9. Chapter 9
Indrie smells smoke in his sleep.
It's faint at first, woven into a dream he won't remember, something about the herb garden in Kalkoa, the purple sage, a warmth that doesn't belong, and then it sharpens, acrid and real, and his eyes snap open in the dark.
He's out of his bunk immediately. His feet hit the floor and the wood is warm beneath them, warmer than it should be, and the air in the sleeping quarters has a haze to it that catches the faint glow of the single lamp left burning at the end of the corridor.
It's not thick yet. Not choking. But it's there, a grey veil that shouldn't exist on a ship in the middle of the night, and the smell beneath it is unmistakable.
Not cooking smoke. Not lamp oil. Something deeper, something feeding on wood and tar and moving fast.
Indrie crosses to Ermin's bunk in two strides and shakes him awake. Ermin comes up swinging, disoriented, and Indrie grabs his arm and says, as clearly as he can manage with his heart already slamming against his ribs, "Fire."
The word works. Ermin's eyes go wide and then he's moving, rolling out of his bunk and grabbing his boots, and the two of them rush toward the lower level.
The hold is worse. The haze here is thicker, heavier, rolling along the ceiling with a life of its own, and Indrie can see the glow before he sees the flames, a flickering orange light coming from the aft section where the dry stores and spare canvas are kept.
When they round the corner, the fire is there.
It's taken hold of a stack of crates and is climbing the canvas draped over them, hungry and bright, the flames licking upward toward the overhead beams with a speed that makes Indrie's stomach drop.
Ermin shouts the alarm. His voice is enormous for his frame, cutting through the lower levels, sharp and piercing, and Indrie hears it echoed above, voices relaying the call, boots hitting the deck, the ship lurching into wakefulness around them.
They don't wait. Indrie grabs a blanket from a nearby storage shelf and throws it over the nearest burning crate, smothering the flames beneath it while Ermin kicks a bucket into position and begins hauling water from the emergency barrel at the base of the ladder.
The water hisses when it hits the fire, steam joining the smoke, and for a long, terrible moment the flames don't seem to care.
They rear up around the blanket, find new fuel in the crate beside it, and Indrie feels the heat against his face, blistering and close.
Others arrive. Men and women pouring down the ladder, some half-dressed, some still pulling on boots, all of them moving with the practiced urgency of people who understand what fire means on a ship at sea.
There is nowhere to go. There is no shore to swim to.
If the fire reaches the hull or the mast supports, they are all dead.
They form a chain. Bucket after bucket passed from hand to hand, from the water barrels to the fire line, Indrie in the thick of it because he can't bring himself to stand back and watch.
The smoke is in his lungs now, heavy and harsh, and his eyes are streaming and every breath is a fight but he doesn't stop.
He throws water, stamps out embers that have scattered across the floor, uses his bare hands to beat out a flame that's caught on a coil of rope near the wall.
The pain is distant, secondary, filed away for later when his body can afford to process it.
For a long, horrible moment, Indrie thinks this is how they're going to die.
On a ship, on fire, in the middle of the ocean, with nowhere to run and nothing beneath them but black water and nothing above them but smoke-choked sky.
The thought is calm, almost clinical, his body already committed to action and his mind just along for the observation.
He keeps passing buckets. He keeps stamping embers. He keeps moving.
And then, gradually, the fire begins to lose.
The flames shrink. The water overwhelms what the fire has claimed, and the embers hiss and die, and the smoke thins enough that Indrie can see the far wall of the hold again.
The canvas is destroyed. Several crates are charred ruins.
The overhead beams are blackened but intact, the wood too thick and too damp from the sea air to have caught fully.
There are char marks etched into the floor and walls, dark and raw, and the air reeks of burnt tar and scorched grain, but they're alive. The ship is still afloat.
The chain breaks apart. Men lean against walls, coughing, wiping their faces.
Someone laughs, the strained, disbelieving laugh of barely surviving, and it spreads, a thin ripple of relief that moves through the group.
There are murmurs about how it could have happened.
A lamp left unattended. Someone warming tea below deck and forgetting the flame.
