Chapter 26
Eskil awakens thirsty.
The thirst is monumental, a desert behind his teeth, his tongue thick and dry, his throat scraped raw. He reaches blindly for the side table and his hand finds a cup, and he drains it in three long swallows without opening his eyes. Water. Lukewarm. It tastes like the best thing he's ever drunk.
He sits up. The cabin is bright, morning light filtering through the porthole, the lamp extinguished at some point during the night, and the air is cool against his skin and his skin is normal.
Not burning, not sensitized, not crawling with the fever's relentless, maddening awareness.
He feels like himself again. Exhausted, wrung out, but himself. The fruit's grip is gone.
He realizes he's naked.
He looks down at the quilt draped across his waist, at his bare chest, at his bare everything, and the memories arrive in a rush that knocks the breath from him.
Not fragments, not impressions. Complete, vivid, high-resolution memories, preserved with a fidelity that the fever should have blurred but didn't.
Indrie in his lap. Indrie's mouth against his.
The way Indrie's breath had caught when Eskil's fingers found the spot inside him.
The flush that ran from his cheeks to his navel in a vivid, unbroken streak.
The way he'd looked at Eskil, wide-eyed and overwhelmed and so open it hurt, when he sank down and took him in.
The sound he made when he came the second time, on Eskil's cock, without a hand between them, a sound that wasn't a gasp or a moan but something between a cry and a prayer.
Eskil rubs a palm over his face and lets out a long exhale that empties his lungs and does nothing to empty his head.
Indrie coming apart in his arms, twice, was real.
It happened. He was there, and conscious, and despite the fever's best efforts to reduce him to an animal, he'd been present for every second.
He dresses. Pulls on trousers, finds a shirt in the trunk, runs his fingers through his tangled hair without bothering to rebraid it.
His body moves with the heavy, slow efficiency of a man who has been through an ordeal and is operating on fumes.
His muscles ache, not with the fever's bright, searing pain but with the deep, honest fatigue of overexertion.
His legs are unsteady. His hands are a fraction slower than they should be.
But he's alive, and the alternative was not alive, and the reason for the distinction is a dark-haired healer who gave him his body to save his life.
He heads out into the sunlight.
The deck is busy with the morning's routines, men coiling rope, Dagny running drills near the bow, Gunnar visible through the galley hatch hauling a pot of something that steams. The sky is clear, the sea calm, the wind steady from the east. A good day.
The kind of day that doesn't know or care what happened in the captain's cabin the night before.
His crew doesn't seem to know either. The men nod as he passes, offer the usual morning greetings, go back to their work.
No sideways glances, no whispered conversations that stop when he approaches.
Bohdi has kept the details contained, which is a small blessing and a large testament to his second-in-command's discretion, a quality Eskil should probably acknowledge more often than he does.
He makes it approximately ten strides across the deck before a hand closes around his arm and pulls him sideways.
Bohdi drags him behind the mainmast, out of the general line of sight, and releases his arm and turns to face him with an expression that could curdle milk.
His jaw is set. His eyes are hard. His arms cross over his chest with the deliberate finality of a speech that has been prepared and will be delivered.
"What the fuck happened last night?" Bohdi hisses.
Eskil stares at him. The blankness is genuine, not evasion, not deflection, but the sincere confusion of someone who doesn't know how much Bohdi knows and therefore doesn't know which version of events to present.
"I was sick," he says. "The healer tended to me. Now I'm better."
Bohdi's glare could strip paint from a hull. "I was outside the door the entire time, Eskil."
Eskil's jaw tightens.
"The entire time," Bohdi repeats. "And it did not sound one bit as though healing was happening."
A muscle jumps in Eskil's temple. The silence between them fills with the sounds of the ship, the creak of rigging, the slap of water, the distant clang of Gunnar's pots, and every second of it is a second Eskil is using to decide whether to explain or to commit violence.
He grabs Bohdi by the front of his shirt.
The motion is fast, reflexive, his privacy violated in the most fundamental way possible and his body responding before his brain can moderate. He pulls Bohdi forward until their faces are inches apart and his voice comes through gritted teeth, low, controlled, furious.
"At what point," Eskil says, "did you think you should walk away?"
Bohdi has the decency to look chastised. The hardness in his expression cracks and what comes through is something more complicated, guilt, maybe, or the discomfort of having been caught in a mistake he can't undo.
"I didn't realize what I was hearing for a long time," Bohdi says. His voice has dropped, the combative edge replaced by honesty. "The sounds were — I thought you were in pain. I thought the treatment was hurting you. I almost came in twice."
Eskil's grip tightens on his shirt.
"And then I realized what I was actually hearing," Bohdi continues, looking very much as though he'd like the deck to open beneath him, "and by that point it seemed worse to interrupt than to —"
"Than to listen?"
