Chapter 23
Bohdi finds him in his bunk.
He's lying on his side, knees drawn up, staring at the wooden wall, when the sound of heavy boots stops beside his bunk and Bohdi's voice, stripped of its usual warmth, says his name.
"Indrie."
The tone brings him upright immediately.
He knows that tone. He's heard it once before, in the hold, after the fire, when Bohdi had pulled a man off his throat with a fist that could crack bone and a voice that could draw blood.
This is not casual Bohdi. This is not joking Bohdi.
This is the voice of a frightened man trying very hard not to show it.
"The king is ill," Bohdi says. "He's getting worse by the minute."
Indrie's stomach drops. He grabs his satchel from the shelf, the motion automatic, his body responding to the word ill before the rest of Bohdi's sentence registers, and he's on his feet and moving.
"What happened?"
Bohdi is already heading toward the corridor, his stride long enough that Indrie has to half-jog to keep up. "I don't know. I found him on the bed, burning up, sweating through his clothes. He says he ate something, a fruit, from the plate, from the Kalkoan stores."
Indrie's mind begins sorting through possibilities.
Fever, sweating, rapid onset. Poison is the obvious conclusion, but the specifics matter.
Kalkoan plants run the gamut from benign to lethal, and without knowing which fruit Eskil consumed, the treatment could be anything from an emetic to something far worse.
"He's," Bohdi hesitates, which is unusual enough that Indrie looks up at him. The tattooed man's jaw is working, his eyes fixed on the corridor ahead, and there's a tension in his body that goes beyond concern. "It's not just fever. Something else is happening. I've never seen him like this."
Indrie swallows his nerves. Whatever happened between him and the king tonight, the apology, the fear, the running, none of it matters if Eskil is dying.
And the cold, practical part of Indrie's brain, the part that kept Armond alive for five years through spite and skill and sheer refusal to let death win, has already taken the helm.
He follows Bohdi to the cabin.
The door is open. The lamplight spills into the corridor, golden and swaying, and Indrie steps inside and the sight of Eskil stops him in his tracks.
The king is laid out on the bed, one arm thrown over his face, the other fisted in the sheets at his side.
His shirt is gone, discarded on the floor, a heap of damp fabric, and his chest is bare, slicked with sweat that catches the lamplight and turns his scarred skin to something molten.
His hair is loose, half-unbraided, spread across the pillow in damp strands.
His breathing is wrong, too fast, too shallow, the rapid panting of a body fighting something it can't beat.
He is flushed from his collarbones to his jaw. The color is deep, vivid, not the pallor of illness but a heated flush that has nothing to do with sickness.
Indrie's mouth goes dry.
He crosses to the bed. His healer's hands are already moving, reaching for the king's face, pressing his palm against Eskil's forehead to gauge his temperature.
The skin beneath his hand is scorching. Not the dry heat of a standard fever but a damp, radiating warmth that pulses against Indrie's palm with a second heartbeat.
Eskil sighs.
The sound is low, involuntary, dragged from somewhere deep in his chest, and his head turns into Indrie's touch.
Not away. Into. His cheek presses against Indrie's palm, his eyes still closed, his brow smoothing fractionally at the contact, and the motion is instinctive and unguarded in a way Eskil has never been while conscious.
Indrie's heart stutters.
Then Eskil's eyes open.
They're blown. The pale grey of his irises is barely visible, a thin ring around pupils so dilated they've consumed nearly all the color, and they fix on Indrie's face with an intensity that sends every hair on Indrie's body standing upright.
The look is not lucid. It's not the controlled, measured gaze Eskil usually directs at him.
It's raw. Hungry. Focused with the single-minded attention of a man whose entire world has narrowed to the point of contact between Indrie's hand and his skin.
Indrie's stomach drops through the floor.
He pulls his hand back, not fast, not panicked, the steady withdrawal of a healer who has just received a critical piece of diagnostic information and needs a moment to process it.
His mind is racing. Fever. Flushed skin.
Dilated pupils. Heightened sensitivity to touch.
Rapid onset after consuming an unknown fruit.
He turns to Bohdi, who is hovering in the doorway with his arms crossed and his face drawn tight with worry.
