Chapter 16
Bohdi finds him at the helm, staring daggers at the horizon, doing his damndest to deal with the war inside him.
The storm has passed. It moved through in the early hours of the morning, the clouds thinning and breaking apart until the dawn came through in ragged strips of gold, and the sea settled from its fury into a long, rolling calm that rocks the ship in slow, easy swells.
The damage is manageable, the broken railing, the lost cargo, some torn rigging that the sailmaker is already working on.
His crew is intact. No one else went overboard. No one else came close.
Eskil stands at the wheel with his hands locked on the spokes and his jaw locked on its hinges and stares at the clean, empty line where the sea meets the sky and tries to get a grip on himself.
Half of him is twisted and unmade by the memory of Indrie naked in his bed.
Long hair falling around slim shoulders, tangled and salt-stiff and dark against the white of the pillow.
The sheet pooled at his waist, pale skin exposed in the lamplight, the flush that had spread from his cheeks down his neck and across his chest when he realized where he was and what he wasn't wearing.
Those dark eyes, wide and startled and so impossibly beautiful that Eskil had nearly lost his composure right there, had nearly reached out and touched and taken and ruined everything.
And before that, during the night, in the dark, with the storm howling outside and Indrie's unconscious body pressed against his, the slow torture of skin on skin.
The feeling of Indrie warming under his hands, the cold receding inch by inch, replaced by a heat that was partly Eskil's doing and partly Indrie's own body coming back to life.
How the younger man had shifted in his sleep, pressing back into Eskil's chest with an instinctive, unconscious seeking that had driven Eskil halfway to madness.
The sounds he'd made, small, soft, wordless, that had no right to be as devastating as they were.
And Eskil's cock, hard and insistent against the small of Indrie's back for what felt like hours, a constant, maddening reminder that the body he was saving was also the body he wanted.
He hadn't slept. He'd told himself he had, but what he'd actually done was lie there with his eyes closed and every nerve ending on fire, holding perfectly still, using every technique he'd ever learned for controlling his body in combat to keep from moving.
From pressing forward. From letting his hands drift from the safe territory of Indrie's arms and chest to the places they wanted to go.
He'd counted breaths. Counted heartbeats.
Counted the planks in the ceiling. He'd recited the names of every settlement in Rengara in alphabetical order, twice, and it hadn't helped at all.
Half of him hasn't left that bed, is still there in the dark with the feeling of it, with the knowledge that he now knows what Indrie's skin feels like against his and he will never, as long as he lives, be able to unknow it.
The other half is incensed at the idea that the younger man has seen him as his owner this entire time.
They gave me to you. To serve you.
The words repeat in Eskil's head on a loop, each repetition carrying a fresh surge of fury that has nowhere to go.
The words and how Indrie had said them, quietly, without inflection, stating an obvious and unremarkable fact.
The sky is blue. Water is wet. I belong to you.
Said with the same resigned certainty he'd use to describe the weather, because to Indrie it is the weather.
It's the unchanging condition of his existence: he is owned.
He has always been owned. The face of the owner changes but the fundamental reality does not.
And Eskil, standing there in his cabin with his shirt half-on and his chest bare and the younger man naked and flushed in his bed, had seen the shape of the last two weeks redraw itself in an instant.
Every interaction. Every careful glance.
Every flinch and every tentative smile and every moment where Indrie had done exactly as he was told without question or complaint.
Eskil had thought he was watching a man adjust to a new environment.
He'd thought the compliance was gratitude, or at least acceptance.
He'd thought the careful deference was respect, earned through the crew's kindness and Dagny's friendship and the small, deliberate gestures Eskil had made to show he was not Armond.
But it wasn't any of those things. It was obedience. The practiced, survival-driven obedience of a slave who has learned that compliance is the only thing between him and the next blow.
Every smile Indrie had given him. Every meal he'd delivered to Eskil's cabin. Every word he'd learned in Eskil's language. Every moment he'd stood in Eskil's presence, careful and quiet and unflinching, all of it was performance. Survival. Not because he wanted to. Because he believed he had to.
The thought makes Eskil's skin crawl.
He grips the wheel tighter and the wood groans in his hands and the horizon doesn't flinch.
"You're going to break the wheel."
Bohdi leans against the mast, arms crossed, red hair catching the early light.
He looks tired, he'd spent most of the storm at the helm after Eskil went overboard, fighting the sea alone until the worst had passed and the night watch could relieve him.
There are shadows under his eyes and a tightness around his mouth that he's making no effort to hide.
"I'll buy a new one," Eskil says, without looking at him.
"With what? Our vast Kalkoan fortune?" Bohdi pushes off the mast and comes to stand beside him, and the silence between them is the particular silence of two men who have known each other long enough that the silence itself is a conversation.
Bohdi lets it sit for exactly as long as Eskil needs, and then says, "How's our charge faring? "
Eskil grits his teeth so hard his jaw aches. Bohdi notices. Bohdi always notices. His eyes narrow fractionally, the shift from casual to attentive so subtle that anyone else would miss it.
Eskil tells him. He gets the words out quickly, with minimal preamble, because dragging it out only makes it worse. "The boy thinks he's my slave."
Bohdi's eyebrows rise. Not dramatically, Bohdi is too controlled for dramatic, but enough to communicate genuine surprise. "How did you possibly get into that topic?"
