by Kirby Crow
“Oleksei,” Scarlet said, shivering as he wrapped up in the blanket. “I wish I didn’t know his name. That makes it worse, somehow. It’s hard to hate a nameless thing.”
Liall gave him a strange look, and something passed between them. He nodded a little, his eyes shadowed. “Yes, Oleksei, curse him. But I never desired him. I swear that to you.” He began to clean a small cut on Scarlet’s wrist. “When cornered, you are as fierce as a snow bear. They expected you to submit tamely.”
“Their mistake.”
Liall's fingers cleaned the cut delicately. “I could have warned them, stubborn lad,” he said, striving for a teasing note. It fell flat.
Scarlet had stopped shivering when a knock sounded at the hatch. Liall jumped up, reaching for his knives. The door opened at his call, revealing the quartermaster and another mariner who carried a covered tray. The quartermaster bowed slightly and spoke to Liall in his own language, then switched to Bizye, looking at Scarlet.
“The captain recommends that you eat something hot, ser, and has sent both a salve for the bruises and some herbs to help you sleep, if there is... pain.”
Liall watched him from beneath lowered brows. “There will be no pain of that kind,” he growled. “And well it is so, or there would be three dead men tonight.”
The quartermaster bowed again and spoke respectfully. Liall snapped something back and the two mariners withdrew. Liall bolted the door when they had gone.
“What was that about?”
“Idiots,” he said, and sat down on the bunk beside Scarlet. “You must eat all of this soup. You look better now that your illness has passed, but you need to put a bit of fat on that frame or you will freeze in Rshan, the land that does not exist.” He winked.
The soup was good and the che was bland but hot. Scarlet suspected that Liall put some of the herbs in after all, because he was sleepy after, but comfortably so.
“Will you let me have a look at you?” Liall asked with worry. “There might be further injuries under your clothes, where I could not see. With our curae dead, it would not do to let a wound fester.”
Scarlet hesitated, and then began to toe off his boots and remove his breeches, blushing with embarrassment. “I fell on the ice, before... just before. And then he threw me into the hold. I don’t know what I landed on.”
Liall’s face was troubled as he politely looked away. Scarlet finished undressing and pulled the blanket around him before Liall motioned for him to lie down on his stomach.
Liall’s touch was gentle as he rubbed the salve into a blue bruise high on Scarlet’s shoulder. Scarlet was tense for several minutes, and then, as his heart slowed and the after-effects of panic set in, his muscles relaxed and he nearly dozed.
He stirred when he felt hands at his waist and started awake, heart pounding, but Liall whispered reassurance into his ear.
“I was only seeing if your legs were cut,” Liall murmured. “I would leave it, but I fear infection on this ship.”
Scarlet nodded wearily. “No, that's wise, I suppose. The hold was filthy.”
Liall’s expression was grave. “Please excuse me.”
Scarlet sighed and closed his eyes, resting his torn cheek against the cover. It continued to ooze blood steadily. “I’m getting the sheets bloody.”
“Let it bleed,” Liall advised. “Perhaps it will help it to heal faster if the blood washes the poison away.”
His face hurt more than any of the rest of his injuries, for the moment. Scarlet heard Liall hiss as the blanket was moved aside. He raised his head, craning to see. “Bad?” he asked.
“They were excessive,” Liall said through his teeth. “If they did not intend to kill you, you could not prove it from this.”
Scarlet decided not to look after all. The salve set warmth glowing on the bruised spots on his lower back, easing them, and he was surprised at how many spots there were as Liall carefully applied it. Later, he would find a blackened bruise the size of his fist on his calf, where Oleksei had kicked him.
“They are fortunate indeed that you were more calm than me,” Liall said, his voice low and frightening.
“I didn’t feel very calm at the time,” Scarlet mumbled sleepily.
Liall tugged the blankets loosely around him. “They are fortunate,” he said stonily. “They laid hands on someone I... care about, intending to harm.”
Liall’s words were like balm to Scarlet, far more soothing than the medicine. He cares about me. His head was buzzing with all the thoughts that were packed into it, like bees in a jar.
