Chapter 15
Indrie wakes in a bed that is far too comfortable to be his bunk and thinks, for a moment, he must be dead.
The mattress beneath him is thick. Soft.
It gives under his weight, cradling him, and the blanket over him is heavy wool that holds warmth close.
His bunk has neither of these qualities.
His bunk has a straw mattress that smells of salt and a blanket that's adequate at best, and the wooden planks above him are close enough to touch if he raises his arm.
These planks are higher. The space around him is larger.
The air smells different, wood and salt, yes, but also cedar and iron and something sharp that his body recognizes before his mind does, something that makes his pulse skip and his stomach tighten.
He remembers.
The memories come in fragments, disjointed and out of order, each one arriving with a physical sensation that his body relives as his mind processes it.
The netting around his boot. The fall. The water, cold, so cold, the totality of it, how it swallowed him and pressed against his open eyes and stole the air from his lungs.
The dark. The sinking. The moment he stopped fighting, when the cold became quiet and the quiet became peace and he'd thought, with a calm that horrifies him now: this is alright.
And then arms. Strong arms, closing around him, pulling him up.
A chest against his cheek, broad and solid, and a heartbeat that wasn't his own hammering against his ear.
A voice, he can't remember the words, or if there were words, but the sound of it, low and fierce and certain.
The waves crashing over them and the arms not letting go and the gasping, the gasping, the terrible beautiful shock of breathing again.
He remembers clinging. He remembers the ladder. He remembers, barely, the deck and the rain and being lifted, and then nothing. A warm darkness that was not the sea.
He hears the clink of a belt buckling and opens his eyes.
His vision is blurry for a moment, the lamplight smeared and golden, the shapes around him indistinct, and then it clears, resolving into sharp lines and warm shadows, and he's treated to the scarred, muscular expanse of Eskil's bare back, presented in the low glow of lamplight.
Indrie's breath stops.
The king is standing near the trunk against the far wall, half-turned away, in the middle of getting dressed.
The belt he's just buckled sits low on his hips, and above it his back is bare, a landscape of muscle and scar tissue that the lamplight traces with an intimacy that makes Indrie's mouth go dry.
The scars are numerous, thin white lines from blades, broader marks from things Indrie can't identify, a jagged ridge across his left shoulder blade that should have killed him.
Between them, the muscle moves beneath his skin as he reaches for a shirt, the shifting of planes and ridges, the flex and pull of a body that has been built through years of combat and labor and the kind of physical discipline Indrie has never witnessed up close.
His spine is a valley between two ridges of muscle that run from his shoulders to his waist, and his waist narrows from the breadth of his shoulders, blade-sharp, and the sight makes Indrie dizzy.
His arms, even from behind, are massive, the kind of arms that could lift a man from the sea with one hand and haul him up a ladder and carry him across a deck without faltering.
Which is exactly what they did.
Indrie lurches up in the bed.
The movement is too fast, his body protests, muscles stiff and aching, his head swimming with the sudden change in position, and the blanket falls to his waist and the air hits his chest and he realizes, with a shock that travels from the top of his skull to the soles of his feet, that he is completely naked.
He is naked in the king's bed. The blanket has pooled around his hips and his entire upper body is bare and exposed and his hair is down and tangled and falling around his shoulders, and Indrie clutches the sheets to his chest with both hands, pulling the fabric up to his collarbones, and stares at the half-dressed king with wide eyes and a face that is rapidly catching fire.
Eskil hears him and turns, in the middle of untangling a shirt from the trunk.
The fabric is bunched in his hands, half-inside-out, and he goes still when he sees Indrie upright and staring.
His eyes move across Indrie's face, assessing, cataloguing, checking for damage, and whatever he finds there must be acceptable, because something in his expression eases.
Not quite a smile. But the tension around his eyes softens and his shoulders drop a fraction and the severe line of his mouth relaxes into something that is, on Eskil's face, practically warm.
