Chapter 22
Eskil is fucking this up and he doesn't know how to be better at it.
He stands at his desk, one hand braced on the surface, the other picking at the plate of food Indrie left.
The stew is cold. The bread is untouched.
The whole plate sits in silent judgment, and Eskil ignores all of it the way he's ignoring the voice in his head that sounds like Bohdi and is telling him he handled that about as well as a man trying to put out a fire with lamp oil.
He can't stop seeing the look on Indrie's face when he fled.
Not the fear, though there was fear, vivid and visceral and so deeply ingrained that it moved Indrie's body before his mind could intervene.
Eskil has seen fear before. He's caused it before, deliberately, on battlefields and in conquered courts, because it is a weapon and he has never hesitated to use one.
He knows its shape. He knows the difference between the fear of facing an enemy and the fear of facing an owner, and what he saw on Indrie's face was the second kind, and it made his stomach turn.
But it wasn't the fear that's eating him.
It was the moment before the fear. The moment when Indrie was apologizing, that practiced, polished, hollow apology, delivered in the flat tone of someone who has been performing contrition since childhood, and Eskil had watched the young man erase himself word by word.
Watched him flatten his own feelings, dismiss his own pain, take responsibility for Eskil's failures and package them up as his own shortcomings, and do it all with the smooth efficiency of someone who has been punished for every honest emotion he's ever shown.
Eskil had said stop because he couldn't bear to hear another word of it. And he'd said come here because the distance between them was a chasm he needed to close, because he needed Indrie closer, needed to look him in the eye and say the things he'd spent the last hour preparing.
And the boy had run.
Because come here in Indrie's world means come here and take what I'm about to give you.
It means stand within arm's reach. It means present yourself for punishment.
Eskil knows this now. Knows it with a sick, crawling certainty, the realization that he has accidentally spoken a language of violence he didn't know he was fluent in.
He picks up a piece of bread and tears it in half without eating it.
Drops both halves back on the plate. Picks up the stew and puts it down again.
He's not hungry. He hasn't been hungry since the deck, since the sunset, since Indrie asked him a question in a voice that was barely a breath and Eskil gave him an answer that shattered something behind his eyes.
His hand, reaching absently for something on the plate, closes around a fruit he doesn't recognize.
It's small, slightly larger than a plum, with a deep red skin that's smooth and waxy under his fingers.
He doesn't remember seeing it before. It's not one of the standard provisions, not something from Gunnar's stores.
It must have come from Armond's larder, part of the miscellaneous foodstuffs they'd taken alongside the treasury goods.
Kalkoan produce. He turns it over in his hand.
The skin dimples under his thumb, yielding, ripe.
He takes a bite.
The flesh is red. Vivid, saturated red, the color of fresh blood, and the juice runs down his chin and onto his fingers immediately.
The taste is surprising. Sweet, intensely so, but layered, with a warmth beneath the sugar that builds on his tongue.
It's unlike anything he's ever eaten. The flavor is complex and deep and almost alive, shifting and intensifying with each bite, the sweetness responding to consumption by becoming more of itself.
He eats the whole thing before he realizes he's done.
He stares at the pit in his palm, small and dark and ridged, and tosses it onto the plate and wipes his fingers on his trousers and turns back to the charts spread across his desk.
The heading needs adjusting. The winds have been favorable, but they're approaching the channel between the eastern islands and the current there is unpredictable, and he needs to decide whether to take the direct route or the longer, safer passage around.
He lasts twenty minutes before something changes.
It starts as warmth. Not the warmth of the cabin or the lingering warmth of the stew he didn't eat, but a different warmth, internal, originating somewhere in his core and spreading outward.
At first he attributes it to the exertion of the past few days, the storm, the ocean rescue, the sleepless nights.
His body is recovering. Heat is a byproduct of recovery. He ignores it.
The warmth intensifies.
It moves from his core to his limbs, flushing along his forearms, his chest, the back of his neck.
His skin prickles. The shirt that was comfortable five minutes ago is suddenly abrasive, the fabric rough against sensitized skin, and he tugs at the collar without thinking. Sweat beads at his temples.
He puts down the charcoal. Blinks at the chart. The lines are blurring. Not from the sweat in his eyes but from something else, a softening of focus, his vision pulling inward. His pulse has quickened. He can feel it in his throat, his wrists, the heavy thud of it behind his ribs.
The heat surges. It rolls through him, cresting in his chest and breaking downward, flooding his belly, his hips, his groin, and the sudden rush of arousal is so intense and so completely unexpected that Eskil's hands slam flat on the desk and he hunches forward and sucks in a breath through his teeth.
Something is very wrong.
He's sweating through his shirt now, the fabric darkening across his chest and under his arms, and his skin is clammy and feverish simultaneously, hot from the inside, damp from the outside, every nerve ending singing with a sensitivity that turns the air itself into a touch.
The charcoal smudges under his palms. The charts mean nothing.
His body is doing something his mind hasn't authorized and the disconnect between will and flesh is alarming in a way that combat and injury have never been.
He manages to push back from the desk. The chair scrapes against the floor, the sound too loud, grating against ears that have become impossibly acute.
He can hear the creak of every plank, the slap of every wave, the distant murmur of voices on deck, and all of it is too much, too close, too present.
He stands and the room tilts and his vision greys at the edges and he makes it to the bed in three unsteady steps before his legs give out.
