Page 64 of Salt in the Wound

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 thatstop 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.

"Theentiretime," 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 facesare 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 tolisten?"

"I wasn'tlistening.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.