"The fruit," Indrie says, and his voice is steady despite the earthquake happening in his chest. "Did you, you took fruit from Armond's stores? Red, small, with a pit?"
Bohdi nods. "We took everything. Spices, dried goods, fruit. Gunnar sorted most of it but some of it went straight to the stores unsorted."
"Describe it. The skin, was it smooth? Waxy?"
"I didn't see it. Eskil said it was red-fleshed, sweet, with some spice."
Indrie pales.
The blood leaves his face so fast the room tilts. He grabs the edge of the desk to steady himself and stares at the plate sitting on the surface, the stew, the bread, and the pit. The small, dark, ridged pit sitting in the center of the plate, the seed of a catastrophe.
He picks it up. Turns it over in his fingers. Runs his thumbnail along the ridge pattern, three concentric lines spiraling from the base to the tip, a pattern he has known since he was old enough to understand why the elders spoke about this fruit in whispers.
He is holding a Cara pit. Eskil has eaten the Cara fruit.
The room seems to shrink around him, the walls pressing in, the lamplight too bright, and Indrie has to put the pit down on the desk because his hands have started to tremble and he cannot afford to tremble right now.
He is a healer. He is the only healer on this ship.
The king is burning alive on the bed behind him and there is no one else who can fix this and Indrie cannot afford to tremble.
He knows what the Cara fruit is. Every child in Kalkoa knows, though most know it only as legend, the old stories, the marriage rituals, the whispered promises of a wedding night so passionate it binds two souls together for eternity.
The Cara fruit is sacred. It is used on the marriage night to seal vows and plunge the lovers into a passionate night of consummation.
The fruit is meant to be shared, split between two people, consumed together, and then enjoyed together, the shared experience of its effects deepening the bond between them, body and soul.
And if the consumers do not experience intimate release with each other, if the bond is not sealed, if the marriage is not consummated, then the fruit becomes toxic in their system.
The same compounds that heighten desire and sensation and bind two bodies together will, without the release they're designed to produce, turn inward.
The fever will climb. The body will burn.
And the person who consumed the fruit will die.
Eskil ate the whole fruit. Alone. Without sharing it. Without a partner to complete the ritual.
He is going to die unless someone lays with him.
Indrie's hands are shaking. He presses them flat against the desk, palms down, fingers spread, and breathes.
One breath. Two. Three. His mind is sorting through options at a speed that borders on frantic, looking for alternatives, looking for the escape hatch, looking for the version of this where he brews a tea or prepares a tincture or does literally anything other than what he already knows is the only answer.
There is no alternative. He knows this. The Cara fruit's mechanism is not chemical in the way a poison is chemical.
It is biochemical and spiritual, tied to the deepest functions of the body, and no herb in his satchel, no tincture, no poultice, no draught can replicate what the fruit demands.
Release. Shared, mutual, physical release with the person whose body the fruit's compounds are designed to bond with.
Eskil ate the whole fruit, which means the full dose is in his system, which means the toxicity threshold is higher, which means there is no half-measure, no workaround, no gentle version of this.
He doesn't know how to explain this to Bohdi.
He has enough words in their shared language to convey the basics, the king is poisoned, the fruit is the cause, he needs physical intimacy or he will die, but the specifics, the cultural weight, the sacred nature of what the Cara fruit represents, the fact that sharing it is marriage in his culture, he can't voice any of that.
The words don't exist in the space between their languages, and even if they did, the words would stick in his throat because saying them aloud means acknowledging what he's about to do.
He's about to consummate a marriage with a man who doesn't want him.
A man who told him, twice, that Indrie is not his.
A man who said no when Indrie asked to belong to him.
And Indrie is going to climb into that man's bed and give him his body because the alternative is letting him die, and Indrie cannot let him die.
He cares too much. He cares too deeply. He has fallen too far and too completely for the king who held his hand under the stars and drew him a picture of home, and the thought of Eskil dying on this bed, burning alive from the inside, consumed by a fruit that was meant to be a blessing, is so unbearable that Indrie would do anything, anything, to prevent it.
Even giving the most intimate act of his life to a man who will never want him the way Indrie wants him.