8. Chapter 8
Bohdi finds him sharpening his blades on the foredeck.
It's early, the sky still grey and heavy with the last weight of night, and Eskil has been at it since before the dawn watch changed.
His longsword is laid across his knees, the whetstone moving in long, measured strokes along the edge, the sound of it a steady rasp, grounding, almost devotional.
Back and forth. Steel against stone. The rhythm is meditative, mindless, and it frees up the rest of his brain to chew on the things he'd rather not be chewing on.
Which is the problem, because Bohdi knows this.
Bohdi knows everything about him. They've been at each other's sides since before Bohdi could walk.
Eskil had been three years old when Bohdi was born to his father's second-in-command, and the story goes that the infant wouldn't stop screaming until Eskil toddled over to the bassinet and rocked it with both hands, small and solemn and determined, and Bohdi had gone quiet.
Eskil's mother had looked at the two of them and said they were brothers born without blood, and she'd been right.
Bohdi knows how Eskil takes his ale, how he sleeps, what his face looks like before he loses his temper and what it looks like after.
He knows that Eskil sharpens his blades when he's restless, and he knows, because he has functioning eyes and an annoying amount of emotional intelligence, exactly what's making him restless.
He sits down beside Eskil without invitation, settling onto the deck with his back against the railing and his legs stretched out in front of him. He doesn't say anything immediately. Just sits. Watches the whetstone move. Waits.
Eskil gives him three full passes of the stone before acknowledging his presence. "What."
"Nothing." Bohdi picks at a splinter on the deck planking with his thumbnail. "Nice morning."
"Is it."
"Could be nicer. You could be sleeping, for instance. Like a normal person. At a normal hour."
"I slept."
Bohdi tilts his head and watches the blade catch the first thin light of dawn along its edge. "The last time you went at your longsword this aggressively was the week before the raid on Kalkoa. And that sword could already split a hair."
"Stop being dramatic."
"Just an observation." Bohdi waits a beat, and when Eskil doesn't respond, he shifts, a subtle straightening of his posture that Eskil recognizes as the transition from casual to serious. The humor doesn't leave his face entirely, but it recedes, making room for the sharper mind beneath it.
"What's eating you, Eskil?"
"Nothing is eating me."
Bohdi looks at him. Just looks. Patient and unblinking, with that particular expression he wears when he knows Eskil is lying and is willing to wait as long as it takes for him to stop.
It's infuriating. It's always been infuriating.
Bohdi's greatest weapon has never been the axe on his back.
It's the silence he deploys when a lesser man would fill it with noise.
Eskil drags the stone along the blade with more force than necessary. The rasp is louder, harsher, and the sound grates even his own ears. He doesn't stop.
Bohdi drops the humor entirely.
"How do you plan to handle the situation with Indrie when we reach Valen?"
The name drops between them and the air changes. Eskil's hand doesn't falter on the whetstone, but his jaw tightens, a fractional clench that Bohdi will have caught because Bohdi catches everything.
"What situation," Eskil says. It's not a question.
Bohdi doesn't dignify it with the obvious answer immediately.
He lets the silence sit for a moment, lets Eskil hear the insufficiency of his own deflection, and then says, evenly, "The situation where a foreign healer who doesn't speak our language is being taken to a kingdom that desperately needs a healer and needs to ask him to stay. "
There it is. Laid out in plain language, stripped of all the peripheral complications Eskil has been dressing it in, the attraction, the power imbalance, Indrie's eyes on him and his own inability to look away, and reduced to its most practical core.
They need a healer. They have a healer. They need that healer to not leave Valen the moment they get there.
Eskil sets his jaw and says, "I'll explain it to him."
"How?"
"With words, Bohdi. The usual method."
"Whose words? Given that you can barely have a conversation."
"Dagny is teaching him."
Bohdi makes a sound that is not quite a laugh and not quite a sigh, something in between, the exhale of hearing an insufficient answer and deciding how much energy to spend dismantling it.
"Dagny is teaching him words for rope and fish and that thing Gunnar made last night that should be classified as a war crime.
" He pauses. Eskil can feel the pause, can feel the weight of what's coming next, the careful precision with which Bohdi is selecting his approach.
"She is not teaching him the nuances of cultural integration. "
Eskil stops sharpening.
He doesn't look up from the blade. The whetstone rests against the steel, motionless, and the space between them fills with the sound of the ship, the creak of rigging, the slap of water against the hull, the muffled voices of the dawn watch changing above them.
He stares at the edge of his sword, at the fine line where honed metal meets light, and considers the shape of the problem Bohdi is outlining.
Because Bohdi is right. And they both know it.
Dagny can teach Indrie to navigate the ship.
Gunnar can teach him to navigate the kitchen.
Ermin can follow him around with puppyish enthusiasm and learn to identify herbs by smell.
But none of that addresses the central issue, which is that Indrie doesn't know what he's walking into.
He doesn't know about Valen, its customs, its people, its expectations.
He doesn't know what will be asked of him or how critically they need him.
