Chapter 14
Eskil sees Indrie's face.
It's a flash, a fraction of a second lit by lightning, frozen in white, and in that fraction he sees everything.
The wide dark eyes. The mouth open on a sound the storm swallows.
The hand reaching for something that isn't there.
The terror, absolute and total, of knowing he's going to die and not having time to be anything but afraid.
And then the healer disappears over the side and into the black water and the image burns itself into Eskil's retinas.
He doesn't hesitate.
His hands leave the wheel. His boots are moving before his mind has finished processing what his eyes just saw, and the sequence of what happens next is not a decision, it's a reflex, a chain of actions executed by a body that has already committed to a course his brain hasn't approved.
He shucks his boots as he runs. Left foot, right foot, kicked free without breaking stride, the leather tumbling across the wet deck behind him.
His belt goes next, fingers finding the buckle, wrenching it open, the weight of his sword and scabbard dropping to the planks with a clatter he doesn't hear over the storm.
A trail of him, shed as he goes, everything that will drag him down in the water stripped away in the span of seconds.
Someone shouts his name. Bohdi, probably. The voice is distant, irrelevant, drowned by the wind and the singular focus that has narrowed Eskil's world to a point the size of a broken railing and the dark water beyond it.
He reaches the gap where the railing was and doesn't pause. Doesn't look. Doesn't calculate the height or the temperature or the odds. He plants his foot on the splintered edge of the remaining wood and dives.
The fall is longer than he expects. Long enough for the wind to tear at his shirt. Long enough for the rain to hit his face at a new angle. Long enough for a single, crystalline thought to form in the space between the ship and the sea: if he's already gone, I'm not coming back up either.
He hits the water.
The cold is a violence. It slams into every nerve in his body simultaneously, a full-system shock that would lock a lesser man's muscles and send him straight to the bottom.
Eskil has swum in northern waters since he was a boy, has broken ice with his fists to bathe in winter rivers, has trained in the frigid harbors of Valen where the water can stop a heart if you're not prepared for it, and even so, the cold of the open ocean in a storm is something else entirely.
It's not cold. It's hostile. The water doesn't want him here and it makes that clear immediately, pressing against his chest, stealing the warmth from his skin, dragging at his clothes with fingers that are patient and strong and have all the time in the world.
He surfaces. Gasps. The air is barely better than the water, rain and spray and wind that stings his face raw, and his lungs take it and his body responds, years of training overriding the shock, forcing his muscles to move.
He can see nothing.
The ship is, somewhere. Behind him, he thinks, but the waves are high enough to block it from view and the darkness is total between lightning strikes.
The sea around him is a churning, heaving chaos of black water and white foam, and somewhere in it, somewhere below or beside or already beyond reach, Indrie is drowning.
Eskil dives.
Below the surface the world is silent and black.
His eyes are open and they see nothing. His hands sweep through the water, reaching, grasping, finding nothing but cold and dark and the current that's trying to pull him sideways.
He kicks deeper. The pressure builds against his ears.
His lungs, already taxed from the impact, begin their protest early.
He ignores them. He sweeps his arms wider, changes direction, dives again.
Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.
He surfaces, drags in air, and dives again. And again. Each time the cold takes more from him. Each time his muscles respond a fraction slower. Each time the dark feels heavier, more final, more certain that it's already won.
He refuses to admit defeat.
He will not surface and tread water and scan the waves and accept that the sea has taken what it wants.
He will not climb back aboard his ship and stand at the helm and carry the image of Indrie's terrified face for the rest of his life.
He will not go back to Valen and explain to his brother that he found a healer with merciful hands and midnight eyes and he let the ocean have him because the waves were too high and the water was too cold and the dark was too deep.
He finds the cluster of fallen crates.
His hand connects with wood, a sharp edge, a corner, the unmistakable shape of a crate tumbling slowly through the water, and he follows it down.
The crates are still connected by the netting, a tangle of rope and wood sinking into the deep, and Eskil dives below them, into the darker dark beneath, hands outstretched, reaching with everything he has left.
