12. Chapter 12
The wind shifts in the late afternoon and Eskil can smell the storm long before the clouds darken the horizon.
It's a particular smell, ozone and brine and something metallic, the air itself sharpened, and he's been at sea long enough that his body registers it before his mind does.
The hairs on his forearms rise. The back of his neck prickles.
He looks to the southwest and the sky is still clear there, pale blue fading to white at the waterline, but to the north the clouds are building.
Stacking. Darkening from grey to charcoal to the deep, bruised purple that means the sea is about to remind everyone on it who's in charge.
He begins issuing orders.
"Batten the forward hold. Secure the deck cargo, all of it, ropes and netting. I don't want a single crate loose when this hits. Someone get the spare canvas over the hatch openings. Move."
His crew responds. They've done this before, not this specific storm, but storms that carry the same weight, and the routine is in their muscles, drilled deep enough that thought isn't required.
The ship shifts from the easy rhythm of a calm afternoon into the controlled urgency of preparation, bodies moving in practiced patterns, voices calling out confirmations as each task is completed.
The mainsail is reefed, drawn down and secured to reduce the wind's grip.
The deck cargo, crates and barrels lashed along the railings, is double-bound with fresh rope and netting.
The hatch covers are battened and weighted.
Below, Eskil can hear the muffled thud of the hold being secured, crates repositioned, loose items stowed.
He stays at the helm and watches his crew work and watches Indrie work alongside them without being asked.
The healer is on the main deck, sleeves rolled to his elbows, hauling rope with Ermin.
Someone, Dagny probably, has shown him the storm preparation routine and he's executing it with the focused efficiency Eskil has come to expect from him.
He doesn't fumble. Doesn't hesitate. Doesn't look around for instruction.
He sees what needs doing and he does it, and when Ermin struggles with a knot on a barrel lashing, Indrie drops to his knees beside him and works the rope with his healer's fingers until the knot holds.
What strikes Eskil now is not how Indrie looks. He's already catalogued that, already committed it to the part of his mind he can't seem to lock shut, and dwelling on it further serves no purpose except to make him grip the wheel harder. What strikes him now is how Indrie moves.
Two weeks ago, the healer moved through this ship with careful, calculated stillness, navigating a room full of traps.
Every step measured. Every gesture contained.
His body held tight and small, shoulders drawn in, occupying less space to make himself less of a target.
He'd flinched at proximity, stiffened at sudden movement, arranged himself around the crew's patterns with a precision that said his survival depended on never being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
That man is still in there. Eskil can see traces of him in how Indrie keeps his back to the railing rather than the open deck, in how his head turns toward any voice raised above conversational volume.
But the man on the deck right now is moving with purpose rather than caution.
His strides are longer, his posture open, and when Ermin calls to him from across the deck, Indrie turns toward the sound instead of flinching from it.
He's not navigating a room full of traps anymore.
He's navigating a ship he's starting to understand, surrounded by people he's starting to trust, and the difference is visible in every line of his body.
He moves between crewmates without shrinking from the contact.
Passes behind Dagny and she hands him a length of rope without looking, and he takes it without breaking stride, and the exchange is so seamless, so natural, that Eskil has to remind himself these two people did not know each other three weeks ago.
He crouches beside the supply crates and works the lashing with Ermin, their shoulders nearly touching, and neither of them tenses at the proximity.
When one of the larger deckhands, a man named Erik who is twice Indrie's width, steps past him in the narrow space between the barrels, Indrie shifts to make room without the full-body recoil that would have seized him days ago.
He moves. Erik moves. The work continues.
There's an ease to him that is new and fragile and utterly disarming, and Eskil recognizes it for what it is because he's seen it before, in horses that have been broken badly and gentled back, in soldiers who've come home from campaigns that nearly unmade them.
It's the first tentative unfurling of a creature that has been clenched against pain for so long it had forgotten that unclenching was an option.
It will retreat at the first sign of danger.
It will snap shut again if the world gives it reason to.
But for right now, in this moment, on this deck, the healer is open.
Moving freely. Working beside people who have given him no cause to be afraid.