He collapses onto the mattress face-first. The impact drives the air from his lungs and the feeling of the sheets against his skin is agonizing in the strangest way, not painful, not exactly, but too much.
Too textured. Too present. Every thread of the linen is a distinct sensation, a line of contact that his nerves register individually, and the sum of those sensations is an overwhelming, full-body awareness that borders on unbearable.
He strips off his shirt. Wrenches it over his head and throws it aside and the air against his bare chest is better and worse, better because the abrasive fabric is gone, worse because the air itself has become a touch, cool and constant and everywhere.
He rolls onto his back and stares at the ceiling and his body is burning.
The arousal hasn't faded. It's intensified, settled low and heavy in his groin with a persistence that has nothing to do with desire and everything to do with whatever the fuck he just ate.
He's hard, has been since the first surge, growing harder as the heat builds, and the pressure is becoming actively uncomfortable.
His hips shift against the mattress without his permission, seeking friction, and he grits his teeth and forces himself still.
Think. What is different?
The fruit. The red-fleshed fruit from Armond's stores.
Kalkoan, unknown, unidentified, eaten whole without hesitation by a king who should know better than to consume unidentified provisions from a hostile kingdom.
If any of his men had done something so reckless, Eskil would have them cleaning the bilge for a week.
The fever crests. His vision swims. He's been lying there for what feels an eternity, minutes probably, though the warping of time makes it impossible to gauge, when the door opens and Bohdi enters.
Eskil registers his presence through the haze: the familiar silhouette, the creak of the floorboards under his weight, the sharp intake of breath when Bohdi sees his king laid out on the bed, shirtless and sweating and very obviously not well.
"Eskil —"
"Don't." The word comes out through clenched teeth, barely coherent.
Bohdi ignores him, because Bohdi has never in his life done what Eskil tells him to do.
He crosses to the bed. Eskil hears him rummaging, water being poured, cloth being dampened, and then Bohdi's hand is on his forehead, the back of his knuckles pressing against Eskil's clammy skin, checking his temperature the way he's done a dozen times over the years they've spent campaigning in climates that breed fever.
The feeling of Bohdi's hand on his skin is electric.
It shouldn't be. Bohdi has touched him a thousand times, clapped his shoulder, grabbed his arm, pressed his forehead against Eskil's in greeting and farewell. The contact has never been anything other than familial, platonic, the easy physicality of two men who have known each other since boyhood.
Now the contact sends a surge of arousal through him that is immediate and visceral and absolutely fucking horrifying.
Heat pools in his groin, his cock twitches, and his body arches toward the touch with an involuntary hunger that has nothing to do with Bohdi and everything to do with whatever poison is burning through his bloodstream.
Eskil bats his hand away. Hard. The motion is graceless, panicked, flailing, his body betraying him in the most fundamental way and his only answer to shove the contact away before it can register further.
"Don't touch me."
Bohdi pulls back. His expression shifts from concern to alarm. "Eskil, you're burning up. What happened?"
"I don't —" The sentence dies. Another wave of heat rolls through him, cresting and breaking, and he clenches his fists in the sheets and rides it out with his jaw locked and his eyes shut.
When it passes, when the worst of it passes, the baseline doesn't diminish, he manages, "The fruit. On the plate. Something —"
"What fruit?"
"Red. Small and spicy. From the Kalkoan stores."
Bohdi's eyes go to the desk, to the plate, to the pit sitting in its center. His brow furrows. "How much did you eat?"
"All of it."
"When?"
Eskil doesn't know. He's lost track of time. The fever is eating the minutes, compressing and stretching them in turns, and his concept of how long he's been lying here is unreliable at best. "An hour. Maybe less."
Bohdi presses his lips together. He looks at Eskil, at the sweat, the flushed skin, the white-knuckled grip on the sheets, the very obvious erection straining against his trousers that neither of them is going to acknowledge, and the concern in his face deepens into something more serious. More urgent.
"I'm going to get Indrie," he says.
Eskil opens his mouth to argue. To say no, to say he doesn't need the healer, to say he'll sleep it off, to say anything that prevents the beautiful young man who just fled his cabin in terror from being summoned back to tend to the man who terrified him.
But the words won't form. The heat is too much.
His tongue is thick, his thoughts are scattering, and the edges of the room are doing something unreliable that suggests consciousness is becoming optional.
"Don't —"
"You're sick and this is not up for debate." Bohdi's voice is firm. Final. The voice of a second-in-command who has assessed the situation and made a decision and is not entertaining him today. "Stay here. Don't do anything stupid."
He's gone before Eskil can respond.
Eskil lies on the bed and stares at the ceiling and the ceiling stares back and the heat in his body builds and builds and he cannot for the life of him understand why the universe has decided that tonight, of all nights, after the catastrophe on the deck and the disaster in the cabin and the look on Indrie's face when he ran, tonight is the night his body chooses to fall apart.
He closes his eyes.
The darkness is not better. In the darkness, the sensations intensify, the sheets beneath him, the air above him, the relentless throb of arousal that is becoming difficult to distinguish from pain.
Every heartbeat drives a pulse of heat through his veins.
Every breath fans the fire. He is aware of his own body with an acuity that is maddening, the weight of his limbs, the texture of his skin, the precise location of every point of contact between himself and the bed.
He grips the sheets tighter and waits and tries not to think about the fact that the healer is coming and Eskil is laid out here, half-dressed and hard and burning, and there is nothing he can do about any of it.
The lamp swings. The ship rocks. The heat builds.
He waits.