And Eskil can't communicate any of that through intermediaries. Not properly. Not in a way that Indrie will believe.
He looks at his second-in-command, who is watching him with infuriating patience, right and aware of it and decent enough not to gloat. Bohdi's arms are crossed over his chest, his red hair catching the first real light of morning, his expression steady and open and waiting.
"What do you suggest?" Eskil asks.
"I think you need to spend time with the boy yourself."
Eskil's grip tightens on the whetstone.
"Hiding behind Dagny and Gunnar as intermediaries is easier, yes," Bohdi continues, his tone measured, not accusatory but not gentle either, delivering a truth that needs to be heard regardless of whether it's welcome. "But Indrie is terrified of you, and distance is only going to make that worse."
Eskil opens his mouth. Bohdi holds up a hand.
"The crew has warmed to Indrie because they've spent time with him.
They've sat with him, worked beside him, let him tend their wounds and argue about stew with their cook.
They know him. He's not a stranger to them anymore, not a foreign captive, not a frightened boy from a conquered kingdom.
He's Indrie. He's theirs." Bohdi lets that land before delivering the final stroke.
"You have spent the last week and a half avoiding him. "
"I haven't been avoiding him."
"You changed your route to the helm three days ago to stop passing the galley."
Eskil's jaw clenches hard enough that something clicks. "That was—"
"And you've been taking your meals in your cabin instead of with the crew, which you haven't done since you were twenty-two and nursing a broken heart over that shipwright's daughter in Harren.
And you've posted yourself at the helm during every hour that Indrie is on deck, which puts you as far from him as possible while still technically being on the same ship. "
"Are you finished?"
"Almost." Bohdi leans forward, dropping his arms, planting his elbows on his knees.
"You're not subtle, Eskil. You've never been subtle.
You are a fine king, a fearsome warrior, and the most stubborn bastard I've ever had the misfortune of loving, but subtle is not among your virtues.
Every man and woman on this ship has noticed you keeping your distance from the healer, and if they've noticed, then Indrie has noticed, and what do you think that distance tells a man who has spent his entire life being kept at arm's length by the people who control his fate? "
The question doesn't require an answer. It provides its own.
It tells him he's not worth the effort. It tells him the initial kindness was an anomaly, a flicker that's already burning out, and the cold distance that follows is the real temperature of the room.
It tells him what he already believes: that he is a tool to be used when needed and set aside when not.
Eskil stares at the blade across his knees and says nothing for a long time.
Bohdi doesn't fill the silence. He's said his piece. He sits beside his king in the growing morning light and waits, because that's what Bohdi does. He pushes until Eskil is at the edge, and then he stands beside him and waits for Eskil to decide whether to step forward or back.
"I'll handle it," Eskil says eventually. The words are rough, dragged out from somewhere he doesn't enjoy accessing, but they're sincere.
Bohdi nods. He stands, brushes off his trousers, and claps Eskil on the shoulder, a firm, grounding pressure that says more than the gesture should. "I know you will."
He turns to go, takes two steps, and then pauses. The grin creeps back onto his face, slow and inevitable.
"For what it's worth," he says, looking back over his shoulder, "Ermin and Skander have caught six rats so far. I'm going to have to start thinking seriously about that blade."
Eskil fixes him with a look. "I thought you didn't have a collection."
"I said I'd figure it out. That's still the plan." He scratches his chin thoughtfully. "Dagny's knife is looking less and less like it belongs to her, the more I think about it."
"Get out of my sight."
Bohdi's laugh carries across the foredeck as he goes, warm and easy and entirely unbothered by the dismissal. Eskil hears him greet someone on the main deck below, probably Dagny, given the responding voice, and then the sound fades into the general noise of the ship waking up around him.
Eskil sits alone on the foredeck. The sun crests the horizon to the east, painting the water in shades of copper and gold, and the longsword lies across his knees with an edge sharp enough to split a hair.
He runs his thumb along the flat of the blade, not testing the edge, just feeling the weight of it. The steel is cool beneath his skin.
Bohdi is right. He's been avoiding Indrie, and the reasons are sound, the power imbalance, the language barrier, the inconvenient and increasingly undeniable fact that he wants the young man with an intensity that compromises his judgment, but the outcome is not.
Avoidance protects Eskil. It does nothing for Indrie.
And Eskil is not in the business of protecting himself at the expense of someone in his care.
He sheathes the longsword, gathers the whetstone, and stands.
He'll handle it.
He doesn't know how, exactly. He doesn't have Dagny's patience for language instruction, or Gunnar's ease with quiet companionship, or Bohdi's gift for making people feel safe.
He has a sharp tongue, a shorter temper, and a face that he's been told, more than once, by more than one person, looks carved from something that was already angry.
He is not, by nature or by habit, a gentle man.
But he can try. For this, for Indrie, he can try.
He heads below deck, deposits his sword and whetstone in his cabin, and goes to find something useful to do that puts him in proximity to the healer without it looking like he's engineering proximity to the healer.
Bohdi would see through it instantly. Everyone else, Eskil hopes, will not.