Gunnar's cooking, for all its sins, is doing its job, and if Eskil told the cook that, Gunnar would be unbearable, so he doesn't.
Below on the deck, Indrie finishes the barrel lashing and stands, pushing his hair out of his face with the back of his wrist. The wind has picked up, the first advance scouts of the storm gusting across the deck in unpredictable bursts, and it catches his hair and throws it across his eyes, and he pushes it back again with an expression of mild irritation that is so ordinary, so human, so far removed from the terrified young man clutching a satchel in Armond's chambers, that something in Eskil's chest clenches.
Bohdi appears at his side.
Eskil doesn't look at him. He keeps his eyes on the deck, on the crew, on the preparations.
He can feel Bohdi's gaze, though. Can feel it track from Eskil's face to the deck below, following the same line of sight to the slender figure currently helping Ermin wrestle a tarpaulin over a stack of supply crates.
Bohdi looks at Eskil. Raises his eyebrows. Says nothing.
He doesn't need to. The eyebrows say everything.
They say: I see what you're looking at. They say: I see how you're looking at it.
They say: You're standing at the helm of your ship in the hours before a storm watching a man tie down barrels with an expression on your face that I have never seen in thirty years of knowing you, and if you think I'm not going to have an opinion about that, you are delusional.
"The next time you give me that look," Eskil tells him, without looking away from the deck below, "you're going over the railing."
Bohdi's expression doesn't change. "I don't know what you're talking about, my lord."
"The eyebrows, Bohdi."
"These are my normal eyebrows. I can't help their position. It's genetic."
Eskil finally turns his head and fixes his second-in-command with a look that should, by all rights, strip flesh from bone. Bohdi meets it with serene indifference, having weathered that look a thousand times and never once lost a layer of skin.
Then Bohdi claps him on the shoulder, a firm, grounding pressure that lingers a beat longer than casual, and says nothing, and turns, and goes to oversee the lower hold.
Eskil stays at the helm.
He is not watching Indrie. He is watching the storm.
He's watching the clouds advance across the northern sky, eating the blue ahead of them, the leading edge a roiling wall of dark grey that's moving faster than he'd like.
He's watching the sea change beneath it, the surface losing its gloss, the swells lengthening, the water shifting from deep blue to the flat, metallic grey that means the pressure is dropping.
He's watching the wind indicators at the masthead, the pennants snapping and shifting as the gusts increase in frequency and force.
He is watching the storm. Specifically the storm. Only the storm.
He tells himself this. He tells himself this while his eyes drift, without his permission, back to the main deck where Indrie is now helping Dagny secure the last of the spare rigging.
The wind catches Indrie's hair again and this time he doesn't bother pushing it back, just works through it, fingers moving deftly despite the hair whipping across his face, and Eskil thinks, absurdly, that someone should give the man a tie for his hair before the storm hits.
He tells himself this until the clouds swallow the last of the light and the sea begins to heave.
The transition is faster than he expected.
One moment the horizon is visible, a thin line of amber where the setting sun is making its last stand against the advancing front, and the next the clouds close over it and the world goes dark.
Not the gradual dark of evening, but the sudden, oppressive dark of a sky that has decided to press down, to smother, to reduce the world to the ship and the sea and nothing else.
The first real gust hits the ship broadside and she heels, hard, the deck tilting to starboard with a groan that runs through the timbers. Eskil braces at the helm, feet spread, hands locked on the wheel, and feels the resistance in the rudder as the sea begins to push.
"All hands!" he shouts, and his voice carries across the deck and down the hatches and into the belly of the ship where his crew is already moving, already coming, already answering the call of the storm.
This is going to be a bad one. He can feel it in the wheel, in the way the ship fights him, in the weight of the wind and the height of the swells and the speed at which the temperature is dropping. He sets his jaw, adjusts the heading to take the waves at an angle rather than broadside, and holds.
Below him, the crew emerges onto the deck, and among them, visible even in the growing dark, even in the chaos, Indrie, wide-eyed but moving, ready.
Eskil turns his face into the wind and prepares.