Indrie is not warm. Indrie is on fire.
The heat starts at his chest and climbs, thorough and merciless, reaching his ears and settling there with the permanence of a brand.
His fingers tighten on the sheet. His eyes are wide and fixed on Eskil and he cannot look away, cannot make himself turn his head, because the king is standing in front of him half-dressed with the lamplight on his chest and his arms and the flat planes of his stomach and the trail of hair that disappears beneath the waistband of his trousers and Indrie is going to spontaneously combust.
His mind, assembling a puzzle at speed while the table actively collapses beneath it, begins to put the pieces together.
He was in the water. He was drowning. He was cold, so cold that the memory of it makes his skin prickle even now, and he'd been pulled from the sea and carried to this cabin.
His clothes are gone. He is naked. There is a single blanket over him and it is warm, deeply warm, the kind of warm that a wool blanket doesn't achieve on its own.
Eskil is getting dressed.
Eskil is getting dressed because he was, until recently, not dressed.
And the warmth in the blanket, the warmth that had seeped into Indrie's bones and pulled him back from the cold, hadn't come from the wool.
It had come from the body that was under it with him.
The body that is currently standing by the trunk, scarred and massive and half-naked, buckling a belt and untangling a shirt, ordinary, unhurried, just another morning after just another night.
Eskil had been in this bed. With him. Bare.
The realization hits Indrie from every direction at once. He clutches the sheets so tightly his knuckles go white and his arms tremble and he can feel his heartbeat in his temples and behind his eyes and probably visible from across the room.
Eskil had undressed him. Had taken off his waterlogged clothes, every piece, had seen him pale and limp and bare.
Had then, and this is the part where Indrie's thoughts begin to fragment into incoherent noise, taken off his own clothes.
And gotten into the bed. And pressed his body against Indrie's body, skin to skin, those enormous arms wrapped around him, that warmth...
Indrie remembers suddenly the arms around his waist and the warm chest against his head.
Not from the water. From after. The memory is blurred, half-drowned in the fog of unconsciousness, but it's there, a sensation more than an image.
Being held. Being surrounded. A heartbeat against his spine, steady and strong, and a breath stirring his hair, and the feeling of being enclosed, contained, gathered up in something solid and warm and safe.
He had felt safe. For the first time since he could remember, sinking into a sleep so deep it was almost death, he had felt safe.
He realizes, quite suddenly, that he's not dead.
That Eskil, the king who took him from his wretched home and could break him in half but has not laid a hand on him, jumped overboard into a storm-black sea to save a healer who can't swim and isn't worth the effort.
Held him above the waves. Carried him from the deck.
Stripped him down and climbed into bed beside him and held him through the night and gave him his warmth and saved his life.
Indrie stares at him, uncomprehending.
Why?
The question is enormous and answerless and it lodges in his throat and will not move.
Why would a king jump into the sea for a slave?
Why would he risk his own life, the life that forty warriors and a kingdom depend on, for someone who is nobody?
Why would he carry him to his own bed instead of leaving him in the medical bay? Why would he hold him?
Then Eskil moves over to the bed and Indrie makes a sound he's not proud of, a sort of squeak, and pulls the sheet tighter. Eskil either doesn't see his mortification or chooses to ignore it. He sits on the side of the bed, the mattress dipping under his weight, and asks, "How do you feel?"
The words are in Eskil's language, spoken slowly, the way he always speaks to Indrie, and Indrie understands them but processing language requires a functioning brain and his brain is currently occupied with the fact that the king is sitting on the bed beside him, close enough to touch, wearing trousers and nothing else, and Indrie is wearing considerably less than that.
He swallows. His throat is raw, from the seawater, from the cold, and the swallow hurts but it's grounding, a small sharp pain that tethers him to the present.
"I'm alive," he says, and his voice comes out rough and cracked and smaller than he means it to. He clears his throat and tries again, tries for something approaching composure. "So I'm doing pretty good."
That earns him a smile.