Liall smeared the salve liberally on a clean piece of linen and had Scarlet press it to his torn face. “Try to sleep with it there,” he advised as he set the salve aside, rinsed his hands in the water left in the basin and kicked off his boots. He took a blanket and made a rough bed on the floor next to the bunk, his knives within easy reach. “Sleep, t’aishka. Nothing will disturb you further tonight. I swear it.”
Days passed, and as Liall's initial fear that Scarlet’s wounds would become infected faded, he seemed consumed with his commitment to punish Oleksei and the mariner’s conspirators. The quartermaster took a vote among the crew, and it was agreed the ones who attacked Scarlet should be whipped. Scarlet gathered there was some dissent over that, but it was mostly from Liall, who wanted the men branded as well, and also a few of the more vocal mariners who disagreed with the sentence and wanted a much lighter punishment. There was a day when Liall’s mood was like a black sky and even to speak to him was risking a cloudburst. Scarlet found out later that it was because Oleksei and his men claimed that Scarlet had promised to whore for them. Oleksei asserted that Scarlet had taken their silver but refused them when the time came, so he and his men had only tried to take what they were due. The lie proved to be short-lived, for Liall offered trial by combat to determine the truth, and two of the men recanted. Scarlet supposed they came to their senses and reasoned a whipping was better than death.
Liall would have had Scarlet go up on deck to watch the whipping, but he refused. The atya shook his head at the strangeness of Byzans and went out to watch alone as the mariners were flogged. Scarlet could hear the whip strokes and the outcry anyway, so staying in the cabin did not shield him entirely from what was done. Liall came back pleased and did not understand why the punishment of his would-be rapists had affected Scarlet so.
“If they had succeeded in their crime,” Liall informed coldly, “I would have had them castrated. It is well for them that we are at sea, and they are needed to complete our journey.”
“You don't understand,” Scarlet said in shame. “You and the crew decided their punishment. That’s justice, and I agree. But Deva forbids revenge, and I wouldn’t be able to watch Oleksei being whipped without feeling happy about it.”
Liall sighed. “I do not comprehend the difference. You have a right to want to see him punished.”
“Yes,” Scarlet agreed. “And no.” He waved his hand and turned away. “I said you wouldn’t understand.”
Scarlet was wary of leaving the cabin after the whipping, fearing that the crew would want vengeance for their fellows, but Liall was always with him, and oddly, he was treated with more respect. Not surprisingly, one of the three who were flogged was the fellow who had put the coin down Scarlet’s shirt.
When Scarlet pointed that out, Liall went stony-faced and quiet and vanished for an hour. When he returned, he looked grimly satisfied and would answer no questions. Liall also treated him with more respect and not so much like an unruly child, perhaps because he saw how much the mariners were already bruised and marked before they were flogged. When Scarlet mentioned this, Liall seemed upset.
“Those are not my reasons,” Liall said.
“What, then?”
They were on the deck in the icy wind, the faint sun a pinpoint of brightness in the dawn mist. Liall took his hand and touched the healing cut under Scarlet’s right eye. “Because I finally realized that fighting against what is happenin
g between us is futile, t’aishka. What should be, shall be. It was decided long ago, and there is nothing that either of us can do.”
Scarlet was curious, but when pressed, Liall would speak no more.
Three days later, in a wet, driving wind that Liall called ‘brisk’ but which stole Scarlet's breath away, Qixa ordered the men to gather fish that would sustain them until the end of their voyage.
“Further north the fish dwell deeper. Harder to catch,” Liall explained, almost shouting over the wind. “We must take them now.”
“How far away are we?” Scarlet asked, teeth chattering. The wind contained little needles of sleet and ice, and the sea boiled with foam. A gust nearly blew him off his feet and he clung to the ropes. Liall steadied him.
“Less than thirty days, as Qixa reckons it, but it is the most dangerous leg of our journey, and many things can happen on those waters. We could easily be delayed or locked in ice. It is best to stop one day and get the fish while we can than to push on and take our chances with starvation.”