A candle too close to the stores. Theories traded in low voices, none of them satisfying, all of them underscored by the unspoken understanding that they were lucky.
The men begin to disperse, heading back to their bunks or up to the deck for air.
Indrie stays. He's bent over, hands on his knees, trying to cough the smoke out of his lungs, and his palms are singing with pain where he'd beaten out the flames barehanded.
He'll need to treat those. Salve and bandages.
Later. In a moment. When the world stops tilting.
He straightens and blinks through the residual haze, taking stock of the damage. The destroyed crates, the ruined canvas, the blackened beams. His eyes travel across the hold, cataloguing, and then land on something that doesn't fit.
At the back of the hold, near the aft wall, there's a crate that's askew.
It's larger than the others, a storage chest used for bulk dry goods, and it's been pushed out from its position against the wall.
Indrie knows it wasn't like that before.
He's been in this hold every day for the past week, sorting through stores for Gunnar and gathering supplies for his medical work, and that crate was flush against the wall the last time he was here.
It's been moved. Recently. The scratch marks on the floor where it was dragged are fresh, pale lines in the soot-darkened wood.
Indrie glances behind him. The last of the crew members are disappearing up the ladder, their voices fading. He's alone in the hold, or thinks he is, and curiosity, or an impulse less wise than curiosity, one that doesn't know when to leave well enough alone, pulls him toward the crate.
He picks his way across the debris, stepping over charred timber and sodden canvas, and reaches the crate.
It's large enough for a person to fit inside, and the lid is slightly ajar, propped up at one corner, closed in a hurry.
There's a smell coming from it that isn't smoke. Something organic, something human.
Indrie reaches out and lifts the lid.
A pair of eyes stare back at him.
He jerks away, a full-body recoil, satchel swinging, his back hitting the wall behind him, but the man inside the crate is faster. He surges forward out of the chest, wild-eyed and desperate, and tackles Indrie to the floor before Indrie can draw enough breath to do more than gasp.
Indrie screams.
The sound tears out of him, high and sharp and raw, and then there are hands around his neck and the sound stops.
The man is on top of him, knees pinning his hips, weight crushing the air from his chest, and his hands are locked around Indrie's throat with a grip that has nothing measured or careful about it.
This is not restraint. This is killing. The fingers dig in, finding the arteries, compressing the windpipe, and the pressure is immediate and absolute and Indrie cannot breathe.
The man's eyes are intense. Crazed. They're wide and bloodshot and fixed on Indrie's face with an unfocused intensity, operating beyond reason, beyond fear, in the animal space where survival overrides everything else.
Indrie recognizes his clothes, rough-spun, mud-colored, the same drab fabric the laborers and lower servants wore in Kalkoa, and realizes, in the shrinking space between one heartbeat and the next, that this man is a stowaway.
He must have boarded before they set sail, hidden himself in the hold, and stayed there, for days, for over a week, in a crate, surviving on whatever he could reach in the dark.
The fire. The crate, moved from its position. The fire was his. Whether intentional or accidental, a lamp, a candle, something to keep warm in the cold belly of the ship, it doesn't matter. What matters is the hands around Indrie's throat and the fact that his vision is starting to spot.
Indrie fights. He is not trained, not strong, not built for this, but his body fights anyway because the alternative is dying on the floor of a cargo hold with a stranger's hands around his neck.
He scrambles against the grip at his throat, fingers clawing at the man's wrists, trying to break the hold, trying to find leverage.
He kicks his legs at the body pressing him into the floor, heels scrabbling against the wet wood, but this man is larger than him and much stronger and Indrie can't move him.
The weight on his chest is immovable and the hands on his throat are iron and the spots in his vision are growing, spreading, eating the edges of the world.
He can't breathe. He tries, his mouth is open, his chest is heaving, his lungs are screaming for air that isn't coming, and the man's grip tightens and Indrie's hands start to go weak against the wrists they're clawing at and this is how he dies.
Not on the cold stone of Armond's castle.
Not in the fire. Not in the sea. Here, in the dark, at the hands of a stranger from a kingdom that never wanted him either.
He sees a flash of red hair.