Chapter 20
Eskil is at his desk going over their heading and trying not to think about the broken look on Indrie's face.
He's failing. The charts are spread before him, familiar coordinates and current lines and wind patterns he could navigate in his sleep, and none of it is registering because every time he looks at the parchment he sees a different piece of paper, a drawing, crude and smudged, that he'd watched Indrie fold carefully and slip into his pocket before leaving the helm.
Before his face collapsed into something Eskil doesn't have a word for and he turned and walked away.
He doesn't understand what he said.
He knows it was wrong. The evidence is irrefutable, how Indrie's entire body had changed in the space between one breath and the next, the warmth draining from his expression, the careful hope in his eyes extinguishing so completely it was as though it had never been there.
Eskil has seen men take blows to the gut that produced less visible impact than whatever his words did to Indrie on that deck.
But he doesn't understand how it was wrong.
Indrie had asked if he would belong to Eskil. And Eskil had said no. You'll never belong to me, Indrie. Six words. He'd meant them as a liberation, as the final, definitive answer to the question that has been between them since the beginning: you are free.
And Indrie's face had collapsed.
Eskil replays the conversation. Replays it again. He picks apart each word, each expression, each shift in Indrie's posture, looking for the moment it went wrong, and he keeps arriving at the same point: if I stay, do I belong to you?
He'd heard belong to and translated it as ownership. As possession. As the dynamic Indrie was raised in and Eskil is trying to dismantle. The answer had been obvious, immediate, delivered with the conviction of a man who means exactly what he says: no.
But Indrie's reaction makes no sense if that's what he was asking.
It makes no sense for Indrie to want to be a slave still.
The boy has spent two and a half weeks watching his bruises fade and his body strengthen and his world expand from a closet-sized room to an ocean.
He's laughed with Dagny, learned from Gunnar, taught Ermin, braided ropes and named stars and argued about stew.
He's not pining for his cage. He's not asking to be put back in chains.
And Eskil knows, somehow, with the inarticulate certainty of a man who reads people better than he reads himself, that he's been misunderstood.
That what he tried to say did not come across.
That there was a meaning in Indrie's words that Eskil failed to catch, and his answer, however correct it was to the question he thought he was being asked, was catastrophically wrong for the question Indrie was actually asking.
But he can't see it. The language barrier that has been between them since the beginning is a wall he can't see over, and whatever Indrie meant by belong, whatever shade of meaning the word carries in his tongue that Eskil's tongue doesn't have, it's on the other side of that wall and Eskil is standing here with his forehead against the stone and his fists at his sides and no way through.
He stares at the charts and the question circles him without resolution.
What were you asking me?
The frustration is a living thing in his chest, coiled and hot, and it's not directed at Indrie, it's directed at himself, at his own limitations, at the fact that he can command a ship through a storm and conquer a kingdom in a morning but he cannot have a simple conversation with a man who makes his pulse quicken without destroying something fragile in the process.
He pushes back from the desk and drops his head into his hands. The heels of his palms dig into his eye sockets and the darkness behind his closed lids offers no counsel and no reprieve.
Bohdi enters and drops into a chair without invitation, which is his custom.
The chair creaks under his weight and his boots hit the desk a moment later and Eskil doesn't look up from behind his hands because if he looks at Bohdi right now, Bohdi will see what's in his face, and then there will be a conversation Eskil is not prepared to have.
Bohdi is quiet for a moment. Which is not his custom.
The silence stretches. Eskil can feel his second-in-command watching him, can feel the weight of that perceptive, patient attention even through the barrier of his own hands.
Bohdi is reading him. Bohdi is always reading him, translating the set of his shoulders and the tension in his jaw and the particular quality of his silence into a diagnosis that is invariably, infuriatingly accurate.
"Three days out, maybe," Bohdi says, finally, "if sailing is smooth. And then we arrive and you have to explain to your brother why there's a healer in Valen that won't look at you."
Eskil drops his hands. He looks at Bohdi and doesn't bother to hide the irritation on his face. He never does. "This is not a good time to discuss this, Bohdi."
Bohdi gives him a flat look. The kind that has no humor in it, no warmth, just the clear-eyed assessment of a man who has run out of patience for dancing around a subject.
"When is a better time, my lord? When he's standing on the shoreline, unsure of his place among us, because you can't decide if you want him or not? "
Eskil grits his teeth so hard his jaw aches. "It's not that simple. And it's not a matter of wanting or not wanting."
"Isn't it?"
"No." He picks up a piece of charcoal and turns it in his fingers, needing something to do with his hands that isn't putting a fist through the desk. "He still thinks I own him. Anything I feel or act on is tainted by that dynamic. I cannot pursue a man who believes he has no choice but to comply."
The words come out measured, rational, the carefully constructed argument of a man who has been having this debate with himself for weeks.
They are sound. They are reasonable. They are the correct position for a king to take regarding someone in his care who comes from a background of slavery and abuse.
"I thought you told him he was free. You said he understood." Bohdi's brow is furrowed in confusion.