While Liall and Scarlet stood on the heaving quarterdeck and watched, the mariners dumped long, tarred ropes into the icy waters, laying them out behind them in a swath leagues long. After an hour or so, the captain ordered the anchor dropped and they began to haul the ropes up over the rail, and Scarlet saw that the ropes were baited at intervals with chunks of fish and palm-sized hooks. They brought up ten hooks in a row with nothing, and then, on the eleventh, a fish as large as a dog with fins like scalloped sails tumbled over the rail in a flash of slippery silver.
They took two more before Liall's restlessness won out and he took the short steps to the main deck as the crew was hauling their fourth beast in. It had fearsome black eyes, fins as long as a man’s arm, and shining, iridescent skin like an opal catfish. Scarlet had never seen the like and could not name the thing, but Liall laughed as he helped gaff its mouth and called over his shoulder to Scarlet.
“It is called a wave-rider!” Liall shouted over the sound of the sea. The fish twisted nearly in half and turned its massive head toward Liall, and Scarlet gasped and started forward, but Liall only laughed. “No fear, it has no teeth!”
Perhaps not, but it could still dump Liall overboard! But Liall was sure-footed as a goat on the icy deck and Scarlet began to feel idle and useless to be standing there easy while they worked. He knew if he went down that Liall would be angry and order him away, so he stood with his hands folded on the rail and watched. It turned out to be pleasant watching: Liall’s muscles strained under his woolen shirt as his body moved effortlessly into the rhythm of labor. He glanced up at Scarlet once, and his teeth flashed in his dark, handsome face when he grinned widely and waved.
So caught up was Scarlet in the scene below that he did not hear footsteps approaching from the wheel. By the time he had turned, Oleksei was standing next to him. Scarlet's heart froze over for a moment and he looked down quickly to see if Oleksei held a knife, but no, his hands were empty. Oleksei stared at him with hate, and Scarlet remembered where he was. Oleksei didn’t have him in a stinking hold with a gang of mariners to hold him down, and there was a pair of Morturii knives hanging from Scarlet’s belt. The beating of his heart slowed and he met Oleksei’s gaze without fear.
“Get away from me, you pig.”
Oleksei held up his mangled thumb—the one Scarlet had bitten—and turned it into an obscene gesture. Scarlet looked aside and tried to step around him, but the mariner blocked him again.
“Lenilyn slut.” Oleksei's voice was filled with loathing. “You may have your master fooled, but I know what you are. How much did you sell yourself for in Volkovoi?”
Scarlet would not answer the accusations of a rapist. “So you do speak my language.”
Oleksei spat. “The tongue of outlander filth. How he bears to speak it, I do not know.”
Scarlet’s lip curled, and he felt in himself a rising sense of power. Oleksei's hate had a basis deeper than simply loathing Scarlet’s race, and realizing it somehow made Oleksei smaller in his eyes. “You want him,” Scarlet said, lingering on the feeling of power. “You want him for yourself, but he doesn’t know you’re alive. It’s me he wants, not you. That’s why you hate me.”
Oleksei skated his hand over empty air, as if thrusting away the idea. “You cloud his eyes with tribal magic,” he accused. “As your kind has done to us before.”
Scarlet laughed shortly, but a sliver of icy fear wormed into his heart. So far, no one, not even Liall, knew about his Gift, and he wanted to keep it that way. He gazed at Oleksei, wondering if he had guessed it or seen something during the pirate battle, but no, the man was fishing in the dark, using any bigotry or excuse to explain Liall’s incomprehensible attraction to a filthy lenilyn. It was corroded desire and bitterness behind Oleksei’s accusation, not knowledge.
Suddenly, the mariner was pathetic to him, and he felt a rush of satisfaction in being able to stare Oleksei down and know that there was absolutely nothing Oleksei could do to change how Liall felt about Scarlet. Oh, there was a knack to this tangle of desire. Instead of groping blindly in the dark, he was finally beginning to find his way.
“Take your bitterness and go, Oleksei. Choke on it.”
Oleksei grinned unpleasantly. “He told you my name.”
“Only so he could curse it.”