Eskil looks at him. Really looks at him. And says, through his teeth, "He implied he wasn't worth saving."
The words hang between them. Bohdi's expression shifts, the surprise draining into something quieter and harder. Controlled anger. Two weeks of watching Indrie have made him fond despite his best efforts at professional distance.
Bohdi crosses his arms. "This is the healer who kept a terminally ill man alive for half a decade."
"Yes."
"The one who set two sprained ankles, broke a fever, taught a man to read, and reorganized Gunnar's galley in under two weeks."
"Yes."
"And he thinks he's not worth saving."
"That's what I said."
Bohdi is quiet for a moment, processing. Then he asks, "Was he a slave? To King Armond?"
Eskil says, through his teeth, chewing every word to get it out, "It seems to be the case. When the advisor said they'd bought him and paid too much, I assumed the man meant his services. That they'd hired a healer and were disappointed in the results. Not that they'd purchased him."
The distinction is significant and they both know it. Hiring a healer who can't cure an incurable disease is an employer's poor expectation. Purchasing a human being and beating him for failing to do the impossible is something else entirely.
"So when Erlan offered him to you as a show of good faith —"
"He was selling property." Eskil's voice is flat. Dead. The kind of voice he uses when the alternative is breaking something. "And I took delivery."
Bohdi is quiet for a while. The ship rocks beneath them in the gentle post-storm swell, and the crew moves around them in the rhythms of repair and recovery, and the world continues to function normally despite the fact that its foundations have just shifted.
"If we want Indrie to live in Valen with us," Bohdi says carefully, "and heal our sick and injured, we can't have him think he's there by force."
Eskil knows this. He's been thinking about nothing else since the door of his cabin closed behind him.
"Not only is it psychologically detrimental," Bohdi continues, his tone measured, "but word will get out very quickly that their king has taken a slave.
" He lets that land. "Which, beyond being unprecedented, our people haven't practiced slavery in generations, Eskil, your own grandmother outlawed it, is not the kind of thing you want to be known for. "
"I know, Bohdi."
"And your brother —"
"I know."
"Morgan will have opinions."
"I said I know."
Bohdi raises both hands, palms out, and waits. When Eskil's breathing has evened from furious to merely angry, he asks, "Did you explain to him that he's free?"
"I tried." The words come out bitten, clipped. "I'm going to have Dagny explain it properly. Since I don't have the temperament for pantomiming such a thing to someone who only understands half my language."
The eyebrow goes up. Just one. It's worse than both. "Oh. So you're blaming this misunderstanding on the abused healer who has been in our care for a little over two weeks and had never stepped foot off shore?"
"It's not —"
"The man who was sold as property as a child and has never known anything else? The man who was dragged from the ocean last night and woke up naked in a strange bed? That's who you're faulting for not grasping the nuances of your culture's position on personal liberty?"
Eskil's grip on the wheel could forge diamonds. "I'm not faulting him."
"What are you doing, then?"
"It's not that simple," Eskil snaps, and the volume draws a glance from the nearest deckhand, who immediately finds somewhere else to be.
Eskil lowers his voice to a register that vibrates with restrained fury.
"Every interaction we've had has been tarnished.
Every one. When he learned my language, it wasn't because he wanted to, it was because he thought I'd punish him if he didn't. When he brought my meals and helped my crew and smiled at me, he was performing. Surviving. The way he survived Armond."
The words are ash in his mouth and he hates every one of them.
"He's been treading so lightly," Eskil continues, quieter now, the anger collapsing under its own weight into something worse, "because he thinks I'm the kind of king who will treat him the way Armond did.
And I can't —" He stops. Breathes. "I can't know what's real.
When he looks at me, when he, I can't know if any of it is genuine, or if it's what he thinks I want to see.
Because that's what he was trained to do.
Give the king what he wants. And the fact that I —"
He cuts himself off before the sentence goes somewhere it shouldn't. Not here. Not on the open deck with crew within earshot. Not even to Bohdi, who already knows more than Eskil would like.
Bohdi steps forward. His hand closes on Eskil's shoulder, firm and sure, anchoring him to the present.
"Then show him you're not."
Eskil stares back. The rebuttal is on his tongue, something sharp and deflecting, something that would push Bohdi away and give Eskil space to stew in his own frustration without interference.
But the fire in him dies at the conviction in Bohdi's eyes.
There's no humor there. No teasing. Just the steady, unflinching certainty of his oldest friend, who has watched him circle this problem for two weeks and has decided, with the patience of someone who loves him, to stop letting him.
Eskil nods.
It's small. Barely a movement. But it's an agreement, and Bohdi sees it and accepts it and releases his shoulder.
Bohdi turns and walks away. His boots are quiet on the deck, his posture easy, his step unhurried. He doesn't look back. He doesn't add a parting comment or a final word of advice or one of his characteristic grins. He just leaves.
Eskil turns back to the helm. The horizon stretches before him, flat and blue and empty, offering nothing, demanding nothing. The wind fills the repaired sail above him. The ship moves forward.
He stands at the wheel and lets Bohdi's words settle into the place where his anger was, and he begins, slowly and painfully, to think about what it means to show someone you're not the thing they fear.