Chapter 23
Twenty-Three
They’d left D’Arcy in the forecastle quarters.
He was laid across a pair of upright barrels that supported his trunk only.
The rest of him hung down loosely. All four limbs outstretched to the floor, fingers curled, toes pointed down and trailing.
His head slumped, chin pointed to rafters, his bare neck boneless except for a prominent, vulnerable Adam’s apple. His face—
His face.
D’Arcy looked as though a demon had pulled him up by the chest to a great height and bent him and slashed him and then tossed him down broken.
He didn’t look alive.
Everard made a noise, unknown, and halted, frozen; Vitaliy pushed gently past and blocked his vision with his breadth as Stephan rushed forward—
“Alive,” the surgeon murmured straight away, as though marvelling. Everard sank down, his right hand groping for purchase. He dimly registered that he couldn’t, couldn’t faint—he’d break his wrist—
Bellingham St. Clare appeared and supported him silently, mercifully to the decking, and Everard crumpled like a fawn.
St. Clare said something back over his shoulder to Vitaliy, and was replied; then the redhead put his hand to Everard’s cheek briefly—a shocking intimacy—and stood beside him, rock-steady; though it seemed he, too, was holding his breath.
Vitaliy asked a question of Stephan, then abruptly pivoted.
Withdrawing his axe, he viciously applied it to the decking beneath his feet.
With four mighty overhead swings he cleaved one plank into a neat length the approximate size of a man.
It was well-maintained, old-growth wood, speckled with fresh blood. Vitaliy made short work of it.
Behind him, Stephan’s big dark hands hovered near D’Arcy’s ears, close but not touching.
“He’s alive, matelot,” the surgeon repeated. “He’s alive. Hi, man, you’re alive,” he said softly down to D’Arcy.
But Everard didn’t dare believe it. He looked away, back again, tiny glimpses; he barely restrained himself from putting his hands over his face, though the one hand was the only thing holding him up, anyway, that and St. Clare’s leg.
León’s voice came from the doorway, soft and warning in Spanish.
Vitaliy didn’t pause. He replied in the same language, “Me vale,”—I don’t give a—and kept hacking.
He wedged in the axeblade, levered the handle with two hands and a wide arc, and then the whole plank came cracking free.
León made a sound like a defeated sigh, but he took the other end.
They carried it over to the barrels and slid it beneath the surgeon’s gently lifting hands, beneath D’Arcy’s body, straightening him inch by inch. It was horrid.
St. Clare shuddered and squeezed his hand tight on Everard’s left shoulder. Everard reached up blindly; the man’s fingers were rough and slender, ginger-furred, short-nailed beneath his palm.
He cast his gaze about so as to look anywhere else than at the listless D’Arcy, and noticed D’Arcy’s pistols had been tossed far in the corner, into the dust beneath a trundle cot. They’d just left them there, useless; no one had even bothered to take them.
Everard was sick. He could imagine it too well: D’Arcy’s being overtaken, being disarmed, being tossed down and beaten. The fight had been personal, targeted, planned. Not just a disagreement gone terribly rogue. Something else.
He saw—from the outside of his vision—that D’Arcy was laid totally flat now. He couldn’t tell if this was better or worse. There was a groan that might have been his own or could’ve possibly been D’Arcy’s, except that he looked so very dead.
Vitaliy held the plank at D’Arcy’s head, shoulders bunching from the tight, narrow grip. León took the other end, and Stephan hovered to one side, rearranging limbs, putting back rent pieces of clothing. Despite this, one of D’Arcy’s arms slid and fell, swaying.
“The greatcabin—straight across,” Vitaliy murmured. His backward steps were careful and slow.
Everard scrambled farther out of the way, crablike, and watched them go.
Then they were gone, and he sat there on the floor, still and afraid, staring at the hole Vitaliy had left in the decking.
He didn’t get too close; alarmed crew had gathered beneath the missing plank.
He heard their voices calling up questions.
He imagined their craning necks, their wild eyeballs—Everard didn’t want their eyes on him.
St. Clare was still there, though. First he retrieved D’Arcy’s guns from the corner—checking their flints and primer carefully as he did so—and then he sat, settling them in his lap. He murmured scripture Everard knew was meant to be soothing.
At last Vitaliy came jogging back. He crouched before Everard’s wavering, edge-curled vision.
“Come—he’s alive,” Everard heard him whisper, “awake. Come and see.”
“Awake?” he croaked, lifting his head. “But… dying?”
Vitaliy hesitated. He put his hand on Everard’s knee. “Most likely not, Stephan says.”
“Mentida.” Lies.
“De debò,” Vitaliy responded. Truly.
Everard put out a trembling hand. “What… That isn’t Russian?”
“No.” Vitaliy pulled him up.
“Català,” Everard declared triumphantly.
He let himself be led. St. Clare followed, pistols at his hip. As the three of them passed, Everard heard distant mutterings from the crew.
Vitaliy ignored all of it until they were beyond León’s crossed arms and gleaming, cocked pistol and within the greatcabin. Then he bolted the door and let out a short, relieved breath.
Everard understood. The robin’s-egg walls, white rafters, and six-pane gallery windows seemed practically like sanctuary. The great guns were tied up once more. The torpedoes were long gone. The cot had been lowered, its linens straightened.
Within it lay D’Arcy, decking and all, stripped bare for the surgeon’s examinations still going on.
Everard staggered over.
“Preston.”
And then he wept.