"I wasn't listening. I was — standing guard. In case something went wrong. In case one of the crew came by and heard — which they didn't, because I was there, making sure they didn't."
Eskil stares at him for a long, murderous moment.
It's only by the grace of knowing Bohdi all their lives, every childhood fight, every drunken confession, every time Bohdi has put his body between Eskil and a blade, that Eskil resists the urge to punch him in the face.
The impulse is vivid. But Bohdi's eyes, beneath the guilt, belong to someone who spent the night outside a door listening to sounds he shouldn't have heard because his best friend was dying on the other side of it and leaving wasn't an option.
Eskil releases his shirt. Shoves him back a step. Breathes.
"I don't normally linger outside your quarters to listen to you fuck our crew," Bohdi says, shifting uncomfortably. “So what in the hells happened?”
Eskil tells him. He tells him because Bohdi is his second-in-command and his closest friend and the only person on this ship, maybe the only person alive, who Eskil trusts with the truth.
He tells him, voice low enough that it won't carry past the mast, that the fruit he ate was a poisoned aphrodisiac.
He describes it, the red flesh, the sweet-spice taste, the waxy skin, the ridged pit.
He tells Bohdi that Indrie identified it immediately, that it's a Kalkoan substance, that without the physical intimacy the fruit demands, it's lethal.
"And so you had sex with Indrie," Bohdi says, slowly. "For medical reasons."
"Yes."
Bohdi looks skeptical for a long moment.
His brow furrows. He's a pragmatic man, not easily sold on the exotic or the supernatural, and the idea that a fruit can kill a man unless he beds someone is precisely the kind of claim that Bohdi would dismiss from anyone else.
But Eskil describes the progression, the fever, the sensitivity, the escalating arousal, the certainty of death, and describes the fruits from Armond's stores, the Kalkoan origin, the fact that Indrie's reaction upon seeing the pit was immediate and visceral.
Realization settles across Bohdi's face. It's slow, reluctant, arriving in stages, from skepticism to consideration to a grudging acceptance.
He grunts. Scrubs a hand across his jaw. Stares at the deck between them for a moment.
"And you’re certain this was — necessary. Medically. Culturally. Whatever the mechanism, there was no alternative."
"According to Indrie, no. And I was in no position to seek a second opinion."
Bohdi grunts again. His eyes come up to meet Eskil's and the question in them is not the one Eskil expects.
"What are you planning on doing with our healer now?"
The question is quiet. Careful. The kind of careful that tells Eskil his second-in-command is treading on ground he knows is unstable.
Eskil's jaw sets. He looks past Bohdi, toward the bow of the ship where the crew is working and the sea stretches out and somewhere below deck a young man who gave his body to save a king's life is doing his best not to be seen.
"Did you talk to Indrie?" Bohdi asks. "About the misunderstanding? Before everything?"
"I tried." The words come out serrated, each one catching on its way out. "I started to."
Bohdi's eyebrows rise.
"I wasn’t as calm as I could have been," Eskil says through his teeth. "And he got scared and ran."
The silence that follows is not comfortable.
"And then you ate the fruit," Bohdi says. "So whatever misunderstanding happened on the deck that hurt him is still unresolved."
"Yes."
"And then you slept with him."
The silence that follows is pointed.
"Bohdi —"
"I'm not blaming you." Bohdi holds up his hands, palms out.
"You were dying. He made a choice. I'm not questioning his choice or your survival.
I'm just —" He drops his hands. "Wondering what we should do.
Because the situation has gotten considerably more complicated than it was yesterday, and yesterday it was already a fucking mess. "
Eskil can't argue with that.
"I'm going to find Indrie," Eskil says. "I'm going to explain it. Now. Today. Before we reach Valen and this becomes an even larger problem."
"And by explain it, you mean —"
"Everything. The misunderstanding. The fruit. What happened and what it means and what it doesn't mean and —" He clenches his fists at his sides. "Whatever I need to say. I'll figure it out."
Bohdi nods. "That's for the best."
He straightens. Adjusts the shirt Eskil crumpled. Meets Eskil's eyes one more time with a look that is not judgment and not humor and not pity but something in the territory of all three, tempered with the love of someone who has spent his life beside Eskil and has never once regretted it.
"For what it's worth," Bohdi says, "he saved your life. Not because you ordered him to. Not because he thought he had to. He walked into that room knowing exactly what was required and he did it anyway."
Bohdi turns and walks away, his boots quiet on the deck, and doesn't look back.
Eskil stands behind the mast. The sun is climbing. The ship moves forward. Somewhere below, Indrie is avoiding him, and the reasons why sit in Eskil's chest alongside Bohdi's words and the memory of a small, warm hand pressed against his heart.
He pushes off the mast and goes to find the healer.