Oleksei’s smile died as his face twisted with hate. He made a grab for Scarlet’s arm and missed when Scarlet stepped back quickly.
“You are safe on this voyage, tribal whore,” Oleksei snarled. “But one day he will cast you off. You will be exiled back to the Brown Lands, and you will have to cross this sea to get there. I will be waiting for you.”
What Scarlet might have answered was lost, for Liall was suddenly there, shoving Oleksei away from him so hard that the mariner fell and toppled to the deck. As large as Oleksei was, Liall was older and stronger and—Scarlet knew—a better fighter.
“Va!” Liall raged further in Sinha and spat, towering over Oleksei. Liall watched Oleksei climb to his feet before turning to Scarlet. His voice was much quieter. “Did he threaten you? What did he say?”
“Nothing that matters.” Oleksei’s insults were bad enough the first time, and Scarlet did not want them repeated. He took Liall’s arm and leaned against him a little. The knowledge that his actions would gall Oleksei made him shameless, and he brushed his uninjured cheek against Liall’s sleeve. “It’s getting late, are you ready to go to bed yet?”
Liall stared at him for only a second longer than normal. “Certainly,” he murmured, and with a last glare at Oleksei, he led Scarlet away.
Scarlet could feel Oleksei’s eyes on his back for a long time. When they arrived at the cabin, he began to regret his brazenness. Perhaps Liall had taken him at his word and would expect... what? A month ago I would have done anything to get Liall to touch me, he thought. Now... I don’t know what to do.
Liall smiled dryly. “I know very well who your words were for. I expect nothing.”
“I didn’t mean to tease...” Scarlet began.
“Yes, you did,” Liall said, dropping his coat off his shoulders. He pulled his shirt over his head and tossed it to the chair, reaching for his belt buckle. “But I do not mind a little teasing.”
As Scarlet watched Liall undress, he realized that perhaps Liall was the one teasing. Liall kicked his boots off and pushed his breeches off his legs, and there he stood: a tall statue of amber skin and carved muscle. His chest was broad and hairless, his waist flat and ribbed with hard planes of muscle, and lower...
Scarlet could feel his face burning and he looked away quickly when he discovered that Liall was pale-haired all over. Deva, he was well-made! Beautiful, if such could be said of men. Seeing Liall, he realized it could.
“You do not enjoy looking at me?” Liall asked softly. He made no move to cover his body or get into bed, but rested one hand on his hip languidly. “Am I pleasurable to look on?”
“Yes,” Scarlet admitte
d lowly. The scent of salt was heavy and his breath misted in front of his face as he exhaled shakily. The cabin was freezing, but Liall was born for this weather and seemed not to feel the cold. “Very pleasurable.”
“Then why look away?”
Scarlet took an unsteady breath. “Because you will laugh at me.”
“Why?” Liall pressed, direct but simple.
“Because I don’t know what to do,” Scarlet blurted, his eyes nailed to the floor. Oh, Deva, he’s going to think me a moron...
He heard Liall approach and felt warm hands on his shoulders.
“And why should you know?” Liall's voice was low and charged. “You think I would despise you for innocence? Scarlet, look at me.”
Scarlet would not raise his head, not until Liall fitted a hand under his chin and urged him.
“Scarlet,” Liall’s voice caressed him like the warm fingers on his cheek. “You have no lack to be ashamed of.”
Scarlet wished he could believe this, but too much had been drummed into his head. “I feel just like what Kio called me: a stuffy old Hilurin.”
“Kio does not know you like I do.” Liall pushed the hair from Scarlet’s forehead. It had grown on the voyage. “There is nothing in the least stuffy about you.”
Scarlet looked away again, extremely uncomfortable. Liall sighed before releasing him. After a moment, Liall turned and folded his long frame into the bed. “What did Oleksei really say to you?”
“I can handle Oleksei,” Scarlet answered boldly.
“No doubt.” Liall pulled the covers up to his neck and rolled over, letting the matter drop.
A wave boomed against the hull and Scarlet sighed, his breath steaming in the cold air as he began to undress. When he climbed into the bed, Liall pretended to be asleep. Scarlet wondered if it was kindness.