testing its weight. "To do as I wish."
Eskil turns to look at him. The sunset catches the scar across his eye and turns it copper. "Yes."
Indrie pauses. The next words are the ones that matter, the ones that cost him something, the ones he has to force past the part of himself that has spent twenty-two years believing he isn't worth choosing and therefore shouldn't ask to be chosen.
"Even if that means staying with you," he says.
Not with Valen. Not with the crew. Not with Dagny or Gunnar or Ermin or the settlement on the coast. With you. The specificity is intentional. He's not asking about geography. He's not asking about employment.
"Yes," Eskil says. "Whatever you choose."
His voice is even. Controlled. Giving nothing away.
But Indrie, who has spent two weeks learning to read this man through tension and temperature and the small tells the body reveals when the mouth won't, can see the set of his shoulders.
The slight forward lean. The way his hand shifts on the wheel.
Indrie remembers Eskil saying you are yours, and the words had been a gift, a key, a door opened in a wall Indrie didn't know had a door. But that's not what he wants.
He wants to be Eskil's.
Not as a slave. Not as property. Not in the way he was Armond's, a thing to be used and broken and discarded. He wants to be Eskil's with devotion, with choice, with the warm and willing surrender of finding the person you want to belong to and deciding, freely, to stay.
But he doesn't have all of the words in Eskil's language.
The vocabulary Dagny has given him is practical.
She has not taught him the words for I want to be yours.
She has not taught him how to say I have never wanted anything the way I want you.
These are not the words you learn for survival on a ship.
These are the words you learn for survival of a different kind.