His lungs are beyond protest now. They're in revolt, the pressure in his chest a living thing that's trying to claw its way up his throat and force his mouth open.
His vision, useless as it is in the blackness, is narrowing at the edges.
He has seconds. Less than seconds. He has the space between one heartbeat and the next and then the sea will take him too.
His hand closes around unmistakable fabric.
Thin. Wet. Wrapped around a body that isn't moving.
Eskil clenches his fists in it and wrenches.
He pulls with everything, arms, shoulders, back, the core strength of a life spent hauling lines and swinging steel, and the body comes free from whatever held it.
The netting, the crates, the dark. He drags it upward, kicking for the surface with legs that are going numb, and the weight in his arms is slight, too light, terrifyingly still.
He breaks the surface.
The sound of gasping fills his ears.
Not his own, his own lungs are screaming but his attention is fixed entirely on the body in his arms and the sound it's making, a raw, wretched, beautiful sound: Indrie, coughing water, choking on air, alive.
Alive. The gasping is weak and strangled and accompanied by retching as Indrie's body expels the seawater it's swallowed, but it's breathing, it's a body that is choosing air over water, life over surrender, and the relief that crashes through Eskil is more violent than any wave.
Indrie clings to him. Hands that were limp seconds ago find Eskil's shirt and fist in the fabric with a grip that's pure instinct, the blind, desperate hold of a drowning creature that has found something solid and will not let go.
His face presses against Eskil's chest, his body convulsing with coughs, and Eskil can feel him shaking, not just trembling, shaking, his entire frame wracked with the cold and the shock and the aftermath of however many seconds he spent below the surface not breathing.
Eskil's grip makes the clinging unnecessary, but he doesn't say so. He locks one arm around Indrie's waist, pulling him flush against his body, and the feeling of the younger man against him, small and cold and trembling and alive, is something he will carry in his chest for the rest of his life.
He's not letting go.
The sea can take them both or it can take nothing.
Those are the options. Those are the only options.
Eskil has made his choice and the water can fight him for it and the water will lose because he has never in his life let go of something he was determined to hold, and he is determined now with a ferocity that eclipses everything, the cold, the exhaustion, the storm that's still raging above them, the waves that keep crashing over their heads and forcing them under.
He keeps Indrie's head above the waves. It's a battle, the swells are enormous, black walls of water that crest and break and try to tear them apart, and Eskil fights each one, turning his body to take the impact, using his mass to shield Indrie from the worst of it.
Water crashes over his back, his head, fills his eyes and ears and mouth, and he spits it out and tightens his arm and keeps going.
The ship. He needs the ship.
He can see it now, or rather, he can see the lights, dim smears of yellow that appear and disappear behind the swells, agonizingly far away.
The vessel is turning. Slowly, laboriously, fighting the storm and the current to come about, and Eskil can see a flash of red hair at the helm and thanks the gods for Bohdi.
His second-in-command has taken the wheel and is bringing the ship around, and it's the most beautiful thing Eskil has ever seen that isn't currently pressed against his chest.
The turn takes forever. The ship is fighting the sea for every degree, the hull groaning, the rigging screaming, and Eskil treads water with one arm and holds Indrie with the other and waits.
The cold is in his bones now, deep and settled, and his free arm is going numb, the muscles sluggish, and each kick takes more effort than the last. But the ship is coming. It's coming.
A rope ladder rolls off the side.
It hits the water twenty feet away and Eskil makes for it with the last reserves he has.
One arm. One arm and two legs that are barely functioning and a current that's doing its best to push him in every direction except the right one.
He swims, if what he's doing can be called swimming, it's more a controlled lunge repeated over and over, and the ladder gets closer in increments that feel like miles.
He reaches it. His hand closes around the bottom rung and the relief is so acute it's painful. He hangs there for a moment, just a moment, his forehead pressed against the rope, his arm locked around Indrie, and breathes.
Then he hauls Indrie up.