"He asked me tonight if he would belong to me if he stays in Valen."
"And you said?"
"I said no." Eskil's hand tightens on the charcoal until it threatens to snap. "I told him he would never belong to me. And his face just... broke."
Bohdi is quiet, his expression thoughtful. He uncrosses his arms and leans forward, elbows on his knees, and studies Eskil with the careful attention of a man working through something.
"Seems awfully different than his reaction last night when you told him the exact same thing." Bohdi taps his nose, the familiar gesture, and his brow furrows. "That doesn't make sense."
"I know it doesn't make sense, Bohdi. That's what I'm telling you.
" Eskil drops the charcoal on the desk. "He meant something that I didn't understand, and my answer was wrong for whatever he was actually asking, and I can't figure out what it was because every time I try, the language gets in the way. "
Bohdi considers this and then says, with more seriousness than Eskil expects from him, "I understand.
And I agree. The timing is wrong. You're right about the power dynamic and you're right that pursuing him while he's confused about his station would be unwise.
" He pauses. "But I think you need to talk to him again. Before we make land."
"I tried, Bohdi—"
"Then try again. Differently." Bohdi meets his eyes. "Because whatever is between you two, you can't fix it by avoiding it, and he can't fix it alone. He doesn't have the words and he doesn't have the power. You have both. Use them."
Eskil stares back. The rebuttal forming on his tongue dies at the conviction in Bohdi's eyes.
Bohdi isn't done. He leans back in his chair, but the casualness is gone. His voice is quiet, stripped of its usual humor, and the words carry a weight that tells Eskil his second-in-command has been sitting on this for a while.
"You have not seen how Indrie looks at you when you turn away."
Eskil stares at him.
"I have," Bohdi continues. "Dagny has. Gunnar has.
Half the crew has, because it's not subtle, Eskil.
He watches you constantly, compulsively, as though you're the force his whole world arranges itself around.
And when you look back, he drops his eyes, every time, because he's been taught that wanting something is the fastest way to have it taken from you. "
The words land one after another, each one finding a space between Eskil's ribs that he didn't know was unguarded.
"The fear in Indrie's eyes is not of you," Bohdi says. "It's of what he feels for you."
The cabin is very quiet.
The lamp swings gently with the ship's roll.
The charts rustle on the desk. The water whispers against the hull.
And Eskil sits in his chair and stares at the broken charcoal and his useless maps and tries to fit Bohdi's words against the conversation on the deck and can't quite make the pieces connect.
He knows there's something there. He can feel it, the shape of an understanding just beyond his reach, but the picture won't resolve.
Indrie asked to belong to him, and Eskil said no, and the word belong is sitting between them in two languages and meaning two different things and Eskil still can't see the second meaning clearly enough to name it.
But he can feel its outline. And the outline is enough to know that he needs to find Indrie and try again.
He is quiet for a long time.
"Check the water stores," he says, finally.
Bohdi, for once, doesn't push. He looks at Eskil with an expression that is not pity and not judgment but something in the vicinity of both, tempered by a compassion that Bohdi has always possessed and Eskil has always relied on even when he couldn't acknowledge it.
He nods. He stands. He heads for the door, and he doesn't add a parting remark or a pointed observation or a grin. He just leaves.
The door clicks shut.
Eskil sits alone in his cabin. The charts are spread before him. The heading is plotted. Three days to Valen, maybe less if the wind holds.
He doesn't have the right words. He doesn't have any words, not in Indrie's language, not in his own, nothing that bridges the gap between what he said and what he meant and what Indrie heard.
And going to find Indrie now, tonight, while the wound is fresh and Eskil still can't name what he got wrong, is as liable to make things worse as better.
He knows himself. He knows his temper and his tongue and how both fail him when the stakes are highest. Cornering a frightened man in his bunk to fumble through another conversation he doesn't have the vocabulary for is not reaching out.
It's proving that Eskil's needs take priority over Indrie's, and that is exactly the dynamic he's trying to dismantle.
But he can't let it sit, either. He can't let the silence between them harden into something permanent, can't let the wall Indrie put back up become too thick to breach, can't let the boy spend night after night in his bunk thinking that the man who pulled him from the ocean doesn't want him near.
He sits with that thought. Turns it over the way he'd turn a chart, looking for the angle he's been missing.
Bohdi's voice, steady and sure: he's been taught that wanting something is the fastest way to have it taken from you.
And Indrie, on the deck, in the sunset, with his hands twisting and his voice assembled from fragments: if I stay, do I belong to you?
Not: will I be your slave. Not: will you own me. Indrie had already heard those answers. Eskil had given them in the cabin that morning, had said you are free with the finality of a closed door, and Indrie had understood. He'd taken the drawing and folded it into his pocket and understood.
So why ask again?
Unless he wasn't asking again. Unless belong meant something different the second time. Unless the word had changed shape between the morning and the evening, shed its chains and its history and become something Indrie chose rather than something done to him.
Eskil's hand stills on the charcoal.
Were you asking if I wanted you?